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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is currently ahead, but I wonder how much of that is perception. There is a lot of media about how Facebook is evil, but that is mostly from a pretty small circle of media and political people, that Facebook is naturally in opposition to. Facebook also owns instagram and whatsapp as well. But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily. Instagram is also used very heavily. Amazon has threats from other E-commerce sites, lots of bad press, Governmental attacks, and unionization. Google prints money on search and I don't see enough people swapping to Duckduckgo to bring them down.

Amazon is also kept up by AWS, which who knows if one day that is spun off.

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FWIW, I joined HN 14 years ago (wow) and there's never been a time in those 14 years that HN wasn't convinced that facebook's demise was just around the corner.

This is true, but the main reason was that people have been predicting this was that young people don’t want to be on a social network with their parents. This social dynamic prediction has played out, and Facebook did the 100% predictable thing that all rich entrenched players do — they bought the smaller competitors, most famously Instagram.

I fully expect them to continue to be able to monetize their user base, and purchase smaller competitors for a while.

The most recent warning flag for me is their rebranding. Announcing a major pivot to center on Occulus (I’m sorry “the metaverse”.), when VR has been nothing more than niche gaming is very weird and troublesome.

On the bright side, Facebook is a giant ossified megacorp. All that’s going to happen is some division is going to get new signage, and every PM is going to update their slide decks to say “metaverse”, and everyone is going to do what they were already doing.

As an ex-employee, Facebook is many things, but ossified it is not. The internal impact/metric-oriented culture means that new bets are encouraged and rewarded, whereas product teams that are keeping it safe will eventually get disbanded.

I’m also an ex-employee.

FB’s predilection to reorg every six months, isn’t a sign of strength. It’s actually a sign of dysfunction. They’ve just been able to power through by being extraordinarily lucky in the social networking space. It’s tire spinning.

The company hasn’t released a noteworthy product in at least a decade.

It’s an ossified megacorp.

Quest was the best selling game console this holiday, which doesn't sound niche to me.

Lol. They have sold 10 million total. PlayStation sold more than 15 million, and Switch more than 20 million, last year alone.

It’s niche.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/metaverse-needs-more-than-vr-ch...

Massive supply shortages on other consoles lead it to be the #1 seller on Amazon throughout December. Unfair fights are the best fights.

The fact that there was plenty of unsold inventory prior to December isn’t helping your argument that it has wide appeal. In fact, it undermines it.

Can't fault people for wishful thinking

I joined HN 12 years ago and I don't remember things that way at all. My impression is that it's extremely rare for anyone to claim that FB's demise is imminent, but it seems like it has become more common for HN posters to comment on FB's decline in recent years. ...but you could say the same thing for Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google as well -- it doesn't seem to be FB specific to me.

I mean, MySpace died, and rather quickly too. At one time most people probably thought they had critical mass.

MySpace died because it became a minority player in a quickly growing landscape, at a time where alternatives were available.

To simplify, if you have captured over 50 percent of the entire english-speaking Internet population, sure you have a huge network effect behind you. But if that population count is multiplied by 100x and your numbers don't grow alongside that, your network effect is not as strong.

My wife was working there at their peak (and left at just the right time—I like to think that their decline was the inevitable result of her departure). They had such high engagement that they had a hard time selling enough ads to fill all the available ad slots.

Including my ex-account period I have been reading HN for 12 years now, while I agree Facebook has always been unpopular on HN. It was since may be 2015 it became extremely one sided. Even the very rare few who speak up with Facebook financial and user growth are all gone. ( Arguably speaking lots of things on HN have become one sided )

There is this phenomenon I witness time and time again, people confuse what they wish to happen; the decline or death of Facebook with any real facts.

It is like saying Apple is doomed for 10 years and yet Apple is now a 3 trillion company.

Unionization is no threat to Amazon. Their margins and hence their shareholders maybe (briefly), but that's just fine and won't affect their ability to be successful. It'll also push them towards further automation on the medium and long term time horizons.

