Facebook Hits 2 Billion Users | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Hits 2 Billion Users

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199 pointsdavidgomes211 comments

As insane as this number is, and it really is an incredible achievement, I'm left feeling Facebook hasn't delivered much real net positive value to the world just yet.

Politics are in disarray. More people are "connected" online but more people than ever feel isolated in some way and mental health issues are on the rise. Highlight reels of your friends living a seemingly amazing life leave people feeling like they've underperformed. Shoddy advertising practices and questionable news are splattered around the platform. Obviously as a communication platform it works, but so what? There are a million ways to stay in touch with people.

I applaud Facebook, and Mark, for what they have achieved in terms of raw numbers and the ubiquity of the platform. But what's the point of having 2 billion users if ultimately this platform doesn't genuinely improve society for the better as a result?

Reminds me of this other thread from a post about a CRM for keeping track of personal associations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14498633

Facebook has a huge opportunity to help people stay connected with those closest to them -- and keep track of a wider circle of friends and family members -- in ways that actually evoke empathy and care, rather than jealousy and attention-seeking.

But I suppose that would run counter to their advertising funnels...

How would they make money doing that?

Legitimate problem, and legitimate question. This is the kind of thing I come to HN to see asked and answered. Too bad no one's taken a stab at it. Maybe that's what the "Facebook killer" will get right. Or Facebook themselves, to prevent being "killed."

I assume the point is Mark Zuckerburg's three cubic acres of money.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

And you know what? That's good enough. Money and power. Pretty much sums up why most big companies exist.

The part about making the world a better place I'm sure it's on their: "a nice to have" pile.

> "a nice to have" pile.

This pile is probably smaller than that other three-cubic-acres pile though.

> what's the point

I can think of two answers to that.

(1) Why does there have to be a point? How many of the other companies we discuss here have a point, other than the enrichment of their founders/investors? Personally I loathe the "financial performance is a company's only duty" attitude (which is contrary to the actual law BTW), but if we're going to say companies should have a point then we should apply an equal standard. Facebook should have a point. Google should have a point. Netflix should have a point. $random_startup should have a point.

(2) Every time Facebook or Google or anyone else does try to use their huge troves of data and powerful algorithms to be any more than a passive conduit for others' attempts to influence society, they get slammed for it. Some of that is happening right here, right now, in these comments. How do we reconcile "try to do good" with "don't meddle"? We need better answers for that, not just criticism.

Good points well made.

I think it's safe to say that Google and parent company Alphabet have legitimately, and for the most part positively, changed the world. Just their search facility without all the other "fluff" gives me access to more information than I ever dreamed possible when I was still using Microsoft Encarta as a teenager. They definitely lose points for lacking in transparency and shoddy advertising practices though...no question.

I suspect it's very very difficult to do the right thing by the world and keep your shareholders happy. Shareholders care about profit, and that is very rarely aligned with doing good - especially on a global scale! With all due respect to everyone on HN, which of course includes me, I doubt the person who has the answer to that billion dollar question is sat reading this thread.

And I can say the same about Facebook. They have kept me in touch with friends and family that I would have no relationship with at this point if it wasn't for Facebook's absurd levels of adoption (which is driven by an amazing product, which surprisingly has to be said since a lot of people here on HN like to discredit the technological / design achievements of companies like FB, Twitter, etc...)

I mean, you could even argue that the levels of adoption that they have achieved is a hugely positive thing in itself. If those 2B people were scattered across multiple platforms, you would not be able to have one platform which is basically guaranteed to be used by the vast majority of the people you encounter.

There's another thread going on right now where people are vigorously debating what the point of Blue Apron is, a company with ~1/200 the market cap and ~1/5000 as many users.

Google is in a similar position as Facebook as a primary arbiter of information and it's also vigorously debated.

I'm not sure if it has ever been true that our arbiters of information were ever truly altruistic and good, but it's hard to imagine that they have ever let us down as badly as they have lately.

When was Facebook about improving society? Oh sure they'll do that as long as it doesn't jeopardize profits, but after all we've learned about their social engineering, social experimentation, pattern recognition and various mechanisms to maintain engagement, is it really right to pretend they are any different than any other large corporation? The dollar is the endgame, and if improving society becomes a profitable endeavor, then and only then is it safe to say they will pursue it.

> The dollar is the endgame...

Is that not equally true for just about every tech company we discuss here?

Of course.

Profit-seeking isn't inherently a bad thing.

Personally I measure their worth of these companies based on the damage they cause in the pursuit of that profit.

I contend that your formula is still incomplete. Yes, we absolutely should count the damage companies cause in pursuit of profit. We should also count the non-financial good they do. The spread of "fake news" is a bad thing. Connecting with other people who have the same disease, as another commenter mentioned, is a good thing. Count both. I'm not trying to say whether the net for Facebook or anyone else is positive or negative. I'm just saying that we should apply the same standard for every company, and it should be standard that includes all relevant data. Too often, I see different and/or incomplete standards used to praise some companies and condemn others.

