Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked | Hacker News Reader

Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

bbc.co.uk

161 pointsJohnHammersley110 comments

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Facebook account. Just having a Facebook account that you “don’t use” allows a massive amount of value (from an advertisers perspective) to be unlocked.

In my opinion no other network is going to be able to compete with the number of users on facebooks platform, and any that do, Facebook will buy or copy (Instagram and Snapchat respectively). Even if you don’t actively look at anything on Facebook, or even log in, the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you with ads on all sorts of platforms and websites that are available to Facebook advertisers through the audience network (ad placements on millions of websites and mobile apps). The crucial moat that Facebook has is simply the massive nimber of registered users (that correspond to people’s real identity) on the platform combined with sophisticated tools to reach those users both on and off Facebook.

I’d love to hear an opposing argument, but the way I see it Facebook is here to stay and will only get bigger and more profitable in the foreseeable future.

It's correct and incorrect at the same time. Social networks like cars, they give value when it's being used. To sell ads social networks must be sure that someone scrolling feeds. No usage - no gains.

Even with huge amount of users data nothing guaranteed. You can't sell same stuff periodically, big data has value only when they are actual.

That’s the point though-they don’t need you to scroll to make money off you. You only need a registered account, and they can track a massive amount about what you do online and then serve you ads across millions of sites and mobile apps. All of this happens off of Facebook owned properties.

Except for those who block third party trackers, which is something like 25% of desktop users and 15% of mobile users.

Companies like Google or even Mozilla can easily ruin or at least make it harder for social networks to track you and your interests with their browsers. You already have "block thirdparties" checkbox and similar restrictions, soon you will be provided with builtin ad-blocking. Sounds bad for all social networks and tracking services.

So Google has everything in his pocket, but if FB really has something to put against?

You can have account, but if you don't use it, which means you don't share your user experience, social network can't feed you and your friends with fresh and actual stuff.

If, as seems to be the case, Instagram is the popular destination to migrate to will Facebook be too bothered by a drop in Facebook numbers? Sure some will go elsewhere, and block enough FB tracking to disappear entirely.

Instagram, of course, will allow Facebook to keep tracking and advertising to people just fine. No doubt they've already linked Instagram and FB identities wherever possible.

So all that remains is to see if ads work as profitably on that platform. If they don't there will no doubt be an Instagram redesign for that.

Instagram, of course, will allow Facebook to keep tracking and advertising to people just fine

There aren’t many “like/share this in Instagram” buttons around the web.

That's the key idea - they will continue to do M&A to get advantage in tracking and exploring user behavior.

Instagram is just data provider.

What if those two billion accounts are bullshit?

Has anyone actually done a sample of Facebook users (or humans) to check those stats? I do not believe them, based on my personal experience and the very large number of businesses and bots on facebook.

Given the massive incentive for Facebook to lie, we’d be naive to take their numbers for granted.

If they provided really fine-grained data, we could easily verify their claims. We pick cities, they give numbers, we survey to confirm, then extrapolate.

Anyone got any data?

Even if the MAUs are half of what they claim (they claim over 2 billion monthly active) they still have a moat the size of a freakin ocean. I think it’s safe to say they have users “in the billions”.

I believe half is even optimistic. I'd venture a gamble that at most 25% are unique and original people.

Even my non technical friends often have 2-4 accounts. For work, for friends, for forgotten passwords, etc...

And then of course bots and bots and bots.

Of course it depends on how they define a user and an account. If I logon only 1 of my accounts in a given month or 10. Do they count as 1 or 10 in either case?

Anecdote rebuttal to an anecdote: None of my personal friends have more than one account on facebook.

Facebook estimates than 10% of the accounts are duplicates [0], so that wouldn't match with most people (~50%?) having 2 to 4 accounts.

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/02/facebook-ad...

Anecdote^3 ... none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts :)

Where do you live?

in a cave apparently, seriously though I don't have many personal friends

>none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts

There's no way this is true

It could be trivially true for someone with zero personal friends :D

It can be true, I think we get used to the idea that most people are connected but if you have friends over the age of, say, 60 it's fairly common for them not have internet access. In the UK, at least?

Why not? In my friend circle only one guy has a facebook account, he created it to talk to a girl he met and i don't think he uses it anymore or even deleted it.

