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Facebook loses users for the first time

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#601

Post by yason »

randomsearch wrote: post #504

This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me: Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that. Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do. Without a stream of new id…

Since then, Facebook have innovated very little.

I hope they hadn't even tried. Initially, Facebook offered lots of value in the early years in the form that users were actually able to follow their friends' lives and stay connected. You had a bunch of friends and you would see a mostly chronological list of what they had posted that you read until you recognized something you had already seen. If they had kept it that simple Facebook might actually be something I'd be willing to pay for. The newsfeed is absolutely the core of the product and they started ruining it about ten years ago, and very steadily at that.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#602

Post by fastball »

jl6 wrote: post #536
antonioevans wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timeline for consumer level glasses with ar + vr will begin shipping 2023. "Apple" level ones 2025. These devices will be as ubiquitious as the smartphone or earbuds.

What are you thinking makes them consumer level? Just cheaper? Because price isn’t the main problem.

Bad take given how well the Oculus Quest 2 is selling.

Primary improvements in OQ2 over previous headsets: Higher Quality + Lower Price + More Portable.

Very easy for me to believe if you just keep improving in those areas you end up with a device that will be present in every lower-middle-class+ household.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#603

Post by makeitdouble »

afavour wrote: post #367
rhacker wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> despite working for them for 4.5 years wow.

Eh, I'd be more surprised/concerned if the Facebook user table had a special flag for whether someone was or ever had been an employee.

That kind of flag can be useful to let test users and internal dev accounts get specific unreleased features or behaviors.

There are other ways to deal with specific users, but flagging accounts doesn't seem outlandish to me.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#604

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

sabarn01 wrote: post #385
sujesh wrote: post #327

I deleted my FB a while ago and it truely helped my online mental health. The fb feed was full of false news and hate speech. I reported as much as I could but nothing happening. There wasn't any regulations and I felt more toxic on the contents. I am not gonna lie there was a positive side like knowing the news instantly but It's not worth it apparently.

I have seen zero hate speech, but I mostly use FB to share pictures of my kids.

Shame on you then for violating their privacy.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#605

Post by throwawayay02 »

antonioevans wrote: post #531
jl6 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … VR is a good play I find your analysis excellent apart from this bit. It’s really far from obvious to me that VR has any future outside a gaming niche.

The timeline for consumer level glasses with ar + vr will begin shipping 2023. "Apple" level ones 2025. These devices will be as ubiquitious as the smartphone or earbuds.

Consumers do not want to wear glasses.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#606

Post by jamesdoe41 »

randomsearch wrote: post #504

This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me: Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that. Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do. Without a stream of new id…

What does the future of Apple and Google look like decades from now? If you believe that AR/VR will eventually be a trillion-dollar market then even a second or third place position for Facebook will bring them billions in revenue, they just need to be in the market when that time comes and they already are with Oculus.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#607

Post by makeitdouble »

noduerme wrote: post #420
josefrichter wrote: post #131

My 16yo daughter says FB is for old people and nobody in her age group is using it.

If she uses Instagram she's using Facebook. If she has a Facebook account and goes anywhere on the web while she is logged in, she's giving money to Facebook. It is not so simple now. She doesn't have to "use" Facebook for them to monetize her image, her privacy, her network of friends. A company like Meta will always have new products to take in kids. That's what their new "Reels" is about, trying to compete with Ti…

What service did you have as a kid that was "cool" but didn't engage in dubious marketing practice nor sell your data around ?

My personal favorite is Chevignon selling cool clothes for teenagers for years, to then enter the cigarettes market because why not.

Some might argue Facebook/Meta is on another scale, but everything is on another scale, I think we'd need to adjust expectations like we adjust for inflation.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#608

Post by threatofrain »

elwell wrote: post #157
petilon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they use Instagram instead. Either way Zuck wins.

Facebook is for old people. Instagram is for moderately old people. Snapchat is for moderately young people. TikTok is for young people.

Where does Reddit fit in all of this?

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#609

Post by chaircher »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #520
randomsearch wrote: post #504

This is how the narrative of Facebook looks to me: Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that. Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do. Without a stream of new id…

>Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do. I can't remember who it was - maybe Stratechery - that theorized that Zuckerberg thanks to his experience running Facebook had a really good intuition for when Social media where going to go far and thus was able to make deals that…

I suppose it's like, they're not going to be able to buy TikTok are they?

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#610

Post by streamofdigits »

As people commented already, meta / facebook will be a enormous cash cow for quite some time. This raises the interesting question of whether it could actually reinvent itself in some way.

Having an almost 100% concentration on a business model that is (thankfully) increasingly seen as a socially detrimental aberration, it means that they would need to diversify into more conventional tech business models the way, e.g., Alphabet/Google is trying to do [0]

The problem is, of-course, that honest tech business models are a well occupied ecological niche and in the absence of some regulatory/political granted monopoly the competition tends to turn lethal.

They could launch a cloud business for example, with the unique selling point: we know best how to collect and monetize your data, so we know best how to protect it :-).

[0] I am dismissing the "metaverse" thingy as some sort of smoke and mirrors that seems to be necessary to provide cover for precisely the kind of news now being discussed

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