This is from Mark Zuckerberg's post. I think it's a decent explanation of their performance. Historically Facebook always made these longer-term bets and they've typically paid off.
"Before I get to that, I want to briefly touch on our Q4 results, which I know Sheryl and Dave are going to go deeper on. I'm proud of the work our teams did here. We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and businesses of all sizes turned to us to help them reach people. But there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business.
The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long-term. As is our work to make sure our apps are the best services out there for young adults, which I spoke about on our last call.
The second area, and related to this, is that we're in the middle of a transition on our own services towards short-form video like Reels. So as more activity shifts towards this medium, we're replacing some time in News Feed and other higher monetizing surfaces. So as a result of both competition and this shift to short-form video as well as our focus on serving young adults over optimizing overall engagement, we're going to continue to see pressure on impression growth in the near term. Now I'm confident that leaning harder into these trends is the right short-term tradeoff to make in order to get long-term gains. We've made these types of transitions before with mobile feed and Stories, where we took on headwinds in the near-term to align with important trends over the long term. And while video has historically been slower to monetize, we believe that over time short-form video is going to monetize more like feed or Stories than like Watch – so I'm optimistic that we'll get to where we need to be with Reels too."
So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads.
Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from people I don’t know that someone I do know shared, and the rest I can’t even classify but it’s utter garbage. The only useful piece of FB was Marketplace but they managed to cram it so full of paid content and the rest is clearly online stores pretending to be local sellers that are this point I have zero use for that as well. I am sure they’ll continue to be printing money with their “generate outrage => show ads” core loop but how long will that actually last?
I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two.
There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you've just accumulated groups and connections for a decade without doing anything to shape your feed, I could see how it wouldn't be very interesting.
But if you take a few seconds here and there to "like" things you want to see more of, hide things you want to see less of, mute the obnoxious people you don't want to hear from at all, and leave groups you're not interested in, it's not bad at all.
Finally, someone with a similar Facebook experience to my own. I've been reading threads about how horrific the FB feed is for years, but my own is literally 99% updates from friends I don't get to see, and an occasional ad (that is interesting more often than not). Glad to know I'm not completely alone!
I just glanced at mine and it's like 90% people I used to know posting pictures of their kids. The rest is stuff like my buddy's mom posting a recipe for 10 minute Roti.
Overall not bad to be honest. Still not much I'm actually interested in but far from cancerous.
FB knows the optimal amount of ads to show a user, and that has to vary between time spent on the site. Someone who just glances at the site could see significantly less ads than someone who a "perma-scroller" for lack of a better term.
I also enjoy using Facebook. I never see extreme ideas. My feed is just:
The local expat group for my city
Vegan recipes
Updates from robot teams
Lame jokes / skits that I enjoy
Birthday posts
Cat pictures
Travel restrictions group (support group for those wanting to come to country X, which is difficult because for the last 2 years it been only charter flights and you need approval from 5 government agencies)
Listen, I am really glad it works for someone! I miss those days. It just feels like a total loss for me and starting to sort through why just feels like a seriously daunting task for a dubious result. I have found ways to keep up with friends that are better (mostly text messaging) and so that’s what I stick to. FB was that for a few years but whatever happened to my feed feels like it can’t be undone.
99% of what you see is updates from friends, but are you seeing all of your friends updates?
When a friend posts, I want to see it. Simple. Sometime, years ago, FB decided to pick and choose what to show me from my friend's feeds. That's when I skipped out of FB, deleted my account.
I want to hear about everything that my friends want to tell me so long as it requires a slight modicum of effort on their part.
Facebook turned everyone into bulk junk mailers. They pay the postage and then slap ads on the flyers everyone sends out. People get to spam their friends with basically zero effort.
If Facebook can weed out zero effort, low value posts from my friends with a high degree of accuracy that at least blunts some of the damage the platform itself has done.
I eventually had to delete my Facebook, but I also did what the parent said, but my feed was primarily suggested content, which was mostly videos, and occasionally it would throw in Fox news, or one of the alt-right shills. I think this content is driven by who you're connected to, and I think it ignores your mutes. I have a lot of friends and family in Louisiana. I've lost friends to QAnon.
So, yeah, if we're going with anecdata, then my experience doesn't match yours, even with this approach of trying to highly curate it.
Word association 101. You place a word that close to another word most readers associate them, which is what they’re trying to achieve here. Take some psych classes?
This, along with all the replies down below is the most un-HN comment I have read for the past 10+ years. Facebook is doomed and crap was the accepted norm.
Especially during pandemic when I get to see update from my friends. Their new born, or kids finally going to school. I have a suspicious feeling many of the negative and politics went somewhere else like Twitter. And the rest are there you could easily filter out. The place is now a lot more calm than it used to be. Although this may be confined to US and UK? My AUS friends are still on Facebook for political battle for some reason.
During the run up to the Brexit referendum, Facebook became very political. I just blocked all political groups that popped up because friends were sharing or commenting under their posts. That made it much more sane and pleasant to scroll through.
I'm guessing maybe the algorithms figure out if you are into political battles or not and adjust your feed accordingly? I get hardly any of that stuff personally.
I can describe a tale of two Facebooks. It was at first the best of times and now the worst of times.. In the beginning was my old account that had basically mostly friend status updates with photos. I deleted this account during the last election and covid pandemic to get a break. I rejoined later and despite adding most of my same friends it's been a complete disaster. So many ads and group suggestions. I feel like I am swamped by craiglist posts if I ever click on the group section even inadvertently. And I have a couple of groups I want to be in!! Just a total cluster f$$$ really.
I am actually grateful b/c I was addicted to FB. I broke that addiction and the reintroduction hasn't been anywhere close to where it was. Now twitter has seemed to become better... but maybe I've changed.
HN is still well, still here, maybe I should leave and see what I think in 6 months.
