This is the beginning of the Big Churn. Less top talent will want to be associated with facebook. Already even a few more privacy clueless friends family members are deleting their accounts. Adverts were always so low yeild, and fb pages 'because we need one'. Now that is all changing due to perception. The FTC, stocks falling, are further indicatuons of falling trust. And all business is built on trust.
Yes, Facebook's current network is fairly strong, but you shouldn't look to where the masses currently are, you should look to where the trendsetters, the young, and the people in the know—where they are. These people are ahead of the curve, and the signs they are emitting is that Facebook is not serving their interests and needs. Young people don't want to use facebook because it forces you to interact with everyone, including parents and people out of your circle. Privacy conscious people and many at the forefront of technology all either personally avoid and limit facebook usage or keep their children away from it (if they aren't already disinterested in the first place). Yes Facebook allows you to "fix" these issues with enough configurations, but then why would a new user go through the hassle of all that when they could just install snapchat or instagram (yes I know facebook owns this, but it's not facebook).
So unless there's a fundamental shift in its business model and allure, its trajectory will be doomed. It doesn't mean Facebook the company will fail, but it does mean that the Facebook product—what it is in its current form—has a finite shelf life.
Facebook has no serious competition at the moment other than Snapchat. Young people are still using Instagram and Messenger. Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher.
There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg himself came out and said he's "actually not sure we shouldn't be regulated" and it's not because he has genuine concerns about his users privacy.
It's because regulation increases the barrier to entry. It means less chance of some college students starting an app that can dethrone Facebook.
> and it's not because he has genuine concerns about his users privacy.
yups. FB users are to FB, what cows are to milk farms. main difference is that FB users are free to go, and cows are in some sort of bonded labour/slavery construction, although it is not commonly called that way.
At least in Brazil I think there is serious competition in the form of WhatsApp. It allows plenty of the things that FB initially brought to the table in the form of family, friend and work groups where people actually share their personal stuff now, while in FB people just mostly show off some generic things and share news articles in their bubble. I would say WhatsApp right now is a lot more social than FB is. When you meet someone new you ask them for their WhatsApp number, not to add them to FB.
Sure FB owns WhatsApp but I don't think they can leverage it financially nearly as much. If ads start to pop up on WhatsApp people will simply flock to different messengers with similar functionality.
MS LinkedIn seems like a pretty strong competitor to me. Seems like their logo/like buttons/messaging/user experience is converging that direction. Perhaps they will offer Office-Ville or Kanban-Crush-Saga.
Contrary opinion, I hate LinkedIn's site and even though I'm connected to some colleagues and industry people on there I avoid using it as much as possible.
Some of this dates back to their repeatedly inventing new excuses to email me that I had to go and unsubscribe from, part is that I can't look at anyone's page without LinkedIn telling them about it, part is their finagling everyone signing up to give access to their Gmail contacts similar to Facebook's harvesting of user info.
I guess they're a competitor, but if they're not as bad as Facebook is it's only because they have less reach.
LinkedIn is not a competitor to Facebook. Why? Context. When you go on facebook you’re in a social state of mind. When you go on LinkedIn you’re in a formal / business state of mind. It’s a glorified resume and socially conservative af. That fact alone means that, even if LinkedIn has the same exact user base as facebook, we are not going to use LinkedIn like we do facebook.
Facebook profits off of our attention and engagement. Facebook’s real competition is who or whatever holds our attention. Whoever manages to make us give facebook less of our time. LinkedIn does not really have our attention like facebook does. We set up a profile and leave and maybe get on it when job hunting or when someone writes us a recommendation. There is no “LinkedIn addiction.” But you wanna know what website has been getting even more and more of our attention? Netflix lol. Netflix can take hours out of our day and during those hours we may be so absorbed in the show that we’re not really engaging with facebook. So yeah, Netflix is a bigger competitor to facebook than LinkedIn.
I deleted my facebook and use HN more. So technically yes, at least for me. I wonder how many other people who frequent HN have either done away completely with facebook or give it less attention than a control group
When social media platforms are optimizing for user engagement, it's not surprising that you're seeing the same features. With enough A/B testing they all discover the same thing and end up on the same path. The FB feed has become a bunch of memes/videos, increasing engagement. It won't be surprising once the LinkedIn feed becomes saturated with videos as well. I don't see LinkedIn as a strict competitor to FB. They're both social platforms but different.
When resentment builds against an entrenched company, and a good alternative comes along, the shift can be pretty rapid. The Quark-X-press to Adobe InDesign exodus was particularly fast.
To me what changed with Facebook was that the local address book that I had on my phone became a tree in a central graph owned by a company and I was fine giving out that information. Today who could muster up the trust needed for me to let them know about everyone I know? I think no such company exists or ever will.
I have no social internet accounts left except for this one. I even recently deleted my Linkedin account even though that is bad for my career (?). I just don't want to feel raped all the time. I keep getting Linkedin-ish head-hunting emails though but I'm sure that'll clear up in a year or so.
If I'm ever socializing again on the internet, give me something that doesn't rape me in the *. Otherwise I'm fine just socializing IRL.
I hope we are a void and that something new is about to happen.
I’ve never had a LinkedIn account (and have got myself into some sort of internal blacklist) and I’ve never felt disadvantaged career-wise or even been asked if I have an account.
Instagram is a completely different app, usage, and completely different UI/UX from Facebook.
Facebook's problems are caused by Facebook (website)'s design, trajectory, and business model. It doesn't have anything to do with inherent evilness in the company itself.
The Facebook site is evil and should be destroyed because of 2 reasons, in my opinion.
Firstly, the news feed is solely designed to get you to stay on the site for longer. And what that means is you get an echo chamber. So, idiot people get idiot posts that agree with them. It's not just a problem on one side of the political spectrum, it's a problem for any extreme view. Anti-vaxxers, left wing communists, and right wing fascists all get into their echo chamber and never get out.
Secondly, the advertising platform that Facebook has created is too powerful. It lets you micro-target people in a way that is absolutely perfect for political ads. You find people vulnerable to an emotional message and bombard them with your emotionally responsive ads.
