[eksemplar]

I wonder when Facebook is going to get disrupted. It seems to me their key feature is having everyone connected, and while anecdotal, my friends list sure hasn’t been affected by these scandals.

What has been affected is the perception. It’s no longer considered cool to have a Facebook account. Meet-ups and interest groups are still heavily used in my social circles, but it’s almost always with an apology for being on Facebook.

Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.

Facebook on the other hand serves as a modern day yellowpages and meetup combined, but with its popularity dropping and people slowly adopting privacy concerns, it seems like the right company with the right business model could displace Facebook.

Of course you could say something similar about google and how it’s search engine is so terrible at finding anything interesting.

Maybe it’s my little anecdotal world playing tricks on my perception, but to me, the whole web seems ripe for another revolution.

[martinald]

Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now make a WhatsApp group which everyone gets invited into.

I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up.

My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp.

The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones.

They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core 'social media' offerings and I can't see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and/or simplicity aspects which make it so popular.

In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they'd released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they'd be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.

[samat]

iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place.

So that's pretty decent market strategy on Apple's end, i'd say.

[rhexs]

I'd kill for a way to use iMessage on my Windows desktop, so Apple is doing a great, albeit frustrating, job selling the Apple ecosystem.

Wish I could at least use icloud.com. Even went as far as to look into how hard it would be to use VMWare to get a OS X desktop going. 4 GB and a processor core would be worth it, but unfortunately it looks difficult.

[eksemplar]

Well, yes and no. The iMessage app is really, really awesome when you’re sitting with your Mac. Until you want to message someone with an android phone. :p

[mcast]

If you enabled Handoff in your iPhone, you can text SMS numbers on your Mac.

[mikestew]

but unfortunately it looks difficult.

More difficult than just getting the VM up and running, IIRC. Something, something, hardware security key to get iMessage working. Or something. Anyway, there are workarounds with which others report having success, but at that my point my interest ran out.

[krageon]

You could get an old macbook that still runs iMessage, hook a KVM switch up to it and use it as if it was local (through a connection over a VPN or something). It sounds like a lot of work, but if you really must have it...

[thestorm_jpeg]

In the most recent builds of Windows 10, there is a new Windows Phone app what enables you to link your iOS device. Not sure if that's exactly what you are looking for but you can use iMessage on your Windows Desktop. Good luck!

[enzanki_ars]

The Windows Phone app only works well with Android devices. Messaging sync with iOS is not supported yet according to their website, and I doubt the Windows can ever get the iOS API access needed to make it work.

[singularity2001]

> Wish I could at least use icloud.com

why can't you? or you mean for iMessage?

[rhexs]

Oh yeah, sorry about the confusion. iMessage through iCloud.com

[stevewodil]

You can do it in virtual box but there's no graphics drivers, so it's not the most pleasant user experience.

You wanna buy my MacBook pro from me? Lol

[firmgently]

I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.

[stevewodil]

What resolution do you run the VM at?

Also it's possible that El Capitan has graphics acceleration in VM's, whereas the later versions of macOS definitely do not

[technofiend]

Bottom-end WiFi iPads are in the $300 range now. You might find one cheaper on swappable, ebay, etc.

[gaius]

think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors

Well, they did that with Onavo didn’t they? Snooping VPN traffic to see who else their users were using. It remains to be seen if they can be as astute without that backdoor.

[onyva]

Agreed about iMessage. Didn’t mind deleteting my Facebook and Instagram accounts (with couple of hundreds of followers) but WhatsApp is almost a requirement in some respects (work, school, family over seas). Would love to get rid of it ASAP for a product from a source I can trust... wish Mozilla were in the messaging business...

[FabHK]

What's wrong with Wire or Signal?

[dimillian]

People. Nobody using it. My mom is not on it. What the point?

[cft]

All my programmer / enterpreneural friends are on Signal / Telegram. All business communication is there.

[parliament32]

Ditto, I was pleasantly surprised to see a huge number of people at work / industry acquaintances already on it when I switched it to my default SMS app. I love how SMS/Signal are seamlessly together in one app if you choose to combine them.

