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We're Watching Facebook Die

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59 pointsthm58 comments

The whole premise of this article seems to be wrong because the author is misreading the quarterly report:

”What’s confusing is that in its Q4 2023 earnings, Meta reported it had 2.11 billion daily active users across its properties — a number that is somehow distinct from the 3.19 billion “family daily active people” that it reported in the same earnings. Daily Active Users is a simple metric — how many people have engaged with a product in a given day — but Daily Family Daily Active People is a number that is somehow so distinct that it’s a billion users higher.”

The number that’s a billion users higher is the one that includes all the properties. The 2.1 billion is for Facebook only. This is plain as day in the linked Q4 report:

”Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 3.14 billion on average for September 2023, an increase of 7% year-over-year.

”Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.96 billion as of September 30, 2023, an increase of 7% year-over-year.

”Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 2.09 billion on average for September 2023, an increase of 5% year-over-year.

”Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 3.05 billion as of September 30, 2023, an increase of 3% year-over-year.”

Yeah, fixing that undercuts a lot of the article. I guess the worst thing that's left is that it's suspicious to aggregate everything, which maybe reflects a lack of confidence that Facebook.com will continue growing or whatever?

I do not think that there is any confusion or misreading of the numbers here.

Without dealing with the specific points made in the piece, I would argue that there is gap in understanding the premise of the piece.

The article starts with numbers but it is not a analysis of quantitative measures i.e. is it not a statistical analysis.

The article is an "outside-looking-in" qualitative argument with an attempt to support those quantitative arguments with quantitative values (this is called competitive intelligence in some circles).

In other words, it should be read as an "opinion piece" with some numbers in it: the numbers are not the point, the (subjective ) opinions are the point.

I get it that numbers can be used to make a point either way (i.e. the author could use "confusion about numbers" as way to make a point while there really isn't any confusion ) but the points I would take away from the argument about numbers are:

- the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:

    i) the org has put out in the past 
    and 
    ii) other similar businesses have used and continue to use

- the number are definitely designed to be impenetrable no matter how you approach them

To quote the author:

"When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign."

Here's the specific link that OP cites and quotes from: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... You don't think the author misread this in the referenced paragraph?

But why should we give any credence to these opinions? Certainly not because the author is an expert on the subject, their background appears to in PR. Nor because the author is showing any kind of understanding of the subject; actually the opposite, given the multiple basic mistakes made in the opening to this piece. Like, it's not even that he got the facts and reasoning wrong. It's that he has so little understanding of the space he didn't realize that there had to be an error somewhere.

And it's not like the rest of the piece isn't full of links to purported facts. The author clearly can't be trusted on presenting the facts correctly nor interpreting their interpretations correctly, so you'd kind of need to fact check all of it. That's a lot of effort just to properly evaluate this tripe.

The only reason to pay attention to this is that they're writing something you want to believe, in a style you find appealing, and don't really care whether any of it is true or not.

> - the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:

But that fundamental premise is wrong. Meta has released comparable numbers in the past, which is exactly GP's point. And releasing aggregate user numbers across multiple products rather than per product is a totally standard practice.

Also:

> In that time period, Meta launched its “Horizon” Metaverse and its Twitter competitor Threads, which it claimed in its Q4 earnings had hit 130 million monthly active users, an increase of 30 million from Q3 2023. Yet between Q3 and Q4 2023, Meta’s overall monthly active users only increased by around 20 million — heavily suggesting that despite adding over 100 million new monthly active users in one property, it’s shedding tens of millions of users elsewhere.

Maybe I’m incorrectly parsing the text, but the author seems to think that 100M more users in Threads — yet just 20M increase in overall Meta users — “heavily suggests” that Meta lost tens of millions of users in other Meta sites?

How does that exactly follow? I think it’s more likely that the majority of the new 100M Threads users were existing Instagram users, which would not add to the overall Meta user count?