I think that's kind of my point. Notwithstanding that they have shareholders to please, and metrics to aim for, I just wonder when they're actually going to do something with their enormous reach.

Implementing a true technical democracy? Meaningfully helping people stay in touch (like the recent social CRM that was on HN)? Suicide prevention? Mental health awareness - I read a study recently about how certain Facebook posts can indicate somebody has a mental health issue.

They must have some angle on trying to do good. The recent implementation of the "mark yourself safe" feature is a tiny gesture towards actually trying to do good but it's trivial really. There must be so much more that can be done.

Money

None.

When was the last time you consider 20 minutes spent on facebook browsing a well spent time?

Quite often. For one thing, it's the primary way I stay in touch with most of my non-immediate family, including my father and my half-brothers who live on the other side of the world. For another, it provides a higher density of humor and "awww!" than anything else in my life. Those are things I sorely need during/after a long day of work and housework and others' online negativity.

Facebook, and every other social media platform, is largely what you make of it. If you friend or follow garbage people, you'll have a garbage feed. If you carefully curate those lists, you can have a feed that's funny or touching or thought-provoking. "The common element of all your unsatisfying relationships is you" is not (just) a joke on a poster. It's good advice too, but not everyone's smart enough to take it.

I dont know about society as a whole, but it certainly improves the lives of those who work for facebook.

I personally didn't have much use of Facebook until I started using it to connect with those who suffer the same illness as me. Then I realized I had a worldwide support group to tap into. That's pretty important to me and to the billions who use this platform.

Uncontrollable love of cats?

Don't forget the ethically dubious psychological experiments performed on unwitting Facebook users.

Honestly I consider Facebook as an entity to be a net drain on the species in spite of whatever good it may have done.

Facebook "works" in the same sense opium "works"

It is both amazing and deeply concerning that one corporation has influence over 1/4 of the world's population. It is even more concerning when you consider the outsized voting power of 1 person at that company.

do they though? I consume Coca Cola, and so do approx 2B other earthing. Does Coca Cola have influence over me?

What makes you think the comparison is valid?

I believe his point is that a company's size should be irrelevant to this discussion.

I disagree. The question he asks seems to me to be about how much influence FB has. Size doesn't seem to figure in his comment.

Do you share your life, connect with your friends, and get your news from Coca Cola?

Isn't that what ShareACoke.com is about?

Does ShareACoke.com have 2 billion users?

I don't do any of that on facebook. The only FB product I use is WhatsApp and Instagram (view only).

Coca cola reaches your stomach, Facebook reaches your social circle

You are what you eat, as they say, so...

I think we should be more concerned with ykk zippers. I mean, they have a near monopoly.

Coca-cola doesn't petabytes of data on your intimate thoughts and conversations.

When you buy a coke, is there an email from coke in your inbox the next day?

When you interact with coke does it gently tailor what you see and what you do not see, month after month?

If you cannot understand how people are influenced, maybe you'll never see the influencing happening. That doesn't make you immune, on the contrary...

No, but it does make me want to drink a coke the next day and maybe more than one a day. I don't have the same problem with broccoli.

His point is not that Coca-cola has _no_effect on you, but their effect on you is pretty much limited to getting you to drink Coke, because that's their goal.

Facebook can, has, and certainly will continue to monitor and influence MOST aspects of peoples lives - social, political, religious, economic, etc. Just ads and subtle filtering of walls and ads alone is provably HUGE impact-wise.

How does an automated email from FB that gets filtered into my FB folder that I never read actually influence me?

That's you. You do not represent everyone who uses Facebook.

Facebook is a platform. They don't do a lot of attempting to influence, as far as I can tell.

Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.

Or plenty of non-tech companies, as the sibling commenter points out. Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc.

Facebook censors content, such as nipples. Facebook put a giant banner across their site for Indian users to promote a specific public policy matter.

> Facebook censors content, such as nipples

But leaked documents from their internal policy allows for displaying the Female nipple under certain circumstances.

See => https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fb-art-...

Source: Leaked Document Lays Out Facebook’s Policy on Sex and Nudity in Art => https://hyperallergic.com/380911/leaked-document-lays-out-fa...

How do they / their algorithm decide if the nudity is "only contours visible" but not "sufficiently detailed"

Algorithm is certainly mostly machine learning.

Algorithm is presorting, cheap third world labour is final sorting.

Cheap third world labour radicalizes with this impression of a corrupt west.

Cheap thirld word labour joins terrorists and produces horrifying pictures/videos - posted to facebook.

Thus the circle is closed.

I saw a vice piece which showed that they used human content filters, at least for some stuff.

In any case the rules determined for their human or algorithmic content filters are culturally arbitrary, and Western-biased. For example, if Facebook was a Saudi company, you can bet more than nipples would be banned.

> Facebook is a platform. They don't do a lot of attempting to influence, as far as I can tell.

Ahem: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

That's the event I was thinking of, thanks for the link.

What point are you trying to make? Can you elaborate? "Ahem" and a link don't do a good job of forming or supporting a specific point.

Edit: Why do people think these are unreasonable questions? Does Google attempt to influence by ordering search results? How can any publisher avoid attempting to influence when any difference in content is potentially influential?

