Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Isn't a basketball game a competition?
Are there any leagues with just two basketball teams?
I'm not aware for basketball, but e.g. the Boat Race has only two teams, and is very much competitive.
Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
271–280 of 294 posts
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#272Anyone 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.
It's still the only decent free-at-point-of-use way to do event organization. That connects up with: it's easy to publish which events you're going to, without interrupting people to tell them. And it's nicely integrated with individual-to-individual messaging, and photo-sharing afterwards.
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what about FB replicating all of SNAP and overtaking them rapidly, taking the advertising growth market share they would of had otherwise? Time to breakup FB?
That just means SNAP sucked if it was that easy for Facebook to entice users. They in no way forced people to use their SNAP replica or charged less than SNAP did.
Their snapchat replica has less intrusive ads, perhaps because they subsidize it with the rest of their business.
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#274Where are all the "analysts" from hn claiming fb wouldn't make it? Thats right. They left. Moral of the story is.... Never believe the consensus that is hacker news. Dare i say inverse Edit: why the downvotes? Is it because my networth is 23 mil?
Sure, I called it wrong. I thought adblocking would grow more than it has, because it makes life so much better, and I thought Facebook would never be able to get good ad performance. I still don't really understand how Facebook manages to get good ad performance - I don't know who it is who's clicking on Facebook ads, it certainly isn't me - but evidently they do.
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't loathe Snap, but I do dislike their decision for not supporting Windows 10. Microsoft even offered a cash incentive to Snap for creating an app and Snap still outright said no. Surely no matter how much you hate a platform, if you're being offered an incentive, you would say yes?
There's a huge opportunity cost in putting some of your developers on creating an app for a niche market. Snap probably felt that Microsoft's incentive didn't cover that cost.
Not to mention maintenance and upkeep.
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another crazy millennial here. I don't have an Instagram either, and frankly I don't want one. As for why HN hates Snap, I'm not exactly sure. Is it because the average user on HN is older and isn't targeted by Snap? Maybe it's seen as a frivolous plaything? No matter what the reason, there's definitely a lot of hate for Snap on this site.
It's because people at SNAP made a lot of money and {HN_user} did not.
Downvoting doesn't make it false.
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#277Maybe 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…
> Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. It's coming. Every time I open the FB app, I see mainly "Sponsored" items or "Suggested" items (most of them videos) and fewer and fewer updates from friends. As a result, my usage of FB has declined by about 80% in the past month or two, and it's only going to get worse. My wife recently uninstalled the app.
> It's coming.
I take it you plan to short the stock, to take advantage of what you know that the market doesn't?
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#278One thing I just can't get my head around... who is clicking on online ads? I click on maybe one a year, and probably less than that, and I don't think I've ever bought anything based on what I was shown in an online ad. Perhaps I'm an outlier, but considering the popularity of ad blockers I don't think my lack of engagement with online ads is that extreme.
You're an outlier. On HN we all are I guess. Most people don't or can't really distinguish between ads and real content and of course the quality of those ads is increasing - with all the information available to Facebook and other companies ads start to become actually relevant. Unless it's one for the product you just bought an Amazon and now see everywhere.
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the Microsoft Office anti-trust rulings should be instructive here. Their monopoly is effectively broken in the sense that you can read Office documents in other software, but that hasn't really killed their business; though it did make the transition to Google Docs easier for me.
I'd argue that the monopoly action against Microsoft was an unqualified success, even if the consent decree ended up being weak tea. Before the antitrust action Microsoft was knifing the baby and cutting off the air supply whenever anyone threatened their hegemony. Afterwards, a million little inroads were made that ended up making their monopoly irrelevant. In fact the continued existence of Apple is a product of th…
The anti-trust action certainly changed Microsoft, and Microsoft has lost it's Monopoly power, I'm just not sure how closely those two are linked and what the lessons to learn are.
I feel like the thing that really hurt Microsoft the most was the web, which made the OS far less relevant and has largely been their downfall. The failure of the mobile web seems to be largely why mobile OSs do matter.
Clearly, without the anti-trust ruling Microsoft was doing all it could to make the web proprietary, but the web wasn't pre-ordained to happen, and if it hadn't we might still be locked into Windows, regardless of what the anti-trust authorities did. Or maybe we'd be largely where we are today with the web having never happened and the focus shifting to mobile anyway.
And to look at Office, I feel like the real downfall of the network effects of Office was when PDF readers became ubiquitous and embedded in browsers, so that you could export a PDF from whatever editor you were using and send it to everyone and expect that they could read it.
Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another crazy millennial here. I don't have an Instagram either, and frankly I don't want one. As for why HN hates Snap, I'm not exactly sure. Is it because the average user on HN is older and isn't targeted by Snap? Maybe it's seen as a frivolous plaything? No matter what the reason, there's definitely a lot of hate for Snap on this site.
40 year old, here. I mainly use snap to play with filters with my young kids. I'd never use it for communication because the UX is horrendous. A while ago, there was an odd corporate push to try to use snap internally (was there some marketing push?). And, all of my co-workers spent lots of time brainstorming how to even use snap effectively. The swarms of 13 years olds that roam through my house only ever seem to us…
Discord is growing like crazy and their voice chat is easy to use and reliable for groups