This is roughly my experience, but I didn't delete Facebook in-between. It's just terrible now. I watched as the newsfeed was aggressively tuned for outrage. I used to see updates about friends. Now it's just outrage and clickbait and ads. So many ads. Even with adblockers. I just can't use it anymore. It's so terrible.
Or I could just go follow different groups I care about on Reddit. I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.
> I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.
If you're not interested in content from people in your social network, then I don't understand what you're expecting to get out of a social network anyway. Facebook isn't a bad way to keep up with friends and family, but if you don't like your friends on any platform then you're probably not going to have a good time.
In other words: You're not their target customer. As with any business, trying to extrapolate your own use case on to the general public is going to be very misleading.
I have meaningful conversation with people on other social networks. Discord, Instagram, Twitter, even TikTok. Facebook is the exception: it throws content at me that I explicitly don’t want and as its user base ages the content becomes less and less interesting. Topic-based groups are good but other networks simply do them better. And the idea of keeping up with what Karen from high school is doing isn’t all that fun at least to me.
I am not on FB but I use Reddit and I’m a little worried about how they will try to monetize when they go public. I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable. I’ve been a Redditor for 10 years now and I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there but I feel like it’s only natural.
> I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable.
> I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there...
Reddit has been unusable for at least the past five years owing to how they tailor the homepage and r/all to be a wasteland of outrage designed to keep users seething at others. It's basically become the two minutes hate.
I use FB all the time and it’s great. I subscribe to a few heavily moderated groups for my city that are full of genuinely helpful and productive posts. It’s where I find out what’s going on here.
I’ve unfollowed almost everyone from my past and when I add someone new I unfollow them as soon as they post anything publicly that I don’t care about.
Ive done that to the point where it frequently says "there's nothing to show here" instead of a feed. I know people I'm interested in hearing from are posting things, but Facebook will never decide to show them to me, regardless of my settings
I'm still a Facebook user (over 30, with kids, friends all over the world, and lots of groups that I care about), but the Reels thing is making me seriously consider leaving for good. It's awful, cringeworthy intrusive clickbaity videos from random kids I've never heard of every few posts on my feed. I clicked the X to make it go away but surprise, it's back. At this point their demographic is not the TikTok demographic, and they're just going to drive their remaining users away trying to force that.
I feel like they might have had better luck starting a new Reels app, just like messenger is available as a standalone app. They're cramming too much functionality into a single app/webpage and trying to force people to use things they're not interested in. Why not just make a tiktok clone and keep it separate?
> I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people
As a random aside, there is a Facebook ‘experiment’ (a/b test basically) that disables all ads for your account permanently. It was customary, for a while at least, to opt your user id (and that of a few friends) into that particular experiment on your last day of working at the company. Best leaving gift ever!
Somewhere in the A/B test slurry there is sometimes a menu item that sorts your news feed chronologically. It really lays bare what a ghost town Facebook is. In my default feed there is all the garbage that you described perfectly, and a burst of content like a friend’s wedding. That little nugget gets replayed over and over so
that it feels like that’s what’s “going on.” Chronologically, it’s old news and no one I’m friends with has posted anything for over a week, just random garbage.
Ironically I feel like the change away from chronological order is what started the slow decline of my feed. I used to see things from people I cared about but didn’t interact with much. Now all I see are things from the same 10 people that I’m closest with, and I don’t care to scroll further.
Totally agree wrt marketplace. For awhile it was great, the only reason to sign on to Facebook. You could sell anything locally easily and quickly. It really pulled off being a better craigslist which is no easy feat and not something I ever would have thought Facebook would do.
Then maybe a year ago they started focusing on non local/commercial sales and it rapidly degraded to the point where it's not worth using now. It seems like they have diverted all traffic to paid listings so my cheap yardsale-esque deals on stuff I'm trying to get rid of get no views (where a year ago I would get ten messages a day for the same item)
The overarching theme I'm seeing is one of FB jumping into whatever format bored people turn to, then slowly cramming it w/ ads until those eyeballs drift to the next fad, rinse and repeat.
Regardless of how one might dislike it, the "generate outrage => show ads" thing has been working just peachy for Fox and friends. So my cynical take is that FB will continue to do just fine even as people shift to different consumption formats, and even if tiktok took over the world, because fundamentally, bored people will always exist and fads come and go.
By the time I deactivated my account all I had in my newsfeed were posts from groups I joined when I was a teenager and the occasional news channel post. Friends had steadily dropped off over the years, which made it very easy to pull the pin in the end.
There one or two days where you get the little ping in your brain to check the app (as an ex-smoker the sensation is not at all dissimilar to cravings), and after that you wonder why you spent time there in the first place. I can’t leave WhatsApp or Messenger because I have too many people I have on both, but that’s a different issue as far as I’m concerned.
Now I am spending some time on TikTok - but I’m get content from there that I actually generally enjoy, so that’s a net win as far as I’m concerned.
For me, Facebook used to be a place to connect with people as I met them IRL. Now LinkedIn has taken over this purpose of being a digital address book.
But sometimes I get stuck scrolling forever. Maybe that ad revenue is enough for them. I still go to FB for groups and business' pages.
I've been blocked twice from using Facebook. The first time was when I tried to register with Oculus to unlock my Oculus Go. I only check Facebook once a week, but still keep in touch with some people, so I went through the process of submitting my ID and phone number and recovered my account. It happened again, because I used a non-standard browser, and this time they can shove it. If they want to keep users they shouldn't block them from using their product. It's abject stupidity.
I don't think DNS ad blocking will do much wrt your feed. Sure you won't be able to click into the ads but they're likely all served from the FB domain
> My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level
Maybe A is a consequence of B?
If you don't let them track you, you get random advertising. And random advertising is painful to watch. I'm not advocating for targeted advertising, just stating a simple fact.
I’m assuming you are using a Pi-hole to block the ads? From my understanding that is becoming less effective with companies like YouTube and Facebook since they serve ads directly from their domain.