Facebook ads are good for non-political things as well, but in this case, we'll have to throw the baby out with the bathwater I think.
Do we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? We can have regulation that bans the use personal information for political ads but allows it for toothpaste ads
I hope so. My concern is that it is hard to define what a political ad is sometimes. For example, if you have an ad that claims that some specific ethnic group gets food stamps more than another, is that a political ad? Because those are the kinds of ads that Russia was buying.
> Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher.
The barrier will only be higher for potential services that want to avoid those regulations. If the market moves in a 'wants more privacy' direction, barrier to entry shouldn't be a problem.
I've been putting off posting this for months because when I write it, it seems grandiose but it's been my life and it's too ridiculous not to share.
I was born in 80 so that dates me. I've worked in music for the last 20 years and I've worked with over 60 bands most of whom are very successful now. However that number is misleading because I've toured with hundreds of bands if you count the openers and headliners over the years. It's stupid really when I look back on it. Once when I was 25 I used my network to start a music festival with no money that's been going on for the last 10 years and has never had less than 50k people attend. Anyways long story short most people don't understand marketing. But when you're touring you're living it. I remember when the words taste maker started getting thrown around. I remember when gorilla marketing became a thing... Because the marketing people would all be coming to our shows and our parties and sponsoring us. All of this to say that
We were early adopters of Friendster, when they killed the bulletin board my friends and I moved to MySpace, when MySpace got over crowded we moved to Facebook, when our families friends got on Facebook we left for Twitter and reddit, the less public of us left Twitter almost immediately but our pr teams stayed, when Obama won in 08 we left reddit. Many of us went to snapchat and we all use Instagram even though we hate it. There was a minor period when we thought google + was going to serve us but that lasted exactly one day.
What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application that has exactly one killer simple feature. A bulletin board to post events. That's it. A simple way to keep in touch with each other and local ownership of our photos and videos. Sure to reduce bandwidth we'd be fine with our friends or fans hosting encrypted files on their devices but that's as far as they go. Do that, slap an easy to use interface on it, don't have advertising call it something literal like friends torrent or something and we'll never have another Facebook. If you want to monotize it... Give it a market place. But if you take anything from this rant it should be this, your tastemakers aren't faceless nameless statistics they're real people and they're friends with each other. We know who we are and we are and have been paying attention.
> What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application that has exactly one killer simple feature. A bulletin board to post events. That's it. A simple way to keep in touch with each other and local ownership of our photos and videos. Sure to reduce bandwidth we'd be fine with our friends or fans hosting encrypted files on their devices but that's as far as they go. Do that, slap an easy to use interface on it, don't have advertising call it something literal like friends torrent or something and we'll never have another Facebook. If you want to monotize it... Give it a market place.
I guess someone here should accept this challenge.
Is there a way to inform you when someone think they have an acceptable solution?
Facebook's popularity is driven by that tic of just wanting to have a quick look to see what friends/family are up to, then getting stuck there because of addiction/manipulative techniques.
I can't see people feeling the same way about a site which is only about events, it's a different impulse... almost like tuning in to an adverts-only station. Nobody is on FB because of bands - although they're happy to find out what bands are up to when they happen to already be on the site (not knocking bands as a thing - the same applies to eg. my art page).
Some might say "it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be as popular as FB" but at that point then why not just have a website?
I know (with lots love)! That's why I haven't built it.
It's also why I don't think it has been built yet and why in my frustration this evening I sort of let loose.
"But if you take anything from this rant it should be this, your taste makers aren't faceless nameless statistics they're real people and they're friends with each other. We know who we are and we are and have been paying attention."
This is why vendors such as Facebook etc. try so had to get their product to be installed on phones (and in a previous generation, cut deals with PC manufactures to be one of the crap-wares installed in their OS image). If they can't get in thru the front door, they aim for the side door or maintenance entrance.
If I could root my phone, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, would be the first things properly removed and not simply "disabled".
Indecently, I'm in the market for a rootable phone with a Samsung Note style digitizer support.
> What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application ... we'd be fine with our friends or fans hosting encrypted files on their devices but that's as far as they go.
What exactly are you trying to get out of encryption in this MinimalBook application of yours?
Privacy, security, rights Managment. Not quite State level but close (because does that even exist?).
It's celebrities that travel nearly most days of the years. Every place that's always in the news for something terrible is probably a destination at somepoint. Also stalkers, extortionists, kidnappers, they're very real. Also and I would think probably more pertinent is that given current events, for something decentralized to take off and for content to be shared semi-locally amongst a partially trusted network it would have to be encrypted with some pretty large keys for it to pass the muster of the initial user base. A lot of these people had their nudes stolen from iCloud for instance. Granted a lot of that was fishing but still if it's going to be adopted people want encryption. It'd probably be smart to put in really big language at the time of install a general introduction to best security practices... And if you really want to be compassionate to the users and little notifier whose nuisance level could be dialed down that periodically reminds them.
Here's the thing. Encryption only allows you to protect the channel of information between two parties. Once the other party has the information you shared, they can in turn share it with whomever they wish. You can establish a private network amongst your selected peers.
But you cannot prevent your peers from violating the network's privacy, either purposefully or accidentally. No amount of encryption can do that.
Right. But I'm thinking torrents and packets distributed to the local network of peers to ease the distributed bandwidth load. Granted a state level actor could potentially collect all data as they do now and have a hell of time trying to piece it all back together. That would take total knowledge of the network and the keys. But for users whom have permission to view the content granted to them through the "friending" process the last thing you want is for them to be able to mine their device or know what's being stored on their device. This would take a fixed install size with a flexible disc space to store popular files, something that would be clearly communicated at the time install of course. Nothing will stop people from pulling triggers other than culture. But making it difficult for the bad actors to do so seems like a good place to start. That and having a paper trail should shit hit the fan.
> But for users whom have permission to view the content granted to them through the "friending" process the last thing you want is for them to be able to mine their device or know what's being stored on their device.