It's really not that complicated. They did attempt to influence.

The point appears to be: FB has, in the past, done "a lot of attempting to influence".

Adding to the reason above, Facebook has been creating filter bubbles for years now. As a feature! Leading to the influence of Fake News and people who believe it.

I remember a few years ago when they experimented with explicitly influencing their users' emotions by manipulating their feeds and home pages. They caught a lot of flack for it (as they should have), but I doubt it stopped there.

>Facebook is a platform. They don't do a lot of attempting to influence, as far as I can tell.

It's a platform that has algorithms to pick what news 1/4th of the world reads. And who has access to the personal data of 1/4 of the world.

>Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.

Yes, but Apple just makes devices. Their Cloud services are not of the type that expert influence of FB or Google kind.(Neither is Microsoft's products).

Microsoft has Bing, though they're obviously less influential than Google there.

I think they have plenty of influence just using the power of showing/not showing people specific things.

Facebook has literally run psychological experiments to test how well they can manipulate their user's emotions.

edit: sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648521

Both Facebook and Google have actively influenced political events.

>[..] on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have. : https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

For more interesting stuff on this topic, look up the company 'The Groundwork'.

Problem is, there isn't any oversight that any person outside of those companies could look at to ensure that it isn't attempting to influence. We know about various studies they've done at Facebook but there is no way, beyond trust, to know if they or any inner groups are attempting to do any influence. Even an accidental bug could influence a startling amount of people and no one would ever know.

When a single platform has the eyes and attention of a third of the world's population each day, even the smallest things, purposeful or not, could cause a ripple of change.

I would argue Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc are different. They can't make instant changes or do AB testing on a scale that Facebook can. Facebook could give a single page over to an algorithm that runs millions of experiments a day to learn how best to influence a person in a certain way, iterate on that and continue. A single engineer, with their scale and data, could set this up given the proper permissions.

I'm more concerned that 2B is only 1/4 of the world's population.

And even more concerning when you consider its a single-country owned corporation.

bow bow bowwww

When Microsoft was monopolizing the world, the government stepped in. Now the EU is going after Google. What is the government doing about Facebook?

Imagine if the government hadn't stepped in to limit Microsoft's monopoly; today there would be no Facebook; everyone in the tech industry would be a Microsoft employee and everyone in the world would be using Microsoft's "Human Social Monitoring System"... and we would chant praises to our dear leader Bill Gates.

Microsoft abused its position as the dominant OS maker to shut competitors out of a different market (web browsers).

I agree the pervasiveness of Facebook is a problem (one of many). But from a legal standpoint, what have they done that can bring a viable antitrust complaint?

Facebook monopolized social advertising. Facebook makes your friends want things that they don't need and in doing so is distorting society's values and encouraging mindless consumerism.

That's not a monopoly, that's just advertising.

So you want to make all advertising illegal?

A world free of ads.... what a wonderful dream

A better dream is a world free of marketing of any type

Maybe the government is comfortable with a company that benignly collects personal data on 1/4 of the population, just in case it ever wants to leverage that data.

> Imagine if the government hadn't stepped in to limit Microsoft's monopoly

That seems like a stretch. Microsoft has drastically decreased in influence because they didn't get in on the big new trends soon enough - web search, social networking, and mobile. I don't see how anything the Government did enabled that. At most, the implied threat of further Government action might have prevented them from more drastic efforts to block those things.

That the USA limited Microsoft is not a stretch at all, it happened!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

There are some attempts in the EU. In Germany, they've been waging a PR battle with the government over fake news, nazi propaganda, and other extremism.

It's difficult because it's not something that neatly falls into established categories, and it quite obviously touches on free speech issues. You can be absolutely sure that, if Facebook were to use its power to promote a political agenda, they'd quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a law. But as long as it's incidental damage, and hard to show with statistical significance, it comes down to the fundamental law of laws: that what doesn't do harm is allowed.

What I suspect will emerge rather soon is a DMCA-style notice/takedown/counter-notice protocol for libel and fake news.

I think it is an overreach to go from 'access to' to 'influence over'. Facebook has access to 1/4 of the worlds population but having access does not imply influence. Only that you can reach them.

It is remarkable that one corporation owns the infrastructure on which 1/4 of the world's population communicates. That makes it an exceptionally good platform for surveillance because even people who are good at keeping their activities hidden now have to make sure that everyone they know is as good as they are.

No doubt because of that risk, any good operational security training will include an example involving leakage through Facebook.

> I think it is an overreach to go from 'access to' to 'influence over'

Facebook is a lot of people's primary source of news or even communication.

Humans are a social species and massively influenced by what they hear from others.

I don't disagree, but I don't think Facebook is responsible for 'fake news' or even 'hate news'. As with any community there are actors within it which self select to group together and communicate. Now what it does do is allow what might be a dispersed group to become a 'local community' but Facebook's role in that is providing the access, not in influencing what those people do or say.

One need only step between rabidly conservative and rabidly liberal enclaves on Facebook to see different groups surrounding themselves with their own messaging.

