I am not as worried as other people are about Facebook, and here is why:
a) Facebook has less users not more, while they always emphasize their user growth I come across more and more people in real life who simply don't have a Facebook-Account, and those are social people. I am careful about basing too much on my own experience ofc, but this was very seldomly the case 4-5 years ago and now happens to me very often.
b) More and more users are disillusioned with Facebook to some extent. Due to some minor reasons I keep a Facebook account (various purposes, among those domain-specific groups to get questions answered and log in maybe once a month) and I see among my peers many who aren't really using it for much anymore. The occasional photo update with minor interaction via comments, the occasional posting of a music video, or the few users in between with heavy political activism on their timeline who apparently don't realize that next to no one will read it anyways and sigh about that crap. Facebook simply isn't cool anymore, so many don't care for most of its features and instead all they want is something to easily chat with people, aka WhatsApp.
c) Facebook certainly has trouble with attracting younger users and this won't stop. A social media platform where it takes a few days after account creation til your grandfather sends you a friend request and you have to answer to your parents about what you just posted? Definitely the cool place to be. Similar things probably can be said about WhatsApp to some extent. WhatsApp is what used to be normal SMS functionality in a way, while probably everyone has it cause everyone has it, it certainly isn't something exiting anymore.
d) Those who in my opinion over-estimate Facebook's role grossly under-estimate how fragile companies are and how easy (in my opinion) something like Facebook could start to fail. It happened to companies before, it will happen again. I don't know when, I don't know exactly why (though many possible reasons are viable). Everyone being on Facebook instead of just your 10 coolest friends might be what kills it in the end for young people for example, who knows what comes along and might attract user growth. The mobile market has made that certainly more dynamic via Apps, it's easier for a new chat App to gain traction than for a new social media website and WhatsApp with 1+ Billion users might not be bold enough to explore what the next big feature is people yet don't know they want. I know Facebook owns WhatsApp, I know Facebook invests in VR, I know their revenue is extreme and they have money stockpiled, I also know that isn't a guarantee of anything...
After thought: Anyone believing in the mighty power of Facebook should put their money where their mouth is and invest heavily in the stock, if Facebook is this monster of a multinational all-controlling company led by this young genius, a company with only growth ahead and such a minimal risk of failing then it shouldn't be a tough decision to make right?
Per the sibling comment, your experience is not upheld by the data. But that does not mean you're making an invalid observation, just that you have to be careful with your conclusions.
There has always been a privacy sensitive cohort in the population, and they have been moving off Facebook, however I can tell you from marketing to them that they are a small fraction of the bulk of the world :-(.
As Facebooks user population has doubled the 'kind' of place changes, and that causes people who were there to sometimes become disillusioned while the 'new' people love it. I got to watch this experience first hand in the changing population of Sunnyvale. New apartment buildings (vociferously opposed by long time residents in less dense housing) have attracted new people to Sunnyvale who really like the experience and the vibrancy of a denser down town. Some older folks move out, and then new people move in, and for them, Sunnyvale has "always been like this". No doubt in 20 years they will be griping about something as well. The point is that communities are a function of who is there and who isn't. And as people arrive and people leave the community changes but the overall vibrancy of the community isn't dictated by what people who used to live here think about it. Remember the Yogi Barra quote "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded."
The bottom line is that everyone in your city can leave Facebook and its a drop in the bucket with respect to the population that are there. It is only when you have year over year declines can you really say that Facebook is 'dying.'
> Facebook has less users not more, while they always emphasize their user growth I come across more and more people in real life who simply don't have a Facebook-Account,
The data strongly disagrees with your anecdote. It wasn't but a few years ago they were targeting 1 billion users. Now they're at almost 2 billion.
How do they define active though? Does that just mean someone that logs in once during that month? Admittedly, that's still something, but it's not the kind of engagement that will excite advertisers.