I assume them is a reference to state level actor? At least to me it is not immediately obvious and I think I misread it the first time.
Looks like wizardforhire was talking about something like distributed encrypted backups. The simple version is, others store your stuff for you (and you store theirs), but they can't read it, because only you have the key.
Add to that a way to authorise people to decrypt your stuff (and, ideally, ways to revoke those rights), and you get the the whole thing.
Distributed backup already exists and can possibly work.
But IIReadC you wanted to cache media on peers devices to allow them to see/listen to it.
That cannot work unless you trust your friends completely (or keep your friends under constant surveillance, and hardly even then) as once they see it on their screen they can photograph or record your media, if necessary using an external device (e.g. a camera) and store it or share it.
Also, once your friends has access to it that makes your friends a target for bad actors that might want to trick or coerce your friends into sharing.
> But for users whom have permission to view the content granted to them through the "friending" process the last thing you want is for them to be able to mine their device or know what's being stored on their device.
This is just another form of digital restrictions management (aka DRM). I think you'll find that most of the engineers that are opposed in principle to the gov-tech surveillance complex are also opposed in principle to DRM.
It is at least possible to build an open-source distributed social networking application that gives you most of the features you described, and in particular, will make it impractical to vacuum up whole social network graphs.
But at some point, ordinary netizens are going to have to learn some basic information theory. Just as commando clubbing is going to lead to some paparazzi getting vagina pics, nude selfies are going to get out beyond your ability to control.
>It's celebrities that travel nearly most days of the years. Every place that's always in the news for something terrible is probably a destination at somepoint.
Given that market, why not charge for MinimalBook as a premium experience instead of postulating an ill-defined “marketplace”?
Alas, the web site (https://qbix.com/people) appears not to work on Firefox Developer Edition 60.0: “Unable to init adapter. App config is not defined.”
> What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application that has exactly one killer simple feature. A bulletin board to post events. That's it. A simple way to keep in touch with each other and local ownership of our photos and videos.
Can't you do this with a mailing list? That handles the notification. A big standard website can do the rest like hosting photos.
Don't discount Warren Buffet's mantra. When people are scared, he buys. When stockholders feel great, he sells. So fear=buy if fundamentals are good, exhuburence = sell and make profit.
All young people are on FB, they may additionally be on something else (probably Instagram which is also FB and starving out Snap) - the default remains Facebook.
I'd bet against you. The trajectory is fine and Zuckerberg is a good CEO. They have nearly a third of the earth as users and a ridiculously high percentage of internet users.
Given a long enough time horizon any company is vulnerable, but FB is here to stay for a long while.
I've always attributed Facebook's success with older generations to the feeling you get when somebody you're talking to brings up a name you hadn't heard in numerous years, and here's why.
Let's first think about the demographic that has kept Facebook afloat; Baby Boomers and Generation X. When you think about most of these individuals, they graduated high school and college without much there to remind them of individuals they were acquainted with, minus maybe their yearbooks from high school. Sure, most probably wrote or emailed their close friends, but we're talking about those afterthought individuals that they came into contact with under specific circumstances that generated that "acquaintance" classification. Then, all of a sudden, appears Facebook, a platform that allows these individuals to link their name with their school. It's a database at their fingertips with all of their classmates with up-to-date pictures, life stories, and mutual friends to explore. Facebook is that one "person" I referenced earlier; the person that brings up that name you hadn't thought about for years, except now you can actually explore what they are up to, and Facebook continuously reminds people of those afterthought names.
The question is, how long is this effect going to sustain Facebook's competitive advantage? Like people have mentioned, there was Whitepages, now there is Facebook, but what's next?
Are they? My young teenaged (age 13-17) nieces/nephews have no FB presence at all. Their older siblings were on FB all the time at that age and still have FB pages, but are no longer very active - they mainly use FB to comment on their parents and other relatives pages.
While this is purely anecdotal, FB does seem to be losing young users:
With time, Facebook is becoming the white pages[1]. Sure, people have profiles there, but just like the white pages, it's entirely passive and something that's there because you forgot to opt out. That publication barely exists now, but there was a time when it was the place to advertise.
Having one third of the earth’s population touch your site at least once won’t matter if you do nothing particularly useful.
Facebook does almost nothing useful. It’s kind irritating to actually try to do anything with the user interface, since everything is slippery funnels.
Whatever isn’t an inductive dark pattern is otherwise emotional blackmail. The options and settings provided to the user don’t make sense, and are all defaulted to the worst choices imaginable.
Logging in once a year is meaningless from a network effect standpoint. They might have an account and even use it to talk with grandparents, but without daily use FB has little pull.
The log(n) factor does work in Facebook's favor against newcomers. It is a barrier to entry. However it is a barrier to entry that can be overcome with a better user experience.
My desired experience is that I want to see what my friends have to say, and don't want to see random commercial spam.
My Facebook feed includes crap from any time I liked a viral link, and DOES NOT include a significant fraction of what my friends had to say. It is very far from my desired experience.
I already see people trying out alternatives like Mastadon. Existing chat applications like Slack and Discord could be turned into social networks. And properties like Instagram and Whatsapp stand as demonstrations that social networks are more easily started than you might think. Facebook can only keep buying up its potential competitors for so long until it runs across one that dreams of something bigger than Facebook can offer.
Short term I believe that there is an overreaction to news. But long-term, I would not want to bet on Facebook. Not over the next 20 years.
Not very much. I thought that my feed is better because I blocked everything, and then have been careful about not liking things.
However my other complaint remains. Clicking on my main feed, then clicking on a random friend, I'm not seeing most of what that friend posts in my feed.
Whatever Facebook once aspired to be? That vision, the “social graph connecting everything and everyone” vision that justifies the $500B valuation, is dead. The social graph will decay without new data, and it quickly loses relevance as the data becomes stale. Is there commercial value in knowing what someone “liked” 15 years ago? Because that’s the future of Facebook.