Not sure why that's so unbelievable.

Another perspective, how many users are actually dead?

http://www.theloop.ca/dead-facebook-users-will-soon-outnumbe...

EDIT:

Well they do measure active daily users but I still think the article above is interesting.

fascinating stats here, thanks for the article.

I've got a friend who buys targeted ads through facebook and they work well. At least some of the stuff isn't bullshit.

'What if those two billion accounts are bullshit?'

Nobody thinks they are all bullshit but, if half of them are, it's still a lot of people.

> The crucial moat that Facebook has is simply the massive nimber of registered users

How well does that moat work in practice? What was the rate of decline in other networks (such as Friendster and MySpace)? I've always gotten the impression that these shifts happen quite quickly.

That shift probably would already have happened if Facebook didn't buy WhatsApp and Instagram.

The biggest misconception is that adverisers track or even know anything about you. They simply ask fb to show this ad to such and such people and they pay fb to do so. This is the greatest asset of both fb and google, they know who and what you like, the moment they give this info away to 3rd parties, they become obsolete.

Are there ways to use Facebook data to serve advertisements outside the Facebook platform? I was under the impression that FB customers (advertisers) can only serve ads on Facebook i.e. Facebook does not display ads on other websites (unlike Google), and it does not pass on user data which advertisers can use to serve ads on other platforms/websites.

NY Times shows Facebook ads.

Yes it's called Audience Network: https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork

Your argument is reasonable, until a better way to market to individuals comes along. It's not about the size of Facebook's user base or their reach on the web, it's how cheaply and effectively brands can sell their product by paying Facebook to help them do that. Once someone else can do it better, that's when it's game over for Facebook.

Like Amazon or Visa?

> Just having a Facebook account that you “don’t use” allows a massive amount of value (from an advertisers perspective) to be unlocked.

Increasingly, this is not the case: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-belgium/facebook...

>I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does.

It matters if those "2 billion people" can abandon it in a hearbeat for some other platform.

Facebook has no solution for China, which will never allow a foreign company to capture all the wealth of that network. The totalatarianism of China also allows them to create the type of invasive dystopian social network that is probably Facebook's ultimate, yet inaccessible, business model.

Facebook doesn't need China. They'd like to be in China, it could be worth several billion dollars in annual profit, but they do not need it.

Facebook nearly generated as much profit in 2017 as Tencent and Alibaba combined, to put it into perspective.

The flip side of China's behavior, is that their domestic tech giants have been unable to go global like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Netflix have (Amazon is still trying to push its model fully global with mixed results). Baidu was supposed to challenge Google globally, it has completely failed at that. The US is the world's most lucrative advertising market, Alibaba and Tencent can't access it because they're wildly incompetent at operating outside of their protected kingdom (as witnessed by Alibaba's embarrassing failure with 11 Main). China is an extremely unique market, the approaches and protections that have given Tencent and Alibaba their dominance there, will not translate well to most of the rest of the world.

This is a fairly USA centric view of the world. USA GDP per capita is ~$57k, China's is ~$8k. As the GDP per capita continues to rise in China, lack of access to this market will be an increasing problem for an advertising company. The fact that Tencent's profit is half of Facebook's doesn't mean much when you compare the relative wealth of the markets.

> the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you

I use a separate browser profile just for Facebook; I never log in from my main profile. Do they link the separate browsers? There'd be a bunch of clues like the IP address, window size, browser version and OS, related but not identical time of activity, etc.

So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don't want them to? I despise Facebook and expect this is the sort of thing they'd do, but does anyone know more?

You are quite the exception. Most people don’t even have a computer and get along with an old Android phone for everything (as admittedly, it’s quite enough)

Yeah, it's unfortunately rare, but it is easy: on mobile you could install some separate browser app. In Chrome on a desktop it's two clicks to switch profiles, and about three to create a new one. I used to open an incognito window for Facebook, but you'd have to log in anew each time.

Of course I wish people would leave Facebook instead. I'm doing my part by not posting there.

So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don't want them to?

It actually doesn’t matter how much effort they put in or how effective their techniques are. Doing that at all for people who have expressed a wish not to be is stepping over the line. That is why GDPR is going to hammer them.

