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U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

(www.marketplace.org)
1293 points rmason | 1 comments | 06 Mar 19 20:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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kojackst ◴[06 Mar 19 21:48 UTC] No.19323205[source]▶
Note: personal opinion bellow

It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.

Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.

Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.

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MR4D ◴[06 Mar 19 22:11 UTC] No.19323409[source]▶
I thought FB was integrating their messaging platforms? That seemed to make all the news rounds a month ago.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-insta...

[1] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-on-whats...

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smacktoward ◴[07 Mar 19 04:30 UTC] No.19325503[source]▶
Integrating the backends of the messaging systems, not the frontends. There will still be separate apps called "Messenger," "Whatsapp," "Instagram," etc., but they'll just be different fixtures set on top of identical plumbing.

This approach opens up exciting new opportunities for market segmentation via badge engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering

... in much the same way that Ford (say) could design one car and then sell it to very different audiences as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable, and Lincoln Continental.

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1. MR4D ◴[07 Mar 19 14:22 UTC] No.19328169[source]▶
I don’t disagree, but there seemed to be a lot of a publicity around a backend tech change, and to me, it is that publicity that undoes the whole idea of keeping businesses separated. As a side example, everyone knows that Coke makes Diet Coke, but many don’t know that they make Sprite. The Sprite model seems to be a better approach than FB’s new Diet Coke approach.