The whole premise of this article seems to be wrong because the author is misreading the quarterly report:
”What’s confusing is that in its Q4 2023 earnings, Meta reported it had 2.11 billion daily active users across its properties — a number that is somehow distinct from the 3.19 billion “family daily active people” that it reported in the same earnings. Daily Active Users is a simple metric — how many people have engaged with a product in a given day — but Daily Family Daily Active People is a number that is somehow so distinct that it’s a billion users higher.”
The number that’s a billion users higher is the one that includes all the properties. The 2.1 billion is for Facebook only. This is plain as day in the linked Q4 report:
”Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 3.14 billion on average for September 2023, an increase of 7% year-over-year.
”Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.96 billion as of September 30, 2023, an increase of 7% year-over-year.
”Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 2.09 billion on average for September 2023, an increase of 5% year-over-year.
”Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 3.05 billion as of September 30, 2023, an increase of 3% year-over-year.”
I do not think that there is any confusion or misreading of the numbers here.
Without dealing with the specific points made in the piece, I would argue that there is gap in understanding the premise of the piece.
The article starts with numbers but it is not a analysis of quantitative measures i.e. is it not a statistical analysis.
The article is an "outside-looking-in" qualitative argument with an attempt to support those quantitative arguments with quantitative values (this is called competitive intelligence in some circles).
In other words, it should be read as an "opinion piece" with some numbers in it: the numbers are not the point, the (subjective ) opinions are the point.
I get it that numbers can be used to make a point either way (i.e. the author could use "confusion about numbers" as way to make a point while there really isn't any confusion ) but the points I would take away from the argument about numbers are:
- the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:
i) the org has put out in the past
and
ii) other similar businesses have used and continue to use
- the number are definitely designed to be impenetrable no matter how you approach them
To quote the author:
"When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign."
But why should we give any credence to these opinions? Certainly not because the author is an expert on the subject, their background appears to in PR. Nor because the author is showing any kind of understanding of the subject; actually the opposite, given the multiple basic mistakes made in the opening to this piece. Like, it's not even that he got the facts and reasoning wrong. It's that he has so little understanding of the space he didn't realize that there had to be an error somewhere.
And it's not like the rest of the piece isn't full of links to purported facts. The author clearly can't be trusted on presenting the facts correctly nor interpreting their interpretations correctly, so you'd kind of need to fact check all of it. That's a lot of effort just to properly evaluate this tripe.
The only reason to pay attention to this is that they're writing something you want to believe, in a style you find appealing, and don't really care whether any of it is true or not.
> - the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:
But that fundamental premise is wrong. Meta has released comparable numbers in the past, which is exactly GP's point. And releasing aggregate user numbers across multiple products rather than per product is a totally standard practice.
> In that time period, Meta launched its “Horizon” Metaverse and its Twitter competitor Threads, which it claimed in its Q4 earnings had hit 130 million monthly active users, an increase of 30 million from Q3 2023. Yet between Q3 and Q4 2023, Meta’s overall monthly active users only increased by around 20 million — heavily suggesting that despite adding over 100 million new monthly active users in one property, it’s shedding tens of millions of users elsewhere.
Maybe I’m incorrectly parsing the text, but the author seems to think that 100M more users in Threads — yet just 20M increase in overall Meta users — “heavily suggests” that Meta lost tens of millions of users in other Meta sites?
How does that exactly follow? I think it’s more likely that the majority of the new 100M Threads users were existing Instagram users, which would not add to the overall Meta user count?
Yeah, fixing that undercuts a lot of the article. I guess the worst thing that's left is that it's suspicious to aggregate everything, which maybe reflects a lack of confidence that Facebook.com will continue growing or whatever?
Ironically, in my local "market" at least, Facebook usability has pivoted. What was once an interesting stream of what your friends are up to, in a way that, say, Strava still is, is now a morass of clickbait, borderline porn and such.
However "groups" are free of that garbage and work very well indeed, for local cycling activity, historical interest and most importantly, neighbourhood interaction.
And Facebook Marketplace is now where to go for secondhand stuff, having relegated the local former leader (Kijiji) to distant second place except, again, niches like auto sales.
There's so much bot-on-bot spam. Or at least that's what it feels like.
My account is just to sell things on Marketplace. I'm in a handful of buy/sell groups for different things. I think I have 3 'friends', I never post anything like anything, etc. It's just private messages and posting Marketplace ads.
