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This is so weird as a support for the FTC complaint. My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users. Tiktok and ot

This is so weird as a support for the FTC complaint. My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users. Tiktok and others are doing relatively well. This is the problem with these networks, they become your parents network. Myspace gone, friendster gone. The FTC claims of monopoly are laughable? Tiktok seems to be crushing Facebook in downloads and in time in app, and now I heard was even crushing youtube (all of these folks are competing, youtube has youtube community and patreon style features now with chat etc as well). is facebook huge? For sure. Is it a monopoly? Have folks not heard of things like tiktok. Will be interesting if China goes after tiktok the way the US is going after facebook.

echelon 5y ago
> My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users. 100% agree. Mark's seen the numbers and he knows the demographic ship is sailing. That's why he's leaning so heavily into Metaverse. He wants his company to compete in 3D/VR/AR/games.
jimt1234 5y ago
All this reminds me of MTV in the late-90s/early-2000s. We all watched it, even though we all pretty much hated it. Then, something magical happened: the internet became a content platform (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc.), and MTV became basically irrelevant - my teenage niece-and-nephew don't even know what MTV is. And this seems to have happened to Facebook; it's still popular with the olds, obviously, but once again, my teenage niece-and-nephew don't have accounts on Facebook. They laughed when I asked them about it, said Facebook was "annoying", just like us olds thought MTV was annoying back in the day. Not really adding much value to this whole conversation; just an observation.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Do they use Instagram? WhatsApp? Oculus? Even if none of these, they probably still "have" an account, waiting for someone to come claim it.
  - jimt1234 5y ago
    It's primarily TikTok and Instagram.
- _3u10 5y ago
  When FB came out I thought, who puts their name on the internet? This is going to end badly.
quadrangle 5y ago
The anti-trust stuff is also about Instagram. Isn't FB the service losing young folks largely to Instagram? Anyway, everything about monopoly is about the market space. FB has no monopoly in places-to-post-stuff-and-get-attention-online… except in the many many countries that FB successfully took over where there is near-zero use of the rest the internet, but those cases don't apply to U.S. anti-trust law. FB has more monopoly power in some other market areas. Not a complete monopoly, but they have a lot of dominance in the market space of targetted social-driven advertising.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Let’s reframe: Facebook is competing in the market of having their button or Javascript on every webpage if the world. Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Facebook, Twitter all 4 have features which require JS (“share”, “login” or “analytics”) or can collect page loads and addresses, thus able to collect user behavior on websites that are not theirs. Tiktok only competes on user interests within their app but can’t collect user profiles elsewhere. In terms of privacy, they’re harmless compared to FB/Google/Twitter.
  - yoavm 5y ago
    That's not entirely accurate - TikTok does have a JS "pixel" implementation that website owners put on their site, mainly to track conversions. It's true that the use case makes it less popular than a like / share button. I research these JS snippets and how they work, and I can say that without a doubt the TikTok pixel is the most complex and network intensive one. It without doubt collects a lot of information. As more advertisers move to TikTok, i see this pixel implemented in more and more websites.
sharkweek 5y ago
I’m now officially at “that point” where I was late to Snapchat and now I haven’t even bothered with TikTok. Was a very early user on FB (the week it launched at my college), but now I can’t be bothered to keep up. My kids are probably young enough to be maybe 2-3 cycles removed from whatever the Next Big App is, but I can’t even really fathom what those might be and I can assure you I won’t understand them. I sound like my dad 15 years ago…
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  My social media in my formative years was email and usenet. I never understood Facebook, never used it.
  - sumedh 5y ago
    > I never understood Facebook What part did you not understand?
    - xmprt 5y ago
      I think Facebook's stated goal is at odds with the way the platform presents itself and how people use it. Facebook should be a great way to connect with people new and old and keep in touch with other people's lives and maybe plan real life events. But Facebook's home page is a newsfeed that rarely shows you posts from friends that you care about and you have to go out of your way to make use of the platform's better features. Also, since most people don't unfriend/unfollow old connections, as time goes on, Facebook's utility naturally goes down.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      The reason to even look at it. I never did. It didn't seem to solve any problem I had.
mike00632 5y ago
You kind of make the case for the FTC, don't you? If Facebook were just the Facebook app, website and social network then it wouldn't be a monopoly. They would have to try to appeal to younger users to compete with TikTok and others. But Facebook is way more than just Facebook. Facebook also owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and much much more, hence the monopoly power.
- _3u10 5y ago
  Monopoly over what? How does FB force users to use their products over their competitors? Doesn’t everyone on what’s app have a phone number that’s known to the people they have on WhatsApp? Couldn’t they just text each other?
throw_m239339 5y ago
Tik tok doesn't double as a customer service for big companies, Tik tok doesn't have a market place, Tik tok isn't widely used to recruit candidates for jobs. Tik tok and Facebook are very different social networks. Facebook is way more than that actually. A lot of people all over the world only browser the internet through Facebook, do all their business transaction via Facebook, this is even truer outside the west.
