I still believe that Facebook could take the niche "garage sale" market from Ebay. My wife used to sell on Craig's List quite a bit but the majority of the activity has moved to Facebook. Facebook could take and process payments, if they can for garage sale items I am not aware of it, quite easily and from there move into third party sales to provide Amazon with some heavy competition. As it stands friends I know are migrating from facebook to instagram to get away from political and weird/shock meme content. It could be something that kept the 35-45 demographic from decaying.

...all anecdotal.

Neither Google or Facebook can really do consumer sales. To do consumer sales you have to treat everyone as a potential customer. Google and Facebook really only pay attention to customers who have already agreed to spend a significant amount of money.

They could pay attention to the person doing the selling, whose customer is the buyer. Swap-meets are generally one-way markets; much less swapping and more of a marketplace to sell (cheap) goods.

eBay is better positioned than Facebook because most everything I have ever seen sold on Facebook is garbage and was never something I would have thought to buy.

For me, Amazon will be because the nature of their advertising is intent-based, like Google's. What Facebook has always struggled with is the context of the adverts (by their very nature), whereas Google and Amazon's advertisers already have the user's intent right there (searches for services/products).

With the difference that Amazon queries are a subset of Google's queries. When using the same keywords, you should add "buy online" / "shop" on Google.

And some people on HN just don't want to buy on Amazon because of counterfeit products. Ads on Amazon will probably make it worse.

The real question is does intent matter for Facebook these days. If I am browsing around to buy something, companies leave cookies that aalow them to retarget wherever you go and since you spend a lot of time on Facebook, you will be retargeted there anyway.

What use is intent if you know every single intimate detail of a person's private life.

Judging by the ads I get on Facebook: a lot.

Facebook also has a search-engine (with a search-bar), and for all we know, 95% of the population may be using it.

Facebook's search is so bad it almost feels like it has been abandoned by their product team.

I think it may even be worse than Reddit's search.

Facebook has a different ad network than Google. Google is really good for intent-based advertising (Shopping for example) and Facebook is really good for prospecting (finding new buyers).

Neither are threats to either. The only way google or facebook or amazon loses anything if they lose customers visiting their properties. Amazon isn't even entering google or facebook's domain.

This is just another in a long series of "i hate google/facebook/social media" propaganda pushed by the media on HN.

There hasn't been a day without an anti-google/facebook/social media post on HN for months now. You can use the waybackmachine to check for yourself. It's incredible.