Facebook Is Dying | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Is Dying

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179 pointsJumpCrisscross116 comments

I dealt with a lot of high traffic live streaming video on Facebook for several years. We saw interaction rates decline almost 20x in a 3 year period but views kept increasing. Things just didn't add up when the dust settled and we'd look at the stats.

It wouldn't be the least bit surprised if every stat FB has fed me was blown extremely out of proportion.

I'd say about half my friends in their late 20s to their mid-late 30s have deleted their Facebook. A majority of the other half of people I know have deleted it off their phones. A majority of those are highly educated professionals with a like-minded social circle in the Bay Area. None of which are in the tech industry though.

My parents and their friends seem to use it regularly still, mostly cause it was such a useful communication tool for a network they lost contact with. Replaces an address book for them.

IG seems to be saturating a majority of phone screens I see in passing. Usually stories. I have noticed a decline in my friends circle with that. People are posting a lot less as of recent. As a media person, I'm seeing less return from IG without an immense amount of effort. I believe the feed is far beyond it's max saturation level. The same thing happened to Twitter for me. You either have to go all in and game the system or relinquish all reliance on it as an important media outlet.

There is no statistical base to my findings, just something I have observed.

I host a Mastodon instance for 24 people for $60/yr (from DO) and $8/yr to my registrar. It's federated with most networks available. If there was more of a UI to manage an instance and its federation/blocking, it might be easier to expand interest.

For me personally, I stopped posting to my wall simply because I felt like it was a waste of time. Very few people actually liked it or responded to it, so why bother? Also the wall is now flooded with "sponsored content" which is just a nuisance if you ask me. The only thing left on facebook for me is basically the groups functions which has certain groups which are useful.

I have to assume you being in the Bay Area, friends regardless of tech, might be more prone to things like how they are treating FB? I know of very few people without an FB account. And the majority that don’t have it are in the Bay Area or in tech. It isn’t used a lot anymore. That’s def true. But people still have it in my anecdotal data.

I am neither in sodtware tech industry nor ever been to bay area ( I'm an indian).

From my anecdotal data, I definitely see that most of my friends have either deleted their account or check their accounts may be once in a month. On the other hand, my wife and my mother regularly check facebook (although they post very rarely).

In my experience, the use of FB is definitely falling amongst 'educated' people, although the story is not same with other demographies. But overall people are definitely getting fed up with FB.

100% been my experience too.

The people most reliant on social media are those that need it for 'staying in touch' or to feed their ego, let's be real.

I know people who live one life online and one life in person without batting an eye.

My experiences with ayahuasca and bufo have made me stop caring so much about social media metrics. Life is so much grander away from 'likes' 'followers' 'comments'.

> My experiences with ayahuasca and bufo...

One of those sentences is not like the others.

Social media is a hall of mirrors that distorts reality and personalities, self-worth even. Entheogens give people the freedom to break free and recalibrate back to a more wholesome and natural identity.

I did searches expecting them to be social media alternatives.

instead you found a doorway to a new paradigm of existence.

Facebook is somehow really good at suppressing key metrics and important stories (and I am not sure how they do it). A good example is the friendly fraud case, which if it had come out pre-IPO, would have probably killed the company, or at the very least made it impossible for them to acquire IG and WA.

I also find it odd that so many investors, stock buyers and advertisers actually trust any of Facebook's self-reported stats.

At this point, I think they have already become the Enron of the tech industry. It may still be a while before the whole thing blows up, but even Enron seemed to be doing really well right up until the moment before the bottom just fell out.

"While it only appeared in the Texas Journal, the Texas regional edition of the Journal, short-seller Jim Chanos happened to read it and decided to check Enron's 10-K report for himself. He didn't think it made sense that Enron's broadband unit appeared to far outpace a then-troubled broadband industry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Timeline_of_down...

So FB is much like Yahoo a generation ago. The cool kids have checked out but the parents are still hanging on.

There's like one sentence of "because I said so" analysis in this article. The idea that Facebook is dying because MAU is growing faster than DAU is basically ... dumb. Both numbers are going up. Facebook users are growing. Feels like people just like upvoting anything anti-Facebook even if the content doesn't really make the case well or at all.

Yep. I'm pretty curious where the overwhelmingly negative FB sentiment on HN comes from. I've never seen so many people pride themselves in never having used / deleting Facebook.

If you understand facebook's business, you wont view it positively.

