56 ms·

Facebook loses users for the first time

• ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  Cant wait for this frustrating company to shut down.
• kajaktum 5y ago
  People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different? They are all free services that profit from your personal information. Some just have better PR than the other.
  • openknot 5y ago
    Hacker News and other relatively smaller forums are different. They are free social media networks that aren't optimized to maximize engagement, promote outrage, or instill a fear of missing out.
    • guerrilla 5y ago
      They don't have as much of a network effect either.
    • sjtindell 5y ago
      That stuff matters too but I think the size is what matters. HN stays clean because it stays small. Lots of posts are boring for the average person’s interests. I’ve seen the same thing on Reddit. Once you go above a certain size, a subreddit completely degrades.
    • spookthesunset 5y ago
      They are also anonymous. I could be flaming somebody I know in real life but it does matter. Don’t ask don’t tell.
    • MikusR 5y ago
      I have seen all 3 things on Hacker News. In addition to large threads about conspiracy theories, antivax and misinformation.
      • openknot 5y ago
        They’re not completely absent, but design decisions by Hacker News make these three factors less visible. >maximize engagement It encourages engagement with upvotes and additional privileges when an account gets more points. However, the site’s design doesn’t maximize it. I don’t get push notifications to check the site, awards, or suggestions for other relevant articles in the comments. >promote outrage Outrage can be a factor that causes posts to rise, but deliberate policies avoid optimizing for it. Specifically, the avoidance of editing the submission title, unless the purpose is to make it less clickbait. >instill a fear of missing out. This is most subjective, but I get the sentiment that if someone posts an amazing project, there’s a good chance of constructive critique in the comments, or more information from the developer about how they made it. Other social media websites don’t have the depth of discussion (just photos of the best parts of their life, without talking about the challenges). This is relatively more of a cultural/user base observation versus an interface decision, however. For conspiracy theories, antivax, and misinformation, the alternative is heavier moderation. It looks like a judgement call by HN moderators to err on being less interventionist with user discussion. There are tradeoffs, but I think the benefits of free discussion outweigh exposure to misinformation, so long as one reads skeptically and critically.
    • mFixman 5y ago
      All social networks with voting systems are optimised to maximise engagement and promote outrage. Just look at how every single country subreddit is a constant flamewar. HN _mostly_ prevents this by having strong and good moderation, but there's still a fair amount of negative metrics coming from it.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    Personally, I applaud decline in engagement with any of the social networks, not just Facebook.
    • feupan 5y ago
      The decline is only one-sided. Facebook down, TikTok up. The mean amount of social network users is not declining at all.
      • spideymans 5y ago
        TikTok is essentially a mobile-first reincarnation of YouTube. I’ve yet to see any users use it to socialize with friends and family they know in real life. I’m hesitant to call it a “social network” when there’s little to no socializing there in the first place
        • nightgarden 5y ago
          It's still a social media network. People socialise there with the broader world. And socialising with friends and family may be passé for young people nowadays.
        • feupan 5y ago
          You have profile, you publish content, people leave comments, you can message anyone. It is a social network. Don’t confuse its format for YouTube because that’s now how the youth is using it
      • barbazoo 5y ago
        Fair point. I do agree with others though, the damage other apps like TikTok do is less for me to be happy about it overall. It's like Transitioning people from an alcohol addiction to a weed addiction, one is much more dangerous than the other, either might not be great for you.
    • raxxorrax 5y ago
      I hope platforms that are focused on topics instead of people will prevail. There is still some exaggerated self-promotion, but it is far less pronounced. Oversharing is a really bad idea in the long run. Your opinions from 30 years ago are probably hated today. Imagine the trauma that is caused if you could read what your parents thought before you were born.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Because it is rotten to the core? Because of its utterly unsympathetic upper management? (Ok, Bezos as runner up). Because of all of the deceptive things it has done over the years?
  • rvz 5y ago
    Exactly. It is no different to the rest of them. This game is simply one tyrant (TikTok) dethroning another (Meta) and all of them make money out of our personal data. Facebook (the social network) was known to be in decline for years. The real attention is on Instagram and WhatsApp are still adding users. I wouldn't rush to rule them out yet over this.
    • pjerem 5y ago
      At least I have the feeling that newcomers like TikTok don’t have this "embrace the web" thing that Facebook had during a decade with embedded tracking scripts everywhere on any website. I feel like TikTok is more closed and that I don’t have a shadow profile on it like Facebook did. But it’s also because the web (especially the browsers and mobile OS) learnt its lessons. OTOH, it also means that newcomers will have to make even more efforts to to "compete" with the historical open web which can create even more situations of information disappearing from the open web.
  • vegetablepotpie 5y ago
    The problem is that there is social media. Facebook is the biggest success, which is why people focus on it. Facebook displaces other forms of communication I prefer to use. I used to use email heavily to communicate with friends. Email was the best format for me, now no one uses it. Everyone is on 12 messaging platforms, Facebook started that trend with messenger. I used to be able to go to business websites and get the information I needed, now everyone primarily uses Facebook pages to post information, which means I have to log in on many occasions to view the content. The Internet before Facebook was much more convenient for me. Facebook hasn’t resulted in any positive interactions for me. Something about the platform drives people to be confrontational. Years ago when I participated on the platform I would reply to friend’s posts. Sometimes I would get replies from their friends and they tried to argue with me. It boiled down to them believing I said something in my post that I did not write. That drove me to not write my thoughts about something, and when I did reply, it was with shallow positive comments. That is a very boring way to interact with people, so I stopped using the platform.
    • spookthesunset 5y ago
      This has become me. Facebook encourages you to become confrontational with all your friends.
    • _3u10 5y ago
      Pretty sure IRC/ICQ started the 18 messengers. It's too bad Adium/Pidgin can't exist for mobile.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    TikTok is very different and will probably turn your view of what drives engagement upside down. Try it for a bit, it's an alternate universe.
    • kajaktum 5y ago
      NO thanks, I am not planning on using yet another service that is trying to psychologically milk every ounce of my attention. Reddit and Hackernews is bad enough. I am also not interested in looking at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days.
      • jollybean 5y ago
        "I don't understand this 'Internet' thing the kids are using, have no intention of trying it, and I already don't like the newspapers!" "at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days." ... is a seriously dim view. TikTok is literally the #1 app in the world, and for someone curious enough to read HackerNews but unwilling to even try app to understand the nature of its impact is a bit odd. Personally, I despise Twitter, but I read it occasionally, and understand why it works, and what kind of content is on there. I would find it problematic to work in tech with someone who doesn't understand 'why people like Netflix' having never even bothered to stream a video before. In particular, the feed algorithm is unlike anything else in tech and the content is definitely a lot less toxic. You should definitely try it, that doesn't mean you have to like it.
        • oska 5y ago
          > kind of an essential for anyone working in tech Don't mean to be rude but you appear to have a quite limited concept of what 'working in tech' can entail.
          • jollybean 5y ago
            I don't mean to be rude but anyone unwilling to even 'try' something like 'Netflix' or 'Facebook' or 'TikTok' or 'Email' - ie the universally popular, generationally defining experiences, is woefully ignorant, and that goes beyond those just working in tech. It's fine to not want to use those services (I personally avoid most of them), but to ignore them, or worse, purposely avoid even understanding what they are is straight, self imposed ignorance. It's ridiculous.
  • max49 5y ago
    >People like to hate on Facebook, but how is any other social media different? I think the main reason for it is that most of us are just old enough to remember what facebook was before they started filling the site with ads and recommended/paid/suggested/etc posts. It was really fucking great back when you would logging and there would be literally no content/ads other than what your friend manually took the time write/post. they gave us a taste of what a great minimalist social media platform could be and then turned monetisation/engagement to 9000. Imagine if HN was bought by reddit and they decided to use the reddit platform (new skin only, no "old.XX...") with all the ads and everything. That's kinda what happened to facebook.
  • makeitdouble 5y ago
    The three critically different things to me: - they have/had a critical size. No other social media was that big, and size matters. - they required (still do?) real IDs. Forcing people to use their real name is a special kind of awful, especially when it's the main network - they push a unified account platform for everything they owned. Other companies tried too but most failed (I also hate Apple for that, if you were to ask).
• monkeybutton 5y ago
  Its already frustrating enough having to use Facebook just to look up a restaurant's information, the set times for a concert, or whatever about a local business or event. If all that stuff starts to disappear behind a meta-verse wall, I might just leap off the nearest bridge instead.
