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Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

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Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#201

Post by johannes1234321 »

kurtisc wrote: post #126
pavlov wrote: post #44

Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month,…

-Facebook is a closed system -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it If both of these are true, the typical person commenting about its evils will have a poor idea of how it's actually used. So someone telling me it's damaging my mental health because of social gratification - I haven't posted anything real-life in years - falls about as flat as someone saying Reddit is a website for sh…

> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it

Please define "strongly".

I know many people who really dislike Facebook, but still use it for business reasons or since their parents, best friend, local community, ... use it to share information or scheduling events.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#202

Post by johannes1234321 »

josteink wrote: post #174
pavlov wrote: post #44

Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month,…

> Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop Maybe. For me personally I’m just not interested. To me it seems like yet another “me too” feature which Facebook has copied from instagram or Snapchat or whoever did it first. Not to mention I don’t care about this feature on the other platforms either. The feature itself just looks like a desperate at…

That's nice, but the discussion was on business value. And for a business value individual opinions from tech-savy people are not that relevant.

Not that I would trust Facebook's numbers considering the amount of lying and shady practices they employ.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#203

Post by dep_b »

Plasmoid2000ad wrote: post #190
pavlov wrote: post #44

Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month,…

Seems like a problem that can be seen quite generally as well. e.g. Movie X is a flop, because it's opening weekend in US is disappointing. Goes on do excellently Worldwide, especially outside opening weekend. Search engine X is a flop, because it's market share in US is negligible. Goes on to have solid user number in China and Germany. It's probably not helped by the strong desire to link future performance predict…

Except that Facebook initially had a huge user- and mindshare in the US before crossing over to other countries, so it's expected that Facebook fatigue sets in first in the US before it starts affecting other countries.

In Europe it's the same story for Facebook. I remember Facebook predecessors that had the same "well my parents are on it now and the same idiots keep posting bullshit over and over so I just lurk now and then" moment and none of them is really important anymore. I mean. MySpace is doing better than all of the others, which is about as good as Yahoo!.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#204

Post by mcintyre1994 »

hanniabu wrote: post #189
tossaccount123 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Where does the growth come next though I'm amazed they haven't taken a crack at Google with a search engine in their app. Imagine how valuable combining Facebook's data with the user intent of search? A lot of users would never leave the facebook app on their phone if they could get a search engine that's halfway decent. It seems like they are leaving a ton of money on the table as it stands If its too much to devel…

At that rate, they'd be better off going all in with a Chromebook-like product with Facebook OS and a fully encompassed ecosystem.

They tried that with mobile already, and with 93% of ad revenue from mobile I'm guessing laptops are pretty irrelevant to them even if they can make one sell with their own OS.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#205

Post by chillee »

csomar wrote: post #191
pavlov wrote: post #44

Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month,…

> "There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily." Duh. Facebook starts running the videos as soon as you open the Facebook page. If you open a video and watch it, it'll start a new one in 3-4 seconds. Unless they remove these practices, it is not clear how much of that 20 minutes is due to their aggressive behavior.

I believe Watch is their separate page for video, and not the autoplay videos that show up as you scroll down your feed. It'd seem pretty surprising that consumers would repeatedly click on that page and get tricked into watching a significant amount of content.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#206

Post by randomsearch »

yoz-y wrote: post #197
randomsearch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of things do they love about Facebook? I’d be interested to hear.

First thing that comes to mind is Facebook Events, people around me use it all the time to organise birthday parties, moving, weddings and whatnot. Multiple people said to me that they "no longer use facebook but still use Facebook Events because it is great". Another example would be Messenger, at least here it is the only place where really almost everybody is, Whatsapp had that place before but that is Facebook to…

The events is an interesting one, there aren't many alternatives if you're setting up a private event and IIRC the facebook event experience was good.

I also think "there's nothing wrong with messenger", I don't finds its experience loathsome like Facebook. That said, I also don't "love" it any more than Signal, Whatsapp, iMessage etc. It'll be really interesting to see how the unification of messaging works out - they could "Facebookify " it, I wonder how people will respond if there's a stronger focus on ads.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#207

Post by Angostura »

ilovecaching wrote: post #133
jseliger wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, it appears that there is a media scapegoating crisis, not an actual crisis, at or with Facebook: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

I’ve been saying it forever. The media hates new forms of advertising because that was their missed opportunity. The media had gotten out of control regardless. They are about as factual and unbiased as a state run news organization at this point. Hopefully it will be possible to have reasonable discourse on HN again instead of the constant flaming.

So, the linked article is simply flaming the media, as far as I can see.

The media has always put dominant companies under substantial scrutiny, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Equifax have all had their fair share of tough stories over the years.

I see nothing particularly unfair in the way that Facebook's travails have been reported. Rather than talking in generalities, perhaps you could give some specific examples of stories that have treated Facebook unfairly.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#208

Post by gammateam »

adpirz wrote: post #12

It’s hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don’t care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Mark’s hypothesis that privacy is no longer a social norm we value seems to be proven more and more right. Despite all the scandals and hearings, their DAU are more than the population of the largest countries on Earth. Short of serious legislation, what slows t…

Facebooks earnings are because advertisers spend more

Every court case, summons and data breach are instructions manuals and tools for advertisers. These are public and much more useful than an outdated Udemy course selling shovels.

Advertisers will continue spending more after each scandal, and they will be better targeted ads, making Facebook have more utility to users at the same time. Any proposed legislation ought to make advertisers spend more before the gravy train is over.

Facebooks share price increase cant be seen as validation from its profile creators which are the product. These numbers didnt jump they offset and stay the same.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#209

Post by csomar »

chillee wrote: post #205
csomar wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily." Duh. Facebook starts running the videos as soon as you open the Facebook page. If you open a video and watch it, it'll start a new one in 3-4 seconds. Unless they remove these practices, it is not clear how much of that 20 minutes is due to their aggressive behavior.

I believe Watch is their separate page for video, and not the autoplay videos that show up as you scroll down your feed. It'd seem pretty surprising that consumers would repeatedly click on that page and get tricked into watching a significant amount of content.

If you try to click (because by default it should be "pause") the video the pause it, it'll upsize it and open Facebook watch. Just another trick to annoy you.
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