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Comment by kosasbest | Hacker News Reader

> It’s far too early to declare Facebook dead. The company’s stock price has risen nearly 30 percent in the past year, lifted by strong advertising revenue and a spike in use of some products during the pandemic

Stock price is not an indicator of aliveness. Facebook is morally dead. It is the new smoking. Slowly but surely people will ween themselves off it, and a great diaspora will begin. To where? Who knows, but I imagine people will have a choice of multiple services instead of one or two big behemoths (i.e Facebook & Twitter).

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the smoking / nicotine analogy is incredibly apt:

* addictive

* network / peer pressure effects

* damaging (but insidiously only after long cumulative use)

* poorly regulated even after the negative externalities became known

* less developed (and even less regulated) markets the final "growth" act of the industry

We can thus extrapolate that usage will only stop when governments start actively warning people (instead of tacitly approving and bankrolling with gratuitous advertisement when they maintain presence on the platforms and invite their citizens to engage there)

Can we push the analogy towards a solution / better social media? There are various proto-alternatives in the fediverse space. But some look suspiciously like E-cigarettes. Maybe the only cure from (at least this type) of social networks is to just pull the plug. As long as the billions keep pouring in and financing this sick business model we'll never really have a proper exploration of possible healthy alternatives to online social media

> addictive

Not just that, but like tobacco, FB was strategically, scientifically researched and optimized for addiction. In FB's case it was through emotional manipulation instead of chemical but capitalizing on biology in both cases.

And, just like the tobacco companies, Facebook has

- deliberately sowed doubt and misinformation about the harmful effects of their productt

- hired in-house researchers to produce bad science to counter the legitimate research finding the product is harmful

- insisted that "the science isn't settled" while hampering study into the harmful effects

Weird how much all this sounds like people against video games, you can add targets kids to the list.

>Facebook is morally dead.

But Instagram is not, and Facebook will keep adding ads and mind-tricks so they can further milk their addicts' attention.

And if not Facebook, TikTok will do so.

Marlboro may be in trouble, but the new Big Tobacco is doing-well-thank-you.

Instagram is dying too, take it from an early(ish) leaver

It depends on how the pivot to prioritizing video works out. I forget who, but one photography YouTuber mentioned good results from adding the occasional video to their Instagram feed. It also boosted their photos. Not good news for people who aren't equipped for or interested in doing video, but it might just work out for them. Especially if they can lure enough people way from YouTube. I'll quit watching someone before I follow them to Instagram, but I don't think I'm representative.

I don't. Many of my friends, who finally left Facebook, are very happy with Instagram. It feels like what Facebook was in 2010, people exchange their Instagram handles instead of phone numbers.

Do you have any kind of stats or even anecdotal evidence to your claim, other than you left ("early" in your own words)?

> Many of my friends, who finally left Facebook, are very happy with Instagram.

Counter-anecdata: Many of my friends are unhappy with Instagram because of the (randomly![1]) filtered timelines, intrusive ads[2], etc.

[1] e.g. I see different timelines on web vs iOS with the same account. It's bafflingly stupid. I just want a chronologically sorted list of post from everyone I follow.

[2] Checking just now, scrolled through 25 timeline entries - 7 of them are ads.

Are they leaving it? Did they identify a replacement they would rather use?

I didn't mean no one had criticisms, maybe "very happy" was an exaggeration. I'm just saying I don't see the exodus the GP thinks is imminent, even on a small scale.

Where dix you leave to?

I made a similar comment before, but what I think will happen is that "Facebook.com" will die, and FB will turn into a digital conglomerate that's made up of acquisitions. They did it with Instagram and with WhatsApp. Facebook knows their core platform (facebook.com) is on it's last legs. They know they have virtually no chance of attracting back the "Young Americans" core demo to use Facebook.com. At this point they are scrambling to acquire and bring in other tech before their core platforms becomes as worthless as MySpace.

It's inevitable that at some point, Facebook the company will part ways with Facebook, the social network. They'll probably rename the company to "FB Inc." or something equally meaningless, ala KFC or FedEx (where the "federal" is no longer apt).

We might even see the name change while the social network is still up and running, resulting in some ridiculous re-brand like "Facebook by FB" (did you know that the actual Express service from Fedex is now called "FedEx Express"? :)

I don’t know how you could say Facebook.com is on its last legs when it is still growing, both in DAUs and MAUs, with 1.9B and 2.9B, respectively.

