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Comment by bitumen | Hacker News Reader

Depends how it goes. Facebook is testing the proposition: Do people love tech companies so much they will live inside of them?

People are increasingly afraid of tech companies, not in love with them. We’re all pretty dependent on them, but that also breeds fear and loathing. It doesn’t help that so many companies are full of the same, weird, Stepford Wife tone of “We love you, we want what’s best for you, and that just so happens to align with our own perverse incentives. We’re changing the world.”

I get the sense that the older guard of the media is also taking this opportunity to stoke fear and resentment of their newer competitors. They’ve been good at that kind of thing for a couple of hundred years longer than tech as a concept existed. I’m concerned that things like encryption and secure messaging, self-driving tech and more will be cynically attacked too.

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I think we need to be careful not to extrapolate trends in the news and HN to a country that is increasingly suspicious of "news media", or a world that we are even more detached from.

Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users[1]. That's billion, with a B. HN has 3.5 million (with an M) unique visitors per month[2]. Everyone on Hacker News AND the 10 people closest to them could all drop off Facebook and it would only be about 1.5% of Facebook's traffic. Are you sure that the trends you're mentioning are happening outside your social circle? I'm not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581

I'm sceptical of the monthly active users number as it also includes Facebook Messenger users that might not ever use the website or app itself.

From my social circle outside the tech world, Facebook is increasingly being frowned upon - and in the teens age bracket , Facebook is what old people (parents and so on) use. Obviously anecdata, but the general feeling is that people use it less and less. There might be a perfect storm coming for Facebook - or it's just a temporary fart, soon to be forgotten.

This is what I overheard yesterday:

"I deleted my FB account; I'm only going to post on Instagram now."

FB is like the Goldman of the Social Media (and increasingly, via Messenger and WhatsApp, Communications) world. They have their tentacles everywhere.

Also at the teen-level, Onavo, FB's VPN service, is yuuugely popular in high schools across America.

And imagine if VR actually takes off and becomes a compelling new communications medium.

FB has a lot of inertia at this point, I don't think they're going anywhere.

(Lastly, even with all this hub-bub in the news, I'm sure the govt loves FB and doesn't want it going anywhere; it's a huge competitive advantage for the US intelligence community).

I agree; Facebook the social network might decay - Facebook the company holding many different things is probably not going anywhere.

I'm skeptical of your determination of Facebook's outlook based on your social circle, which is limited in size, geographical location, wealth, social status, and a bunch of factors.

Saying 2 billion people use Facebook means around 2/3 of everyone on the internet uses Facebook. When you look around your social circle and see useage closer to 2% it's reasonable to suspect their numbers are fake.

Sure, I know plenty of people that used Facebook several years ago, but it's become a ghost town. My friends, family, and coworkers might be unusual, but not that unusual.

No one I know clicks on Google ads. Does that mean Google's ad business is probably illegitimate?

Google can get by with very low click rates. It can be profitable at 1 click per 10,000 views. I may only click an add every few months and mostly by accident, but that's enough. Further, a small percentage of people can easily be clicking more often where Facebook viewership is binary users can only count as one viewer.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/02/12/facebook-losi...

Facebook is losing the young audience in a big way.

How many of those daily active users are bots, spammers, cloned accounts, webscrapers, or people logging on for two seconds because they sent or received one message, or want to do one thing? Do they count people using them to login to other sites as active daily users? How many are generating content or participating in a way that drives the platform?

How much of the daily traffic from a small percentage of people drives a large portion of the rest of the platform? How much of that 1.5% can Facebook afford to lose before it creates a trend they can’t escape?

> How many of those daily active users are bots, spammers, cloned accounts, webscrapers, or people logging on for two seconds because they sent or received one message, or want to do one thing?

How many have to be for 2.2 billion to not still be a pretty damn big number?

> How many are generating content or participating in a way that drives the platform?

Facebook has no shortage of content.

> How much of the daily traffic from a small percentage of people drives a large portion of the rest of the platform? How much of that 1.5% can Facebook afford to lose before it creates a trend they can’t escape?

All of them, as long as the losses are made up in other areas.

Even if the real number is half of that, that still 1 billions account. It's 3 times the population of the US.

