
Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers (2014) - NicoJuicy
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-princeton-researchers-infectious-disease
======
ysavir
> John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and
> aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number
> of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The charts produced
> by the Google Trends service show Facebook searches peaked in December 2012
> and have since begun to trail off.

Well, yeah... The more people are already familiar with facebook, the less
they will be googling/researching it. If anything, considering the popularity
of Facebook at the time, it should have been seen as a sign of vitality.

I'm pretty disappointed that the Princeton researchers were so blinded by
googlinums that they forget those googlinums don't exist in a vacuum. Probably
why mechanical and aerospace engineers aren't fit to make predictions of a
social nature (among other engineers, too, sadly).

~~~
azinman2
Googling facebook is how many people access it and other things. That will
probably correlate more to a older and less savvy audience, but should still
give a decent proxy in terms of popularity of the web property.

What it _doesn't_ take into account is mobile app usage, which might have been
what sucked in all those people vs just total loss.

~~~
spanishgum
Even on a desktop / laptop, many people probably use the browser's auto-
complete or bookmarks for access.

~~~
ubernostrum
Talk to people who run usability studies and ask how many users know that the
browser can do these things.

People joke about "my grandfather opens his browser and types 'Yahoo' into
Bing, clicks the link and types 'Google' in to Yahoo, clicks the link and
types 'Facebook' into Google to get to Facebook", but it's not _that_ wild an
exaggeration of how much of the developed world -- which is _not_ computer-
literate -- uses the web. That's part of why walled gardens and native-feeling
app experiences are so successful.

~~~
wtvanhest
Adoption of Chrome likey erases that pattern. As more and more people adapt to
searching from the address bar, autocomplete is also used more and more.

~~~
lhopki01
No people type google.com into the address bar and then enter facebook in
search page.

~~~
grzm
You'd be surprised how often people do in fact do exactly that. I know two
personally. I don't have overall figures but it's definitely greater than
zero.

Isn't there a service which shows popularity of search terms? That would be
one way to get a handle on frequency.

Found it:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=Facebook](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=Facebook)

I don't know this tool well enough to know if this is for queries where the
only term is Facebook. Happy to be corrected!

------
paulhodge
Is this being posted for humor value?

This was written in 2014, the researchers saw a small trend and extrapolated
that the trend would continue, causing 80% user loss from 2014 to 2017.

Since 2014, FB's active user count has increased from 1 billion to 1.7 billion
and the stock price from ~60 to 120.

This article is a great example of a very terrible and very wrong prediction.

~~~
Johnny555
There are around 3B internet connected people in the world, does FB really
have half of them? I know more than a handful of people that eschew Facebook
entirely, it's hard to beleive that half of the world is on FB. I also have 3
or 4 FB accounts myself, (that I created to test an app) am I counted as 3
people?

~~~
nathan_f77
1.79 billion monthly active users.

I guess you might be counted as 4 people if you use all your test accounts
regularly, but the average number of Facebook accounts per person must be
extremely close to 1.

Facebook estimates that between 5.5% and 11.2% of accounts are fake [1]. So
that's still around 1.59 billion real users.

[1] [http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/03/facebook-
estimates...](http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/03/facebook-
estimates-5-5-11-2-accounts-fake/)

~~~
ryanplant-au
I wonder how many active Facebook users aren't actually actively using
Facebook. Per that link, Facebook defines an active user as anyone who logs
into a Facebook account, but that includes using a Facebook account to log
into a third-party service. An enormous number of apps and services now use
Facebook OAuth rather than their own user registration system and,
anecdotally, I know a surprising number of people who have zero-friend zero-
post Facebook profiles solely because of that. As far as I can see Facebook
doesn't publish information on how many of their active users are actively
using Facebook itself.

~~~
mcintyre1994
This is no longer true as of late 2015. The new definition is "We define a
monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited
Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app
(and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date
of measurement."

So if they don't use Facebook's website or app, or Messenger as a Facebook
user, they don't count.

