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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

#621

Post by mettamage »

busymom0 wrote: post #618
davedx wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of what you wrote up to this point: > He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play He made a school yearbook on the internet and copied some features from existing social networks like MySpace. Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well. The jury is very much still out on whether "VR is a good play", too. It might turn out to be a gigantic o…

I personally don't think VR is a good play. Personally, I just can't binge on anything with VR. It's just not comfortable. But maybe we haven't had enough hardware innovation yet.

I strongly believe we didn't have enough hardware innovation. I tried watching movies as well and it sucked.

I would recommend VR videos though, there are a few from Oculus TV which are amazing, they are an entirely new experience.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#622

Post by BoxOfRain »

blitzar wrote: post #571
petesergeant wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at my teenage kids and their friends I wonder how important this demographic really is. I understand there's an argument for kids being the future, and so on, but almost everyone I know with disposible income is on Instagram and Facebook, via the apps, and seeing ads. As teenage kids stop being teenage kids, they're going to start caring about sharing baby photos and travel photos and cyber-bullying their m…

> considering kids don't actually have much money to spend This does presume that the metric is money and not eyeballs; from where I sit tech in general cares little about revenue and a lot about "daily active users". Despite that, if you can brainwash 0-15 year olds into the belief that your brand is great, the future goodwill may offer significant rewards as you evolve with your users.

>Despite that, if you can brainwash 0-15 year olds into the belief that your brand is great, the future goodwill may offer significant rewards as you evolve with your users.

I know we're all on HN and know how the sausage is made, but nonetheless that's such a dystopian sentence to have to write! I genuinely believe that the attention (ie manipulation) economy will be today's lead paint and asbestos.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#623

Post by busymom0 »

dathinab wrote: post #232

I think they lost users much much earlier. It's just that most users they lost went from "I use Facebook" to "I don't want to use Facebook, but kinds still have to" (because friends, family etc.). All people below 40y I know which have Facebook fall more or less in the second category...

I know too many of my friends only used FB because of the events feature. However during COVID, that usage dropped too.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#624

Post by mettamage »

jl6 wrote: post #512
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…

> … 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.

Note: it already has a health niche. Now that I think about it, one could create a startup in that space. The health niche will be expanding. I'd argue that Apple is excellently positioned for VR.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#625

Post by erikbye »

hyperbovine wrote: post #560
FullyFunctional wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone remember that Next Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs? I think VR is similarly misguided (ie, will never go mainstream but will have a healthy niche).

I think this is a great analogy in that there are fundamental physiological limits on how much 3D TV the human body wants to watch, and the answer is “not much”. All the VR/AR products I have seen fall into the same boat—a bit of a lark to use for an hour or so, beyond that, no thanks. It is a fundamentally different experience than reading a screen or listening to earbuds, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Not much, huh?

I think you're wrong in saying there's a limit when it comes to AR.

Our smartphones are AR devices, a poorly interfaced cybernetic extension. It's a cumbersome device yet unimaginably successful.

This poor AR device has constraints that will always hamper it. It must be of a certain size to display anything useful/readable and to be a useful touch-operated device.

If people put up with this poor device and it's slow information delivery, due to the poor human-computer interface, then they sure as hell will put up with AR devices of the future.

This new wave of AR need not have near as hampering constraints.

AR has the potential to be more successful than the modern smartphone when products are as uncumbersome, lightweight and comfortable to wear as regular glasses/sunglasses, while having the technical specs to augment reality with razor sharp and useful 2D and 3D overlays, and sound.

I see no reason people will be more reluctant to put on a pair of sunglasses than carry an iPhone in their pocket or purse.

Then there are other AR product forms, like contact lenses.

AR has a wide host of useful applications, both civilian, social (recreational), military, engineering, medicine, etc. That's not the future, for most of these branches it is already in great use. There's a ton of R&D going on in this space.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#626

Post by nicholast »

The biggest asset of Facebook for now is the facebook platform, perhaps a more durable asset will be the social graph sourced by the facebook platform. What would it mean for a durable social graph commercialization model? I'm not sure, but at a minimum it would need to be exportable and portable between platforms and ecosystems.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#627

Post by nprateem »

petesergeant wrote: post #544
gman83 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acquisition strategy could have worked going forwards, seeing as there's not much anti-trust will in the U.S. against M&A, but the problem is that they missed the chance to buy musical.ly (bought for $1 billion by ByteDance in 2017) which became TikTok. If they had made this acquisition they would be in a very different position. Looking at my teenage kids and their friends, they barely use Instagram (let alone F…

> Looking at my teenage kids and their friends I wonder how important this demographic really is. I understand there's an argument for kids being the future, and so on, but almost everyone I know with disposible income is on Instagram and Facebook, via the apps, and seeing ads. As teenage kids stop being teenage kids, they're going to start caring about sharing baby photos and travel photos and cyber-bullying their m…

There are shops I never go into, radio stations I never tune into, and products I never buy because in my mind they're frusty and old fashioned. My opinions about them will never change. If FB are in this bracket, their long-term growth is dead without major innovation to cause a reversal.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#628

Post by mettamage »

major505 wrote: post #612

I work in a big consulting firm that really believes that the Metaverse is gonna be the future, and are even creating a team just to develop aplications for clients in the Meta. I don`t think this is what going to save the company. PAssing all day with an VR device in your face seens very uncorfotable to me, and I can see works adopting it.

Which firm is that? Are there VR specific positions for that I might be able to apply to?

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#629

Post by kabdib »

I use FB to keep track of a few old friends, a couple of online "clubs", and to just kind of monitor the goings-on and general sense-of-the-crazy from That Side of the Family (if you have one of those, you know what I mean).

FB is inessential. If it collapsed tomorrow, I'd remove a bookmark.

Re: Facebook loses users for the first time

#630

Post by zmmmmm »

hyperbovine wrote: post #560
FullyFunctional wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone remember that Next Big Thing was supposed to be 3D TVs? I think VR is similarly misguided (ie, will never go mainstream but will have a healthy niche).

I think this is a great analogy in that there are fundamental physiological limits on how much 3D TV the human body wants to watch, and the answer is “not much”. All the VR/AR products I have seen fall into the same boat—a bit of a lark to use for an hour or so, beyond that, no thanks. It is a fundamentally different experience than reading a screen or listening to earbuds, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

> It is a fundamentally different experience than reading a screen

It's an interesting thing to say because, one of the pending killer apps for VR is liberating us from our clunky rectangular meatworld screens that can't travel with us. It's still too low resolution now in affordable hardware, but it's at a tipping point and it is going to be quite exciting to see it cross that. I wouldn't rule out that in 5 years from now, a sizeable percentage of the professional computing workforce is using VR just for this reason alone.

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