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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is really not doing fine. It's not about to fall off a cliff - but it's a slowly sinking ship, and I doubt FB can change that (and they don't really need to since they have enough diversity - Instagram - and can just buy something new).

Twitter is a sunk ship - one of the worst business purchases in history.

Pinterest is nowhere near as bad as Twitter. It's maybe "fine" depending on your definition.

TikTok was on a truly incredible growth trajectory. In many ways - it would be impressive for TikTok to make enough bad changes to not at least be "fine". But "fine" is subjective. That growth trajectory is nowhere near as impressive these days.

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Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users and that number is increasing.

If that’s not doing fine, what the hell is?

Depends what counts as an MAU. I deleted my Twitter account, but I can’t realistically delete my Facebook account because I have too many messenger contacts to make it worth doing. I occasionally receive a text message fron someone I haven’t seen for a long time or an aunt on another continent, so I probably count as an MAU but I am not seeing any ads on Facebook.m

Apple, on the other hand has 2 billion active devices that people paid money for and are on a replacement cycle. Somehow that is only worth twice what a Facebook account is worth in terms of market cap.

MAU != Active Devices

One user can own multiple devices. My friend owns an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods as well.

Also, the timeframes are different. Apple consider any device which pinged one of their services within the last 90 days to be active. So it's approximately 1 month vs 3 months in terms of the window of measurement. And we're not even getting into the possibility of devices pinging their services that aren't in true active usage, i.e. an iPad that's just charged and connected to WiFi but not actually used.

Of course, that's still extremely impressive from Apple! It's an amazing achievement which the market has obviously rewarded. But it's very much apples to oranges here. Those two statistics can't be directly compared because they represent different measurements over different periods of time.

The whole point is that they are vastly different. Of course it’s an apple’s to oranges comparison. Nobody is trying to compare the two statistics as if they were the same - that wouldn’t make any sense.

The comparison is between 2 billion physical devices that cost real money to buy and replace with 3 billion entries in a users table with a datestamp.

Of course we can make that comparison.

Zuckerberg claim they have that many users. It wouldn't suprise me if 90% are bots or manual click farms if the number is accurate.

They intentionally can count the same person as multiple users.

You can grow "users" without actually growing users, by having the same people have multiple accounts.

How many bots?

Twitter is a sunk ship - one of the worst business purchases in history.

I googled “twitter active users per year” and similar revenue charts and they don’t support this claim. There is a slight down since 2021, but that was when everyone was locked up and had whole days to speak. Nasdaq has basically the same /\ profile in 2019-2023 range. Taking the whole economy into account, twitter is fine.

Are you sure it’s not just “I left the ship and wish it to sink”? Not a musk fan either, but statements like this feel rather wishful.

This is a huge problem right now, FYI:

https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1753804822573109393

>I googled “twitter active users per year”

None of the numbers you're going to see since the purchase are reliable, given that the company is now private and unlikely to release anything substantive.

the quality of content I see on Twitter is... gone

Even if facebook isn't doing fine, instagram is. Instagram is eating the market of younger people who would have used facebook. Either way meta wins.

FB is still surprisingly strong in growing markets. But that translating to business means those markets see drastic increases in spending power, which we’ve been awaiting for many years. It’s up, but nowhere near parity with western markets.

>FB is still surprisingly strong in growing markets.

In a lot of those growing markets, Facebook is the main (or only) way of having a web presence for their business. WhatsApp is similarly the main way to have IM support, as well.

It seems like this is setting the bar insanely high for success and failure. Meta is a trillion dollar company with growing revenue. One of the most successful companies in the world. Even at half the size, it would be tremendously successful .

TIL that having more daily active users than they've ever had is a "slowly sinking ship."

Most businesses would literally kill for the kind of "slowly sinking ship" where they're making tons of profits from their decades-old primary business that is somehow even more popular now than it was when it was actually cool.

> Facebook is really not doing fine

By what metric?

Definitely not any of the numbers here. /s

OP has no idea what they are talking about. Growth is massive.

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

The acceleration of the "hype cycle" has to be scary from the view of TikTok. When your hype shot upward that fast, it's liable to drop just as quickly.

If Tiktok is no longer on that "incredible growth trajectory", then what is? I haven't heard of anything coming on the horizon to take over.

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