[http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/monthly-active-users-
defin...](http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/monthly-active-users-definition-
revised/629624)

------
robobenjie
A FB engineer's response at the time: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-
develin/debunking-prince...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-
develin/debunking-princeton/10151947421191849/)

~~~
gohrt
Not everyone at FB is an engineer.

~~~
b2600
Engineer is liberally defined nowadays. It apparently no longer means someone
who has a B.S.(or above) in Engineering.

~~~
luck_fenovo
It also no longer means someone who shovels coal into a steam engine

~~~
1love2program
Actually, that was the fireman.

~~~
luck_fenovo
I stand corrected

------
cblock811
Reminds me of doing a math problem, getting an answer, and saying "well the
math is correct so this value must be as well" and not actually thinking if
the results really make sense.

~~~
laxatives
9 women can make a baby in a one month. I used billions of data points to
train my model.

~~~
paulddraper
My data model says 9 women and 9 men.

~~~
verma7
My data model says 9 women and 1 man.

~~~
EGreg
My data model doesn't say all that much in english but has amazing curves that
I can integrate with the data I've got. Any intelligent person who sees the
result can easily differentiate it from what's out there.

You get more insight into curves on Facebook if you analyse them with the Cox-
Zucker machine. No relation to the facebook founder.

------
readhn
its impossible to predict when FB will die (most companies die). its like
timing a market top, we know its coming but getting exact timing is hard.

just some anecdotal facts: i know lots of my friends (mid age working
professionals) realize that FB is a waste of time and if anything try to avoid
it more and more. its just a matter of time before other platform takes over.

~~~
maverick_iceman
They realize, stop using it for a few weeks/months, starts missing it and then
come back again. I myself have gone through a few such cycles. This is
frustratingly similar to trying to quit an addiction.

~~~
dominotw
One trick that worked for me is to gradually subscribe and like boring stuff
like cat pictures, scientific journals ect. Anything that doesn't rile you
mentally, i.e low mental imprint. Do this very very slowing but consciously
after a while your facebook feed would become 'boring' making it easier to
quit.

I did this couple of years ago and never went back.

~~~
clovis
More radically, you can try this chrome extension. I've been using it for a
couple of weeks now and it drastically cut my use of facebook.

Link: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-
eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-
for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg)

~~~
dominotw
i use that now but it's hard for an addict to install that .

------
thatguy99
Firstly: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-
monthly...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-
active-facebook-users-worldwide/) Facebook's MAU is now at 1.7B users (That's
almost 1 out of 4 people on the planet!) and is growing at about 10% per year.

Secondly: Saying that Facebook's popularity will rise and fall in a similar
trend that Myspace did is like saying Google's popularity would rise and fall
like Ask Jeeves's.

Thirdly: Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp

Conclusion: Big brother Zuck is here to stay!

~~~
paulddraper
So sad that Jeeves is no longer around :(

------
quickConclusion
I think Facebook's demise is closer than we believe, and that the main culprit
will be Wall Street.

Given that the Street wants the stock price to always go up, future earnings
has to go up. Hard to do with less user growth, because 1.5B already. More ads
is hard if you want to keep the platform interesting. Still, room to grow in
lesser FB-developed countries, with FB benefiting from economy growth and ad
market growing there. But how much growth left in main earning market (US)
without destroying the user experience?

With strong leadership, FB could say "to hell with higher and higher profits,
I am happy to run a very profitable utility, not plastered with ads, a la
Craiglist". But Zuckerberg seems all talk there. And he is trying to sell a
lot of his stock. Yes, he's trying to retain control too, but that will be
very hard (see current litigation on that). And employees don't like stocks
that are not going up.

With less user and financial growth, less momentum, fewer interesting
challenges, FB can slowly turn into Yahoo/AOL, and people may start saying bad
things about the company (users + employees), creating a bad momentum. It
would be hard to reverse, especially if FB is managed quarterly by earnings,
as opposed to strong leadership.