So I've always wondered about this. How many of those companies are making a return on their advertising? Everybody knows that there are bots that click on ads, so for clicks I'd imagine the metrics are useless. So then the obvious follow-up is conversion - how many people click through and then buy something? I imagine for some companies this is a positive return and then obviously the money was well spent, but what about the many companies where that just doesn't directly translate? Advertising for cars is very different than advertising for toys. I imagine a lot of companies trying to generate brand awareness through advertising are wasting money. And it's obvious many sites are gaming the system with autoplay videos and a bunch of other obnoxious shit.
Obviously this works well for Facebook as they continue to generate revenue. I've just never understood the advertising world. Then again, I use adblock and when I used to watch broadcast TV I muted commercials, so I'm not the target demographic. I know in addition to ads they make money selling your information, such as Facebook's patent to determine your credit score based on your friends (doesn't that sound fun).
I realize this is a mature industry and I do not pretend that I have some brilliant insight nobody has thought of before. But I do question the assumptions on which modern advertising is based.
My industry is premium video games. But a lot of my industry friends are in the mobile f2p world. According to them not only is Facebook a clear return on investment it's by far the best. No other advertising platform comes close in efficiency.
Successful games can achieve a user lifetime value (LTV) in the range of $5 to $10. Which lets them turn on a firehouse of advertising money. If user acqusition costs $4/user but their LTV is $8 that's a good deal!
I'm somewhat with you. I also block all the ads. And I'm not a fan of the vast majority of f2p games. But the proof is in the pudding. It works and businesses are highly profitable off the back of Facebook advertising. <shrug>
As already mentioned in some other comments, unfortunately data tells you are being wrong here. I had the same feeling, but numbers tell me I am wrong as well. [0] Now, either numbers are fake (...) or I simply admit that I don't care and that it was just my hope that people use FB less than they do now. It may not be anymore the new thing but it has become part of everyone's daily life, which is even worse :s
Since the person to post this comment also posted that submission, probably because they're unhappy that their submission didn't catch on yet it's the exact same subject. Sadly, shit happens.
But the person has to realize that this won't help him/her at all, only comes off as being a little bit whiny, maybe even a little bit desperate. Yeah, it happens, but it's only virtual points on an Internet site we are talking about... who cares who submitted it in the end.
EDIT: Hope I haven't offended anyone, I am usually not the judgemental type, couldn't help wondering in this case.
Personally, I think that there should be minimal dupes. Therefore, I felt the earlier submission which did not gain traction should be deleted from HN and/or merged. I'm not sure of the protocol.
I wasn't aware this came across as desperate for virtual points. I really don't care.
Some people wanted bin-patches apparently, openbsd is heavily focusing on using its resources as efficiently as possible and doesn't provide them, a reliable 3rd party stepped up providing them for free, charging for binpatches for older versions (a service model built on top of open source software, nothing wrong with that)
A few points:
-) since mtier here tries to basically sell you something, they make it sound harder than it seems, checking the errata page, writing a 20 line script to get notified if the page is updated, that's enough
-) not every bug found is critical towards your own security, not every bug does need you to update (you can decide on an individual basis)
-) micro-managing (as one comment stated) is pretty much the opposite of what you do with openbsd, openbsd is secure by default, if you want to have anywhere near the same amount of security with some other OS have fun reading tons of documentation to harden the box yourself (and you still won't have all the same security mitigations)
-) updates are trivial: update, re-compile, reboot, if the bug is not critical for you then don't, or use -current (rolling release "development branch"), or use the bin-patch by mtier
-) I doubt some of the people here criticising "having to use" 3-rd party binpatches practice the same scrutiny in day-to-day life regarding it-security (seeing how other OSs deal with security they would probably be using openbsd by now then if they were)
-) considering the size of the openbsd project and how many critical pieces of security-focused utilities they maintain (openssh, libressl, opensmtpd, ...), how many security mitigations they implement, how well they do in regularly auditing their code and actually addressing bugs across multiple architectures quickly with patches provided (especially compared to so many so much larger projects), it's somewhat ridiculous for an outsider to criticise how they spend their time or resources (because in my opinion and in the opinion of many others, they actually do hell of a great job!)
