Comment by mtrovo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtrovo | Hacker News Reader

Are we seeing apex Facebook?

I still have a lot of friends that use it daily but it's all for things that don't hold a company with a 1T market cap.

Anecdotal data:

- Facebook usage from my feed it's just older family members posting cheesy political posts and selling items on marketplace

- Instagram became a selling channel for brands, be it with their accounts or with "partnerships" with meme/influencer pages. I see less and less content from friends. SO has a professional account there, she always has the feeling that if she doesn't pay them her posts are rarely seen, even by people that follows her. I'm using it less and less every week.

- I still use WhatsApp a lot, and I'm quite scared how they could leverage their ad network with my private communications to improve bottom line

- I don't use and don't see the point of downloading Messenger, Threads, Reels, Lasso and any of the other weird knockoff apps they release every few months

I remember the last chapter of Chaos Monkey and the author hit a very good point that Facebook bought their extension ticket of relevance two times with Instagram and WhatsApp, since then (if you disconsider Oculus) the company didn't manage to create or acquire their next ticket. Maybe they're going the same route as MySpace?

edit: small typos, posted from phone

Per the latest earnings release on https://investor.fb.com on July 28:

* Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.91 billion on average for June 2021, an increase of 7% year-over-year.

* Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.90 billion as of June 30, 2021, an increase of 7% year-over-year.

* Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 2.76 billion on average for June 2021, an increase of 12% year-over-year.

* Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.51 billion as of June 30, 2021, an increase of 12% year-over-year.

It's hard to show large growth rates when you already count most of the +16, non-Chinese internet population as your users, but it doesn't look like an apex.

Are we seeing apex Facebook?

I've been thinking this for years now, but there's really nothing to replace it, it has a huge lock-in, and there's not been an underlying technical shift that enables product re-invention.

"Social networking" has obviously been around forever, IMO that core technical landscape shift we've seen for 70+ years that results in product evolution has been increasing network connection speed. Faster connections drive re-invention on just about every layer of the internet. In this case:

     300b ---> 14k+ -> 56k --> DSL/Cable > Mobile 3G -> ??

     Email --> BBS --> AOL --> MySpace --> Facebook --> ??

My guess is we'll see a true Facebook killer emerge once mmWave 5G hits widespread adoption. Of course FB will have their own products to compete, but talking to many Gen-Z they are not really interested in Facebook and typically use Snapchat/TikTok/etc. Facebook is losing the mindshare game, so we're waiting on the tech to seal the blow.

On the devil's advocate side, FB has made some shrewd acquisitions like IG/WhatsApp, and tech itself is increasingly headed towards a "cereal box" mindset where a few core companies make all the products you consume under separate labels. A new competitor would need the guts to avoid an early exit.

I honestly just don't get who is really using Facebook. My parents aren't on there, kids aren't on there (my friends are teachers). I have friends (30yo) who removed accounts. Not a single close friend whose account remains posts more than once every few months, the vast majority never post. A handful of people that aren't close friends post every now and then, but I'm so disinterested in the content that I typically unfollow them so it doesn't show up in my feed.

Just took a quick sample of my first 10 things in the feed: - Article from a paper I subscribed to a decade ago. (just unfollowed) - Ad about some stock related thing - 'suggested content for you': picture of a football team (PSG) lineup for 2021 posted by Eurosport - Sales listing for a 2nd hand yard sale group in my city that I follow - Post by UN Water that I followed a decade ago and had zero interactions with since (unfollowed) - A comment posted yesterday on a meme posted 5 months ago, by a person I met on exchange that I've not spoken to or seen in a decade (unfollowed) - Ad for furniture - Another sales listing for the 2nd hand yard sale group - 'Suggested for you': news about a guy going crazy at the airport after baggage delays, posted by a local news channel - A video of a building getting demolished (spam), posted in a (unmoderated?) FB group for selling bicycles that I joined years ago when I bought a bike (unfollowed)

There's literally not a single piece of useful content in here. One comment by a stranger-friend that was unfollowed. Two ads. Two wrongly suggested content I didn't ask for. One spam video. Two posts by orgs I never interacted with in a decade and unfollowed. And two listings from a 2nd hand group, that's the only thing I'll stay in (although the listings weren't interesting, the group has some good stuff).

And this is from a person who's on FB maybe 10 minutes per week, the 'good' content should've piled up. It's pretty insane how this crap can somehow be one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Facebook (and YouTube) are at peak awareness and penetration and now moving along the maturity model to squeeze more and more revenue from the audience they have. It will 1000% percent happen to TikTok and probably way faster than the others.

> Are we seeing apex Facebook?

One can only wish.

Except for the fact that it's being replaced by something worse.

Back around 1990 I had the thought 'every new communications medium turns to sh*t eventually'. I think because it eventually gets dominated by grifters swindling marks of the lowest common denominator.

30 years on and I'm not wrong yet.

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