There are plenty of parallels with what happened with Snapchat Stories, but I do wonder if it's the "same thing".
Stories are best when created by people you know, and they're easy to create too. They're the type of content that would build off of Instagram's social strengths.
The type of content people consume on TikTok, as far as I understand, is largely made by creators though. This is similar to YouTube; they now even get financial compensation directly for it too [1] (although apparently this compensation is not as good as YouTube's).
This could be a Snapchat vs Instagram Stories situation, or it could be a YouTube vs Facebook Watch / IGTV situation. Facebook has historically been notoriously bad at creating a high-quality video platform, so if that's what it takes to beat TikTok I honestly wouldn't expect Instagram Reels to overtake TikTok anytime soon, especially considering a lot of what I've seen there are random accounts reposting TikTok content (which feels a bit like the type of content Watch became infamous for).
I would argue that they destroyed Instagram in the process. It set them on a path where they add more and more "features" to Instagram for legitimate strategic reasons, but in the process it turned a focused app into something now approaching the hot garbage that is the Facebook.
For now, but this whole thread is about accepting short term costs for long term gains. The overall direction of Instagram doesn't seem to be following that model.
During the time they added stories to Instagram there was still more signal then noise. I enjoyed them because my friends shared casually and it was actually fun to go along on their vacation or bike ride, and not just see the perfectly composed photos which are usually the more polished summary of what the stories covered.
At this point, IG is Facebook. The feed is a slurry of signal, random suggestions, shitty ‘memes,’ and ads. When I stumble onto a Reel somehow, it’s the same crap. Stories worked for me because it was my friends. Reels is just random flotsam, and it seems like a ton of it is just reposts from TikTok anyway.
Meta’s repeating pattern is to enter every new format, screw with the chronology and cram it full of robo-content until it’s unbearable to look at. That Zuck calls chasing short-form video fad a long-term strategy is pretty telling. They have nothing but crap to sell, and if (if) Metaverse turns out to be anything, it will just be more crap, but you’d have to have your face inside a helmet in order to to enjoy the boomer arguments, shitty ‘memes,’ TikTok reposts and whatever else the content slurry that yields the most engagement is.
It's terrifying, in fact. TikTok is specifically engineered to be cocaine for your attention. This is a race to the bottom, where the human attention span parallels that of a gnat.
Bacause FB/Meta and none of it's other incarnations is not fashionable among young generation anymore, it's platform for old people.
I'm wondering what kind of play would be successful long-term in this scenario with long-lasting social platform to capture next generation which is naturally inclined to be in opposition when it comes to parents way of life. Maybe creating some kind of "undercover" division not officially connected to parent company? Or even spinning it as some part of company "revolting" against main body and going "rogue". But in both cases mainly founding would uncover the plot.
Of course buying competitors usually works too to some degree - or at least allows to buy some time.
It’s time to stop Facebook buying companies then - how anyone approved them buying WhatsApp is beyond my understanding. I really don’t like TikTok, but I really don’t like Facebook (the company) a bit more, so I hope TikTok does well and will not be bought.
Probably not but the TikTok has to pivot before they loose steam and start being a coglomorate otherwise they Will eventually fade so it depends on how successfully they execute this. Meantime Facebook just needs to catch the next TikTok to be relevant again.
I’m addicted to 9Gag, which is closer to TikTok, but the difference is Facebook’s intensive work on breaching privacy, telling all my friends what posts I like. On 9Gag, liking/commenting is basically anonymous, so we’re not afraid of being seen liking something - thus my 15hrs a week in the app.
I don't know a single person under 30 that still uses Facebook for real. They mostly are still there to talk to grandma or parents. If Facebook hadn't bought whatsapp they would be toast. The writing is on the wall, the beginning of the MySpace curve happening before our very eyes.
I don’t think Facebook will catch up to TikTok with Reels. I do think that it’s quite probably that TikTok will fuck yo their platform before they take down FB.
It's unfortunate that Reels (at least what I get in my feed) is complete garbage. Half the time I don't even know what I'm watching, it's just some mix of shock media and sexually suggestive crap. I keep trying to hide it from my feed but Facebook is intent on shoving it down my throat.
Stories "paid off"? Are there ads in them? Are they popular with other people?
Very minimally utilized in my social circle, I see maybe 1 suggested story per month, maybe click through 2-4 a year, watch 10 seconds of bland content by someone I haven't talked to in years, then close the tab wondering why I thought the it was going to be interesting this time.
Maybe I'm a generation younger than you, but if you were young when Snapchat was cool, then you probably transitioned to stories from the "main" IG content and dropped Facebook altogether. I spend 90+% of my time on IG on stories and it is a really good way to keep up with people as far as generally knowing where they are/what they're up to. I probably post once a month for reference.
Ah, this is about instagram stories! Yes, definitely know peers who use that. I was thinking Zuck was referencing facebook stories, which seem like a flop.
Zuck is worried Facebook is becoming the lame social network for old people, probably because it is. It's hard to lose that label once they've got it. He even says here that they're willing to sacrifice short term engagement for more youth engagement. Stories is widely used among the youth making it incredibly valuable.
> Historically Facebook always made these longer-term bets and they've typically paid off
Have they? They're better than Google. But most of Facebook's side gigs fizzled. Their last bold leap was from desktop to mobile, and that was only by averting disaster with their Instagram acquisition.
> I wonder why they didn't buy TikTok when it was starting to become popular like they did with Instagram or Whatsapp.
ByteDance was a large company before TikTok and had other successful products. TikTok actually developed out of a billion dollar acquisition Bytedance made[1]. It wasn't for sale. Sort of like how Tinder wasn't for sale because it was owned by IAC (Match, OkCupid).
Also regulatory environment in the US and in China would make it unfeasible.
