This is the beginning of the Big Churn. Less top talent will want to be associated with facebook. Already even a few more privacy clueless friends family members are deleting their accounts. Adverts were always so low yeild, and fb pages 'because we need one'. Now that is all changing due to perception. The FTC, stocks falling, are further indicatuons of falling trust. And all business is built on trust.
What's interesting for me is that I finally deleted my account. I never used it anyway but now I feel empowered to say "I don't have an FB account" and that's ok.<p>I think this is a sea change - there will never again be this dominant of a social network imho. From now on the space will be fractured into niches (AngelList, LinkedIn, NextDoor, etc...).
It's too easy for some of you to get excited about one giant corporation taking a rather public beating. The anti-facebook tribe is strong in the Hacker News community.<p>Plus, what SV company wasn't a free-for-all of user data in 2012-2013? I don't know if any of you remember the Path app's lawsuit that triggered Apple's lockdown of API permissions. Apple, who suddenly got religion about privacy, but they too learned from their mistakes.<p>Anyway, I'm not here to argue in favor of FB, but the stock going down is pretty self perpetuated right now. It's algorithmically triggered in response to bad news in the press, that then generates more bad press like this and so on. I'm not sure where the bottom will be here, but I'm pretty sure it'll reverse course soon enough.
In other words, FB has done somewhat worse than the NASDAQ, and about the same as GOOG over the same time period.<p>Best not to take broad market movements and try to ascribe specific market expectations to individual companies.
I fail to see how this will seriously damage them. They already own the two biggest alternatives to facebook - Instagram for pictures and WhatsApp for communication. More people are using their services than ever before and more people are getting access to the internet in developing countries.
I have no idea where the FB stock is going. I don't think the company is in trouble, but likely to continue shifting focus. The good thing for them is that their products complement each other pretty well.<p>FB the product has been changing quite a bit. Many people don't use it anymore to see what their "friends" are doing. They use it to follow certain groups of interest. For me it's becoming something between Reddit, Meetup, and Craigslist. (I don't check my FB often)<p>Instagram (which I don't use) is still strong in what FB used to be, but the friendship model is more lax like in Twitter. The demographics also complement FB well.<p>WhatsApp (which I use daily for everything) is huge all over the world. It's also catching up in the US. Besides the 1on1 communication, it's also big on groups. But the WahtsApp groups are quite different from the FB groups. They tend to be smaller and more personal. It's not really by design, it's mainly because it's connected to people's phones. They just need to figure out how to monetize it. The potential is huge. (but first please improve the calling quality, it's so bad)<p>WhatsApp is a great product but among the three the most easily replaceable. But that's not going to happen any time soon. FB were smart keeping it independent and separate (many users don't even know they own it). One thing I really dislike about Google is that they merge everything under one umbrella.
I genuinely believe that advertisers are only pulling out because it's the PR thing to do. There are many other companies that would love to take advantage of a less competitive bid for Facebook ad space and I have no doubt they will be taking advantage of it and will continue to spend boats of money on Facebook.
Facebook didnt loose $100B in 10 days: it's market value dropped in response to bad news. Stocks go up and down all the time on companies that remain around a long time. It's still making piles of money. Its users have a huge, switching cost to block a transition, too.
Perhaps some good will come out of all this.<p>Maybe in the future, when some PHB asks development to add a questionable data gathering function to a platform they can say, "Remember Facebook?"
I hope they continue to lose money. That's a pretty negative feeling to have towards a business for me too. However, they started harvesting text and call info back in 2006; that is about the time I first started looking into anything technology related. I thought fb was terrific as it grew and helped enable more connectivity. Now that it has been shown to be true tho, the invasion of privacy is absolutely ludicrous.
Could this spark a small tech bubble burst?<p>Will non-tech people be fed up with their data being abused by tech/ad companies? If this trend goes viral (ironic, eh?) it could mean less ad money. Advertising has had it really good compared to older days of TV and radio with targeted online communities and data about them.<p>Maybe this just sparks less VC investment towards freemium products?
This looks like big news but I think it is merely a small correction of its market value. For better or worse, they are going to stay for a very long time. At least from the current generation a significant amount of people will cling onto it for the rest of their lives like others do with cigarettes.
I wouldn't particularly mind if it lost another 100-200b in market cap. It's gotta be enough to have a long term affect, and to teach the other social media giants a lesson so they don't replicate the same behavior. Unfortunately the might just get better at hiding it.
Facebook isn't going anywhere for a long time. They'll retain the privacy-clueless fossils with FB. They'll keep the aspirational set with IG. Anything even remotely competitive or alternative they'll just throw cash at and snap up.
I’m impressed at how misleading this headline is. If you didn’t know better, you might think Facebook’s bank accounts contain $100 billion less than they did a week ago. What they actually mean is that the stock price is down ~20%.
So while it seems like $100B dollars is a large sum, it's really about 12% ish of the market valuation. Yes it hurts, but no, it's not the end of the company.<p>Think of it this way. How much money will FB have to spend to rebrand itself and fix the privacy issues. $1 Billion, maybe $2 Billion?<p>You can do a lot with $2B dollars.
Change isn't coming. Sorry.<p>Trump's victory signaled a social media gold-rush for political campaigns. 2018 is a major election year in American politics. You can bet that campaigns are evaluating and signing onto social media related efforts. To meet this demand, as Cambridge Analytica buckles, others will take it place. The people who benefit by these services are those who make the laws. While legislators benefit by social media targeted services, there won't be a political will sufficient to pass a law that will slay the goose laying golden eggs.
The advertisers leaving is what really hurts Facebook. Remember, you aren't Facebook's customer if you're just a regular user; you're the product.<p>Think of it this way; imagine a farmer having a bad harvest. that's a lot of pressure, but he or she will try to cope with the loss and monetize what's left cleverly.
Now, imagine the same farmer but the demand for the crop is falling. Now that's a capital "P" problem right there.
Is it crazy to consider investing in their stocks soon-ish. I totally hate the company but if this is global-minimum i can make some cash pretty easy. I'm relying on the premise that most users will continue to user the site and that this is a short term media frenzy similar to youtube advertiser fiasco.