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Comment by dopylitty | Hacker News Reader

You might even guess that’s the goal of this “economy is going to get worse” narrative that these “company announces layoffs” stories are part of.

The economy has been doing well despite supply issues caused by the pandemic and war. This has made hiring difficult which has given employees power. While businesses have been making money hand over fist they’ve also been begrudgingly forced to give a small amount to employees.

By pushing this narrative that a recession is imminent they can lower employee expectations so that even more of their record revenues can be channeled to profits/executive compensation.

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Initially, I thought this was overly antagonistic.

Then, I remembered the swath of anti-remote work articles when we were more optimistic on the state of the economy: worries about "quiet quitters," WFH employees secretly living in another country/state, etc. If those are truly big problems, why has discussion slowed so much?

(I'll believe they are problems, but that they have been exaggerated.)

Yeah, companies like Snapchat and Roku are down close to 90% because of a narrative. The growth slowdown is real

Snapchat has nothing to do with a general 'growth slowdown'. People have left Snapchat for TikTok[1]. Social media users, especially youth, are fickle and the industry relies heavily on network effects. Once you're no longer perceived as cool and/or lose enough users that the network effect isn't as powerful, it tends to snowball, and is hard to get that back.

"But there could be a bigger reason the company[Snapchat] has seen revenue deflate. Its reputation as the social media platform for young people has faded—particularly in the eyes of advertisers."

Not denying that growth slowdown is happening to some extent. But Snapchat has problems beyond that, and isn't a great example for it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-01/snap-i...

As for Roku, I'm not as well-versed there, but I do see that in October 2021 they announced that they're losing 85 channels, including the behemoth YouTube, so that may have contributed significantly to its decline this past year.

Not to mention lots of TVs now tend to have the same type of channels as Roku built-in, rendering it a bit unnecessary. Mine has everything I care about for streaming, for example. Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

[2] https://bestlifeonline.com/news-roku-losing-channels-youtube...

> People have left Snapchat for TikTok[1]. Social media users, especially youth, are fickle and the industry relies heavily on network effects.

The article you mentioned didn’t describe an exodus of users leaving Snapchat to use TikTok. It describes how TikTok is now advertisers’ preferred platform to reach younger audience, where Snapchat used to dominate.

Snapchat added 15 million daily active users last quarter. [1]

[1] https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...

The elite is lying to you and always have been. I know this first hand as my company is heavily invested in the travel industry and we have been bleeding money during the pandemic like crazy AND YET we have also been hiring like crazy.

All of this is just to tell the pesky employees to know their place.

The narrative was that Snapchat and Roku were worth those previous validations, this is just back to reality.

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