Facebook’s core business model appears to be in decline. They don’t have a very diversified revenue stream despite trying various side businesses. This is the market worried that Facebook’s best days are behind it.
Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff but without meaningful financial results that’s not going to placate market concerns over what looks like a downhill future for the core businesses. Facebook’s less than fantastic record at making money on its other businesses doesn’t have the market terribly optimistic about about the future prospects metaverse stuff either. Net net stock down 20%.
I don't get metaverse - they seem to be throwing lots of money and people at it, and hyping it up like it's the future. But from what I've seen so far they've just built VRChat, but worse. It's been done before by other people, it's not a new thing at all (Second Life released almost 20 years ago).
This isn't a project that benefits from any of Facebooks strengths - game development companies are much better positioned to make compelling social VR experiences like this.
"Metaverses" in general are a cool 80s sci-fi novel concept. But they're just video game environments with better-than-typical communication features - hyping them up with piles of marketing and betting the farm on your specific one being successful seems like an incredibly poor business move.
> game development companies are much better positioned to make compelling social VR experiences like this.
I don't think that's true. Game developer company culture is heavily oriented towards making and selling products to consumers. They know how to make games people will pay for, and the entire business and culture revolves around that.
With Meta and other ad-driven companies, the people aren't the consumers, they're the product. The whole incentive structure and architecture of the company is fundamentally different. Think about how a company like Facebook or Google has an entire army of sales people and enormous apps like AdWords and Facebook Ads Manager that are how the company actually makes money. Game companies don't have that kind of stuff.
What they have is a bunch of programmers who know 3D rendering and networking. But Meta can simply hire those people—and game devs are used to bouncing around every couple of years—and they are. Several of my old EA coworkers are at Meta know working on it.
VR Chats made by consumer-first game developers are already only minimally compelling to niche groups (furries, anime weebs, etc).
I cant understand why people think a consumer-hostile company would be able to improve the experience enough to reach broader audiences.
People will try it for an hour or two when they boot up their oculus. Realize being in a room of shouting tweens is not fun, and then never try it again.
>What they have is a bunch of programmers who know 3D rendering and networking
Game companies haven't been stuck in the 2000s. Nowadays they are legitimate media businesses. Just look at what Riot did with Arcane, or Epic with Travis Scott's Fortnite concert. That actually felt metaverse-ish compared to the geriatric experience of Facebook's VR games.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeFAlVC8qU)
If you look at China its even more clear that game companies are way beyond just making games. Moving into ads isn't that hard, delivering actual content and really understanding young people very much is.
You are absolutely right. Looking back at the days of Mafia Wars and Farmville. For these games social was a core aspect of their success. Now Roblox, Minecraft, and Fifa have incorporated similar features already. In 2022 it's not that hard anymore. So, what would FB's moat be? How large is the overlap between FB's current customers and new Metaverse customers?
Agreed - if anything FB has a harder fight than folks like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft.
FB is really noncommittal about what a metaverse product would even be, which can be interpreted either as secrecy... or they just don't know themselves. From the little we've seen (notable that it's 100% CGI concept reels and 0% anything concrete) it really does seem like just social spaces.
One thing the game studios have figured out is that simple chat is insufficient - Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite have all developed genuine social spaces that center around some activity. FB's metaverse concept seems to have no unifying purpose and lacks some compelling purpose that the games do. To the extent these necessary unifying activities are discussed it's usually hand-waved away as something users themselves will concoct.
More generally, it seems that FB wants to be the substrate of a new social network - but it's not clear to me that that's what anyone wants? What's the role of FB as a platform when "VR socialization" can just be apps on a device - in which case FB's role is solely that of a device/OS vendor, which clearly is insufficient for their ambitions? What does FB bring to the table that Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc, would care about?
If socializing in VR is going to be a thing (big if, but let's assume for a second), why would I go to FB? Why would I not directly go to any number of apps and vendors who have created focused products? I don't need a single unifying platform when I can just... install a number of different ones?
I personally believe that the rebranding is to attract talent to work for them as Facebook had a negative brand value in tech and required a premium for hiring. This rebranding changes their narrative from a technical perspective. Will it work?
Exactly, and unlike, say, Google or Apple, I don't think Facebook has really ever had more than one big payoff idea. If that core business model/idea has seen most of its growth, and may even decline, then there is really not much reason to expect it to find any other way to keep growing. They are big, they are profitable, but they are not going to be growing fast in the future, and one could argue should be valued (in terms of earnings/share) more like a utility or a consumer commodity manufacturer, than a technology firm.
> unlike, say, Google or Apple, I don't think Facebook has really ever had more than one big payoff idea.
Interestingly, by revenue Apple is more of a one-trick pony than Facebook. iPhone sales are fully half their revenue, and almost all of their software income is totally dependent on iPhones as well. Meanwhile at Meta, Instagram revenue is roughly equal to Facebook revenue.
Saying Google is "just" ads seems a bit disingenuous. Google controls the entire stack for ads, from the all important search, to Google network and YouTube, all the way to operating systems and the browser. That last part is important because Facebook got absolutely fucked by apples privacy changes on iOS. Google has diversified, but more importantly they're not reliant on another company's users.
Apple's moat is much larger. The costs involved with hardware manufacture, and the need for a deep software ecosystem are challenging.
Meanwhile Facebook is "just" an app. It's pure software, and doesn't have the same ecosystem tie in. It's not a platform in the way that android/ios/windows are. Starting a new social network is much cheaper than creating a new mobile platform.
My reading of that comment is that FB itself hasn’t innovated in quite some time. FB “innovation” has come through acquisition. The core company hasn’t produced anything unique or compelling in over a decade. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus were all acquisitions.
I fundamentally don’t think FB can innovate. And I don’t think the regulatory situation will allow them to continue acquiring to grow.
An example of this changing landscape is FB failed attempt to acquire Giphy. Can FB survive if they are forced to compete and innovate on their own? I doubt it.