And the funny thing is, with both Facebook and Google, this is completely obvious to anyone outside the very narrow demographic they hire from. So much for (their fake) diversity.

'So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don't want them to?'

I stopped using Facebook several years ago; I wasn't much a user anyway so never worried about it.

Then, last year, I installed whatsapp. Then I started getting emails about an old colleague's activity on facebook. I don't have any contact details for this person anywhere, especially on my phone. I'd forgotten he even existed.

OK, you can connect the dots since my email hasn't changed and that connects me to facebook, and so on.

Nonetheless, it just made me realise how hard you have to work to protect your privacy these days.

When I deleted my facebook account I couldn't know that one day I'd use another service and facebook would not only acquire that service but then start using it to hook me back in?

> What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Facebook account.

And what will kill them is the increasing regulatory pressure (GDPR especially) that will end this soon, for a significant percentage of their most valuable users.

Once GDPR lands Facebook will need every user to explicitly opt-in to tracking their non-FB browsing actions, plus separate opt-in for tracking various elements of their Facebook data itself, and will face very tight constraints of how this can be shared with advertisers even once they have that consent. Sharing WhatsApp/Instagram's data with Facebook would be another separate opt-in there, etc etc. Access to these sites cannot be contingent on you agreeing to give them your data (that's not considered legitimate consent). Effectively the EU is going to forcibly stop them tracking EU users, or using any of their data for advertising, for anybody doesn't explicitly ask them to.

This is going to hurt. They're going to have to persuade every EU Facebook user that they _want_ to have their data tracked for advertising. Right now I can't see them making a convincing case for any significant percentage of their EU user base (though I'm sure they've put a lot of thought into this, so there may well be developments here in the coming months).

The EU is nearly 20% of Facebook's user base (~50% larger than the US), and as a relatively affluent part of the world, it's a particularly valuable segment for advertisers. Before the end of this year they're going to lose their unique advertising advantage for a very large proportion of that group, and I'd expect over the next decade other countries and regions to follow suit.

The model of advertising on the Internet is going to change pretty drastically over the next few years, and Facebook's success fundamentally depends on the current model. The 'crucial moat' you point out is about to disappear overnight, and they're not in a good place to deal with it.

I so wish you are right... but historically, corporations have been just fine after regulatory hit, 99% of the time.

They have pretty strong lawyers. I fear the GDPR is already backdoored and only faintly hope this is not the case.

Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. Facebook is just beginning to monetize the value of what they have created.

Facebook, the company != Facebook, the platform

I think the arguments in the article, at least most of them, are focusing on the platform.

GDPR will prevent that unless there's an active opt-in, so you can strike out EU citizens from that scenario.

Why would Macdonald’s pay for that? Tom is already in McDonald’s and is going to buy what he wants. There’s no incremental value in making the menu confusing by changing it all the time.

They’re not changing the menu, they’re just subtly highlighting things, offering discounts, etc. And yeah, he’s in the store already, but if they can sell him MORE on that visit, that’s good.

How much do you think McDonalds would pay for a magic camera + menu that boosted all their store revenue by 5% overnight?

Less than 5% of their revenue for sure.

Changing the menu "subtly" is still changing the menu. How does it work with everyone else in the store, are you going to compute optimal clusters on the fly? How are people going to react when the menu is morphing in front of them? Are franchisees expected to pay for all the hardware and compute involved?

Sorry, but I'm just not buying the vision. Facebook has ridden this incredible wave, first of investors spooging themselves with excitement over the potential value of all the data collected, then the wave of advertisers coming in and spending massive amounts with very questionable ROI. Long term everyone is going to get more sophisticated and realize there are cases where "would you like fries with that?" simply performs better once you factor in the weaknesses of comprehensive data-driven in-store advertising (cost, bandwidth, alienation, noisy data, key data out of band, etc, etc).

In Australia we have ordering kiosks now at a lot of stores, so maybe that would be one avenue where it's easier to cater to a customer's specific tastes by warping the menu a bit.

I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, just that it's an option.

You can make the "just getting started" argument for just about any company.

What you describe does not seem to require the involvement of Facebook. It doesn't even seem to require cameras. Just ask them to swipe their credit card to start using the automated ordering system.

