Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.
It doesn't help that their core code is a steaming pile of bloated dung that doesn't seem to be tested by anyone.
a) No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless.
b) No evidence that staying true to the original Facebook is the best strategy. Unquestionably, Stories has been a popular feature in both Instagram and Facebook ecosystems and perhaps certain features from TikTok will be the same.
But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.
You're right that HN is not the right place to judge this. I will say, as someone who works with high school kids, almost none of them have seemed to use it over the last 4-5 years.
My point is you should dispute the original claim that it is life or death for Facebook instead of the subcomment running with that theory.
I think Facebook is doing OK, but they have issues breaching the younger democratic, which is worrying them.
You cant build a buisness on a bubble. You can build a bubble and extract money from investors, but honestly, the only people who use facebook are doing it because they are addicted and likely not internet savy. Its like hooking people on sugar. Except fb doesnt own the sugar, and cant only buy up the competition for so long before your no longer the hot stuff investors belevied.
Facebook is a fad. Social media is not, it has overtaken traditional media in less then a decade. Social media will morph, it is not static. You cant own it. And Facebook is not the defination of it anymore.
Are they as sexy as the bajillion TikTok users out there? No.
Are they enough to build a solid business aruond? Yes.
Would facebook ever consider stepping up to the plate that built their core business again? No, because Facebook management sucks.
I don't give a shit about algorithmic recommendations and of horse-shit force-fed happiness content don't anticipate ever changing that. Many of my friends are the same way.
What ever happened to servicing the long tail?
People keep saying this is what people want. Show me the numbers that it's true.
Because when Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube etc. all move to this model and stick with it the evidence is clear that it's not want people want.
But as a solid, sustainable profit source? Are you claiming that only a marginal number of people want this, or what?
So clearly they know a little bit about what is a solid, sustainable profit source.
It is more than a "solid, sustainable" profit source, it is a best-in-class cash cow that feeds a growing monstrosity for shareholders that want more, more, more.
The business they left behind is still sustainable.
Facebook and other social media isn't quite at that level, but the same logic applies to your argument: there are fundamentally different kinds of "wants", and the drug dealer/social media metrics invariably cater to the unhealthy kind.
The evidence may be clear, but it is also driven by tech that is increasingly effective at pressing our dopamine buttons. I'm not sure that the opinions of a drug-addled constituency are important for the far more simple question of, "is there a sustainable business here?"
There is a lot of biases and nonsense in here and in the news being spread around over the death of Facebook (Meta) or even the beginning of its death, which has been greatly exaggerated.
They will be around for another 10+ years.
But their first down quarter (for users) does say something. No one would be talking about this if it hadn't happened.
Can't think anyone serious would look to derive any meaning from a single data point in this environment.
For all we know the entire DAU drop could be from Ukraine and Russia alone.
Literally none of these things account for people not logging in to FB. In fact, some (all?) of those sound like the sorts of things that would drive engagement among millions of bored and frustrated people.
That means less to spend on new phones, data plans etc. And more time spent at work.
The DAU drop happened before the war, in the quarter up to December 2021.
You may very well be right. Facebook is adjusting their offering to keep a certain segment of users. That will eject another group, or at least reduce their engagement. That’s fine, if it ensures profitability for the next five years.
It’s just interesting to be part of a group of users that aren’t intersting to the social media platforms. Which in a way just confirms that the social media part of Metas business isn’t actually important to them, only the ad revenue that it might bring.
You're describing Instagram. Facebook has been the "parents' generation water cooler" for several years now. They don't even post "original content" like party pics unless it's an obituary. It's all "shares" of news and political content.
I'd love to have something like that again that everyone uses, but everything is about goosing the influencer economy now rather than letting me socialize.
BTW have you tried dreamwidth.org, a fork of the venerable livejournal.com? They look as if 2005 had never ended,in a good sense.
They simply don't offer enough value over say a WhatApp group.
That's actually what Google+ was with circles before the morons in charge forcibly bundled it into Youtube and killed it. Google should have had some patience like the people over at Musical.ly and built an audience organically rather than shoving unwanted garbage down our throats.
I don't think so. TikTok is vastly more addictive and fresh in its content. How much content can your circle creating in a day? No more than 20 posts I would say? If facebook stays being facebook, they will die anyway.
Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with, it is a social network, but tiktok is not. Tiktok is the new TV, with endless contents. I follow zero people there, but still I using it the right way.
FB took care of that by removing the chronological time line. As soon as it went away from a time line of things that happened to the people I love into a addiction stimulating ever refreshing list of flashing images it took away the interactivity. It became more of a consumption site place and they're leaning heavily into that (with Instagram too). This then means that content creation is moving from users you know to professionals (people playing the algorithm).
[0] https://theprint.in/tech/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-led-to-an...
I have no horse in this race, but why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there?
They clearly saw TikTok as a direct threat, and, probably fueled by thousands of data-driven tests, confirmed that this change results in more engagement and keeps more people on their site for longer.
What you seem to want from FB is likely what a minority of its older userbase wants, but wouldn't make graphs go up and right as much. They need to attract younger generations and new users if they want to do that.
doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions
Of course not, but I doubt that the ones making these decisions are ignoring the metrics that the thousands of smart engineers are generating.
All the large companies are able to afford extra staff whose job is exclusively to generate and analyse metrics.
It seems a reach to conclude that the company pays thousands of people for a specific output, just to throw that output away. It may happen to one or two of them, but certainly not to all of the people generating the metrics.
In my own network (age brackets 25-40), I rarely see any people posting updates or uploading pictures, which was common 5 or 10 years ago.
On the other hand, Meta managed to keep the younger generation audience by acquiring Instagram, but apparently, it failed to acquire the Next-Bing-Thing (Tik-Tok)