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Facebook is currently ahead, but I wonder how much of that is perception. There is a lot of media about how Facebook is evil, but that is mostly from a pretty s

Facebook is currently ahead, but I wonder how much of that is perception. There is a lot of media about how Facebook is evil, but that is mostly from a pretty small circle of media and political people, that Facebook is naturally in opposition to. Facebook also owns instagram and whatsapp as well. But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily. Instagram is also used very heavily. Amazon has threats from other E-commerce sites, lots of bad press, Governmental attacks, and unionization. Google prints money on search and I don't see enough people swapping to Duckduckgo to bring them down. Amazon is also kept up by AWS, which who knows if one day that is spun off.

andrewflnr 5y ago
The strongest signal that Facebook will fall is the recently publicized trouble they're having in hiring people. I expect that to have rather strong knock-on effects... 10-15 years down the road. For example if VR turns out to be as big as everyone says and FB/Meta/whatever are only able to put up a weak offering. I tend to agree that they'll be harder to kill than a lot of us wish.
- kkcorps 5y ago
  Do they really? It seems to be blown up by media. Talented people are still applying in droves for a job at FB. The competition has definitely increased with good options out there for candidates but hiring trouble is bit preposterous.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    I guess I could be wrong, but I remember reading that they were having to give even higher offers than other SV companies. That indicates a real, widespread reluctance to work there.
    - eclipxe 5y ago
      They have always paid top of market - in the early days it was to hire from Google it seems - who at the time was paying top of market.
- jrm4 5y ago
  For me, overwhelmingly the strongest signal is that they appear to be going all in on what is to be a widely used social interaction platform that's more-or-less explicitly banning sex; when that's been a primary or secondary driver for so many new internet/tech platform things.
arcticbull 5y ago
Unionization is no threat to Amazon. Their margins and hence their shareholders maybe (briefly), but that's just fine and won't affect their ability to be successful. It'll also push them towards further automation on the medium and long term time horizons. That would in turn alleviate a lot of the governmental attacks and bad press. I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service - they hate Amazon the pee-bottle-broker and tornado-warning-ignorer. As for other e-commerce sites, they'll probably just buy them, crush them, or if they can't do that - sell them logistics and infrastructure services. [edit] Consider FedEx vs UPS. FedEx can't hire staffers right now, while UPS, unionized, saw basically zero attrition. FedEx is suffering right now. UPS, crushing it. [1] The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, nonunionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-shortage-ups-union-drivers-give-delivery-service-edge-over-fedex-fdx https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-sho...
- praptak 5y ago
  > I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service Wait, what? They do have a huge problem with counterfeit crap sold via bait-and-switch reviews. Edit: A related article https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/amazon-still-hasnt-fixed-its-problem-with-bait-and-switch-reviews/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/amazon-still-has...
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    I'll never call them perfect, to be sure. They do have counterfeit issues and bait-and-switch reviews. However, I don't hate them for it, and I'm confident they're continuing to improve. JMHO. But a fair call-out nonetheless.
- 5y ago
random12345678 5y ago
>But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily everyone over 30 i know are past facebook and realize Instagram is adware/spyware.
- chermi 5y ago
  Almost everyone I know between 30 and 40 dropped Facebook. Not completely, I'd guess the majority still have their accounts. Just no one uses it. My survey isn't very data heavy, but from the people I know, it's mostly older people and the people who stayed in my hometown that still use it.
lbrandy 5y ago
FWIW, I joined HN 14 years ago (wow) and there's never been a time in those 14 years that HN wasn't convinced that facebook's demise was just around the corner.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  This is true, but the main reason was that people have been predicting this was that young people don’t want to be on a social network with their parents. This social dynamic prediction has played out, and Facebook did the 100% predictable thing that all rich entrenched players do — they bought the smaller competitors, most famously Instagram. I fully expect them to continue to be able to monetize their user base, and purchase smaller competitors for a while. The most recent warning flag for me is their rebranding. Announcing a major pivot to center on Occulus (I’m sorry “the metaverse”.), when VR has been nothing more than niche gaming is very weird and troublesome. On the bright side, Facebook is a giant ossified megacorp. All that’s going to happen is some division is going to get new signage, and every PM is going to update their slide decks to say “metaverse”, and everyone is going to do what they were already doing.
  - romanhn 5y ago
