Comment by nmfisher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nmfisher | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest, I was a Facebook naysayer back in 2008 too. I thought that the public was too fickle, and would jump to the next big thing within a few years, and the platform would quietly die off.

Completely wrong, obviously. Coming from a position of tech savvy early adopter, I totally underestimated:

- the impact that mobile had on the landscape. For most of those over 30, the internet was for work, not for "group socializing". I think mobile normalized the practice of spending hours a day on social media for average users.

- how "sticky" older users are. Once they're on Facebook, they stay on Facebook.

- Zuck's adaptability, and the difference between "Facebook the platform" and "Facebook the company". I mean, I was partially right about the exodus to the Next Big Thing (TM). That's exactly why Zuck just went out and just bought it (Instagram and WhatsApp in particular).

That being said, I still think there's a coming reckoning on digital advertising. I hear so many complaints about poor ROI, click inflation/fraud and general dissatisfaction (e.g. Basecamp competitors bidding on the search term "Basecamp"). I can't help but think there'll be a shift in spend towards advertising on more "conventional" media (Spotify, Netflix, YouTube).

Facebook stock (recently sold all of it) made me a millionaire. I think FB-the-company is a scourge and wish it good riddance but it was more than obvious years ago that there was a lot of value there for stock speculation.

I've lost track of how many friends and family laughed at my investment and/or advised me to dump it before "I got ruined". What I found interesting was that a lot of these friends were tech insiders with decades of experience in the field and ought to have known better. What I think happened was that in all cases, their personal dislike for FB-the-company clouded their ability to properly analyze the situation.

I predicted Facebook's success years ago. I think what everybody misses, even within the tech industry is that Facebook (and now Instagram) have one very important 'killer app' for the modern world that nobody realizes. That is that those websites are everybody's defacto 'photo album' for the 21st century. I know people whose entire life in photos from the last 15 years is entirely on Facebook and likely not backed up anywhere else. Every major life event is readily available in seconds with dates attached and even the nice or mean things that friends and family said about each photo at the time. This was what MySpace, Friendster, Google+, and the other apps of the time did not understand. They concentrated on crafting some pointless 'social network experience' when in reality nobody cared to switch anyway because all of their photos and memories were somewhere else already, and I think this is what keeps people on the platform.

I think Instagram is very, very effective as an advertising platform. Consumer product direct sales work very well on IG. The ads don't even feel intrusive to me as I can easily scroll past without having to engage, but occasionally a product catches my eye and I find myself purchasing directly from an ad.

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