That would in turn alleviate a lot of the governmental attacks and bad press. I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service - they hate Amazon the pee-bottle-broker and tornado-warning-ignorer.

As for other e-commerce sites, they'll probably just buy them, crush them, or if they can't do that - sell them logistics and infrastructure services.

[edit] Consider FedEx vs UPS. FedEx can't hire staffers right now, while UPS, unionized, saw basically zero attrition. FedEx is suffering right now. UPS, crushing it. [1]

  The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, nonunionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-sho...

> I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service

Wait, what? They do have a huge problem with counterfeit crap sold via bait-and-switch reviews.

I'll never call them perfect, to be sure. They do have counterfeit issues and bait-and-switch reviews. However, I don't hate them for it, and I'm confident they're continuing to improve. JMHO.

But a fair call-out nonetheless.

>I can't think of anyone who hates Amazon the service

I don't like the destruction of smaller companies. Why go with a smaller company who is going to charge more for the product, quite probably charge for shipping, all while taking longer with the shipping?

> But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily

That's an interesting perspective, I was pretty convinced that facebook was almost dead since all of my friends (in France) have almost completely stopper using it. Well most of us are still casually browsing it every once in a while, but it's far less often than it used to be, and worse: we don't have interactions together on that platform. The last remaining usage was events, but since covid basically killed most large-group events for a while, even this usage died off.

I wonder if it's more of a group difference, or maybe it depends from country to country. Where do you live?

Midwestern GenX suburban parent here. Nothing important happens in our subdivision (hundreds of homes) without mention of it in the neighborhood's private Facebook group. Our public school district uses a Facebook page as a primary announcement platform. Kids' sports and social groups are all organized as Facebook groups and pages. You cannot escape Facebook if you're a suburban parent in the US.

True but thats 10 minutes per day. Facebook needs everybody to spend hours on them each day.

Very good point. Facebook has gone from something that I used for enjoyment (2004 through maybe 2016) to something that I resentfully use only to conduct business in my local community. It's still "social" but it's the difference between hanging out with friends vs. running errands at the store, post office, city hall, etc. It has clearly grown in importance by becoming the de facto official online presence of so many entities, so I can't escape it, but I absolutely want to minimize my time spent on that stuff.

I reflexively answered the poll with Facebook because I hate it, but then I realized that I'm probably closer to killing my Netflix account than my Facebook account, and I doubted my answer. Now you've convinced me again that Facebook is most in decline.

In my experience, a lot of people still use Facebook, but in a completely different way than, say, 5 or 10 years ago. In the past, I would check it many times a day to see what my friends were up to, or to see what events we could go together to. Now what I see is mostly reposts of memes and ragebaits. Part of the reason is probably that we got older and I moved (the latter being the main reason I still use Facebook, to keep in touch with people), but since younger people moved to other networks, that doesn't change much in my opinion.

Also, people die. I already get from time a reminder of the birthday of somebody that I know died. That's creepy as hell and it's only going to get worse.

In my opinion the only redeeming feature of Facebook at the moment are private groups, but that in my opinion is not enough to sustain a social network, since many are moving to WhatsApp, Telegram and the like.

>Also, people die

I deleted Facebook last year. At that point, I had 420 friends, 10 of whom were dead. One of them I discovered was dead while going through the list of all my friends making notes of who they were. This was despite numerous posts on her wall about her death. The damned algorithm didn't bother to show me that bit of news.

No one's posting to their news feed anymore. They're spending all their time commenting on news posts, posting in neighborhood groups, and and buying/selling on Marketplace.

The strongest signal that Facebook will fall is the recently publicized trouble they're having in hiring people. I expect that to have rather strong knock-on effects... 10-15 years down the road. For example if VR turns out to be as big as everyone says and FB/Meta/whatever are only able to put up a weak offering. I tend to agree that they'll be harder to kill than a lot of us wish.

