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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Yep, 2014 is looking like it's going to be the year of "FACEBOOK IS DEAD" articles.

Just 9 days ago we discussed the end of the Facebook era.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6917392

Personally, I'm curious why we care that much? Is there some benefit to knowing the fate of Facebook? Are we shorting the stock?

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It's one of the largest employers of people like us, they have tremendous mindshare as virtually everyone is a user and in one insidious way or another they form an important part of the net as a whole (see, "sign in with fb" or "comment with fb" or "like on fb").

Why do we care about Facebook is tantamount to never covering any large internet company which I might be OK with but I suspect is not what you're arguing about.

It might be worth a conversation about why the HN filters are tuned so that I hear so much about Snapchat and I never heard a single word about the Climate Corporation - easily the most exciting startup I've seen, right up until they sold to Monsanto.

Cool company, thanks for the reference!

melling isn't complaining that we hear so much about Facebook, but asking: Why are there so many articles proclaiming Facebook is dead?

It was like this during the IPO too. The internet really just likes to hate on FB for whatever reason. You don't here the same about Twitter, whose stock is outperforming FB despite making less money.

Maybe people think that if everyone believes Facebook is dead then it will die. Facebook has information on everyone and it's really hard to leave because everyone else uses it. If it just fucking disappeared one day I would be so happy.

> The internet really just likes to hate on FB for whatever reason. You don't here the same about Twitter, whose stock is outperforming FB despite making less money.

I don't know about "the internet," but most of Hackernews's top-rated comments for the Twitter IPO were skeptical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689742

Everyone likes an underdog, and the new thing. Facebook probably stopped being both by the time the movie came out, and the IPO cemented it. Pre-IPO Twitter, like your favorite team in the offseason, is still a blank canvas onto which we can paint an impossibly bright future.

... and it's not the first one. As there are websites generating content in facebook format, such as jokes, philosophical quotes and personality quizzes, ... there seem to be websites generating content fitting HN. "Facebook", "teenagers" and "dead" is basically the magic receipe to climb up the newsfeed, now that NSA articles are downgraded by default on HN.

Should we attempt to detect and bury HN submissions about teenagers leaving facebook?

Does the founder have a similar opinion?http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=FB+Insider+Transactions

"Is there some benefit to knowing the fate of Facebook?"

If you care about social media in general then yes, the fate of the world's largest social media platform is tremendously important. If your life or business doesn't intersect much with social media then, no.

Companies come and go in both existence and importance. If Facebook goes away tomorrow, something will take its place.

If your business is social media, wouldn't it be better to discuss how to improve it, new features, etc.? Where can a small company create a viable business?

Here's hoping that it's the last year of these sort of posts because it died and is replaced by something less intrusive and where you can control what data about you is disseminated and used against you.

Have to drive the stock down somehow. One sentence in the last quarterly conference call and it shed more than a few percentage points.

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