    As an ex-employee, Facebook is many things, but ossified it is not. The internal impact/metric-oriented culture means that new bets are encouraged and rewarded, whereas product teams that are keeping it safe will eventually get disbanded.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      I’m also an ex-employee. FB’s predilection to reorg every six months, isn’t a sign of strength. It’s actually a sign of dysfunction. They’ve just been able to power through by being extraordinarily lucky in the social networking space. It’s tire spinning. The company hasn’t released a noteworthy product in at least a decade. It’s an ossified megacorp.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    Quest was the best selling game console this holiday, which doesn't sound niche to me.
mech422 5y ago
Personally, I think FB is in trouble because it became 'your grandmothers social media'... the youngsters seem more interested in insta and tiktok
- billyhoffman 5y ago
  > the youngsters seem more interested in insta ... which is owned by FB. Between Instagram securing the audience of the next generation, and Whatsapp gaining huge share as the communication tool of developing world, FB is going to do just fine, even if facebook.com usage totally tanks (also unlikely)
  - throwawayay02 5y ago
    I'm convinced facebook.com usage will completely tank. It is surviving on older people and newer market where it got popular later, but I believe all social websites have the cycle where it's unknown, then popular, then everybody's parents join, then no longer popular, then dead. As for Whatsapp, it makes no money, and there are plenty of non-monetized instant messengers, so I can't see them making a profit there. The one thing they still have is Instagram, but it's "reels" haven't beaten tiktok, and it's already filled to exhaustion with ads, so it's a matter of time before it's popularity starts to decline. As for the multiverse, that will never amount to anything.
  - mech422 5y ago
    I think that will hold them a couple of years... Then something else (possibly NOT FB owned) will take over... like another tik tok. Kids don't want to be on the same social as their parents. Its gonna be a revolving door every 5 or 10 years.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Miner49er 5y ago
My thought process on Facebook declining isn't about perception. It's that they are putting a ton of capital into and taking a huge risk on the Metaverse. If it fails it could mean a major decline for Facebook.
jhbadger 5y ago
I think they've lost GenZ, though. Boomers and GenX use Facebook, Millennials use Instagram, but GenZ uses TickTock, and unlike with Instagram, it doesn't look like they can just buy it out to reach the next generation.
- cmsj 5y ago
  I would fully expect this trend to continue - each new generational cohort will latch onto a new social network that is separate from the ones their lame parents and older siblings use. This poses a massive institutional risk to any social network. They either need to aggressively pump out new brands to try and capture that themselves, or buy promising startups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to fail at both of those and just completely skip a generation. A few of those misses added up could be a terminal failure.
- runlevel1 5y ago
  Younger generations appear to be less married to the platform, though. Tiktok seems to have largely displaced Snapchat in under two years.
littlestymaar 5y ago
> But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily That's an interesting perspective, I was pretty convinced that facebook was almost dead since all of my friends (in France) have almost completely stopper using it. Well most of us are still casually browsing it every once in a while, but it's far less often than it used to be, and worse: we don't have interactions together on that platform. The last remaining usage was events, but since covid basically killed most large-group events for a while, even this usage died off. I wonder if it's more of a group difference, or maybe it depends from country to country. Where do you live?
- chronotis 5y ago
  Midwestern GenX suburban parent here. Nothing important happens in our subdivision (hundreds of homes) without mention of it in the neighborhood's private Facebook group. Our public school district uses a Facebook page as a primary announcement platform. Kids' sports and social groups are all organized as Facebook groups and pages. You cannot escape Facebook if you're a suburban parent in the US.
  - slyall 5y ago
    True but thats 10 minutes per day. Facebook needs everybody to spend hours on them each day.
    - warner25 5y ago
      Very good point. Facebook has gone from something that I used for enjoyment (2004 through maybe 2016) to something that I resentfully use only to conduct business in my local community. It's still "social" but it's the difference between hanging out with friends vs. running errands at the store, post office, city hall, etc. It has clearly grown in importance by becoming the de facto official online presence of so many entities, so I can't escape it, but I absolutely want to minimize my time spent on that stuff. I reflexively answered the poll with Facebook because I hate it, but then I realized that I'm probably closer to killing my Netflix account than my Facebook account, and I doubted my answer. Now you've convinced me again that Facebook is most in decline.
berberous 5y ago