The issue of official binpatches is not a critical problem, but it is still a problem. It is a security and usability issue simply not present in the vast majority of nix systems, and that should be acknowledged rather than downplayed, as this facet of OpenBSD is usually an unpleasant surprise for potential converts.
Repeating "secure by default" seems rather disingenuous when a freshly-installed system needs extra attention, and cannot automatically fetch the latest security updates.
Updates may be "trivial" to you, but they are still clearly more complex than the average system, as they require individual attention and recompilation. These speedbumps to security are not what "secure by default" implies.
Alternatively, relying on a third-party tool (and having to vet that extra party) is not "secure by default" either.
Your final points are distracting from the issue and verging on ad-hominem. Firstly, first-party binpatches are so prevalent that noticing their absence is hardly significant scrutiny. Secondly, just because OpenBSD is very good in some areas doesn't mean we can ignore deficiencies in other areas.
OpenBSD does not try to be everything for every person and I think it's fair to put some things in context. Just because other systems provide binary patches for security issues (and I haven't so far named and will continue to not name other OSs, but many have a lousy track record of doing so to begin with), that does not make them automatically more secure than OpenBSD, which has so many active pro-security measurements built in from the start and where updates are provided, but not officially via binary patches. I think a lot of the comments did not acknowledge the circumstances and see the greater picture and my sense of a need for some further context was justified.
But your original comment was: "Does it seem a little embarrassing to anyone else that this is necessary? OpenBSD is supposedly the most secure nix platform available, and yet users have to resort to third-parties to get functionality that is available on nearly every other nix system by default."
So no, I don't consider it to be embarrassing for a little project that does so much in so many ways (part of it being that every single security issue is addressed and patched swiftly across multiple architectures, full disclosure is practised et cetera) to not provide binary patches while having an experienced community accepting of this. This last part actually what makes OpenBSD such an efficient catalyst for innovation, since people accept breaking backwards compatibility, turning on security mitigations while it might brake some stuff here and there, et cetera...
While mtier may have exaggerated the difficulty of updating from source, "...writing a 20 line script to get notified if the page is updated, that's enough [...] updates are trivial: update, re-compile, reboot" downplays the hassle a little too much. Your procedures are fine if you only have to update one machine, but they are inefficient when you have multiple machines to update. Furthermore, OpenBSD doesn't need a lot of RAM nor disk to run, but to compile is a different matter. This is not a problem (at least for i386 / amd64) for physical machines made in the last 15 years, but is a concern for VMs. IME, w/o X11, OpenBSD (i386 / amd64) runs fine w/ 64 MiB of RAM, but needs 512 MiB of RAM to compile (excluding X11) without swapping.
For my use case, I set up a dedicated builder VM, have it build a full release, then "upgrade" the other VMs with my local build. Although the installer only officially supports upgrading from version N to N+1, IME it seems to work for N -> N "upgrade" as well. This is workable and not too complicated, but it's definitely not trivial.
That said, to me mtier doesn't provide enough value, either. Prior to me setting up a dedicate builder, I probably would be interested, if they provide support past upstream's support period. 1.5 years is not "LTS" to me.
Maybe I downplayed it a little bit too much, probably can't deny it, but it was in reaction to people making (imo) too big a fuss about it, while criticising a project which - with limited resources and manpower - does an extraordinary job on the whole (as many - myself and most likely you included - could agree on).
A lot of people who utilize OpenBSD like you do most likely have the skill-set to deal with it in a similar manner as you have though, or can pay for commercial support. Thanks again for the insight!
It might not be "perfect code", but I find it fascinating what certain institutions do to create bug-free and easily testable code, institutions which are involved in work where small errors can quite literally ruin billions of dollars of investment.
For example Coding Standards from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for C[1] and Java[2]
This will also give you an idea of just how tedious it is to do so
I am not even sure if enforcing those strict standards leaves a Turing-complete language
> important general differences from the JPL institutional C coding standard for flight software references (JPL-C-STD) are: (1) the Java standard allows
dynamic memory allocation (object creation) after initialization, (2) the Java standard allows recursion, and (3) does not require loop bounds to be statically
verifiable. Apart from these differences most other differences are due to the different nature of the two languages.