To date I don't see Facebook exerting an editorial influence that is swaying meaningful sized groups. Sure there are groups that use Facebook to do that, but it isn't something you can buy or arrange for from the company.

See the comments below regarding Facebook's algorithms about what gets presented in people's feeds. Facebook is absolutely a principle player in what people see, by virtue that their algorithms can be gamed in particular ways, and their promotion of news and products can be bought. To think that Facebook isn't selling outsized influence over people's feeds for obscene amounts of money would be naive.

EDIT: I believe this is also the secret to Reddit's success...

I see it differently. I see people gaming Facebook's algorithms just like people have worked to game search engine algorithms for years, in order to push their message in front of people who would be receptive to it. I don't see Facebook as the agent of that gaming which is perhaps an insignificant point as far as some in the discussion would consider but for me it is the essential point.

I see Reddit, Facebook, Topix, Google+, HN, all providing "watering holes" or a place for a community to form, and these days there is always an algorithm connected to a mechanism for the community to use to signal its approval and disapproval. In "broad" community sites like Facebook and Reddit there is an explicit 'hands off' policy on how those communities operate (until there isn't). That supports a wide number of communities and optimizes for high user counts. In "narrow" community sites like HN and various forum sites, there is an explicit 'hands on' policy which drives the community to a particular place. That optimizes for content/discussion that is highly aligned with the owner's editorial goals even at the cost of ejecting users who don't align with those goals.

The way I think about it, for a multi-community site to actively "influence" its users, the site operator would have to apply some mechanism for shaming or promoting specific communities within it. Further it would associate users with that level of compliance which would signal to them if they were 'betting better' or 'being worse'. The signalling is needed to help the users understand which way they are "supposed" to go, without that signalling it is much harder.

So multi-community sites don't (and won't) do that because it results in users leaving and taking their eyeballs with them. And ultimately the point of such sites is to collect as many people there as possible with as wide a demographic as possible, so that people can advertise goods and services to them.

Monthly, active according to this source:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15880494/facebook-2-billi...

And if you look at these stats from March 2017:

https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

It could be either one. Daily active were 1.28 B and monthly active were 1.9 B so either way it is likely they have both crossed, or are about to cross the 2B mark.

why would it be likely that daily active users ballooned 56% to surpass 2B? Seems like it must be monthly active in the discussion. Did FB do something recently that leads to your remark

This is from March 2017. I just thought that if the Monthly users were going to go over, they would have done so a while ago.

Another reply, from @jackmodern, indicates that they may have done that, so now I am less confident that it is the daily actives.

I checked the date, slightly confused. Just to make sure: could you send me the lottery numbers for the last two years?

Anyway, that Facebook about-us page also has an article from summer 2015 about hitting 1 Billion daily active users for the first time. Their growth really isn't that impressive any more (+280Million in two years), mostly because they've run out of people.

they crossed 3 months ago when I still worked there but didn't want to share it broadly because they thought it was a temporary spike due to some political unrest in SE Asia. Safe to assume they are over the hump by now.

Just curious, what political unrest in SE Asia? Are you talking about the Jakarta election?

something in India actually I think.

I neither like, share heart or use groups, how ever I'd consider myself as an active user.

I'm so glad I'm still in the majority.

So, not to discredit this number, but here are some things to consider -

1 - Bots. Lots of bots.

2 - Multiple accounts. I've seen people with as many as 4 accounts, used for different purposes(friend groups).

3 - 'Facebook is the internet'. Facebook is free(ie not charged as data usage), and therefore, 'the internet', in many poor nations. I'm not actually sure if this is Facebook's doing, a carrier agreement, etc, but it exists. This accounts for what I assume are the bulk of the 'real' users.

Yeah, bots were my first thought. Run any decent sized fb group and you'll realise just how many there are, then realise you're probably only seeing a small cross section. I would say thousands new every day. I saw a friend having some fun a while back posting public statuses to bait spambots with keywords like "tupac movie" and "watch online" - they get flooded within minutes. Also, I have at least 3-4 accounts and know plenty of people who have as many, too. Can't imagine how they'd differentiate that from say, my housemate or partner logging in from the same IP address.

> I'm not actually sure if this is Facebook's doing, a carrier agreement, etc

This is absolutely in part Facebook's doing. They've struck numerous deals.

Doesn't surprise me. I don't want to make too harsh of accusations, but in my head, it feels just short of fraud. Not growing fast enough? Shrinking? Give a third world nation free internet to become users and pad the numbers. Tell advertisers and investors you're growing, but not precisely how and where.

Again, that's just my first instinct, not an accusation.

You know the old joke where the mentor says "pay me 100 dollars and I'll show you how to make a million dollars"?

I laughed a little because reading the post about facebook's user growth immediately nags me to sign up for facebook. Nothing against facebook; the irony just got a chuckle out of me.

Consensus is monthly active users: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/

Remains to be seen how many are real humans though.

