We use them at CommentSold for feature ideas, bug reports, and even top 1% feature ideas. The ability to tie it into our product and see the features voted on from an MRR aggregate not a vote-aggregate is phenomenal
Ah. Makes a lot of sense. Gets the person to a lower friction commitment point where they feel like they’re going back on their word if they abandon at that point. And you can harass them with PMs to follow up lol.
Having used tiktok for a total of 10 hours now, I get programmer humor, car videos and funny animal videos - exactly what I want
That's the whole point - the ability to curate content that you will like is phenomenal, especially given the non-obvious inputs to their model. Like a video? Sure you'll see more of that kind of stuff. You may not think about scrolling up/down to restart the video, watching it multiple times, sharing it, opening/closing the comments (and I'm sure 10,000 other inputs) all feed into it's ability to curate
The ultra-rich will have a variable level of "decreased performance in their portfolio". They're still rich, especially if not over-levered. They are also well positioned to take advantage of any hyper-inflation event.
The average american, with the loss of their primary income and no real UBI is going to feel it the most.
It was a lot of fun watching the project and community evolve. I think you and the team did an excellent job. I remember a huge spike in users around when discovery.etcd.io launched. It was really a game changer for us building large-scale multi-data center telecom systems. I still remember bootstrapping the first cluster in a 24 data center test and having things blow up, particularly in higher-latency environments (cross-DC)
Fast-forward 4 months, the project had grown and scaled to support the influx of new curious devs and use-cases that stretched the bounds of what was possible at the time. At the end of the 4-months, we had a 128 node cluster that stayed up for years and still powers all of the emergency notifications in a few states in the US!
Even at $1/year - their 1.5 billion active users should be an equal amount of revenue. I'd say that's enough to cover the cost of servers and bandwidth.
But that is it. If all you want is basic messaging then you are probably right.
However, if you are trying to build a messaging platform, which is what probably FB intends to do, then it requires more investment. Today, you might think that that is where the problem. All the users really want is basic messaging. However, in 3-5yrs from today, the reality may be very different (see WeChat or LINE in APAC) and WhatsApp maybe a complete misfit in that world.
All good products evolve. For something like messaging, if all you provide is a basic product, then you risk yourself being taken over by default platform apps (such as what happened with iMessage on iOS in US). You need stronger lockins and FB is well suited to provide those.
