4 ms·
There's a tremendous anchoring bias around people's perceptions of Meta products. "I don't see anyone using [Product N] in my social circle, so it must be doome
by pavlov 9mo ago
There's a tremendous anchoring bias around people's perceptions of Meta products. "I don't see anyone using [Product N] in my social circle, so it must be doomed."
It's been like this for at least ten years. People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake. Americans having no idea how important WhatsApp is elsewhere. Etc.
When user bases are measured in billions, you simply can't extrapolate your own anecdotal experience to anything. Some Meta product/feature can be very popular among a hundred disparate groups like "Filipino diaspora" and "Spanish-speaking children" and "North European singles" (and who knows how many more), but your social network has no intersection with these hundreds of millions of people, so you'd never know.
You can see many examples of this effect in these comments.
- munk-a 9mo agoIn Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a whole is viewed. I'd in fact attribute X's steep decline to how much it has become a single message platform and pushed out those niche communities to other technologies. I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.
- wanderingstan 9mo agoMight you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.
- nebula8804 9mo agoAnd India too I think. I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)
- qingcharles 9mo agoThis makes me wonder what my Orkut email address was. My Gmail was a beta test one from 2004, so that is post-Orkut.
- RuggedPineapple 9mo agoOrkut was launched in 2004 too
- qingcharles 9mo agoThat's wild, thank you. I could have sworn it launched in 2000 and was very much earlier than Facebook.
- preisschild 9mo agoIts definitely not the norm though. I live in central europe and never had whatsapp. Sure some companies offer whatsapp support but they also take email.
- ohyoutravel 9mo agoThis seems like the sort of anecdotal experience the post to which you’re responding is talking about haha
- matusp 9mo agoYep, it is a thing in a handful of Western European countries.
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo agoEurope's infatuation with WhatsApp is bizarre. The EU is supposedly a bastion of privacy but goes all-in on a proprietary, siloed communication channel. Given their predilection for enforcing standards usage, you'd think there'd be a move for a federated SMS successor that works with IP clients to counter the risk of dependency on an American company with so much power.
- hahahahhaah 9mo agoThat might be more likely now given recent events
- _cenw 9mo agoMy pet theory is that it's just because don't have a critical mass of iOS users to make iMessage viable and still wanted features at least half a decade before RCS got to a usable state.
- wongarsu 9mo agoWhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche
- voidfunc 9mo ago> People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake I only ever hear this stuff from people that don't use Facebook. It's a self-selecting crowd and they have their fingers in their ears and theirs eyes closed shut while yelling into the void trying to convince themselves everyone else is just like them. Except all that's out there is the same echo chamber of people that also are doing the exact same thing.
- physicsguy 9mo agoI found with FB if you’re in some community that uses it then that’s it, you either use it or miss out. For a long time my running group used it, and while it still does, the WhatsApp community is more used now. My (Catholic) church still uses Facebook for many announcements along with its own website.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 9mo agoYou're probably being downvoted as most here are conflating WhatsApp and FB as both are owned by Meta so you're distinction is moot in the context of this discussion.
- loeg 9mo agoI hear this stuff from people who do use Facebook. They just don't consider their use "use." It's weirdly dissonant.
- Barrin92 9mo agothat's what happens with stuff that is so popular it becomes infrastructure. It's like the guy who goes "ew I haven't touched Java in ten years" while half the stuff he uses runs on it. WhatsApp in some countries is less of a ChatApp you use than a thing you live in. Like the psychology bit that Freud seems absurd because all that's left to us are his mistakes because the rest has been so thoroughly absorbed you don't even realize it
- notahacker 9mo ago
- jmyeet 9mo agoYou're right. I don't think many HNers realize what a bubble HN is, within a bigger bubble of the SF tech scene. Your comment remind me of the ~15 year old hype around Q&A sites. You have VCs say things like "everyone I know uses Quora" and that helped hype it up. But for anyone a little removed, Quora was just Yahoo Answers 2.0. And still is. This was a couple of years after Stackoverflow came out. Remember the hype around location and Foursquare? Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use. Another example of what you're talking about (with essentialy isolated communities) was Orkut, which was hugely popular in Brazil and a couple of other places.
- dylan604 9mo ago> Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use. And what if you're on HN and don't use what other are using there? I don't use AI. I don't use social media. I don't use JS frameworks. I don't use Go or Rust. I bang out HTML/JS/CSS by hand in an editor that is not VSCode when I write UIs. I also don't use Docker. Am I even allowed here?!
- deaux 9mo agoYes, you are in fact absurdly overrepresented on here, not just compared to general populace but even in tech -comparison would e.g. be techy subreddits. Ironically proving GP's point pefectly.
- distances 9mo ago> Remember the hype around location and Foursquare? There are dozens of us still doing regular check-ins with Swarm, the check-in app that Foursquare rebranded years ago. Maybe hundreds even! It's a good time to join, mayorships are easier to get than ever and there are no busybodies left pushing pointless app updates!
- Macha 9mo agoNever mind foursquare, clubhouse had it beat even more as “product that absolutely captured HN power users (including VCs) and approximately no one else”. For a month or two at least, then even those groups got bored
- mathgeek 9mo agoNone of my Asian friends live in China or India, so clearly there’s no one living there.
- mvdtnz 9mo agoI work on a product with >200 million monthly active users and see this all the time. If you only read our product's subreddit you'd think we're a failing business with customers dropping like flies. Meanwhile in the real world we have an incredibly enthusiastic userbase that's growing at a clip.
- anonymousiam 9mo agoHow many of your monthly active users are bots?
- mvdtnz 9mo agoVery few. It's not a social media app, news site, forum or anything that would benefit from scraping or posting. There's no public "feed" or anything like that. It's a tool.
- baubino 9mo agoMedia outlets frequently cite Twitter posts which perhaps adds to the perception that its use is more widespread than other social media.
- nabbed 9mo agoIt reminds me of this: Every time Yahoo sneaks into the tech news, somebody posts a comment along the lines of: "TIL Yahoo still exists" or "What? There's still a Yahoo?". It's almost like there's a bot that adds these comments. Apparently, there is no overlap between Yahoo users and people into cool tech. (I am still a Yahoo email user, so I guess I don't like cool tech).
- blitzar 9mo agoWhats a yahoo?
- chistev 9mo agoI still don't know anyone who uses Threads, literally. I know tons of people who use Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. I don't know a single person who uses Threads.