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Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.88 billion on average for March 2021, an increase of 8% year-over-year.

> Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.85 billion as of March 31, 2021, an increase of 10% year-over-year.

Let this be another sign that Facebook's demise is greatly exaggerated: their daily & monthly active user counts are _still growing_ ... and by non-trivial amounts.

Almost _2 billion_ people visit Facebook at least once _daily_ .... that's mind-blowing.

Yes, I know: the common HN refrain is "how many are fake / bot accounts?" etc. etc. Until that's proven to be a real problem, which would lead to significant lawsuits for misleading shareholders, I will lean on the hypothesis that the significant majority of this growth is "real."

You can play "chicken little" all you want and say "Facebook will go away just like MySpace," but doubters should be sweating right now, as the numbers refuse to show that.

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Bots or not - that $25B is coming from somewhere.

I'm most sad that so many smart humans are working on this of all the important problems in the world.

Makes loads of money though, so won't change until incentives change.

Solving world hunger is obviously better than ads, but I'd say in the scheme of things tech people spend their time on, ad improvements is middling in importance? It's not the bottom.

Good ad targeting means:

1) New small businesses (on Shopify) can reach customers without going through retail gatekeepers. Ask any Shopify seller, nothing beats FB.

2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).

3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.

Not completely unrelated: FB makes killer programming tools loved by most.

- PyTorch for Deep Learning overtook TensorFlow in Academia and Competitions and breathing down the neck in Industry despite the latter having significant inertia.

- React.js is THE hottest frontend framework now.

- GraphQL is highly adopted in the industry.

I want FB to exist as long as possible and very successfully as I do not want the tools to go away. I have worked with two of the three, and I love them. It had made me fond of and loyal to FB and FAIR.

> React.js is THE hottest frontend framework now.

I am not quite sure what you mean by "the hottest". Would you say that jquery was THE hottest frontend library circa 2014, or that Wordpress it THE hottest CMS now?

React is hugely popular, no doubt about it. It absolutely was the hottest frontend framework somewhere around 2015. It's more complicated now, I think.

> I'm most sad that so many smart humans are working on this of all the important problems in the world.

Depends upon values and perspectives of the problem. Part of me agrees with you, and yet part of me is sympathetic to the goals of connecting the world, encouraging community discussion, and bringing transparency to social issues and reducing the power of governments to control the narratives. - to the point that many governments fear FB and ban it outright. (e.g. Do you think China banned Facebook because of "misinformation?" Or that the ratio of real information to misinformation was a little too much for them to lose control of their propaganda narratives?)

Would I say that's more important than sustainable farming / agricultural tech? I don't think so - but to each their own.

I don't work there anymore, but I always liked the idea of connecting the world. Sure a service without ads would be great, but you gotta pay the bill and you can't connect the world with a monthly fee. I get that this is HN and the majority thinks "this is bad", but just writing this because there are people like me with a different opinion.

Quite interesting that the ad revenue growth is mostly from ads commanding a higher price, and only marginally because they serve more ads.

FB's targeting is pretty good, if for no other reason then because they see all the social stuff users do even without the need for crutches like third-party cookies. Likely customers are willing to pay increasingly more for a well-targeted ad.

Why would I be sweating that Facebook is adding users? Disappointed, more like, because the science shows that Facebook actively damages people’s mental health and I hope we all want people to feel good. Your numbers show that a almost 2 billion people feel worse each day from Facebook.

If I drink enough water to kill myself from water poisoning / overhydration, that isn't a good reason to ban water. It's more like "user error."

Too much of _anything_ is bad.

So it's a strong claim to say "2 billion people feel worse each day," when it could be that the majority use it in moderation and probably feel some positive utility from it.

> because the science shows that Facebook actively damages people’s mental health

come on...

>Almost _2 billion_ people visit Facebook at least once _daily_ .... that's mind-blowing.

Does daily active users mean that? Or is it just the amount of users who visit facebook on any given day?

Isn’t your definition monthly active ?

Facebook has made their product emotionally addictive.

Their biggest threat now is regulatory changes to consumer data. I haven’t read the filings but I’d expect their lobbying efforts to be in full gear.

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