[downandout]

Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' while leaving those buttons in place.

I'm sure that it wasn't intentional. Most CMSs have this functionality built in.

Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task.

Do you think anyone will try? This is a PR storm, but it will be drowned out in a few weeks or less with whatever headlines get clicks for news sites at that point. Click-hungry web publishers are not going to remove these sharing tools, and many smaller sites depending on tools like Wordpress probably don't even know how even if they wanted to.

If Facebook lost half of its users tomorrow (which won't happen), there would still be over a billion people using it, not to mention its other tools like Instagram. Love them or hate them, Facebook isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

[pgeorgi]

> Most CMSs have this functionality built in.

Which is a big problem for German (and potentially European) publishers due to privacy laws. One major German IT publisher therefore developed an open source privacy preserving tool that strikes a balance: https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff

It shows a bunch of buttons but only loads the 3rdparty Javascript when you press them once (ie. show intent to use them) and asks you to press once again (then the native 3rdparty button).

[fusiongyro]

On the other hand, one thing Taleb points out in Fooled by Randomness is that meteoric rises are often followed by catastrophic losses, whereas gains more slowly made are typically also lost more slowly.

You can also apply Richard Gott's estimator:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/06/we-ha...

At the 50% confidence interval, it predicts that Facebook has between 5 and 42 years left in it. Maybe the Cambridge Analytica scandal is serious enough to be the death knell, and in five years it will be defunct. Five years is a long time on the web. I could easily see us looking back on this as the scandal that led to Facebook's complete downfall.

Another question I don't have the answer to is how dependent is Facebook on advertising. If their brand becomes toxic and all the advertisers pull out, how much runway do they have? Enough to build a completely new revenue model before going out of business?

Day to day big things are rare, but over longer time intervals large companies do die, and for more frivolous reasons than this.

[downandout]

If their brand becomes toxic and all the advertisers pull out, how much runway do they have?

There are plenty of companies that will still advertise there. As long as the users remain - and that appears to not be a question, at least right now - there will be advertisers chasing after them. I am in charge of a relatively large Facebook advertising budget, and I can tell you that I would love it if, for example, half of the advertisers left. Facebook ad pricing is largely based on an auction model, and that would mean less competition and lower priced clicks. But I'd be stunned if even 0.5% of the advertisers left over this.

Mozilla is in a unique situation, in that the political views of its workforce seem to dictate many of its business decisions. That is not the case at most companies.

[fusiongyro]

Let me reinforce my earlier point: I am not predicting Facebook disappears tomorrow because of this scandal. However, I doubt it's the last big scandal, and I don't see a way for Facebook to unreveal their star killer base or disarm it. I am predicting slow decline for them from here on out, until they enter a heay death like MySpace or LiveJournal. Just because it appears to be a complete fixture in billions of lives today, does not mean it will be forever. We all lived without it 14 years ago.

"When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide." -- Dijkstra

[vkou]

The thing is, MySpace died because it was replaced by Facebook.

What will Facebook's successor look like, and what makes you think it'll be any more human-friendly?

[vertex-four]

It looks a heck of a lot like any number of mobile messaging apps combined with subject-specific forums, in my circles. But we're relatively out of the mainstream - not in tech, but a different circle that hasn't wanted to be attached to Facebook for years.

Honestly, I think it's going to be "mobile messaging and X" where X is different for every subset of people. The mobile messaging allows you to keep contact details for people and keep in touch in a non-1-to-1 way through group chats, while the choice of X allows people to make a statement about what sort of person they are.

[downandout]

It’s certainly possible that you’re right. I just don’t think that this situation is the beginning of the end. It’s a big deal in the Valley, but I’m not sure how big of a deal it is elsewhere.

[EGreg]

This analysis reminds me of a Princeton study 3 years ago:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/23/facebook-losing-users-prin...!