  • Nbox9 5y ago
    If you call a local business you can usually get that sort of information without logging into facebook.
    • alisonatwork 5y ago
      Some local businesses only provide their "number" as a WhatsApp contact, so you're kinda stuck on a Facebook-owned platform anyway.
      • irrational 5y ago
        Can you give an example? I just go to google maps or Apple Maps and type in any business and have all the information I have ever needed.
        • alisonatwork 5y ago
          You might be in the US. In many other countries WhatsApp is a first class communication mechanism, comparable to WeChat in China.
  • xbmcuser 5y ago
    This is the reason I went anti facebook years back not because of privacy implications but I felt with facebook the web will become less open. As most business will make a facebook page instead of a website accessible to everyone
  • xwdv 5y ago
    A meta-verse bridge or an actual bridge?
• XorNot 5y ago
  Which is impressive because I still have Facebook I just don't login and never use any of its services - the account now exists to simply hold a lock on my name on the service. I suspect I'm not the only one doing this.
  • eBombzor 5y ago
    I mainly use it to sell things locally. Or maybe there's a local apartment rental group. That's about it.
  • voisin 5y ago
    This would be reflected in change to Monthly Active Users which seems way more relevant than total users.
    • Tempest1981 5y ago
      I also see them using "Family daily active people (DAP)" and monthly active people (MAP). https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2022/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2021-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... I wonder if that counts unique/distinct people, taking into consideration a person with multiple accounts -- FB, IG, WhatsApp, etc.
  • zammzam 5y ago
    I'm starting to notice this trend in my group of contacts.
  • erehweb 5y ago
    The stat being referenced is daily active users, so not counting people who have an account but never login.
    • friendlydog 5y ago
      Does it count people who have messenger but never open it, but their device is signed it? It is cramware on a lot of android phones.
• Victerius 5y ago
  > Daily active users dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.92 billion, with the drop coming from Africa and Latin America.
  • studmuffin650 5y ago
    I think they only lost a half million users (which wouldn't even show up as a blib on that number)
    • ikt 5y ago
      This may be like the first time McDonalds posted a loss: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2688665.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2688665.stm I still remember it and the changes that came after it, the McDonalds of today is nothing like the McDonalds of 2003. We'll see what Facebook does, I assume buy out Snapchat or Tiktok or some other product where the kids hang out.
      • dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
        > I still remember it and the changes that came after it, the McDonalds of today is nothing like the McDonalds of 2003. Building remodels aside, what are you referring to? They have chicken wraps and salads? Otherwise it seems more or less the same McDonalds of my childhood?
        • MattGaiser 5y ago
          Moving towards chicken in general was a big one as chicken has soared in popularity.
  • tr33house 5y ago
    Isn't it suspicious that the losses conveniently happened in Africa and Latin America which contribute to a smallest share of their revenue
    • 5y ago
• dkackman11 5y ago
  This is good news. Facebook has proven itself to be a negative influence on people and countries.
  • systemvoltage 5y ago
    It is just me or there seems to be a strange lack of criticism about TikTok on the same or stricter level than FB. Especially that it is a Chinese company HQ’ed in Beijing. Neither do I ever see discussion about the asymmetry in China’s trade policies with regards to FB/Tiktok. Tiktok enjoys free market access (except India), whereas FB is banned in China just like many other US-based platforms. On the contrary, there seems to be praise about TikTok on HN! How come we don’t see scathing articles on NYT about TikTok but on WSJ? Has this become a partisan issue (Trump wanted to ban Tiktok)?
    • zwieback 5y ago
      I think it's because of the perception TikTok=cat and dance videos, FB=misinformation. At least that's what my feeds looks like. Also: TikTok=kids, FB=adults
      • systemvoltage 5y ago
        I use Instagram daily. I love it. And so do my friends. Ads are also very on point and small business oriented. No scams. Instagram has super cool retro computing and countless vaporwave aesthetic channels that frankly are unique to IG. It’s incredible. I have curated my own feed using the save feature. Never used FB but IG seems to be better than Tiktok mentally and otherwise.
      • leonidasv 5y ago
        At least in my bubble, TikTok has plenty of misinformation too, and to me it's as bad as Facebook when it comes to dissemination.
      • whiskyant 5y ago
        TikTok has plenty of misinformation, Twitter too.
• higgins 5y ago
  I wonder if they tried to buy wordle... What's the hottest social network they could buy?
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    TikTok
    • uptown 5y ago
      "...they could buy" Nope
      • hailwren 5y ago
        Seems like FB has about $55b on hand, but their market cap is ~$800b vs Bytedance's highest valuation of $425b. Without taking into account fiscal responsibility, it's in the realm of possibility that FB could buy TikTok with credit + options.
        • manquer 5y ago
          Money is only one part of the equation, You think regulators in either country will sign off on a deal like that ?
          • sjg007 5y ago
            Nope. China won't no way.
      • fullshark 5y ago
        Discord then
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • paxys 5y ago
      That ship sailed a long time ago.
• n8ta 5y ago
  https://archive.md/PPaDg https://archive.md/PPaDg
• trident5000 5y ago
  Theres so many ads on instagram Im considering dumping it. Thats the only social platform I ever liked because I dont have to hear peoples opinions on things. But Im at a breaking point.
  • ProAm 5y ago
    > Im considering In poker they call this a bluff
    • trident5000 5y ago
      I dumped facebook, linkedin, snapchat. I can dump another.
  • lurker619 5y ago
    Exactly. The main feed doesn't hold any meaning for me now. I find I miss around 50% of my friend's posts and reels if I don't check their profile manually. I only use it for seeing and posting stories now. I'm sure stories would get similarly ad-clogged in 1-2 years as well. Just to clarify, I'm fine with seeing some ads in between chronological posts. But the feed is entirely ads after 5-6 posts. Hoping some brave instagram PM reads this comment.
    • annadane 5y ago
      Don't you love going to Instagram and having it refuse to show you pictures without logging in? I sure do
  • toxican 5y ago
    It's almost impressive how much of Instagram is just ads. I keep it around to follow a few people, but it seems like more than half of what scrolls by is either ads or totally off-base account recommendations (Which are themselves, essentially ads)
    • giobox 5y ago
      Instagram is arguably fast becoming the 21st century version of the glossy fashion magazines my parent's generation often read to kill time, where every second page would be a full page advert for a perfume or a watch.
• ProAm 5y ago
  When the metaverse actually launches they will skyrocket. They were smart to pivot early. Saying the 'metaverse' is on FB right now is similar to people selling acres on the Moon before anyone landed. FB is planting an imaginary flag on the 'metaverse' hoping they can technically catch up to their claims and capitalize on it.
  • cwkoss 5y ago
    I feel like "selling acres on the Moon" and "smart" are at significant odds with each other...
    • ProAm 5y ago
      If someone asks you for $25.00 for an acre on the moon, you'd probably pay it just in case its a future lottery ticket.
      • toxican 5y ago
        No, I'd point to those sites that sell stars and laugh in their face.
      • cwkoss 5y ago
        I'll sell you up to 50,000,000 acres on Mars for 1/5,000,000th of a bitcoin each, lmk if you want me to send a btc address. Proof of ownership will be provided as a convenient and portable .txt file If you but the whole amount, I'll write into my will that my decendant's also have to honor your claim. If any of them becomes king or queen of mars, could be quite lucrative!
  • Victerius 5y ago
    I predict the Metaverse will fail, and fail early. It will be Google Plus, but worse. No one I personally know cares about Metaverse, including young people and Facebook users.
    • ProAm 5y ago
• EGreg 5y ago
  Well, diminishing returns Mark Z talked about S curves 10 yea to ago
  • deleted 5y ago
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• deleted 5y ago
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• didip 5y ago
  Stock dropped by 22% as well.
  • thegeomaster 5y ago
    This is huge. Facebook is 2% of the S&P 500, it basically dragged the whole market slightly down.
  • Calist0 5y ago
    Yes, unfortunately I bought in 2 days ago. The market is irrational. Facebook literally missed its projections by 3% and loses 0.15% of its active users (mostly due to things opening up) and investors panic. Good time to buy in.
    • lordnacho 5y ago
      Expectations were that it would do like the other internet giants and beat by miles. Yes it's weird that the expectations are not just their own performance, but that's often how the market works.