That is mind-blowing. 2 billion total users an immense volume in and of itself but 2 billion even semi active users is incredible

Google's profile counts -- Android, Gmail, Youtube, and G+, mostly, in about that order, topped 3 billion a while ago.

http://archive.is/zi4Uw

(Origin site appears down.)

I have at least two Google accounts and a very old never-really-used Youtube account (from the days before it was a Google account), so it's very appropriate that you say "profile count" rather than "user count".

I'm quite aware of that, but yes, that's a crucial distinction.

Point being that very large user account collections do exist.

Only active users should be counted.

An upstream comment menttioned total accounts.

I've some awareness of G+ active users.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

There may also be other concerns or interests.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

It frustrates me to think I count in this number even though I only have a fake Facebook account under a fake name and with no friends, simply because my job requires that I log into their developer account occasionally.

You and other fake test accounts by developers are still a rounding error. More interesting statistics is how many fake accounts are created for influencing discussion. Twitter has a huge problem with this, Facebook seems to handle it better but even if it is a single digits (1-5%) it is still tens of millions of accounts

I legitimately wonder how many of these accounts are "real" (e.g. not bots, not developer accounts, not "old" accounts, not parody accounts, etc). I know I have 3 accounts myself (various developer accounts), but even nontechnical friends "remake" their FB every year or so pretty regularly (my sister has a good 5-6 accounts that she no longer uses anymore). And that's completely ignoring however many spam/bots there are out there spamming FB messenger, groups, friend requests, etc.

I need perspective

At peak, how many landline phones (residential) were there? Peak: printed newspaper readership worldwide? Peak: tv viewership (like july 20, '69)

How many people have electricity? Water?

How many active smartphones in use today?

How many machines run any MS OS?

How many worldwide automobiles?

At first it seems like Gomer "Gol-ly" but not really.

World Cup 2014 probably beats July 20, 1969 as far as pure viewership numbers go

Edit: 600 million watched the moon landing [1], 3.2 billion watched the World Cup [2]

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5852237/Apollo... [2]: http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/y=2015/m=12/news=2014-fifa...

Amazing to me that 3.2 billion people could be watching the same thing at once while I have no awareness at all that it's happening.

Let me rephrase it: amazingly there is (at least) 3.2 billion people having no awareness of you ;)

After your links id ask another way: how many FB ers are on at the same time?

1.16 billion landline phones in 2013 per Wikipedia (CIA world factbook reported 1.26b in 2003; either is likely a roughly good peak global number, a solid mix between high globalization development (eg China & India had started to get large enough economically to install plenty of landlines) and pre high-level cellphone dominance in the developing world):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline

That's mind-blowing to me. Is that correct that roughly 26% of the world population is on Facebook? Or are these numbers representative of total users since the beginning of the site?

If it's the latter, then I'd be curious as to how many users actively use the site today.

It's monthly active. Also, this isn't surprising given the trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

Also factor in that 13% of Americans don't use the internet as of Sept 2016. I'd expect that average global percentage to be even higher.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/07/some-america...

Say what you will about Facebook but I can't deny that I use their products to connect with others. Facebook messenger and groups along with Facebook events has been a part of my life in better ways than AIM, Hangouts, or BBM ever was.

Congratulations to them for hitting 2 billion.

Mainly because everybody else is using it.

It's hard not to barf at all the "community" and "progress" and "connecting" and (worst of all) "journey" going on. (One of these days, can everything stop being a "journey" please?)

You know who talks like that? The inexperienced earnest, the zen master, and the liar. The ones who can say life truly is just a profound journey of progress and connecting with the community, are those who have never messed up, or had their lives ruined, or truly lived, on the one hand, or those who have worked for a lifetime to master a spiritual outlook on the other hand. And then throw in the liars - the people camouflaging themselves behind all that, to conceal something else they're doing. If I had to guess I would say Mark Zuckerberg might be some weird mix of "inexperienced earnest" and "liar" (including self-liar). But it's only a guess.

Is it showing signs of peaking? Remember that for some third-world countries facebook IS the internet.

This really bums me out.

And for some western countries Google IS the Internet.

I think Facebook counts you as active even if you're logged in, never go to the site, but see any site with a like button. I've blocked Facebook using both Safari Content blockers and my `/etc/hosts` file, but I wonder if they have other ways of attempting to count me in.

Please share all your FB entries to block

I use FanBoy's filters w/uBlock origin. Check them here: https://www.fanboy.co.nz

The reason I go with Safari Content blockers and /etc/hosts is because both of those solutions stop network requests before they even attempt to make a network request. uBlock is a good backup solution, but I want my computer to think Facebook doesn't even exist as a url, regardless of context.

For example uBlock won't stop iMessage from trying to load Facebook's inline media content when someone messages me a Facebook link.

for OSX blocking at DNS level: Posted a year ago in hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11793855

for linux use: https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor/tree/master/data

https://www.perpetual-beta.org/weblog/blocking-facebook-on-o...

This is also a great solution.