My two cents is that people are dramatically under-weighting the possibility that Zuckerberg is a visionary with his AR/VR plays. I am extremely bullish on FB solely because of that. I think people will be as wrong about his VR plays as they were about the Instagram acquisition.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Agree with you there. You've got a founder led company making visionary plays that have every appearance of being on the right track. The Quest is not just a tech marvel, it was also the best selling game console this Christmas. The overall vision will take a few more hardware iterations, but has huge potential to replace smartphones, laptops, game consoles and offices. At this very moment there's another comment thread talking about how the web is an SEO spam graveyard and Google is ripe to be disrupted. Those thinking the disrupter is going to be Duck Duck Go are kidding themselves.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    VR has been just around the corner for at least 30 years. I remember experiencing my first VR demo in 1997, complete with the gushing marketer convinced that the new age of VR was finally upon us, and this was long after the failed "VR pods" of the early 90s. The argument has always been "The technology is finally real-enough looking and believable! VR is now inevitable!" I argue that VR is not held back by graphic realism, input latency, or lack of content, but the form factor itself. Too few people want to strap something to their face which entirely takes over vision and hearing and then stumble around awkwardly flailing their limbs and hoping they don't run into anything. This fact hasn't changed since the earliest days of the technology.
wombat-man 5y ago
Well, as those 30+ year olds get older, marketers are going to give less and less of a shit about them. Facebook makes most of their money from their ad network that mostly exists on sites that nobody actually needs to visit (Facebook, ig). In addition, Meta is spending a boat load on engineers who don't really want to work there, so they can make a "metaverse" which I'll bet most of them don't give half a shit about. Then they're going to market the hell out of it and at the end of the day I just don't think that many people are going to use it enough to make it all worthwhile. I could be wrong but I think if Meta isn't careful in how they diversify their focus they could face a real reckoning that has nothing to do with their current political pushback. Google search is still pretty good, and their ad network is used throughout the internet so I think they're safe. Amazon will do whatever it takes to keep sales up, so I have faith in them. If nothing else they're a company that seems extremely capable of adapting to changing market conditions.
bgro 5y ago
Amazon / Google I think will stay strong due to their infrastructure in cloud technology. Amazon has the physical delivery infrastructure as well, which doesn't have a great competitor yet. Apple is currently doing fine with their devices. I think the health industry will adopt some of their tech soon (like the apple watch) to get some of that sweet, sweet healthcare / insurance money That leaves the "worst" of the group to either Facebook or Netflix. I haven't heard much about what Netflix is doing, but things seem to be going generally okay so far. Facebook has extremely negative news all over the media on seemingly both the tech and political side. For example, malicious targeting of children and their platform being used for fake news / propaganda. On the tech side, I don't have confidence in their current, future, or past projects such as Oculus or their extreme hype around the metaverse. For these reasons (by default and past/present/future speculation) given the wording on this question, I think Facebook is the obvious "loser."
- discardable_dan 5y ago
  I believe nobody talking about Netflix is worse than people talking negatively about Facebook. Facebook has far-reaching influence over non-US societies, and are generally capable of living off of just those societies. Netflix, on the other hand, is very quickly losing the content war to the likes of Disney and HBO, plus further losing its bread-and-butter catalog backfill to Hulu. Facebook is going to keep being the popular boogeyman, possibly declining over the next decade. Netflix may truly be gone in 10 years, though.
systemvoltage 5y ago
I love Instagram as well as Pinterest. Two unpopular things on HN. There is no service out there to curate visual culture like these two. Want to build a image collection of vintage receipts!? You got it. These two platforms are truly amazing for this kind of a thing. Also ads on IG are something I'd actually want.
slategruen 5y ago
Unless there will be another communication platform that could capture a good chunk of Facebook's users, Facebook is here to stay. A lot of Facebook features are just very difficult to implement in other platforms nowadays. One example is group messaging. WhatsApp has users from a wide range of age groups and no other platforms could easily compete with that. Communicating with our family, regardless of their age group, is a very crucial part of our culture and Facebook fills that gap. Another example is online selling. Buy-and-sell groups are thriving in Facebook because it's so easy to publish your products and immediately communicate with your potential customers. For example, in the Southeast Asian region, Facebook took a large chunk of users from Carousell, the most popular online selling platform there for years before Facebook released Marketplace. Even for me personally, I've tried to stop using Facebook for several months but in my home country, Facebook is just too integrated in its culture.
throwawayboise 5y ago
> everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook What about over 50? I have never used any mainstream social media. I do participate in this and a few other online forums. For communicating directly with others online, I use email.
tootie 5y ago
I voted for FB but yeah I really have no idea. I don't get social media at all. I don't get Twitter or TikTok. I don't get how anyone makes a nickel in advertising. I also don't get crypto. They're worth billions based on network effects for reasons I can't comprehend. I understand the internal logic of how they function and monetize but I can't understand how they get so much engagement.
bamboozled 5y ago
My Instagram feed has pretty much just ended up being soft porn. It's pretty easy to be replaced from this point on by anything. The "AI" has basically re-created Sport Illustrated in scroll form.

