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Comment by nostrapollo | Hacker News Reader

Hard to tell from my phone but are there any sources for the ‘exodus’ numbers? I don’t get the same impression that this post is laying out.

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Anecdotally I know exactly one person using Twitter to tweet and that's only because he shares some of those tweets to a Telegram channel. When he does I might check those messages on Twitter but I often don't.

All the messages I exchange with friends in WhatsApp groups are not happening inside Facebook groups and are diverting traffic from there. In the last many years FB has been a site I use to announce work events and to say thank you to happy birthday messages once per year. That's too be polite because my direct contacts say happy birthday to me on WhatsApp or in person.

I also know very few people who use Facebook, however a couple of degrees seperated from me, most people do. They all use Facebook Messenger (but just call it messenger). Other people a couple of degrees a different way use Twitter extensively.

On HN, we're in a bubble as we're people who give a shit about privacy and the companies running our social media. I'm fairly sure we're a tiny minority.

That's what I was looking for; starts with a popular conception, provides no evidence, then moves on to wish fulfillment.

It’s a vibe shift. The hard numbers may not be there (yet?), but the early signs are.

Facebook has been dead for years, unless you count instagram. Twitter never actually caught on with the normies. Gen Z is on TikTok.

In my friend groups everything that used to happen on Facebook now happens on private WhatsApp, iMessage, and Slack groups.

> Twitter never actually caught on with the normies.

Does not need to. That's where all journalists look for news. Normies then get their news from journalists. The circle is complete.

I agree. But a thriving social network that does not make.

A social network does not have to dominate the whole world to be useful and profitable.

It may be useful, but Twitter has not turned a profit for about four years.

I believe Musk is actively trying to change that. Whether he succeeds or not remains to be seen

I wonder what Musk's plan looks like. ~90% of Twitter's revenue comes from ads, and they are not doing too well since Musk took over. He may have to double down on non Western markets where large companies are still willing to work with him.

By adding -1B per year in interest rates? Interesting strategy!

Wasn’t it significantly profitable in 2019?

That applies to all commerce really, but the SV philosophy is "growth like a cordyceps on meth", so...

Facebook is still a thriving host of non-technical communities and classifieds. The features and experience across both of those use cases are constantly being degraded and are user-hostile, but FB is still winning.

Something in the vein of Discord will eventually replace FB groups, I think.

Classified is probably the service best protected by the most of FB’s network effect.

Nextdoor also has a local ads / classified ads section. I expect that would be the next destination for the FB Marketplace users (since they mostly fled Craigslist previously).

The problem for Nextdoor is that its active membership is even more skewed towards older folk than Facebook.

It's unreal to me how poor Facebook's actual product is. I regularly get white screens of death on the site, viewing a photo from the feed dumps the feed in the background forcing you to rescroll the whole page to get back where you were, account pages are little more than naked HTML... It's so shitty! Don't start me on how poor the business experience is either. Get locked out of an account or get flagged in error? Ha fuck you customer!

The only thing floating them is the network.

>It's unreal to me how poor Facebook's actual product is. I regularly get white screens of death on the site,...

I've wondered for a really long time how so many non-technical people could stand using Facebook; it always confused the hell out of me and was just awful to use.

I think non-technical people are ok with the abuse because everything on their computer abuses them. And if something goes awry, they figure it's their own fault for using their trackball mouse incorrectly [0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackball

When your president has a social media profile and regularily uses it, then that particular platform is dead.

Vibe shift is just another term for a change in elite aspirant opinion. The vibe is localized to highly trend conscious social and professional milieus. These scenes are often regarded as a cultural vanguard, but are in fact often detached from the majority of the population, and are less harbingers of broad shifts in public opinion, and more simple reporters on their own microclimates. That is all to say, the hard numbers might not materialize for some time, if at all, and not for the reasons presently stated.

Even if a vibe shift is recognized it isn’t necessarily described so.

Looking at the earliest comments that include “tiktok” on this site, the product wove its way into mentions before some article blew it up.

That said if you were on the service when the boss walk was just breaking, and experienced the product’s progression (as a user) to Old Town Road, it was obvious something big was going on—before the numbers were there.

Doctorow is engaging in an awful lot of wishcasting here.

Isn't he always?

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