4 ms·

> that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways Spend more time talking to average people. They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and Whats

• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them. Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public. A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
  • Retric 4y ago
    At least 3/4th of people don’t uses Facebook and their average user makes 1 posts per week. So it’s really not important to most people. It’s numbers are heavily influenced by people who use it because someone or some organization happens to use it.
    • pwinnski 4y ago
      I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and don't use it ever. But that's a really bad way to determine the important of Facebook, for two reasons. 1. You've assumed that the only purpose of Facebook is posting, so a user making an average of one post per week isn't finding it valuable. Bad assumption. 2. You're counting a bizarre measure of market penetration, a standard that only air and food and water would meet. Many, many people don't use cars, and people who do often only use them five days a week. If you think that means cars aren't important to many people, try taking one away!
      • pc86 4y ago
        I really like the car analogy for this. I will frequently go 2-3 days a week without using my car. On the days I use it, there's a roughly 75% chance I am going to drive 5-6 miles to the gym and back, and nothing else. However, a car is a necessity for me. If my car disappeared into the ether tomorrow, I would have a new one in my garage by the end of the day.
        • tomcam 4y ago
          > If my car disappeared into the ether tomorrow, I would have a new one in my garage by the end of the day. And that’s the difference between us. If my car disappeared into the ether, I would immediately launch a series of ether-disappearing experiments, systematically trying larger and larger items and video recording the results. I would post these to HN, admittedly in the hopes of going viral while also doing my best to move science forward. But you? Noooo, just pop over to your insurance company and get a new minivan, leaving the rest of us in the dark about your amazing ether disposal system.
    • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      > At least 3/4th of people don’t uses Facebook 1/4th of all people is a staggeringly large number. Also, Meta is more than Facebook and they don’t need to post to be using the platform. They have about 3.7 billion monthly active users. I really don’t understand this knee-jerk drive to try to downplay the scale of a company that has half of the planet as their active user base.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • kleinsch 4y ago
      You’re missing the point of the parent comment. News Feed and FB posts are a small fraction of activity in the FB family of apps. Messaging is massively important to billions of people worldwide. WhatsApp or Messenger usage is greater than SMS is some countries.
      • el-salvador 4y ago
        I have kept my Facebook account mostly to interact with business. Most of them, especially small ones, keep their FB pages more updated than their websites. Facebook Marketplace is a whole world of its own. It's become like the Etsy/Ebay/Craigslist in Central America. Payments are confirmed by sending screenshots of bank transfers, and deliveries handed by private post or an informal network of couriers that visit towns and neighborhoods on specific days of the week.
• throwaway9870 4y ago
  Sure, until they are sick and they suddenly realize the quality of the medical equipment is actually more important. Or there is a disaster and they realize getting electricity or having satellite comms is more important. God forbid you end up in a war and the quality and innovation in your weapons determines if you live or die. Don't even get me started on food. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only important when life is good. They are icing on the cake. But once things go south, they can be quickly discarded.
  • Kye 4y ago
    Guess how they'll coordinate with friends and family and stay up to date on news from the government and emergency services. Do you think Facebook's crisis response features are for show? I use the utility's outage map to find out when I'll have power again during storms, but I would bet most people turn to the Facebook page.
    • kwhitefoot 4y ago
      > I use the utility's outage map to find out when I'll have power again during storms, but I would bet most people turn to the Facebook page. Do either of those pages get the power back sooner? How about regulating and resourcing the power systems so that storms don't frequently take them out. I've lived in the same house for over thirty years and I can count the number of outages on the fingers of one hand. Two of them were planned and all were of less than 24 hours duration. I'll grant you that I live in an area that doesn't have a lot of storms but even so the electricity company cuts a wide corridor either side of power lines to make sure that trees cannot fall on the lines.
  • mxschumacher 4y ago
    Meta is running data centers and subsea cables. Communication isn't icing on the cake, especially in difficult times
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Whatsapp is pretty much the cornerstone of personal and business relationships here in India. I’ve closed more deals over Whatsapp than over phone calls and emails and Zoom calls combined.
  • lupire 4y ago
    And WhatsApp before Facebook famously ran on a tiny budget of humans and money per user.
    • skapadia 4y ago
      Exactly. WhatsApp was fine before Facebook, and will be fine after Facebook. They only acquired it to stifle competition.
  • hugocbp 4y ago
    Same in Brazil. WhatsApp outages become the main national news when they happen, because it became so fundamental in everyday's life. It is not just people talking to each other, several business rely almost completely in WhatsApp around here.
    • hnhamdani 4y ago
      I think pretty much Europe + Africa + LatAm + Asia (minus East Asia) is using WhatsApp as defacto personal/work/business communication platform. Even in govt. domain. IG is also still the top social media as well globally.
      • silksowed 4y ago
        this just reminds me how US centric some of us default too, myself included.
  • pier25 4y ago
    Same in Mexico and probably Spain too.
  • 4y ago
• BrainVirus 4y ago
  >They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them. Drugs are important to drug addicts. That's not a reason to praise the dealers for their business acumen. Facebook and Instagram are exploitative as fuck.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    IG is a photo sharing site with ads interspersed and WA is E2E texting. We gotta tone down the rhetoric here. They’ve gotta be two of the least toxic social media sites compared to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — any why: because the format is cancer to news. Social media itself is great — Snapchat, IG, BeReal, Radite, Discord as long as they are successfully able keep them from becoming political megaphones. TikTok has come the closest to being a general purpose broadcast social network that hasn’t been corrupted but long term I’m sure it’ll get poisoned too.
    • kolbe 4y ago
      Facebook and Instagram have the same ad tech behind it, and that's the most poisonous part.
      • WillDaSilva 4y ago
        To add to this, it's poisonous because it makes increasing "engagement" a primary goal for these platforms.
        • kolbe 4y ago
          Those work together. But I find the most insidious aspect of these platforms is how it allows companies to exploit our vulnerability to unhealthy behavior. Even if you grant that Instagram's content isn't toxic (which it is, but just hypothetically), the ads are terrible. I, for example, don't drink. I was never an alcoholic per se, but I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and in many ways I miss it. Instagram shows me ads all the time trying to convince me how fun it is to drink, and why so-and-so drink is delicious and amazing. Now extend this to shopping additions, misinformation campaigns, et cetera.
• shwoopdiwoop 4y ago
  Whatsapp had 55 employees and 1.5b monthly users when they got acquired by FB. I very much doubt that the product is fundamentally better now that they are part of a company that has tens of thousands of employees. Same could be said about Instagram I guess?
  • lupire 4y ago
    It's the tyrrany of the rocket equation. Each dollar of revenue costs more than the last, and the money keeps getting spent until they are paying $0.999999 for earn $1
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• papito 4y ago
  Important doesn't mean "good". These apps literally rewire people's brains to stop being able to take in long-form information. No wonder that we get stories of students now revolting against challenging courses: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/letters/nyu-tough-professor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/letters/nyu-tough... "A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students." The exact timeframe when children who marinated in social media grew up. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind (from two different NYU professors), the authors track a sudden change in student behavior, like intolerance, impatience, fragility - all around 2013. So we can discuss how "important" it is to them, but we are just now beginning to get data about how these apps absolutely destroy our ability to focus, think, and connect with other humans.
• kwhitefoot 4y ago
  I'm sure that those things are important to those people. But they are less important to the world than the engineering that goes to make sure that there is power to run the servers, routers, laptops, and mobiles. Less important than the engineering that makes the motors that move the trains to get people to work and production lines for the food we all eat.