Do they really? It seems to be blown up by media. Talented people are still applying in droves for a job at FB. The competition has definitely increased with good options out there for candidates but hiring trouble is bit preposterous.

I guess I could be wrong, but I remember reading that they were having to give even higher offers than other SV companies. That indicates a real, widespread reluctance to work there.

They have always paid top of market - in the early days it was to hire from Google it seems - who at the time was paying top of market.

For me, overwhelmingly the strongest signal is that they appear to be going all in on what is to be a widely used social interaction platform that's more-or-less explicitly banning sex; when that's been a primary or secondary driver for so many new internet/tech platform things.

My thought process on Facebook declining isn't about perception. It's that they are putting a ton of capital into and taking a huge risk on the Metaverse. If it fails it could mean a major decline for Facebook.

Well, as those 30+ year olds get older, marketers are going to give less and less of a shit about them.

Facebook makes most of their money from their ad network that mostly exists on sites that nobody actually needs to visit (Facebook, ig). In addition, Meta is spending a boat load on engineers who don't really want to work there, so they can make a "metaverse" which I'll bet most of them don't give half a shit about. Then they're going to market the hell out of it and at the end of the day I just don't think that many people are going to use it enough to make it all worthwhile.

I could be wrong but I think if Meta isn't careful in how they diversify their focus they could face a real reckoning that has nothing to do with their current political pushback.

Google search is still pretty good, and their ad network is used throughout the internet so I think they're safe.

Amazon will do whatever it takes to keep sales up, so I have faith in them. If nothing else they're a company that seems extremely capable of adapting to changing market conditions.

I love Instagram as well as Pinterest. Two unpopular things on HN. There is no service out there to curate visual culture like these two. Want to build a image collection of vintage receipts!? You got it. These two platforms are truly amazing for this kind of a thing. Also ads on IG are something I'd actually want.

My two cents is that people are dramatically under-weighting the possibility that Zuckerberg is a visionary with his AR/VR plays. I am extremely bullish on FB solely because of that.

I think people will be as wrong about his VR plays as they were about the Instagram acquisition.

Agree with you there. You've got a founder led company making visionary plays that have every appearance of being on the right track. The Quest is not just a tech marvel, it was also the best selling game console this Christmas. The overall vision will take a few more hardware iterations, but has huge potential to replace smartphones, laptops, game consoles and offices. At this very moment there's another comment thread talking about how the web is an SEO spam graveyard and Google is ripe to be disrupted. Those thinking the disrupter is going to be Duck Duck Go are kidding themselves.

VR has been just around the corner for at least 30 years. I remember experiencing my first VR demo in 1997, complete with the gushing marketer convinced that the new age of VR was finally upon us, and this was long after the failed "VR pods" of the early 90s. The argument has always been "The technology is finally real-enough looking and believable! VR is now inevitable!" I argue that VR is not held back by graphic realism, input latency, or lack of content, but the form factor itself. Too few people want to strap something to their face which entirely takes over vision and hearing and then stumble around awkwardly flailing their limbs and hoping they don't run into anything. This fact hasn't changed since the earliest days of the technology.

Unless there will be another communication platform that could capture a good chunk of Facebook's users, Facebook is here to stay. A lot of Facebook features are just very difficult to implement in other platforms nowadays. One example is group messaging. WhatsApp has users from a wide range of age groups and no other platforms could easily compete with that. Communicating with our family, regardless of their age group, is a very crucial part of our culture and Facebook fills that gap. Another example is online selling. Buy-and-sell groups are thriving in Facebook because it's so easy to publish your products and immediately communicate with your potential customers. For example, in the Southeast Asian region, Facebook took a large chunk of users from Carousell, the most popular online selling platform there for years before Facebook released Marketplace. Even for me personally, I've tried to stop using Facebook for several months but in my home country, Facebook is just too integrated in its culture.

Amazon / Google I think will stay strong due to their infrastructure in cloud technology. Amazon has the physical delivery infrastructure as well, which doesn't have a great competitor yet.