> for linux use: https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor/tree/master/data

This appears to be broken.

https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists

https://github.com/evilneuro/FreeContributor

  127.0.0.1 facebook.com
  127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
  127.0.0.1 static.ak.fbcdn.net
  127.0.0.1 www.static.ak.fbcdn.net
  127.0.0.1 login.facebook.com
  127.0.0.1 www.login.facebook.com
  127.0.0.1 fbcdn.net
  127.0.0.1 www.fbcdn.net
  127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com
  127.0.0.1 www.fbcdn.com
  127.0.0.1 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
  127.0.0.1 www.static.ak.connect.facebook.com

0.0.0.0 is a better target than localhost, because it means the connection fails immediately rather than possibly timing out, and it won't accidentally succeed if you're running a local server.

The IPv6 variant (two colons, ::) is shorter still.

This is what I get when I `cat /etc/hosts | grep facebook`. Not all are Facebook

  0.0.0.0 facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookinc.122.2o7.net
  0.0.0.0 ncaafacebook.com
  0.0.0.0 www.ncaafacebook.com
  0.0.0.0 wwwfacebook.com
  0.0.0.0 www.wwwfacebook.com
  0.0.0.0 facebook-proxy.hi5.com
  0.0.0.0 facebook-repto1040s2.ahlamountada.com
  0.0.0.0 facebook.cm
  0.0.0.0 www.facebook.cm
  0.0.0.0 www.facebook.realtorarcf.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookasciiart.com
  0.0.0.0 www.facebookasciiart.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookbox.com
  0.0.0.0 www.facebookbox.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookcrawl.co.cc
  0.0.0.0 www.facebookcrawl.co.cc
  0.0.0.0 facebookloginsignin.com
  0.0.0.0 www.facebookloginsignin.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookoxy.com
  0.0.0.0 www.facebookoxy.com
  0.0.0.0 facebooktbtoolbar.ourtoolbar.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookunblocking.com
  0.0.0.0 www.facebookunblocking.com
  0.0.0.0 hacking-facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 www.hacking-facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 needfacebook.com
  0.0.0.0 www.needfacebook.com
  0.0.0.0 unblockfacebook.co.uk
  0.0.0.0 www.unblockfacebook.co.uk
  0.0.0.0 facebook-zdjecia.bo.pl
  0.0.0.0 zdjecia-facebook.bo.pl
  0.0.0.0 facebook-color.5v.pl
  0.0.0.0 podgladfacebook.wirtualnie.pl
  0.0.0.0 facebook-uzaleznienie.wirtualnie.pl
  0.0.0.0 facebookpodglad.wirtualnie.pl
  0.0.0.0 facebookszpieg.glt.pl
  0.0.0.0 pl-facebook.com--contest.co
  0.0.0.0 facebookcolor.pl
  0.0.0.0 www.specials.facebook.netsa.pl
  0.0.0.0 ilenafacebooku.pl
  0.0.0.0 facebook-app.pl
  0.0.0.0 facebookred.pl
  0.0.0.0 facebookfriends.com.pl
  0.0.0.0 ktopodgladamnienafacebooku.wordpress.com
  0.0.0.0 5facebookfrienddel.blogspot.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookkoloruj.blogspot.com
  0.0.0.0 aktualizacjafacebooka.blogspot.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookaplikacje.blogspot.com
  0.0.0.0 facebook-kolor.blogspot.com
  0.0.0.0 facebookkviewer.blogspot.com
  0.0.0.0 creative.ak.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 pixel.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 ads.ak.facebook.com
  0.0.0.0 ads.ak.facebook.com.edgesuite.net

And my rule in 1Blocker is

  https?://([a-z\.]*)?facebook\.com.*

@netaddict list is better.

They do not: http://www.adweek.com/digital/monthly-active-users-definitio...

They don't need to fake count you as active. It would not be beneficial to misrepresent your own stats, because if your engagement numbers don't reflect that to advertisers then you're in trouble.

Dangerously approaching 2,147,483,647. Let's hope their user ID's are not 32-bit integers :-)

Sign shouldn't matter for an ID; it works as long as the ID is unique. So I think the real limit would be a factor of 2 higher.

PHP uses 64-bit integers on 64-bit systems. Of course they have some compiled variant of PHP which might do anything...

They scrapped the compiling to C++ part long ago, HipHop is now HHVM.

/me duckduckgo's that

Hmm, JIT but only to bytecode it seems, not to machine code. Interesting!

I'm fairly certain they would have designed and kept the Earth's actual and expected population in mind with their scaling.

If they're using auto-incrementing IDs, they will have broke past that number some time ago. 2bn is monthly active users, which implies there's many dead or inactive accounts.

Can they hit back? Or at least protect themselves from being hit? It's domestic violence, people!

That is excluding China...So it is more impressive if we do the calculation, 2B out of 6B population if we assume the current world population is 7.5B.

FB is blocked in China?

yes, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, Picasa, WordPress.com, Blogspot, Blogger, Flickr, SoundCloud, Google+, Google Hangouts, Hootsuite are all blocked according to [1] 1. http://www.saporedicina.com/english/list-of-blocked-websites...

I get shamed occasionally for never having a Facebook account. It's amazing how mindshare drives market share really and gets people to react like this.

