sirpunch

I can attest to this with N=1 datapoint here. My best friend postponed having kids till they could afford a SFH, but kept pushing it further as the supply dwindled and rates shot up (tier-1 city residents). I can imagine how the number of planned kids could be directly proportional to the number of bedrooms a couple can afford to have.

Not sure why you're making it sound like a conspiracy theory. User behavior profiling is common strategy for all personalized IR products, including recommender systems, targeted ads, web search, e-commerce, and many more. A bunch of major tech companies rely on it. Do you think Google AdSense is also an evil empire? What about Apple and Amazon ramping up their own ads businesses? More people use YouTube than Meta products and even spend more minutes per day there. Do you also think YouTube is also equivalent to cigarettes? What about TikTok, Twitch, and other streaming platforms? Was Doordash also wrong for setting up personalized ads and recommendations?

I absolutely love Instagram app and my friend circle actively uses it. I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but I come back to Facebook groups and marketplace fairly frequently. What's your metric to measure this general propensity? DAU? MAU? Vibes?

Sure, the company may not exist 10 years from now. But there's no downfall indicator yet for this trillion dollar giant. All companies that size have headwinds and tailwinds. The self-assurance you see on this platform for Meta's sure shot upcoming decline is just absurd.

I find it fascinating how much Meta's business and HN sentiment towards anything Meta are mutually exclusive.

You could say the same thing about every big company. Apple has headwinds from sales in China and US-China trade wars, Tesla is trailing BYD and seeing declining EV demand, and so on. Every large company has something or the other going on. But I find it funny that every new project from Apple is reminiscent of iPhone 1 while it's the Yahoo path for everything from Meta.

This HN bandwagon again. Meta has had an astounding yoy growth. Did you even see their Q4 report.

One US & Canada user is worth 3x a European user and 15x ROW (rest of the world) user to Facebook.

Source: ARPU from Meta's Q4'23 earnings announcement.

HN users have long been calling Facebook a dead platform because none of their contacts are there. Yet FB has 130M dau in north America. Threads will be fine too.

IMO it does provide a better user experience. It gets to the end goal quickly by giving you a list of places directly in the Maps app. You can see how far each place is and if you really wanna go to that part of the town from a bird's eye view. Sure, I can Google the same query. But that'd require me multiple clicks and scrolling through possibly long-winded blogs to finally get a list of addresses.