andrewflnr 5y ago

The strongest signal that Facebook will fall is the recently publicized trouble they're having in hiring people. I expect that to have rather strong knock-on effects... 10-15 years down the road. For example if VR turns out to be as big as everyone says and FB/Meta/whatever are only able to put up a weak offering. I tend to agree that they'll be harder to kill than a lot of us wish.

kkcorps 5y ago
Do they really? It seems to be blown up by media. Talented people are still applying in droves for a job at FB. The competition has definitely increased with good options out there for candidates but hiring trouble is bit preposterous.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  I guess I could be wrong, but I remember reading that they were having to give even higher offers than other SV companies. That indicates a real, widespread reluctance to work there.
  - eclipxe 5y ago
    They have always paid top of market - in the early days it was to hire from Google it seems - who at the time was paying top of market.
jrm4 5y ago
For me, overwhelmingly the strongest signal is that they appear to be going all in on what is to be a widely used social interaction platform that's more-or-less explicitly banning sex; when that's been a primary or secondary driver for so many new internet/tech platform things.

arcticbull 5y ago

Unionization is no threat to Amazon. Their margins and hence their shareholders maybe (briefly), but that's just fine and won't affect their ability to be successful. It'll also push them towards further automation on the medium and long term time horizons. That would in turn alleviate a lot of the governmental attacks and bad press. I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service - they hate Amazon the pee-bottle-broker and tornado-warning-ignorer. As for other e-commerce sites, they'll probably just buy them, crush them, or if they can't do that - sell them logistics and infrastructure services. [edit] Consider FedEx vs UPS. FedEx can't hire staffers right now, while UPS, unionized, saw basically zero attrition. FedEx is suffering right now. UPS, crushing it. [1] The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, nonunionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-shortage-ups-union-drivers-give-delivery-service-edge-over-fedex-fdx https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-sho...

praptak 5y ago
> I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service Wait, what? They do have a huge problem with counterfeit crap sold via bait-and-switch reviews. Edit: A related article https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/amazon-still-hasnt-fixed-its-problem-with-bait-and-switch-reviews/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/amazon-still-has...
- arcticbull 5y ago
  I'll never call them perfect, to be sure. They do have counterfeit issues and bait-and-switch reviews. However, I don't hate them for it, and I'm confident they're continuing to improve. JMHO. But a fair call-out nonetheless.
5y ago

random12345678 5y ago

>But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily everyone over 30 i know are past facebook and realize Instagram is adware/spyware.

chermi 5y ago
Almost everyone I know between 30 and 40 dropped Facebook. Not completely, I'd guess the majority still have their accounts. Just no one uses it. My survey isn't very data heavy, but from the people I know, it's mostly older people and the people who stayed in my hometown that still use it.

lbrandy 5y ago

FWIW, I joined HN 14 years ago (wow) and there's never been a time in those 14 years that HN wasn't convinced that facebook's demise was just around the corner.

jonathankoren 5y ago
This is true, but the main reason was that people have been predicting this was that young people don’t want to be on a social network with their parents. This social dynamic prediction has played out, and Facebook did the 100% predictable thing that all rich entrenched players do — they bought the smaller competitors, most famously Instagram. I fully expect them to continue to be able to monetize their user base, and purchase smaller competitors for a while. The most recent warning flag for me is their rebranding. Announcing a major pivot to center on Occulus (I’m sorry “the metaverse”.), when VR has been nothing more than niche gaming is very weird and troublesome. On the bright side, Facebook is a giant ossified megacorp. All that’s going to happen is some division is going to get new signage, and every PM is going to update their slide decks to say “metaverse”, and everyone is going to do what they were already doing.
- romanhn 5y ago
  As an ex-employee, Facebook is many things, but ossified it is not. The internal impact/metric-oriented culture means that new bets are encouraged and rewarded, whereas product teams that are keeping it safe will eventually get disbanded.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    I’m also an ex-employee. FB’s predilection to reorg every six months, isn’t a sign of strength. It’s actually a sign of dysfunction. They’ve just been able to power through by being extraordinarily lucky in the social networking space. It’s tire spinning. The company hasn’t released a noteworthy product in at least a decade. It’s an ossified megacorp.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Quest was the best selling game console this holiday, which doesn't sound niche to me.

