Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US • Hacker News Board

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#41

Post by orbifold » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #36

InclinedPlane wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was m…

The social graph and the social connectivity is huge. You're asking people - 2.2bn of them - to incur the overhead of another platform to check, which they're not going to do unless all of their friends are already on that platform in the first place. And those people (and the advertisers that pay for the servers, the hosting) are not going to turn up unless ... well you get the picture. And the reason why advertiser…

I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for example Discord or Slack can exist even though they have some overlap with Facebooks functionality (mostly messenger and groups). I don't really know what the value of facebook is to most people, I've heard that it has groups for almost everything, but most other features I would guess are easily "unbundled" as Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat are evidence for.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#42

Post by hyperbovine » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #35

Outpox wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, ditched Chrome for Firefox and Chromium, and Google Search for DDG. Altough I don't see how I could stop using Android, maps, youtube and gmail :-/

I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better. You should ditch Chromium as well.

> Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better.

The last company to pour significant resources into maps was Apple and they have essentially given up. If the most valuable company ever created cannot defeat Maps, nothing will. Including OSM. There was a story on here a few months ago called Google Maps’ Moat. Give it a read. Maps is not going anywhere.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#43

Post by icantdrive55 » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:03 AM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #30

cx_in_the_chat wrote: post #11

I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new, cleaner and with less spam will be available to migrate to. Of course after some period of time the new service will also end up filled with memes and ads and the cycle will continue once again.

The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between 175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m. Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs. There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building a slightly better mousetrap is not goin…

I don't think the comparison is tired. It's the psychology of of not using the product that interests me.

My internal dialogue, and I imagine others:

1. Oh--you are not just a casual user of Facebook?

2. Wow--you're fishing for compliments, and posing in every picture.

3. You're listing way too much information about yourself?

4. You have way too many friends.

5. You are not the person I thought. I don't want to know you, and I don't feel sorry for you in that he's/she's probally lonely, and has no self-esteem. You're coming across as just irritating/tedious. I better delete my account again. Will this time be the last?

(I do think the next big thing will be a site kinda like FB, but people will be given a percentage of the ad revenue. They will pose. They will brag. But they will justify, with "Oh--it pays me." And they will continue being irritating, but have a monetary reason to explain their posturing.)

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#44

Post by jimmies » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:05 AM UTC

cx_in_the_chat wrote: post #11

I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new, cleaner and with less spam will be available to migrate to. Of course after some period of time the new service will also end up filled with memes and ads and the cycle will continue once again.

I think there is definitely a potential for such a competition. And people, such as diaspora and mastodon lately, have attempted so but failed. I have put some thoughts into it, and I think the reason diaspora failed is because they focused too much on federation and technology. The core issue of Facebook isn't that it is not federated. It is that it is too greedy, no one trusts it. I'd think if someone like Jimmy Wales created a non-profit social network with clear ethical guidelines, I'd be very much interested to join and donate to.

Trying to make something decentralized for the crazy cost of deployment difficulties seems like one unworthy tradeoff.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#45

Post by fwdpropaganda » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:11 AM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #42

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better. You should ditch Chromium as well.

> Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better. The last company to pour significant resources into maps was Apple and they have essentially given up. If the most valuable company ever created cannot defeat Maps, nothing will. Including OSM. There was a story on here a few months ago called Google Maps’ Moat. Give it a read. Maps is not going anywhere.

I read that article back then, I just don't agree with it ^.

With the rise of self-driving cars, maps will become a non-issue. All the companies that nail self-driving cars, and there will be several, will over time have a maps that is better than Google's today.

^ I mean, I do agree it's a moat, it just had the unusual property that the path to bring it down is pretty clear.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#46

Post by mrmondo » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:12 AM UTC

vuldin wrote: post #7

Anecdotally, I haven't been on Facebook in months. In spite of that, I wouldn't be surprised if my account is counted somehow in the daily usage for some of those days just because of the extent to which their services have extended throughout many other websites. I've joined, canceled, then joined again, but never really used the site to any large extent. It is a very unnatural (yet at times necessary) way to commun…

I moved my account to Ireland (in a somewhat improperly researched attempt to force them to delete my data due to Ireland’s data retention laws), waited a month or so then scripted deletion of all the images and posts on the account, changed all details and disconnected it from everyone and everything, then waited a week or so ‘deleted’ the account.

That was about 5 years ago (and it was a great life decision IMO) but - people say they still see me popping up on their feeds with my (fake) birthdate, memories (which I was untagged or had privacy settings disallowing me to be tagged in) and other weird things.

I’ve been careful not to mistakenly log in once which I fear my bring the account back from the dead and I’ve also kept an eye to make sure there’s no identity theft / fake account going on.

I don’t trust that company one bit, I’m glad I left but I don’t for one second believe my data’s actually been deleted.