That said, the standard in question is explicitly only intended for ground-based systems.
How can it not be Turing complete? You have the option of doing those things, even if by accident but you avoid it as much as you can. Turing complete does not mean it runs forever or has a mind of its own. I'm not necessarily trying to be combative and am not the most well versed in computational theory, but this statement seems off.
I will comment on Soylent as a product, not the 1.6 update specifically, sorry, just want to make a few points (I think some of you are in for a tough ride, just passionate, not my intention to attack anyone personally):
-) psychological value: eating has a great psychological value, it's pleasure (if not, you should eat better food)
-) social value: you probably won't go out with friends to have a glass of Soylent, would you?
-) Arguments about "increased productivity" because of less food preparation are ridiculous... if you can work all day long without needing a break, congratulations, you are everything common sense and science tells me is not possible. We need breaks, regularly, and why not use that to cook something. And cooking doesn't take hours a day.
-) Health: Because the supplement industry is such a thoroughly regulated and well behaving industry? If you believe that, do your research. I want to know what I am eating, and I don't when buying this mix of various powders they most likely buy in themselves. Would you give this crap to your children? Do you think we already have unlocked the key towards the perfect nutrition? (spoiler: no, we haven't, studying this is hard)
-) You can't cook: It's not hard, have you ever really tried? You don't need a Michelin star to cook solid and good food.
-) Unhappy with your current diet? Then change it, why ditch food altogether?
-) Cost, so it's not about productivity or health now, but about saving a few bucks? I doubt you save much if anything at all, it's not that expensive to buy good food, and isn't this mainly marketed towards high income people to begin with? You can afford it.
-) Soylent is revolutionary: It's not, 100% food replacements have been used in medicine for decades (just no one was crazy enough to ditch real food for it if not needed) - you can even buy it, it's far more expensive though than this, and of course I am still not for it as a food replacement for healthy adults.
-) Trust your body: Every body is different, the reason we have cravings for food is because the body tells us what it needs. This can fail us, for example when we eat too much sugar and our blood sugar levels are creating massive cravings for more down the line (I am not making a case for Coca-Cola here though), but all in all, it's an incredibly accurate and needed thermostat. If you eat more, you will ditch your blanket at night subconsciously to burn more calories by cooling down, if you eat less you will feel more cold and not do so. It's downright arrogant to think that some individual having read some studies and reports knows what is absolutely best (besides commonplace arguments like "sugar is bad", "being overweight is incredibly unhealthy", no proper doctor would ever make such bold and arrogant claims)
My opinion: This is part of a not well regulated industry, a repackaged and cleverly marketed mix of food supplements that have been available for decades, sold with incredibly high profit margins. They buy in their stuff, they mix it, prep it up with some nice fancy talk, sell it, and see dollar signs in their eyes.
Everyone should be able to do whatever he wants to as long as he is not harming others. If you think Soylent is great, then by all means, I won't stop you, I am passionate about food and am disgusted just looking at this. If someone thinks this is healthy (spare me your cherry-picked study citations), then - with all due respect - you are delusional
Every time I see a comment like this, I'm amazed at the commenters inability to not take everything to the extreme. YOU CAN EAT SOYLENT AND STILL EAT FOOD. If you don't have much time on your hands, and you want a quick meal, it works really well and is better than, say, McDonalds.
1) Eating isn't pleasure for me 2 to 3 times a day. I eat lunch because I'm hungry. I'll go out and eat a nice meal once or twice a week. You can drink Soylent and still eat food. Everyone is different.
2) You can drink Soylent and still eat food. And I only eat socially a couple times a week anyways.
3) Cooking takes time to prepare, time to fetch ingredients, and time to cleanup. This is a non-negligible amount of time. I'd rather spend 10 minutes total on a meal than 30+ mins.
