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Comment by engendered | Hacker News Reader

Now, I would say Twitter’s users are worth 2-5x as much as the average FB users because the product is just much more “upscale.”

What a strange claim.

As an aside, recently the Facebook app (at least on Android) embedded its own web browser, so instead of going to Chrome when you followed a web link, it would open in the Facebook app. You can reconfigure it to use the external browser, but the power of defaults mean many won't.

This seemingly small change has a big impact because if you open a link you want to share, the Facebook app restricts you to sharing it via your wall, versus the traditional Android app where you might share it over hangouts, Google+, email, etc.

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That small change was enough to get me to uninstall the Facebook app on my Nexus 5, and while I imagine there are others that felt that way, it certainly didn't manifest itself in their numbers, leading to some cognitive dissonance on my part.

The incredible staying power of default behavior being what it is, I'm sure these continued attempts to grow FB's mobile control on Android will be ignored/accepted...but it makes me wonder at what point a normal user will say "enough is enough." What's the threshold for abusive default behavior in an app? Or a network/platform, for that matter?

When the annoyance outweighs the benefit.

The change of the internal browser broke many websites using Facebook oauth, how? You start the authentication flow on chrome and end up on Facebook's internal browser without the cookies...

Yeah that is a weird claim. Most twitter user's don't even tweet. Twitter has serious engagement issue with new users.

Even further, most of Twitters users don't have accounts, which is why they like to annoy people with the sign-up prompt ("Not on Twitter?") just to view a user's page.

It's not a strange claim. It's a ridiculous claim[1].

It says a lot about this market when a prominent angel investor would publicly make such a foolish claim and follow it with "would be interested in seeing some demographic studies on this if anyone has them" when this information is readily available to anybody who knows how to use Google and has 30 seconds.

[1] http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/intelligence/2014/0...

'Worth' in this context measures the potential for monetization, not actual current revenue like the ARPU graph shows.

Calacanis' words:

> Now, I would say Twitter’s users are worth 2-5x as much as the average FB users because the product is just much more “upscale.” It draws the more elite, powerful, and intelligent folks (overall).

There's no measurement here. There's no analysis of potential monetization. All we have is a lazy, uneducated argument that a summer analyst at an IB wouldn't get away with.

You appear to be (deliberately?) misreading Calacanis' claim, as made particularly clear when he says he doesn't have demographics. So the data he's discussing obviously isn't a google away.

Thank you... for reading!

1. I'm not an analyst and everyone knows that -- I'm an angel investor and former journalist.

2. It's not a lazy or uneducated argument -- it's an opinion... that's why it says "I would say..." before the claim.

3. The opinion is based on the face that the FB = "all users" but Twitter = a subset of all users. That subset contains the most powerful politicians, CEOs, technologists, finance, art, celebrities, journalists and writers -- who are addicted to the platform. Those same folks are not spending their time on FB in any major way. Those folks are massively influential, thus my opinion.

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