Also, I get the feeling that FB got a small temporary break with Trump. A
Hillary victory may have meant many very senior executives leaving to the new
administration, possibly accelerating FB's loss of momentum.

Obviously, lots of talk here, many "ifs" and "maybe", and no hard data. That's
why in the end I am not shorting the stock today. But wondering if I should.

------
niftich
Back in 2008-2010, FB conquered instant messaging [1]. Since then, other
services proliferated, including WhatsApp (which they wisely bought), and
others, but FB Chat, rebranded as Messenger, is still a hugely important
platform.

Instagram is growing among the demographic that Facebook first conquered when
it first came out and is vying [2][3] for Snapchat (partially by its original
premise, partially by copying its features [4]) to be the most popular
platform for 18-25.

Meanwhile the original Facebook's audience is aging, and most of the time it's
an event scheduler (like Google Calendar), or photo album store (like Flickr),
or a tumble-log of memes (like Tumblr), but lots of people still run the app
on their phones and wander around with Location enabled. On desktops, a ton of
people don't clear their cookies and the Like widget on websites lets Facebook
know what sites they visit. Some people have taken to using Facebook Auth to
log in to medium-value sites they visit less often -- like to buy concert
tickets.

All this contributes enormous value to Facebook's ad ecosystem, which is in
second place to Google, and together those two are the only real players [5].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11107321#11114518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11107321#11114518)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12799794#12800418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12799794#12800418)
[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12799794#12800957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12799794#12800957)
[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12210324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12210324)
[5]
[https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/814842452003659776](https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/814842452003659776)

------
maverick_iceman
I read the linked paper and it's of a very poor quality. They fit an
epidemiological model to the current data and then extrapolate it blindly to
the future. (The fact that it worked in the case of MySpace is not as
impressive as it sounds since by 2014 MySpace was long dead.)

------
bluedino
I'm almost two years FB free but I don't see anyone else quitting, just
allowing it to suck them in 24/7\. And new users are always joining.

~~~
mattnumbe
I've also been off for quite some time now (I "deleted" my account 3 years
ago). I know none of the information gets removed so I logged back on early
last year to grab some old pictures for a wedding slideshow. It's really scary
how much I wanted to keep it activated after re-activating it, and how quickly
people started messaging me about why I was back on Facebook. I'd say it's
less like the plague and more like gangrene.

------
arjie
This made me go back and find a couple of Facebook threads right after IPO
that made predictions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975)
(Facebook is not worth $33 billion) - This was more than a year before the
IPO. The market cap is 10x that today. Lots of poor predictions but also some
cautious optimism from some people.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002730)
(FB down 8% at opening) - Some rubbish number pattern matching and lots of
doom and gloom. Interesting

------
giis
I found myself spending/wasting time with fb. I tried to close the account
couple times but few days later reopened the account.

Last year, I tried to close the account again. First unsubscribed from all
email notifications from fb. And downloaded all my content from fb. Then
closed the account. But this time too I logged in twice but made sure instead
of logout I closed the account both times. That's it - its been more than
8months now. I didn't bother to login to fb. Honestly, I feel much peaceful
now.

Last week decided to quit, en.lichess.org its been week . let's see :-)

~~~
curiousgal
Try Sublevel[0] if you feel a social itch.

0.[https://sublevel.net/](https://sublevel.net/)

------
dmalvarado
"John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler ... have based their prediction on the
number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The charts
produced by the Google Trends service show Facebook searches peaked in
December 2012 and have since begun to trail off" as more users started using
their phone instead of google to experience the Facebook.

------
bhouston
I think that this may be true in that the desktop app has considerably lost
users in favor of the mobile app.

Search traffic has decreased significantly:

[https://www.google.ca/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook,yah...](https://www.google.ca/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook,yahoo,twitter,snapchat)

------
macawfish
I had a dream recently (after the election that shall not be named) that
Facebook's stock was spiking like an airplane about to stall. Indeed, it did
stall and crashed like a rock.

