Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

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.”

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)

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?

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