While I truly hope something open source and decentralised gets momentum, I still truly love twitter - I get a lot out of it and I’ve met and networked with a lot of great people through Twitter.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#47

Post by oblio » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:15 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #33

kristianc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between 175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m. Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs. There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building a slightly better mousetrap is not goin…

Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was m…

> All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits

Yes, cause we all know that in tech, having a superior product guarantees success :)

On top of that, let's say you're right. The product has to be radically better, people won't move for 5-10-20% better.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#48

Post by InclinedPlane » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:28 AM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #36

InclinedPlane wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was m…

The social graph and the social connectivity is huge. You're asking people - 2.2bn of them - to incur the overhead of another platform to check, which they're not going to do unless all of their friends are already on that platform in the first place. And those people (and the advertisers that pay for the servers, the hosting) are not going to turn up unless ... well you get the picture. And the reason why advertiser…

By your logic facebook shouldn't be popular since it was too difficult to start.

The thing is, you absolutely 100% don't need a competitor to spring forth fully formed with 2.2 billion active users on day 1 as Athena leaping out of the head of Zeus. You just need enough of a community to exist for it to be viable on its own (and there are already many not-facebook killers who are at that level). What's missing right now is a compelling experience that fully competes with facebook. Everything else out there is either in a smaller niche such as instagram (which is owned by facebook) or snapchat or what-have-you or doesn't cover all of facebook's core featureset or is a worse experience or is run incompetently in some way (/cough/twitter/cough/).

The way that these switchovers happen is early adopters start doing lots of cool shit somewhere else and then a subset of people start following them there. You act like it's an onerous thing to do so, but this is meat and potatoes run of the mill shit for digital natives in the 21st century. Almost no one on planet Earth has a single social media account. If you have one you likely have several. Facebook, instagram, tumblr, twitter, snapchat, slack, discord, whatsapp, groupme, hangouts, AND SO ON. You will use whatever means is most convenient for keeping up with your friends, that's just the nature of life today. If your best friend starts using "something else" a lot then you are going to be incentivized to check it out. If you're young you are even more likely to invest the time and energy in exploring new platforms, if you're older it may take more effort but it's just a matter of how much. If some other platform is truly more compelling than facebook then people are going to engage with each other more there, which will encourage more people to check it out, more people to adopt it as one of their primary modes of keeping in touch, and a preference cascade to start.

What all this means is that facebook's marketshare of the social media landscape is actually surprisingly tenuous. A truly superior competitor could unravel their entire market in a single year, perhaps. That may be unlikely (it's hard to say without specific examples) but it's the sort of thing that is well within the realm of possibility.

Remember, people thought that myspace, blogger, flickr, etc. all had nearly unassailable locks on their respective marketshares too, but those crumbled almost overnight. Given that a lot of people use facebook right now who are nevertheless very dissatisfied with the experience of using facebook I think the situation is ripe for a turnover.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#49

Post by kristianc » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #41

kristianc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social graph and the social connectivity is huge. You're asking people - 2.2bn of them - to incur the overhead of another platform to check, which they're not going to do unless all of their friends are already on that platform in the first place. And those people (and the advertisers that pay for the servers, the hosting) are not going to turn up unless ... well you get the picture. And the reason why advertiser…

I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for example Discord or Slack can exist even though they have some overlap with Facebooks functionality (mostly messenger and groups). I don't really know what the value of facebook is to most people, I've heard that it has groups for almost everything, but most other featu…

Facebook's value is in the 2.2bn figure - its value to advertisers is in its identity graph. To displace FB as FB did MySpace, you need some way of replicating that.

The value of that identity graph to advertisers (which is how you keep the lights on) works in exponents - if you have 10% of Facebook's graph, you don't have something that is 10% as useful, you have something that is 1% as useful.

You can get some of the way by unbundling FB's core feature set and innovating on a particular feature, but your upper limit for that is probably a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people, not a Facebook killer.

Slack's moat is that it is socially unacceptable to use Facebook at work, which is a nice one to have but sets up an entirely new set of challenges trying to get people to adopt it outside. Discord, similarly is almost entirely limited to gaming. Number of PC Gamers worldwide total tops out at about 800m.

WeChat is a special case: Owned by Tencent, operates in a market that Facebook is completely locked out of, and operating on a completely different set of cultural assumptions.

Re: Daily Facebook users drops for the first time in US

#50

Post by test1235 » Mon, Feb 05, 2018, 11:07 AM UTC

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #35

Outpox wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, ditched Chrome for Firefox and Chromium, and Google Search for DDG. Altough I don't see how I could stop using Android, maps, youtube and gmail :-/

I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better. You should ditch Chromium as well.

if you were really wanting to move away from gmail, I'd recommend a paid-for service, like fastmail