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Comment by barrenko | Hacker News Reader

You could say the same thing about Facebook...

You mean the social network that is currently dying the same death as countless other platforms before it, just on a larger scale?

Maybe some are too young to remember the great migrations from/to MySpace, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Skype, local alternatives like StudiVZ, ..., where people used to keep in contact with friends. Facebook was just the latest and largest platform where people kept in touch and expressed themselves in some way. People adding each other on Facebook before others to keep in touch hasn't been a thing for 5 years. It's Instagram, Discord, and WhatsApp nowadays depending on your social circle (two of which Meta wisely bought because they saw the writing on the wall).

If I open Facebook nowadays, then out of ~130 people I used to keep in touch with through that platform, pretty much nobody is still doing anything on there. The only sign of life will be some people showing as online because they've the facebook app installed to use direct messaging.

No, people easily migrate between these platforms. All it takes is put your new handles (discord ID/phone number/etc) as a sticky so people know where to find you. And especially children will always use whichever platform their parents don't.

Small caveat: This is a German perspective. I don't doubt there's some countries where Facebook is still doing well.

Last time I checked 99% of normies are still happily scrolling FB and Instagram

FB in particular is becoming deader and deader every month, and it's only a matter of time before something else comes along that sucks their attention away.

The beauty of Meta is that they can just fake engagement metrics. Not defending them, just knowing that they do

>No, people easily migrate between these platforms.

No? It's rare for these platforms to survive, the one that was closest to challenging Facebook was kneecapped by the US government.

The time between the founding of MySpace to Facebook was a little over a year. Instagram has been the largest social network for close to decade now, and it's not like others haven't been trying. META is up 600% over last 3 years. I'm really question your definition of the word "dying"

meta made over 60 billion dollars last year. The idea that it is dying is lunacy

People say you're wrong but I agree. Facebook is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man between you and your friends/family. Instead of just talking to your family normally, like over the phone, now you have to talk to them in between mountains of Sponsored Content and AI-generated propaganda. It provides no productive value to the world except for making the world more annoying and making people more isolated from one another.

When you realize this, you realize that a lot of other supposedly valuable tech companies operate in the exact same way. Worrying that our parents' retirement depends heavily on their valuations!

> Worrying that our parents' retirement depends heavily on their valuations!

Maybe you should short the stock to hedge your parents' retirement :)

FB has network effects (your friends/neighbors/etc are there). When I use ChatGPT, I don't care whether anyone else uses it as well.

Not at all, because it is not easy to replicate and move its social graph

I mean, technically no, FB has a network effect of the other people on it either being the people you want to talk to, or the people you want to advertise to.

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