Watch, Facebook will be the new Yahoo! Enough successful products to keep them alive, but with its vision destroyed and it’s mandate revoked, it will be a shadow of its former self. Influencers have already started moving away.
That company has a market value somewhere greater than zero but certainly less than even Facebook’s current market cap. The question is not “will it drop?” but “how low will it go?”
Let's not forget that Facebook's network is actually a virtual one. The real social graph is independent of any virtualization provider.
Which is why all it will take is a compelling competitor to start the great migration. This is sort of the corollary to the network effect — as soon as there is a better alternative that people really move to, a vast amount of people will move spontaneously.
Imagine if Instagram started right now. Do you think they would accept any offer to be bought by Facebook?
The mesh/decentralized/p2p networking movement is really interesting, and given the ever increasing power of user devices, the balance for a shift to those models is compelling.
There are huge existing challenges, but I'm seeing really smart ideas in the space, and I think it's only a matter of years before we start to see mainstream p2p networks (still over the Internet) replacing a server model for some successful widespread apps or services. Facebook style social networking is the PERFECT use case for such a topology.
Facebook's time is coming to an end. Not now (like some are reacting), and not in the next year or so, but soon enough. Their paradigm isn't as good as the alternative. The alternative simply has implementation issues that need to be worked out, but they aren't insurmountable, and different groups of people are solving them in novel ways constantly.
> The mesh/decentralized/p2p networking movement is really interesting
There isn't a single lasting mass consumer adoption example of decentralized anything in the modern history of technology (eg post WW2). That's due to a rigid reason: human nature. It's not going to change.
The only thing that will change here, is privacy laws will force behavior changes on centralized platforms.
I can name dozens of massive technology & platform adoptions by consumers, every single one of them is centralized. Now, name the dozens of vast decentralized examples... crickets.
Decentralized as a mass consumer adoption thing will perpetually be fantasy. Only (some) tech people want it.
There are two or three hubs between Europe and America,
terminating the big under sea cables and a few internet backbones. It's not as if you had point connections to every IP. Rather, you go through one single IP to your provider in the general case. Somehow "decentral" lacks a proper graph theoretic definition.
By the way, the sun is decentralized, its center of gravity does not coincide with the galaxy's center of gravity!
Good comment anyway. I didn't even think of e-mail.
But it has to stay stronger than it's bad reputation. If the only thing you have is a network effect you are in a very bad place. Everyone I know used to be on MSN and then within a week everyone had WhatsApp and MSN was practically dead.
> this is also not even including their other assets (Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus)
True Instagram is strong especially since they can show a shitton of ads there.
But Instagram isn't Facebooks vision of what the world should be.
Oculus is highly underrated in my opinion. I would bet that the majority of their income is through VR by 2030. Great VR content with the ability to personalize it using AI with tons of personal data will lead to major addictions in my opinion, resulting in a gold mine for many businesses.
> Great VR content with the ability to personalize it using AI with tons of personal data will lead to major addictions in my opinion
Do people really want that? Or do they just want good VR games and experiences? I'm not sure what kind of personal data would get added to a VR experience but it sounds...creepier than most people would want.
It remains to be seen how much impact this will ultimately have on Facebook, but it's not ridiculous to think it could be significant. Trust is important; for a cautionary tale we need look no further than Uber, whose pervasive bad faith approach to basically everything has undoubtedly had a negative imact on hiring talent.
Yes network effect is pretty strong. BUT it is not getting stronger anymore, at least in the world I live in.
I mean I deactictivated FB long ago. So did most of my friends (from my school, from college, from my past companies etc. ) Even those who still have accounts never post anything. They don't even update their current city/companies etc.
Although I also noticed a trend of older people joining FB and being fairly active on it. But overall FB is definitely losing its appeal.
Sadly, people have ditched FB in favor of Whatsapp which belongs to FB.
I would be careful with those calls. I mean, they're a decent hedge, but I'm not sure they have as much upside as you think. What we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg. It is not unlikely that even more negativity will come crawling out of the woodwork (not least because the media don't seem to be massive fans of FB).
I agree its a overreaction. I think selling premium is better for the stocks high implied volatility. Something like the 155/150 put spread for $160-ish risking $340 per contract.
There’s a real disconnect I’m noticing, which comes with a kind of script here. “Nobody cares,” “I’m buying their stock,” “It will all blow over,” “No one outside of our bubble cares.”
I suspect the same people will be saying the same thing next week when another $50b have been shed, another scandal or two has come to light, and more users and advertisers flee the platform. I wonder at what point it’s going to sink in that between Trump’s election and a general backlash against tech, this is the tip of a very large iceberg?
You will always see both side of the coin - after all if your interpretation was any more certain than parent, the stock would be worth 0 today.
FB lost a few months of profits and has a set of issues. All the rest are hunches, it could be the beginning of the end, or just shedding a bunch of investors that just want to cash in and have nothing to do with the drama. It could also be the time that the government step in, regulate the shit out of social network, locking anyone but the richest companies from competing and basically cementing Facebook as de-facto standard with a license to print money.
I'm sympathetic to wanting to see a shift in the way things have been going, but we shouldn't lose sight of reality. If this is the beginning of something, it's a years long process that has begun. We're not going to see a change overnight.
No I understand how derivatives work. Why bother with options at all if you are so confident it is going back up? Why not pay the spot price if you are that confident it is currently undervalued?
I don't believe in facebook because I personally don't depend on it and nobody I know depends on it. It's a waning bubble -- people signed up because it was trendy/they got peer-pressured, and they now hang on to it with a vanishing sense of habit.
I also believe that we've barely scratched the surface in terms of insight into their internal surveillance and identity-tokenizing machinery. I believe that if we get to see those details in full glory (e.g. as the result of an investigation) we will be HORRIFIED. This applies to Google as well (or more).
While I'm not top talent, and haven't been pursued by Facebook, I've always wondered why anyone would want to be associated with them. Other than as a status symbol in tech. I've never thought of them as anything less than a reprehensible company.
