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

The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 236 posts

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#161

Post by pier25 »

danso wrote: post #126
pier25 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it's really a matter of time. Facebook has become the social network for grandmas and aunties. Facebook has expanded to new countries in the last decade which has brought these millions of users, but younger generations in countries that have had Facebook for a long time are not using it anymore. In the US most Facebook users are between 25-34. There are barely any teenagers. https://www.statista.com/statis…

Most developed countries have populations that continue to skew older: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/cent...

Yes, but teens are using other platforms than Facebook:

http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-tec...

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#163

Post by ams6110 »

agumonkey wrote: post #127
myspy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree to your assessment.

I just came back from an island, we barely used computers. Never been so happy. People use whatsapp a lot, but it's just a modern reincarnation of phones. Send a little text, a little voice message, a little video. Nothing more. There it seems it's just right fulfilling the need to chat. The rest was a fantasy.

So (never used WhatsApp), how is it better than email or SMS for those things?

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#164

Post by typon »

2sk21 wrote: post #103
typon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries Not FOR WhatsApp it isn't. I don't know of an app that all my family/friends would switch to if WhatsApp decided to put ads on it. Switching chat apps with your entire contacts list is very cumbersome.

It's not as hard you might think. Other messaging services like Telegram and Signal also use phone numbers as the identifiers so it would be relatively easy to switch.

I tried my friends to switch to Signal and it failed miserably. Their friends and family are on WhatsApp, so why would they switch? It's very annoying for people to deal with multiple chat apps for multiple groups, especially if some members of those groups are overlapping. I've personally settled with chatting with my SO on Signal and everyone else deleted Signal and moved back to WhatsApp

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#165

Post by mark212 »

SCdF wrote: post #55
TekMol wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I an active user? Yes Am I an active user? Yes Am I an active user? Yes Am I an active user? Yes

That is a very nicely formatted response. It--- at least to me--- proves my point that active user is not a useful metric, as all of those people have very different values and drive growth (or don't) in very different ways, and so have no use being clumped together. We didn't even get to talk about differing user demographics or time, data by country, trends inside countries etc.

You could have made the same criticism about a magazine in 1965. They tout to advertisers how many “readers” they have and how readership is growing, and your criticism is “all I do is open it and flip through the pages; I don’t _read_.”

Your value is not in reading the articles but in viewing the ads. For FB display advertising, you opened the app and viewed ads. Eyeballs captured! Value unlocked! Sure they’d rather have you spend 5 hours on the site, but even your slight attention is valuable.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#166

Post by howard941 »

iamzozo wrote: post #11
kilroy123 wrote: post #8

From reading some of the stuff Yahoo put out back in their prime. I always got the sense that they thought they would never fall and were maybe a bit invincible. I think Zuckerberg and Facebook in general, are very aware that Facebook is on the decline, they need to diversify. That's why they bought Instagram and used it to flight Snap. That's why they spent such an insane amount on WhatsApp. Zuckerberg knows they ne…

Simply, they can't create the next big thing outside of facebook. That's why they bought things.

It's not just Facebook. Perhaps your employer (I know my Fortune 500 is this way) prefers acquisitions over developing new products in-house. From experience I know it saps motivation and good people move on but it seems to be a thing.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#167

Post by seibelj »

AJ007 wrote: post #155
dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

Adding to other snarky comments about The Economist here, if it is published in The Economist it probably is the crowded view. I read the magazine for years and I'm not sure if I gained much unique insight about anything. Certainly Facebook is not Yahoo. I think you are right, Facebook is almost exactly the opposite of Yahoo in every way, from the founder sticking around to how acquisitions were picked and managed. I…

They have accurate, high quality reporting on a wide variety of subjects. You are lying if you read the economist cover-to-cover every week and you don’t learn one “unique” piece of information, unless you are regularly keeping track of every country in Asia, Africa, etc.

If something is in The Economist, is isn’t breaking news, and it’s more like an assessment of a newsworthy situation from the neoliberal viewpoint. I find it very interesting compared to other news sources, definitely worthy of my subscription.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#168

Post by mytherin »

typon wrote: post #164
2sk21 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as hard you might think. Other messaging services like Telegram and Signal also use phone numbers as the identifiers so it would be relatively easy to switch.

I tried my friends to switch to Signal and it failed miserably. Their friends and family are on WhatsApp, so why would they switch? It's very annoying for people to deal with multiple chat apps for multiple groups, especially if some members of those groups are overlapping. I've personally settled with chatting with my SO on Signal and everyone else deleted Signal and moved back to WhatsApp

Of course, there’s no large reason for them to switch from whatsapp. It’s reliable, free, has no ads and it’s encrypted. Yes, privacy is an issue, but most people don’t care about that all that much. What they do care about is being annoyed or paying. If they give people a reason to move by making the app significantly worse through ads then people will move, and once people start moving it will be fast. Sure, people will need to keep two apps around for a while to deal with stragglers, but that is a minor inconvenience that will become unnecessary fast.

A free chat app does not have much lock in. Just look at what happened to e.g. MSN.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#169

Post by jacques_chester »

nolok wrote: post #117
wybiral wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attemp…

Yeah Google doesn't get social (you forgot Buzz in your list) but at least they try, and keep trying in different ways, like it different fields, until one sticks (you forgot Chrome in your success list - it doesn't bring money, but it allows them to partly dictate where the web goes and how it works, something that is a lot of value for them). When they get something that looks cool, they try it. Yahoo didn't even t…

Chrome is and was a fortress intended to defend the approach to their river of gold: advertising. A dominant browser controlled by another technology company is an existential risk to Google as it would provide a point at which their advertising could be entirely disintermediated.

Android exists for the same reason.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#170

Post by visarga »

typon wrote: post #164
2sk21 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as hard you might think. Other messaging services like Telegram and Signal also use phone numbers as the identifiers so it would be relatively easy to switch.

I tried my friends to switch to Signal and it failed miserably. Their friends and family are on WhatsApp, so why would they switch? It's very annoying for people to deal with multiple chat apps for multiple groups, especially if some members of those groups are overlapping. I've personally settled with chatting with my SO on Signal and everyone else deleted Signal and moved back to WhatsApp

Maybe we need laws against abusing the network effect, which is akin to monopoly. The networks should be split in multiple segments and they should be forced to implement a public protocol to communicate between them, and with other networks. Moving from one network to another should be like porting your cell phone number to a different operator. It's ridiculous that we imposed such strict rules on phone networks when people use SMS and voice calls less and less by the day, but not on internet based services that offer similar functionality (communication). It's a public interest issue, just like in the case of net neutrality and eminent domain.
Post reply on HN