Internal emails cause more trouble for Facebook and its C.E.O.

I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up.

My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp.

The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones.

They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core 'social media' offerings and I can't see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and/or simplicity aspects which make it so popular.

In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they'd released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they'd be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.

My parents use facebook nearly constantly. That wont change anytime soon. I don't know if they could list a single facebook, "scandal" that happened this year. It's not that they are dumb people they just don't care. Their friends use it so they use it.

I think Facebook's more likely to lose out because apart from messaging, its organization and events and business finding tools simply aren't that good or well-surfaced within the app because Facebook has prioritised the world of feed clickbait. Don't think it's security concerns that have my friends doing event invites via Whatsapp group threads as often as via Facebook's dedicated event invitation service. But the average person having a number of old friends whose only reliable contact information is their Facebook is a pretty big moat.

My hope would be a decentralized service, where everyone hosting an instance determines their own business model, or a paid service. None of which will be as fast to iterate, and be able to crank out features as fast as Facebook can ...

Yesterday's news tells us that competing with Facebook in the messenger field isn't easy (Google cancelling Allo)

For a long-term strategy we have to see how there diversification (facebook@work, Oculus, ...) works out and how long they can keep printing money.

The saw their trust woefully violated by Facebook, and they'll never give another network the same access to their data again. And, thus, stay on Facebook.

But I believe you’re wrong about instagram. Living in Brazil, I feel that Facebook and Instagram are two sides of the same coin. It keeps people interested and “connected” when Facebook is going down.

From Orkut to Facebook, it was the same.

The difference is that Facebook bought its potential competitors before they were cool

Is Instagram useless, or just useless to you? I understand that HN isn't Facebook's target market, but it's disappointing to read comments that dismiss its services and anyone who does find utility in them.

I say "semi-contrarian" because remember, even 4 or 5 years ago Facebook seemed to be the latest corporate iteration in an ever-flipping lineage from AIM lists to Friendster to MySpace.[2] So the common gospel was: "Facebook" - such as it was understood - could be toppled any day now. Remember MySpace?

The counterargument was that the market capture was incomparable and the network effect was insurmountable. And that's still true, kind of.

But the way we use Facebook has changed. In short, it's gone from being a single service with a bunch of features to being an SSO gateway for a bunch of federated platforms. And that's not just a change in user perception, it's reflective of a completely different product strategy.

That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for Facebook so far, and I'm not sure what they could have done differently. But I think it leaves them vulnerable to any one of those platforms, or all of them, being usurped by new kids on the block.

Part of the problem is that none of Facebook's platforms are all that great in their own right.[3] But that alone doesn't make them vulnerable. MySpace proved you can have a terrible product and coast off network effect alone, while Google+ proved that without a network, you have nothing.

But wait a minute. Does any one of these platforms on their own have the network effect that "Facebook" itself once had? I mean, yeah, they've absorbed a greater user share than the 2012 webapp ever had. But that's not what I'm talking about. Is connectivity to "Facebook," and hence its network, a killer feature at this point?

To give one example: I have zero confidence anyone on Groups is a "real person," it doesn't offer any unique features, it's painful to use for anything other than reading a general quasi-chronological survey of recent posts, and it means nothing to me that 17 or 18 "real friends" happen to be a member of the group (how does that help me find a sublet?).

Right now I'm one of millions of people who "just use Facebook for Events and Messenger." Except I don't _just_ message people through Messenger, and I don't _just_ learn about events through Events, and the fact that "my friends" are "on" these platforms seems to mean less and less every day. But I'm still on them... for now... with gradually diminishing frequency... basically out of ambivalence.

Is this product direction sustainable?

[1] Any references I make to Facebook in this post refer to the core service - the website, the app, whatever you want to call it. Not the company, which I'm aware owns WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, and could potentially continue to coast off acquisitions alone.

[2] This is a myopically North American view: in Brazil it would have started with Orkut, in Southeast Aria Friendster held steady market share for quite a while, etc. The point is that we used to consider portal-like predecessors as a litmus of comparison for Facebook’s health, and now that doesn’t seem as salient.

