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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc would be a pretty good little business. And they already have all of that functionality built, so they could run significantly leaner, and hence not have to drive their remaining users away with excessive ads.

This seems like a good idea to me. But I also think it's about as likely to happen as President Stallman.

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Marketplace is the only reason a lot of people still use the site. This is since especially true for people looking for beater cars since Craigslist started charging $5 to post ads for cars.

If Apple or someone else with an ax to grind with Facebook really wanted to bust Meta's kneecaps, they could off to subsidize this charge. Maybe also help them out with fraud and spam detection, since that's where most of the overhead on that section is going to come from.

That might be the reason for you, but there are many other reasons why people still use the site. For example, coordinating events with friends, discover local events, discussing on messenger, sharing photos, discussing in groups...

I hear this all the time but SMS/MMS/iMessage/whatever Android has does this just as well.

For cross-platform communication, Messenger/Whatsapp win over the above. (Telegram, Signal, etc in some circles).

The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn't be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.

>No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.

Until their HOA or their sports club start using Facebook as their official platform for announcements and communication.

I know there are other free platform that could fill the same role, but you will never find one where literally more than half the adult population already has an account and is familiar with the interface/features. Lots of groups use it because it's the path of least resistance.

Enough people don't have or won't use facebook in 2022.

Email is still the lowest common denominator.

If you can get our town's PTA, or city hall, or childcare to use email more than they use Facebook, I will give you one thousand fucking dollars.

I can barely get my D&D group to reliably use emails to communicate, instead of group texts that usually include the entire group, but not always.

>Enough people don't have or won't use facebook in 2022.

It is top 3 most visited after google and youtube. Literally every other service/website you can imagine is worse in terms or popularity.

If >2.5B active monthly users is too low, I can't imagine that anything will ever be enough for you.

Source? This sounds like conjecture at its finest.

It's not conjecture. Just look at any form your fill out, from taxes, to medical, to employment. They all ask for your email address and not for your facebook url.

Taking an average of the various reports about Facbook usage in the US, about 70% of internet users use Facebook at least once per month.

Somewhere near 100% of internet users use email.

As ok123456 points out, there's a reason that you get asked for your email address and not your Facebook ID. Asking for Facebook leaves out a huge chunk of people.

Can you sign up with Facebook without an email? I know it asks for your phone number but not sure if it still requires an email.

It's funny how much projection people do when speaking of FB, as if their personal experience offers some deep insight into a platform of 3.5 billion users whose usage varies by user, demography and geography.

It's funny how people try to deny the simple truth that the site hasn't been fun to use in 15 years.

Whether or not it's fun doesn't isn't the primary driving factor in its continued popularity. People use it because other people use it. It got big and now has a network effect of inertia holding it in place until something else takes off and replaces it.

Then, why does my original post have +30? It must have struck a nerve with more than just myself.

Because there's a certain group of people who feel the same way as you do. And maybe people who read HN are more likely to belong in this group. But HN is not representative of the world.

I'm not sure an opinion (how fun a site is to use) that surely varies wildly across FB's billions of users can even be a universal "simple truth".

Huh? In my experience, no one under 40 uses the site much anymore for its original purposes. The only status updates and memes being posted are from the older crowd.

I meant under.

> No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.

What? The over 40 crowd is FB's main demographic.

Might be true for you. But this is so not true for a lot of the world still. Lots and lots of young people (late 20s, early 30s) still use FB. Anecdotally, quite a few of my friends still do, if not mostly for the groups.

I use it for groups. Many of our local clubs do great on facebook

The problem is that FB has changed groups as well. Groups seem to be redesigned to become more like open billboards than private enclaves with a limited membership.

They haven’t gone all the way there, so the groups are still useful, but I’m worried that’s the direction they’re taking.

Private groups mean less people and less engagement. So they'll try to trick you into opening.

That seems to be getting the same Zuckerberg death-spiral: Facebook has lots of users so it’s tempting but everyone I know who’s tried it was deluged with blatant scam attempts & Google MFA phishing attacks. Skimping on abuse just seems to be the corporate default.

FB is also actively making Marketplace worse.