Apple is currently doing fine with their devices. I think the health industry will adopt some of their tech soon (like the apple watch) to get some of that sweet, sweet healthcare / insurance money

That leaves the "worst" of the group to either Facebook or Netflix.

I haven't heard much about what Netflix is doing, but things seem to be going generally okay so far.

Facebook has extremely negative news all over the media on seemingly both the tech and political side. For example, malicious targeting of children and their platform being used for fake news / propaganda. On the tech side, I don't have confidence in their current, future, or past projects such as Oculus or their extreme hype around the metaverse.

For these reasons (by default and past/present/future speculation) given the wording on this question, I think Facebook is the obvious "loser."

I believe nobody talking about Netflix is worse than people talking negatively about Facebook. Facebook has far-reaching influence over non-US societies, and are generally capable of living off of just those societies. Netflix, on the other hand, is very quickly losing the content war to the likes of Disney and HBO, plus further losing its bread-and-butter catalog backfill to Hulu. Facebook is going to keep being the popular boogeyman, possibly declining over the next decade. Netflix may truly be gone in 10 years, though.

I voted for FB but yeah I really have no idea. I don't get social media at all. I don't get Twitter or TikTok. I don't get how anyone makes a nickel in advertising. I also don't get crypto. They're worth billions based on network effects for reasons I can't comprehend. I understand the internal logic of how they function and monetize but I can't understand how they get so much engagement.

>But everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook, heavily

everyone over 30 i know are past facebook and realize Instagram is adware/spyware.

Almost everyone I know between 30 and 40 dropped Facebook. Not completely, I'd guess the majority still have their accounts. Just no one uses it.

My survey isn't very data heavy, but from the people I know, it's mostly older people and the people who stayed in my hometown that still use it.

My Instagram feed has pretty much just ended up being soft porn. It's pretty easy to be replaced from this point on by anything.

The "AI" has basically re-created Sport Illustrated in scroll form.

> everyone over 30 I know uses Facebook

What about over 50?

I have never used any mainstream social media. I do participate in this and a few other online forums. For communicating directly with others online, I use email.

I think they've lost GenZ, though. Boomers and GenX use Facebook, Millennials use Instagram, but GenZ uses TickTock, and unlike with Instagram, it doesn't look like they can just buy it out to reach the next generation.

I would fully expect this trend to continue - each new generational cohort will latch onto a new social network that is separate from the ones their lame parents and older siblings use.

This poses a massive institutional risk to any social network. They either need to aggressively pump out new brands to try and capture that themselves, or buy promising startups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to fail at both of those and just completely skip a generation. A few of those misses added up could be a terminal failure.

Younger generations appear to be less married to the platform, though.

Tiktok seems to have largely displaced Snapchat in under two years.

Personally, I think FB is in trouble because it became 'your grandmothers social media'...

the youngsters seem more interested in insta and tiktok

> the youngsters seem more interested in insta

... which is owned by FB. Between Instagram securing the audience of the next generation, and Whatsapp gaining huge share as the communication tool of developing world, FB is going to do just fine, even if facebook.com usage totally tanks (also unlikely)

I'm convinced facebook.com usage will completely tank. It is surviving on older people and newer market where it got popular later, but I believe all social websites have the cycle where it's unknown, then popular, then everybody's parents join, then no longer popular, then dead.

As for Whatsapp, it makes no money, and there are plenty of non-monetized instant messengers, so I can't see them making a profit there.

The one thing they still have is Instagram, but it's "reels" haven't beaten tiktok, and it's already filled to exhaustion with ads, so it's a matter of time before it's popularity starts to decline.

As for the multiverse, that will never amount to anything.

I think that will hold them a couple of years...

Then something else (possibly NOT FB owned) will take over... like another tik tok. Kids don't want to be on the same social as their parents. Its gonna be a revolving door every 5 or 10 years.

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