A fourth of the world population uses it daily, and a third uses it monthly. They are far from dead.

True, I was really only talking about the American market. I will say I think the same will happen in other countries eventually. If you think about it in terms of Digital Churn, first the young folks used Facebook, then the older demo. This churn is lagging in other countries but I feel like it will catch up.

Even in the US, FB is still growing their MAUs, albeit slowly.

Sure, one day that will not be the case. But you can say that for any company out there.

>To where? Who knows, but I imagine people will have a choice of multiple services instead of one or two big behemoths (i.e Facebook & Twitter).

Hopefully, they will re-discover the joys and challenges of in-person communication and social networking.

Definitely not.

The next frontier is vr metaverse.

Hard to tell if you're serious. If so, the "VR Metaverse" will only exist for a select few techno-elites, and I'm not really sure what they would say to each other. Probably end up just scrolling on their phones in VR.

You're seriously disconnected from what young people are doing. Search 'vrchat' on youtube.

I am not going to spend my time watching videos of other people in VR. You're seriously disconnected from what young people are doing. Search "dirt jumps" on youtube.

...which is currently a multi-billion dollar effort at FB (Facebook Reality Labs)

I want to be fully wired in and never interact with someone in person ever again. Your username reeks of pure evil for someone like me.

I disagree very strongly. FB is big piece of digital real estate and it keeps growing in the developing world. Innovation might be stagnant at fb but I would argue this is the case for all of big tech

The smoking analogy gets thrown a lot, but it’s just a further and less accurate one than the TV analogy.

The TV industry has been booming and the only issue is more advanced successors.

TV can be addicting, rage inducing, waste of time, ruining teenagers minds and giving them bad body images issues.

TV is also informative, educational, and makes people happy since it’s fun to watch at other times.

While some people have been for years complains about the destruction of human society by TV, the majority just nods and prefers having it to not.

(FB employee, opinions my own)

Your employer is toxic and causes long term damage, like smoking. As for the TV whataboutism...

TV doesn't track me, doesn't tailor content to influence my behavior, TV doesn't try to build a model of my social network. And the big difference - TV actually creates content themselves.

TV wants to and at times is starting to do many of those things.

Ok, does this change anything about parent's main point that Facebook's core business is results in major society level issues?

No... ? Did I say anything to contradict that point?

Facebook showed them the way

Do you mean traditional over-the-air television? Because I'm absolutely certain companies like Netflix, HBO and Disney tailor content to influence your behavior. Haven't you ever compared the Netflix recommendations for your account with anyone else's? And yes, "TV actually creates content themselves", but that means you'll be exposed to whatever agenda and viewpoints the stakeholders of the production company that creates the content what to promote, and only that viewpoint.

Netflix recommendations is one of the reasons I’m not worried about tailored content. Netflix apparently have zero idea about what shows or films I like. Either that or they don’t have them. All I want is fantasy removed from sci-fi, explosions, spaceships and boobs.

Any other service will become like Facebook or worse unless people start paying directly for social media and privacy regulations get passed.

The trend I've seen is the emergence of services that exclusively cater to an echo chamber (usually far right or far left) and will probably monetize by selling that audience out to interests who want to reach that demographic. That I'm afraid is even worse than Facebook since it puts people into permanent filter bubbles from which they will not escape unless they leave the network.

Facebook is like smoking in some ways, but there is one huge difference: the dynamics of the market forced Facebook to be like that or die. Since everything has to be "free" but nothing actually is, things can only be monetized in sleazy underhanded ways.

"Free" is really the central pillar of surveillance capitalism just like it was for classic wall-to-wall advertisements television.

Not necessarily. Just changing the newsfeed to show most recent first instead of their algorithm that is designed to make you angry and/or sad in order to get more clicks would be a huge step in the right direction.

The next FB could be smart enough (or regulated enough) to require this change.

It would require regulation and/or a financial model that is not based on user exploitation, which in turn requires either direct payment or a highly regulated ad experience.

All the financial incentives right now heavily incentivize sleaze.

People pay for the Fediverse, but it doesn't seem to be an echo-chamber.

To where?

Twitter and Instagram are just as bad as Facebook.

Reddit is magnitudes worse.