• annadane 5y ago
  Literally all Zuckerberg has to do is not be the kind of person he is... his product itself did achieve success in that a huge number of people are using it, but then he had to prove himself to have no ethical standards
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    Literally all Zuckerberg has to do is be the same person who made him worth $80 billion.
    • annadane 5y ago
      Your point is taken, but I think it's kind of clear Facebook's only strategies are "lie" and "copy/buy everyone else"
      • slig 5y ago
        And it worked perfectly fine, they only missed TikTok. Whatsapp and Instagram were perfect acquisitions.
        • annadane 5y ago
          Worked is debatable - sure, it worked for them, but they made those platforms worse for consumers
          • sk0g 5y ago
            Facebook succeeded because it made money, which is the primary objective of for-profit companies. The government (and people) represent the interests of the people, usually.
    • zepto 5y ago
      He’s worth $80 billion for now.
  • kumarvvr 5y ago
• mythrwy 5y ago
  When Facebook first started getting users I tried to access it from a script using Lynx. I don't remember why but it was nothing nefarious, I think I simply wanted to download something for GF periodically. I got a message that said "We aren't cool enough to support your browser". Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account. Later I blocked all Facebook domains in Host files and it's been that way ever since. For awhile it was a bit awkward with people demanding to know why I didn't have a Facebook page but apparently I hold grudges for a long time. It's been delightful to see people come around to my point of view on Facebook. They really are like a seedy bar in the bad part of town. With snooty messages for circumventors. But I have to thank them for that snooty message otherwise I would have probably caved and opened an account years ago.
  • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > I got a message that said "We aren't cool enough to support your browser". Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account. Really? I think Facebook's message is kind of nice compared to the standard "Please use a different browser". Whereas the common message implies that you are the problem for using an unusual browser, Facebook's message acknowledges that they are the problem for being less cool than you.
  • saimiam 5y ago
    Tbh, you don’t have a point of view on Facebook that people have come around to. You didn’t like FB for their condescension. Today people are walking out of fb for their business practices (and ppbly a myriad other reasons). Your reason and theirs have little overlap though it could be argued that condescension is a symptom of internal malaise which is also reflected in shady business practices which is causing users to now abandon FB.
  • whiskyant 5y ago
    I'm surprised that message irked you that much, doesn't sound that bad to me. Almost sounds sincere, rather than sarcastic.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• GCA10 5y ago
  Peak coffee consumption (per capita/US): 1946 Peak cigarette consumption (per capita/US): 1963 Peak oil production (global): unknown, maybe 2020-2030 Peak Facebook: ?? That's an incomplete peer group, but I find it interesting that at some point, society does start to unplug from addictive substances. The tapering off is quite slow, though. Unclear whether heavy users cut back, or new generations just don't develop the habit as older ones die off
  • rowanajmarshall 5y ago
    The difference is, the US population kept growing, so while per capita figures falling is noticeable, total coffee/cigarette consumption may not have fallen. Facebook's numbers are falling despite a growth in world population, and I'd bet a larger growth in the internet-connected population. That's worse, especially for a platform heavily reliant on network effects.
  • kumarvvr 5y ago
    I think it has more to do with alternatives (except perhaps in case of cigarettes which have direct measurable health effects) availability rather than society starting to unplug from addictive substances. Peak coffee is in 1946, but what have consumers moved onto from then? Alcohol, Tea, Energy drinks, Soft Drinks ?
    • baby-yoda 5y ago
      Soft drinks mostly, but even that appeared to be in the early stages of tapering as of 2005. What is next? https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58920/finding_buzbyfig.gif?v=7945 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58920/finding_buzbyf...
      • kumarvvr 5y ago
        Current fads that come to mind - Gatorade and similar stuff - A movement to drink water (HydroHomies) - High caffeine energy drinks (Red bull and the likes) - Healthy alternatives (juices, smoothies, etc)
    • 5y ago
• parsd 5y ago
  I am thankful to these evil companies. Thanks to them - I spend less time online, try to read more books, appreciate real-life conversations, rely on locals for information and news, and let my mind wander.
  • brewdad 5y ago
    Careful not to pull something patting yourself on the back like that.
    • thorwawayrus53 5y ago
      because?
    • parsd 5y ago
      There is nothing facetious or self-flattering here, these things aren't achievements, rather reactions to dependence on some massive facets of modern life, which, as it turns out, are not critical or even necessary.
• jppope 5y ago
  I think this has been pretty obvious for a while... MAU doesn't tell the real story and I think we all have anecdotal evidence that the engagement and demographics changed substantially over the last 5 years.
• Damogran6 5y ago
  I went back to my forums, find myself easily disengaging from Reddit (around the election, Reddit was nothing but stress), Check Twitter maybe 10 minutes a week, go to Instagram once a week because my kid posts his artwork there. But in general, ALL of the sticky sites aren’t…sticky anymore. I took 2 weeks off at the worst of it and it did an amazing job of breaking the feedback loop. Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey. Then they started poking around with VR and Meta and man, I really don’t want to use this headset if I’m forced to log into Facebook and you’ve got 6 outward facing cameras, Zuckerberg. Good. Can’t come soon enough.
  • stadium 5y ago
    They finally monitized their products and customers to a breaking point. They run on engagement metrics without common sense or empathy to how fear and anger impact their user's wellbeing. I most definitely do not need or want a VR immersed version of that toxicity.
    • rubicon33 5y ago
      VR has nothing to do with facebook, at least at the moment. Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. If you enjoy video games, its hands down the best way to game right now.
      • TeeMassive 5y ago
        > Just logging in with your facebook account doesn't mean its suddenly sucking all your life from you and piping it right to facebook. You don't have to login into Facebook to have it build a profile of you: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profi...
      • Damogran6 5y ago
• Proven 5y ago
• joelbondurant0 5y ago
• ahmed_ds 5y ago
  The fact of the matter is they still have close 2 billion active logins each day. Even if they have settled in matters of user acquisitions they haven't stopped harvesting increasing amounts of profit from each users. I would like to know how the statistics of revenue per user would be from this point on.
  • manquer 5y ago
    The revenue guidance for next quarter is not very great either, so given the user numbers ARPU is not growing
    • Calist0 5y ago
      They're still growing year-over-year. They were just off their target in the last quarter by 3%. They're valued at $3.67 per share versus the $3.78 expected. Their stock literally dropped ~25% because they were only 3% off expected earnings. And lost 0.15% active users, which is expected as the world opens up again. I don't see what the big deal is. The market is overreacting.
      • manquer 5y ago
        Post close trading can be swing by a lot. The reaction I think is not because that they are off by 3%, the future growth looks only to be pretty dull , perhaps also why FB is making such huge gamble on VR. The high P/E big tech companies enjoy is on basis of the implicit expectation to keep growing fast[1], if that on confidence on growth is no longer there, then price will reflect closer to a more traditional tech stock. Tesla trades at P/E of 185x, Amazon - 58x, Microsoft - 35x, Google - 29x and FB - 23x[2]. I think it accurately reflects the market expectation of their respective future growth. --- [1] Same reason Tesla is valued so high despite relatively modest revenue, the expectation is massive growth on the back of their lead in the space and the accelerating shift towards EV. [2] SAP, IBM, ORCL all trade in the same range today.
  • notyourwork 5y ago
    I'd like clear qualifying of what a login means. Does that mean I goto facebook.com or open FB app at least once a day? I imagine "daily login" could be artificially inflated in all sorts of ways like having fb.com tab open on my browser and never actually going to it as one example.
• backtobecks 5y ago
  bye bye facebook
• IronWolve 5y ago
  Facebook suspended the official washington state republican group multiple times for posts, they finally moved over to mewe. Facebook is a shadow of what it use to be after running off everyone.
  • tasty_freeze 5y ago
    > Facebook is a shadow of what it use to be after running off everyone. Yes, everyone ran off, leaving only 1.9B subscribers.
    • youareafool 5y ago
    • friendlydog 5y ago
      Only a few people closed their accounts, many leave them as husks. The account is there but dead.
  • spacexsucks 5y ago
    Yes but lets not talk about fb's harming algorithm that amplifies dumb views
  • notreallyserio 5y ago
    Do you know what sort of posts they were? There are some real nutty pro-violence Republicans in WA state (ex: Shea) which could trigger bans or suspensions.
• josefrichter 5y ago
  My 16yo daughter says FB is for old people and nobody in her age group is using it.
  • joelbondurant1 5y ago
    [dead]
  • petilon 5y ago
    But they use Instagram instead. Either way Zuck wins.