Not any company. Every decade has a foundational technology upon which most of the economic growth of that period is based. 1987 - 1997 was the decade of the personal computer. 1997 - 2007 was the decade of the world wide web. 2007 - 2017 was the decade of mobile which is just starting to get mature. 2017 - 2027 will be the decade of AI / autonomy. Who will be the companies that excel at AI? The ones that can invest the most engineering dollars, and the ones that have access to large datasets for training. So I suppose you could say all tech companies with large datasets are just getting started given the growth I imagine we’ll see in the next decade.

Also I’m talking about tracking someone using their face, without them interacting with any systems at all or even checking out. Sure you could do implement a simpler similar system with credit cards but people have many credit cards that change often and so it would be difficult to get an accurate full profile of an individual. By contrast Facebooks AI would be universal and would be able to look at what you ordered at Wendy’s and use that to optimize the menu that is presented to the user for optimal conversions, even if you’ve never been in a mcdonald’s before. This is nice if you’re mcdonald’s but if you’re a small restaurant it’s a game changer. I don’t even know if Facebook is working on this but you can imagine them making a lot of money offering these types of services.

Society needs to figure out if that should be illegal. It's the secret manipulation of people's reality to get them to do things that are against the interests of their wallets and health. Very few people would consent to that if they understood how it works, especially at Internet scale. I think it would be easy to reach a dystopia if society travels too far along that path.

Back in ancient Venice, everyone wore masks in public.

While it doesn’t involve a fancy camera, you’re describing a loyalty card.

The merchant tracks your buying habits, and in return you get a variety of promotions. Square does this, FiveStars does this, Ritual does this, Clover and every other “connected” register company do this, Starbucks app does this.

The fancy camera, while interesting, is not a necessary aspect of this. Customization when the customer is physically in the store is nice, but the real money seems to be in getting that customer to the store.

People who walk into a McDonalds will spend money there. How much more would they spend at that hypothetical CreepyMcDonalds?

Ad targeting has it's place for certain applications, but it is easy to overestimate its impact.

I'm not sure if this article can support a substantive discussion or not, but thought it might be worth the trick of taking a more complex phrase for the title in the hope of stimulating more substantive responses. HN threads are often like those psych tests that measure complexity of response by time delay.

It's a bit weird, but there's some reason to believe that just the small tax it imposes on the brain to parse a complex title may slow it down enough to discourage pure reflex in reaction. Reflective, not reflexive, reactions are what we're going for here.

If I understand correctly what you said, I think it worked. It took ~30 mins for the first "I dont use fb anymore because it's evil" reply. Unfortunatelly, not great debate started in the quaiet timeframe

Thanks dang, I used the title from the article, but much prefer the updated one. Hoping it will generate some interesting discussion

Love your consideration in order to get us to reflection.

They're influencing the internet in more ways than just social stuff, though. From a technology perspective, Facebook is doing solid work. And it looks like they're continuing the trend - rather than being at the end of it.

Facebook's open source footprint is quite influential. Namely, React + Redux + Reselect are pretty sweet. React-Native. Haven't used it, but hhvm.

And I haven't heard of this one before, but it looks cool: https://github.com/facebook/prepack

https://github.com/facebook

That's a nice portfolio.

Prepack is one of the coolest ideas to come out of FB OSS.

The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices.

AFAIK, that sort of AoT evaluation has been limited to academia and niche applications in Haskell and OCaml because purity analysis is so tricky in languages that don't track effects.

> The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices.

Could you elaborate on what is cool about that? I feel like I'm missing something...sounds like it analyzes javascript to make it run faster.

If you have some JavaScript code, it goes through a few phases as it's evaluated by your browser:

1. Parsing

2. JIT optimizing

3. Compilation to bytecode

4. Re-optimization as the program runs

Steps 1 and 2 are expensive, and there are a few ways to cut down on them:

- Removing dead code before you ship

- Optimizing your code for the JIT compiler (eg. Closure Compiler does this)

- Webassembly

- Pre-evaluating your code with Prepack

More philosophically, the question is "when does my code run?". The answer has usually been "on the client". With Prepack, the answer is "as much as possible during compilation, and the remainder on the client".

You can say that now, when they turned their open-source project into truly open-source, and not something they can Trojan horse other companies with. React had BSD + parents licence until they go a lot of criticism.

