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Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

Peter is a smart guy, and this does suggest Facebook is not worth holding long term. Sean Parker's comments a few days ago were not positive either. Anecdata-wise, things are not looking too rosy; many of my more intellectual and interesting friends have abandoned the platform, barring the occasional message (e.g. if they lost their phone and had to change numbers) - the less interesting people I know (not friends, but acquaintances) seem to be fully immersed in Facebook still. Not sure Facebook can even hold the attention of those people much longer, as the platform is simply feels noisy, boring and out of date!

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My take is that Thiel has realized most of the gains he expects to get from Facebook and has much better opportunities for capital gains available to him.

Which says pretty much nothing about Facebook's continuing health.

A very interesting pattern of votes on this comment of mine - first swinging up to +15, now back down at 2! Don't think I've ever attracted such a divided response!

> not worth holding long term

for him.

Even if he were confident that Facebook has a good chance of growing, say, 10% YoY for the next 20 years, with those smarts and his access he can put the money to work on the next facebook, or even less successful companies that will likely beat that 10% in aggregate.

> Not sure Facebook can even hold the attention of those people much longer, as the platform is simply feels noisy, boring and out of date!

Facebook is big enough that when they start bleeding users somewhere else they'll just buy them.

Which platform did your more interesting friends move to ?

My experience (I am not the OP) is that the facebook leavers are abandoning social media platforms altogether rather than simply moving to a different one.

They did not move to any platform. You ask the question as if being associated with a platform is a basic necessity!

Well, unless they are purely communicating in person or by phone, SMS, or email (or snail mail) they ARE on some platform.

Yes, if you're being pedantic about it, but they did not go from one Facebook-like platform to another. I think people just don't see much value in Facebook-esque platforms like before, because they recognise them as places filled with all sorts of irrelevant junk that can usurp copious amounts of valuable time.

That's true but to an extent that a social networking platform derives most of its utility from having people present on it, it being a non-FB-like platform may only be a matter of time. It could become more FB-like (if that was deemed necessary) or it could be bought by FB or FB-like companies.

iMessage/Photostream? Privacy concerns lead my family to use nothing else.

Most of my friends moved to more one-on-one private forms of communication, such as skype, kik, regular text message (iphone imessage lets you create groups).

I also noticed majority of my friends (even some PhD etc) are pretty embarrassed about their postings from few years ago how they pretty much throw up on their facebook wall daily about even silliest stuff. They cyber-grew-up and now would not do that kind of stuff again.

As of Thiel's sell, even FB on their recent call warned stockholders that recent successes will be hard to duplicate. As more move into mobile use and there is less space for ads than on your desktop, the only option FB has is to stuck more ads between your feed, lowering the quality of experience altogether.

When your user base is 1/5th of the total world population your potential to 100x your growth is probably fairly limited... at least in terms of number of users.

Yeah but Instagram is doing fine

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