I can attest to this with N=1 datapoint here. My best friend postponed having kids till they could afford a SFH, but kept pushing it further as the supply dwindled and rates shot up (tier-1 city residents). I can imagine how the number of planned kids could be directly proportional to the number of bedrooms a couple can afford to have.
Not sure why you're making it sound like a conspiracy theory. User behavior profiling is common strategy for all personalized IR products, including recommender systems, targeted ads, web search, e-commerce, and many more. A bunch of major tech companies rely on it. Do you think Google AdSense is also an evil empire? What about Apple and Amazon ramping up their own ads businesses? More people use YouTube than Meta products and even spend more minutes per day there. Do you also think YouTube is also equivalent to cigarettes? What about TikTok, Twitch, and other streaming platforms? Was Doordash also wrong for setting up personalized ads and recommendations?
I absolutely love Instagram app and my friend circle actively uses it. I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but I come back to Facebook groups and marketplace fairly frequently. What's your metric to measure this general propensity? DAU? MAU? Vibes?
Sure, the company may not exist 10 years from now. But there's no downfall indicator yet for this trillion dollar giant. All companies that size have headwinds and tailwinds. The self-assurance you see on this platform for Meta's sure shot upcoming decline is just absurd.
You could say the same thing about every big company. Apple has headwinds from sales in China and US-China trade wars, Tesla is trailing BYD and seeing declining EV demand, and so on. Every large company has something or the other going on. But I find it funny that every new project from Apple is reminiscent of iPhone 1 while it's the Yahoo path for everything from Meta.
HN users have long been calling Facebook a dead platform because none of their contacts are there. Yet FB has 130M dau in north America. Threads will be fine too.
IMO it does provide a better user experience. It gets to the end goal quickly by giving you a list of places directly in the Maps app. You can see how far each place is and if you really wanna go to that part of the town from a bird's eye view. Sure, I can Google the same query. But that'd require me multiple clicks and scrolling through possibly long-winded blogs to finally get a list of addresses.
Good point. Although I'd also say that the barrier to entry for content producers is somewhat higher for App Store. You'd likely need some level of computer science education and their review process also takes longer and is controversial at times.
Apple doesn't really have experience with building a platform for user generated content. Sure, they have the technological might, but content moderation, recommendation fairness, ad monetization, etc. are different beasts and usually come with awful publicity risks that might just not be worth the effort for the world's richest company.
There are also a bunch of recent immigrants on threads like these who have the 'close the door after me' mindset. They also support hard restrictions on immigration, as soon as they get the green card or citizenship.
> "TikTok can employ them in a less competitive labour market and not fight companies like Google which don’t operate in China."
Is this really true though? I imagine the market for SDEs in china is much more competitive and cut throat. There are only so many locals/immigrants to choose from in the US, hence the higher salaries. A lot of top talent in Silicon Valley have almost worked at all FAANG companies.
I hope people don't make the assumption that anything that's not coming from Google is harmful and a potential adware/malware. People who support Apple's app store monopoly also use the same logic. Maybe the Indian government needs to push separate bills prohibiting manufactures from packaging crapware. But this is a step in the right direction IMO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Jindal