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Ask HN: What will be the tipping point for Facebook?

55 points by camillomiller ↗ HN
I think it’s clear now that Facebook is a horrible company that operates with machiavellian efficiency, lacks any human empathy, and has applied deplorable methods to deflect fundamental problems of the platform instead of actually fixing them. Still, they keep on going just fine with a slightly dented image, while ads dollars keep pouring in. So, what needs to change for Facebook to pass a point of unsustainability? It looks just like another “kill someone on 5th avenue” scenario to me.

39 comments

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sdan
Looking at their growth, it seems they have enveloped the Social Graph and have the most users, incentivizing more users to join and be social with their friends. As long as Facebook's algorithm spews out some posts from friends and a lot of recommended/ads, users I believe will still stay on the platform.

Overtime, people (including myself) have the FOMO and are in a way forced to be addicted to FB.

So as long as FB triggers the small dopamine rush people have when they see they have 10 notifications everytime they're on the site, a majority of people will stay on, regardless of the news.

thiago_fm
100% agree. It is like telling drugs are bad to crack addicts.
metildaa
I hold the opposite view, Facebook itself has lost social momemtum to Instagram, Twitter and others, and this is eroding their grip on the high value parts of the social graph.
ms013
Instagram seems to be coming up a lot as a place people are leaving to from facebook. It’s owned by facebook. I wouldn’t say that is eroding facebook’s access to social data as much as it may seem.
fooker
You know Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, right?
metildaa
I know, but the point is social networking sites are ephemeral, owning the social graph of older social groups does not ensure dominance of younger social groups.
fooker
It does if they they have the same backend. For example, Facebook and Instagram each use your network from the other to for friend suggestions.
dewey
But Instagram is FB too so they are not losing anything. People link their accounts and friends and the social graph continues. They push FB connections into IG pretty hard these days.
8fingerlouie
The notifications have the opposite effect on me. Facebook (recently?) tried to put a "marketplace" button on their iPad app, and the darned thing would show an unread badge every time you opened the app.

After being thoroughly annoyed for a few weeks, i decided to do something about it, and found a way to disable it, only to discover Facebook replaced the "marketplace" icon with a "videos" icon, which now displays it's needy notification icon.

So i took the next logical step, which was to remove the thing from all my devices.

According to Apple's screen time, i now spend <5 minutes a day on Facebook, which is mostly spent checking notifications from friends/family, and _quickly_ scrolling down my news feed scanning for anything interesting.

I've never used Instagram, and i try my best to educate my friends to use iMessage or Signal for messaging instead of Messenger/Whatsapp, but so far i don't have much luck :)

aaronbrethorst
I think they’re past the point of sustainability for their core product. They’ll be around for a long time to come, but I think a reckoning is on the horizon.

I think this’ll have both user engagement and regulatory aspects to it, and it’ll decimate FB’s market cap, leaving them open to meaningful change inside the company.

Yetanfou
Facebook the product is dying a slow death, Facebook the company has loads of money and with that is able to buy its way out of whatever hole it has been digging for itself. For now they can rely on their ownership of Instagram and (to a lesser extent) Whatsapp to keep them at the forefront of the data mining industry. It remains to be seen how the Instagram and Whatsapp crowd will react to Facebook's increasing pressure to 'monetise' them. Whatsapp has plenty of competitors which puts limits on how far Facebook can go in their attempts to squeeze its users, Instagram is probably more stable in this respect but also more susceptible to being overtaken by 'the new cool' which might be just around the corner. Were they to lose traction in these two markets at the same time they might be in trouble but for now this seems unlikely. Facebook-the-product will probably hang around way past its best before date just like AOL did, a grey haunt of mediocrity visited only by those who lost track with current trends and as such comparable to the dusty echoing corridors of dying malls where half the windows are boarded up.
throwaway98121
I’ve been reading these kinds of comments for several years now. Don’t get me wrong- I despise Facebook and these other exhibitionist platforms in general. I think there’s some truth and less teenagers using Facebook, but this notion that it’s a dying platform is wishful thinking at worst or speculation at best.
panarky
Network effects drove FB growth.

My friends were posting interesting stuff on FB, so I needed to join FB. Then my friends started posting stuff twice an hour from their phone, so I needed to check FB twice an hour from my phone.

Reverse network effects undo that growth.

First slowly, then seemingly all at once.

My most influential and interesting friends rarely post on FB anymore. Most of my ordinary friends are still there, but they only post once a week or once a month.

