Facebook Reports First Quarter 2020 Results | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Reports First Quarter 2020 Results

investor.fb.com

70 pointshkmurakami57 comments

> Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.73 billion on average for March 2020, an increase of 11% year-over-year.

So despite all the hate and rumors that less and less people use FB, the numbers tell a different story

Quarantine only reinforced people's zombie-browsing (FB, IG) habits, since there's nothing else to do.

It's so sad because there's so much more to do. Socializing with your family, exploring intellectual curiosities, exercising, reading old books, learning something new.

The human brain compute in this modern age is sadly wasted.

Must... scroll... the endless slot machine of dopamine!

this is an extremely stressful and worrisome time for many people. many are also dealing with loss from death of loved ones due to the virus.

it's great that you are apparently able to use this extra time positively.

but for many, right now is basically as close as can be to hell. i don't blame anyone for turning to some mindless entertainment.

I'm not sure that's sad. People should do the things they enjoy, including randomly browsing and chatting on an app.

People can spend time on gaming, TV, music, reading novel, sleep, rolling on the floor, watching K-Dramas... And that's fine. It's a misconception that humans need to optimize for productivity. Some people optimize for happiness instead (myself included), and there is nothing sad about that. In fact, I'm pretty happy :).

Social media use is not generally associated with higher degrees of happiness or satisfaction, but in fact in some demographics like adolescent girls with increased self-harm and loneliness.

The rise in loneliness (and its associated effects) over the last ten years that thas largely coincided with the advent of social media have been so extreme that some countries like the UK have created a distinct ministry and government strategies to deal with it.

But maybe can you think about the causation in an opposite way? Isn’t because in the guise of neoliberalism society has become increasingly hypercompetitive and alienating that people are flocking into those social media sites as a last resort, no matter how horrible do you think it is?

I’ve seen people suggesting to leave social media to find real opportunities for human relationships, but if you really have enough social capital for that you wouldn’t be vigorously surfing around on Reddit or Twitter in the first place. (In other words: how dare you have the sheer luxury to leave social media and say that it’s harmful to you!)

Connecting with friends/family over Facebook doesn't count as socializing? How about communicating over Whatsapp or Messenger?

Wouldn't being distanced from your friends and family kind of increase the usage of mediums you can use to connect with them, and see what's up in their lives?

Also, humour through content like memes, videos which platforms like Instagram, Tiktok provide is a nice escape from all the gloomy news.

While you can use platforms like Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp to kind of socialize in new ways like your home workouts, cooking things etc.

to be honest, if people are not using facebook, they might still use twitter, tiktok or whatever.

not everyone is going to learn sth new when they have free time. I do not think that is a waste.

> financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2020

The quarantine period is only 15 days or so for US, a bit more for couple other countries.

40 days in India with India having the largest Facebook user base and second largest Instagram user base. And this is only going to grow even more.

Umm.. that[1] is not even remotely close. It just includes about 7-8 days of lockdown period from India.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_lockdown_in_I...

Those were not all in Q1 which this quarterly result is about.

Yep - it's easy to look back at all of the bad HN predictions from two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16683278

General HN anti-FB sentiment has been wrong on this issue for a long time.

It would be interesting to see the demographic changes that come with Facebook.

I have a feeling younger users are leaving and older users (especially now that they're more isolated than before) are joining.

But that's what the theory has been for years. At some point if it's actually become only for older people like we all keep saying, you'd see that in the growth numbers, and that keeps not happening. Which is what the parent meant about how we've been wrong on this for a long time.

The data doesn't really talk about the demographics of the users from what I've seen. Maybe I'm wrong.

Sure, but this narrative about it being for older people and hemmorhaging younger people has been going on for so long that if it were true, there is no way the growth could have been what it's been, because they would have run out of people in that demographic. The more plausible explanation is that young people are still joining, even if perhaps begrudgingly.

Or growth is not in the US market and predictions were right.

I have been using facebook for nearly 15 years, and there has never been a time at which your exact statement wasn't true. It has been both hated and fast-growing for pretty much its whole existence.

Not really, the press and general sentiment was very positive around Facebook up until around 2015-16 when the Trump election kicked into gear.

I mean, I guess I read the comment from my own personal perspective, from which I have always seen what I would describe as lots of hate and lots of rumors (or wishful thinking more like) that it was going to go the way of myspace. I wasn't thinking about the press (and mainstream sentiment has never been against it). But rereading it, I can see where that is perhaps the more obvious interpretation than my own.

I dunno... early on (e.g. while locked to universities) I very much didn't see widespread un-like for it. I overheard tons of people who were thrilled when it became available, and even after a year or two I don't think I heard any complaints (except that you couldn't put gifs everywhere). It was dramatically more useful than anything else we'd used, especially the stuff the school was offering.

After it opened up, yeah, it wasn't long before sentiment shifted :) I'm not sure when I'd label it crossing a majority of what I hear, but there was a definite shift within a year or so.

