Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lightgreen 2098 days ago
> There is very little incentive to make their users happy when their users are not paying for the service

This is plainly obviously wrong.

When users are not happy, they leave the service, and advertizers stop paying.

Even more, companies are much more afraid to lose users than to lose advertizers. Companies can live years without advertizers (by borrowing money for example or by burning reserves), but if a company lost it's users, the company is finished.

1 comments

Yes, in some way. But sole complaints are simply not hurting FB. How many of the people complaining would've used Instagram otherwise or even go as far as closing their account? I doubt the can even zoom in their Dashboard far enough to see the impact.

The real problem here is that for a single account, you're far more dependent on Instagram than Instagram is on you.

> you're far more dependent on Instagram than Instagram is on you

Same way, if you have a Ford car, you depend on Ford much more than Ford on you.

> But sole complaints are simply not hurting FB.

Same as complaints on bad Ford service don't really hurt Ford.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with the fact that users of Facebook are not paying Facebook.

> There is very little incentive to make their users happy when their users are not paying for the service

This quote [typo] is very incorrect. I'm not going to argue that Facebook/Google support is good or bad, I'm just pointing out this statement is false.

> Same way, if you have a Ford car, you depend on Ford much more than Ford on you.

But the latter is contractually obligated to help you to some extend due to warranty etc.. Also, Ford has far less lock-in than Instagram.

> > There is very little incentive to make their users happy when their users are not paying for the service > > This quite is very incorrect.

I'm not disagreeing with you here; I'm disagreeing with your point that users are (far) more important than advertisers. Single-user complaints or unhappiness tends to be ignored, I doubt the same is true for advertisers. The recent Reddit changes, for example, show this very clearly (to be fair: I don't have an FB-example as I don't follow it in any way).