Yep, my brother decided to join Facebook in a non-tech role (admittedly, right before the #deletefacebook movement began), and it was purely for the compensation. He even joked he had joined "the dark side". I've been off Facebook since 2011, so it was a bit disappointing. But, the compensation was the highest out of the companies he got offers from (Google, Stripe, etc.), so I don't blame him.
In this case I'm not getting that your brother wanted to be associated with them necessarily. If compensation was equal, which do you think he'd have picked?
Right but that's kind of irrelevant isn't it? Perhaps a semantic detail, but Donald Trump could hypothetically pay me as much as he wanted but it wouldn't change my desire to have his name next to mine.
Facebook is known for being a little more profligate with their spending, especially for senior and up. On the other hand, they will fire you faster. I have heard that Netflix is even more in that direction, if "excitement" is something you desire in the domain of "whether you will be employed tomorrow or not."
I think if the most important aspect is compensation, then the company is arbitrary. Not to suggest that compensation is an invalid priority, but I don't think it's the same as wanting to be associated with a company for an inherent quality.
I flirted with it briefly, had a few phone interviews, then realised that there's few things I want to do with my working life less than help to progress facebook.
I wouldn't know either. The reason your cite, status in tech, however, could be a real thing. FB was innovative in some areas like infrastructure and PHP.
If your career goal is to set yourself up as a PHP guru, some FB credentials could be useful. If you think about it, a guy who wouldn't mind his career being about PHP is exactly the type who wouldn't get why ('zuckerberg-couldn't-get-laid(a-busines-carries-founder-DNA)).
I also remember a time when FB was seen as cool compared to MySpace, because it hinted a higher social value because you supposedly needed to be an Ivy league student to have one.
> If you think about it, a guy who wouldn't mind his career being about PHP is exactly the type who wouldn't get why ('zuckerberg-couldn't-get-laid(a-busines-carries-founder-DNA)).
I don't see how the opinion you're promoting here is any more mature than what you're criticizing.
What I am trying to do is to give an explanation to the question posed by the grandparent.
My explanation is relying heavily on a sociological observation. I don't see how that is immature.
Let me put it another way.
People who tend to not to value specific elements of fashion and style, do so for many reasons, one of them being that the subtler elements of these matters elude them. Or if they catch them, the do not pose high value on them.
This is what also predisposes to be comfortable with life choices that completely ignore certain elements of fashion and style. One example of such a life choice would be to make PHP the cornerstone of your career.
This comment coupled with your original is a fine explanation.
As an adjacent point, I think the same reasoning can be applied to professional-cultural disparities in general. Such as my gradual distancing from swathes of career software developers in that I'm no longer able to construct a scenario where I wouldn't care about things like well-being, culture, why and what I'm putting out into the world.
> Less top talent will want to be associated with facebook.
I don't necessarily consider myself top-talent, but I'm personally avoiding facebook's open source projects (e.g. React) because I don't approve of their company values.
FB‘s open source projects are one of the few things they are doing right, so why avoid them? AFAIK the licenses are ok, so they are interchangeable in the end as maintainers.
It's not the quality of the code I'm concerned about. It's more a matter of principle, and the fact that every use of their software possibly contributes to their reputation and appeal to highly qualified developers.
Do walkie talkie apps actually shoot to the "top"? I assume that requires massive amounts of downloads in a huge geographical region, for example tornadoes in one part of the country might only affect 20MM of 320MM people in the US. Even if there were twenty times as many people downloading walkie talkie apps, that wouldn't put them close to Facebook.
In particular, I'd love to see detailed statistics on top free apps, changes, and what causes them.
>Less top talent will want to be associated with facebook
How certain is this? Whether you like what Facebook does or not, you can't deny their engineering talent is top tier. I don't even use Facebook but I'd still want to work there just to work with the people there and the environment. Companies like Facebook and Google are pretty engineer friendly, more so than other companies. I don't think this event will be the tipping point for top talent to leave Facebook.
I was recently considering responding to the Facebook recruiter that keeps e-mailing me. Now I'm back to a definite no. These things start with people who are more on the fence.
If top talent working somewhere was enough to keep top talent from leaving, then no company that employed top talent would ever loose their position without missing payroll.
You have a valid point. Top talent existed in places like Silicon Graphics, Yahoo, etc. I guess you're right, the top probably got off the sinking ship long before the rest of the crew realized what was happening.
However, I still think this event is not "bad" enough for the crew to start fleeing. This is a bump in the road. People may hate Facebook but people sure do love Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. Facebook has a pretty strong moat (for now at least).
'Top talent' generally have a lot of options, and there are plenty of companies in the Bay Area which have an engineer-friendly environment. Street-cred matters a lot more than you might think.
How certain was the same with Uber while they were going through the bulk of their issues? In a full employment market, not wanting to be associated with a company simply due to potential perception would be enough to have most candidates pass on an opportunity.
If Apple has top tier talent, why do they ship an OS with a huge security vulnerability? With a map framework that has memory leaks? With a messaging app that messes up the order of messages?
If Google has top tier talent, why did they create an OS that allowed a third party developer to siphon calls, contacts and messages?
If this is your argument, then no company has top talent.
"no company has top talent" is much closer to the truth than your implied assumption that even companies drenched in top talent must deliver shit products.
Well the better answer would be that top talent either work on ads or server side infrastructure. For client side its user device, battery, RAM and money and they could care less once they have thrown a free app in the face of users.
It takes some amazing engineering talent to build an app which drains your battery that slowly whilst uploading "everything" on your phone to Facebook's servers? :-)
Because swooping up all mobile audio and transmit it over would be a management decision, certainly not engineering.
This is what most likely drains the battery and your data plan.
You cannot explain this amount of drainage with CPU only.
Also swooping all kind of privacy data, like call logs, messages, contacts, calendar info is from management. Engineers really know better that this will be found out sooner and later, and then it's the end.
The share price is now the same as it was mid last year. That means investors are just as confident now as they were then. What information do you have that they don't? Surely you're not claiming to be smarter than them?