So I've deleted the FB app from my phone and now I check it a couple times a week from my laptop instead of a couple times an hour from my phone.

It's like Gresham's Law for social networks. Bad actors drive out good actors.

A falling signal-to-noise ratio is a vicious cycle that drives out signal and attracts more noise.

FB overreached in driving engagement, and it's backfired spectacularly. The FB brand is damaged and young people are embarrassed to use it.

Reverse network effects will remorselessly undo what network effects originally built.

throwaway98121
Fair points, but these are all anecdotes. They don’t speak to macro trends. I certainly wouldn’t use these to state that FB is dying. The FB platforms demographics may be shifting, and the company itself has several offerings in its product line. The doom and gloom is purely speculative though. On paper, FB is a very solid company despite the recent stock sell offs.
glastra
Facebook is, as I see it, in a constant struggle to "own" the social graph of humanity. Be it trying to make your friends coerce you into using it, be it buying other social networks (e.g. Instagram, WhatsApp).

As long as they are successful in doing this and there is no other way to be "properly social" on the internet without them or their child companies, they win.

cddotdotslash
While they could get pushed out by some "cooler" app on the market, I think their downfall may ultimately be pissing off just enough people with the right power in government to significantly impact their ability to continue bringing in massive piles of cash. Maybe it's a data breach that results in some kind of legislation or a privacy law that limits their ability to use the information they have to make money.
Yetanfou
Well, yes, maybe. Or maybe not, Facebook does have access to an enormous amount of information on a very large group of people after all. That includes a lot of people in government who might be less than thrilled for some of that information to be made public by someone - not by Facebook of course, never that. With their hoard of money and information Facebook can wield both a carrot as well as a stick, both of which have been shown to be effective means to direct politicians' aim.
raywu
How does Oculus play in?

If we view FB core platform as strictly a distribution platform for FB to push new product out, it is a stronghold/moat.

Single auth and FB login's ubiquity may continue to allow FB to safeguard their position as a distribution platform. Not to mention the current success of WhatsApp and Instagram, as many others pointed out on the thread.

From Elad Gil's interview with Marc Andreessen [1]:

> "In fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric."

> "They become a distribution channel, so they can get to the world. And then they put many new products through that distribution channel."

[1] http://growth.eladgil.com/book/introduction/where-to-go-afte...

Edit: elaborated on why I asked about up and coming products like Oculus

fargo
What will be the tipping point for GE?

Facebook (the product) != Facebook (the company) and the company is diversified enough at this point to remain one of the top ad networks for a long long time.

yashBonde
Agreed 100%. All these giants only die when someone with a revolutionary idea comes along. IBM was about do die when other with a new way of making PC came along.
Maro
"I think it’s clear now that ..." --- I worked there for a while. FB has a lot of empathy, and it's the most (internally) honest company, and the most efficient at fixing them [of all companies I've ever worked at]. You're a victim of highly biased reporting/information.

Having said that, FB lives and dies by 2 metrics: MAU and Timespent/DAU. An outcome of those is Ad revenue. If you want to understand how Facebook is doing, watch those metrics. MAU is still growing globally, but it has peaked in the US. Lately a big driver of growth is Instagram. Workplace is an awesome product, if it takes off, a lot of people will be using "Facebook" in the workplace, too. If VR ends up being a generally useful thing (eg. we have our meetings in VR), Facebook will dominate due to their lead with Oculus.

arsalanb
As somebody doing his own startup, that is absolutely mindblowing. At the size Facebook is currently, I envy their ability to keep things so focused on well-defined KPIs and still make the whole thing feel like a startup.
Maro
When you join, they tell you "FB is the world's biggest startup". It actually felt like that.
teekert
I guess OP listened to TWIT's last episode...
Juliate
> FB has a lot of empathy, and it's the most (internally) honest company, and the most efficient at fixing them [of all companies I've ever worked at]. You're a victim of highly biased reporting/information.

Well, it may have a lot of empathy internally, externally, it just does not show.

FB & Twitter & YouTube seem to play the very same game: while they do provide great connection and progress with their tools, they also heavily contribute to setting the world on fire by giving everyone tools that highly benefit (and are incentivised by) extreme/clickbait/fake information.

And they seem not to be willing to act on it. Twitter is particularly demonstrative by its apathy (and its CEO discourse) regarding bot accounts. YouTube by its conspiracy contents. Facebook by its displayed ingenuity about their knowledge of what happened ("oh really? oups, sorry, nevermind, won't do it again").