But, based upon whatever tracking etc information Facebook has, they present me with short videos, posts, etc. A lot of the crap is stuff like "Top Legend Actor Tom Cruise", and a picture or two of Tom Cruise, and then responses like "Beuatiful man!", "Always love him", "Such a boss"
Do people make money off these accounts? Are they just scripts? I don't get any of this.
My dad bought a fridge from them a couple years before they went bankrupt. When he had issues with it he tried to claim the warranty but got a whole runaround. He declared to me that he would never buy from sears again probably 3 years after they went bankrupt
When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign.
Isn't this.. a good thing? Don't we want Facebook to die and go away?
> When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign.
Citation needed. When companies shift from Monthly to Daily active users for example it's a perfectly valid way to recognize that they want to change the way they think about their north star metrics. At Facebook scale, I think it's rather brave for them to change the most important metrics that they report, showing that they're still open-minded to innovate on that frontier (and they are most certainly on that frontier as few companies operate on that scale). Having worked there in the past I would believe that this isn't just a vanity change, most likely a fundamental change on how their teams will be viewing these metrics and objectives, and may lead to material differences, likely for the better.
Pardon the glib reply, but if this is what Facebook considers "innovation" then I'm with the author of TFA. How does switching to a more obfuscated metric result in a better product or improved user experience?
Are we ready for facebook to be dead ? what will happen when the billion of users are suddenly mind free and in need for actual interesting stuff to do ? :p
It would be nice if the data could be frozen and archived in some fashion. So much (foolishly) moved onto Facebook, letting it just "die and go away" would be like torching a non-insignificant sampling of historical public records.
I want Meta to die for certain. I wouldn't mind Facebook sticking around if it can stop incentivizing the spread of misinformation, stop radicalizing my parents, and stop abusing the mental health of it's users in the name of promoting engagement.
None of these social networks are inherently wrong in that they shouldn't exist as technology, it's just they are all subject to the same perverse incentives that drive them to make their products socially corrosive is the issue.
I’m confused by the numbers from which the OP draws his conclusions but anecdotally the sentiment feels on point. I recently logged onto FB to help organize a reunion and FB proved itself to be irreplaceable in that use case. But trying to use FB more casually to check up on old friends, I’m astounded at how ugly and user-hostile the newsfeed is. At least with twitter there’s an option (i.e. the ”Following” tab) to see your friends content exclusively.
But even the ads and junk content farms are far worse on FB. For example, one of my friends works with Caitlin Clark, and I’ll throw a like at her CC photos. For a month now, my feed is flooded with CC content. Not legitimate or interesting or content (such as game coverage or posts from the Indiana Fever account), but dozens of engagement bait posts from pages named like “official Caitlin Clark 4ever fan club” with a handful of followers using AI photos and prompts like “You are really Caitlin Clark Fans sey yes”
I spent 15 min awhile ago just manually hiding and blocking those accounts, with little noticeable effect. What’s the point of a content algorithm if you can’t filter out obvious low effort garbage and expose me to (presumably) the ad-buying official accounts
Facebook is probably the largest free content management system for people who don’t know what that is. It’s also extremely difficult to export that much less migrate that to another site with similar features. Are there even any?
I have been wondering when they are going to start turning the screws on WhatsApp users to monetise that platform. Maybe this suggests they are getting closer to doing it.
Readit News
”What’s confusing is that in its Q4 2023 earnings, Meta reported it had 2.11 billion daily active users across its properties — a number that is somehow distinct from the 3.19 billion “family daily active people” that it reported in the same earnings. Daily Active Users is a simple metric — how many people have engaged with a product in a given day — but Daily Family Daily Active People is a number that is somehow so distinct that it’s a billion users higher.”
The number that’s a billion users higher is the one that includes all the properties. The 2.1 billion is for Facebook only. This is plain as day in the linked Q4 report:
”Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 3.14 billion on average for September 2023, an increase of 7% year-over-year.
”Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.96 billion as of September 30, 2023, an increase of 7% year-over-year.
”Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 2.09 billion on average for September 2023, an increase of 5% year-over-year.
”Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 3.05 billion as of September 30, 2023, an increase of 3% year-over-year.”
Without dealing with the specific points made in the piece, I would argue that there is gap in understanding the premise of the piece.
The article starts with numbers but it is not a analysis of quantitative measures i.e. is it not a statistical analysis.
The article is an "outside-looking-in" qualitative argument with an attempt to support those quantitative arguments with quantitative values (this is called competitive intelligence in some circles).