Your point still stands but it seems like he referred to the wrong report. The Q4 Report is where the 3.19 and 2.11 billion user counts are asserted

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

(as opposed to 3.14 and 2.09 billion, which is what’s in the Q3 report that he links to)

Ironically, in my local "market" at least, Facebook usability has pivoted. What was once an interesting stream of what your friends are up to, in a way that, say, Strava still is, is now a morass of clickbait, borderline porn and such.

However "groups" are free of that garbage and work very well indeed, for local cycling activity, historical interest and most importantly, neighbourhood interaction.

And Facebook Marketplace is now where to go for secondhand stuff, having relegated the local former leader (Kijiji) to distant second place except, again, niches like auto sales.

There's so much bot-on-bot spam. Or at least that's what it feels like.

My account is just to sell things on Marketplace. I'm in a handful of buy/sell groups for different things. I think I have 3 'friends', I never post anything like anything, etc. It's just private messages and posting Marketplace ads.

But, based upon whatever tracking etc information Facebook has, they present me with short videos, posts, etc. A lot of the crap is stuff like "Top Legend Actor Tom Cruise", and a picture or two of Tom Cruise, and then responses like "Beuatiful man!", "Always love him", "Such a boss"

Do people make money off these accounts? Are they just scripts? I don't get any of this.

I've read posts like this for 10 years at least.

it takes a long time for companies to die. it took sears decades even though everyone could see that coming from a mile away.

Sears was killed off, though.

So what we need is a heavily debt-leveraged private-equity buyout of Facebook? Then it will be gone in a couple of years.

It will take even longer for FB compared to Sears.

FB could lose 50% of its users and still clear billions in profit.

It could, but it would be more challenging for them to arrest a downward spiral.

Facebook is not immune to Metcalf's Law. People will log in less when half their friends are not there, meaning fewer ad impressions.

And that's if you assume that falling numbers of people are their only problem, and it's really not that.

My dad bought a fridge from them a couple years before they went bankrupt. When he had issues with it he tried to claim the warranty but got a whole runaround. He declared to me that he would never buy from sears again probably 3 years after they went bankrupt

When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign.

Isn't this.. a good thing? Don't we want Facebook to die and go away?

I want Meta to die for certain. I wouldn't mind Facebook sticking around if it can stop incentivizing the spread of misinformation, stop radicalizing my parents, and stop abusing the mental health of it's users in the name of promoting engagement.

None of these social networks are inherently wrong in that they shouldn't exist as technology, it's just they are all subject to the same perverse incentives that drive them to make their products socially corrosive is the issue.

Don’t those incentives make them inherently wrong?

I don't think so? Like, having a website where you can add your friends and create groups and share things between one another is very nice. It's why so many products have grown up with this being the (supposed) goal. Social networking can be quite fun and useful when it wants to be.

It's just then the company isn't making (enough) money and starts enshittifying itself to do so, almost universally at the expense of the user experience and in some cases, user safety.

It's pretty clear that in this usage, "it's a bad sign" means "for the company". Not "for society as a whole".

Yes, except for Facebook Marketplace.

I prefer Craigslist because it works with email. No need to go to Facebook or have Facebook apps on my phone to talk to potential buyers.

I prefer Facebook because I can do an impromptu background check on someone before trying to meet them with what is sometimes thousands of dollars in goods or cash. Also, at least in my area craigslist is pretty dead, and there are much better deals on FB.

while I agree with your point, I stopped using CL after several people on different occasions tried scamming me. One, I took my stuff and left after I felt I was about to get robbed for my $200 smartphone.

I used to love CL. I used it so many different ways. From getting rid of stuff we didn't need, to older tech stuff I could give away and always have a bevy of people wanting it. Now? It just seems rife with sketchy people trying to scam or outright rob you.

Facebook Marketplace is pretty bad for scamming, too. Scammers figured out that if they just block the person after the transaction concludes they can prevent the victim from leaving a bad review. Facebook sees no problem with this state of affairs.

Yes. And take Instagram, TikTok, SnapChat, and X (Twitter) with it, please.

Sorry for the rant. I’m just a bit salty from seeing the irreversible negative impact all of these have had on society.

With the introduction of AI bots, similar thing will happen to messages send and actives metrics in WhatsApp, IG etc.