HHVM never really took off in the PHP community. These days regular PHP performs as well, and has adopted most of the additions HHVM made to the language. Larger projects like Symfony dropped support for HHVM a while ago. It’s main purpose these days seems to be a thing to run Hack (the langauage) on.

Without going to deeply into the content of the article, just because a company has “peaked” doesn’t mean it’s “failing”. IBM peaked decades ago, but still has a somewhat successful business. Microsoft peaked in terms of influence probably a decade ago, but is still important. I doubt that Facebook will go the way of MySpace or Yahoo anytime soon.

Not only is Microsoft still important, their stock performance has been pretty phenomenal in the past decade.

Almost nobody talks about lack of trust, yes there are words about fake news and formal reassurances from FB staff that they will investigate, fix and so on. But trust was already undermined, you just can't restore it to previous level.

People were reading news in FB feed and didn't even think it can be fake, now they read and go "outside" for fact checking. Not a good sign for social network which wants you to be engaged all the time.

> People were reading news in FB feed and didn't even think it can be fake, now they read and go "outside" for fact checking.

You know this is an interesting topic in and of itself. Are people looking outside FB for news? I would argue that if FB supports your world view that people aren't looking outside of it. Others have had the same theory:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

The reality is that the internet provides a platform to even the most marginal ideas, time cubes, flat earths, and lots of rather stupid ideas that have no basis in logic or reason. If these things appeal to you seeing them in print and on video will only bolster ones false reasoning and allow you to further push out other points of view.

I won't agree that internet provides you with such level of information. Internet is a service, it can't figure out your desires, but FB and other social networks really try to do it.

The only reason such for fake news being spreaded everywhere are suggests and recommendations from social networks feed. They multiply junk and fakes.

Trust is my issue too. I've put almost no personal information on FB since the day I opened my account. But over the last year it's gotten worse: I trust the news sources less, I trust the ads less, I deleted the FB app, and I trust the FB company least of all. That translates to me posting less and spending less time on the website, and never "just using FB" to sign up for another website.

And you know what? I'm happier with less FB in my life.

Now you weakening your social graph, which means you have impact on many related things.

Facebook just needs to lose its "evil" image. I could throw out ideas but let's face it everyone does that and I have zero experience running a social network. Right now the biggest obstacle facing Facebook is that people are starting to think that using Facebook is bad for you and bad for society. Facebook cannot survive in such a climate indefinitely. If it's true, make it false. If it's false, prove it.

Well said.

Though I could imagine that only <1% of FB users are aware of all the headlines we get served here on HN every day...so it’s probably not a real issue

In a math sense, the signal to noise ratio on FB became much higher over the last decade. At inception, it was a focused way to directly communicate with a close college circle. Now its effectively as open as Myspace, bombards you with ads, and as with all wide networks, the discourse has dropped to meme / quiz bot level (Which annoying social media app represents you?!)

I remember the main draw early on being the simple, uniform UI, especially in contrast to MySpace. White, blue, feed, photos. Product designers just never know when to quit.

Well it certainly is a business decision. Likely Facebook knows better when it needs to canibalize its own product and squeeze the most profit out of it then move on.

Instagram is now the social place to be.

I think you mean "much lower" signal to noise ratio.

I'm a non native English speaker. Which one is more suitable for "less quality"?

Lower.

High SNR = Much signal, little noise

Low SNR = Much signal, much noise

> Low SNR = Much signal, much noise

Or, the reason I gave up fb -- little signal, much noise.

It's describing a ratio:

A to B => A ÷ B

I deleted my Facebook account two years ago (Valentine's day 2016). Before doing so I reached out to my close/medium ties and exchanged numbers, encouraging them to check out Signal as a way to contact me. Some of them demurred (nothing to hide) but pretty much everyone adopted Signal after the election, heh.

I don't have a huge amount of "friends" now, but I have a small group of people I text or call occasionally. I feel happier and more connected than I did using Facebook.

Hey guys, don't believe in doomsayers.

Market (aggregate opinion of investors) is often smarter than each individual.

The market assigns a fairly healthy P/E ratio to FB. Similar to that of Google. Both better than that of AAPL.