It feels to me like there is a reckoning coming that even Facebook is not
immune to.

------
syphilis2
Based on Google Trends, which is the source used in the paper, Facebook is
only 43% as trendy now as it was at its peak in 2012. Compared to the past,
Facebook is as trendy now as it was in 2009.

The irSIR model that was predicted by the paper is about 2 years off from
where we are now (the "late" model is about 1.5 years off). Repeating the
study with information up to today and the new prediction is that Facebook's
Google Trends measure will drop below 20% within 2 years.

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02y1...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02y1vz)

------
pfarnsworth
A great example of how most headline-grabbing "studies" are garbage.

------
slantaclaus
Ever tried to quit facebook? What happened?

~~~
skewart
I quit a while back. I don't miss it.

The closest thing to a problem has been that I sometimes learn about events a
little late. But I've found that pretty much anything I'd actually want to go
to I find out about other ways, usually by talking with friends. I probably
miss out on a lot of major life news from people I vaguely know, but I'm okay
with that. And it probably pushes me to make a little more effort to stay in
touch with people in old-fashioned ways, like seeing them in person, or
talking on Snapchat.

~~~
vinay427
So far, I've had a somewhat similar experience. I am more energized to talk to
people individually on Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. because of
an interest in staying up to date on their life events, which personally feels
healthier to me.

------
pessimizer
Contemporary discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904)

------
nl
I think the most interesting thing about this is the previous HN
discussions[1][2].

It's worth noting that even back then people thought it wasn't a great piece
of research.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9096125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9096125)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904)

------
CoryG89
Yeah, I totally didn't believe it then either. I wouldn't doubt they'll lose
users one day, but I seriously doubt they'll lose many anytime soon.

~~~
jyrkesh
The title is a bit clickbait-y. From what I gathered, they really mean 80% of
active users which is probably still too high, but I think it's probably
Snapchat's year to peel off A LOT of active users from Facebook. Not that it's
a zero-sum game, but I anecdotally I see a lot of FB fatigue around me.

~~~
readhn
Yep. FB fatigue is REAL!

------
xux
Whenever I see a prediction from academics, I'm reminded of this:
[http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/scientist-
predicts-...](http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/scientist-
predicts-99-chance-of-clinton-win-801634371744)

"Princeton professor predicts 99% chance of a Hillary Clinton win"

~~~
asafira
This is a little unfair, it's not clear to me why academics would always have
worse predications than any other body of people. This especially goes for the
presidential outcomes predictions.

~~~
azinman2
Especially when most predictions were for her.

Also, if that summary is true, that meant 1% likelihood for Trump. Not zero.
That's how stats work.

------
crispytx
Facebook still may lose 80% of users in the near future. AOL Instant Messenger
used to be the shit and everybody used it...

------
conqrr
Have been using the Facebook eradicator plugin for a long time. No news feed,
just the groups and messages. Perfect for me.

~~~
newscracker
I've long stuck to just groups and messages over a web browser. But this
extension can surely help people who just keep scrolling down the news feed
and spend several hours a day on it without realizing. I found a similar
extension for Firefox called Kill News Feed for Firefox [1], but it was last
updated in 2014. I'll give it a try sometime.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/kill-news-
fee...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/kill-news-feed-for-
firefox/)

------
Arkaad
The article says "80% of its peak user base within the next three years", but
the title says "by 2017"?

Also, I'd have liked to know to what Facebook would lose its users. During the
Pokémon GO craze Facebook and other social sites lost temporally their users
before they came back.

------
master_yoda_1
"John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and
aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of
times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term"

Really amusing. Now people type facebook.com and open facebook app on mobile.
This research is garbage.

------
donretag
"based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google
as a search term"

While it might have been common to go to a website by searching for it,
accidentally or not, many interact with Facebook via a mobile app. Using
google search trends will not account for this change in behavior.

------
ggregoire
> most companies die

I feel like Facebook and Google will never die, at least not during my life.
Am I the only one?