    • elwell 5y ago
      Facebook is for old people. Instagram is for moderately old people. Snapchat is for moderately young people. TikTok is for young people.
      • chris_wot 5y ago
        Hopefully soon Facebook won't even be for young people.
      • makeworld 5y ago
        Everyone uses Instagram, teens most of all.
        • jader201 5y ago
          Most of the “not so young” people I know do not even have an Instagram account. Of my two teens, only one of them uses it (the other has zero interest). I’m trying to do my part in keeping my teens off social media. I’m about 50% successful.
        • spideymans 5y ago
          Eh… anecdotes are anecdotal, but in my experience the only reason people use Instagram is for messenger. Almost everyone is on Instagram, so it makes it really easy to connect with people. Kind of like a giant phonebook. I almost never see any of my friends posting on Instagram anymore. The only ones that do are artists and people with some “personal brand” to promote (aka, they have a business interest in posting to IG). Some more people post on stories, but even that’s rare. Like Facebook, most people I know hate using Instagram, so I figure it’s only a matter of time before it’s engagement numbers go down. I’m in my 20s for reference. I feel like in the coming years we’ll see these Gen Z kids almost entirely eschew posting on social media. Most young people I know are almost entirely socializing with their friends via messaging apps, while very rarely making posts on social media. Instagram will fade from relevance for the youth, much like Facebook, and I don’t expect that any social media platform will replace it. Yes, TikTok is popular, but it’s more akin to YouTube that twitter/Facebook/Instagram. We’ll probably see some dramatic headlines about “the death of the social network” at some point over the next few years. Messaging will be the future of digital socializing. I think this is ultimately driven by young people coming to the realization that posting to social media is either completely unfulfilling, or actively detrimental to their mental well being. Platform owners thought they could ignore the issue, without considering that their target demographic may very well just reject social networking all together.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  The language around this is confusing and contradictory around the article. Did overall users fall or did user growth fall? Is it decelerating or shrinking?
• cmsonger 5y ago
  Due to past behavior and FB's justification of that behavior, I quit using the company's services and products years ago. I remain unwilling to be a FB user of any kind. Good. Keep going. Facebook, doing harm at scale.
  • chris_wot 5y ago
    Same. In fact, I literally just abandoned it. I didn't try to delete it. I just deleted it off my phone and never logged back in again. Been like this for 4 months now. Feels great!
  • marticode 5y ago
    Likewise. I'm still stuck using WhatsApp because it's the de-facto messaging standard over here, but I moved as many people as I could to Signal.
• plazmatic 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• kbrannigan 5y ago
  I remember when AOL or Yahoo or MSN was the place to be. Then myspace or Hi5 was the place to be Now it's google and facebook. How long will they last? Nokia was the phone to have Then Blackberry was the phone to have Now it's iPhone How long will this last?
  • notyourwork 5y ago
    Capitalism. The market speaks with their time and money. If you cannot keep them, someone will innovate on your idea and the herd moves.
  • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
    Google hasn't really ever been a place to be. Search isn't a place to hang out. Google seems more likely to hang around a long time, it's products are utilitarian and win based mostly on scale at this point.
• messe 5y ago
  Is this including all facebook owned platforms (such as instagram and whatsapp, or just facebook.com [and the associated apps])?
• UltraViolence 5y ago
  Facebook has been losing users for a long time, but has kept this hidden by only removing bot accounts sparingly, to mask their decline. But I guess the decline has become undeniable, but I suspect even now they're manipulating the statistics to dampen their fall.
  • spideymans 5y ago
    Yup. Average daily users is such a meaningless stat. There’s a huge difference between spending 5 hours a day on Facebook, and briefly opening Messenger to respond to a single message, but both are equally considered a “daily user”
• mrtri 5y ago
  [dead]
• kurizu4444 5y ago
  good.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  And thus begins their gamble. They’re going to have to bet the entire biz on virtual. Most public companies can’t do this, but FB has a unique control structure that gives Zuck the ability to bet the farm.
  • notyourwork 5y ago
    Does anyone else find this on the level of batshit crazy insane? Meta, are we really going to divest so far from the physical world that the a virtual reality is worth that much? I mean VR is realistically a video game. I just don't see it but I do see desperation from FB.
    • mmaunder 5y ago
      Then you’ve never experienced how transformative VR is and you lack vision.
      • notyourwork 5y ago
        Transformative, can you be more specific? The "lack of vision" seems like an attack more than a justification that VR is something beyond a gimmick.
      • rezbull 5y ago
        Sounds similar to what crypto fanatics say.
      • mypalmike 5y ago
        Some of us saw the last wave of VR hype. It was around the same time as PalmOS, iPaq, and other handheld computing devices. It wasn't obvious to most people at the time that one of these technologies would transform the world. But visionaries saw it. It wasn't VR then and it won't be now. VR has gained a foothold in this wave in its niches of gaming, other "entertainment", and random educational and military applications. General casual use beyond that is a pipe dream.
        • 5y ago
• epa 5y ago
  If you think about how metrics works, they probably had friendly fraud pumping their numbers -- think about them counting bots as new users when in fact it was just bots. Zuck sells Nov'2021 because he knows this info (insider trading works this way), earnings come out and news is released from the prior quarter.
  • notyourwork 5y ago
    Zuck and other executives sell on a schedule right? I agree this is plausible but your second sentence sort of implies he in short time frame defrauding investors by selling before releasing numbers. Not sure that is the case, its the same as Elon Musk asking Twitter if he should sell but already had scheduled sales disclosed prior.
• Calist0 5y ago
  They lost 3 million active users out of 1.93 billion active users. That's 0.15%? As countries are opening up more. And that's newsworthy? I don't see how that justifies the stock crashing -25% in 15 minutes.
  • r0fl 5y ago
    Trillion dollar tech giants are expected to GROW to justify their valuations. Look at the numbers alphabet and apple posted the last few days. Huge growth. Facebook is not only growing but much worse, shrinking. I’ve been bullish on FB from the ipo date but this seems like the beginning of the end unless the meta verse is out of this world
    • computerphage 5y ago
      "not only [not] growing"
    • Osiris 5y ago
      I've never really understood this MBA mentality because growth must stop at some point. There are only so many humans on earth. The expectation that a company can grow forever is impossible, at least until we find an alien planet with a population willing to sign up for Facebook.
      • School-Cotton 5y ago
        Right, of course. The claim wasn't "all companies must continue growing forever or they are bad companies / their stock will crash". It was rather "Facebook in particular's current valuation is based on investors predicting it will continue to grow". When (not if) Facebook stops growing, it will be worth _something_. Owning its stock is a bet on what that number is, and the stock price reflects the market's collective estimate.
      • spookthesunset 5y ago
        True but Facebook was valued for this growth. Better or worse if they don’t grow their stock price will take a well deserved beating.
• nyxtom 5y ago
  I used facebook for a brief period only because I was trying to sell some stuff on the marketplace. That being said marketplace is a crapshoot most of the time it seems so it ended up not working out. Every time I visited that cesspool of a website I regretted it immediately. Had to add a stylus script to disable loads of unwanted content
  • sjg007 5y ago
    I'm not sure craiglist is better... I think for the general folk that FB is quite a bit better.
• dathinab 5y ago
  I think they lost users much much earlier. It's just that most users they lost went from "I use Facebook" to "I don't want to use Facebook, but kinds still have to" (because friends, family etc.). All people below 40y I know which have Facebook fall more or less in the second category...
  • b0afc375b5 5y ago
    Facebook replaced sms/voicecall with family. If it wasn't for that I'd have already deleted my account years ago.
    • aylons 5y ago
      You may keep your messenger account while extinguishing your profile and all.
  • frob 5y ago
    I fall into a 3rd category: I used to log into FB once a month or so to check in. For some reason, they decided I was a fake account (despite working for them for 4.5 years) and asked for my ID. The resolution on my 10-year-old MBP was too low for FB's contractors so they rejected my ID 3 times and I seem to now be locked out of my account indefinitely. Definitely in the top 10 best thing to ever happen to me.
    • cipheredStones 5y ago
      Given how rarely you were using it before, I'm surprised you rate the impact so highly - how come?
      • vmception 5y ago
        Closure is powerful
        • frob 5y ago
          Bingo. I'm done. It's over. No matter how much I want to hop on and rage about the current issue of the day, I just can't and it's not worth pinging my former teammates there for the Nth time trying to fix it.