Genuinely I couldn't work out how it improved my life in any way. Everyone I know who uses it shows signs of addiction. It's like a cigarette. Perhaps that's it!

And my pet snake is one of them, so I'm not sure what that really means.

So if 10% of their users are pet snakes (a really generous estimate imo), they've got a mere 1.8 billion monthly active users.

More likely hundreds of millions are bots.

So a mere 1.5 billion then? :)

That seems like a conservative estimate, IMO, considering how lucrative/easy it is to get into Messenger/Groups spam.

Is your pet snake a monthly active user?

Well, Zuck's dog Beast has a profile with a million likes and since a human is actually operating it, it is as legitimate a profile as yours or your pet snake's (assuming you keep it active)

Beast has a Page, not a Profile. Pages don't count as people :)

The sssstatistic is ssssub-optimal.

Serious question, is a social network like Facebook a public good, in the economic sense? Should it be a publicly regulated utility?

Facebook is non-rivalrous but is is excludable (that is, one user of Facebook does not 'take up a slot' preventing any other users from using it, but you can be prevented from using it if you don't 'pay', i.e. follow the TOS).

In general, public goods are things like air, languages, street lights, and national defense. Facebook (as far as I know) is not critical to your safety or survival, so you'd have a devil of a time trying to convince anyone that it's a public good.

As a litmus, I would wager that the odds of Facebook or any other website becoming a public good before the internet are nearly zero, so once it happens to the internet, we'll come back to it.

Microsoft at it's peak was more powerful and monopolistic than Facebook, with the same public good questions popping up. Now few would feel that way. It's pretty amazing how technology can disrupt seemingly invincible entities. Facebook's dominance is quite precarious over a multi-decade timeline.

"We're making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together."

.. Making the world, a better place!

For comparison, it was August 2008 when they hit 100 million users:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/our-first-100-millio...

It was October 2012 when they hit 1 billion (active) users:

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2012/10/one-billion-people-on-f...

Have a hard time believing these numbers are correct. I keep getting fake profile friend requests. Seems incredibly inflated but I mean who will look into that.

I recently created a dedicated fb account to connect with some people, and I was very very surprised how dull fb is. I tried it back in the days and felt it had some value, in terms of UX and "connection" but now it's all foobar and gimmicky. Very odd. I would never had expected it to reach 2B so fast. I wonder if it's mostly because of mass + [o]auth capabilities so ubiquitous now.

It's a social network. If a lot of your friends are not on it (or are not active on it), expect it to be dull. Most people use it as a clubhouse not a personal journal.

If you friends don't post, then your feed will largely consist of advertisements or pointless posts from pages.

Ok. So, how many of these are Facebook Ghost profile users?

https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pr...

Oh yeah, you think you're safe because you don't have a Fb account, or closed it when it was popular to do so. Guess again... Your "friends" will keep posting you and they keep building a profile.

Better yet, I suggest people keep their Fb account, and pollute it and lock it down. Don't install the phone apps. Ban their emails with @facebook.com and @fbcdn.com . The long and short; ghost them and don't be the product.

These are (monthly/daily) active users, not total number of profiles.

One of the most frustrating (and shady) things I have seen Facebook do is ask your friends personal information about you. I have very little personal info on my profile, but I know that Facebook has all of it. Because I have seen little popups saying things like "Where did your friend so and so go to highschool?"

Then later, you will see a question on your profile like, "Did you go to ... High?" So you know they are storing it whether you confirm or not.

They will also ask "security" questions to people trying to reset their password. They seem to include a few things that are in Facebook and then a few items that are not. This gathering even more details about my personal life that I did not choose to share with Facebook.

I try to frequently seed it with false information. But I know plenty of people are out there just merrily giving up all my personal information to this beast.

So, how would one grow a competitor at this point? Appeal to underserved users?

Facebook is too broad a platform to compete with generally. You can however compete and win against individual facebook products. I.E. Instagram for pictures, Whatsapp for messaging, etc.

Oh wait. Shit.

The general rule of thumb of competing with any juggernaut is to identify some subset of their users that you can create a specialized product for (that meets their needs better) and then expanding your reach outward after gaining a strong foothold.

You have to target a niche where you can build a product that is 5x-10x better, to convince users to spend their time on your superior product instead of Facebook.

If you wanted to substantially undercut Facebook, there are only three possibilities.

1) Facebook drops the ball. Basically they screw-up their platform big time, in any number of ways, and make the product so incredibly bad people are desperate to leave. Then you have to have the right product at the right time to catch that exodus, vs other competitors like Google etc.

2) Technology inflection erodes Facebook. For example, had they continued to ignore mobile, they would have died like MySpace. Zuckerberg's move to heavy-mobile was equivalent to Bill Gates's call to arms regarding the Internet tidal wave memo in 1995 [1]. Zuckerberg is young enough and still at peak motivation (seemingly), it'll be very hard to catch him fully off guard on a major inflection.