I would assume HN users have some idea of facebooks business..

that's beside the point. Facebook and its products are growing regardless if you like them/know about their business (as if its some sort of esoteric practice...?), to state otherwise isnt worth discussing much less posting about on here

Microsoft was also hated for their business practices. I find what a company does to be a perfectly good reason to like or hate them, not that my opinion matters. But if you have enough people feeling a certain way it changes things.

For what it’s worth I don’t like FB because of Zuck and his FU attitude towards his user’s privacy (he was quoted early on calling his users “dumb fucks” if I’m remembering correctly).

The question was "where [does] the overwhelmingly negative FB sentiment on HN come from?"

What does success have to do with popular opinion or morality? Has anyone here said facebook isn't successful?

Exactly, Casinos are successful in a business sense as well.

These companies get most of their profit from addicting people and keeping them addicted.

They have the same moral standing as a drug dealer.

I think he understands its business, having worked there. :)

It’s like the old adage about television:

“How do you know someone doesn’t own a television?”

“They tell you.”

Yes, back in the days when not owning a television was ahead of the curve. But would you like to buy stock in a TV manufacturer today?

Depends how you define a television. Furthermore, whether Facebook’s engagement metrics depend on how you define engagement.

Given that pretty much every large manufacturer makes things beyond televisions, and displays aren’t going out of fashion...

Like pilots and vegans

And people who do cross-fit.

> I'm pretty curious where the overwhelmingly negative FB sentiment on HN comes from

I imagine because Facebook is considered an unethical company.

Facebook has had a number of major ethical failures over the years, which have been well covered here and HN readers are more likely to fully appreciate the significance of their privacy invasion (a recurring theme with Google’s lost prestige, too) and undermining important efforts (e.g. abusing MFA phone numbers after saying they wouldn’t, hurting a substantial security improvement).

For me it's personal. Facebook's newsfeed stole a lot of my time through it's psychological tricks and I can't help but dislike it for that.

You’re blaming Facebook for your lack of self discipline and control?

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

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

How would you suggest this post be strongly interpreted? Any interpretation I can come up with conflates their own self discipline with Facebooks doing.

I suppose one might be that whatever tricks they're talking about are exploits that have more to do with hard-wiring in humans than self-discipline.

Either way, though, please don't post personal attacks. If you don't think it violates that guideline, it certainly violates "Be kind." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stalking horses for a TSLA-like fall to accumulate.

Yup. Even if the "blue app" is dying, brushing off Instagram and WhatsApp because they are less monetized is dumb. It's exactly because they are less monetized - but FB is extremely experienced in monetizing attention - that they are major levers left to pull from a revenue perspective.

I think the most exciting test for FB is whether it succeeds in monetizing WA and IG without killing engagement. I don't know if there is a comparable story of a mature network absorbing other mature networks (please share examples), but if they succeed it is evidence of a way to keep rolling their data and revenue advantage over from product to product - so who even cares about the blue app.

When scrolling on Instagram, 1/5 posts is an advertisement. The more you scroll it seems to become more frequent and tend to 1/3 posts.

That's a lot of ads.

I see the same. Shocks me how many ads there are. On the other hand, the ads tend to be really good. I have to close the app to prevent myself pissing away money on stuff.

IG is monetized quite a bit. It could be monetized more, but I doubt we are going to see a major difference from the current trend it is already on. Under $2B rev in 2016. Projecting $14B for 2019.

FBM and WhatsApp (which you mentioned) are the things to see if they can be even semi-monetized. They both have over 1.5B active users. If they can average a couple of dollars per user per year a piece in the next 5 years, that’ll prevent any major blows for the company as a whole. Or say they can only monetize them at a combined $5B rev a year with $2B profit and Facebook l.com profits and revenue decline in equal part while IG grows. That’s not such a big deal. We don’t know what else they can buy or come up with.

And FB as a company right now is the 5th most valuable company in the world. If their market cap, including inflation, drops by 20-25% over the next couple of years...they’ll still be a top 15 company by market cap in the world. If not possibly in the top 10. I haven’t checked this second so I might be off with some, but once you get out of the top 10 largest market cap companies, you get to companies like P&G, Disney, and some financial companies like BoA, MasterCard, maybe Wells Fargo. A bit farther down would be the telecoms like Verizon, Att. All ranging in the $2XXB range. All top 20 or so companies by market cap. FB is at $575B. Their P/E is 33 it seems. If their growth stagnates as a whole and their P/E drops to ~15, they’ll likely still be a $300B+ company.

I’m both those case FB as a whole is still doing pretty damn well.