4) Do you know if everything that goes into every processed food you eat? Do you have verification?
5) You can eat Soylent and still eat food.
6) This clearly isn't about cost.
7) Soylent is evolutionary in the sense that it's one of the first food replacement marketed to consumers that doesn't have a load of sugar in it.
8) Doesn't every company have dollar signs in their eyes? How is that a fault? They're providing a product that people want at a price point people are willing to pay. There isn't much to complain about there.
I am going by how they market it, not by how you use it. If company makes market claim "x", which is ridiculous and I criticize that claim, someone then saying that he personally hasn't bought it because of claim "x" does not make my point invalid at all.
1) We differ there, I can well get all of my calories from normal food without being annoyed by eating.
2) But it's marketed as complete food replacement, not as a simple nutritional supplement. Though I don't fancy the supplement industry either.
3) I think it's stupid to consider this time as waste instead of time well spent.
I had rice with fresh salmon today: Wash rice, put it in the rice cooker with 1 1/2 parts of water and some salt - wait 15 minutes (you can do whatever you want there) - use a non-stick pan, some olive oil, fry the salmon, use some spices, in between you can start cleaning up whatever kitchen equipment you have used - 5 minutes later rice is cooked, salmon finished, arrange it on a plate, some soy sauce and Wasabi on the side. Total time of work maybe... 8 minutes? Total time to clean up... 2? Total time to eat (quick eater)... 5?! And that's a pretty decent dish I think, I have my go to foods too, when I really can't be bothered. I can easily have a banana, an apple, eat some peanuts (100 grams have 620 calories, important and healthy fats, 25 grams of protein), can make some hard boiled eggs (can make them in the morning, eat them during the day), I can just take some bread, butter, tomatoes, and salt, sit in front of the computer watching something and eat during that. Takes no time really, and in the end you don't have much to clean. Food allows for creativity, be creative.
Have we all forgotten how to deal with real food?!
I hate to go to the store to buy, what I can I buy in bulk, sometimes I buy things frozen (it's often incredibly healthy food, when immediately frozen the nutritional value is great) and when I really can't avoid making an effort, it's not a waste considering what I get out of it.
4) Standards for food production are higher, I can touch it, I can see it, I can ask where it's from. Not sure where you have been buying your food. A banana I eat is not the product of a badly regulated industry, where hobbyists create mixtures of their liking.
5) It's the same point you made with 2)
6) It's an argument I have encountered multiple times, and it's also something I remember from the early days of Soylent. "It only costs x dollars a day and is all you need" (see my intro)
7) You mean "revolutionary"? It's not revolutionary by any means, if you mean it's revolutionary because it has taken something previously not used as mainstream food and marketed it as such, then yes maybe. I don't think that's a great achievement.
8) You are only addressing part of my ending here, talking about the high profit margins and that I think they are acting in bad faith was part of the larger point, that what they are doing is fundamentally easy and a lot of it is simply improvised, they don't really know themselves, but they claim to know. They buy it in, they mix it, dress it up, and market it. Anyone can do it, I can't however raise cattle, grow tasty bananas, peanuts, and catch delicious fish every day. So talking about profit margins, I think their profit margins are quite higher than people realize, their expertise is lower than what people think, their claims are 100% marketing, what they do is easier than people give them credit for.
Food is not that important to everyone. I care about food about as much as I care about baseball or ballet; if I never had to eat again, I'd be a happy person. Same with sleep. I want to spend my life doing what I enjoy.
So what is your problem? "I should eat better food?" "I should learn to cook?" "My friends won't like me if I eat product X?" You don't know me. You don't know my friends. You don't need to provide a synopsis of what you ate today; that's not interesting. It'd be like if I said I was passionate and went to a football forum and pointed out all the ways that football was a pointless waste of time.
No. Padding your judgmental crap with "I believe in truth justice fairness and freedom" doesn't make it a good point. Sounds more like you're bordering on irrational hatred. Call it 'passionate' if you want. Let's say that's your right and that your real problem is with branding. That's not hypocrisy at all.