3) Take a category of audience away and expand it. ie knock down the first bowling pin, one that you can hold and grow outward from. It's key that you be able to hold the ground you take. College students are the obvious target still and always will be. Facebook is very much not cool at this point, but Instagram still is (mostly), that enabled Facebook to kill Snapchat and retake the ground they lost. This third one is always viable and very hard sustain, there will always be a strong/tempting argument for selling at a high price after achieving success in taking ground (eg if Snapchat had sold for $10b or $20b to Facebook instead of going public). The monopoly will almost always pay up to continue their dominance, in the Standard Oil model, so far as they can and avoid anti-trust problems.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/

Most depressing news I've read today...

I tried to quit Facebook (for the 3rd time this year) the last week but it keeps remind me of the people that will miss me by email. I guess this is one of their mental tricks to make users feel that they did the wrong choice by leaving Facebook. Any ideas, tricks on how to solve this problem ?

I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those people talking about how they quit, but here we are. I haven't used it in well over a decade (I quit back when it was much easier to do).

The snarky answer to your question is quite frankly, ignore them. Your friends will still be your friends without Facebook. I have personally NEVER been inconvenienced by not having an account, and the sheer abundance of communication mediums on the web today makes it so easy to stay in touch. Between just Email, Hangouts, and Texting, I am still in touch with everyone that matters to me, and they know how to reach me. It can't possibly be an inconvenience to text me since they're already almost certainly on their phones too.

You already hit step one of this - you KNOW Facebook is manipulating you. Step two is just to stop letting them.

1. Make a list of the people that you actually care to stay in touch with for social reasons (for professional connections you already have LinkedIn). Ensure you have other lines of communication open with them (email, IM, text, phone, Skype etc). If possible, and if necessary, inform them you're leaving FB and how you intend to stay in touch with them

2. Delete your FB account. Delete the app from your phone (if you have it)

3. Mark any email from FB as spam

4. Block all FB domains at the router level

Tragic.

Every new user is a potential loss for the open web.

Precisely. Facebook is a black hole, nothing comes out of it and onto the wider web. We are all familiar with people moaning about articles being posted on HN from paywalled sites, but when was the last time you saw an article on HN that originated on Facebook? (With people moaning about it).

Sometimes you will get a Facebook 'tech' story posted, e.g. that compiled PHP thing they did or how 'fake news' is to be dealt with, but these stories - if they make it to HN - will be Facebook's own pages, not Facebook user 'pages'.

I don't know why this is, Twitter stories make it into 'journalism' all the time, Facebook? Never!

Damn it, I have about 40 users playing my game and I'm supper happy.

I log in to mine about once a month, spend about 5 minutes getting frustrated with their horrific timeline that shows me nothing of people I care about by default, dismiss a few messages that I missed, and sign out.

I just signed in and the "news feed" shows 1 post from a friend 4 days ago. Everything else (I have a few hundred friends) is hidden.

As a social platform it just baffles me these days.

What percent of those are bots and what percent haven't logged on in years? I'd imagine both are pretty large groups.

AFAIK, this is the amount of daily & active users.

Source? I see neither the word daily nor active listed anywhere.

It's monthly.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/

Anti-Facebookers, stay strong my friends

By MAU according to https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ (first point)

For daily active use, I wonder, are they tracking "people explicitly logging in each day" and using facebook.com? Or, just people browsing the web while still logged in to Facebook from weeks ago?

Amazing! For perspective, there are ~2.5B smartphone users in the world.

I wonder how many of those users are legitimate real people?

The stories in 2015 about Facebook fake profiles estimated it to be ~11%. As comparison, estimates for Twitter was ~15% fake users.

89% of 2 billion is still a mind-boggling ~1.7 billion.

https://www.facebook.com/logout Good thing that you can't leave

Maybe you are implying this. But even logging out of Facebook, they will continue to track you and gather information about you through every site that has a Facebook like button on it.

Lets watch as this goes down to 0.

DELETE YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT TODAY

1.99 million bots can't be wrong!

Do they still use mysql for storing the usernames. What is their software stack as of now ?

Are businesses people?

2 billion daily, active users.

Insane.

How did you conclude it's active daily users?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648251

I am not sure it's daily active users, it just says "2 billion people"

I think it's more like 2 billion monthly active users, based on this projection from earlier this year:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14474534/facebook-earnings...

Still impressive, regardless.

Active is really stretching the term there.

That's MAU not DAU

Someday, the first general AI will make good use of all that neatly organized, easily searchable and voluntarily supplied information and behavior patterns when it's plotting how to turn us into batteries or paper clips.

Our bodies are not good batteries. The original Matrix plot "had the brains of the humans being used as part of a neural network for additional computing power." https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

Hows it being old?

Nearly no one in my age range uses FB, just snapchat + ig.

does instagram not constitue facebook though?

no, you don't need an fb account to use ig.

> Hows it being old?

If you want to comment here you need to be nice, regardless of how someone else behaved or how old you think they might be.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648376 and marked it off-topic.

So, ummm, you use Instagram? -- the company owned by Facebook to provide an alternate brand to appeal to those tech savvy kids?

Same database, different name.

....and thank god, I'm NOT one of them!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com