Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

Video 1: Sheet Pan Chicken Fajita Crunchwrap (recipe video). My comment: I basically never cook and I would never watch a cooking video.

Video 2: "THE NUN PRANK" (some young idiots doing a prank in an underground parking lot). My comment: I find this totally moronic.

Video 3: Banana Bread on a stick (another recipe video). My comment: Zero interest in this.

Video 4: Brave Boy Kills Giant Tiger (looks like a trailer for a cheesy Bollywood kind of movie) My comment: I don't watch this kind of thing at all and have zero interest.

Video 5: "Lilwin" (looks like an amateur video set in Africa with two people speaking an unknown language) My comment: I have no fucking clue why this was recommended to me.

Conclusion: FB watch is total shit.

The market’s had a hard time deciding what to make of all the “scandals” but the past few headlines have had less and less of an effect on the stock. The TC article that came out yesterday had absolutely zero effect which surprised me a little and the news that they might receive a record fine a week or two ago knocked the stock down for literally twelve minutes before it sprang back up (I was following it that day). I think the market is finally ready to move past all of this and focus on what moves Facebook is going to make going forward because it’s quite obvious users and advertisers don’t care about any of this.

I think there are two camps out to get Facebook for reasons that go beyond privacy- media outlets threatened by its existence and Twitter users who have amassed a large following and view it as an “us versus them” dynamic because they’ve come to rely on Twitter as a communication mechanism. To view Twitter as any better is completely illogical but media outlets are happy to choose favorites if it suits them.

Hopefully it will be possible to have reasonable discourse on HN again instead of the constant flaming.

That's a pretty big assumption. People's feelings can and do change based on new information.

Please define "strongly".

I know many people who really dislike Facebook, but still use it for business reasons or since their parents, best friend, local community, ... use it to share information or scheduling events.

Not that I would trust Facebook's numbers considering the amount of lying and shady practices they employ.

In Europe it's the same story for Facebook. I remember Facebook predecessors that had the same "well my parents are on it now and the same idiots keep posting bullshit over and over so I just lurk now and then" moment and none of them is really important anymore. I mean. MySpace is doing better than all of the others, which is about as good as Yahoo!.

This quote from an analyst is one reason why I believe the user numbers.

> "It's hard to get people to stop using something they love. People love using these products, and there's these massive attacks that news outlets continue to heap on them, but consumers like these platforms and advertisers follow eyeballs. Most of Facebook's advertisers have no other place to go with a return on investment this good. This is clear proof."

AFAIK, you count the number unique users each day, and then compute the average over a period like a quarter. Media reports often make it sound like a DAU is someone who uses a service each and every day, but this is obviously wrong.

They did selectively start buying back shares recently as a form of capital return. I'd expect that to continue to the extent the stock remains modestly priced versus the business growth rate.

If all they do is keep on the same path, they easily get from here to $100+ billion in sales by doing nothing special beyond what they're already doing. Plus ~$35 billion in profit to go with it.

A mere 6% average sales growth per year for the next ten years gets them to $100b in sales. More likely, they get there in fiscal 2022 without much trouble.

I'm amazed they haven't taken a crack at Google with a search engine in their app. Imagine how valuable combining Facebook's data with the user intent of search? A lot of users would never leave the facebook app on their phone if they could get a search engine that's halfway decent. It seems like they are leaving a ton of money on the table as it stands

If its too much to develop their own maybe they could team up with Bing or something?

So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good.

There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well.

So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here.

[1]https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more...

Large detrimental downstream effects and people's perceptions and trends all happen on timescales on the order of magnitude of a decade. Give it a few years.

IMO the core reason people keep using this shady service is that they've just never been exposed to the truth.

How about subtle data-directed lobbying to cause subtle data-directed changes to the educational system to create subtle data-directed vulnerabilities to manipulation in adulthood?

There are plenty of examples in the real world, throughout history. It is going to get a whole lot worse, and it has the potential to never get better.

And mass surveillance and data collection combined with blackbox machine learning techniques are somehow producing a different outcome?

I think it is very misguided to conclude that people don't need privacy from all of this. Most of what people use Facebook and friends for is private, they just haven't been seriously and obviously burned enough from the fact that a large number of corporate entities are siphoning it up.

Maybe they'll never get burned enough. Maybe it all turns out well. But concluding that no people do not need privacy as a basic psychological need is wrong. I know I do and I don't have a bad social life because of it.

But it’s of course a easy way to defend ones point of view :)

Eternal September[0] exists everywhere. =]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

But my point is orthogonal to that. My point is FB is alive and well, and the recent scandals, as damaging as they seemed PR-wise, have done basically nothing to it.

> Also, it is time to #undeleteFacebook. You know you are missing it!

No, it isn't and no, I'm really not. I don't need a "time filler". The mind needs some time off. It pays off to give it that time and perhaps be a bit more mindful instead of populating every moment with crap.

Haven’t used it in over 3 years, and I don’t miss it. It got to the point of why I was wondering why I’d sit there flicking through the news feed only to read about what someone’s aunt Joan was going on a racist rant about.

Instagram hasn’t been any better with the rise and incouragement of influencer culture.

They’re increasingly subversive in their tactics which is something I’ve always disliked in any company.

They get to a certain size and have to keep pushing for growth as they need to further maintain their growth rates to prove they’re still worth investment money.

Where does that end?

In a heavily diluted form they would both be fine, but the dark patterns in their designs are prevalent, in spite of what good they might have offered the world.

I don’t give Coca Cola a pass because their drink tastes good and can make people happy at times. They’ve cordoned off entire towns water supplies through shady dealings. Know what I mean?

So I propose a dictatorship of HN commenters ;)

Any regulation introduced, would be to stop this change. But it will never work, you can't make people care about privacy through regulations.

Otherwise it be easy to game

Who's going to prove him wrong? Does anyone else have access to FB internal metrics? And what's the downside to lying? Worst case a slap on the wrist fine and a drop in stock price?

Zuck has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be the type of person who will absolutely take advantage of any situation without any kind of ethical qualms.

I'm not saying he's lying about this too, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least, SEC or no.

Perhaps to be more generous I should say “exaggerating” or “being selective.”

Clearly his interests are aligned with higher stats. Therefore, it makes sense to corroborate those stats with independent data.

It isnt a baseless claim to point out the infallability of a CEO or the broken incentive model to tout bad information or consciously lie

What I meant to communnicate was "we shouldn't take these stats at face value and therefore assume the scandals have had no impact" but I made the mistake of phrasing it as if it were an assertion (not an interpretation I'm used to), being too pithy, and also using Zuckerberg's name rather than "social media"/"facebook".

I didn't mean it to be a tangent, just a genuine point that such statistics should be treated with healthy scepticism and therefore caution against concluding too much from them. Hopefully the last bit in the post at least indicates I was sincere. But totally my bad. Need to take more care.

I'm certainly often a contrarian, but never intentionally a troll.

The stock increase is not unique to Facebook today. ALL major tech stocks are up today.