[pseudalopex]

Signal requires a mobile phone number. The iPhone app isn't bad, but it's buggier than Messages and doesn't rotate. The desktop app has the usual Electron problems.

[TAForObvReasons]

iMessage arguably serves as lock-in for the iPhone user base. If it were supported on android, many people would switch to the less expensive Android + iMessage ecosystem, likely enough to really make a dent in their cash cow

[isostatic]

There are many reasons to move off iphone (not least the lack of earphones), but imessage is so integrated with SMS that I don't know anyone who considers it different on any level other than geeks knowing it intellectually. On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example. Personally I, and wife, and motherinlaw, are on SEs because my mother's android phone is crap. It's just stopped ringing again -- last time required a software update.

iphones still Just Work. In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good. People buy iphones because they are good, not because of messaging lockin.

However that aside, across android and iphone, people constantly use whatsapp though because of groups and simplicity.

[zolthrowaway]

>People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good.

This is quite the overarching generalization. Especially on a site like HN where there are tons of financially well off people choosing to use Android. Do some people buy Androids because they are a cheaper alternative to iPhones, sure. Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down, like having access to things like Termux, the ability to flash their own ROMs and root, etc? Absolutely. I don't even want to make this an Apple vs Android thing, but please don't reduce a valid choice down to people's financial situation.

[scarface74]

Statistically the average selling price of an Android phone is $200. Even Samsung’s ASP is $250.

An “overarching generalization” doesn’t mean there aren’t outliers. But most people aren’t buying Android phones so they can flash ROMs and run Termux.

On the other hand, the “slowing down phones” meme is outdated - it was a choice between slowing them down and then shutting off completely. All batteries degrade over time.

[davrosthedalek]

It was a choice between telling the users that they do and don't telling them. They chose... poorly.

[zolthrowaway]

I don't want to argue about Android vs iOS at all. You should buy what you like, I just provided a couple reasons why I use Andoid. I'm assuming your numbers are worldwide since you did not provide a source. If they're US centric, I'd be very surprised. Living in the US, I know plenty of people with Pixel 3s and S9s. These people did not buy these expensive flagship Android phones because they were cheap. There are plenty of valid reasons to buy them.

[Tom4hawk]

Simple, effective, cheap and ecological solution: make phones with batteries that can be swapped easily by anyone.

Radical concept, isn't it?

[newscracker]

> Do some people buy Androids because they don't like things like Apple intentionally slowing devices down

Please read up on this point in detail instead of going by sensational headlines. You’d get a more comprehensive picture about how batteries work the same on iPhones and Android phones, and why Apple put in some software changes.

[dbingham]

My partner switched to a Pixel because she got tired of having to restore her old iPhone from backup every 6 months when it complained it was running out of space - inspite of the fact that she wasn't doing anything that should be gobbling up space.

I've been android forever, and my experience of Android phones has been they are solid for about 3 - 4 years, and then they start showing their wear. But I'm pretty hard on them. There are lots of significant drops that occur in that time. Drops that would shatter most iPhone screens.

[newscracker]

> when it complained it was running out of space - inspite of the fact that she wasn't doing anything that should be gobbling up space.

The reason could’ve been found by going into Settings and looking at the storage usage. The only case that annoys me on iOS is the download of a new version of iOS without permission and taking up space. But even that can be deleted from the same place in Settings (though this behavior shouldn’t be there in the first place).

[dbingham]

Trust me, she tried that. She tried pretty much everything. There was nothing listed in settings as taking up the storage. She took it various apple repair shops and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. They were the ones who told her to just periodically do backups and factory resets.

[hunta2097]

The problem for me is that there is a large spectrum of devices, some of them are shit. Especially if you don't do your research.

Ive had Apple-like longevity out of all my family's Samsung "S" and Sony Xperia devices.

If you met my daughter (destroyer of USB cables) you would know that the fact her Xperia has survived 2 years is some small miracle on its own.

Just avoid LG, HTE and off brand crap - they eventually have issues.

