Facebook loses users for the first time • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#861

Post by jensensbutton » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

teknopaul wrote: post #709

My take: fb failed as a social network. Its a data sink you put stuff in but you can't get anything out. You cannot represent real social networks in fb. In real social networks you have different social circles and a different name. Facebook devides the world into friends and public, you yourself have one identity only, and that's not a good model for mapping real social networks into digital ones. During the pandem…

18 continuous years of user growth, covering almost literally half the population of planet earth, and they FAILED as a social network?

I beg you to please get some perspective.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#862

Post by pkdpic » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

> They are going to try to do a few things. One is to anti-trust Apple (in the media at least), and the other is to hand wave (Metaverse).

What does 'hand wave' mean in this context?

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#863

Post by dionidium » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

BaldricksGhost wrote: post #782

jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

"Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later." This is probably the most accurate description of Facebook I've seen.

This probably sounds like a real zinger to a certain kind of young person who moved to Brooklyn and thinks everybody back home is a total loser, but this is not the modal Facebook user, so I'm not sure it matters much.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#864

Post by anxrn » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

Feels like Yahoo in the days it realized it was losing the search arms race to Google and Microsoft. There was this uneasy sense of the underlying seismic shift and that the game had changed and you didn't have the best hand.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#865

Post by dionidium » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

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…

> Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.

I used to work for an extremely unfashionable website that nevertheless was one of the most visited on the web (even though you'd probably be surprised by that if you knew the site) and my experience there was that leadership tried to replicate that success with dozens of other products and never once was able to do it. So much of what made the original site successful was timing and luck.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#866

Post by m3kw9 » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

The Fb home feed is becoming a cesspool of brag photos disguised at wanting to share their daily lives with friends and family.

There are better ways to do that than having 500 friends on your list and hoping someone would see it and press like. It feels a bit disgusting now that people actually use it more like their Instagram feed

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#867

Post by colinmhayes » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #805

ThinkBeat wrote: post #641

I always find the constant expectation of growth puzzling. and that it is a regular occurrence. For a long time, DELL grew and grew and got bigger. Then they plateaued (for a while) and the investors were mad. There are only so many people in the world who want an FB account. and only so many companies and people who need a DELL computer. Infinite high growth is impossible to sustain. Physically.

Isn’t Dell famously a private company?

Dell went public in the 80's, was bought out by its founder in the early 10's, and then did a reverse merger with vmware to go public once again a few years later.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#868

Post by wonderwonder » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

I think social media has shifted from wanting to keep up with friends and family to serving as a distraction from the general malaise most seem to feel. TikTok and Instagram are bright and shiny and distract people via images of attractive hopeful people. Facebook is just seeing that everyone else is doing as badly as they are or perhaps worse, better. I think it ties in with the boom in crypto, everyone is looking for a moonshot to escape. I think the country is going through something very unique, like a social despair and that companies need to adapt. I could be projecting.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#869

Post by fairity » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #841

fairity wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely pick stocks, but I took a long position in Twitter, Snap and Pinterest this morning bc, imo, this is definitely an over-reaction. The time the average person spends on their phone (and social media) has only been increasing year over year. If Facebook's growth is slowing, that's directly at the hands of competitors.

The current consensus is that TikTok takes the time of users. If that is true, every social media other than TikTok is in trouble.

I think that’s the consensus because Facebook specifically blamed TikTok on the earnings call. The question is if we should take that statement at face value.

It’s easier to blame competition than to admit that users are growingly apathetic towards your product (sans competition).

Facebook’s falling engagement, in and of itself, is great news for other social media apps.

TikTok’s rising engagement is, in and of itself, bad news for other social media apps.

I don’t think these two pieces of information net out poorly for other social media apps when overall social media usage is rising.

We’ll see in short order. Earnings calls are coming up in the next 7 days.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#870

Post by olivermarks » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

jmacd wrote: post #774

There is something else going on around FB. Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working…

Bizarre how Tiktok went from being a Chinese sovereign state/public enemy that was going to be 'bought' by Oracle/Walmart but is now starting to destroy the 2nd gen social networks, the original concern. I've assumed for a while FB was being sunset'd/Yahoo'd to prep for a next gen surveillance capitalism engine but the TT Chinese data mining allowance continues to surprise. Meanwhile the 'off' platforms - Rumble etc - continue to expand, and given Trump's vast small donation $100m+ war chest it seems likely there will increasingly politicized factional networks very soon