A lot of people on HN talk about how Facebook is pointless and on its way out. And it's true, Facebook probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people who are st

A lot of people on HN talk about how Facebook is pointless and on its way out. And it's true, Facebook probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people who are steeped in an email culture. Young adults are not. Facebook is far and away the dominant messaging platform. Email in high school was for spam, communicating with teachers, and passing attachments ONLY. Short, synchorous messages that you didn't mind typing with your thumbs would go via SMS, but more verbose synchronous conversations and email-like async conversations were invariably Facebook Messenger. I can find anyone from my real life that I'm likely to want to talk to on Facebook just by knowing their real name and identifying their face in search results. It's entirely frictionless - no exchanging identifiers or mucking around with pseudonyms. And I can have a conversation synchronously or asynchronously, transitioning seamlessly between devices and modes of communication, with conversation history, read receipts, and delivery confirmation always available. Messaging is a more important part of Facebook than I think much of HN realizes. It makes sense that Facebook would neutralize WhatsApp's threat to its hold on messaging.