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Comment by gopher2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Stalking horses for a TSLA-like fall to accumulate.

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