That would surprise me. The only people I know who think about Facebook—the actual product Facebook not its subsidiaries—are those that locked into it during their late teens or early twenties, and have stopped meeting new people. Parents, homeowners, married people, etc.. Granted I'm not part of this demographic, but I imagine if I was, I'd already have it and not be a new discoverer of FB. For casual new connections, it's Snapchat & Insta, maaybe Messenger but those are mostly people who used FB and have just continued using the chat aspect. Otherwise, events are still for some reason coordinated on the website, which is why I don't hear about weddings.

I live in a college town (and so am constantly surrounded by the up and coming generation) and as far as I can tell Facebook is alive and well: essentially _everyone_ uses it; they don't spend a ton of time posting on it (they do that mostly on Instagram), but everyone has an account and a ton of critical information is essentially only ever discovered or disseminated due to people using the two massive local groups (a free and for sale group, and a very awkwardly named meme sharing group) that each have tens of thousands of members. I think a key problem in these discussions is that people like to conflate "posting on timelines" with "using" Facebook, whereas most usage of Facebook is shifting to different use cases.

Without more context it seems hard to make conclusions from the data presented.

In terms of the raw figures both Daily Active Users and Monthly Active Users are up. However Monthly Active Users has increased at a faster rate than Daily Active Users, therefore user engagement which is defined as the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users has fallen.

Is this because existing users have reduced engagement with the platform, while Facebook continues to signup new users, or is it because the new users Facebook is signing up are not as engaged in the platform, or a combination of both?

For example maybe Facebook is 'hacking' its user growth figures by signing up marginal users at the cost of engagement.

Rise in new signups might be a side effect of Facebook removing fake accounts as a part of its purging fake news initiative. Those fake account holders are creating new fake accounts as their old ones are dead.

Does engagement include interaction with FB messenger apps? Or just the social network part?

I could see the profile based social network part being downplayed by them in the future as they try to become the WeChat of the west - which is where you have to look if you want to see where FB wants to be in 10yrs.

WeChat is taking over the lives of the average Chinese person in ways FB only dreams about [1].

One big way WeChat has grown is through groups which act as mini marketplaces and mini newspapers. Both formed organically by anyone or any niche.

I doubt FB would care about their social network stuff declining if they can ramp up the use of mobile payments and groups. But I also have big doubts FB can rebuild the trust they lost with the early adopters to really pull off any big shift in payments. The group stuff I can see (continuing) to work with the older audience but the younger crowd is where the future is.

It’s too bad WhatsApp sold, they could be trying to do WeChat style stuff, with more privacy than FBs business model could allow.

1. https://www.wsj.com/video/series/moving-upstream/chinas-grea...

But people are using Instagram. I don’t have numbers/data to back this, but anecdotally I see people using Instagram for viewing content, for sharing content, and for chatting, over their use of FB.

Even if FB is in decline, FB made a wise decision to buy IG and hedge with IG. Something about the simple UX is allowing IG to thrive, while FB has become more complicated over the years.

As he said though: monetisation is not as good as the core product.

From a media buying perspective, IG is kind of niche. It takes loads of work to produce content for it, but it’s really hard to measure ROI because it’s mostly only good for branding, rather than more intent driven stuff. Idk, it’s an amazing product on its own, and well monetised, but comparing it to the borg, and expecting to hold it up, seems like putting a lot on its shoulders.

If they monetize ig the way they monetize Facebook, they’ll wreck user engagement there, too.

What's interesting to me about Instagram is that there are a ton of ads. Probably more than Facebook. But unlike Facebook, the most valuable ads run on the platform (and the ads most preferred by users) are from transactions that take place off of the platform.

When Louis Vuitton wants to advertise on Instagram they don't open the Instagram Ad Manager. They call Kylie Jenner and pay her to post a photo. And not only do users not mind those ads - a lot of users seem to enjoy them. People actually seek out those types of ads. It's incredible engagement. But Instagram doesn't make a penny.

And then the FTC, usually Facebook's nemesis, comes along and hands them a silver bullet to monetize Instagram without harming user engagement: Social Media Endorsement Guidelines.[1]

If users are legally required to disclose when they've been paid to post something via #ad or #sponsored then Instagram could easily charge a small fee for every thousand views/comments/likes on those posts. Consider it a small tax for monetizing an otherwise free platform. They could even charge accounts a small annual "hosting" fee based on the number of followers to unlock/use the legally-required hashtags or for the ability to include hyperlinks. Is Kylie Jenner going to turn down a million dollars from Louis Vuitton because she'll get a $1,500 dollar bill from Instagram? Doubtful. She puts out content users want to consume. Instagram would get paid as the platform that brought all of those users together. Advertisers could still reach their audience and users wouldn't be, ya know, stalked.