• Osiris 5y ago
  I use Facebook almost exclusively for local motorcycle groups and my BJJ gym. For small, local groups, Facebook is a great free way to setup events (like group rides) and share hobbies. My motorcycle group used to use Meetup but it has a fee and has much lower engagement. I've stopped using it as a way to communicate with family and friends because of the toxicity related to political divisions. I had to leave a family group messenger chat when two of my brothers started calling my oldest brother vulgar names while talking about my Aunt and Uncle dying of COVID.
• sammalloy 5y ago
  I seem to recall that one of the regulars here said this would never happen just a few months ago. Have they issued a mea culpa yet?
• sub7 5y ago
  About time. Unlike Google or Microsoft before them, this company was evil from day 1. 0/10 for them and anybody who made their money there
• dcchambers 5y ago
  I feel like all of the Metaverse stuff we've heard over the last few months was in preparation to try and distract/deflect from this.
  • kwijibob 5y ago
    EXACTLY!
  • spideymans 5y ago
    Yup. You’d think they’d wait until they had an actual product (heck, even a janky demo) to unveil the metaverse. This whole thing feels like a grift. It’ll keep the investors distracted for a few years, which will buy Facebook some time to actually put together a real product (who knows if it’ll be something anyone wants to use)
• yogeshkhetani 5y ago
• FpUser 5y ago
  Good to know. Not using it anyways.
• cutler 5y ago
  "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." (Winston Churchill). One can only pray.
• dang 5y ago
  Related ongoing thread: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185214 - Feb 2022 (436 comments)
• AnonC 5y ago
  Anecdotally, I know several people who shifted from Facebook, with its toxic space for arguments, to Instagram in the last few years. I stopped using Facebook a few years ago, when it was mainly for a few topic focused groups. I wish there were a way to download all the group posts and comments (or at least the ones I participated in) in some kind of an open text based format I can store locally and refer to. If you know of any such tools, please share. There’s so much information locked into the platform, and with no way for search engines to index and no easy way to even lookup information within it (Facebook search has always sucked), it’s a huge loss.
  • feupan 5y ago
    I really don’t get this argument. Facebook is just people. The same people you find on Facebook are everywhere else. You think ig is clean? Let me introduce you to my antivax cousin. Junk is everywhere and I don’t understand how people focus on the company. Everyone here should understand how difficult it is to combat spam, especially on a planetary level like on Facebook.
  • vmception 5y ago
    People need to be careful with that because Instagram is much more powerful while seeming innocuous. (Even before copying TikTok with the reels feature, and before chilling Snapchat with the stories feature. Now it’s all amplified.)
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    I don't get it, aren't there also discussions on Instagram? I don't use it much but I thought people could comment on posts there just the same.
• shados 5y ago
  If only the VR division was its own thing (while still having the resources). Their VR stuff is pretty damn awesome.
• sujesh 5y ago
  I deleted my FB a while ago and it truely helped my online mental health. The fb feed was full of false news and hate speech. I reported as much as I could but nothing happening. There wasn't any regulations and I felt more toxic on the contents. I am not gonna lie there was a positive side like knowing the news instantly but It's not worth it apparently.
  • carabiner 5y ago
    You must have spent a lot of time arguing politics with your friends. My feed is really benign. It's mostly family/travel/outdoors photos.
  • marto1 5y ago
    > false news and hate speech I believe there's something much more sinister than that going on with that feed. I believe it's specifically programmed to fish out your mental vulnerabilities and bully you with content that touches on exactly that.
    • raducu 5y ago
      Just unfollow everybody. It's such a liberating thing to do. You can still manually check on people if you want to and you can still message them. After a few weeks it feels like a superpower "wow, so I can just use facebook for 5 minutes every couple of days and easily stop using it? Unbelievable!"
  • nradov 5y ago
    If that's what your friends were sharing then maybe you need better friends?
    • feupan 5y ago
      Yes and no. Groups are the best part of Facebook and with good information also comes the spam.
    • nomel 5y ago
      Maybe I’m old school, but there’s usually more to someone than what they share on Facebook. One of the funniest people I know, and a good real life friend for nearly a two two decades, posts dumb stuff like that all the time. We also have great conversations full of conflicting viewpoints, which I love, and we’ve both changed the others perspectives. I don’t really care what their political beliefs or medical choices are. We can find common interests outside of that. It doesn’t affect me. For some reason, that’s now the primary focus of many peoples lives and identity. He’s more than that, and I hope I am too.
• Advaita63 5y ago
  Almost everyone I know is getting off Facebook. It distorts reality and takes over lives. I got out a month ago and don't miss it.
• Advaita63 5y ago
  Everyone I know is getting off Facebook. I got out a month ago. It distorts reality and takes over your life.
• dzink 5y ago
  The big reason behind losses was likely the iOS 14 tracking update. Right after it a ton of Facebook Advertisers groups on Facebook started complaining all of their carefully crafted campaigns were not producing revenue anymore. Targeting and regathering stopped making sales for advertisers and they quickly stopped spending on FB. The people who still spend are now doing videos as ads. Small advertisers were the canary in the coal mine.
  • j4yav 5y ago
    That makes sense for revenue but how would that drive a loss of users? I’m not seeing the connection and would like to understand.
    • simonswords82 5y ago
      There are only 24 hours in a day and if a person spends those hours on TikTok it’s less likely they’ll have time to spend on Facebook or instagram
      • j4yav 5y ago
        TikTok wasn’t impacted by the iOS tracking update in the same way that Facebook was, in a way that it drove users from Facebook to TikTok?
  • tomrod 5y ago
    Android has more market share.[0] Is there something intrinsic to FB ads that are significantly more successful for iOS users rather than Android users? Does FB cater their apps to iOS somehow more successfully, e.g Android users are more savvy and less likely to take to digital nudges? If that's not the case, then the 25% of market loss doesn't make sense to me -- are FB ads bulk purchases somehow, or are they by user? [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-share-held-by-mobile-operating-systems-since-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
    • asadlionpk 5y ago
• naruvimama 5y ago
  It might have very much to do with their shoddy 2FA rollout. I have heard of quite a few among my circles who got locked out. They hurriedly pushed out something that did not work in the first place.
• noduerme 5y ago
  Upvoted because THANK GOD
• evocatus 5y ago
  I am glad that people are finally seeming to catch on.
• mercy_dude 5y ago
  As for the stock price, it will come back. FB users may be down but FB now owns Instagram and WhatsApp and they haven’t started to monetize them yet. Not to say they have genuinely been trying new technologies with AR/VR and with their stash of cash can buy any startups in AR/VR space. If anything FB is way underpriced IMO.
  • Eduard 5y ago
    Instagram is old cohort. The fresh demographic is tiktok
  • hazelnut 5y ago
    Sorry but Instagram is full of ads. So full that it bothers me and avoid looking at stories. WhatsApp is not monetized yet. Though, I believe it can be easily exchanged with a different service (e.g Signal, Telegram, …) if they start throwing ads at the users.
  • fourmii 5y ago
    I don't know about WhatsApp, FB has been running ads on Insta for awhile now. How else are they going to monetize it?
  • _l4jh 5y ago
    Instagram is monetised to fuck. It’s 50% ads these days. Almost useless and they keep “tweaking” the time line algorithm so nothing is in chronological order and you see the same things again and again. Often from days ago. WhatsApp is yet to be monetised but doing so is going to be tricky and messy. There are excellent alternatives with the same functionality for free such as Signal that while not a perfect drop in replacement are more than good enough. If they fuck up WhatsApp they could lose their users very quickly. That’s the trouble with so many messaging platforms. WhatsApp is nothing “special”. I would argue the only “special” service is iMessage due to the exclusivity of iOS although that seems to be more of a US thing than elsewhere. I think Facebook see they’re in a shit place with WhatsApp which is why they are yet to make any real changes despite owning them for years. It is the only acquisition they have made that they haven't made any substantial changes to as I honestly think they don't know how to do so and as it is all tied to a persons cell number anyway migration is pretty painless. People don't need to share a new username with anyone, just blast a message to all their friends with "Hey it's [redacted], I'm using $NewMessageApp now as WhatsApp got all weird with their changes". You get a few people to do that and people happily switch and the network effect takes over. Most people are using multiple messaging services anyway so it isn't even switching just dropping. Look at the hell they brought on with their last small change with the privacy policy. You had so much backlash to a small change that they pushed back the deadline and then dropped it altogether. Imagine actual real monetisation. It would be the end of the service in the blink of an eye.
