[curiousllama]

I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and burgers.

When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more with Hershey's than McDonald's.

Businesses evolve or die, no?

[matthewdgreen]

I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't.

If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time.

If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)

[diggan]

> Businesses evolve or die, no?

What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.

Case in point: Facebook.

[pixl97]

Numbers must go up. In the stock market anything steady state is dead.

[ViktorRay]

This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.

[psunavy03]

But that doesn't conform to the internet's stereotype of mustache-twirling capitalists in top hats and monocles, so obviously it can't be true . . .

</SARCASM>

[FeteCommuniste]

Numbers can naturally go up with the population, unless the product stays the same and newer generations decide they don't want it. Facebook suffered a double hit from both changing the product to scrollslop instead of a way to check on friends, and from becoming "uncool" with young people because it's what their boring parents used.

[zelphirkalt]

Infinite growth!!! How silly we still are as a species. The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day, when they can no longer be stopped.