~~~
FlorianRappl
No, I am sure are not the only one. This is a temporary perception and it
could change with just a single event.

Take VW (Volkswagen) for instance: They looked like the dominant car vendor,
but with the Dieselgate they hit a wall which will make it hard to recover.
Another example would be Nokia. They still sold about 40% of the phones in
2010 - but they missed the crucial trends and made the wrong decisions.

------
altitudinous
Facebook are smart and moving with the times - no doubt the original Fb blue
website is losing hits etc but they move on with Instagram and Messenger which
are more popular than ever - Insta I think is going through an intense growth
phase at the moment

------
chippy
These things seem to come in cycles - as one service begins and attacts users
the other one declines. We are not seeing the alternative to Facebook yet. In
other words users are not going someplace else...yet, but they probably will.

~~~
threeseed
The alternative to Facebook already exists: Instagram.

That's why it it was such an inspired move by Zuckerberg to acquire it when
they did.

------
codecamper
Hmm. and I was just wondering how much longer Google would last. How often do
people really use Google? Most everyone I see is just taking & sharing photos
/ occasionally updating a facebook page.

~~~
dx034
Google is the #1 source of knowledge for most internet users in the world
(excluding China). In addition to that they provide a large share of
communication (GMail), orientation (Maps) and are responsible for ads on many
other pages.

Many companies (including Facebook) tried to beat Google's search algorithm,
they all failed (except for Bing which seems to be used by some). Unless
someone can make a search engine that is much better than Google, they will
keep being successful.

Same for an ad network. If you have a website, using Google for ads seems to
be the best option so far. No one is really happy with Google, but they still
seem to be better than most competitors.

~~~
newscracker
> Many companies (including Facebook) tried to beat Google's search algorithm,
> they all failed

I'm not sure how much Facebook tried, but searching within the Facebook
platform is a really bad experience. It's as if many things are either not
indexed or are indexed with only selected sentences or words from the content.
I struggle so many times to find older content for reference and to point
people to, and fail a lot more times than I succeed (I mostly search in
groups). Since Facebook thrives on people wanting new content and clicks, it
doesn't seem like it's in Facebook's interest to make searching within the
platform better. From whatever I've seen over the last several years, if at
all Facebook has been working on search, the engineering team is utterly
incompetent on that front.

~~~
dx034
I remember that there was this huge announcement about Facebook Graph, which
was Facebooks idea of a revolutionary new way of searching. Didn't work at
all, and searching on Facebook is indeed very limited. Which is somehow really
problematic, as Google also cannot really search Facebook.

Wikipedia with some background:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Graph_Search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Graph_Search)

------
simonh
Can FB really be compared to these diseases though? Maybe I'm nitpicking the
details here but a lot of diseases, including bubonic plague mentioned in the
article, kill a large proportion of their hosts.

~~~
newscracker
I'm a privacy nut, and to me FB is worse than these diseases and will kill
society, progress, freedom from surveillance and many other things that will
deny more people the rights that they ought to have without being oppressed or
suppressed.

------
arkj
Phew!!! What a searchers. It just means fb is as or more popular than google.
You dont need to go to princeton to guess that. The funny part is, you don't
even need to read the article to make it out.

------
grigjd3
I recently quit Facebook, but I get the impression that I'm the exception.

~~~
pacomerh
I quite FB in around 2009 with the plan of being more productive and it worked
really well. I was being constantly distracted by unimportant events from
other people. The one interesting thing that happened after that is that some
of my "friends" actually contacted me to see if everything was ok with me,
when in reality they where validating their egos making sure I didn't block
them.

~~~
grigjd3
I didn't find my productivity went up. Evidently, I can find enumerable things
to distract myself with. I just got fed up with all the political hate flying
around. Seems this year things went from people ironically commenting on the
things our government does to claiming that anyone in disagreement belongs in
a death camp. I just didn't want to see that shit anymore.

~~~
rconti
I cannot enumerate the things I can distract myself with; I can therefore find
innumerable things to distract myself with.