• gtsop 5y ago
  This just in: Can't grow infinitely within a finite world.
• dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Ever try to find out where your old friends live? Like, hey, don't I know someone in Philly? Very basic utilities are missing in Facebook.
• submeta 5y ago
  Now that‘s some good news today. - FB is toxic, for individuals and societies alike. The sooner they diminish, the better off we are.
  • Jugurtha 5y ago
    People associate with the most toxic people, subscribe to the shadiest pages, and spend their day talking non-sense in dangerous groups, then complain they have a shitty Facebook feed. People say that about YouTube as well. They'll complain about conspiration theories and fake news, when there are literally videos on practically any subject (physics, History, cooking, sports). It's is YouTube! It's like people will ignore every delicious food on the planet, go directly to the sewers to feast on feces, and then accuse everyone else. At some point, someone who likes to feed on shit ought to question their culinary choices and take responsibility.
  • MikusR 5y ago
    It's about as toxic as every other social network.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• actuator 5y ago
  That's why I was commenting last week here that the antitrust lawsuit in US on monopoly is bogus. Tiktok has come out of nowhere in the span of last few years to compete. FB doesn't have a market capture as the US lawmakers and Lina Khan accuse them of having. Also, the same issues like disinformation etc which FB suffered from is going to be a problem for any social media platform, even Tiktok. Tiktok has far less infra and resources invested into stopping it, so it will be interesting to see if the target shifts on to Tiktok now.
• oriettaxx 5y ago
  we all know how hard is to get out, to remove a FB account, so to be (with their figures) considered a lost user: the financial consequences of this news is another reason why it's so hard :) Now the wall has fallen. You can hide many things, but sooner or later the figures have to come out: as a paradox, their "statistics" department can probably start to relax a bit now.
• oriettaxx 5y ago
  By the way, this has been so far my best upgrade: cat /etc/hosts ... 127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com 127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com
• winrid 5y ago
  IMO, they most likely predicted this, and was part of the motivation for Meta.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Just like with MySpace and Hi5. We are now at yet another generation switch and newer one is somewhere else.
  • hamolton 5y ago
    To Instagram, which they already bought
    • alex_duf 5y ago
      I hate to tell you that but Instagram is probably two generations too old. I doubt teenagers are joining much anymore.
      • qualudeheart 5y ago
        Tiktok is the most common app among gen z.
        • nlitened 5y ago
          I've heard that Tiktok is for old farts who finished school, and young people use Likee nowadays.
          • consumer451 5y ago
            I think you are joking, but we had four generations in a room over the holidays. When the grandparents started talking about their favorite TikToks the teens looked around in horror. We all started joking how TikTok is "over." I remember this conversation 6-8 years ago about FB. Is older people liking your platform really a death-knell? If so, I am curious what the timeline for TikTok would be.
• landswipe 5y ago
  loses loser users
• mro_name 5y ago
  who cares about facebook but zucky.
• randomsearch 5y ago
  This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me: Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that. Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do. Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple) Facebook double-downed on maximising revenue growth from their core advertising business. This led to all the scandals and disasters they have brought us, including destabilising societies. Inevitably, this led to the core product becoming less attractive, and people were also turned off by the negative press. Zuckerberg's rigid control of the company has led to him being a lightening rod for the backlash against big tech and especially adtech. His media skills are awful, so insisting on control and making himself a figurehead has further damaged the business. Zuckerberg knows the only way out is another home run. He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play. It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing. This then marks the beginning of the end for the company, as it continues to bring in revenue from Instagram and monetises Whatsapp. Its sheer size means decline is going to take decades. I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg leaves in the next few years, before the failure of Meta strategy becomes apparent. What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped. I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app, which would have created an enduring product, and then used the time that bought them to rebuild the company. Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.
  • dbbk 5y ago
    Let's maintain some perspective here. They went from 1.93 billion DAILY active users, to 1.92 billion.
  • flyinglizard 5y ago
    I think the shift to VR is actually FB acknowledging they lost the mobile platform battle and can not depend on Apple and Google for its future, so it must move the game on. VR is a platform in which they have a head start and own top to bottom with Oculus. Essentially Zuckerberg is fast forwarding the future so he’ll have place to sell ads in without a 3rd part like Apple setting the rules. This is also why he goes full VR and not AR which would likely require a phone somewhere on the side.
• nmca 5y ago
  I used to use Facebook for events, but faced a bug recently where random friends could see the event details for a private event, as if invited, despite not being invited. A pretty serious bug, leading to some awkward messages! In any case, I now only use FB for one single niche community. If that goes elsewhere, so will I!
• Animats 5y ago
  Facebook pulled a Myspace. Growth slowed, so they added more ads to compensate. Growth slowed even more and went negative. For Myspace, that was a death spiral.
• darkinvisible 5y ago
  Another issue: dumbing down. Connecting via web / browser has gradually dropped a lot of stuff and has become just like the mobile app. I used to log in a couple of times a week; now it's not even once a month.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• rendall 5y ago
  Speaking as someone who deleted his Facebook account years ago, a positive that FB brings to the world is ubiquitous and easy sharing of personal information with the public. With an FB account, you can keep in touch with even casual acquaintances, perhaps forming a connection. That's pretty deep, and a net positive for humanity, and fulfills the promise of the internet. I predict that what we call "social media" today - this specific aspect of ubiquitous human connection - will continue long after FB is gone and forgotten. I foresee that the ultimate successor will likely be more of a protocol like RSS or FOAF that various platforms can plug into, rather than another web app you log into, owned by yet another monetizing corporation.
  • danieljacksonno 5y ago
    The picture you paint of connecting with friends and acquaintances is no longer how Facebook works for me. The last years, my Facebook feed has been completely dominated by a few groups I'm in (OK, I guess - but not what I signed up for originally), news and commercial entities I have "liked" at some point, and ads. I never see my friends there any more, unless they're the marketing hustle type. It feels honestly not entirely unlike LinkedIn, which is not a compliment. As a test, I visited some of my better friends profiles to see if they have posted anything lately. None had. For YEARS. All their content has moved either to Instagram or Snapchat, or they have just stopped posting altogether. But my group of friends still use Facebook as our primary Event invitation system, and roughly everyone has FB Messenger (as that's the standard here in Norway).
    • rendall 5y ago
      Yeah. Agreed. It had stopped working that way for me when I quit, also. And they kept lecturing me and my friends about community standards. I got tired of that stifling, moralizing hypocrisy. I guess I speak more of the original vision of FB.
• johnamata 5y ago
  get woke go broke
• _ezak 5y ago
  Facebook, great engineering org as it is, has done a lot of less than great things. Not just bad stuff to others, but less than optimal stuff for themselves as well. Could this be karma? Zuck's chooks coming hoome to roost?
• hereforphone 5y ago
  There may be hope for humanity yet
• gigatexal 5y ago
  I am here with popcorn watching and relishing. I hope the decline continues and accelerates.
• Zenst 5y ago
  My take away from this is amazed they have had increased daily user activity for 18 years, that alone (whatever you think of FB) is pretty amazing from a business perspective. Which is probably why this is an eventful news worthy note. I'm now wondering if such a blip could snowball via the markets and see a tech crash at some level and a sign of that will be how this news from Facebook plays out upon the other social media outlets. Will TikTok, Twitter and in-part via YT, google, also see a dent in share prices based upon this! Maybe, given how much of the market is based upon perception and momentum. Though that is just my thoughts upon this and certainly I'm not burried into the markets knowing every nuance and sign. [EDIT ADD] I somehow missed this poignant aspect in the article "Shares in other social media platforms, including Twitter, Snap and Pinterest, also fell sharply in extended trading." So does somewhat lean into my thoughts upon how markets operate in some ways. How that holds and if this blip is just a knee-jerk reaction over a period of time is more the indicator in-play here.
  • fairity 5y ago
    I rarely pick stocks, but I took a long position in Twitter, Snap and Pinterest this morning bc, imo, this is definitely an over-reaction. The time the average person spends on their phone (and social media) has only been increasing year over year. If Facebook's growth is slowing, that's directly at the hands of competitors.
    • netheril96 5y ago
      The current consensus is that TikTok takes the time of users. If that is true, every social media other than TikTok is in trouble.
