The claim that Instagram lost a quarter of its users isn’t supported by the data | Hacker News Reader

The claim that Instagram lost a quarter of its users isn’t supported by the data

qz.com

41 pointsdanso13 comments

You can pretty much stop reading any article once you hit 'stock dropped because', save maybe earnings announcements. Cause and effect of a 2% move in a stock as volatile as FB is just silly.

It's funny because cause and effect is one of the reasons he uses to call the claim "bogus".

The claim isn't supported by common sense either. I doubt 25% of users even heard about the new ToS, let alone acted on it.

I haven't even heard of Instagram before their change in ToS.

Seriously??? That's very surprising that someone who reads hn hasn't heard of something as popular as instagram. It was a big deal on hn when fb bought them. even a quick search on hn shows over four thousand results. I don't buy it unless you're new to hn or the internet.

The person you are replying to has 12 karma. They may very well be a rare browser of HN and tech-sites in general.

I've only been reading HN constantly in the last two months and some sub reddits like /r/linux /r/programming and /r/cpp.

To me HN is just a ripoff of Reddit.

Absolutely. The people who'd get up in arms about the whole thing likely weren't users in the first place. I told a non-HN-reading, Instagram-using friend (i.e. an average American college student) about the ToS fiasco the other day; said friend frankly did not care a bit, and wondered why anyone would.

What is up with this website? I scrolled around a bit and all of a sudden I'm on a new article with no sign of the original. Terrible user experience.

Also I had to pause Ghostery to get the article to load at all.

I totally agree. I would add that appData stats are very inaccurate especially when you look at a short time window and daily stats.

1 - Usage is defined by how often an app accesses user data using a token. This does not necessarily mean the user used the site, at least not in the last 60 days (user tokens need to be renewed every 60 days).

2 - Facebook often lags a few days when reporting daily user activity and is somehow inconsistent of when the data is reported. (their open graph reporting seems to be more up to date/realtime ) When that happens appData seems to sometime report the same data point for a few days. You can actually see on the graph that the traffic is totally flat for a few days which is unlikely.

This website never seems to load for me in Firefox.

You probably have an add-on blocking something that the web site requires.

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