- echelon 5y ago
  > Tik tok doesn't have a market place https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/tiktok-shopping-expands-with-more-partnerships-live-shopping-new-ads-and-more/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/tiktok-shopping-expands-wi... https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-x-tiktok https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-x-tiktok > Tik tok isn't widely used to recruit candidates for jobs. https://www.axios.com/tiktok-job-hiring-tiktok-576f3b99-602c-46ac-afed-218ddf61a9ba.html https://www.axios.com/tiktok-job-hiring-tiktok-576f3b99-602c... > Tik tok doesn't double as a customer service for big companies Not for long. TikTok is going to eat the world. They'd be stupid not to.
  - diveanon 5y ago
    TT will be gone in 3 years and replaced by whatever the new fad is
    - novok 5y ago
      Yeah, just like FB and Instagram /s
      - Shared404 5y ago
        More like Vine, or MySpace. Cherry picking examples is not a good argument
        kbenson 5y ago
        I don't know. I'm practically a Luddite when it comes to social networks, and I've started consuming tiktok content quite a bit lately. I think the best way to describe it is in relation to twitter, which I use heavy for 2-3 days in a row once every few months. Twitter exposes my to lots of interesting things, but ultimately is depressing because of how everyone is so shrill and unwilling to give the benefit of a doubt, and interactions feel hollow. Tiktok is just pure entertainment, and rarely do I not come way in a better mood. It's like they took r/videos and r/gifs and distilled them into their core components and deliver them through a fire hose. Will they be gone in a few years? Maybe, but I doubt it. Whatever they're doing it's working and makes me feel better and happier when I use it, so that's a win.
bogwog 5y ago
A company doesn't have to be a Hasbro monopoly to be guilty of illegal anti-competitive behavior. Take the alleged collusion between Google and Facebook that was revealed recently: does it matter if Facebook or Google are monopolies or not? Hell no! It's illegal as hell (allegedly) whether they're multi-billion dollar companies or struggling startups.
fullshark 5y ago
Even more amusingly the SEC whistleblower protection she's claiming is for securities fraud, that FB is committing fraud overstating its company health to investors.
mrandish 5y ago
> The FTC claims of monopoly are laughable? I agree that the regulatory question of whether FB meets the technical requirements of being classed a 'monopoly' is unclear. However, I see the real worry for FB here as going beyond one anti-trust action, it's the building cultural consensus and growing political momentum to "do something". That kind of tidal wave is hard to reverse and difficult to escape unscathed. I also agree that as pervasive and pernicious as FB is today, it is under serious growing threat from alternatives as well as already "jumping the shark" perceptually with young users. Together those twin storms on the horizon comprise a long-term threat to FB's dominance and relevance. That said, FB's revenue will likely continue 'up and to the right' for several years before the impact is seen in their financials.
grishka 5y ago
Facebook is a monopoly because it does its best to make the switching costs sky-high and keep them that way. There are many people who would delete Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp but they literally can't because that's where their friends are. It also does its best to control the experience end-to-end to make sure no one can innovate their way out of these algorithmic feeds and ads. People aren't building better client apps because they fear getting sued. Imagine using Facebook but doing so via a comfortable UI that puts you first, gives you complete control, and allows you stuff like cross-posting to other services. This is their nightmare. And another problem: the US government is on their side from what I see happening (disclaimer: I'm not from US). It should be such that if they do try to sue you over a browser extension or an unofficial app or whatever, they would get laughed out of the court because you were in your right to do what you did. But unfortunately, there are apparently laws that do allow them to sue people trying to improve their own user experience on someone else's online service.
- blake929 5y ago
  High switching costs and controlling the experience end-to-end may be anti-competitive business practices, but it doesn't make Facebook a monopoly. Apple also uses similar practices, but clearly has a lot of competition. Monopoly definition: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service
  - srcreigh 5y ago
    FB has exclusive possession/control of digital connections to most of your friends and family. Apple doesn't have network effects like FB. Network effects + high switching costs = monopoly. Why doesn't FB let other businesses else access friend lists via API? or send people messages via API? Same with Google and all their data about you. They just can't do it. https://stackoverflow.com/a/50103448/1997590 https://stackoverflow.com/a/50103448/1997590
    - _arthur_ 5y ago
      At one time, they did have a very permissive API. Which got abused by Cambridge Analytica.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
Doesn't any anti-trust investigation on Facebook likely include Instagram, WhatsApp or any of the other ~hundred companies they've acquired[1] and indulged in anti-competitive practices? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
raxxorrax 5y ago
When government is through with these platforms, they might already be far more irrelevant. I don't know anyone that has Facebook as a large part in their lives. That said, being overly compliant to external pressure made these platforms a lot less attractive. Youtubes official channels seem like bad TV, a reason why many fled to platforms like it in the first place. Instead of promoting its strengths, it relapsed towards a bygone understanding of media, with official and safe content for allegedly everybody (which doesn't really exist outside a lowest common denominator).