But cooking is never as easy as what you're saying. I get home, just thinking to figure out what to make is a pain and sometimes leads to not eating at all. I have to thaw the meat I want to use, takes far too long. Cooking sometimes takes long. Need ingredients I thought I had but don't. Go to buy the ingredient, get the wrong thing, now I've got two of what I don't need and none of what I do.
I don't consider myself inept but with cooking it's really hard to make it happen when I need to eat.
edit as regards a previous post: Alternative hospital shakes and such tend to be extremely high in sugar, and low calorie. If you calculate how much sugar you'd end up getting in for 2500 or 3000 calories a day, it's terrifying.
I don't use Soylent. I eat a ton of nuts to supplement my caloric intake of regular meals. But it looks amazing and I don't understand why people seem almost offended it exists.
>Have we all forgotten how to deal with real food?!
Apparently, yes.
"The dream of all these companies is to capture the all-powerful and elusive millennial eater, who just isn’t all that into cereal for breakfast. It’s just too much work, for one thing. Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it."
>2) But it's marketed as complete food replacement, not as a simple nutritional supplement. Though I don't fancy the supplement industry either.
I'm not sure where you got this idea, the Soylent guide they send you when you get your first shipment even tells you that it's not necessary to go 100% Soylent. And, as far as I can tell, the website never says that you should eat only Soylent.
>3) I think it's stupid to consider this time as waste instead of time well spent.
Is the 10 minutes of making breakfast sausages really time well spent every day? That 10 minutes where I'm still somewhat sleepy, somewhat groggy, and pretty grumpy? I'd much rather have a serving of Soylent for breakfast, takes me 30 seconds to pour out a cup and spend an extra 10 minutes running in the morning, reading a newspaper, etc.
>4) Standards for food production are higher, I can touch it, I can see it, I can ask where it's from. Not sure where you have been buying your food. A banana I eat is not the product of a badly regulated industry, where hobbyists create mixtures of their liking.
As for the health of Soylent, you can find every ingredient and amount [1] for every iteration of it. While there's definitely less regulation in this industry, Soylent themselves have done a decent job of publishing the nutrition facts [2] and ingredients, is this that far removed from another traditional food? Can you really verify what pesticides were used in the production of that banana that you're eating?
I remember when the Soylent-Creator was on the Colbert Report, and he clearly marketed it as a 100% food replacement. Saying that you don't have to replace food with it completely is smart, it opens up additional customers, makes sense. Their Soylent promotional video however makes the claim that 1) it can replace any meal 2) while not having to replace every meal, it certainly insinuates it can (which is way different from other supplements).
Fair, they were a small operation back then, but even if it might not tell you how they work now, it certainly shows you how low the standards are. Their facilities don't even have to be inspected, ... at all.
So you are too tired to cook, but fit enough to run? And usually I have to get dressed, have to shower, pack up my things, work over my schedule, read some mails, activities where I can have something on the stove at the same time. If something needs 10 minutes to cook I am not staring into the pot for the duration.
The composition of the ingredients does not tell me how they know, where they buy, anything in beyond. I rather see food, touch it, smell it, know where it's from, I don't really bother about whether the fish I just bought has 1 gram fat more or less, that's not the "quality" in food I am looking for.
> 1) it can replace any meal 2) while not having to replace every meal, it certainly insinuates it can..
So...your beef with Soylent is that they insinuate that every meal can be replaced? You're free to enjoy food however you want, but you do realize just because they insinuate it, you don't have to follow that right?
> So you are to tired to cook, but fit enough to run? And usually I have to get dressed, have to shower, back up my things, work over my schedule, activities where I can have something on the stove at the same time. If something needs 10 minutes to cook I am not staring into the pot for the duration.
Not wanting to cook doesn't translate into an inability to cook. I'd much rather not spend the time in the morning if I don't need to, and Soylent allows more freedom in my schedule.
> your beef with Soylent is that they insinuate that every meal can be replaced
Their kick starter didn't insinuate this, it explicitly said you could use it as a 100% meal replacement.