------
mark-r
This really points out the danger of using an analogy to extrapolate other
similarities. Bacteria don't live forever, but there's nothing to prevent
Facebook users from being Facebook users forever.

~~~
xanderstrike
Facebook users also don't live forever, to be fair.

~~~
mark-r
They live forever in Internet years. At least most of them do.

------
waspleg
a lot of people have an app on their phone. that means no search.

------
jl6
They've already lost 80% of me.

------
stevehiehn
Maybe, but what if people just open the app now and don't search google for
facebook?

------
automatwon
What a coincidence Snapchat is supposed to IPO in 2017...

------
ppierald
$58 in 2014, $120 today? Follow the money.

------
sporkologist
There may be a Facebook app to blame.

------
sebiche
This is proof that the signal-to-noise ratio of top links on HN is declining.

------
inverse_pi
[https://xkcd.com/605/](https://xkcd.com/605/)

------
nso95
It is 2017

~~~
grzm
The article is from 2014.

------
fivre
vkontakte fberyoad, bitches.

------
jwtadvice2
The comparison of Facebook to a disease is entertaining (if because it has a
little bit of truth from a certain perspective). But I'm not sure that the
model they chose is the right one to use to make predictions. So I think
immediately the predictions have to be in question.

That said, I would like Facebook to go, and not only because of its repugnant
behavior with regard to its partnership with the US and foreign governments
for propaganda, censorship and surveillance.

About a decade ago developers tried exhaustively to make every app "social".
The reason for doing so is that, after a certain threshold, having a community
locked into your platform raises barriers to competition.

When it comes to large social media sites - Facebook now and Myspace before it
- there can 'only be one'. There's only one place where large numbers of users
can go. They don't want to post everything they think ten times to ten
different communities.

This makes the kind of large scale social media network Facebook represents a
"natural monopoly". It can not have competition, except in the form of
potential successors to market capture.

This makes the "market" of social media look more like king-of-the-hill than
it does efficient laissez faire competition.

The better solution for social media would be a distributed platform with no
central ownership. This solves privacy, censorship, and surveillance concerns
and limits propaganda to a certain degree as well.

It also creates an environment where there can be competition. Now companies
are free to create different client software with different feature sets at
different costs. So distributing the infrastructure for social media addresses
the enormous problem of market failure as well.

~~~
x2398dh1
This makes no sense. Natural monopolies arise when there are extremely high
fixed costs of distribution, like Utilities, Railways, things that are
difficult to build. That is not what social media is at all, and there is
absolutely nothing guaranteeing that what those Princeton researches predicted
will not become true, precisely because software on servers is so easy to
replicate, and distribution is inherently word of mouth. Facebook had to
purchase Instagram because they couldn't figure out that type of social media.
They may not be able to do that for the next Instagram. Facebook has started
to suck hard because they inherently live based upon outrage and fake news. If
they can't figure out ways to constantly reverse various trends that come up
over time, they could get caught in a crap information spiral and fail.

~~~
prewett
I think you might find that the fixed cost of distributing pictures and video
to 1+ billion users who check their FB hourly to be rather expensive. I think
you would also find that storing all those pictures and video might be
expensive. Additionally, the database requirements to search through those
billions and billions of posts are not going to be small and on top of that,
FB's database returns the results very quickly.

Sure, distributing the software to new servers is free. Procuring the software
that needs to be on the server is another matter. This isn't a slap a load
balancer on top of a few servers and a Postgres instance sort of problem.

~~~
x2398dh1
It's not just, "I think you might find," but rather, that is precisely correct
- server costs for 1 billion users is expensive. However, do you need to set
up for 1 billion users in year one? Which is more expensive to start up: a
railway or an internet-based software application with a very high growth rate
based upon word-of-mouth?

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forgingahead
Fake news!!

/s

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edblarney
FB usage has shifted.

I wonder how many people use it in the very social sense anymore, and how many
use it for basic messaging.