[freehunter]

That seems to be the way these conversations always go:

1 "iPhones are too expensive, people should buy cheaper Android phones"

2 "I buy cheap Android phones and the quality is terrible"

3 "You can get good quality Android phones, you just have to pay iPhone prices for them"

Every time a conversation about price vs quality comes up, the conversation starts at the price, goes into the quality, and then ends up at the same price and quality as the competition.

[matwood]

This is the exact conversation I have had with myself and others multiple times. If I'm going to pay a lot of money, I'll just stick with my iPhone.

The Google Nexus line really could have changed things. It was inexpensive, a great phone, and ran vanilla Android. I moved from an iPhone to the Nexus 5. It had some quirks, but for the price it was great. Then Google started chasing the iPhone money, and pushed me back to iOS.

[GFischer]

Not true. Me and my family are on Xiaomis, they're on a different level.

I have a company-issued S8 and an iPhone, and I wouldn't trade them for my Xiaomi.

Best part is, they cost less than half of an equivalent iPhone, have better battery and amazing performance.

I used to buy Samsungs (and Nokias earlier before they suicided).

I have an iPad and it's a great piece of hardware, but I don't stand the Apple ecosystem (iTunes in particular is a piece of crap).

Currently waiting for the Pocophone F1 to be distributed by the local carrier. Another slam dunk by Xiaomi.

[davrosthedalek]

I agree with 1 and 2, but really, you don't have to spend iPhone level prices, just don't buy the cheapest phone you can get.

[cm2187]

I still have to sync my music on my iphone using itunes on windows, and I beg to differ on the "it Just Works"...

[nirmalc]

Ditto . "Just works " doesn't seem to apply when itunes is in picture

[newscracker]

That music thing is quite annoying. I can add books from Dropbox or other places into Books app but not add music from anywhere into the Music app? Long ago I heard this restriction was put in place to reduce music piracy, but over the years I’ve concluded that Apple wants people to buy music from it (or subscribe to Apple Music), and doesn’t give a damn about what users may want.

[lol768]

>In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit.

As some of the other commenters alluded to, there really are a huge variety of different devices. I'd be curious as to whether the folks you knew were buying e.g. Google's Nexus or Pixel devices which IME have generally felt higher quality to use, or whether they were Samsung/HTC/Huwaei-branded devices.

[ams6110]

I've used Motorola "Moto G" phones since I've had smartphones. My current phone is from 2015. They are low-cost, but seem well made. Never had any problems with the hardware. I've been happy with them. The downside is they don't get updates over the long term.

I could afford an iPhone, or a flagship Android phone, but the value proposition isn't there for me. Mobile just isn't a very important thing for me. I use it for basic communication with family and friends, navigating/maps and that's about it.

[scarface74]

Are there any devices that have five years worth of OS upgrades?

[toast0]

If you spend $200 on a phone instead of $1000, you get five years of OS upgrades by getting a new phone every year. If you luck out and one of your phones does have upgrades, you can skip a year.

Because the Android ecosystem doesn't have a strong upgrade ability, app developers generally target a wide variety of OS versions, so when you do get cut off from app updates, it's really ancient versions, like gingerbread.

[davrosthedalek]

While I agree that this is nice, many people upgrade their phones every 2-3 years anyway, just because of the hardware/battery. For them, this is not a selling point.

[me551ah]

If you buy a cheap Android phone you are going to get cheapness. In my experience the kind of experience you have with an android device is pretty much driven by the cost of the phone.

I personally own a Sony Xperia XZ ( which is now over 3 years old), but it had a price comparable to an iPhone when i bought it with better specs.

1. Better front camera ( 13 megapixels ) and the rear one has a 25 mp sensor which captures great photos.

2. 192khz/24bit audio. Being an audiophile I hate the fact that apple does not support hi res audio. This phone had a headphone jack and is really good at playing flac music or hi-fi audio from Tidal.

3. Well designed - The back is made out of alkaleido which sounds like a marketing gimmick term, but it really does change colour in a subtle but nice way. iPhones haven't changed much in design over the years and they don't really look as attractive as they did previously.

