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Comment by exogeny | Hacker News Reader

I wish you well on your speculation.

I didn't dig into the financials all that much, or even listen to call so I'm approaching this from a place of ignorance, but I do happen to have five or six family members between the ages of 13 and 18 and all of them have unanimously reported to me that Snapchat is unequivocally over.

That's as anecdotal as it gets, but I'm also hard pressed to believe that they're all simultaneously unique. And as we've seen elsewhere in tech, once the "cool" vibe is gone (Yahoo, AOL, etc.), it's a long spiral to irrelevance.

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I can't count the number of times I've heard from people very plugged into the industry declare that the FB exodus was underway.

If you read Hacker News and Reddit, it's obvious that Facebook is about to die. People are put off by its privacy issues, its outlandishly aggressive efforts to keep you clicking, and its culpability in tilting information and elections to shady actors.

But I'd probably make a bet than they'll reach 3bn before long.

3bn what? I still "use" it in some sense, but I mostly publish auto-syndicated stuff, and read via mbasic, which uses no JavaScript and limits their surveillance. Of course I never load their "like" buttons. My parents found it useless and stopped using it; my kids can't be bothered. How much is Myspace 2.0 worth?

~$520 billion as of Friday. Aside from international expansion, the difference between Facebook and MySpace is that Facebook has made and will in all likelihood continue to make a lot of money, actual profit measurable with GAAP. Snapchat will die before it makes GAAP $1, just as MySpace did.

3 billion monthly active users. They hit 2 billion this summer [1].

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

> 3 billion monthly active users.

I was trying to suggest that a lot of those "users" are not sources of income/data. I'll bet a lot of them are either bots, or humans smart enough to use an ad blocker. And most of the MAU humans are probably in a 10-year age range, having signed up when FB was useful.

I would disagree again here. Significant numbers of their users use their apps only/majority of the time. Can't block ads on closed platforms!

The number of people who do all of what you do with FB is a minuscule fraction of people. You're also not counting that Instgram, Whatsapp, and FBM have 800M, 1.4B, and 1.1B monthly active users each. With IG already likely profitable and likely to make billions in profits soon and FBM trying to begin to try to monetize. These three are prob worth at least $125B if spun out or separated hypothetically.

This is a diff world and company than MySpace. Calling it 2.0 is misguided at best.

Do your family have private or public Insta profiles? My understanding is that the usecase is not perfectly the same. Insta is "halfway" between snap and twitter, though I'm sure Zuck would like it to be "both".

If you don't mind me asking, what social media are your family members using? Are their friends on that platform too?

Instagram is the current leader, with Kik, Snapchat, and Messenger in some messy run-off after.

I have to admit a lot of surprised how quickly Instagram got to parity and overtook Snapchat with my family, but I'm at least two decades out of that demographic so that's probably more of me being old and out of it than anything else!

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