Here's what happens in Soylent threads:
Someone says how great this new thing is, this new total meal replacement
Someone else says that liquid meal replacements are not new
Some people will say that they're not marketed as 100% liquid meal replacements (they are, to medical professionals)
Other people point out the problems of Soylent marketing ("puts everyone in perfect health"!!) and the problems with 100% liquid feeds (the risks are acceptable in ill people, but probably not in well people)
People then say that of course it's not a 100% meal replacement, and no-one would ever use it like that.
Soylent isn't new; the early marketing was amazingly irresponsible; and the early creation was irresponsible. They've pulled back from many of their earlier claims, and most people have stopped saying that it's a 100% meal replacement. So now we're left with a dull product that has no differentiation from all the other products on the market that have existed for many years.
To me the appeal of Soylent is this: most men are problem solvers. There is a problem that comes up several times a day called "What do I do about hunger?". There are dozens of ways you might solve that problem, but if you are just not interested then having a bottle of Soylent on hand solves it for you handily.
I get the feeling that you have absolutely no idea how low depression can go. "Don't care at all about real food and can't eat" is decently common in the less painful stages.
But people not only "bubble" themselves, Google and Facebook (everything personalised to one's liking) heavily encourage that, so using the "bubble effect" as justification for removing radical content is really strange.
I was just hinting at what I think is the core problem. If you want to avoid radicalizing bubbles without blocking content, you need to encourage diffusion of ideas, discussion and confrontation. Perhaps, however, radicalized people are just too closed-minded for any such software solution. Then the question is what is worse: An occasional discussion about the decision boundary of what kind of content should be blocked, or dealing with radicalized groups of people more often, potentially risking more terror attacks and also the freedom limiting laws that ensue.
a) Facebook has less users not more, while they always emphasize their user growth I come across more and more people in real life who simply don't have a Facebook-Account, and those are social people. I am careful about basing too much on my own experience ofc, but this was very seldomly the case 4-5 years ago and now happens to me very often.
b) More and more users are disillusioned with Facebook to some extent. Due to some minor reasons I keep a Facebook account (various purposes, among those domain-specific groups to get questions answered and log in maybe once a month) and I see among my peers many who aren't really using it for much anymore. The occasional photo update with minor interaction via comments, the occasional posting of a music video, or the few users in between with heavy political activism on their timeline who apparently don't realize that next to no one will read it anyways and sigh about that crap. Facebook simply isn't cool anymore, so many don't care for most of its features and instead all they want is something to easily chat with people, aka WhatsApp.
c) Facebook certainly has trouble with attracting younger users and this won't stop. A social media platform where it takes a few days after account creation til your grandfather sends you a friend request and you have to answer to your parents about what you just posted? Definitely the cool place to be. Similar things probably can be said about WhatsApp to some extent. WhatsApp is what used to be normal SMS functionality in a way, while probably everyone has it cause everyone has it, it certainly isn't something exiting anymore.
d) Those who in my opinion over-estimate Facebook's role grossly under-estimate how fragile companies are and how easy (in my opinion) something like Facebook could start to fail. It happened to companies before, it will happen again. I don't know when, I don't know exactly why (though many possible reasons are viable). Everyone being on Facebook instead of just your 10 coolest friends might be what kills it in the end for young people for example, who knows what comes along and might attract user growth. The mobile market has made that certainly more dynamic via Apps, it's easier for a new chat App to gain traction than for a new social media website and WhatsApp with 1+ Billion users might not be bold enough to explore what the next big feature is people yet don't know they want. I know Facebook owns WhatsApp, I know Facebook invests in VR, I know their revenue is extreme and they have money stockpiled, I also know that isn't a guarantee of anything...
After thought: Anyone believing in the mighty power of Facebook should put their money where their mouth is and invest heavily in the stock, if Facebook is this monster of a multinational all-controlling company led by this young genius, a company with only growth ahead and such a minimal risk of failing then it shouldn't be a tough decision to make right?