There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined, most people don't give a shit and are just trying to minimize cognitive effort. My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day because it would mean less planning.

▲

wnevets 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There are 3 billion users of FB/WhatsApp/Instagram combined

Is there tho? I have Facebook account but don't use it in any meaningful way. I'm certainly not feeding it any new data. I'm curious to know what percentage of that 3 billion are zombie accounts like mine.

▲

cillianpower 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There almost certainly is. I think on HN people aren’t really aware that they don’t represent the median internet user super well. I would wager if you were to tally every late millennial and zoomer across the west, Instagram usage would probably be near 90%. Facebook usage among older people is also still absolutely rampant, at least anecdotally. Not to mention WhatsApp usage which is huge everywhere but the US seemingly

▲

ipaddr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. Maybe if we add threads bots we could get closer. Most of the accounts are bots/fake/not used anymore.

90% of zoomers don't have an account, most rarely use it and don't add more than a few photos for social proof.

	▲	wenc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The population of the west who fit into zoomer near millennials wouldn't even be close to 500m. There are many people of all ages not in the west from very populous nations who use Insta, FB and WhatsApp. I’ve learned that US usage patterns are not representative of rest of world. More saliently, HN users’ conception of others’ usage patterns are absolutely not representative.

▲

CuriouslyC 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Instagram seems like their most engaged property. FB seems to be devolving into groups + marketplace, and WhatsApp gets a lot of play but I don't think it's the best ad serving/bot surface. I don't think Insta alone can carry the company long term, and while I can see group moderation bots, marketplace agents and insta content assistants being popular, I don't think Meta has an entre into running people's lives the way Google does.

▲

crisdias 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This. The metric is "monthly active users" but people prefer that other metric "I don't use it, I don't seen anyone using it in front of me, so nobody uses it".

▲

dr_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For anyone who has school age kids, WhatsApp usage is pretty huge in the US as well.

▲

bertmuir 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'll take that wager! Before you look at any real statistics, how does $1000 sound?

▲

alexpotato 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I placed an ad on Facebook as an experiment just to see what the conversion rate would be.

It's for real estate so you can't select age ranges.

The view count grouped by age (highest views to lowest) was:

- 65 to 75

- 55 to 65

- 45 to 55

And almost all women.

In other words, there are a LOT of older women on FB.

▲

runjake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Who knows for sure, but Meta's own financial disclosures[1] report over 3.6 billion "Family Daily Actice People (DAP), which represents the de-duplicated number of people who log into at least one of Meta's core properties (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp) daily.

At even 1% of that figure, that's a heck of a lot of people.

1. https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

▲

hbn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Outside of US/Canada and a handful of countries with their own chat apps like China, WhatsApp is like... THE global method of internet communication.

▲

walthamstow 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

India is 1bn-something people and they're pretty much all on WhatsApp

▲

1123581321 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, of course. Wikipedia has a quick summary of the most popular networks ranked by monthly active users. Facebook is #1 and Meta owns three of the top five. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...

▲

smokel 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Those are self-reported numbers from 2023. Besides most likely being highly inflated, I think Facebook is on the decline.

	▲	Scoring6931 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, perhaps. But to the same extent that all the other social networks' usage numbers would also be highly inflated.

▲

stronglikedan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Is there tho?

Yes.

> I'm curious to know what percentage

A fraction of one.

Same with most topics that HN considers sensitive, such as privacy concerns. >99% of people just don't give a shit.

▲

missedthecue 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Almost everyone in south asia, Latam, and Africa with a smartphone uses whatsapp daily. I mean the penetration rate is actually crazy. In my latam country 92% of internet users are whatsapp users. In india, the figure is 97%.

So how many billions is that before throwing in IG and FB?

▲

dbbk 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes

▲

badc0ffee 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FB Marketplace is great.

▲

dashundchen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I actually despise Marketplace compared to the Craigslist days. Unfortunately it seems to be where everyone moved.

Craigslist had no accounts or login wall. Postings were chronological with a map. Simple email for communication rather than FB messenger.

	▲	badc0ffee 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I should clarify that what I mean is that it's very useful for buying and selling. Where I live, at least, it's more active than Kijiji or Craigslist ever were.

▲

oblio 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're probably a techie so statistically an anomaly.

Also WhatsApp is absolutely huge around the world and wherever I go it doesn't seem like it's slowing down.

▲

afavour 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m sure there is a percentage of accounts that are zombie but there’s no doubt that Meta has an absolute shit-ton of daily users. All else aside, in most countries outside the US WhatsApp is the primary messaging medium.

▲

lxgr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so I'm not trusting Meta with much, and it's the only way I can reach quite a lot of people. A lot of people I know trust them begrudgingly (primarily with Instagram, because all of their friends are on it as well).

People don't need to love a company to use its products. The perceived benefit merely needs to be bigger than the perceived cost.

▲

jcgl 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

WhatsApp is E2EE, but Meta controls both ends. Instead of reading your plaintext on the server, they read it on the client. Not that tricky.

I presume the hardest part would be avoiding detection via decompilation and other reverse engineering techniques. Not familiar with that space (can anyone here shed some light?), but it seems likely that an entity with Meta’s resources would be able to figure that out.

