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Re:Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year by brightball on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @05:58PM (#14860743)
They just need one viable competitor. That's the crux of it.

They need something on the other side of the "or" in "Uses Facebook or ..."

They do their best to buy anybody that sneaks in there.

Re:Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year by anth1988 on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @07:56PM (#14861481)
> They just need one viable competitor

I'm not convinced that is sufficient. Facebook at 80% isn't really any different than facebook at 99, or whatever. Google has a viable competitor in Bing, but google still dominates search to a massive degree.

Re:Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year by brightball on Friday July 28, 2017 @11:20AM (#14874865)
I don't disagree, but it's more like having a viable alternative in the background that gets relatively popular and stable.

As long as it's there, then if there's every a major ball drop on Facebook's part that makes a lot of people want to switch to something else they'll have somewhere to go. When people moved to Facebook from MySpace it was driven by a lot of issues with MySpace that pushed people away.

Something like this past year's election with all of the controversy over how the trending news was handled could have promoted a movement of "Enough, I'm done. Going to X." Enough "me too's" and you start a trend.

A lot of that happened with Instagram. People wanted a place they could go free of political rants and Instagram largely provided that...and Facebook owns them.

You've seen a lot of "quitting Facebook" trends this year and I believe that it's largely a result of lack of a viable alternative.