All in all, I'd ignore this dude's predictions. Facebook has a bunch of smart people. Market is factoring in plenty of growth into FB's stock. Given market's expectations, I'd bet this guy is wrong.

https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/pe-ratio

https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog/pe-ratio

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/pe-ratio

(2018 was a special year due to a one-time write-off, check out 2019 and beyond)

I mean Facebook has arguably reached all the audience it could reach.

The only way they could keep growing is the increase time spent on their platform. That said Id conjecture the optimization towards short term reward cycles (more clickbaity articles being recommended, etc.) loses customer loyalty over the long run

Yes but the point is that it is now losing people that it used to reach because it's too full of advertising, shitty memes and fwd:fwd:fwd: tag your friend in this if...

And they never really adequately solved the "my aunt sent me a friend request and will be offended if I don't accept it" problem.

Everything I used to share on Facebook I now share on WhatsApp because it has no advertising and my actual friends are likely to see it. Smart buy by Facebook.

social media has peaked? which sites are still growing in westernized countries?

This may be true for Facebook in the US and other developed countries.

Facebook is still making inroads in countries that are just getting connectivity (like Myanmar).

Revenues will come from developed countries though so I'm not sure if Facebook can sustain its business off developing countries.

Anecdotally, I'm one of the people who walked away from Facebook this year, due to exhaustion, disinterest, disgust, protest, or other (negative) reasons. I don't miss it and won't be going back.

Amusingly, after about a week, Facebook started emailing me to try to entice me to come back. So I logged back in to disable those emails.

What are the masses switching to?

The real world, let's hope.

...he wrote on a message board ;-)

Yay for the real world!

I recently deleted almost all my accounts online, i.e. Github, LinkedIn, Twitter. I only have this account left and few others which are for learning purposes. I don't know for certain why, but I feel this need to be empty in a sort of way and do away with the non-essentials: digitally, physically, and internally, i.e. use the terminal instead of an ide, use technological devices less and do more natural things, and stop interpreting things, respectively.

Though then again, I hope my nonexistent online presence is not a negative to future employers as I complete my bachelor's in a few years. It seems if you want to work for company x, you should be using product x. That's probably not the case but it does seem like it.

Well, at least an active Github account is a sufficient (but non-necessary) proof that you have at least a basic understanding of Git. But still, there are lots of ways to captivate employers: a good old coding blog can beat many a LinkedIn profile.

I read this as an assertion the masses are losing interest overall, not switching to a competitor

Even if the masses have yet to lose interest, there's certainly a group of us that lost interest already.

From what I've seen it's Instagram. Expected since everyone and their network are already linked with their Facebook accounts, switch is quite smooth. For now it's also cleaner, more image-oriented than video and less ad-polluted.

Are we talking about facebook.com the website, or Facebook the company ?

I stopped looking often at Facebook. I don't like their upgrade and more people are posting stupid things on the network. To be honest I don't care about it anymore. Instagram, whatsapp and Snapchat have taken over most of Facebook imho.

I like the irony :D

"Eight reasons Facebook has peaked"

"please follow me on Twitter or Facebook"

Well, "peaked" means it's as powerful as it will ever be.

Firstly, when did prediction and conjecture become news? Would be great if the news industry stuck to actual news.

Secondly, lets hope so and lets hope that will finally put an end to the crazy amount of hit pieces by the media on facebook and social media. Has anyone older ever witnessed anything like this before? The media, both in the US and the UK, has been obsessed with facebook and social media for past year. It's like someone declared war on facebook/social media and ordered the entire industry to attack them. The only thing I can compare it to is north korea's media's rabid attacks on SK, US and Japan.

Anyone else "entertained/exasperated" by the media blitz against facebook.

Articles don't have to be news in the narrow sense to do well here. They need to gratify intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wasn't talking about hacker news. I was talking about the bbc.

I was asking why the bbc published a non-news story, not why it was here. I was just saying the news industry should publish news rather than conjecture or predictions.

Ah I see! Well, you'd have to take it up with them, but the BBC publishes all kinds of things.

the BBC publishes all kinds of things

Mostly "someone said something on Twitter" and "here are some more personal opinions of Laura Kuenssberg". Their days of being a serious news organisation are long over.

That's a popular kind of thing to say on the internet, but IMO a good habit to stay out of. From an HN point of view it's far from true:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.co.uk%20points%3E10&sort=b...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc.com%20points%3E10&sort=byD...

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