It would be nice if the data could be frozen and archived in some fashion. So much (foolishly) moved onto Facebook, letting it just "die and go away" would be like torching a non-insignificant sampling of historical public records.

> When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign.

Citation needed. When companies shift from Monthly to Daily active users for example it's a perfectly valid way to recognize that they want to change the way they think about their north star metrics. At Facebook scale, I think it's rather brave for them to change the most important metrics that they report, showing that they're still open-minded to innovate on that frontier (and they are most certainly on that frontier as few companies operate on that scale). Having worked there in the past I would believe that this isn't just a vanity change, most likely a fundamental change on how their teams will be viewing these metrics and objectives, and may lead to material differences, likely for the better.

Pardon the glib reply, but if this is what Facebook considers "innovation" then I'm with the author of TFA. How does switching to a more obfuscated metric result in a better product or improved user experience?

Having the right metrics is very important in product development. Your team will improve the things you measure.

Daily active people is the de facto north star metric for a lot of companies, and to move forwards and adjust their definition is interesting.

"Obfuscated" is a judgment we're making. I'm assuming internally it's very well-defined. Perhaps they need to better define it outwardly.

I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and if they are indeed doing it as obfuscation, I agree it's not good.

Are we ready for facebook to be dead ? what will happen when the billion of users are suddenly mind free and in need for actual interesting stuff to do ? :p

They might go outside and talk to people in person.

I’m confused by the numbers from which the OP draws his conclusions but anecdotally the sentiment feels on point. I recently logged onto FB to help organize a reunion and FB proved itself to be irreplaceable in that use case. But trying to use FB more casually to check up on old friends, I’m astounded at how ugly and user-hostile the newsfeed is. At least with twitter there’s an option (i.e. the ”Following” tab) to see your friends content exclusively.

But even the ads and junk content farms are far worse on FB. For example, one of my friends works with Caitlin Clark, and I’ll throw a like at her CC photos. For a month now, my feed is flooded with CC content. Not legitimate or interesting or content (such as game coverage or posts from the Indiana Fever account), but dozens of engagement bait posts from pages named like “official Caitlin Clark 4ever fan club” with a handful of followers using AI photos and prompts like “You are really Caitlin Clark Fans sey yes”

I spent 15 min awhile ago just manually hiding and blocking those accounts, with little noticeable effect. What’s the point of a content algorithm if you can’t filter out obvious low effort garbage and expose me to (presumably) the ad-buying official accounts

Facebook is probably the largest free content management system for people who don’t know what that is. It’s also extremely difficult to export that much less migrate that to another site with similar features. Are there even any?

Their user activity metric includes WhatsApp. Isn't that a bit desperate?

I have been wondering when they are going to start turning the screws on WhatsApp users to monetise that platform. Maybe this suggests they are getting closer to doing it.

They already have. "Ask Meta AI" is at the top of your chats list and it can't be turned off.

Huh, doesn't seem to be in mine (in the UK). Maybe a phased rollout.

This piece is written by Ed Zitron who has made an entire writing career out of incorrectly predicting the deaths of Facebook and Twitter.

Just in the past few months,

[0] Facebook is dying

[1] Facebook is dying

[2] Google search is dying

[3] The internet is dying

0 https://www.wheresyoured.at/were-watching-facebook-die/

1 https://www.wheresyoured.at/killingfacebook/

2 https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

3 https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die...

I've had to report on users for previous media companies I have run. Using a daily number will make the overall number seem higher than the monthly total unique users.

Here is an example of one site I ran a long time ago to illustrate:

Average daily unique users: 111,000 Total unique monthly users for the same period: 2MM unique users.

I could see how the interpretation of the average daily might have someone inferring it's x 30 for a month so call it 3.3MM users during the month but the actual monthly total is lower.

I don't think there is anything wrong with reporting daily especially if it's the type of site or app where the user is likely to be there on a daily basis vs say the websites of the past two decades where half the readers only come once and the other half come 2 -10+ times.