But what has Facebook done to monetize Instagram? The same thing they did with Facebook - cheap, high-volume surveillance advertising for $5/CPM. Instead of figuring out a way to monetize the advertisements that users like, Facebook decided to sprinkle their feeds with crappy/creepy t-shirt designs, drop-shipped Alibaba junk, and vitamins/CBD/essential oils that very well might kill them.

If Instagram goes belly up Zuck & Sandberg have no one to blame but themselves.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

It's 100% anecdotal but the observation has a 10-year run...

I've been riding the same train line in Chicago for almost 10 years (Blue Line) and when I started I remember cringing that so many spent their free time scrolling facebook before/after work on the ride home.

Now it's much less social networking--but when it is, it's definitely instagram or occasionally twitter. Can't remember the last time I saw someone scrolling the blue app on their phone.

Guessing people still use it at home sometimes because they have to, or in the case of boomers, they're hooked on political memes.

Losing ground so much ground on the phone is an ominous sign.

I'm curious: what's replacing social networking during people's commutes?

> occasionally twitter

Can't believe I'm saying this, but it's looking like Twitter might outlive Facebook as a relevant platform.

I haven't tabulated it but if it's not those two it's usually a game or (more likely) sms, and a lot of news sites.

As an aside, I honestly have little interest in snooping (it's boring) but on very crowded trains you can't always avoid it.

About games, ZNGA's outperformed FB in the past year.

> Can't believe I'm saying this, but it's looking like Twitter might outlive Facebook as a relevant platform.

It definitely has for me. Twitter is good for news, conference chatter and contacting folks I do not know. Facebook is great for people I know, but my friends have migrated to SMS or email, and professional contact is happening over LinkedIn.

#anecdata

That's a bizarre way to interpret the numbers.

They aren't dying. They just aren't growing at the same rate.

Which you would expect as you saturate the markets that have internet access.

His premise is that social media companies either grow or they die, and Fb is running out of growth. The follow-on to the premise is that the delay between growth falling and revenue falling can mask the signs of impending doom, at least in the eyes of “the market”.

I’m not trying to claim that the premise is correct, but I would say that there is some evidence to support it.

Engagement fall happens when users lose interest, revenue fall happens when advertisers realise users have lost interest. It makes sense to me, advertisers will lag a bit.

DAU/MAU is an engagement metric, not a growth metric. The decline says nothing about their growth rate.

Plenty of people try to promote brands and businesses with social media but the word on the street is that there are too many ads on Facebook/Instagram.

It is as if they have ended up with the wrong revenue model. Imagine if telephone calls weren't metered and you could talk all you wanted to so long as you were willing to wait out five minutes of adverts every ten minutes. This would be fine for cheap people willing to 'be the product' but you would not be able to have serious phone calls.

You don't need to imagine, this mechanism was implemented many times in various countries.

It's pretty obvious to see why: an insane number of adverts, and too much irrelevant content (people posting in groups, friends commenting on other friend's posts, people tagging you in "only 1% of people can solve this" nonsense, etc.). It's fixable, but maybe not without sacrificing advertising revenue.

By 2025 Instagram will be the same and I'm sure Facebook plans to buy whatever people migrate to from that.

This analysis is interesting, as its the first time I see actually reflected in numbers and graphs what I observe around my friends. Hardly anyone is using it.

I thought that most likely the continuous growth in other countries is what makes Facebook numbers go up -- but it clearly shows that user engagement is significantly down and FB is the weakest performer amongst FAMGA (how the other refers to the core peer tech companies)

That's why FB is so paranoid & creepy about detecting the rise rival platforms: It has the cash to buy the next 10 Instagrams, but it needs to get in before they become too big.

This will work until someone young and hungry comes around and says: "I don't know what I could do with the money. I'd just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have." [1]

[1] https://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg...

Evan Spiegel has been turning down Facebook for a few years now. Snapchat's strategies are kind of different from Instagram's and Facebook's, and I'm curious to see how things work out.

https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2018/12/24/snap-...

Anecdotal but everyone I know who used to be on Snapchat has now moved to Instagram. This is mostly 18-26 age group I know and a lot of them moved to IG when Snapchat did their Ui change last year I believe.