It's like they act with social data & behaviour exploitation such as oil companies act with crude oil: a spill here and there? so what? we destroyed your ecosystem? listen, we bring so much more to the world, you can't blame us.

It's really like... boys with toys.

KnightOfWords
> You're a victim of highly biased reporting/information.

I don't think this report on Facebook's role in the Rohingya massacres should be dismissed as biased reporting:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-45449938

"But there was also a much more fundamental issue - the lack of Burmese-speaking content monitors. According to the Reuters report, the company had just one such employee in 2014, a number that had increased to four the following year."

Facebook can work great for connecting friends, family and community groups but it's real world impact can be devastating when it strays into 'news' and politics. Across social media personalised feeds reinforce echo-chambers and attention metrics push users towards provocative content.

hardwaresofton
They supposedly have 2.2B MAU[0]. This is a huge number and it represents momentum, even if teens/younger people are abandoning it left and right these days. The thing is, as much as younger people have caught on to why not to use Facebook, there are literal generations of greater fools out there who are lining up to get on it and figure it out. Let's say they figure it out twice as fast as the younger people did, that still gives a lot of time to FB to recover/pivot/do whatever.

Also as a side note, bigger worse companies than Facebook have existed and done more obviously terrible things and still exist. Good PR, skilled marketers/advertisers, and money can go a long way.

I think the tipping point for something like Facebook is if it gets broken up by a government force, I don't think it's possible for Facebook to reach it's tipping point solely by users leaving -- that's like saying junk food companies are likely to reach their tipping point once everyone realizes how bad junk food is for them.

[EDIT] - I completely forgot -- they also bought Instagram, which is just about the only place everyone is jumping off Facebook to. Snapchat fumbled their core value proposition, Tumblr is niche, Twitter is for flamewars and not as personal, Reddit is still relatively niche/nerdy. I don't know where people go when they quit FB if not Instagram.

This brings another point into view -- FB probably wouldn't even die from a max exodus of it's users, as long as it buys whatever competition is next up to take it's place.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

mrweasel
How are those 2.2B monthly active users counted though? Does a Messenger login count, does a Facebook login button on a third party site? If you counted users as someone who spend at least 30 minutes on Facebook.com (or their app) during a week, or said that an active user is someone who posted at least twice in four week, I doubt they'd have even close to that number of active users.
hardwaresofton
I feel like if you apply the same stringent measurement you'd apply there to any other social apps, you'd still find that facebook is still leading the pack...

The definition of an "active user" can get pretty contentious, but let's just say it's someone opening the application at least once in a month (which is a pretty ridiculous metric but works as a baseline) -- FB is in uncharted territory.

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nelsonic
Facebook will continue to harvest and sell people's data for as long as people are willing to give it to them. The conditions for Facebook's ultimate demise are:

1. Non-technical people are educated about their data being sold to advertisers who are in turn selling them stuff that is destructive/unhealthy. e.g: getting them into debt to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like!

2. Willingness of these people to pay for storing their data in order to control their personal details and who can see them.

3. Availability and awareness of a low-friction-to-adoption alternative platform where people control their own data which has similar features to Fb's "core" products and biggest "child" products (Insta, WhatsApp). The "alternative" needs to be: distributed/decentralised, encrypted and mobile-first.

I am bullish on all 3 of these things and feel that it's only a matter of time before the alternative is available.

As others have said, Fb has a massive cash reserve and they won't go down without a fight. My only hope is that the EU will take Fb to the cleaners under GDPR and that will keep the Fb execs busy for long enough for the alternative social network to win!

jbob2000
This is hilarious, no non-technical person gives a shit where their data lives. We can’t even get people to understand the cloud. The QA department at my work doesn’t even understand where my app ends and our vendor’s app begins, and that’s their job! My mother thinks any text box with a search button beside it is Google.

Nobody outside of the tech ecosystem gives a crap about tracking (they already see ads all around them anyways). Nobody would even been aware of an alternative to Facebook, the same way people are barely aware Bing exists. Hell, people can barely get off their asses to vote and you think they’re going to care what the EU parliament does?

The only way Facebook will go down is by a major outage. Grandma logs on one day and can’t chat to her grandson so she calls him up instead. Boyfriend opens messenger to chat to his girlfriend about their date tonight, but can’t because it’s down, so he texts her instead. Friends can’t upload pictures of their trip so they use email or google photos.