Facebook wasn't built on trust, obviously. I would rather say it was built on the ignorance of the masses. There are a few people who never created a Facebook account, because they understood the consequence of a big American platform having all your contacts and activities.
Regarding the stock price -exactly just because I am 'shorting 'it- (betting that it will drop for the non-traders), it is now a good 'BUY' opportunity. If FB gets serious about putting their ducks in order, they will end up even better than before.
And I hope they do so, so that others can also learn that honesty and ethics DO pay in life.
"Adverts were always so low yeild" - Maybe for large corps, but FB is by far the best advertising platform for smaller companies that don't just shovel money at ads.
What's interesting for me is that I finally deleted my account. I never used it anyway but now I feel empowered to say "I don't have an FB account" and that's ok.
I think this is a sea change - there will never again be this dominant of a social network imho. From now on the space will be fractured into niches (AngelList, LinkedIn, NextDoor, etc...).
I did the same. While I used to use my account regularly 5+ years ago, my feed was just full of stupid updates. People posting food pics, family commenting on news, and old viral videos, and lots and lots of ads. So, hey, I deleted my account. While Facebook isn't loosing any revenue from me, it certainly didn't ever attract me back into the active user status. Good riddance.
A few months back I had tried doing the "Hide this Page" game hoping to reclaim my feed. This turned into a Sisyphean task that makes Inbox Zero look fun. As it turns out, there are also a number of pages[0] that you simply cannot hide or otherwise unfollow.
I happened to "delete" my profile a week before this shit storm blew up and thankfully someone pointed out the Deactivate vs. Delete dark pattern and I quickly fixed that situation.
It's a weird world when the Smut Peddlers have some sound advice on living.
[0] - I didn't keep a list, but I recall one called "Wittitudes" or something along those lines simply lacked the "Hide" option, and all attempts at blocking it failed.
Only up to a point. In the real world, people move in multiple social spheres, and usually like to keep them separate. I think the same is true online. For example, some kids see Facebook as "the place their parents are," a place to act polite and keep things to themselves. After all, why are we "toasterlovin" and "username223" here?
Good points. I think there's a good chance that there will be a changing of the guard at some point.
But social media within a given sphere is a winner take all game. Then the winner in the biggest sphere will try and buy all adjacent social media companies (see Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). The only hope I see is either 1) somebody has a large enough ego to think they can take on the dominant player (Snapchat/Evan Spiegel), or 2) the government gets some sense and decides that it's not a good idea to let the dominant player buy adjacent companies. So maybe Snapchat wins eventually as their demographic grows older. But then we're in the same position we're in now, just with a different company on top.
At least, that's how things seem like they will play out to me.
Agreed. Our weak antitrust rules are causing problems in all sorts of areas, and this is just one of them. The world would have been a better place if Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp had remained separate, each pursuing its own version of a "social network." WhatsApp even had a subscription model that people accepted.
It's too easy for some of you to get excited about one giant corporation taking a rather public beating. The anti-facebook tribe is strong in the Hacker News community.
Plus, what SV company wasn't a free-for-all of user data in 2012-2013? I don't know if any of you remember the Path app's lawsuit that triggered Apple's lockdown of API permissions. Apple, who suddenly got religion about privacy, but they too learned from their mistakes.
Anyway, I'm not here to argue in favor of FB, but the stock going down is pretty self perpetuated right now. It's algorithmically triggered in response to bad news in the press, that then generates more bad press like this and so on. I'm not sure where the bottom will be here, but I'm pretty sure it'll reverse course soon enough.
You’re just doing a really great impression of someone who is? My initial reaction was an unrealistic belief that you and others singing a similar tune work for FB, but I doubt that. I think it’s a very rational fear that FB is the first domino to fall, possibly along with Uber. Fear and self-interest, and the simple desire not to see your industry facing a prolonged public backlash ending in regulation makes more sense as a motive.
As it's impossible for me to convince anyone in this thread of anything on this topic, I'm just freely making some points. People have already picked a side to stand on and the line has been drawn. Case in point, you've already gotten your pitchfork out.
> Facebook closed on Thursday at $165. It closed on Friday at $160
16 March open to 26 March close, Facebook lost 13% of its value [1]. The same statistic for the S&P 500 is 3.4%. This time horizon makes more sense than yours because it matches the first revelations of Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook's data [3].
Market has been choppy since February but FB moving down will bring other stocks down with it. Google was down over the same period BECAUSE of Facebook. Facebook is very much a bellwether company like it or not.
> Google was down over the same period BECAUSE of Facebook
This feels counter-intuitive to me as these are the major players in online advertising. A facebook exodus would feel like a positive for google's primary revenue driver. Why is the inverse effect true?
Good explanations here but it's mostly due to relative valuation and this is magnified by the fact that a lot of these big names are cross-listed among hundreds and thousands of ETFs. I cannot stress enough the impact ETFs and so called "smart" beta trading will have in the next couple of years.
This took surprisingly many searches to answer - I was expecting to find this neatly tabulated from earning reports etc. But anyway :
"Alphabet generated $32.3 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, up 24% from the same period last year. It was Alphabet’s highest-revenue quarter ever, beating out the prior quarter. About $27.2 billion of that revenue, or 85%, came from Google’s advertising business."
I also found it interesting how much Google pays for "traffic acquisition" (like paying Mozilla for default search etc):
" In its most recently completed quarter, traffic-acquisitions costs were $6.5 billion, or 24% of Google’s advertising revenue, up 33% from the same period last year. Google’s strongest growth areas—mobile search and programmatic advertising—carry higher traffic-acquisition costs, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat said on the earnings call."
(this is of course how Facebook is competing with Google: they have a captive audience that they additionally know very well).
As far as I can tell ad revenue is growing faster than all of google's "hobby" projects... They're still an advertising company with a couple of tech projects in a shed in the garden.