4. Google cardboard - Android has some good VR applications which run on google cardboard. Heck you can even use TrinusVR on Android and VR stream games wirelessly from your PC . Can an iPhone do that?

[krageon]

Apple hardware works well only with Apple hardware. Every day you pretend otherwise you will be reminded that your life is bad unless you bend over and accept the fact that you'll get annoyed by your own hardware constantly until you relent. People buy Android phones because the promise there is, at least, that you might get a device that belongs to you.

[vinay427]

> On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example.

What does this have to do with an ecosystem? Lots of other devices on the market support similar or superior features.

[matwood]

I think you are over simplifying the situation in assuming that if iMessage was open there would be a mass exodus from the iOS platform. The people looking for the cheapest phone solution have already switched to Android (or were always Android). iMessage may serve as some lock-in, but there are many other reasons that people prefer iOS and Apple devices.

[Sharlin]

As another datapoint, iMessage is probably the least useful thing to me in the whole ecosystem. Apple has nowhere enough market penetration around here (N Euro) for it to be useful as anything more than an SMS app.

[freehunter]

I live in the US but have many friends from northern Europe and I've noticed the same thing. The only thing I use WhatsApp for is communicating with my European friends, and every single one of them prefers it over text or iMessage even though they all have iPhones.

[izacus]

Probably because it lets you communicate with everyone without being That Asshole who judges you over brand of electronics you bought.

[JustSomeNobody]

I seriously don't think that that is true. Sure, you'd find some people who would. But not the majority. iMessage is great, but it's not the reason people buy iPhones. It is one of the reasons.

[IggleSniggle]

The irony there is I keep iMessage turned off since I want a platform agnostic, lowest common denominator (as in social availability) messaging system, and I can get that with SMS via a Google Voice number.

[fosco]

isn't whatsapp owned by facebook? and instagram (in parent comment) why do people differentiate them from facebook?

to me you are still using facebook just an 'app' under facebook.

I feel this is akin to saying I use gmail but not google.

am I wrong here?

[distances]

The difference is in encryption. WhatsApp has end-to-end, while other FB products obviously do not. Also, the current lack of ads. It's an improvement even if not a perfect solution.

[fosco]

I think what I'm saying is specifically it is facebook whatsapp like it is google gmail or apple messaging.

it appears that people often refer to this as different companies and they are not.

it being e2e encrypted does not change who owns, makes decisions on where the future of it goes, and if it will continue to exist in 5 years. it is still facebook and not 'whatsapp' by itself above and in many areas people refer to whatsapp and instagram as different entities and they are not, I'm concerned with people acting like it is.

[ams6110]

It seems to me that Apple could deploy iMessage and FaceTime versions for Android whenever they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is probably that they don't want to cannibalize sales of their own hardware.

[zimpenfish]

That would surely have to imply they trusted the creators of the Android OS to be as security- and privacy-concerned as the iOS creators, no?

[krageon]

This is a company, and as such their core driving force is money. If you are framing them as having different driving forces that will make their behavior on occasion seem really weird.

[basch]

>My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp.

Facebook should become a compute platform like AWS/Azure that specalizes in compute services for social services, including but not limited to authentication, spam detection, censorship/moderation tools, social graph, storage, bandwidth, localization, learning, ranking.

[dade_]

They just need a leader with ethical qualities. They have always been lacking there, and birds of a feather...

[JustSomeNobody]

iMessage on Android would be huge. Do that, then introduce a meetup feature and I swear half the people I know who "have to use Facebook" would delete their account. FB would shrivel up in five years.

[parliament32]

I feel like this would go about as well as BBM's Android release a few years back. Non-iphone users would use it for a bit then switch back off as the novelty of "yet another ecosystem messaging app" wears off.

The proper way to do this is to convince people to switch to an app that integrates other messaging platforms as well: people switch to Signal and stay on it because they send all their normal SMSes run though the app as well. Then as their friends switch to Signal their conversations are painlessly migrated, everything looks the same, you just get a bonus "lock" icon.