I was part of the locked-to-your-university cohort. I disliked it right from the start - I am not a naturally social person and I found college to be inundated with socialization, facebook was yet another thing to make me feel weird, and I thought it was creepy because I was in all these pictures I didn't post, out there for anyone to see - but yeah lots of my friends loved it. But I did know other weird people who didn't. Just for round numbers, let's say 1% of us actively disliked it and 99% loved it. What I think has happened as I've watched it since then is that that love/hate ratio has stayed relatively stable, but it has grown so much that there are a lot of people on the hate side now, in absolute terms, so it's more noticeable. But I don't think the fundamental calculation is all that different.

It seems like they're rolling all their platforms (Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, FB Main) into that one metric? HN's position has generally been that FB Main is on the decline and I'm not sure this metric is enough to contradict that.

FB mainsite is on the decline...in the US.

Globally it's still going strong.

>It seems like they're rolling all their platforms (Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, FB Main) into that one metric? HN's position has generally been that FB Main is on the decline and I'm not sure this metric is enough to contradict that.

Those numbers are for FB Main. The number of active users across all platforms is 3 Billion.

From the linked report: "Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 2.99 billion as of March 31, 2020, an increase of 11% year-over-year."

HN is notoriously bad at predicting trends. We're blinded by hate.

is it though? In terms of human population, there's still billions of people for FB to 'acquire'. But I would still venture that it's worrisome if they're shedding users/usage in the USA or the west in general as they are usually monetized much better.

Just saw TikTok cracked 2Billion downloads and had the thought that it's confirmation that the best way to "beat" any of the major tech companies is to build a great product that people enjoy. I'm sure Zuck is feeling the heat, and personally I've noticed I'm receiving mostly tiktok links now from friends.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/29/tiktok-tops-2-billion-down...

As someone who has not used Tiktok what does Tiktok do differently from existing products like Instagram? Wouldn't videos in Instagram stories/posts already cover Tiktok's usecase?

Also, I guess give Zuck time. He weathered the Snapchat storm and left them far behind.

The TikTok hook is that any user can re-use the audio from any video to create their own video.

That is certainly different. I wonder if Instagram is resisting, lest it will lead to feature bloat.

TikTok is winning at making random people famous. It’s not really about friends and celebrities as much as Instagram. It’s also picking up from Vine on surfacing short videos that are super addicting to watch. Twitter really killed a golden goose with Vine.

btw the creator of Vine launched a new TikTok competitor called Byte recently.. it's basically the same thing but clips are limited to 8 seconds and less press...

Remember vine?

Arguably a nicer 2.0.

Super addicting.

the content is incredibly addicting. i was skeptical at first but don't underestimate people's creativity. they did a great job unlocking that with music.

I think there's a few considerations on the potential for TikTok. IG is laden with ads to where it degrades the UX (every 2-4 pics/videos is an ad), it's been taken over by insta "models" and paid-for-content which makes it less appealing to the average joe/jane, it tries to do too much.

From my limited exposure what I'm seeing is that a ton of millennials are on TikTok making funny videos. I mean, TONS of people in past weeks. I checked it out maybe a year or so ago and it was all teenagers, but now it's millennials which btw are the users that made facebook/instagram what they became. So far it isn't laden with ads, the UX is very simple (1 video at a time and that's it), it's owned by a massive Chinese conglomerate with deep pockets and a likely appetite to take on FB.

edit: as someone else said the feature that makes it unique is the ability to use the audio from anyone else's video. They also have a large catalog of existing audio to choose from...

Their effective tax rate is only half what it was the previous year. Any ideas what changed?

The $3B FTC fine was deducted from Q1 2019's income, substantially increasing the effective tax rate for that quarter. The fine was not a tax-deductible expense.

It has been interesting to see the different approaches to future planning in the wake of Covid-19 by the two big ad players.

While Google is looking to scale back on things like hiring, FB looks to be going all in on this opportunity and doesn't seem to be slowing down with future plans specially wrt hiring(though they have pushed back joining dates to the later half of the year). They even considered it wise to do an all cash deal for $6 billion for a minor stake in a telecom provider in India.

FB to the win. Younger company. PIP culture. Hot products. They will collect nice talent during current recession. Bad for Google.

Don't all companies have PIPs? Does Facebook have disproportionately high percentage of PIPs compared to their peers in FAANG, even Amazon?

The original post was about Google and generally I’d say FB is indeed faster to hire and also faster to pip/fire than Google. Compared to Amazon and Netflix, probably not.

I was a manager at FB for a couple of years. Basically, my first official act as a manager was firing someone. From there, it was pretty much, "find one person on your team per year to fire."

It was an extremely high performing team, and even the less talented engineers were still very good.

I quit rather than live in the culture.

Was this similar to MS's infamous stack ranking system where some teammates will be always rated bad even if everyone is doing well?

Yes, FB has a similar system.

That’s bullshit. FB does not stack rank.

There is stack ranking at the org level. It’s all a bit hush hush but it’s there.

Maybe not to the degree that Microsoft does (did?), but look into 'calibrations', which is similar.

yes they do. I sat in multiple calibrations. They stack rank.

Did you lie to HN community to gain fame or it is actually true?

Stock appears to be soaring after hours.

Wonder if Amazon will beat numbers too.

Not great results

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