Except NAZDAQ rallied today, so did Google. Facebook did not. Google's decline was part of the halo effect cast over big data techs as a result of the facebook debacle, and indexes in general were down over fears of pending trade wars with China that have now eased slightly. Facebook's decline continued despite these other factors getting some relief. Its issues are all its own at the moment.
ah, I see now they rallied shortly before close. I last checked them around 3:30 when they were still down about 2-3%. Though I think it's important to note they did not rally to the extent the rest of the market did, which largely erased 90% of the losses from the prior Friday.
I fail to see how this will seriously damage them. They already own the two biggest alternatives to facebook - Instagram for pictures and WhatsApp for communication. More people are using their services than ever before and more people are getting access to the internet in developing countries.
Do android users actually uses Hangouts? I have a couple of friends on it but my understanding is that Android users (like myself) just stick with standard SMS/MMS in the US. Patiently waiting for Universal RCS to take off...
We non-US people will never understand this, sorry. Instead of staying in a single cross-platform system US people prolonged for other ~5 years the use of SMS that was non existing here for a long time, also paying the highest costs in the world per SMS more or less (AFAIK you used to pay even for receiving), and now are picking OS-specific platforms.
Also true for banking — The prominence of Apple and Android Pay is a direct response to the U.S. banking industries anti-competitive prices and poor adoption of global standards. Broadly speaking, Europe and SEA had contactless EMV chip payments well before the vendor-specific smartphone solutions.
I don't see many people in the US carrying Android devices. Everyone I see seems to have iPhone. Android is more concentrated in Asian and South American countries IMO.
iOS and Samsung’s U.S. market share is now tied [...] iOS is up 3.7 percentage points year-over-year, to achieve 35 percent market share, while Samsung only grew 0.8 points, reaching a 35.2 percent share [...] Android is still far ahead in the U.S., with a 63.2 percent share to iOS’s 35 percent.
The founder (Durov) is a Russian in exile, fighting Putin's attempts to control the encryption keys. Secret chats are not affected, but cloud chats would be. Durov has stated he would rather see Telegram banned in Russia than give in, but the world will know in 2 weeks.
He's not "in exile", it was bluff/PR piece. He regularly visits St-Petersburg, and the main development office was also in St-Petersburg as of a year back right next door to the Vkontakte one.
Durov is a very shady person, I wouldn't trust him with anything that you may want to keep private. Check out how a story by ex-employee of his [1], it gives a lot of backstage info.
I have no idea where the FB stock is going. I don't think the company is in trouble, but likely to continue shifting focus. The good thing for them is that their products complement each other pretty well.
FB the product has been changing quite a bit. Many people don't use it anymore to see what their "friends" are doing. They use it to follow certain groups of interest. For me it's becoming something between Reddit, Meetup, and Craigslist. (I don't check my FB often)
Instagram (which I don't use) is still strong in what FB used to be, but the friendship model is more lax like in Twitter. The demographics also complement FB well.
WhatsApp (which I use daily for everything) is huge all over the world. It's also catching up in the US. Besides the 1on1 communication, it's also big on groups. But the WahtsApp groups are quite different from the FB groups. They tend to be smaller and more personal. It's not really by design, it's mainly because it's connected to people's phones. They just need to figure out how to monetize it. The potential is huge. (but first please improve the calling quality, it's so bad)
WhatsApp is a great product but among the three the most easily replaceable. But that's not going to happen any time soon. FB were smart keeping it independent and separate (many users don't even know they own it). One thing I really dislike about Google is that they merge everything under one umbrella.
I'm a bit worried they will soon enough go the route of AT&T, Comcast, the Telco mafia, Airlines, etc. and embrace their suck, then just lobby for survival.
I don't believe that recruiting is a big problem. Their immediate problem is that money isn't coming in. When you don't have money coming in you're not worried about hiring more people.
I don't think you really need the best of the best programmers to keep Facebook running. Other than the infrastructure needed to support the massive number of users Facebook has, I doubt the rest of the work done over there is really much more difficult than work done anywhere else. And I doubt they'll have to improve the infrastructure very much any more, seeing as they've much got as many users now as they ever are going to have. If anything it will get easier over time as more and more people leave the platform.
Facebook's offers are still higher value than Google/Startups. And Google (although not the company in question) has nearly as questionable data use as Facebook.
I genuinely believe that advertisers are only pulling out because it's the PR thing to do. There are many other companies that would love to take advantage of a less competitive bid for Facebook ad space and I have no doubt they will be taking advantage of it and will continue to spend boats of money on Facebook.
Two of the largest advertisers don’t think Facebook ads are effective. The latest, P&G, specifically call out how narrow targeting is ineffective.
> After cutting back on certain digital ads, “we didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate,” said Mr. Moeller during the call. “What that tells me is that the spending we cut was largely ineffective.”
I wonder why Facebook doesn't make deals with supermarkets to collect data on every single purchase. There's no doubt that Facebook advertising would be far more effective if it knew when John Smith last purchased toothpaste.
Yeah I'm not surprised. It's really hard to track how any online advertising leads to B&M purchases. On the flip side, I have no doubt online retailers thrive with Faceboook ads.
Agree, it's a great platform for advertisers and they know it's great for targeting and conversions.
Most of the outrage and awareness seems to be in the tech sphere (the vocal minority?) while the rest of the world just gets on with it.
Facebook didnt loose $100B in 10 days: it's market value dropped in response to bad news. Stocks go up and down all the time on companies that remain around a long time. It's still making piles of money. Its users have a huge, switching cost to block a transition, too.
Unfortunately, even if Facebook were to collapse into a sinkhole and disappear tomorrow, the general takeaway for the sort of person who would abuse user data will be "be unethical, make billions of dollars over a decade, jump ship when shit catches up with you and get off scott free!"
It's not exactly a fable that discourages repeats of history.
We get entirely different outcomes when we think of that scenario. In my mind the manager goes "hell yes I remember Facebook, give me some of them stock options!" - the "questionable" data gathering was the entire reason the platform became so valuable and started printing money.
Facebook runs a messaging service with ~1.2 billion monthly active users. One of the core features of the product is to integrate with other contacts on your phone, and you have to explicitly enable this feature, agreeing to "ongoing upload" of your "text and call history".
