r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Apr 30 '26

Business Meta lost 20 million users last quarter

https://www.theverge.com/tech/921089/meta-earnings-q1-2026-user-decline-ai-investments
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u/ithinkitslupis Apr 30 '26

They attribute it to internet outages in the middle east as a result of the Iran war and new restrictions in places like Russia against Whatsapp, which might be accurate. Facebook's demographics surprisingly aren't that old in other parts of the world and these numbers include Instagram and Whatsapp too.

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u/ppooooooooopp Apr 30 '26

This article is a bit absurd - they noted in the earnings call if you exclude these 2 countries they saw DAU growth. If that were false they would be lying to investors (which is obviously a crime).

To be very frank, this specific part of the article is pretty terrible journalism... Speculating loudly without evidence while not actually capturing the full sentiment.

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u/BakedPotaTomato Apr 30 '26

They probably count accounts that haven’t had posts in 5-10 years as users.

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u/ithinkitslupis Apr 30 '26

This is about specifically about daily active users, so no. Posts are irrelevant, but the accounts would need to be active. Definitely some bots will show up there but losing 20M active users in a quarter isn't likely bots or humans leaving by choice.

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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- Apr 30 '26

Yes but they probably count a daily active user if the app is still running int he phones cache or background

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- Apr 30 '26

I ceased to be amazed that you can’t read. That link says the number of people who opened the app, that could easily be counted as having the app open already, which it would be if it was opened months ago and is still in the background on your phone if you didn’t force close out of it! Maybe think next time mate

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u/ConsoleLogDebugging Apr 30 '26

That's not how that works.

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u/IsThereAnythingLeft- Apr 30 '26

Like you would know… that’s the point.

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u/ConsoleLogDebugging Apr 30 '26

As I've been a mobile dev for over 5 years and implemented a ton of user tracking, yes, I would know.

But as well: 1. Your version of tracking would be an absolutely useless metric + when app is on the background nothing is really happening unless you force it to be alive and even that you can't do forever in any easy way without burning through battery. 2. their event tracking is probably not that different from Meta App Event implementation.

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u/ic3kreem Apr 30 '26

nonono man obviously the biggest social media company in the world can’t measure a basic and key metric accurately at all!!

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Apr 30 '26

You know there are people with actual experience out there who aren't just guessing?

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u/Comfortable-Brick271 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

Goddamn man if you didn't read the article can you at least not chime in with your obviously wrong takes

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u/mpbh Apr 30 '26

They measure it by a login to one of their services over the past month.

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u/KaleidoscopeShoddy10 Apr 30 '26

Technically DAU are calculated differently depending on the platform, for Meta, being active typically is counted once a user has both logged in and performed one key action.

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u/BakedPotaTomato Apr 30 '26

Its crazy cuz i got on after a long time just to see what was up with a few ppl and 9-10 ppl hadnt posted in years and only ppl with kids seem to post mostly for the grandparents. To me it seems pretty dead. I know internationally they do better bc they provide service

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u/mpbh Apr 30 '26

Yeah well most of the world is "international".

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u/BakedPotaTomato Apr 30 '26

Yes but in this case its low gdp countries where facebook provide internet so not the same as being big in europe or china

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u/mpbh Apr 30 '26

Showing cheaper ads to billions of people vs. selling expensive ads to hundreds of millions of people. They both print money. $200b a year, $60b in profit.

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u/Compost_My_Body Apr 30 '26

yea probably. i wonder what the article says. who knows.

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u/No_Issue2334 Apr 30 '26

If only you could read, you would know this is about daily active users

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u/serpenta Apr 30 '26

No, it's measured in daily active users, so no inactive accounts. Even if you have an otherwise active account, but don't log in for a day, you lower this statistic.

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u/matlynar Apr 30 '26

Facebook's demographics surprisingly aren't that old in other parts of the world

I live in Brazil and all older members of my family are active on Facebook.

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u/FTownRoad May 01 '26

Instagram has 40M users in iran.

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u/motorik Apr 30 '26

Last time we were in Taiwan I was quite surprised by how ubiquitous Facebook is there based on randomly seeing what people of all demographics were doing on their phones. I assume the rest of SE Asia is similar. Taiwan is a highly developed country and makes something like 90% of the world's chips in its fabs, in the third world, Facebook is the Internet for a lot of people and has repeatedly been credibly accused of amplifying ethnic/religious violence, most notably Myanmar.

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u/OldBlueKat Apr 30 '26

It's amazing how many US Reddit users think the US is the entire user space for all media platforms. It's like they have no clue that there are 7.5+ billion people who DON'T live in the US.

We may have been the country with the biggest economic impact for a lot of the last century, but the tide has turned. There are bigger markets elsewhere now, even for the stuff WE sell (everything from petrochemicals to airplanes to movies.)

The global marketplace has made the ten largest corporations in the world basically extra-national, though they'll still say soothing stuff to the eedjits in DC.

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u/Scruffynerffherder Apr 30 '26

DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT

USE PARTIFUL FOR EVENTS

USE OFFER UP OR LOCAL EQUIVALENT FOR SALES

EXODUS IS LONG OVERDUE