mech422 5y ago

Personally, I think FB is in trouble because it became 'your grandmothers social media'... the youngsters seem more interested in insta and tiktok

billyhoffman 5y ago
> the youngsters seem more interested in insta ... which is owned by FB. Between Instagram securing the audience of the next generation, and Whatsapp gaining huge share as the communication tool of developing world, FB is going to do just fine, even if facebook.com usage totally tanks (also unlikely)
- throwawayay02 5y ago
  I'm convinced facebook.com usage will completely tank. It is surviving on older people and newer market where it got popular later, but I believe all social websites have the cycle where it's unknown, then popular, then everybody's parents join, then no longer popular, then dead. As for Whatsapp, it makes no money, and there are plenty of non-monetized instant messengers, so I can't see them making a profit there. The one thing they still have is Instagram, but it's "reels" haven't beaten tiktok, and it's already filled to exhaustion with ads, so it's a matter of time before it's popularity starts to decline. As for the multiverse, that will never amount to anything.
- mech422 5y ago
  I think that will hold them a couple of years... Then something else (possibly NOT FB owned) will take over... like another tik tok. Kids don't want to be on the same social as their parents. Its gonna be a revolving door every 5 or 10 years.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Miner49er 5y ago

My thought process on Facebook declining isn't about perception. It's that they are putting a ton of capital into and taking a huge risk on the Metaverse. If it fails it could mean a major decline for Facebook.

jhbadger 5y ago

I think they've lost GenZ, though. Boomers and GenX use Facebook, Millennials use Instagram, but GenZ uses TickTock, and unlike with Instagram, it doesn't look like they can just buy it out to reach the next generation.

cmsj 5y ago
I would fully expect this trend to continue - each new generational cohort will latch onto a new social network that is separate from the ones their lame parents and older siblings use. This poses a massive institutional risk to any social network. They either need to aggressively pump out new brands to try and capture that themselves, or buy promising startups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to fail at both of those and just completely skip a generation. A few of those misses added up could be a terminal failure.
runlevel1 5y ago
Younger generations appear to be less married to the platform, though. Tiktok seems to have largely displaced Snapchat in under two years.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily That's an interesting perspective, I was pretty convinced that facebook was almost dead since all of my friends (in France) have almost completely stopper using it. Well most of us are still casually browsing it every once in a while, but it's far less often than it used to be, and worse: we don't have interactions together on that platform. The last remaining usage was events, but since covid basically killed most large-group events for a while, even this usage died off. I wonder if it's more of a group difference, or maybe it depends from country to country. Where do you live?

chronotis 5y ago
Midwestern GenX suburban parent here. Nothing important happens in our subdivision (hundreds of homes) without mention of it in the neighborhood's private Facebook group. Our public school district uses a Facebook page as a primary announcement platform. Kids' sports and social groups are all organized as Facebook groups and pages. You cannot escape Facebook if you're a suburban parent in the US.
- slyall 5y ago
  True but thats 10 minutes per day. Facebook needs everybody to spend hours on them each day.
  - warner25 5y ago
    Very good point. Facebook has gone from something that I used for enjoyment (2004 through maybe 2016) to something that I resentfully use only to conduct business in my local community. It's still "social" but it's the difference between hanging out with friends vs. running errands at the store, post office, city hall, etc. It has clearly grown in importance by becoming the de facto official online presence of so many entities, so I can't escape it, but I absolutely want to minimize my time spent on that stuff. I reflexively answered the poll with Facebook because I hate it, but then I realized that I'm probably closer to killing my Netflix account than my Facebook account, and I doubted my answer. Now you've convinced me again that Facebook is most in decline.

berberous 5y ago

My two cents is that people are dramatically under-weighting the possibility that Zuckerberg is a visionary with his AR/VR plays. I am extremely bullish on FB solely because of that. I think people will be as wrong about his VR plays as they were about the Instagram acquisition.