[AlwaysRock]

The thing to keep in mind about facebook is that the average user isnt a tech person.

My parents use facebook nearly constantly. That wont change anytime soon. I don't know if they could list a single facebook, "scandal" that happened this year. It's not that they are dumb people they just don't care. Their friends use it so they use it.

[notahacker]

To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos.

I think Facebook's more likely to lose out because apart from messaging, its organization and events and business finding tools simply aren't that good or well-surfaced within the app because Facebook has prioritised the world of feed clickbait. Don't think it's security concerns that have my friends doing event invites via Whatsapp group threads as often as via Facebook's dedicated event invitation service. But the average person having a number of old friends whose only reliable contact information is their Facebook is a pretty big moat.

[Jedd]

> To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos.

If you were being dishonest, what would you think differently.

I think most people are vaguely aware their data on Facebook is being misappropriated, but they don't understand the implications of that, especially in the long term.

The challenge, and it seems most of the informed are stuck on how to resolve this, is explaining why this is a horrendously bad situation.

Just today at lunch with a phd mathematician (ie someone way smarter than me), I was struggling to get past his 'I've nothing to hide, why does it matter' attitude about fb and messenger android apps.

[base698]

The standard response is: what if your friends do have something to hide and you end up questioned and detained because you had conversations with them. What if the sites you visit outs an embarrassing medical condition?

[azangru]

While I am no mathematician and not at all smart, I work in the tech industry. But I share the attitude of your mathematical friend. Let Facebook do what they please with my data; there's nothing important there.

It's not the data misuse that repulses me from Facebook, but the overall shallowness of conversations, its feed contents (I don't care about what my friends liked or responded to; I am content with just seeing their posts, thank you very much). So there's a lot to dislike about Facebook apart from how they treat our data.

[gnu8]

There must be something important there because Facebook is making money off it. But it’s YOUR data and that money is yours too. Facebook is STEALING from you. Mark is the greatest con artist in history.

[notahacker]

Facebook is making money off the fact I still visit their website enough to show me sponsored content (much like most of the rest of the internet does), and the data in theory means purchasers of its ads get better bang for their buck. I'm not convinced the fact that I'm a 30something single male currently located in a particular area is something anyone would pay me for, and granting Facebook right to use those facts plus data from ad-retargeting networks to show me ads and sponsored content (some of which I haven't even managed to block!) for free use of their web platform seems like a pretty fair trade to me.

tbh I'm not even convinced half the data is actually that good for the ad platforms: the fact that I invariably report obvious ICO scam ads as "it's a scam" seems to have triggered Facebook to show more of them to me.

[azangru]

> There must be something important there because Facebook is making money off it

I think there is a logical fallacy in arguments like this, which is extending conclusions made on large samples to special individual cases.

While there is no doubt that Facebook is making money (I would think, primarily from ads or from paid promotions of particular posts), and while it is true that, in order to better serve ads, Facebook is using their users' data, it in no way follows that Facebook is making money off me specifically, or that my data specifically is of any value to Facebook and not just garbage.

I don't think I am a valuable Facebook asset. I don't follow ads. And I am not a particularly social animal.

[jcbrand]

Someone with a phd in math have shown themselves to be a smart in a particular way.

That doesn't mean that they have good judgement, wisdom, empathy or all kinds of other traits which might be considered "smart".

[Jedd]

Undeniably, and as per my observation.

The challenge for us is how to engage people who are clearly smart, but lack the same concerns that many of us have developed.

[bwindels]

Whether it happens or not, if the disruptor doesn't have a business model not based on targeted advertisement, I don't see how it will be different once it becomes large enough.

My hope would be a decentralized service, where everyone hosting an instance determines their own business model, or a paid service. None of which will be as fast to iterate, and be able to crank out features as fast as Facebook can ...

[jbreckmckye]

Contrary data point: over the past month three of my friends have closed their Facebook accounts - and they are not technical people. So it's not only a matter of reputation.

[merpnderp]

I bet I’ve lost 5% of my friends list to people sick of Facebook’s constant bickering over politics and social posturing.