> While I don’t really want to draw comparisons between Meta and Enron, there’s an undeniable truth in the adage that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Uh... I feel that's the wrong adage to use and endorse here: It mainly shows up regarding surveillance by an authority that might not have a good reason to even be looking. (As opposed to investor-owners in the company or counterparties on deals.)

> Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.”

-- Snuff by Terry Pratchett

> As a result, Meta is kind of like an absentee parent, occasionally looking up from their phone and muttering “don’t do that” when something obviously awful happens, and even then they’re extremely hesitant to intervene.

I felt so seen that I had to turn around when I read this!

The Facebook feed is over half ads. I rarely use Facebook anymore except for some groups I am active in. Even the groups are overrun by bots. I rarely use Instagram. Facebook is dying a slow death.

I maintain a Facebook account specifically for FB Marketplace, and every time I log in I am shocked at how overly complicated and buggy the UI is. It doesn’t appear anyone cares about users enjoying the experience.

FWIW I deleted it two weeks ago. I do browse Instagram sometimes as a way to keep tabs on artists I like, but I do feel like Facebook itself has run its course. Don't know what that means for Meta as a whole.

FBs company policy is they consider the half life of a social networking service to be about 7 years, and plan accordingly. Coming from that perspective FB is ancient, living on borrowed time

As in 12.5% of social networking services last 21 years?

As in, after the peak in 21 years a service will have only 12.5% of its peak DAUs

> These groups are a stark example of both Meta’s total lack of platform quality control and its total contempt for users.

I can't blame them. I share that contempt.

I’ll bet $100 this is wrong and Meta continues to grow both users (slowly), revenue, and profits over the next five years. Anyone want this action?

> Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.

Why is the author so certain that Facebook Messenger is counted separately, or that it matters? I'm pretty confident that somebody using both Facebook and Facebook Messenger counts as exactly one user for this metric, because that's the definition of the metric: "one or more of [...]".

> What’s confusing is that in its Q4 2023 earnings, Meta reported it had 2.11 billion daily active users across its properties

Uhh... No, they didn't. From the author's own link: "family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 3.14 billion on average for September 2023, an increase of 7% year-over-year."

Umm... No, the numbers suggest nothing like that? They're totally consistent with almost all users of Threads being already monthly active users of some other Meta property. Which is what you'd expect if they already have >3B users.

This might be some of the least competent financial analysis I've ever read, wrapped in a clickbait headline. I'm not sure if the author is completely innumerate, or if they just have trouble with understading complex phrases like "one of".

Yeah, zuck is the worst of the bunch. Funny that some weeks ago there was so much praise in HN for open sourcing ai models and being an engineer at heart. No, buddy. He's evil. Dunno if he was born this way or became this way but behind that robotic facade lies the worst villain of the modern world, along with putins and netanyahus and larry ellisons.

Now, here, in latin america: what must we do to get off whatsapp?

Thanks for the article.

Don't just stand there watching, stab it with a sharp stick...

I think this is the second or third Ed Zitron article I've seen flagged here. HN has a real hateboner for him.

Author guy dares to blame the promotion of "anti-vaxers" by Facebook as the reason for the platform's decline when it was the lockdown and vaccine skeptics that were getting deplatformed left and right and the protestors having their bank accounts frozen that led to an absolute breakdown in trust in social media companies. Your job as a platform is not to wade into any topic and fact-check it. If someone you know is spouting off things you don't like on your feed, you can simply mute them or unfollow them. The antivaxxers were more right than they were wrong. The vaccine didn't stop Covid, natural immunity is not a right wing conspiracy theory, and lockdowns and mask mandates were excessive abuses of liberty and ineffective to boot. But I digress.

Absolutely no one wants a nanny bot to prevent discussion or opinions from being said on their own page. I also don't want to see 15 recommended groups, ads, or pages being injected into my feed while I'm trying to check whose birthday it is and what people got going on lately in their lives.

The reason Instagram is doing pretty decent is that it's a far less noisy social media site. It's mostly photos and video stories.

Also instagram allow you to see your feed in chronological order. And if you reopen it you still can see all posts (except ad) in the same order and on the same place they were.

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