dougmwne 5y ago
Agree with you there. You've got a founder led company making visionary plays that have every appearance of being on the right track. The Quest is not just a tech marvel, it was also the best selling game console this Christmas. The overall vision will take a few more hardware iterations, but has huge potential to replace smartphones, laptops, game consoles and offices. At this very moment there's another comment thread talking about how the web is an SEO spam graveyard and Google is ripe to be disrupted. Those thinking the disrupter is going to be Duck Duck Go are kidding themselves.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  VR has been just around the corner for at least 30 years. I remember experiencing my first VR demo in 1997, complete with the gushing marketer convinced that the new age of VR was finally upon us, and this was long after the failed "VR pods" of the early 90s. The argument has always been "The technology is finally real-enough looking and believable! VR is now inevitable!" I argue that VR is not held back by graphic realism, input latency, or lack of content, but the form factor itself. Too few people want to strap something to their face which entirely takes over vision and hearing and then stumble around awkwardly flailing their limbs and hoping they don't run into anything. This fact hasn't changed since the earliest days of the technology.

wombat-man 5y ago

Well, as those 30+ year olds get older, marketers are going to give less and less of a shit about them. Facebook makes most of their money from their ad network that mostly exists on sites that nobody actually needs to visit (Facebook, ig). In addition, Meta is spending a boat load on engineers who don't really want to work there, so they can make a "metaverse" which I'll bet most of them don't give half a shit about. Then they're going to market the hell out of it and at the end of the day I just don't think that many people are going to use it enough to make it all worthwhile. I could be wrong but I think if Meta isn't careful in how they diversify their focus they could face a real reckoning that has nothing to do with their current political pushback. Google search is still pretty good, and their ad network is used throughout the internet so I think they're safe. Amazon will do whatever it takes to keep sales up, so I have faith in them. If nothing else they're a company that seems extremely capable of adapting to changing market conditions.

bgro 5y ago

Amazon / Google I think will stay strong due to their infrastructure in cloud technology. Amazon has the physical delivery infrastructure as well, which doesn't have a great competitor yet. Apple is currently doing fine with their devices. I think the health industry will adopt some of their tech soon (like the apple watch) to get some of that sweet, sweet healthcare / insurance money That leaves the "worst" of the group to either Facebook or Netflix. I haven't heard much about what Netflix is doing, but things seem to be going generally okay so far. Facebook has extremely negative news all over the media on seemingly both the tech and political side. For example, malicious targeting of children and their platform being used for fake news / propaganda. On the tech side, I don't have confidence in their current, future, or past projects such as Oculus or their extreme hype around the metaverse. For these reasons (by default and past/present/future speculation) given the wording on this question, I think Facebook is the obvious "loser."

discardable_dan 5y ago
I believe nobody talking about Netflix is worse than people talking negatively about Facebook. Facebook has far-reaching influence over non-US societies, and are generally capable of living off of just those societies. Netflix, on the other hand, is very quickly losing the content war to the likes of Disney and HBO, plus further losing its bread-and-butter catalog backfill to Hulu. Facebook is going to keep being the popular boogeyman, possibly declining over the next decade. Netflix may truly be gone in 10 years, though.

systemvoltage 5y ago

I love Instagram as well as Pinterest. Two unpopular things on HN. There is no service out there to curate visual culture like these two. Want to build a image collection of vintage receipts!? You got it. These two platforms are truly amazing for this kind of a thing. Also ads on IG are something I'd actually want.

slategruen 5y ago

Unless there will be another communication platform that could capture a good chunk of Facebook's users, Facebook is here to stay. A lot of Facebook features are just very difficult to implement in other platforms nowadays. One example is group messaging. WhatsApp has users from a wide range of age groups and no other platforms could easily compete with that. Communicating with our family, regardless of their age group, is a very crucial part of our culture and Facebook fills that gap. Another example is online selling. Buy-and-sell groups are thriving in Facebook because it's so easy to publish your products and immediately communicate with your potential customers. For example, in the Southeast Asian region, Facebook took a large chunk of users from Carousell, the most popular online selling platform there for years before Facebook released Marketplace. Even for me personally, I've tried to stop using Facebook for several months but in my home country, Facebook is just too integrated in its culture.

throwawayboise 5y ago

> everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook What about over 50? I have never used any mainstream social media. I do participate in this and a few other online forums. For communicating directly with others online, I use email.

tootie 5y ago

I voted for FB but yeah I really have no idea. I don't get social media at all. I don't get Twitter or TikTok. I don't get how anyone makes a nickel in advertising. I also don't get crypto. They're worth billions based on network effects for reasons I can't comprehend. I understand the internal logic of how they function and monetize but I can't understand how they get so much engagement.

bamboozled 5y ago

My Instagram feed has pretty much just ended up being soft porn. It's pretty easy to be replaced from this point on by anything. The "AI" has basically re-created Sport Illustrated in scroll form.