[3] I mean, Groups _barely_ serves its job of being the sort of Craigslist-with-authentication into which it's evolved, in part _because_ it evolved into that role over time. The Events interface is totally cluttered and incoherent, and despite its ubiquity, it seems to get the lowest social engagement of any of Facebook's core products. Messenger is... fine I guess, but I have no strong preference for it over WhatsApp or iMessage, and having hypothetical connection to hundreds of "friends" I haven't spoken to in years isn't exactly a value-add.

I don't think profit motive is innate, we're not Ferengi!

However, things can't go on growing forever, and the rich need growth to get richer, and need churn to maintain fashion as the societal norm that feeds growth, and feeds purchases of stuff in order to fit in ...

Things that work well enough and stably and are liked are prime for exploitation for [more] profit. It's really only very few people driving that exploitation -- though perhaps many more would if given the chance.

It's shocking how heavy-handed it is. Literally every day I see some news article about how Facebook is O-V-E-R.

Meanwhile, my friends list hasn't changed one bit, and I haven't met a single person who's dumped Facebook for more than a few months. Some leave, but they always come back.

Everything about this seems like an organized attack on FB by the mainstream media.

Once a company (or individual) becomes a media target, the media generates its own news about the company.

At the same time, most media companies cannot admit this dynamic even if they understand it (they don't).

I don't think much has changed from FB's behaviour, nor is there a coordinated media campaign against them. Rather, the general public is warming up to the idea that FB might not be all that great, which opens a window for the media to publish stories about FB in a negative light.

Given this, it seems disingenuous and even harmful to attribute the negativity side of it to the “media” or suggest that the coordination and timing of the stories is a media “campaign.”

Nobody denies that the media can coordinate like this and probably has in the past and will again. However, there is no need to reach for conspiracy theories when it comes to negative reporting on Facebook.

Facebook is negative. Facebook has perpetrated a serial campaign of negative behaviors. The media in this case are merely just reporting that. Any negativity is down to Facebook itself for acting negatively, not down to the media.

This is the same kind of logic as thinking that everything some CEO does is a "marketing ploy", or that every terrorist attack is a false flag operation.

It was more or less the same [edit: data / service] Facebook provided to Obama's both campaigns, except selling to Obama was seen as "supporting progressive cause" and "modern way of reaching out to the young voters", while selling to Trump was deemed a "terrible betrayal" and "hacking the democracy"; the press' opinion on Facebook turned from "that dependably progressive company we can get mutual support from" to "that unpredictable hired gun that's willing to work with anybody bad".

Think of it; nothing else has changed. The press, and people in general, were well aware for years that Facebook is collecting, processing, and selling reams upon reams of user data. It was all glossed over as long as it was supporting the good cause. Now it's bemoaned to no end.

It doesn't help that the press has natural adversarial relationship with Facebook just as much as with Google and other similar, due to the platforms being both major news channel (direct competitor), while at the same time the major source of web traffic to the news' websites, thus ad revenue.

Uber didn't change much, and so won't Facebook, because the media will eventually pick another target (I wonder which, I'm guessing Google) which makes people click their links. They don't really care about reporting or about making things right, they just need a dead horse to beat.

I am happy the power of the media dwindles year after year, they should have no right to do something like this against certain people or companies they don't like. They are bullies, that's all they are.

I don't understand "fishermen" metaphor. Whose "we" in "You're throwing another rock into the net we're carrying..."?

This comment doesn't really add to the discussion in a positive way.

Someone pinged me about your comment and I've changed the title now, but of course it's too late to make much difference.

He has been extremely critical of the large tech monopolies (eg his Davos speech covered here and elsewhere https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/25/george-soro... ) so it's no surprise that Facebook would do "opposition" research on him. Facebook has a very large pavilion and visible presence at Davos so the criticism must have been particularly embarrassing in that context.

I think, from how they talk, that Facebook wants to have everybody watching it all the time. From how they talk, more even than making money.

I think Soros wants intellectual freedom. Not so sure about that, but it looks that way from the philanthropy.

Both just happen to be using free markets to work towards their goals.

I think we are consuming wildly differing news sources.