In other words, it should be read as an "opinion piece" with some numbers in it: the numbers are not the point, the (subjective ) opinions are the point.
I get it that numbers can be used to make a point either way (i.e. the author could use "confusion about numbers" as way to make a point while there really isn't any confusion ) but the points I would take away from the argument about numbers are:
- the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:
- the number are definitely designed to be impenetrable no matter how you approach themTo quote the author:
"When a company starts playing weird games with how it reports user activity, something is going very, very wrong. In general, when a company starts trying to obfuscate the true numbers about its revenue, growth, or profit, it’s a bad sign."
And it's not like the rest of the piece isn't full of links to purported facts. The author clearly can't be trusted on presenting the facts correctly nor interpreting their interpretations correctly, so you'd kind of need to fact check all of it. That's a lot of effort just to properly evaluate this tripe.
The only reason to pay attention to this is that they're writing something you want to believe, in a style you find appealing, and don't really care whether any of it is true or not.
> - the fundamental premise behind putting the numbers in the piece is to make the point that they are not the same numbers that:
But that fundamental premise is wrong. Meta has released comparable numbers in the past, which is exactly GP's point. And releasing aggregate user numbers across multiple products rather than per product is a totally standard practice.
> In that time period, Meta launched its “Horizon” Metaverse and its Twitter competitor Threads, which it claimed in its Q4 earnings had hit 130 million monthly active users, an increase of 30 million from Q3 2023. Yet between Q3 and Q4 2023, Meta’s overall monthly active users only increased by around 20 million — heavily suggesting that despite adding over 100 million new monthly active users in one property, it’s shedding tens of millions of users elsewhere.
Maybe I’m incorrectly parsing the text, but the author seems to think that 100M more users in Threads — yet just 20M increase in overall Meta users — “heavily suggests” that Meta lost tens of millions of users in other Meta sites?
How does that exactly follow? I think it’s more likely that the majority of the new 100M Threads users were existing Instagram users, which would not add to the overall Meta user count?
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
(as opposed to 3.14 and 2.09 billion, which is what’s in the Q3 report that he links to)
Deleted Comment
However "groups" are free of that garbage and work very well indeed, for local cycling activity, historical interest and most importantly, neighbourhood interaction.
And Facebook Marketplace is now where to go for secondhand stuff, having relegated the local former leader (Kijiji) to distant second place except, again, niches like auto sales.
My account is just to sell things on Marketplace. I'm in a handful of buy/sell groups for different things. I think I have 3 'friends', I never post anything like anything, etc. It's just private messages and posting Marketplace ads.
But, based upon whatever tracking etc information Facebook has, they present me with short videos, posts, etc. A lot of the crap is stuff like "Top Legend Actor Tom Cruise", and a picture or two of Tom Cruise, and then responses like "Beuatiful man!", "Always love him", "Such a boss"
Do people make money off these accounts? Are they just scripts? I don't get any of this.
FB could lose 50% of its users and still clear billions in profit.
Isn't this.. a good thing? Don't we want Facebook to die and go away?
Citation needed. When companies shift from Monthly to Daily active users for example it's a perfectly valid way to recognize that they want to change the way they think about their north star metrics. At Facebook scale, I think it's rather brave for them to change the most important metrics that they report, showing that they're still open-minded to innovate on that frontier (and they are most certainly on that frontier as few companies operate on that scale). Having worked there in the past I would believe that this isn't just a vanity change, most likely a fundamental change on how their teams will be viewing these metrics and objectives, and may lead to material differences, likely for the better.
None of these social networks are inherently wrong in that they shouldn't exist as technology, it's just they are all subject to the same perverse incentives that drive them to make their products socially corrosive is the issue.
Sorry for the rant. I’m just a bit salty from seeing the irreversible negative impact all of these have had on society.
But even the ads and junk content farms are far worse on FB. For example, one of my friends works with Caitlin Clark, and I’ll throw a like at her CC photos. For a month now, my feed is flooded with CC content. Not legitimate or interesting or content (such as game coverage or posts from the Indiana Fever account), but dozens of engagement bait posts from pages named like “official Caitlin Clark 4ever fan club” with a handful of followers using AI photos and prompts like “You are really Caitlin Clark Fans sey yes”
I spent 15 min awhile ago just manually hiding and blocking those accounts, with little noticeable effect. What’s the point of a content algorithm if you can’t filter out obvious low effort garbage and expose me to (presumably) the ad-buying official accounts