Probably the most interesting thing Apple has going for investors is their move into advertising within iOS - and they’re kneecapping the competition through ATT.
Google is search/ads. This is their cash cow. Without it, it would have gone under years ago, just like Yahoo, with a bunch of dead-end project that either make no money or go nowhere.
because the killer feature of facebook is staying in touch and meeting people. the path to monetization and revenue burned those features and overloaded them with spam and shit no one wanted. it got to the point where people stopped using facebook to meet and stay in touch with people
a similar pattern is happening on instagram although to a lesser degree
the metaverse bet is a good one to try and make something new where the value requires you to be on the fb platform. we will see if it works. i personally don’t see it going anywhere
I've been using a roommate's Quest 2 for a few days. A few years ago I was using an OG Oculus. The Quest 2 is so much staggeringly better in every way. So much so that I can see a future where people are spending hours in VR games rather than hours playing games on a monitor.
Yes, there are issues to work out with the headbands, weight, general FPS and battery life, but I finally _get_ it. The amount of badassery you feel as you shoot headcrabs and combine in Half Life: Alyx is hard to describe in words.
Maybe that's not Metaverse persay (is that like, VR chat or something?), but it is the equipment that Facebook is selling, and they've got their own set of games that're pretty fun too.
I felt the same way, I literally bought a Quest 2 for everyone in my family. We have 4 of them and over $200 worth of games. After a couple months no one uses it anymore. It's sad lol.
I do think it's amazing - Superhot is one of the best games I've ever played. But I get it - I don't know how to explain, but it seems like work to use it.
It seems like they sold a ton over the holidays this year. I and at least 4 of my friends got a quest 2 and all of us have already not used it since early Jan. VR has been looking for a killer app for 5 year and the most popular app so far is basically VR guitar hero but only for one player.
I agree, but I’m still very bullish. I think the disconnect is:
1. A lot of people saying this are just older and with less free time. Do you still play video games a lot? I think the question is in part whether VR can engage kids for as long as video games do.
2. The headsets are still too early. Wireless latency is almost there, but not quite. The headsets are too heavy. I think the Quest 4 or 5 are going to be so vastly better that users won’t mind staying in VR for longer, and won’t get bored of it.
3. Content, content, content. Alyx is awesome, but there needs to be 10 of those per year. And with better headsets, and an ever expanding user base, I think content will continue to explode.
I guess you don't have a game PC? The PC games are amazing. If you don't have a good pc there's some streaming services coming online too like plutosphere that's doing a free beta now.
I'm a PC gamer and have a very capable PC but haven't bought any VR equipment because I don't know what I'd play.
The issue is probably that I'm not looking for an excuse to buy a headset, I'm waiting for a reason. I don't seek out information for VR and none of it is getting through to me.
On the other end of the spectrum, I'm a PC gamer and I haven't bought any VR equipment because there are way too many games to play as it is. I don't feel the need to increase the backlog of games I want to play if I won't realistically be able to play them.
If you are into simulations (driving, flying) then I'd say get a headset ASAP. Also potentially if you see yourself getting into immersive rhythm/fitness games. Otherwise I think it's pretty reasonable to wait for more compelling content to be released (and reap the benefits of the better hardware that will be available at that time).
I've been posting a lot of comments recently about how much Half Life Alyx disappointed me, not with any sort of motive but here we go again.
I felt incredibly lame shooting the headcrabs in half life alyx. They were fat and slow, and when I felt like they were going to hit me I tapped the left stick twice to teleport 20m away while they waddled towards me hopelessly. When they hit me, I just kind of shrugged because the experience of being hit in VR is so uninteresting. A lot of the times I would just be annoyed that aiming at a headcrab 10m was hard so I just waited for it to fall close to me then shoot it at point blank range 4 times.
In resident evil 4 (which is now vr but I've no experience with it) the zombies did this thing where they ran at you really fast, but when they got close, they walked slowly. This was because you had low mobility when aiming, so the enemies had to play nice to give you a chance. Half Life Alyx felt like that but way more so. Everything coddled you to the point of seriously breaking immersion for me.
Electric dog? Warns you that it's going to zap a path for like 10 seconds before doing anything.
Machine gunner guy? Shoots for 10 seconds then sits still for another 5 in plain sight while reloading.
Normal combine guys? Mostly just standing out in the open or failing to use cover effectively so you can casually snipe their weak spot.
Felt to me like a poorly curated house of dead line gun game.
I’m with you on this. I received a Quest as a Christmas gift and basically went from 0 to 100 on VR and the Metaverse. It finally makes sense to me.
Like you say, there are some issues with the tech, but they’ll be resolved in time, and it’s clear that this is the future of gaming at least, and maybe much of social media/virtual interaction.
I'd be curious if you feel the same way in a year or so. When I first got into VR I felt very strongly it was the future, but that novelty wore off over the course of a year. I go back every few months to catch up on experiences I've missed and try out new tech, but the novelty has still worn off.
VR is not a daily use experience for me, and I assume for a lot of consumers, but it is still amazing.
I find that a) the bulkiness of the headset (and the added wires and external sensors of the Valve Index) and b) the fact that I don't always feel like waving my arms around or reaching stuff after sitting in front of the PC all day, made it wear off for me.
I was into Pokerstars VR for a while but interacting with people through the microphone made me realize I don't really enjoy talking to strangers from around the country while playing poker.
I was developing neck pain from Pokerstars - it's not exactly table tennis. On the other hand, Moss was a very cool game but I found it annoying on my joints to reach under virtual corners and even get on all fours to look under something. Amazingly cool concept, but it's not exactly physical therapy after a computer posture.
Steam VR has a player that can use your PC to stream stuff, including even controlling your PC desktop. I don't think it's comfortable to have a screen right in your face with a heavy thing on your head, it's easier to watch something in a relaxed posture, moving your neck how you see fit.