echelon 5y ago

> My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users. 100% agree. Mark's seen the numbers and he knows the demographic ship is sailing. That's why he's leaning so heavily into Metaverse. He wants his company to compete in 3D/VR/AR/games.

jimt1234 5y ago

All this reminds me of MTV in the late-90s/early-2000s. We all watched it, even though we all pretty much hated it. Then, something magical happened: the internet became a content platform (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc.), and MTV became basically irrelevant - my teenage niece-and-nephew don't even know what MTV is. And this seems to have happened to Facebook; it's still popular with the olds, obviously, but once again, my teenage niece-and-nephew don't have accounts on Facebook. They laughed when I asked them about it, said Facebook was "annoying", just like us olds thought MTV was annoying back in the day. Not really adding much value to this whole conversation; just an observation.

lapetitejort 5y ago
Do they use Instagram? WhatsApp? Oculus? Even if none of these, they probably still "have" an account, waiting for someone to come claim it.
- jimt1234 5y ago
  It's primarily TikTok and Instagram.
_3u10 5y ago
When FB came out I thought, who puts their name on the internet? This is going to end badly.

quadrangle 5y ago

The anti-trust stuff is also about Instagram. Isn't FB the service losing young folks largely to Instagram? Anyway, everything about monopoly is about the market space. FB has no monopoly in places-to-post-stuff-and-get-attention-online… except in the many many countries that FB successfully took over where there is near-zero use of the rest the internet, but those cases don't apply to U.S. anti-trust law. FB has more monopoly power in some other market areas. Not a complete monopoly, but they have a lot of dominance in the market space of targetted social-driven advertising.

laurent92 5y ago
Let’s reframe: Facebook is competing in the market of having their button or Javascript on every webpage if the world. Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Facebook, Twitter all 4 have features which require JS (“share”, “login” or “analytics”) or can collect page loads and addresses, thus able to collect user behavior on websites that are not theirs. Tiktok only competes on user interests within their app but can’t collect user profiles elsewhere. In terms of privacy, they’re harmless compared to FB/Google/Twitter.
- yoavm 5y ago
  That's not entirely accurate - TikTok does have a JS "pixel" implementation that website owners put on their site, mainly to track conversions. It's true that the use case makes it less popular than a like / share button. I research these JS snippets and how they work, and I can say that without a doubt the TikTok pixel is the most complex and network intensive one. It without doubt collects a lot of information. As more advertisers move to TikTok, i see this pixel implemented in more and more websites.

sharkweek 5y ago

I’m now officially at “that point” where I was late to Snapchat and now I haven’t even bothered with TikTok. Was a very early user on FB (the week it launched at my college), but now I can’t be bothered to keep up. My kids are probably young enough to be maybe 2-3 cycles removed from whatever the Next Big App is, but I can’t even really fathom what those might be and I can assure you I won’t understand them. I sound like my dad 15 years ago…

throwawayboise 5y ago
My social media in my formative years was email and usenet. I never understood Facebook, never used it.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > I never understood Facebook What part did you not understand?
  - xmprt 5y ago
    I think Facebook's stated goal is at odds with the way the platform presents itself and how people use it. Facebook should be a great way to connect with people new and old and keep in touch with other people's lives and maybe plan real life events. But Facebook's home page is a newsfeed that rarely shows you posts from friends that you care about and you have to go out of your way to make use of the platform's better features. Also, since most people don't unfriend/unfollow old connections, as time goes on, Facebook's utility naturally goes down.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    The reason to even look at it. I never did. It didn't seem to solve any problem I had.

mike00632 5y ago

You kind of make the case for the FTC, don't you? If Facebook were just the Facebook app, website and social network then it wouldn't be a monopoly. They would have to try to appeal to younger users to compete with TikTok and others. But Facebook is way more than just Facebook. Facebook also owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and much much more, hence the monopoly power.

