Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#41

Post by pbalau »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

The biggest misconception is that adverisers track or even know anything about you. They simply ask fb to show this ad to such and such people and they pay fb to do so. This is the greatest asset of both fb and google, they know who and what you like, the moment they give this info away to 3rd parties, they become obsolete.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#42

Post by scarface74 »

Without going to deeply into the content of the article, just because a company has “peaked” doesn’t mean it’s “failing”. IBM peaked decades ago, but still has a somewhat successful business. Microsoft peaked in terms of influence probably a decade ago, but is still important. I doubt that Facebook will go the way of MySpace or Yahoo anytime soon.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#43

Post by oldcynic »

utellme wrote: post #23
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

It's correct and incorrect at the same time. Social networks like cars, they give value when it's being used. To sell ads social networks must be sure that someone scrolling feeds. No usage - no gains. Even with huge amount of users data nothing guaranteed. You can't sell same stuff periodically, big data has value only when they are actual.

If, as seems to be the case, Instagram is the popular destination to migrate to will Facebook be too bothered by a drop in Facebook numbers? Sure some will go elsewhere, and block enough FB tracking to disappear entirely.

Instagram, of course, will allow Facebook to keep tracking and advertising to people just fine. No doubt they've already linked Instagram and FB identities wherever possible.

So all that remains is to see if ads work as profitably on that platform. If they don't there will no doubt be an Instagram redesign for that.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#44

Post by scarface74 »

randomsearch wrote: post #24
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

What if those two billion accounts are bullshit? Has anyone actually done a sample of Facebook users (or humans) to check those stats? I do not believe them, based on my personal experience and the very large number of businesses and bots on facebook. Given the massive incentive for Facebook to lie, we’d be naive to take their numbers for granted. If they provided really fine-grained data, we could easily verify thei…

Another perspective, how many users are actually dead?

http://www.theloop.ca/dead-facebook-users-will-soon-outnumbe...

EDIT:

Well they do measure active daily users but I still think the article above is interesting.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#45

Post by ssivark »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

Are there ways to use Facebook data to serve advertisements outside the Facebook platform? I was under the impression that FB customers (advertisers) can only serve ads on Facebook i.e. Facebook does not display ads on other websites (unlike Google), and it does not pass on user data which advertisers can use to serve ads on other platforms/websites.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#46

Post by bsbechtel »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

Your argument is reasonable, until a better way to market to individuals comes along. It's not about the size of Facebook's user base or their reach on the web, it's how cheaply and effectively brands can sell their product by paying Facebook to help them do that. Once someone else can do it better, that's when it's game over for Facebook.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#47

Post by sfilargi »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #40

Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. F…

Facebook, the company != Facebook, the platform

I think the arguments in the article, at least most of them, are focusing on the platform.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#48

Post by zombieprocesses »

Firstly, when did prediction and conjecture become news? Would be great if the news industry stuck to actual news.

Secondly, lets hope so and lets hope that will finally put an end to the crazy amount of hit pieces by the media on facebook and social media. Has anyone older ever witnessed anything like this before? The media, both in the US and the UK, has been obsessed with facebook and social media for past year. It's like someone declared war on facebook/social media and ordered the entire industry to attack them. The only thing I can compare it to is north korea's media's rabid attacks on SK, US and Japan.

Anyone else "entertained/exasperated" by the media blitz against facebook.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#49

Post by dang »

zombieprocesses wrote: post #48

Firstly, when did prediction and conjecture become news? Would be great if the news industry stuck to actual news. Secondly, lets hope so and lets hope that will finally put an end to the crazy amount of hit pieces by the media on facebook and social media. Has anyone older ever witnessed anything like this before? The media, both in the US and the UK, has been obsessed with facebook and social media for past year. I…

Articles don't have to be news in the narrow sense to do well here. They need to gratify intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#50

Post by zombieprocesses »

dang wrote: post #49
zombieprocesses wrote: post #48

Firstly, when did prediction and conjecture become news? Would be great if the news industry stuck to actual news. Secondly, lets hope so and lets hope that will finally put an end to the crazy amount of hit pieces by the media on facebook and social media. Has anyone older ever witnessed anything like this before? The media, both in the US and the UK, has been obsessed with facebook and social media for past year. I…

Articles don't have to be news in the narrow sense to do well here. They need to gratify intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wasn't talking about hacker news. I was talking about the bbc.

I was asking why the bbc published a non-news story, not why it was here. I was just saying the news industry should publish news rather than conjecture or predictions.

Post reply on HN