Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikig | Hacker News Reader

When the largest accompanying FB news headline is: "Over 400 million Facebook users' phone numbers exposed" this feels like the most poorly timed product launch.

View on HN

I assume they're thinking the groups of people that read security disclosure articles and those that would use FB dating are disjoint. They're probably not wrong.

We overestimate change in the short-term but underestimate it in the long term. Any individual news story isn't going to be the reason Facebook loses 75% of their users over night, but the steady march of these stories isn't going to have no effect. I find it easy to imagine a world where in 5-10 years, Facebook is a complete non-entity, and for all the articles written that claim to understand why, nobody will actually be able to point at any small set of events as an explanation. It could be the very small contributions of a lot of events.

I (physically) don't live in SV or its bubble, and I can assure you, the news that Facebook isn't necessarily trustworthy is getting out there to "the masses". It isn't necessarily changing people habits yet, but the process is certainly started. By the time it causes noticeable problems for Facebook, it may be too far progressed for them to do anything about it.

I agree with you, but Facebook seems be aware and is mitigating using brands like Instagram and Whatsapp which average people don't associate with Facebook. If they keep acquiring undervalued social companies and downplaying their ownership, I could see them sticking around for quite a while unfortunately.

Don't underestimate Facebook. I am sure they have stats that show that almost no one knows. Because almost no one knows - not even most IT professionals. There is also something I call "sulking to the giant" (my made up term) - I've seen many times people say "I would never tell Facebook my name/city/age/..." only to do it a year later.

Yeah, I don't know about underestimating them, I've been chatting back and forth with our FB account manager regarding our business needs for something in their Ad biz.

Turns out, they can't deliver on this pretty universal feature (even Twitter has it), so huh yeah, let's talk about how great they are again.

I would guess that their business analysts are separate from their development team.

If you look at their stock, its a third time they try to break the ceiling at $200 mark [1]. That's most likely how they were aiming this news.

https://stockrow.com/FB

Reply on news.ycombinator.com