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Instagram Is Facebook Now

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Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#381
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) and Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. In terms of the rebrand they committed $10+ billion a year to VR development and promoted the head of VR to CTO so it's a pretty bold PR stunt.

> Zuck doesn't own 50+% of the company (just the voting rights) You're right to clarify, but it's “Just” the only thing that matters. > Oculus, FB Marketplace, FB Groups and WhatsApp are all very relevant market leaders. Oculus is a “market leader” in a really narrow niche. Is FB marketplace really a market leader? I didn't even know that was the thing actually (it may very well depends on your country). FB groups is…

The ~$350 billion that those extra shares would be worth don't matter?

FB marketplace has a billion monthly active users. That's more than Amazon and eBay combined. Anecdotally I know people who hated FB before it was cool that have returned because of Marketplace. The feed, Facebook video, birthdays, events and a host of other features are still significantly used.

VR is a rapidly growing narrow niche which Oculus is dominating. I am a Signal fan and I actively push my contacts to use it but I don't see it surpassing WhatsApp anytime soon.

Disliking FB/Meta ≠ FB/Meta being irrelevant. There are billions of users left to come online and odds are that Meta products will be amongst the first they use.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of LINE. What makes it different?

Asian messenger apps like LINE are really more of an “everything app.” I use LINE to chat with everyone. In Taiwan it’s a given that that anyone you meet will have LINE. Businesses have a special business line account that staff can use. You can book your hotel, vet apt, reserve a table, etc because every business has LINE. You can pay for things with it by letting someone scan your code or or pay for things online b…

That's fascinating. So if it's compromised, _everything_ is compromised?

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#383

I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp. Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all. Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It…

This is just your perception/opinion (I have a similar one). The company Financial Results and statements (facts) are showing something different. PS: They are awful for me. I miss the old Internet days.

I’m referring to where the puck. Plenty of cash left in the Facebook cow, but its decline is terminal.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#384
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the real root cause of the rot is that the people making the decisions no longer have the long term trajectory of the product at heart.

I guess this is self-inflicted. Most companies pay shit so people milk them out for experience/achievements to then jump ship to the next one. Maybe if you give zero incentive for your people to jump ship they'd be more likely to stay and actually care about the company's long-term?

> Most companies pay shit so people milk them out for experience/achievements to then jump ship to the next one.

I wouldn't count FAANG pay as "shit".... and yet here we are.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#385
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the real root cause of the rot is that the people making the decisions no longer have the long term trajectory of the product at heart.

I guess this is self-inflicted. Most companies pay shit so people milk them out for experience/achievements to then jump ship to the next one. Maybe if you give zero incentive for your people to jump ship they'd be more likely to stay and actually care about the company's long-term?

Raising pay in the lower pay brackets will increase loyalty (but not enough to compensate for otherwise poor treatment) but once you get above 'comfortably well-off' pay grades, increasing compensation might also be necessary but it's not the answer, and all of the problems with product design here stem from the top. The only real answer is to hire people who drink the kool-aid, who genuinely believe in what you're doing for its own sake and aren't just there to pump their own careers and then cash out.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delete it instead. I’ve been deleting any but text medias and I just can’t believe how much time people spend on it. For reference, Instagram lets you see how much time you spend on the app, daily and on average. I was shocked when I found out I averaged almost 18 minutes per day. I just didn’t feel like I spent so much time on it, but then you start realizing all of the pauses and voids it filled here and there and…

Wow 18 minutes per day? How did you recover from this shock?

I understand the sarcasm, but the point i was trying to make is that I would've never thought I was looking at it for more than 5.

I thought or felt I was just checking it few times, not even everyday, and yet that wasn't true.

So imho averaging 18 minutes on something you're actively trying to limit or avoid is quite telling of the time sink it is without you realizing.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that doesn't stop growing, is cancer. The focus on growth is disgusting and cancer for the real world, the environment as well as society

[flagged]

Probably because it was a generic ideological comment, pointing further in the direction of generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You broke more than one of them here—I'm sure unintentionally.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#388
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. G…

The only thing that doesn't stop growing, is cancer. The focus on growth is disgusting and cancer for the real world, the environment as well as society

Please don't post generic ideological comments or flamebait to HN. It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which countries in Asia still count it as the most popular messaging app? China is on WeeChat, Korea has KakaoTalk and LINE is everywhere else. It is pretty amazing that Meta had three messaging apps and none of them are close to something like LINE in terms of ubiquity or utility.

Literally all of India uses WhatsApp. Non-WhatsApp users (exclusively Signal/Telegram/Mitron or whatever homegrown flavour of the day) are a rounding error.

The recent privacy notice from WhatsApp gave some boost to signal and telegram, but it got nowhere. WhatsApp has become an integral part of Indian's life, it would be hard to break up that relationship.

Re: Instagram Is Facebook Now

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met one of the most brilliant people in my life. Smart, passionate about art, culture, politics. Brilliant student, top of her class from elementary through college. Fluent (as in certified) C2 in English and German. Terrific career as a public servant in foreign politics already in her late 20s. She would never, ever, miss a single episode of a “reality” about dating in tv, a show famous in Italy as “trash tv”. It…

We are humans. We need social connection, we need soap operas, "trash TV" is just human drama basically. Our brains were not made for studying math 24/7 but they were made for social interaction 24/7. Social interaction is like driving on autopilot. It fulfills us. Doing science, solving hard abstract problems, being engaged in political events is tiring. Sometimes we just want to do what our brain is made for as its…

Social media ≠ social connection, for the most part (i.e. the proportion of time spent messaging vs. passively viewing is skewed towards the latter).

That's why it's trash - it's a pseudo-relational avoidance of both the greatest rewards of connection but also - crucially I suspect - of its most painful liabilities (i.e. no one's heart is broken if a pseudo; relationship ends).

And since humans are naturally biased more towards avoiding loss than seeking gain, social media takes over the world and online becomes the default place to hang out.

A world which in aggregate no one wants becomes a reality because of narrow preferences repeated over and over again and at scale.

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