Ask HN: Is 2018 the end of Facebook?
Facebook is now getting so much negative press, is 2018 the year it will go the way of MySpace... a rapid fall off, a decline in minority?
Can Zukerberg turn things around?
Can Zukerberg turn things around?
Relevant portion: "Murdoch hosted Zuckerberg at his Sun Valley, Idaho, villa and expressed discontent with Facebook's News Feed algorithm and its handling of news.
He requested Facebook consult publishing partners and be more generous sharing digital ad revenue, or he vowed, News Corp executives would take their dislike of Facebook public. He also hinted that News Corp lobbyists would take a more aggressive stand against Facebook with U.S. regulators, as the company had done against Google in Europe.
News Corp denied it would mobilize its journalists against Facebook, although unnamed Facebook executives said they believed at the time that would happen."
It definitely seems that someone(s) is grinding their axes against FB, much like the flurry of negative news that came out against Uber a year or so again.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...
Sometimes clueless, sometimes willfully ignorant.
Both FB and NewsCorp have done immeasurable harm to our system of government.
What exactly are you trying to say about Facebook with this forced metaphor?
That is a reasonable interpretation, though, so thanks.
http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...
Neither murdoch nor Zuckerberg are admirable characters.
And the point of my tongue-in-cheek comment was that Murdoch did buy MySpace, and utterly failed to compete with Facebook, or even to grow what little traffic MySpace had before he bought it.
Facebook is going to get done in by the fact that the younger generation doesn't like it, but that process has been underway for a few years now, and it will take many more years to complete (obviously offering Zuckerberg many chances to turn the ship around).
All the younger generation I know are big users of Instagram and WhatsApp - both FB properties.
Instagram is fairly popular as well but WhatsApp never really went mainstream.
No interest in working there personally because I despise both PHP and working in an open office, but I don't think the Zuckerberg brand of fine social content is going away any time soon.
If you think Facebook is only getting hammered inside the tech bubble, you probably are living inside the tech bubble.
People are waking up to the harm caused by Facebook everywhere. My non-technical friends' raging against Facebook sounds similar to what I've been hearing from my technical friends for the past 5 years.
If you think people are "waking up everywhere", you're probably inside a bubble. Where I'm from (outside the US) Facebook is just doing business as usual. If anything its new features are growing (anecdotally, Marketplace).
Nobody ever questioned the value of giving the uneducated this much power and amplification.
It's at the tipping point where grandparents are starting to talk about the "snooping" and data gathering of Facebook.
Well mainstream news 'in the UK' seems to focus on most things that are not in the UK, so no surprises there.
And I can say that Facebook is receiving negative coverage from all of them. It's standard mainstream fare now.
And it has been so for at least the last 3 months.
Facebook isn't going to literally end (i.e. go bankrupt and dissolve) this year. It's too big to fail in that sense. Keep in mind that MySpace is still around. I'm guessing this isn't the kind of ending you're talking about.
So if you don't mean literally end, what do you mean by end?
Lose their dominance? In what space are we talking about them losing dominance (ads, social networks, something else)? Keeping in mind that for them to lose their dominance in any of these spaces in 2017 a viable competitor probably has to exist already.
Or are we talking about their markets shrinking? I.e. people realizing that social media is toxic and quitting in droves to some arbitrary low point (let's say, they lose half their active users)?
And in either of these cases, what would keep them from simply shifting spaces?
I'm sure some intelligent conversations will come out of this, but that's only because people on here will pick a possible meaning of your question and run with it. There would be a lot larger of an intelligent conversation if people chose their words for specific meaning rather than this clickbait-y silliness.
More importantly, IBM "died" at least 10 times, Microsoft "died" at least a couple of times. Big companies have a huge shelf life, even in bad market conditions, if the management is half competent.
Just because in the US/Europe Facebook is getting bad press, or declining amongst young users, etc. doesn't mean that's the case in other countries.