_3u10 5y ago
Monopoly over what? How does FB force users to use their products over their competitors? Doesn’t everyone on what’s app have a phone number that’s known to the people they have on WhatsApp? Couldn’t they just text each other?

throw_m239339 5y ago

Tik tok doesn't double as a customer service for big companies, Tik tok doesn't have a market place, Tik tok isn't widely used to recruit candidates for jobs. Tik tok and Facebook are very different social networks. Facebook is way more than that actually. A lot of people all over the world only browser the internet through Facebook, do all their business transaction via Facebook, this is even truer outside the west.

echelon 5y ago
> Tik tok doesn't have a market place https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/tiktok-shopping-expands-with-more-partnerships-live-shopping-new-ads-and-more/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/tiktok-shopping-expands-wi... https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-x-tiktok https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-x-tiktok > Tik tok isn't widely used to recruit candidates for jobs. https://www.axios.com/tiktok-job-hiring-tiktok-576f3b99-602c-46ac-afed-218ddf61a9ba.html https://www.axios.com/tiktok-job-hiring-tiktok-576f3b99-602c... > Tik tok doesn't double as a customer service for big companies Not for long. TikTok is going to eat the world. They'd be stupid not to.
- diveanon 5y ago
  TT will be gone in 3 years and replaced by whatever the new fad is
  - novok 5y ago
    Yeah, just like FB and Instagram /s
    - Shared404 5y ago
      More like Vine, or MySpace. Cherry picking examples is not a good argument
      - kbenson 5y ago
        I don't know. I'm practically a Luddite when it comes to social networks, and I've started consuming tiktok content quite a bit lately. I think the best way to describe it is in relation to twitter, which I use heavy for 2-3 days in a row once every few months. Twitter exposes my to lots of interesting things, but ultimately is depressing because of how everyone is so shrill and unwilling to give the benefit of a doubt, and interactions feel hollow. Tiktok is just pure entertainment, and rarely do I not come way in a better mood. It's like they took r/videos and r/gifs and distilled them into their core components and deliver them through a fire hose. Will they be gone in a few years? Maybe, but I doubt it. Whatever they're doing it's working and makes me feel better and happier when I use it, so that's a win.

bogwog 5y ago

A company doesn't have to be a Hasbro monopoly to be guilty of illegal anti-competitive behavior. Take the alleged collusion between Google and Facebook that was revealed recently: does it matter if Facebook or Google are monopolies or not? Hell no! It's illegal as hell (allegedly) whether they're multi-billion dollar companies or struggling startups.

fullshark 5y ago

Even more amusingly the SEC whistleblower protection she's claiming is for securities fraud, that FB is committing fraud overstating its company health to investors.

mrandish 5y ago

> The FTC claims of monopoly are laughable? I agree that the regulatory question of whether FB meets the technical requirements of being classed a 'monopoly' is unclear. However, I see the real worry for FB here as going beyond one anti-trust action, it's the building cultural consensus and growing political momentum to "do something". That kind of tidal wave is hard to reverse and difficult to escape unscathed. I also agree that as pervasive and pernicious as FB is today, it is under serious growing threat from alternatives as well as already "jumping the shark" perceptually with young users. Together those twin storms on the horizon comprise a long-term threat to FB's dominance and relevance. That said, FB's revenue will likely continue 'up and to the right' for several years before the impact is seen in their financials.

grishka 5y ago

Facebook is a monopoly because it does its best to make the switching costs sky-high and keep them that way. There are many people who would delete Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp but they literally can't because that's where their friends are. It also does its best to control the experience end-to-end to make sure no one can innovate their way out of these algorithmic feeds and ads. People aren't building better client apps because they fear getting sued. Imagine using Facebook but doing so via a comfortable UI that puts you first, gives you complete control, and allows you stuff like cross-posting to other services. This is their nightmare. And another problem: the US government is on their side from what I see happening (disclaimer: I'm not from US). It should be such that if they do try to sue you over a browser extension or an unofficial app or whatever, they would get laughed out of the court because you were in your right to do what you did. But unfortunately, there are apparently laws that do allow them to sue people trying to improve their own user experience on someone else's online service.

blake929 5y ago
High switching costs and controlling the experience end-to-end may be anti-competitive business practices, but it doesn't make Facebook a monopoly. Apple also uses similar practices, but clearly has a lot of competition. Monopoly definition: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service
- srcreigh 5y ago
  FB has exclusive possession/control of digital connections to most of your friends and family. Apple doesn't have network effects like FB. Network effects + high switching costs = monopoly. Why doesn't FB let other businesses else access friend lists via API? or send people messages via API? Same with Google and all their data about you. They just can't do it. https://stackoverflow.com/a/50103448/1997590 https://stackoverflow.com/a/50103448/1997590
  - _arthur_ 5y ago
    At one time, they did have a very permissive API. Which got abused by Cambridge Analytica.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

Doesn't any anti-trust investigation on Facebook likely include Instagram, WhatsApp or any of the other ~hundred companies they've acquired[1] and indulged in anti-competitive practices? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

raxxorrax 5y ago

When government is through with these platforms, they might already be far more irrelevant. I don't know anyone that has Facebook as a large part in their lives. That said, being overly compliant to external pressure made these platforms a lot less attractive. Youtubes official channels seem like bad TV, a reason why many fled to platforms like it in the first place. Instead of promoting its strengths, it relapsed towards a bygone understanding of media, with official and safe content for allegedly everybody (which doesn't really exist outside a lowest common denominator).