They keep relegating their local pickup products and trying to turn it into a generic online marketplace.

It's annoying, but welcome. As soon as Marketplace dies, I can delete FB forever

> Marketplace is the only reason a lot of people still use the site.

Do you have any data to back this claim?

Yes. I know several people who only have Facebook accounts because they need it to buy and sell things on Marketplace.

"Won't someone please think of the shareholders"... It seems like the obvious idea, it is exactly their strengths and their user base is old enough for those features to be of value.

The thing is that would mean making Facebook less valuable, causing the current shareholders to lose money. It's going to be hard to get someone to accept a business plan that will cost them money, even if the alternative is worse long term. Perhaps because you're betting that you can of load our shares before the whole thing goes belly up (whenever that may be).

I think your idea makes a lot of sense, it would be cheaper to run, there's less fancy features to develop, might be cheaper to run andless use for moderation. The thing I don't understand well enough is the ads: Can you charge more, because your users are older and buy different things, or do teens and younger people have more disposable income?

Zuck owns a majority of the shares and there may not be anyone to please besides him. Also, cutting 50% of the expensive tech jobs sounds profitable to me.

The issue is that Zuck is no Craig Newmark. Craig is a nice guy, a philanthropist, and generally a good figure to look up to become one day.

> The thing I don't understand well enough is the ads: Can you charge more, because your users are older and buy different things, or do teens and younger people have more disposable income?

The ads run at auction, FB doesn't explicitly charge a set price for the inventory. Facebook for years has been running with an inflationary inventory (first fb, then fb newsfeed+fb, then fb+nf+insta, then fb+nf+insta+ insta stories, etc). Meaning that they have more ad slots, and more impressions, and can create a lower (at least in short term) the price per ad, while increasing overall revenue. Remember, Facebook is really good at getting an ad to the right person, so Facebook ad inventory has been valuable. If Facebook stops adding new features, then the inventory becomes static, and the price per ad will rise (again, valuable), and price out their ad customers.

(I think the idea is terrible but more feasible than people give credit for).

> The thing is that would mean making Facebook less valuable

Would it? Is the stock market completely irrational and incapable of seeing the long-term value here? Or does the market know something we don't?

FB is also the only popular platform where you can do actual "miniblogging" as in record and share your actual thoughts and experiences in a few-paragraphs textual format. But that’s pretty much the opposite of trendy right now.

I'm glad they will probably fail at that, as I absolutely do not want Facebook to be mandatory for regular life.

Yes! Exactly this.

Facebook is your online second life. It’s actually you.

With that, it doesn’t make as much sense to be the place to mindlessly scroll dance videos, or discuss politics with strangers.

It does, however, make for a great place to discuss local things, discuss hobbies, buy and sell things, message people, keep up with friends and family

> Facebook is your online second life. It’s actually you.

Does anyone want that anymore?

I think there are plenty of cases! Groups, especially. There are lots of local community groups where your real identity is useful. Like “I need a dog walker, any recommendations” or “anyone a math tutor?” Or “looking to buy a car”.

FB's core strength today is the boomer market. Definitely something I did NOT see coming 10 years ago. The 60+ crowd practically lives in Facebook Groups now and they will buy basically anything that they see in an ad on FB. You can sell people who are 60+ basically anything on FB if you target them. The pandemic really solidified this, and now the conversion rates are higher than anything I have ever seen anywhere.

It's interesting to me because many older FB users barely know how to use the platform and they have invented their own tricks and conventions—my favorite of which is commenting "Following" because they don't know how to follow something, but know that if they leave a comment they will get notifications about responses. I see that every day and I always find it interesting. Every now and then someone calls them out on it and they just don't care. They have developed their own memes and are probably the only group that uses those Bitmoji-esque "What's on your mind" cards.

FB can lean into the boomer market and basically print money. FB is going to replace QVC. Hell, they should just buy QVC.

This seemed to be their strategy for several years in the early 00s. Facebook was pretty enjoyable to use back then!

That would be the low risk strategy. Just run it as a cash cow value business and extract as much profit as possible until it dies.

However, Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to bet the company on AR/VR and is investing $10B into that area. If they get it wrong then he'll look like an idiot. If they get it right by building the next major platform for humans to communicate then he'll look like a visionary genius. We won't know which for at least 10 years.

People gave Google a ton of crap for buying YouTube for 1.6 billion (~16% of annual revenue at the time). That $10B FB spent is more like 8.5% of their revenue.

I’m skeptical of the metaverse, but I was also pretty skeptical of user-generated video. And given their current ad take, $10B is not a crazy bet.

Everyone wanted to watch and share video clips on their computer directly on the web without and without having to care about codecs, file formats, and hosting.

No one wants to have business meetings wearing VR headsets or give NFTs to virtual panhandlers or any of the other silly usecases for a modernized version of Lawnmower Man.

Maybe? I generally agree with you, but playing devils advocate:

What does the generation raised on Minecraft and Roboblox do when they grow up? They spent their adolescence in virtual worlds. Do they grow out of that? Or does it start to bleed into other parts of daily life?

VR still seems clunky as hell, but if the tech gets less obtrusive I can imagine a world where a sizable chunk of daily life is mediated through a headset.

Find a new form of escapism? A large driver of kids and teens seeking out escapism like this is that compulsory education is unsatisfying and they have very little self-determination generally. This isn't new to Minecraft and Robolox. A generation ago, it was watching way too much TV. What are those kids who watched 6 hours a night of TV doing now?

At one point no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous. Metaverse technology is still really clunky today and used only by a few early adopters, but it's entirely possible that the experience will improve a lot in 10 years. Who knows?

Yeah, no. Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time (global pandemic).

Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter. There is no counter-factual where this becomes a success.

I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn. If this is the best they can come up with, whatever of "Meta" that is left in 10 years won't be worth 1/20 of that.

> Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time

They also had a product that worked terribly at the wrong time [0].

> Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter.

Subsidizing it seemed to get a lot more people to buy it over the last few years. I 100% see a world where you don't buy a monitor, you buy a headset to use your computer. Monitors are big, ugly and fragile, and not portable. In 2-5 years when the screen tech is better and I can use a virtual monitor instead of a real one, I will 100% do that, and I think many will. Lots of younger people never buy traditional desktop or laptops.

Also, a lot of "meta verse" dialog came from not-meta, eg web3 NFT shit, so I wouldn't place too much into that being their vision. Part of a strategy for attention is certainly to get people excited, and attaching "meta verse" to random trend du jour seems like a solid way to get attention. There are crypto pumps related to the queens recent death, but that doesn't mean the queen would have wanted anything to do with crypto.

> I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn.

TBF they started to back out of making this their only thing, and they still sell a crap ton of valuable ad space to lots of people. Its not like they abandoned their existing cash cow.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...

> no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous.

No one wants to use Zoom now. It's either required or the lesser of two evils (the other evil being working in an office).

A significant factor to consider with that situation is that the recent widespread use of teleconferencing software wasn't organic.

Many people and organizations that started using it frequently during the last three years only did so because they were forced to, mainly due to absurd and unjustifiable government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions. Otherwise, the remaining adoption was mainly driven by paranoia, and only occasionally by convenience.

We've seen a tendency for such people and organizations to return to in-person interactions as soon as they can, which usually starts the moment that government stops interfering.

While the adoption may have been rapid and widespread, we also see the reverse happening as soon as it's possible to.

Isn't user-generated video mostly dead though? The vast majority of videos on Youtube, at least by viewership hours, seems to be produced by professional youtube creators. These range in scale from the "web content" branch of large media corporations to one person doing research, presenting and editing, but all are effectively just companies. There seem to be very few videos from regular people sharing something interesting. These videos can mostly be found on Facebook, Telegram, imgur gifs, Twitter, etc.

Why do we need to wait ten years? He's building Second Life with a higher-resolution mesh. Is that visionary?

Instructions unclear, piled all available capital into the "metaverse" instead.

That's GNU/President Stallman

Their current market cap can’t be sustained by going back to their roots. They need addictive attention

Yes, but it's still a dumb idea to make instagram into tiktok rather than catering to their existing audience.

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