The US isn't even Facebook's largest market anymore; it's India [1]. Sure, most money comes from the US/Candada region [2], but that's just now. As these countries' economies continue to grow the amount of money Facebook can make there will too. There's also strength in numbers; the US has around 300m people, the world minus China and the US has 5,400m others.
If you wanna make serious analysis you have to look at the numbers too. Facebook's active users worldwide aren't even stagnant; they are still growing at a fairly constant rate [3]. 2018 is not even close to being the end of facebook.
I see a ton of emotional and anecdotal comments here. The question itself is itself, I'd assume, based off the recent discussions here on HN and news articles around Facebook and Russia, and IMO written just to incite another hot Facebook thread since I'd assume anyone could guess that a $500+b company can't possibly die in 9 months. That's ok, but I am however surprised and disappointed by the lack of statistics and analysis though. I would've expected more from the HN community. I was hoping people here would like to stick more with facts, numbers and a rational view.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
[3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Besides, just as others said the impact of bad press is not that pronounced. There's always bad press about it, and so far Facebook continues to dominate the social network market.
The real question should be: do I believe Facebook will decline more than I believe Facebook will sort of muddle through (like Twitter) or Facebook stages some sort of recovery and return to grace.
What is the statement based on? Could you provide a citation for this or any corroborating evidence that this is fact?
This isn't my idea, & I expect to see one of these emerge and take over in the next 1-3 years.
It's possible that Facebook will be disrupted (although I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Facebook is operating at such an unprecedented scale that it's hard to apply traditional "rules of thumb" to them), and it's possible that what disrupts them will be a nonprofit competitor--but it's not going to disrupt them because it's nonprofit. Bluntly, idealism isn't sufficient; I don't see much indication that it's even necessary. Wikipedia "won" in its space against early competitors largely because of the features that its competitors perceived as its big weakness, e.g., not only can anyone read it for free, anyone can edit it for free, without even making an account.
A rule of thumb that I do think will prove to hold up: whatever replaces Facebook will be at least as difference from FB as FB was from MySpace. We're seeing that to some degree in the interest shift from FB to Instagram and SnapChat. (Of course, FB owns Instagram; another thing that's going to make them really difficult to disrupt as a corporation rather than a service is that they're big enough to throw money at potential disruptors until they sell out.) I think it's also going to be very difficult for a nonprofit to disrupt them for that reason, though, honestly; remember, even as huge as Wikipedia is, they're constantly struggling for money, and their infrastructure is way less resource-intensive than something like FB's is. Thing That Replaces FB may solve that by being fully decentralized and distributed, but it needs to be just as easy to use as FB is (and again, provide a more compelling reason to use it rather than "it's not FB").
The problem isn't Facebook. The problem is us. People. Humans. We're too prone to addictive behaviors. We're too prone to believe what we want to believe. And at least some of us are too willing to exploit a medium to manipulate the behavior of others.
A non-profit won't change any of that. People will still become addicted to it; it will still propagate fake news; and people will still use it to manipulate others.
But when the incentives are aligned differently, the overall behavior of such a system could indeed affect humans differently.
Right now, the goal is eyeballs glued to the page, and thus the algorithms deep down find the most clicky/sticky things to put in front of your eyes.
If the goals were different, such a network might instead encourage different behaviors, like actually not using the site very much, etc.
Probably the best thinking I've seen on this topic is from Tristan Harris: http://www.tristanharris.com More info there.
There are lot of bots in all the social media apps. So, Facebook might report deletion of large number of fake accounts to show they are doing something.
Old-people-facebook will cling to life because it is part of the media-ecosystem now. So I won't expect a steep dropoff, but rather a slow gradual decline in users as they literally die off.
Proper answer: I just saw their stock plunged 10%. And I use the word plunged, because it created a gap (which I am super fool not to have taken advantage from this and short their stock since I knew of the 50m users fiasco way before NYSE opening). And although I do not appreciate, nor use FB, I do undertstand that they serve a purpose, and as many note, the average Jo/Jane doesn't care for privacy violations as "they got nothing to hide", and for as long people abandon(ed) their right to privacy, then Facebook will be growing stronger.