Interested as to why you think Reddit is so much worse?

Not OP, but Reddit is really awful morally and from a user perspective unless you heavily curate your subreddits to low population subs. The front page has to be 95% secret ads or corporate/political shills. Its heavily populated by posts from bot accounts that use them to sneak in advertising posts.

> unless you heavily curate your subreddits to low population subs.

Isn't this true of any service, at least of a certain size? My Twitter feed is tightly, tightly curated, and even the comment replies to these extremely high-quality accounts are full of unbelievable levels of stupidity and hostility.

Not only that, Reddit is an echo chamber, populated by people who claim to be tolerant, intelligent and open to new ideas. In reality most are single minded and will attack annoy one those who don’t share their believes.

I closed my Reddit account after the last Danish parliment election, when it became clear that only left wing politic was considered “correct” and apparently any liberal party or candidate is not to be trusted, so no argumentation would considered valid.

Reddit is in general hot garbage, but sub-communities have been wonderful if you can find them. Reminds me a lot of the old message board communities.

I think the smoking analogy is a pretty bad one, because smoking is an empty activity with little redeeming value. Once you quit you actually become sort of repulsed by the activity. There's very little at the core of smoking that's worth keeping.

But the core of what Facebook does is very good. Everyone I care to still be in touch with from high school, college, and multiple past jobs is there. That core feature is good, not bad.

And it's not at all obvious that those people are ever going to go somewhere else. Sure, teenagers are going to keep adopting new, fun stuff, but none of that new, fun stuff replaces that core feature of Facebook.

"Teenagers hanging out" is a different use case from "adult who wants to stay in touch with people he knew a decade ago." There's no competition for this latter use case.

I’m hopeful, but I think it’s important to note that this isn’t inevitable. Facebook could just as easily go the way of junk food, where everyone knows it’s bad and everyone sees how it contributes to major social problems but we just accept it as a fact of life.

Possibly one business will come into being: quit-Facebook coaching. Probably won't be as big an industry as smoke-quitting or Alcoholics Anonymous but might still be profitable.

> a great diaspora will begin.

That was announced to great fanfare and support in the NYT a decade ago, and it didn't turn out so great.

> Stock price is not an indicator of aliveness. Facebook is morally dead. It is the new smoking. Slowly but surely people will ween themselves off it

It sounds like you are predicting that their user base will shrink significantly? Since the stock price is essentially people estimating the expected value of the company, including future growth or decline, it seems to me like the stock price should be a good indicator of this?

> it seems to me like the stock price should be a good indicator of this?

Successful value investors like Warren Buffet have proven time and again that the stock price is often wrong. They are so rich only because others are so often so wrong (paraphrased from Charlie Munger).

Stock prices can be right or wrong. Here’s the interesting question - What should Facebook financials look like to justify its stock price now? You can read “Expectations Investing” to find out the approx “correctness” of $FB current market price.

Warren Buffet being able to pick stocks better than the market doesn’t mean that a HN commenter will be right about a given stock though. Anyone here could easily be of the others who are “so often so wrong”

Buffet’s insane returns are numerically more to do with how long he’s been in the market:

> $81.5 of Warren Buffett’s $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday. (Housel)

In your analogy of smoking, the returns of smoking companies like Philip Morris have been astronomical.

Adult smoking has been on a downward decline in the US for decades and youth smoking peaked in 1997[1]. While I'm sure the returns of stocks like Philip Morris were very good in their heyday, nowadays MO stock does not have astronomical returns. They just have an extremely solid dividend yield. Compared to FB (>21% 5-years) or Snap (>100% 3-years), Altria Group total 5-year returns are just over 10%. Over 15 years, they don't even break 5%[2]. Philip Morris International has a similar story: returns in the mid to high single digits[3].

1: https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco... 2: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnys/mo/trailing-returns 3: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnys/pm/trailing-returns

In their heyday is about 30-40y of holding period. So, it seems we have to wait another 20y or so to see single digit FB returns.

> Facebook is morally dead.

It's also just about the least cool thing out there now. In the early days of FB, old people would sign up b/c FB was where they could get in touch with their grandchildren. Now 20 somethings keep their FB account around just to keep in touch with their Boomer grandparents. FB is the new Fox News. A financial juggernaut fueled by angry baby boomers.

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