I think it will take off when the gear becomes slim and light - like a much newer generation of glasses. Something that as far as I know is still in the realm of sci-fi - but not far.
The novelty hasn't worn off for me because I don't treat it as a game console. I treat it as a new form factor computer.
I use it daily for HIIT workouts, and I use it to spend time with family and friends who are either far away or busy with life i.e. kids. It's way better than FaceTime or Zoom.
Mostly FitXR since it's competitive and SuperNatural. Both are subscription based, $6/month and $15/month if paid yearly. I tend to end with Thrill of the Fight.
In addition to Beat Saber, you might want to check out games like Until You Fall and SynthRiders.
For the sake of argument let's take you folks' word that it's the future of gaming (for the subset that can tolerate and enjoy the headsets). How much money is in that?
I don't believe for a moment that it'll extend into work interactions. Maybe family visiting type experiences, again for the subset that can enjoy the headset setup.
I want to disclose a bias I have here: I run a video startup, so I'm pretty incentivized to believe VR will become a standard in several work contexts.
That said, when I try my hardest to think objectively about the future of work, I think VR is going to be everywhere.
Workers going into factories will become exceedingly rare. The cost of humans is high both from a safety and headcount perspective, and more and more of manufacturing pipelines are becoming automated end-to-end. Service repairs will likely happen remotely and only require humans to be onsite if absolutely necessary in the future. It's good for business.
There is a ton on "dark factories" to be found online. Also, there are many startups that have significant traction which are bridging these two worlds via AR:
When it comes to knowledge work, I think anywhere where you have to work with visuals will become a predominant VR stomping ground. If you need to be working with 3D models (lots of engineering + manufacturing) or flat UIs (being able to point and pan and modify is more natural with hand gestures), VR will likely win out. I also think VR will create a space for completely new ways of constructing software architecture. This could be a bridge to creating architectures visually for the first time (want to define a service that automagically becomes a kubernetes service and node on the backend? create a box here and give it some parameters!). The interactivity of this kind of build feels very natural, and it's how we actually already do things in a more limited 2d context. My guess is the killer feature here with VR is the immersiveness allowing for better synchronous collboration.
I could be totally wrong about this stuff, but I think a lot of our lives will change with VR. There are some serious hurdles we need to get over, most notably form factor, weight, and nausea. I feel like these are solvable problems, but honestly that's mostly a hunch more than anything. Would love to hear from others who know more than me!
I think I agree, though from a more skeptical standpoint. To be fair I haven't used VR much lately, but at first glance I see a lot of parallels between this and the iPad.
The iPad is a fantastic device, and it definitely changed the way many people use computers. People use them for all sorts of things, because they feature properties that make them more comfortable for plenty of work applications.
I'd argue however they haven't had the significant, "post-PC" impact people used to believe they'd have. I remember the narrative back then was predicting they would change the way most people interacted with computers, and PCs would stick around "like trucks" just for the "heavy" or specific jobs for which they'd the absolutely required.
What I've seen instead is that iPads (and all tablets really) act mostly as a utility or compliment, and when I had one I only casually used it for light tasks when my computer was out of reach or battery.
So in my case, I don't doubt a lot of places will have VR headsets for work, but I still don't think people will consider them indispensable except for very specific applications. I think we'll keep seeing more remote service repairs, for example, but not that workers going into factories will become exceedingly rare— only less extraordinary. I think it's probable VR will become as common for 3D artists as tablets are for 2D artists, but don't necessarily think it'll spill out into software architecture or other keyboard-centric applications like that.
In summary, I think VR will become more commonplace and be a fantastic tool in many contexts, but I don't think at the moment that it will signify a significant paradigm shift in most work contexts.
This feels like a highly probable outcome as well. It feels natural. We shall see! I do wonder if there are patterns we can see in the past of other devices (like the iPad) that ended up being utilities more than main devices.
This was surprisingly persuasive. You're thinking about actual productivity and not just dreaming of avatars sitting at a virtual conference table. (Ick.)
I agree with the other commenter that people are going to keep showing up in factories and repair shops, but there may be a decent sized niche of genuine utility.
Do us a favor: stay independent and stay interesting. Don't get acquired by Zuck. Maybe the MechE's in my family will use your stuff one day.
Yeah I agree. The idea of 1-for-1 bridging avatars around a conference table feels horrible. That's not a world I want to live in.
I do agree it's highly probable that VR becomes a utility until we have another leap in technology (contact-lens form factor?). We shall see!
> Do us a favor: stay independent and stay interesting. Don't get acquired by Zuck. Maybe the MechE's in my family will use your stuff one day.
Thank you I really appreciate this compliment. :) My father is actually a MechE so this comment hits close to home. My background is in materials science as well as computer science. After this company, I think I'll go back to my roots in more physics, chemistry and biology and try to do something within bioengineering. Then again, who knows. I feel, as I get older, the only thing that's certain is that I have no idea what I'll value in 2-3 more years, and I think that's a good thing!
Hope you and your loved ones are doing well internet friend.
Facebook loses about $150 per Quest 2 sold (basing this off of what an engineer who worked on it told me). Either way, they're not making money off the hardware.
They plan on making it up via game sales in the Oculus Rift Store, and services. Same as what Sony did with the PS4 (which was quite successful). I see "Quest Season Passes" in VR's future.
I've tried working in VR and it's... ok. If you're ok with working on a single monitor at < 1440p you'll be fine.
At 1440p and above resolution isn't there yet and pushing multiple monitors through to the headset is still (to my knowledge) not practical. The remote desktop-like apps I've tried only do a single monitor.
I like the bet that Quest 2 made with making the headset do all the processing, but it fails for tasks like this.
I think eventually we'll get a headset where working in VR becomes practical and affordable, but we're not there yet. Maybe apple pulls off a Gear-VR-like setup where you plonk your phone in front of some lenses on your face. But AFAIK anything better than the Quest 2 is substantially more expensive.