It would take a sustained outage of a few days to break the habits Facebook has created in us. I don’t see any way for a competitor get past their moat, they have too many features and too many people on board.

nelsonic
@jbob2000 agreed, the current reality is that 95-99% of people don't know or don't care where their personal data is stored, who has access to it and how it's being used to manipulate them.

Just because something is the "status quo" doesn't mean that it won't be possible to change. History is full of examples of where once popular ideas/systems/regimes have crumbled in the face of something new.

Again, I remain optimistic that the (unhealthy) "habits Facebook has created in us" can/will be broken. (and not replaced by something worse!)

Just as Rome was not built in a day, it also did not "fall" in day either. i.e. I don't think a single outage will have much effect on Facebook's dominance.

The first step in helping people "detox" from Facebook is creating an objectively healthier way to spend those "bored" or "lonely" minutes Zuckerberg is obsessed with owning.

mrweasel
My theory is that Facebooks users will quietly stop visiting the site, as user generated content is replaced by ads, post from various companies and political nonsense. It depends on your circle of friends of cause, but I think a large number of Facebooks users have seen a trend towards decreased engagement with friend on the site. In the end friends are the reason for going to Facebook, when friends don't post anything, you just start visiting the site less and less, until one day you've logged in for the last time.

Facebook will however be able to survive for a VERY long time, due to groups and Messenger. They have effectively kill the forum business for a large number of communities. Those communities will have to be rebuilt.

In the end people don't remember or even care about Facebooks missteps. If they did most politicians won't be elected for more than one term. A small number of us care and we don't have Facebook accounts anymore, the rest are outraged for a week or two and then it's business a usual.

heavenlyblue
>> Facebook will however be able to survive for a VERY long time, due to groups and Messenger. They have effectively kill the forum business for a large number of communities. Those communities will have to be rebuilt.

Agree. I have moved most of my newspaper listings towards feedly. Friends I care about are on Whatsapp. Groups, on the other hand - for example: there's a group that regularly shares shit art sold in charity shops in the UK; it's content is brilliant and incredibly funny - way beyond anything you could find on the likes of Reddit.

jryan49
Probably will end up like AOL, and AIM. Operating for many years after it's demise.
corobo
They'll die when they become boring. I know we'd all like them to stop harvesting data from everyone, stop tracking where people are over the internet with their like buttons, etc but honestly Facebook's fall will be becoming boring.

I skew more towards the techie and older (relatively, in my 30s) side of the Facebook world so I'll probably be in the second, third, fourth wave of people to leave forever but I'm starting to notice the younger people in my family have moved on to other apps and services already. If you try to get in touch they'll refer to whatsapp (I know.) for messaging and other apps that fill in the social side of things.

Personally I've started to notice my feed ending if I go past the second "page" - it just says there's no more posts to display.. Out of the 11 years or whatever I've been on Facebook there's.. nothing.. more to display, Facebook? Boring!

Ever since that's started I've noticed I only really use their messenger service to keep in touch with people who have no replacement IM app yet, and even that's starting to shift more towards Discord in my nerdy gaming circles

Unfortunately I have to veer away from the other comments that suggest the mainstream will learn how much data is being harvested. The mainstream doesn't care. We've already had Cambridge Analytica and still I see people cramming data into apps like "OMG" that are blatantly hoovering up personal information. Facebook will die when enough people find it boring enough that a snowball effect starts

aogaili
I think by definition there will be either one global social network or open standard that allows people to find each other regardless of which social network they're on.

Facebook took it's sweet time to deeply integrate in the web like a cancer spread in the body and this is largely due to the failure of creating/adopting a standardized social networking protocol. Thus, in my opinion FB should have be replaced by an open identity, content protocols otherwise it's here to stay on the web filling this need.

Also FB the company is here to stay since they bought all the major social networks while everyone is watching.

rchaud
There likely won't be a tipping point, exactly. When a company pulls in billions every quarter, you can shutter the service tomorrow, and still have enough capital and enough user data to enter a completely different business, like surveillance, facial recognition and security. Don't be surprised if Zuck starts to openly court the Chinese government to build surveillance tech. The current state of affairs in the US is such that leaders are openly saying "my values are for sale as long as you have money".

FB is a data behemoth, with both profile and shadow-profile info of billions of people. They will continue to make money by exploiting that data. People will eventually stop using FB, but many will move their activity to Instagram. Plenty of people don't use FB or IG, but do use Whatsapp, another FB company.

without GDPR-style regulation, FB's influence will continue to loom large unfortunately.