The death of Facebook might represent a considerable loss of human history. So much online interaction, so many communities have moved to Facebook, but unlike the various forum websites that people used before, Facebook groups do not get picked up by the Wayback Machine and conveniently stored for scholars or for just anyone who wants to delve into the past. I hope that if Facebook goes – and I would not mourn all the downsides of social media – appropriate archiving of public posts is done.

Honestly what is being missed? I dont use facebook and believe i have not missed any important moment for humanity. At least none that I can think of.

Lots of stuff is being missed. Here are two examples that I can think of off the top of my head:

1) There are Facebook groups not only for cities, but sometimes even for individual neighborhoods within those cities. People gossip with their neighbours, complain about local politicians, or announce community events. These groups may represent a goldmine for the study of local history.

2) A lot of the travel community has abandoned standalone forum websites like Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree or Horizons Unlimited for Facebook groups. The way people have traveled in the past is something that tends to interest later generations, as one can see from books that still get published about 19th-century round-the-world travelers or the Istanbul-Kathmandu trail of the ’60s and ’70s. Yet much of the detail of travel in the last decade or so risks being lost if Facebook goes.

There is too much noise in facebook, and there is just so much data that it would overwhelm archive.org. I think whatever is important leaks to other, more public social media like reddit. Gossip and petty politics is not important.

"Gossip and petty politics is not important."

Any historian would disagree with you. The gossip and petty politics revealed in small-town newspapers, people’s correspondence, or diaries represents a resource they find valuable for understanding the history of a place. With the death of small-town newspapers, Facebook city and neighborhood groups have partly filled the slot that they used to represent. Yes, there is now Reddit, but there are several years where Facebook has a wealth of content for community events but Reddit had not yet grown large enough to cover them.

> Gossip and petty politics is not important.

Robert Caro's experience in uncovering the watershed moment in Lyndon B. Johnson's career might change your views.

"The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/the-secrets-of...

You 'd need to have an archive of private conversations for such things (not just on facebook). I think the NSA/FBI will take care of that

Usually joining groups for your city, or for communities you belong too, is always a good way to get up-to-date news, tips, or meet people.

This might be true if it was an outlet for human creativity the way MySpace or Geocities were, but Facebook has almost entirely lived its digital life as yellow pages.

Things that will interest future generations go beyond intentional creative productions. As I point out in my other comment, Facebook captures a lot of people’s and communities’ everyday lives.

I imagine that even if Facebook goes the data will be bundled up and sold to third parties - a somewhat scary thought. Not that Facebook has been a good steward of the data so far but its hard to imagine vulturous third parties being better.

It's not like we'll have historians in the future, because we'll all be dead from climate change anyway...

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Considerable loss in volume, but also in value?

Unlike Reddit or HN, Facebook is the worse social network for having any kind of meaningful conversation. The UI is terrible once you get past 1st level replies.

But it does have a wealth of useful data! It has the social graphs of a lot of people, it has a somewhat meaningful list of things they are interested in, and it has a bunch of photos of them. Those things tell stories all of their own, regardless of how shit facebook is.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not.

I'm not. Facebook has a massive store of data that will likely be very interesting to future historians. Just because it is biased and unreliable doesn't mean it isn't useful.

I'm concerned about future powers using data to target me and my family for "re-education camps"

Perhaps foolishly optimistic, but maybe they can turn things around. They abused a lot of people's trust, but it isn't impossible to imagine they could win it back.

It's possible, but OTOH how many sites have lost their users and won them back? MySpace, Digg, etc, went down forever, and new users (teenagers) don't seem generally interested in Facebook.

Are FB/Twitter/etc. user engagement numbers influenced by removing fake accounts, battling misinformation, and banning some groups from using their platform?

Or are the number of stories/accounts removed so small that it doesn't move the needle either way?

> Believer that Crypto is the biggest thing to happen in the history of mankind.

Well, there's apparently a reason why this guy is your average Silicon-Valley millionaire and Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire.

What is the basis for creating a peer group (dubbed FAMGA) or unrelated businesses? Comparing Facebook’s growth (a social media platform) to Amazons (retail and cloud computing) seems pointless.

I've followed social media since BBS days. Every site has a finite lifespan. Every unstoppable juggernaut disappeared seemingly overnight. Even as user counts grew, so did discontent and a desire for a new paradigm & host.

Facebook is no different. It's showing the same patterns in the same timeframe. The format is obsolete, the banter toxified, a critical mass looking for a way out but for a new destination.