E2EE probably protects well against bulk data collection (traffic analysis would sniff out sending 2x volume of data pretty quickly). But something more subtle and targeted, smuggled out in various fields of various protocols, would be hard to detect.

▲

lxgr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They only need to get caught doing it once to have a gigantic lawsuit on their hands. They could possibly pull it off very selectively, but doing it in a dragnet fashion seems incredibly risky.

	▲	netsharc 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My suspicion is that things like URL previews, or when the app calls a handler to open a link (YouTube, browser), are still monitored. So e.g. opening a link to an Amazon product that a friend sent makes you a target for ads in that category. It's a suspicion, they'd probably argue their EULA allows this. The typical "we have to monitor links for dangerous content" is always the standard bullshit.

▲

augment_me 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This assumes completely techo-rational actors that continuously monitor cost-benefit analysis, other alternatives and switch products when one outweights the others.

This is even further away from the reality where people have breakdowns because their app icon moved location and is not in the usual spot.

The average person is optimizing towards energy use minimization by default because life is already hard enough with plans, kids, etc.

Use incentives and we will arrive at closer truths than by claims and expressions.

	▲	larodi 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		People have breakdowns because they are left without mobile reception for a few hours. Indeed this IS happening and I would expect people soon to have breakdowns, because they lack access to AI.
	▲	lxgr 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Slightly different lens, same outcome: It's there, it lets people do what they want to do with acceptable effort/other negative consequences, so they use it.

▲

bossyTeacher 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted,

- Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when

- backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained

- even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext

▲

netsharc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've read that if you give FB/IG/WA access to all files/photos, and you have GPS metadata for photos (I do, hey it's useful to know where I took a pic), it can trawl that data to see where you've been and when...

So now Android strips location info when sharing an image to an app. A filter layer between filesystem and app, to add complexity to the whole system...

▲

lxgr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> - backups are not encrypted by default so plaintext of your private chats can be obtained

Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves.

> - Meta data of your messages is not encrypted so meta can make a graph of who you talk to and when

Fair enough and worth mentioning. I'm personally fine with it.

> - even if you enable encryption for backups all it takes is for the other person in your private convo (or a person in a group chat) to not enable it for your messages to be available in plaintext

Yes, but how would you prevent that even in principle? I can't control what the people I'm messaging do with their copy of my messages. As long as there isn't unnecessary non-repudiation (e.g. by the sender cryptographically signing all outbound messages, which the Signal protocol intentionally avoids), I think this is fair as well.

I do agree that e.g. vanishing chats with a short timeout/"view only once" images should probably not be included in backups, though; last time I checked, I think they were.

▲

cobbzilla 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Yes, but importantly not by Meta themselves.

Don’t they save backups to Meta? Even if not, they can read whatever’s (unencrypted) on your phone if they really want to.

	▲	lxgr 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They currently go on iCloud on iOS and Google Drive on Android. There are rumors about a first-party backup service, which would obviously change that calculus, but nothing concrete yet.

▲

addandsubtract 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

WhatsApp / Meta is also on both sides of the E2EE.

▲

lxgr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but so is every security researcher in the world if they want to be, and they only need to get caught shipping exfiltration logic once.

	▲	bossyTeacher 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> so is every security researcher in the world if they want to be Most security researchers lack Meta's history: - Testing emotional manipulation features on thousands of users non-consensually - Adding spyware on underage users - Intercept a rival app's traffic - Allowing harm to teen mental health And most importantly, most security researchers lack the money and power to fend off the legal consequences of these acts.

▲

cyanydeez 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

someone's questioning that claim legally: https://www.pcmag.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has...

▲

lxgr 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And has a verdict been reached? Otherwise, people are pursuing all kinds of outlandish claims legally.

▲

Egrodo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I work there. The claims made in this article are just blatantly false, and so obviously so to any employee I'm not sure how this hasn't been thrown out.

	▲	cyanydeez 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, it should be rediculously easy to demo it's real e2e capabilities. to everyones benefit

▲

runjake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

3.6 billion (de-duped) daily users!

https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

▲

meowface 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Honestly I am in that camp, but Facebook is kind of a special case for me. I don't really care about giving Google or Microsoft or OpenAI or Anthropic all of my personal data, but Facebook is a bridge slightly too far.

▲

ghostpepper 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One thing they could try eating is glue on their pizza, helps the cheese stick to the toppings

▲

shimman 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This comment is one of the most dystopian things I've read on this site.

	▲	edgarvaldes 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>My elderly parents would absolutely love if someone would just tell them what to do and eat every day I guess a lot of the AI enthusiasts are already pushing the "I automated my daily life decisions to this awesome AI. I now have more time and more brain power left to be productive!" angle.
	▲	afavour 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think the phrasing is a little extreme. Rather than “tell them what to eat” I’d say something like “everyone wishes they had a personal assistant”. I could do a lot better at meal planning than I do. I rotate between relatively few dishes. An AI that finds recipes and automatically adds the ingredients to my shopping could be interesting. Technically it’s “telling me what to eat” but it’s not like I’m taking orders from it.