Apple runs a messaging service called iMessage. It logs all of your call metadata, SMS history, etc. There is no opt-in, it's just default behavior. Apple also runs iCloud. All of your data is sent there, too, including complete conversations.
Can someone for the life of me explain to me what makes Facebook the villain here? Apple does exactly the same thing.
Facebook has never sold this data. There is no evidence they've even used the data for anything except its explicitly-stated purpose.
> you have to explicitly enable this feature, agreeing to "ongoing upload" of your "text and call history"
I don't remember this being explicitly asked of me in any obvious way. And even if it was, I would have assumed they only needed that permission to get a list of contacts on my phone, and that the rest of it would be unused.
> Apple runs a messaging service called iMessage
Yes, and it's all encrypted and none of it is sent to third-party advertisers or creepy voter manipulation firms.
> Facebook has never sold this data. There is no evidence they've even used the data for anything except its explicitly-stated purpose.
I hope they continue to lose money. That's a pretty negative feeling to have towards a business for me too. However, they started harvesting text and call info back in 2006; that is about the time I first started looking into anything technology related. I thought fb was terrific as it grew and helped enable more connectivity. Now that it has been shown to be true tho, the invasion of privacy is absolutely ludicrous.
> Procter & Gamble Co. PG 0.66% , the biggest advertising spender in the world, will move away from ads on Facebook that target specific consumers, concluding that the practice has limited effectiveness.
More-and-more-specialized online display advertising rarely delivers as (heh) advertised on any platform.
But on the other hand, the bit you leave out includes both that they weren't cutting their FB budget, and that they'd found some areas where it works better:
> Mr. Pritchard said P&G won’t cut back on Facebook spending and will employ targeted ads where it makes sense, such as pitching diapers to expectant mothers.
So the real question is: were these political campaigns the useless sort of micro-targeting, or the effective kind?
> “Digital ad spending was lower versus a high base period and due to current period choices to temporarily restrict spending in digital forums where our ads were not being placed according to our standards and specifications,” the company said in its earnings
I suspect that FB targeted ads are not as useful for larger companies (who are generally advertising for awareness) compared to smaller or niche companies (where the target audience may be well defined).
"ads [...] that target specific consumers" sounds like code for retargeting or custom audiences. But those are just two ad products that Facebook offers.
If you want to build brand awareness for bland, forgettable products that people buy offline as I imagine P&G does, you want to blanket ads to broad audiences, not relatively small lists of specific individuals.
Will non-tech people be fed up with their data being abused by tech/ad companies? If this trend goes viral (ironic, eh?) it could mean less ad money. Advertising has had it really good compared to older days of TV and radio with targeted online communities and data about them.
Maybe this just sparks less VC investment towards freemium products?
This looks like big news but I think it is merely a small correction of its market value. For better or worse, they are going to stay for a very long time. At least from the current generation a significant amount of people will cling onto it for the rest of their lives like others do with cigarettes.
I wouldn't particularly mind if it lost another 100-200b in market cap. It's gotta be enough to have a long term affect, and to teach the other social media giants a lesson so they don't replicate the same behavior. Unfortunately the might just get better at hiding it.
Facebook isn't going anywhere for a long time. They'll retain the privacy-clueless fossils with FB. They'll keep the aspirational set with IG. Anything even remotely competitive or alternative they'll just throw cash at and snap up.
Myspace actually did keep a niche going with musicians for quite some time after its general popularity had waned. No idea why that was or if there's even any of that left.
Sorry to say it but its been a few years since I started to consider FB "useds" lame (just to use your word, but I would describe them with harsher terms). It seems my side of the fence is growing in numbers pretty fast lately.
I’m impressed at how misleading this headline is. If you didn’t know better, you might think Facebook’s bank accounts contain $100 billion less than they did a week ago. What they actually mean is that the stock price is down ~20%.
So while it seems like $100B dollars is a large sum, it's really about 12% ish of the market valuation. Yes it hurts, but no, it's not the end of the company.
Think of it this way. How much money will FB have to spend to rebrand itself and fix the privacy issues. $1 Billion, maybe $2 Billion?
Trump's victory signaled a social media gold-rush for political campaigns. 2018 is a major election year in American politics. You can bet that campaigns are evaluating and signing onto social media related efforts. To meet this demand, as Cambridge Analytica buckles, others will take it place. The people who benefit by these services are those who make the laws. While legislators benefit by social media targeted services, there won't be a political will sufficient to pass a law that will slay the goose laying golden eggs.
The advertisers leaving is what really hurts Facebook. Remember, you aren't Facebook's customer if you're just a regular user; you're the product.
Think of it this way; imagine a farmer having a bad harvest. that's a lot of pressure, but he or she will try to cope with the loss and monetize what's left cleverly.
Now, imagine the same farmer but the demand for the crop is falling. Now that's a capital "P" problem right there.
Is it crazy to consider investing in their stocks soon-ish. I totally hate the company but if this is global-minimum i can make some cash pretty easy. I'm relying on the premise that most users will continue to user the site and that this is a short term media frenzy similar to youtube advertiser fiasco.
If you hate the company, don't invest. If you're non-fussed but think it will return to it's glory days invest. If you love the company, invest.
You aren't the only one who doesn't like the company, it "can" be taken as a negative signal and suggest the company will continue to lose.
How many people LOVE facebook? I don't think they really exist anymore. Apple has it's haters, but it also has it's fans. Google has more haters than fans.
Of course, we're talking about more mature companies here, so the upside is not as great, the downside could have a real impact.
Of course, you have to consider FB as more than FB. If you loved Occulus, I'd say maybe invest. Big fan of Whatsapp, maybe invest.
There should be other opportunities to invest in things you do like that you would be proud to own.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Clearly a lot of investors agree with you, as the stock recovered at the end of today to be exactly where it was at the start of the day. If you truly believe what you wrote, then you should invest in it. I disagree with you, but I could be wrong.