The recent swatch of negative press is just amplified 10x in the US because it almost always revolves around Donald Trump being elected. If Hillary won and this same stuff leaked it would be noted but die fairly quickly in the news.
Every old person practically lives on FB 24/7. Most middle age people are on there and will stay due to kids, family, etc. Millenials use Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp like crazy.
Or does "end" mean something else, if not measured in users? Is it the year people realize that the idealized image of themselves and their thousands of friends not worth maintaining or checking?
Yet, this also means very little spam and garbage. There seem to be little bots in the platform as far as I can see, and the few that send me friend requests seem to be taken down within hours, as opposed to Twitter for example.
Many people honestly don't care about this data scandal or the other things Facebook does.
Someone is either doing a power play in order to prove a point (perhaps Murdoch?) or actively trying to manipulate the stock price. It all starts with a bunch of articles/opinion pieces and the rest of the media herd follows because it's the trendiest thing to hate on and get traffic.
It will blow over soon enough. I think Google is next in line now as some classic `law enforcement vs privacy` stuff started showing up.
Think about how many times you see a post like this on HN: "I barely use facebook. I just keep it for <some random purpose>".
Facebook started off as twitter, then added the kitchen sink. People thought they wanted the kitchen sink, but realised it wasn't worth the noise and/or privacy/security risks. Twitter itself has suffered 'feature creep', but to much less an extent. Facebook does have the 'monopoly' advantage, so I can imagine a lot of people will hang around out of inertia, but I also think that other competitors to very specific subsets will arrive, just as twitter did, and some will prefer to jump ship.
Unless Facebook was discovered to be doing very illegal things I wouldn’t count on anything changing, and even so they would potentially be fined and a few people fired ala Volkswagen but IMO extremely unlikely to be broken up/disbanded/sold/rebranded
Also, FB for promoting businesses just makes sense.
FB can easily open new lines of business beyond social networking.
Both are ad companies. Google got lucky with buying YouTube and Android on search ad money. They haven't been able to translate that success into anything else.
Facebook probably got lucky with WhatsApp and Instagram. Only time will tell if they can do it again once those two start to collapse.
The new time waste machine is Facebook again, but with a different name: Instagram.
I love Instagram. It's the only social network I use regularly. I like Twitter, but I use it in a read-only way and only check it maybe once or twice a month.
Instagram though, is fantastic, at least for now. They are starting to ruin it with ads though. I wish I could pay for an ad-free version.
No, nobody cared. I mean, it was a meme that everyone made jokes about, even late night talk shows. But nobody cared.
And yes, people do care. I work at a top tier U.S. university, and in our college at least we have so far refused to update or support our Windows machines past 7. Microsoft’s Windows 10 stumbles do matter.
Switching their operating system is almost completely inconsequential, like they might not even notice after one day of getting used to the new icon for the trash bin. But cut them off from Facebook and they lose context in their organizations, ability to do their job (social media customer relations is a big part of businesses like cafés, cinemas, festivals, etc), easy contact with their family and friends, access to cheap local marketplaces, information about local events, and so on ad nauseum.
Facebook is extremely important for the real lives of hundreds of millions of people. Like, more important than Wikipedia, Google, and Twitter combined.
Also, look at how people use Facebook. Quitting it would absolutely require a change in their social habits and opportunities.
Too many HNers look at Facebook through the lens of their own slowing social life. Long out of university, aren't meeting people regularly. Yes, makes sense that you could delete Facebook with a skip and a hop.
The only way I keep up with a dozen or so people is via facebook: I don't have any other communication line to them. And I am tech savvy.
A lot of people wouldn't know where to begin without that platform there.
> refused to update or support our Windows machines past 7
What's your long term strategy?
Is there a silver bullet?