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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of Facebook, in fact quite the contrary. But you do have to give them one credit, they understand Social very well. HN audience is not something FB targets. The world outside HN is quite different and loves FB, Instagram etc.

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I actually don't think that's true at all. Facebook has been caught sleeping again and again with the latest social trends. This new trend of private, group communication seems to be something that's completely caught them off guard and now they're trying to catch up.

> This new trend of private, group communication seems to be something that's completely caught them off guard and now they're trying to catch up.

I'd bet that there's more of that happening on WhatsApp than any other app in the world, possibly by an order of magnitude.

Absolutely. And acquiring WhatsApp is another example of them being on the back foot and having to catch up.

At a certain size, companies innovate through thoughtful acquisitions.

You can't separate the company WhatsApp from the company Facebook because they are the same company FB.

That's a fair point. But Facebook has managed to grow its ARPU to insanely high levels that far outstrip pretty much every other social media outlet.

There has to be some sort of magic there. Maybe someone with more experience in the space can offer more insight here. But it just astounds me that Facebook has managed to generate at least an order of magnitude higher ARPU than Twitter, Snap, Reddit, etc. They're making as much per user as Netflix does from actual paying subscribers.

"What do you mean we can't read or data-mine their conversations? That's impossible."

They had the "moments" app, which wasn't successful as expected. They had everything needed to make it work, the user base, engineering resources, but they still failed.

YC loves Facebook far more than most people should and that should really give everyone here a lot of pause.

Maybe because 1) FB represents a level of success aspirants hold in high regard 2) FB is a marketing/monetization platform startups find difficult to ignore

I find it hard to get excited about this.. probably will get cancelled in 6-9 months after languishing a bit.

YC is pushing almost 6 years since their last true successful company. They’re no longer pushing innovation but, smartly, niche markets. That’s distant from the universe of what FB is.

An alternative hypothesis is that it takes that long or longer before you can really see that level of "success".

I love instagram. I will never use this.

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