> that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways
Spend more time talking to average people.
They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.
Spend more time talking to average people.
They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.
Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public.
A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
So it’s really not important to most people. It’s numbers are heavily influenced by people who use it because someone or some organization happens to use it.
But that's a really bad way to determine the important of Facebook, for two reasons.
1. You've assumed that the only purpose of Facebook is posting, so a user making an average of one post per week isn't finding it valuable. Bad assumption.
2. You're counting a bizarre measure of market penetration, a standard that only air and food and water would meet. Many, many people don't use cars, and people who do often only use them five days a week. If you think that means cars aren't important to many people, try taking one away!
And that’s the difference between us. If my car disappeared into the ether, I would immediately launch a series of ether-disappearing experiments, systematically trying larger and larger items and video recording the results. I would post these to HN, admittedly in the hopes of going viral while also doing my best to move science forward.
But you? Noooo, just pop over to your insurance company and get a new minivan, leaving the rest of us in the dark about your amazing ether disposal system.
1/4th of all people is a staggeringly large number.
Also, Meta is more than Facebook and they don’t need to post to be using the platform. They have about 3.7 billion monthly active users.
I really don’t understand this knee-jerk drive to try to downplay the scale of a company that has half of the planet as their active user base.
Facebook Marketplace is a whole world of its own. It's become like the Etsy/Ebay/Craigslist in Central America. Payments are confirmed by sending screenshots of bank transfers, and deliveries handed by private post or an informal network of couriers that visit towns and neighborhoods on specific days of the week.
It is not just people talking to each other, several business rely almost completely in WhatsApp around here.
IG is also still the top social media as well globally.
Banks that use WhatsApp for customer support, or restaurant chains that take orders via WhastsApp bots, pay WhatsApp partners for API access.
The payment goes to the WhatsApp partner. What I'm not sure is, if it is distributed between Meta and the WhatsApp Api provider.
I reckon its a bit like email. Great as a top of the funnel customer acquisition tool. Not that great from a money making perspective.
Drugs are important to drug addicts. That's not a reason to praise the dealers for their business acumen.
Facebook and Instagram are exploitative as fuck.
They’ve gotta be two of the least toxic social media sites compared to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — any why: because the format is cancer to news.
Social media itself is great — Snapchat, IG, BeReal, Radite, Discord as long as they are successfully able keep them from becoming political megaphones. TikTok has come the closest to being a general purpose broadcast social network that hasn’t been corrupted but long term I’m sure it’ll get poisoned too.
No wonder that we get stories of students now revolting against challenging courses: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/letters/nyu-tough...
"A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students."
The exact timeframe when children who marinated in social media grew up. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind (from two different NYU professors), the authors track a sudden change in student behavior, like intolerance, impatience, fragility - all around 2013.
So we can discuss how "important" it is to them, but we are just now beginning to get data about how these apps absolutely destroy our ability to focus, think, and connect with other humans.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only important when life is good. They are icing on the cake. But once things go south, they can be quickly discarded.
Do either of those pages get the power back sooner?
How about regulating and resourcing the power systems so that storms don't frequently take them out. I've lived in the same house for over thirty years and I can count the number of outages on the fingers of one hand. Two of them were planned and all were of less than 24 hours duration.
I'll grant you that I live in an area that doesn't have a lot of storms but even so the electricity company cuts a wide corridor either side of power lines to make sure that trees cannot fall on the lines.