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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

wsj.com

211–220 of 294 posts

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#211

Anyone please explain what is the utility of FB. The newsfeed quality is terrible, with lots of spam and inaccurate content. I stopped using FB a while back, I don't get why a Billion people are still hooked on to this social media trap.

Very useful for events of all scale, especially in countries where services like meetup don't exist.

Groups for making money. Need an instagram bot, find the best cryptocurrency, learn how to sell on amazon, there are groups out there with people that will help.

It's actually becoming more useful for me and people I know, though their feed is focused on attention and not quality as you mentioned.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#212

Anyone please explain what is the utility of FB. The newsfeed quality is terrible, with lots of spam and inaccurate content. I stopped using FB a while back, I don't get why a Billion people are still hooked on to this social media trap.

• All my friends are already there (and many of them are thousands of miles away from me) so it’s a convenient way to stay in touch or just get a passive awareness of what they’re up to. Other services don’t fill that same niche for me.

• It’s an easy way to organise events and participate in small online social groups for common interests or memes or whatever. (It’s a partial replacement for forums and newsletters.)

• My newsfeed is now mainly stuff that’s interesting & relevant to me—hell, even the ads sometimes—because I’m proactive about unfollowing people who post stuff I don’t care about, hiding uninteresting content, and reporting spam.

• Even though I was an active user before, I worked there, and after having met many of the the people running the show, I generally trust that they’re technically competent and care about making something useful & good for people.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#213
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to be fair, "ignoring debt" is kind of an odd way to measure something like "who is sitting on cash"

Think of it not as "what's their net worth" and more as "what's the biggest cheque they could write today that wouldn't bounce."

That would hopefully be a much smaller number, unless they're all storing their entire cash reserves in a single account somewhere.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#214

Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. Their website is almost meaningless to my day-to-day life at this point. I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off. I don't personally know anyone who still uses it regularly as we did back in 2007. I don't know a tactful way to put this... but it seems lik…

One of the reasons Facebook (and Google) are working on bringing internet to third world countries and remote locations is to increase access to new users.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#215
post #142

Some fun Facebook facts from the earnings call/report - Facebook has a massive, $35.5 billion hoard of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. It's the third biggest S&P 500 company by this metric that isn't paying a dividend, after Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. - Facebook's headcount is now at 20,658. That's up 43 percent since last year - Average Revenue Per User Rises 23% to $4.73, Down from 4Q 2016 -…

Maybe I'm just a crazy millennial, but I absolutely loathe the idea of FB / Insta stories. Snapchat going under wouldn't convince me to move over -- I'd just stop using the service and move on to communicating some other way. And Stories aren't the only appeal of SNAP, though I suppose they are a large producer of revenue. HN just loves to hate SNAP, and I can't really fathom why. I can get being skeptical but every…

Used it starting in 2013, uninstalled after they started filling it with crap.

For me its killer feature was how easy it was to send videos. But it's not worth all the advertising they're stuffing into the app.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#217
post #95
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that interesting? Companies should hire more people until marginal profit per new hire is $0 to maximize profits. And that number says nothing about marginal profits.

Companies don't try to maximize total profit, but rather return on invested capital.

This can't possibly be right. Why would you forego making extra money to keep your statistical average up? What are you getting from the average number?

Your theory predicts that price discrimination can't happen because companies would rather sell M widgets at X price than sell M widgets at X price and N widgets at Y price.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and stan…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and stan…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#220

Some fun Facebook facts from the earnings call/report - Facebook has a massive, $35.5 billion hoard of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. It's the third biggest S&P 500 company by this metric that isn't paying a dividend, after Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. - Facebook's headcount is now at 20,658. That's up 43 percent since last year - Average Revenue Per User Rises 23% to $4.73, Down from 4Q 2016 -…

> Monthly Active Users 2.0 Billion

Just as a reminder of how insane this is, the population of the entire world is 7.5 billion.

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