My wild guess is that practical work VR is 2-3 years away. Meta's next headset iteration might do it + price drops.
ImmersedVR can do multiple virtual monitors. But I think the real step forward is dropping the desktop metaphor and having windows floating free in VR, like Simula are doing. They whole concept of a monitor is more constricting than useful in VR.
Here’s the thing though. I remember when the iPhone came out. The web browser experience was a horrible low resolution experience; it was slow, clunky, and you had to charge it every day. Yet none of it mattered - almost overnight everyone became glued to their phones. It didn’t need hyping up like “just wait for 4k to come out and then it will really take off” - people wanted it despite all the original flaws. Same with original game consoles. I don’t know, I just don’t see it.
The original iPhone was also better than anything else mobile at the time though. Much better.
As clunky an experience you describe, the rest were far far worse.
VR is a cool niche experience, but the friction is still far too high for me. I wear glasses, and it needs to be only slightly more friction than that. Whether AR or VR, I don't much even care, as software experiences will adapt to the hardware at some point.
Not OP, but I also picked up a Quest 2 and was impressed after finding all previous VR experiences I'd tried gimmicky and not holding my attention for long.
The problem is that the problems are mostly the same problems we had since 2012. I am not sure if we can really address them without new breakthrough technologies.
That's true, but specific to the Quest 2 hardware is the much nicer display, lighter than its predecessor, its inside-out tracking is more convenient than setting up stationary tracking beacons (a-la Valve Index), its guardian system is nice for setting up arbitrary play areas, and it degrades more gracefully at low FPS than its predecessor by respecting 6dof of head movement at a minimum of 90fps at all times, reducing motion sickness.
There’s a whole bunch of geriatric millennials out there remembering what happened to second life. With the pandemic letting up the last thing people are going to want to do is live in some virtual world. Fresh air is the new black.
How could anyone ever forget flying penises pelting Anshe Chung in the face during a CNN-sponsored Second Life ‘town hall’? Anyone expecting something different from the ‘metaverse’ is living in a fantasy world.
Porn companies and sex workers will make money in VR environments, whether mainstream companies can remains to be seen.
I think it'll play out in five to seven years. I'm also in the group that bought a Quest 2 over the holidays and am really, really, really impressed. It's very close to being more than a novel experience. Immersed works well, but because of the res of the headset, you can't actually see any more text than you would on your monitors in real life, the monitors are just bigger. For games, FPSes and driving games seem to be "solved", but almost every other genre still needs work. Basically, if a game genre is normally played first person, it'll work well in VR already. Movies, TV, manga/comics are there too. I'm at the point now where I don't plan on buying another monitor unless I absolutely have to.
I should note that I only play multiplayer experiences with PCVR because I'm afraid of getting banned for whatever reason and having my headset bricked. That's one area I'm worried about, but it's not related to the hardware/technology.
Disagree about them "betting the farm" on metaverse. They may be throwing some advertising dollars behind it, but it is clear that the bulk of their efforts are still focused on their core apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and the competition with TikTok. I doubt the product and engineering teams are as invested in metaverse as Zuck wants the world to believe.
> Facebook’s core business model appears to be in decline.
If you mean the data mining and trading, I wouldn't believe that for a second. Sure, it can't go on so openly and monopolised like before, but there is a huge industry built on it already, each new digital service opening up opportunities for a bit of side income. Facebook was an easy target to aim at - but there's your webshop, food delivery service, electricity supplier in the line.
> Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff but without meaningful financial results that’s not going to placate market concerns over what looks like a downhill future for the core businesses.
Unless Zuck can pull a Bezos with convincing investors, Meta's stock will be in trouble for a few years until their metaverse division starts becoming profitable; which will be at least a decade if they're focused on growth.
Alphabet is more than 80% advertising: https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735 . They are good at skewing how they are perceived but they are very close to being a one-business company. Not defending Facebook, but Google is not much better.
FB has Audience Network which extends their targeting off platform.
But yes, Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick and investment in video through YouTube has allowed them to capture the publisher and buyer side of much of the open web (and use the data to cut out competition - cf. Project Bernanke)
Audience network just took a big hit from apples privacy policy changes. Google controls the entire ecosystem for many users and most of the ecosystem for pretty much all of them, so they can never get blindsided like Facebook did.
I saw this claim elsewhere in this thread as well, but I didn't really get it. Google is going be affected equally by iOS changes. Google does control the Android/Chrome ecosystem, but I don't see how Google could make any changes there that hurt Facebook because of antitrust concerns.
That's actually a spectacular improvement (82% ad revenue)... it was more like 98% not that many years ago. So while it's taking them years, they are slowly diversifying.
Yeah the figure I had in mind before looking for sources was 95%, which might have been a couple of years ago. There still is a chasm between how they make money and how people think they do. Probably because ads and tracking are more or less background noise when you browse the Internet, and things like Android are more sexy and concrete. But Android clearly is just a way to drive ads, not a separate business.
Google is not really that diversified, most of the revenue comes from ads. Microsoft is a better example of a diversified business, and IMHO Amazon would be another good example.
Edit: sure, it's true that they put ads on everything, from YouTube videos to Gmail mailboxes, but that's not comparable to the level of diversification that MSFT or AMZN have IMHO.
MS also sells the same things in somewhat the same ways from 30 years back.
But their business models are not same at all, nobody is valuing MS at trillions of dollars for its Windows OS licencing business. In the last 20 years MS has diversifyer into gaming and cloud successfull that are a big chunk of its current business and future growth, even with older products like Office they successfully pivoted to O365 and converted it to a recurring revenue stream.
Amazon is making more money from AWS than retail and evolved a lot as a company.
If the metaverse gamble works Facebook could be looked on as a similar success but until then their growth is risky
I guess it depends on how you define "forever" but the success of Azure seems to be evidence that Microsoft is fundamentally capable of pivoting to a new business model if they really need to, in a way that Facebook hasn't shown any capacity for.