      • Zenst 5y ago
        Slight tangent but the balance of interaction and pulling users back of Wordle is brilliant. Users can saturate and over indulge and reach a point of cutting off over maintaining that momentum. Oh and yes, TikTok seems to of hit a sweet spot(also the best stock bet currently), but if they can pull off 18 years of solid growth in interaction, that will be amazing. Paradoxically, the stock market itself for many is their social media outlet, which probably seen a longer streak of growth than any social media platform. Be interesting how HN growth and interaction has tractioned over the years, but then it doesn't matter as this is the Sparta of social media interaction in many ways and I ruddy love it.
• glanzwulf 5y ago
  It was me guys. I finally deleted my account.
• whiplash451 5y ago
  Meta recruiter (sipping coffee): Let me close this candidate today. The Market: hold my beer.
• major505 5y ago
  I work in a big consulting firm that really believes that the Metaverse is gonna be the future, and are even creating a team just to develop aplications for clients in the Meta. I don`t think this is what going to save the company. PAssing all day with an VR device in your face seens very uncorfotable to me, and I can see works adopting it.
  • mettamage 5y ago
    Which firm is that? Are there VR specific positions for that I might be able to apply to?
    • major505 5y ago
      NTT data. Is a japanese consulting firm. They have strong presence in asia, Spain, Portugal, and South america also. I don`t know how this new department is doing, but I will inquire about. I was in the last newsletter we received.
• kabdib 5y ago
  I use FB to keep track of a few old friends, a couple of online "clubs", and to just kind of monitor the goings-on and general sense-of-the-crazy from That Side of the Family (if you have one of those, you know what I mean). FB is inessential. If it collapsed tomorrow, I'd remove a bookmark.
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  As people commented already, meta / facebook will be a enormous cash cow for quite some time. This raises the interesting question of whether it could actually reinvent itself in some way. Having an almost 100% concentration on a business model that is (thankfully) increasingly seen as a socially detrimental aberration, it means that they would need to diversify into more conventional tech business models the way, e.g., Alphabet/Google is trying to do [0] The problem is, of-course, that honest tech business models are a well occupied ecological niche and in the absence of some regulatory/political granted monopoly the competition tends to turn lethal. They could launch a cloud business for example, with the unique selling point: we know best how to collect and monetize your data, so we know best how to protect it :-). [0] I am dismissing the "metaverse" thingy as some sort of smoke and mirrors that seems to be necessary to provide cover for precisely the kind of news now being discussed
• nicholast 5y ago
  The biggest asset of Facebook for now is the facebook platform, perhaps a more durable asset will be the social graph sourced by the facebook platform. What would it mean for a durable social graph commercialization model? I'm not sure, but at a minimum it would need to be exportable and portable between platforms and ecosystems.
• zmmmmm 5y ago
  The upside that I hope to see from this is that the faster Facebook loses its shine and becomes a negatively viewed legacy product on a downward trajectory, the more likely Meta is to make good on relaxing the Facebook account requirement for Oculus.
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  I always find the constant expectation of growth puzzling. and that it is a regular occurrence. For a long time, DELL grew and grew and got bigger. Then they plateaued (for a while) and the investors were mad. There are only so many people in the world who want an FB account. and only so many companies and people who need a DELL computer. Infinite high growth is impossible to sustain. Physically.
  • motoboi 5y ago
    Growth means a share bought today will have a bigger value tomorrow. Investors (people) expect a remuneration for their money. So, a public company can only survive with growth. Growth and risk/reward balance is what keep companies alive.
    • karatinversion 5y ago
      This is true of Facebook and many other tech stocks, but that is because these companies have never paid dividends. Investors have put up with that because the expectation of higher future profits (and thus higher cash piles for dividends or stock buybacks). A shrinking company that has never paid a dividend is much less attractive from this point of view.
    • ehnto 5y ago
      That's not true, public companies can survive on profits and their investors then enjoy dividends. The market just figured out that growth is more lucrative than dividends for specific people, and there is less incentive to make sustainable companies.
  • MichaelMoser123 5y ago
    Yes, but the stock market works on the premise of growth, they try to raise money by virtue of being on the stock market, in order get the money required to finance that growth. I would think, that a company that has plateaued should take itself off the stock market, however this doesn't seem to be happening. Such a move would probably imply some drastic changes in how a company is goverend.
• carrja99 5y ago
  Good. We’re tired of what they did to society.
• benreesman 5y ago
  I haven’t worked at FB in almost 5 years, and it’s definitely a clear milestone on growth not being massive always, but shaving 2 dimes off the market cap seems, abrupt. You’d think the cap might slow its growth more gradually and (if DAUs go up again) gain more gradually. I appreciate companies only release rock solid figures on a certain cadence, but there’s like a zillion analysts who can read tea leaves. IMHO tech equities are pricey in general, but for someone who wants FAANG exposure this might be the bargain at Barney’s Upper East? I hold no FB stock btw.
• kinnth 5y ago
  The number 1 reason FB has missed is the IDFA change from Apple. It has completely crippled their ad business and their effectiveness and the majority of spend I know has gone to Google. When FB was clearly 1st or 2nd in all GEO's around the world, they now are not even in the top 3 in many GEOs.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Why would that affect the number of users?
• ho_schi 5y ago
  I'm not surprised. The complete company doesn't provide any actually required product or value, just aggregating "users". And the company has the worst imaginable reputation (closed-source, awkward and stupid censorship, clear name enforcement, advertisement, users are not customers but a resource, and much more). Interestingly this article was featured here recently: https://luttig.substack.com/p/dont-forget-microsoft https://luttig.substack.com/p/dont-forget-microsoft It doesn't talk about software, development, technology or service. Merely, buy others. If you don't innovate yourself you have to buy quickly everyone else before they can harm you. That is what Facebook is doing.
• morelish 5y ago
  My 2 cents, not that it's important, is that Facebook killed it's own product by A/B testing for user engagement. The product went from a cool place to see what your friends were up (bit like insta was for a while), to this sh*thole place filled with junk viral videos, adds, whacky content from a few insane friends, etc. It became like a cheap social porn dumping ground. I really just want to see what my friends are up to. I don't want to feel that the posts I get are heavily filtered by algorithms or that 'unpopular' opinions are hidden or whatever. The original Facebook product back in 2008-2010 was really good. If anything, I think Facebook shows how important is it to develop a product vision that is more than just 'clickbait+++' which is basically Facebook's strategy. [Around 2010, I imagine a bunch of overly nerdy socially maladjusted 20-something programmers sitting around Fakebook HQ describing to robotic-Mark how an excel-driven click-bait approach can make Fakebook way more popular than ever. "Look popularity with maths".] Now the only thing I really use it for is business pages. [I don't even know why Google don't have a slightly better business-page experience on their maps.] Zuckerberg, I think is a bit of a genius, but seems to lack much capacity or instinct to display technological 'taste'. That rare thing Steve Jobs valued and talked about. It's why Apple is and remains cool and why it's able to handle PR better. Apple are just much more sophisticated at controlling people's perception around the appeal of the brand. Apple provide a 'luxury' brand experience to 50% of the (developed) world. Facebook's brand is so toxic it decided to change it's name to Meta. [Note, timing the change to Meta not long before the growth slows a lot. I'm surprised Facebook was really even growing much. Well I heard most growth has come from outside the developed economies and it's a waste ground among the young in the West.] Zuckerberg - from afar - looks like a robotic alien trying to work out the grandest legal pump and dump scheme he can pull off. I do salute him because he's so successful and I still think he'll work out how to make Meta's transition. He's got lots of cards to play in his hand and he seems pretty good at business poker. So, I also congratulate him.
  • AtreidesTyrant 5y ago
    after the dawn of extremist content--i dont even want to see what my friends are up to anymore lmao
• saos 5y ago
  #deleteFacebook I'm praying they are forced to sell WhatsApp
• mikaeluman 5y ago
  People have many reasons for disliking Facebook. We have the personal data usage and integrity problems. Then they wanted to get clean from this and did it by way of censoring and silencing what can be called conservative voices. And now they want you and your kids to waste your life in some VR "meta" world... Facebook does still serve a purpose. It's a popular and easy way for local communities and associations to stay in touch. I couldn't stand Facebook though so I find myself not being able to join these conversations. Hoping something better comes along.
• jokoon 5y ago
  Finally! Although you still need facebook to login into several other things, like tinder etc.