[Finnucane]

I still have a facebook account, I just use it less and less. And while I don't think many of my friends have dropped it either, it seems they are also using it less and less. Most of my feed now comes from a fairly small group of people.

[johannes1234321]

Well, Facebook has full pockets and a working cash machine. And at least until now the managed to identify threats. For example WhatsApp and Instagram were acquired. When G+ came they copied G+'s circle feature close enough with their contact grouping feature, when Snap didn't want to be acquired they added stories everywhere (WhatsApp, messenger, Facebook)

Yesterday's news tells us that competing with Facebook in the messenger field isn't easy (Google cancelling Allo)

For a long-term strategy we have to see how there diversification (facebook@work, Oculus, ...) works out and how long they can keep printing money.

[wdr1]

I think Facebook is benefiting from everyone having learned their lesson.

The saw their trust woefully violated by Facebook, and they'll never give another network the same access to their data again. And, thus, stay on Facebook.

[theklub]

I believe discord is replacing it. At least in my circles.

[leetbulb]

Discord definitely seems to be the preferred platform for the younger generation in my area. It just sucks that they have zero plans for text E2EE, at least the last I checked.

[kiriakasis]

Anecdotically my experience in Italy is that everyone and their dog have WhatsApp, if you go into the over 50 many have WhatsApp and not an email (or at least never check it)

[sotojuan]

Good thing Facebook purchased it.

[pnongrata]

Same here in Brazil. WhatsApp is the main communication platform by far.

[thrwyahk11111]

For sure Facebook main quality is being place where every one is.

But I believe you’re wrong about instagram. Living in Brazil, I feel that Facebook and Instagram are two sides of the same coin. It keeps people interested and “connected” when Facebook is going down.

From Orkut to Facebook, it was the same.

The difference is that Facebook bought its potential competitors before they were cool

[Puer]

> Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time.

Is Instagram useless, or just useless to you? I understand that HN isn't Facebook's target market, but it's disappointing to read comments that dismiss its services and anyone who does find utility in them.

[elorant]

It will get disrupted when people realize the cost of putting their personal life online. The Cambridge Analytica incident was a good start but we need many more cases like it to start making a trend.

[Beltiras]

There are a lot of startups trying. Hopefully one of them will reach critical mass. I would be happy to leave Facebook but being involved in politics makes it a prerequisite to reach my audience.

[squish78]

I remember back when Facebook was only available to college students. I wonder if any startup would create another 'exclusive' network to increase it's perceived social value

[hazz99]

What startups? I've seen a lot of messaging solutions, but not too many full competitors. Maybe I've been a bit blind

[Beltiras]

Just look up distributed social networks. There are multiple ones with up to 10^7 users.

[subw00f]

I don't think you can say that about google. Care to elaborate?

[eksemplar]

When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar.

None of which is interesting.

Google is still good at finding specific things. Like when you commit an act of google programming or want to buy a book. But it’s really terrible and finding interesting content.

You could say that the web is flooded with shit, and be right, but HN is evidence that not everything on the internet is terrible, google just isn’t your portal to it anymore.

So we visit HN, but that means google has become yahoo, aol search and all those other search engines it replaced by being a combination of relevant, interesting and exploratively fresh.

I mean, 2018 was the year I adopted DuckDuckGo as my standard search engine, and it wasn’t because of privacy. Sure privacy helps, but to be honest, it was because it gives more interesting results. I’ll still use !g when I’m searching for something I know google will find, but if I’m just exploring a topic I’ll almost never use google.

[jasode]

>When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar. None of which is interesting.

Can you be more specific and give examples of "things" you're searching for and what you mean by "uninteresting"?

For me, I have been issuing 50+ random searches on Google every single day for years. I've been using Google since 2000 and it almost always finds what I'm looking for. Yesterday, I searched for "replace Moen faucet cartridge" and it returned plenty of pages showing exactly how to do it. A week ago I searched for "install Windows 10 from USB drive" and again, it found plenty of helpful pages that answered that question. And recently, I ran across a cook I never heard of before named "Alice Waters". A Google search told me she owned a restaurant and what her specialty was.

