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Comment by underwater | Hacker News Reader

I doubt Zuck is underestimating TikTok. He has spent a 13 years living and breathing social media, has surrounded himself by smart people, has access to masses of data others don't, and has shown a willingness to admit making mistakes.

Taking his Q&A responses at face value is a mistake. There is a huge element of PR in his response. He is undoubtedly very aware that anything he says has a decent chance of being leaked to the press.

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His concerns should be that he cant buy TikTok and the facebook brand name is toxic to the youth. TikTok is mostly youth.

Facebook is toxic to adults to, it's like AT&T or Comcast. Everyone who uses it hates it and can't find a suitable replacement.

A phone with a contact list, and messaging is a suitable replacement to Facebook... and 99.99% of people using Facebook have that.

And yet here we are. Facebook has billions of active daily users.

No it is not. Facebook is a way to quickly call all my classmates when Ed died - I never was friends with Ed but I knew him and it was important to find out. Facebook ensures that the grandparents see pictures of the grand kids sure I could mail them, but hitting "upload to facebook" on my camera (read phone) is vastly more convenient and cheaper so it gets done.

Did you not the convenient word there? That is the key, nothing else is as convenient as facebook, so much as I don't like facebook I remain.

Perhaps we are realizing that both those use cases are not really solving anything real though.

The people that knew Ed well enough to care will find out. And the grandparents would probably prefer an extra visit a month than a never ending photo reel.

It appears convenient but adds nothing of substance to our lives.

I don't live close to my parents. I would love to visit more often, but it isn't practical. Pictures are the next best thing so it is what they get.

I really detest the "if you find value in x you're living your life wrong" argument.

There may be value, but there may be more value in not having your privacy violated.

I think you may be misapprehending the argument. The value propositions that people cite when talking about why they use Facebook are certainly understandable. However, there is a cost incurred here (ex. questionable usage of private data, externalities imposed on elections, loss of understanding and control over what shows up in your feed, etc.)

So yes, there is certainly value there. And it's made even more attractive by the fact that the actual cost is effectively hidden to users since they aren't actually the customers. The argument here is more about whether the cost incurred is actually worth the minor convenience.

Tangentially, I've often thought that the added convenience necessarily cheapens the interactions. Things like the automatic birthday reminders have basically outmoded the old "it's the thought that counts" adage.

I'm not. You're arguing about whether or not the losses of using Facebook are worth the gains. The other comment wasn't, it was asserting that Facebook is not worth it under any circumstance.

They are both depriving the user of freedom to choose to compromise their privacy for convenience and asserting that the user is inherently flawed because they even thought they had such a choice. They aren't just arguing that the individual should reconsider their decision to use Facebook, they're arguing that they need to reevaluate their life.

Conveniently everyone will be and is subjected to a corporation. Nothing new. Every single human on this planet is controlled and owned. We are just waiting for the next command. The more we discuss, comment, tweet, post and share the less we know how utterly entangled and imprisoned we are.

Facebook's biggest strength for me was in navigating the first couple months of a new acquaintance becoming a friend. Sharing numbers and managing all that is cumbersome. Adding someone on Facebook was easy and if the relationship didn't pan out, it was painless to keep the contact or purge them later. To me and a lot of people I know, texting is an intimate thing whereas Facebook was not.

Note, I left Facebook some year ago, and my mental health is better for it.

Why can't he buy it and why can't he buy it and leave it under the existing brand?

It is owned by China's ByteDance.

It's not so much the toxic aspect but if given a choice why would yonger generations be on the same platforms/networks as their parents/grandparents? Instagram is set to be facebook2 and so on generationally.

The same could be said for Xerox, Kodak, Apple, Blackberry, IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc.

Yet each one got their lunch ate in the next trend.

I don’t really think Apple, Google, or Microsoft fit in that set...

Apple and MSFT do not belong in that list at all. Google remains to be seen, but they’re doing just fine. Apple has demonstrated time and again the ability to innovate in the hardware space, even if you find their products overpriced like I do. And MSFT has so many different extremely successful products they’re totally unkillable.

While they are all long lived, they have had incumbents come in and eat (*some) of their lunch.

MSFT missed the boat on mobile and have given up from a HW standpoint. Apple missed the boat on the cloud (tbd if they can catch up). Google missed the boat on social.

I would rather say "screwed up" rather than "missed the boat".

Microsoft never was a hardware company but their software powered many pre-iPhone smartphones. If you are into Android hacking, you probably know about xda-developers. It got its name from the O2 XDA brand, a brand of Windows Mobile early smartphones. They were on the boat, they just couldn't keep up. When tablets became a thing, they had a second chance, they tried to take it, but failed.

Google had Orkut before Facebook even existed, and every few years, they try a new social thing, and they invariably fail.

As for Apple, they didn't really miss out on the cloud. Apple has cloud services... for Apple device users. It is an exclusive service they offer to people who buy their overpriced devices, and it seems to work well for them.

The failures, I think, are just a matter of corporate culture. What helps them one way handicaps them in another. Microsoft focus on business hinders their ability to consider consumer-focused mobile devices. Google machine-centric doesn't help with the human element of social interactions. And Apple focus on hardware limits the availability of their software.

Microsoft didn't recover from the post-dot-com-bust slump until 2012(!), but it's done amazingly well since. It's a magical tail of recovery and/or proof that having a nice monopo gives you an extra long lease on life.

Given up from a hardware standpoint?!

They lost out on mobile, but you can’t catch every boat.

IBM did >75B this year they aren't doing chump change. But they thought they owned computing and it went a different direction. I'm talking about being arrogant and not recognizing a trend in time. Doesn't mean they're original market isn't still big. Just a niche player ate there lunch in a new segment.

A lot of large companies capture a market and then slowly switch to defending the status quo while the world changes around them.

I don't believe that Facebook is at that point yet. If they were they would have missed the switch to mobile, struggled against Google+, lost to Snap, etc.

It's true that he spent his life doing this, but that doesn't mean he's god knows everything person. Truth is, during history, most leaders lost track of certain aspects, we can cite Microsoft, Apple and other bigger companies. Just because he built FB doesn't mean he understands TikTok.

Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to TikTok is similar to that for Snapchat. After he failed to convince Evan Spiegel to sell, his company released Poke[0] in 2012, an app that failed to reach its competitor’s success and got shut down in 2014[1].

[0]: https://www.vox.com/2018/2/17/17022586/facebook-snapchat-pok...

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-d...

Facebook also responded to Snapchat by copying their most compelling features and integrating them into Instagram. It has been highly effective at taking the wind out of Snapchat’s sails. Facebook can easily afford to attack threats in a multitude of ways.

> [...] and has shown a willingness to admit making mistakes

lol, we must live in a different world.

He dumped 20 billion dollars into WhatsApp, a company with a dozen employees, when Facebook already had a successful messaging app. That's an astounding lack of sentimentality.

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