A teacher I had in High School explained a particular portion of history to us about like this: "I can rule via Love or via Fear. People can fall out of Love; People don't fall out of Fear." So this monarch dictated government via Fear, and it worked until he died [which is the point much of the time].

Now, the monarchs may not die. "Facebook Forever" as reality? A 'Black Mirror' episode isn't a far stretch, and to be fair so is the opposite -- both of which we can see in reality today.

Being skeptical of tech companies is great. Behaving appropriately is also great. Going "all or nothing" can be debated. I'm interested in hearing about something in the middle, should such exist.

Not wholly on topic, but for some added depth to that "love or fear" dynamic, I suggest reading Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws." He analyzes different forms of government (democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and despotism) and their animating principles. For democracy, it's virtue. For monarchy, it's honor. For despotism, it's fear. It's a much more thought-provoking look at how authority works in governance.

Montesquieu also described separation of powers in the same book [1]

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers#Montesqui...

Companies come and go. If I have grandchildren, chances are high that they won’t have a clue what Facebook or Twitter or Amazon was, besides the senile stories from grandpa about what computers were like during the Stone Age.

You can also rule by utility and dependence. People don't just love FAANG, they need FAANG because they provide indispensable tools which yield vast utility.

You can also use addiction as a strategy to create dependence, but this is a strategy: users will inevitably realize there's more harm than good being done. It also means you're at risk of become a fad. I actually think Facebook's pivot from user engagement maximizer to social fabric platform reflects some internal awareness of the vulnerabilities of an addiction-focused business strategy over the long term.

Besides Google’s search I can’t think of any FAANG service/product that would be indispensable for the average Joe, being the only service that has no real competition. For all the others, people would replace them relatively easy. Could you provide some examples?

People need Microsoft Windows to operate their businesses and do their jobs, Apple phones and Netflix subscriptions are much easier to replace.

For average joes today:

- Facebook: Rolodex

- Apple: Simple, low-hassle, powerful tech

- Amazon: Supply chain, low prices, long-tail product discovery, stellar shopping experience supported by an tremendous economies of scale, compute, internet infrastructure

- Google: Search, email, maps, productivity software, compute, internet infrastructure

For as long as these companies remain dominant in these categories continue to provide value to customers, they will not be replaced. They continue to grow exponentially in major part because of the very real value they provide and the lack of viable competition from outside of these groups.

I can’t think of any FAANG service/product that would be indispensable for the average Joe

Hence Facebook's goal to move into fundamental infrastructure with both this company town plan and internet.org

Same with Google Fiber etc...

The ultimate goal for a tech company is to provide what utilities and public infrastructure cannot.

I want to agree with you, but realistically I think a lot of people have come to view Amazon at least, as pretty indispensable. Between their retail offerings, and AWS, they’re into a lot!

Maybe I’m biased because I’m living in a country where Amazon has little to no presence and there are just other retailers to fill the gap, other delivery companies etc. so life goes on. I never heard anyone cry for Amazon to come to our rescue.

> addiction as a strategy

I neglected this vector whilst recalling my previous comment, and I acknowledge addiction as a viability towards ruling over others. Putting ethics, morals, and similar aside for sake of power -- addiction I feel is a "better" method of ruling than fear, given that fear is "better" than love. Why go after all the trouble of scaring people about "the enemy from the East/West/Whatever" back and forth forever when you can just jack them up happy on Jizzum 3.4? You don't, so develop Jizzuj3.4 as you scare people from East and West.

>self-driving tech and more will be cynically attacked too.

Not cynical at all. We have to push back or we risk the hellworld scenario: the well-to-do safe and secure inside self-driving cars that don't brake for pedestrians. [1]

Pedestrians likely made homeless by NIMBY protectionism preventing the construction of shelters and restrictive zoning that limits housing supply to astronomically expensive single-family homes.

1. http://fortune.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-car-crash/

> People are increasingly afraid of tech companies

No, a small part of the IT community, whose overly represented on HN, is increasingly afraid of tech companies.

Around me I can tell you nobody cares about my worries. They think it can't possibly lead to anything dangerous. And that's in the rare case they though about the issue at all.

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