In my experience, the topic has to be obscure or brand new for Google searches to be useless. For some trivia, I did find a weird effect of the search algorithm for a person named "Bettina Warburg". She's a young woman who's given several presentations on blockchains[1]. However, for some reason, the Google, Bing, and DDG search results have a side box citing someone else that was born in 1900 and died in 1990[2][3][4]. Something about her is tripping up the search engines. Bing in particular has the odd logic of placing the photos of the still-living BW above the text of the BW who died.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bettina+warburg

[2] http://google.com/search?q=bettina+warburg

[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=bettina+warburg

[4] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bettina+warburg

[rapnie]

Yesterday there was the HN thread on DDG's filter bubble study of Google search. Quite interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608306

[kiriakasis]

Too much advertising that mimic as search results. Sometimes even with the same title as the page you know you are looking for.

[rapind]

I think the problem is the business model, not specifically Facebook. Are any of their competitors following and succeeding at a different model at scale?

[sjg007]

It'll be something you don't expect. Maybe an iMessage plugin.

[cribbles]

A few years ago I would have made the semi-contrarian point that Facebook[1] was here to stay, for the long-foreseeable future.

I say "semi-contrarian" because remember, even 4 or 5 years ago Facebook seemed to be the latest corporate iteration in an ever-flipping lineage from AIM lists to Friendster to MySpace.[2] So the common gospel was: "Facebook" - such as it was understood - could be toppled any day now. Remember MySpace?

The counterargument was that the market capture was incomparable and the network effect was insurmountable. And that's still true, kind of.

But the way we use Facebook has changed. In short, it's gone from being a single service with a bunch of features to being an SSO gateway for a bunch of federated platforms. And that's not just a change in user perception, it's reflective of a completely different product strategy.

That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for Facebook so far, and I'm not sure what they could have done differently. But I think it leaves them vulnerable to any one of those platforms, or all of them, being usurped by new kids on the block.

Part of the problem is that none of Facebook's platforms are all that great in their own right.[3] But that alone doesn't make them vulnerable. MySpace proved you can have a terrible product and coast off network effect alone, while Google+ proved that without a network, you have nothing.

But wait a minute. Does any one of these platforms on their own have the network effect that "Facebook" itself once had? I mean, yeah, they've absorbed a greater user share than the 2012 webapp ever had. But that's not what I'm talking about. Is connectivity to "Facebook," and hence its network, a killer feature at this point?

To give one example: I have zero confidence anyone on Groups is a "real person," it doesn't offer any unique features, it's painful to use for anything other than reading a general quasi-chronological survey of recent posts, and it means nothing to me that 17 or 18 "real friends" happen to be a member of the group (how does that help me find a sublet?).

Right now I'm one of millions of people who "just use Facebook for Events and Messenger." Except I don't _just_ message people through Messenger, and I don't _just_ learn about events through Events, and the fact that "my friends" are "on" these platforms seems to mean less and less every day. But I'm still on them... for now... with gradually diminishing frequency... basically out of ambivalence.

Is this product direction sustainable?

[1] Any references I make to Facebook in this post refer to the core service - the website, the app, whatever you want to call it. Not the company, which I'm aware owns WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, and could potentially continue to coast off acquisitions alone.

[2] This is a myopically North American view: in Brazil it would have started with Orkut, in Southeast Aria Friendster held steady market share for quite a while, etc. The point is that we used to consider portal-like predecessors as a litmus of comparison for Facebook’s health, and now that doesn’t seem as salient.

[3] I mean, Groups _barely_ serves its job of being the sort of Craigslist-with-authentication into which it's evolved, in part _because_ it evolved into that role over time. The Events interface is totally cluttered and incoherent, and despite its ubiquity, it seems to get the lowest social engagement of any of Facebook's core products. Messenger is... fine I guess, but I have no strong preference for it over WhatsApp or iMessage, and having hypothetical connection to hundreds of "friends" I haven't spoken to in years isn't exactly a value-add.