Facebook is not dying soon, but I wish it would happen. I don't delete my FB yet, just to keep old contacts of friends, but I deactivate frequently. The controversy of exposing user data makes it become far away from the original Facebook few years ago.

Is there a public metric of active users defined as people who actually post things, rather than idly scrolling and hitting the like or share button here or there?

I think HN folks, incl me, hope so, but numbers don’t lie.

I wish it’s really dying, but sales and earnings keep rising... \_(シ)_/

A DAU/MAU ratio oscillating within a <1% band for over two years implies stability, not "dying". Such an extraordinary stability that unreliable data is a more plausible explanation than the absence of any trend.

Lou Kerner believes that "that Crypto is the biggest thing to happen in the history of mankind". He has a community-first crypto VC. He has written multiple articles on how bad Libra is.

I question the bias of the article.

Politics aside, I don't really FB is an effective medium to communicate anymore. I posted something on Facebook recently after a long while, there is like 1-2 follow-ups I got, it feels obsolete to me.

I suspect its not, but it would be nice if it did go.

Forgive me, but the numbers presented in that graph look to be growing, it’s their relationship that’s changing. People are still using Facebook, they are just using it on a more reasonable frequency that is common to all things, after a certain infatuation period is over. It appears to me they are just reaching a steady state. If you look at any relationship between two events sampled at different intervals you tend to see this pattern.

If only Medium.com would also go away.

This whole XXXX is dying, we have seen this before and how many of them actual die? None I'm aware.

But it has become the defacto headline grabbing go to for so many and always operate on the premise that the company will stay stagnate in innovation and not evolve in any way.

Long live Instagram

Facebook didnt monetize itself until they took captive for ransom the audience that brands had built with Facebook Pages . They 'll pull the same with instagram

I wish exaggerated titles were dying too.

His key metric moved from 66.3% to 65.7%, this is his evidence of death.

Sounds like good news for everyone, including casual FB investors like myself. The quicker this platform dies, the better. It is a cancer on our society, our government, and all its people including those who don't use it. And not just our society but every society in the world, some more than others. Investors losing a little money is a miniscule price to pay. I just hope the author is correct. Maybe Facebook users have tired of the privacy invasion, rigged elections, genocides, and social malaise this platform brings upon the world (to name just a few negative consequences).

Do you think people will stop using FB-like services? At least with one mega platform it's easy to regulate versus having a dozen smaller spinoffs

Mega platforms are powerful enough to influence political and regulatory processes to their ultimate advantage.

Ease of regulation isn't really a good reason to enshrine monopolies.

Why would you want a current investment of yours to go down? It doesn't make much sense..

>> Why would you want a current investment of yours to go down? It doesn't make much sense.

It makes plenty of sense if financial gain isn't the absolute, single overriding principle guiding their outlook.

(Also, this is unlikely given that OP classified themselves as a casual investor, but it is possible they intend to short the stock.)

To short it :-)

It's called "short selling" because you sold it, and no longer own it. Also, in economics and finance, the term "investment" almost always refers to an asset in which you have long exposure.

Given the number of times facebook has brazenly lied to customers, journalists, regulators, and governments, it seems likely that the situation is probably worse than the picture painted by the article.

Remember all the skepticism around here that scandals like Cambridge Analytica would affect Facebook and people using Facebook's positive press releases and financial results from like a month later as "proof" that the scandal didn't affect the company?

I said then it doesn't work like that. Give it a year.

Facebook is still growing though and the slow down in growth predates any of the scandals.

So based on the evidence we have the theory that people are impacted by privacy concerns isn't founded. Also you are piggy backing on the slow down when the more logical reasons are (a) market saturation, (b) competitors like Instagram and (c) the growth impacts from younger users as Facebook's average age increases.

Without further insight into the numbers it's impossible to evaluate if FB is growing or not. I mean, imagine John Doe is logged into FB with some persistent cookie. Does every page view that contains an FB-thumbs up frame count as an interaction? FB could have hundreds of million thrice a year users that they count as active due to this.

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-grew-monthly-averag...

"The world's largest social network is now even larger: Facebook reported 2.4 billion monthly active users (MAU) in Q1, per its earnings released Wednesday."

So every third european is active on facebook.com each day. The number doesn't make sense at all. I guess it's hugely exaggerated.

>> slow down in growth predates any of the scandals.

Not only that, but growth was inevitably going to slow down. They have literally capture a large part of the global population [that has access to network and phones/computers]. It is a fascinating problem -- when you stop growing because you have saturated the market.

Now, not capturing the youth is a different issue, and one they should be more worried about.

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