• teknopaul 5y ago
  My take: fb failed as a social network. Its a data sink you put stuff in but you can't get anything out. You cannot represent real social networks in fb. In real social networks you have different social circles and a different name. Facebook devides the world into friends and public, you yourself have one identity only, and that's not a good model for mapping real social networks into digital ones. During the pandemic when we all really needed social networking fb failed to map your local bars social network onto fb.com. If they focused on being a social network tool, instead of eating competition so they are _the_ (only) social network, people might increasingly use their products. But they give nothing back.
  • raziel2p 5y ago
    Google plus did exactly this and look at where that went.
  • jensensbutton 5y ago
    18 continuous years of user growth, covering almost literally half the population of planet earth, and they FAILED as a social network? I beg you to please get some perspective.
• mrtri 5y ago
  [dead]
• endofreach 5y ago
  FINALLY. Can‘t wait for the failure of „meta“ (i refuse to let evil FB Inc. own that word) and see all the awesome devs working there, finally work on something else than exploiting the privacy of people to fill pockets of all these zuckerbergs… What a great day.
  • smugglerFlynn 5y ago
    You make it sound like these devs did not consciously choose to work for a privacy-exploiting company in the first place
• GnarfGnarf 5y ago
  I am seeing fewer and fewer of my friends and relatives on Facebook anymore. My feed is overwhelmed with intrusive advertising. I wish I could give it up, but I have to stay because some customers are on it.
  • shmoopi 5y ago
    There are ways to block Facebook's ads on your feed. But the only way to win is not play.
• imtemplain 5y ago
• jmacd 5y ago
  There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working example. Discovery > Static friends list. The entire premise FB was founded on is eroding. This isn't just Apple privacy and some regulatory strangulation. It's seismic to the business. The reason most people are still going to Facebook is incompatible with their primary activities online which is: consuming content from people-you-don't-know. Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later. They are doing everything they can to try to move in this direction, but the more they push it the less useful Facebook is for the average user. Instagram's discovery page is a prime example. But Reels are less good than TikTok, and whatever they are doing for short form video in Facebook is surely a hopeless game of catch up. This is classical innovator's dilemma. The very idea that Zuckerberg straight up said they need to copy the competition harder is incomprehensible considering the resources they have. They are going to try to do a few things. One is to anti-trust Apple (in the media at least), and the other is to hand wave (Metaverse). The reason the Metaverse was such a non sequitur is that it is so clearly a last minute thrust coming out of the C-Suite. If you've ever worked at a highly visible tech pubco, you've seen this happen before. Weak quarters mean that product announcements get pushed up. When it is as all encompassing as the Metaverse announcement, you know something is up.
  • yalogin 5y ago
    Yep, you nailed it. TikTok is hitting Facebook and they are unable to respond. May be they will by copying the algorithm but things are going to get worse before they improve. Not sure if they will change Facebook itself though. That is too entrenched and too many users to change. This is going to be tough for fb to fight.
    • lovefeature 5y ago
• pshawcaddy 5y ago
  Paywalled
• DiffEq 5y ago
  I wonder how many people are like me...they see this article and think, "Hey, I have a Facebook account, I should see what it is going on there since I haven't looked at it in however many days." Then I look and see there are no messages or anything and close it...for who knows how long again.
• throwawayvibes 5y ago
  The past 5 years I only used messenger and miniature wargaming groups. That's all the utility FB provides, and sadly, I don't see the wargaming groups move anywhere else.
• l30n4da5 5y ago
  The only reason I still have a facebook account is because I have logins for other sites tied to it. Haven't personally logged into facebook on purpose since 2016.
  • timbit42 5y ago
    You should untie those. What happens if your FB account gets frozen?
• d3vmax 5y ago
  Good! These buffoons are responsible for the spread of mis-information and should pay for the murder / unwarranted deaths caused by their desire for more views during the past two years by giving every village idiot an amplified voice! I have reported so many mis-information post and they do nothing. They could create thousands of jobs by having more humans for verifications, but no. They want to maximize profits and depend only on AI with no appeal possible. They do not want to create more jobs to balance the transition to digital from analogue world so I am glad their stock price is getting avg'd out. They really don't think long term of their role/responsibility to society. All their top brains and fancy school hires cant even grasp long term consequences of their short term on-steroid decisions. Every empire / entity / co. will come to an end, it's the law of nature due to stagnation & complexity. So will this. Good riddance!
• iamricks 5y ago
  Hacker News is starting to feel like Reddit /all more and more every day
• buttholesurfer 5y ago
• everdrive 5y ago
  My account is deactivated, but not deleted. I wonder if I am still in their counts?
• Pete-Codes 5y ago
  TikTok has crushed them in the Gen Z market. In many ways TikTok re-creates the best part of myspace - being able to express your personality. You can dance, make fun of yourself, post a thirst trap or make history memes. You can't do any of that on Facebook and I'm sure the fact your videos can go viral is way more appealing.
• m3kw9 5y ago
  The Fb home feed is becoming a cesspool of brag photos disguised at wanting to share their daily lives with friends and family. There are better ways to do that than having 500 friends on your list and hoping someone would see it and press like. It feels a bit disgusting now that people actually use it more like their Instagram feed
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  I think social media has shifted from wanting to keep up with friends and family to serving as a distraction from the general malaise most seem to feel. TikTok and Instagram are bright and shiny and distract people via images of attractive hopeful people. Facebook is just seeing that everyone else is doing as badly as they are or perhaps worse, better. I think it ties in with the boom in crypto, everyone is looking for a moonshot to escape. I think the country is going through something very unique, like a social despair and that companies need to adapt. I could be projecting.
• socrates1998 5y ago
  I don't have much to add to this, but Facebook couldn't go away faster for me. My account is still active, but I deleted the app on the phone and probably only check my home page once every two weeks. My friends and family just aren't that interesting when they post stuff or it's awful content. I find myself sharing everything with people I want to interact with over text. Zuck is a sociopathic asshole, so I hope Facebook fails miserably.
• adlorger 5y ago
  FB lost US about 2M users in summer 2020, but has been pretty flat since then. See FB's slide 13: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4/Q4-2021_Earnings-Presentation-Final.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4... The drop this round is in the rest of the world and not US, Asia, or Europe which are flat or even up The hot takes of Peak Facebook are unfounded, or at least premature.
• beart 5y ago
  My children's school communicates a lot of information through their Facebook page. I had to reactivate my dead account after years when my kid started kindergarten. There was particularly important information that they did not send out anywhere but on Facebook. Meanwhile, they have a "news" page on their actual school website that has not been updated in years. I hate it and I think it should be illegal to force the use of a private, ad-driven platform for public/governmental information. Facebook may count me as a user, but my account has absolutely no information listed about myself and the only pages I subscribe to are for the school.
  • jeffsyacht 5y ago
    I notice the same thing with local governments, where the Office of Emergency Management or Police will post updates about public safety to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Worse now with these services requiring login to see the pages, so now without an account I cannot get the information. This should absolutely not be allowed.
  • jhickok 5y ago
    Same. My kids are in sports and Facebook is how they communicate with us, including changes to schedules, "snack duty", pictures and videos from games, etc. It's basically impossible to be a judicious parent and not be on Facebook for me.
    • basisword 5y ago
      I ask this seriously because I’m curious: have either you or the parent comment talked the school/clubs about communicating via other means? Or indicated Facebook isn’t possible for you?
      • jhickok 5y ago
        I have not. There's really no sense in which Facebook isnt possible for me. I could say that I have privacy concerns but I'm genuinely not interested in being a weirdo parent that puts pressure on my kids. Most of the organizers are just trying to find a platform that is "gated" (by invite only) and everyone uses. Hard to beat FB for that in 2022.
• dancounsell 5y ago
  Insert Ron Swanson happy dance gif here
• ratpik 5y ago
  I am not sure why they have been unable to build the right set of features to grow WhatsApp for Business in India. That's almost a Billion DAUs where a lot of business transactions happen via chat on WhatsApp.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  I love Facebook, but it's been dead for a while. A car that runs out of gas while accelerating downhill doesn't stop - or even stop accelerating - for a long time
• hestefisk 5y ago
  I have been without FB for almost 3 years now and never looked back. People still look shocked at me when I tell them I’m not on IG or Twitter.
• JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  "for the first time" i mean yeah if you believe their numbers
• aaroninsf 5y ago
  A shame Facebook hasn't seen the massive upside in pivoting to "be a force for saving democracy, with a side line in diminishing inequity, political (and wealth!) polarization, and inculcating respect for the commons, the middle ground, and public wellbeing."
• oversocialized 5y ago
  Good. Facebook needs to die.