Hacker News Reader

Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

I think they lost users much much earlier.

It's just that most users they lost went from "I use Facebook" to "I don't want to use Facebook, but kinds still have to" (because friends, family etc.).

All people below 40y I know which have Facebook fall more or less in the second category...

View on HN

I fall into a 3rd category: I used to log into FB once a month or so to check in. For some reason, they decided I was a fake account (despite working for them for 4.5 years) and asked for my ID. The resolution on my 10-year-old MBP was too low for FB's contractors so they rejected my ID 3 times and I seem to now be locked out of my account indefinitely.

Definitely in the top 10 best thing to ever happen to me.

Given how rarely you were using it before, I'm surprised you rate the impact so highly - how come?

Closure is powerful

Bingo. I'm done. It's over. No matter how much I want to hop on and rage about the current issue of the day, I just can't and it's not worth pinging my former teammates there for the Nth time trying to fix it.

> despite working for them for 4.5 years

wow.

Eh, I'd be more surprised/concerned if the Facebook user table had a special flag for whether someone was or ever had been an employee.

hmm, don't they require you to use your personal facebook account to log into their facebook for work system as an employee? ( Am I just misremembering? )

That kind of flag can be useful to let test users and internal dev accounts get specific unreleased features or behaviors.

There are other ways to deal with specific users, but flagging accounts doesn't seem outlandish to me.

Facebook requires employees to provide their personal account, which will be used throughout the work.

I was locked out of amazon almost a year ago because of some security issue blah blah!!! I never tried to unlock the account and I am OK living in a world where I don't need to deal with that monster!

You wait for a week for items to get delivered and pay for expedited shipping each time? What a wonderful world!

North American users (US & Canada) were reported to show declines at least as early as 2019, see:

https://hypebeast.com/2019/3/facebook-user-base-decline

WaPo links to US declines as early as 2018:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/30/faceboo...

The big news here is a worldwide decline, which shows a rather larger weakness.

I know too many of my friends only used FB because of the events feature. However during COVID, that usage dropped too.

I also wouldn't be surprised if FB is fudging those numbers and it's declining even with their fudging.

After inflating the video play numbers I don't put anything past FB.

Facebook replaced sms/voicecall with family. If it wasn't for that I'd have already deleted my account years ago.

You may keep your messenger account while extinguishing your profile and all.

There's even a metric for that: Daily Active Users. I bet Facebook does not publish that number (or the historical values for it). I bet that number has been going down lately, at least for North American users. There's a reason they changed their name.

That also would be skewed imho. I use messenger to communicate with my family and I do click on facebook links they sends me but that's about it - am I an active user?

Sounds like you're actively using Facebook's products, so I'd assume so.

This article is literally about their daily active users number dropping.

HN Users typically read the heading and jump to the comment section..

Well, ${WEBSITE_NAME} users also typically read the heading and jump to the comment section..

True for literally every site ever. Some people read the article and never comment. Some read the headline and always comment. I’m in the later.

That’s where all the insights are…

I'd actually argue that HN is one of the better forums in terms of percentage of commenters who have read the linked article

It's really ONLY the daily users that are dropping, everything else is still going up:

> But not all growth trends were negative. The company’s family of apps, which encompass Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger continued to modestly add users. The number of users logging in monthly to Facebook continued to grow, even as the number of daily users dropped.

What's interesting is that it seems like Facebook isn't counting Messager users as Facebook users and that more users are actually using Facebook every month, just not as frequently as before.

The weird bit is that a drop that small and cause Facebook/Meta to lose that much value. The stock market either reads the news like HN does, or Facebook is a lot more fragile that I would have guessed.

I don't think DAUs would necessarily tell the full story for Facebook. Browsers still get pointed to Facebook a few times a day, but I bet the depth of engagement is a fraction of what it used to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com