Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

If Facebook goes away, MySpace is nowhere near an adequate analogy. Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users. In other words, there are more active monthly Facebook users in the world than:

* Roman Catholics (1.2 billion)

* People living in China (1.4 billion)

* Total speakers of English, the most widely-spoken language in the world (1.4 billion)

* Muslims (1.8 billion)

* Viewers of the 2014 FIFA World Cup final (1 billion)

* iPhones ever manufactured (1.2 billion; also, the top two most-used apps are Facebook and Facebook Messenger)

* Windows users (1.4 billion)

* Inhabitants of the European Union (508 million)

* Cats (600 million)

* Firearms (875 million)

* Africans (1 billion)

Now, obviously whether or not you use Facebook isn't as important to your identity or as hard to change as your religion or where you live, but it's also not something that's just going to suddenly disappear without some sort of replacement, or else if it does, it will be the first time in human history that two billion people all decided at once to give up on something.

And myspace had 75m monthly active users at its peak.

This really does look like a bad comparison.

Maybe you could adjust for total internet users then and now but I doubt that would make a difference.

Edit: (dubious) source:

https://startupbros.com/myspace-the-rise-fall-and-rise-again...

That 75m might not look so bad if you compare it to the total number of internet users at the time. But it's still probably an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook.

Probably half of that are fake profiles, profiles made by people for commercial purposes or bots. If you make fake account and you will start wandering in the endless facebook steppes, you will notice that many of them are one post account that advertise or play games. The best ones are those with pictures of known or lesser known models to collect friends and sell such an account for dollars later. I have reported several hundred of such profiles, of which maybe 1/20 have been blocked rest is fine because moderators can't see difference between real life person and photo from google images in 20 accounts in a row...

2.2 billion isn't the total number of accounts, it's the number of "monthly active users"--and Facebook would probably be in much hotter water than they are now if they cooked the books on that number.

Bots are active though, right?

Yeah, but they’re not looking at ads or providing useful data for brokers.

This don't change my comment still many of them are fakes. I know people who have 5-6 accounts active at one time playing different games with 500+ friends on it. Many of those "friends" also are fakes, some even with the same profile picture of "real person" with fake data but I have nothing against FB, every medium is abused.

It's just interesting that not a single research was done on this topic that I know about. :)

Why do your friends have 5+ accounts opened? To get around limits on games?

I used to create new accounts each time when I logged into facebook. Better than to remember passwords.

Game limits, not wanting to share private account with some random folks used in games or for commercial purposes aka selling account later on and I can tell that this business is booming! :)

I've heard that you count as a monthly active user if you sign into something else using your FB account. If true that would inflate the number quite a bit

Let's assume that half of them are fakes. Now they have "only" 1.1 billion users every month. The number is still staggering.

Yea, that is still a huge number, but for advertisers that use FB as a platform is a huge waste of money and FB could easily abuse that as well.

Advertisers in any medium probably have to accept that some people aren't paying any attention to the ad. High-viewership events cost more to advertise on, but a significant portion of the audience is going to wander off at any given commercial break.

yeah, at least 4 of those 2.2 billion are mine.

"Facebook" is more like a suite than a single service. For example, I use Facebook almost every day, but I never look at my newsfeed, and virtually never post to it. I basically only log in for 2 specific private groups that use it for scheduling.

It would be easy to replace, if that group of friends/colleagues decided to use something else for collaboration. We don't need to replace all 100 services they offer. We need only a couple.

I suspect that's how Facebook is going to end. We're not all going to stop going to "facebook.com" overnight. Someone will steal away chat (Twitter?), someone will steal away photos (Flickr?), someone will steal away events, and so on, until it's been picked clean.

If you assume 1 MOD account means one person 30% of the world's population uses Facebook. At one point 23% of the world's population belonged to the British empire [0]. Facebook falling would be similar to the British empire decline.

[0] http://theunbrokenwindow.com/Development/MADDISON%20The%20Wo... (page 97)

No, it would be much less significant.

We all quit watching the 2014 FIFA World Cup at the same time... so it's only a factor of 2 difference from that.

That's because the World Cup because it ended, not because we all decided that we didn't want to watch soccer any longer. That analogy would work if we all quit Facebook because Facebook shut off its servers. It doesn't work for people voluntarily quitting Facebook.

I think you missed the joke.

Ah, yes, I guess I did.

Mmm... 2.2B MAU. When you think about how they counted them, probably they used HyperLogLog. In usual configuration, it has a 0.7 - 1% error. Basically a medium-sized country...

Or the number of users that any startup founder will die for...

It is impressive what Facebook managed to build, but, although the number is staggering, the relative amount of people that switched from horses to cars or to electricity for illumination from candles and burning oil is even bigger... People do not voluntarily stop using something, but the force of innovation is huge. Very few Fortune 500 companies even existed 100 years ago, and the pace of disruption is accelerating...

we usually overestimate short term trends and under estimate long term trends.

Who would have thought Apple would be the most valuable company when the iPhone came out. Nokia was the king back then. Kids nowadays don’t even know what Nokia is.

What is Nokia?

Just joking, Totally agree with you...

Will it actually be "the first time in human history that two billion people all decided at once to give up on something"? How many users of leaded gasoline were there? I guess that wasn't "all at once", though.

You're right. If the government of the United States were to ban using Facebook, you'd probably see a lot fewer people using Facebook.

It looks like ~1-1.4 billion cars are driven every day now, which is an all-time high. So add "cars" to the original list.

Staggering.

MySpace didn't suddenly disappear, it fizzled out over a long time. Also, the relevant metric isn't the total number of users -- this is a massive parallellisable process -- it's the average network-effect lock-in per user. For one thing, networks are fairly segmented around geographies. And that's what makes the MySpace analogy relevant: people thought it would never go away because it had very strong network effects, everybody you care about is on it.

Facebooks demise doesn't require the coordinated action of two billion people. Network effects work the other way as well: when people do leave, they make the experience a little worse for all their contacts, lowering the bar for them to leave as well.

Sure, the number of users probably extends the long tail of the demise, indeed I expect Facebook to hang around as at least a low-engagement contact book/messenger platform for a long time. Their demise will look more like Yahoo than MySpace, but the MySpace story does tell us that network effects aren't magical spells that can never be broken, and network effects are Facebooks most important moat.

I'm curious about how many people were on the internet at Myspace's peak though.

Seems a lot of the online world is on Facebook now, but technology does make it very easy to switch platforms at a moment's notice when the new thing comes out. As you've stated, it's MUCH harder to change a core part of one's identity.

Facebook's metric probably counts me as a user because once or twice a month I watch a video that happens to be on Facebook. Be careful about taking that number too seriously.

The 19 Billion chickens in the world scoff at your bookface.

you also have to consider how many people actual connected to the internet back then... most connected with a desktop computer. nowadays, everyone with a phone has the internet in their hand.

2.2 billion is a bullshit number, plain and simple.

You can subtract one. I'm not on it anymore.

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