Google is probably screwed if search and ads go under, but they seem to be running an interesting experiment on how low quality their search results can get before they lose marketshare...
That’s not necessarily a problem if the future of the cash cow looks bright. Facebook’s problem is that the cash cow is looking rather ill with nothing clear to pick up the slack. Also the business model of GOOG and MSFT is far more diversified than FB.
- Earnings per share: $3.67 vs $3.84 expected
- Revenue: $33.67 billion vs $33.4 billion expected
Facebook also missed estimates with user numbers.
- Daily Active Users (DAUs): 1.93 billion vs 1.95 billion expected
- Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.91 billion vs 2.95 billion expected
- Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $11.57 vs $11.38 expected
Future guidance was the biggest miss.
- Q1 revenue guidance was $27 billion to $29 billion, while analysts were expecting sales of $30.15 billion
It's not really plausible that the market can predict Facebook's earnings to within 5% and that such a small miss would cause a rational investor to value Facebook 20% lower.
This seems more like a symptom of the market being generally skittish, with a small side of "expected" earnings actually being a low-biased estimate, so it's more like a 10% miss.
It’s not about accuracy. If a stock is priced at a huge multiple to earnings and sales, the market consensus is enormous profit growth for a sustained period. When the slope of the curve moves (or changes direction) the NPV (Net Present Value) of future cash flows drops dramatically.
The miss is also against future guidance. This could be answering a question of “Is Facebook too distracted to grow their core business?”
Anyone who thinks they’re more rational than the market can take the other side of these large moves. (Many quant hedge funds do)
> If a stock is priced at a huge multiple to earnings and sales...
FBs P/E ratio was well into the value stock territory of ~22 before this dip. They were trading at the lowest multiple of any other big tech company by far, now they're even more insanely undervalued from a fundamentals perspective. I realize that doesn't matter in the age of the meme stock, but personally I'm still pretty bullish in the long term and that's assuming the XR stuff is just a giant money furnace and returns nothing.
Agreed. I was looking at them even before this dip. They are valued so low that even if they simply maintain current earnings relative to inflation they are an OK investment.
FB at it's worst is growing much faster than average, it's balance sheet is healthier than almost every other company beside MAAG, and yet it is valued below average.
Also for reference, the entire rest of the world outside the US has an average P/E of 14.5 right now.
Make of that what you will.
Also, re: the parent comment, a P/E of 22 would traditionally never be called "value stock territory"...whether or not that valuation is too pessimistic about Facebook's growth prospects.
That PE means it is grossly overvalued, concentrated in a few large tech companies. Saying pe 22 is value territory just illustrates the massively distorted current market.
at the same time, dont take guidance misses literally out of context. many companies habitually sandbag guidance (so they can “beat” guidance every quarter) and then analysts play kremlinology to figure out what the “real” guidance is.
Stocks are always very sensitive to the slope of the profit curve. FB didn’t just miss earnings they also said next quarter will be lower than projected that’s generally going to see a significant drop.
Lots of funds are prohibited from trading after hours. There’s also low liquidity in after hours. Very easy to push the price however you want because NMS protections are also off during those hours. Reversal after overreaction like this is one of the strongest market anomalies you can stick to EMH fans.
And that's just ETF inflows aside from mutual funds and options markets.
The top recipients, according to the article linked above, were VOO, VTI and SPY. All follow an index that's market-cap-weighed, benefiting top 10 holdings more than the rest of the market.
The explanation I've seen floated is retail investors treating VOO and VTI as their savings account (for the lack of any decent yield opportunities). That money is eventually going to be withdrawn and spent, punishing those top 10 holdings excessively compared to the rest of the market.
If Facebook's earnings growth is 5 percentage points per year lower than previously believed, then after less than five years, that's 20% less profit. Markets extrapolate growth rates into the future, not just the next quarter.
This. People forget markets are forward looking. Forward guidance matters more than a beat/miss on estimates.
Zuck is also kind of saying that their slice of the pie is getting smaller due to competition like Tiktok. That just kills sentiment.
Hard to say if the metaverse will play out favorably or if it is going to just be hype. If I were to tell my past self 10 years ago that this is the world we live in now with EVs and cryptocurrencies etc being mainstream I would certainly not believe it nor would I have bet the farm on Elon or Bitcoin
Seemingly narrow misses often cause large declines. The reason is that management has a lot of ways to guide analysts to reasonable numbers. Like it or not, companies also have ways of stretching to make it work. If the company can’t meet those numbers, even after all of that communication, with all the means available to them, well that’s a bad sign.
Plausibility has no part in this, when stocks are "priced to perfection" any blip can cause a large correction in price. I remember linkedIn when it was still public and not owned by MS missed earnings slightly and the stock tumbled 40% in the day after earnings. When you have a sky high valuation and your business model requires ever more additions of users, slowing usage and drops of revenue are a bad thing.
It's so confusing to me see headlines calling this a "huge earnings miss". Revenue was greater than expected, as was ARPU. I get that the users are under, but this seems pretty far from a huge miss, no?
Feel free to do a deep dive on the meaning and nature of earnings estimates, and you'll find it's mostly just a service that exists because it gives the appearance of legitimacy to various financial institutions. Earnings estimates do not come down from God and there's no one single earnings estimate either, different sites and sources will report different estimates. Typically it's just the average or the median of a bunch of guess work done by analysts across a bunch of different brokerages or financial institutions and they exist to give credibility to said institutions.
A basic quantitative analysis of earnings estimates reveals that they are not particularly accurate when compared to the earnings guidance given by the company itself, and in the rare cases where companies provide no guidance, estimates are almost worthless.
All this is to say don't confuse the term "Wall Street estimates" with what people who actually buy and sell stock estimate. The actual people who have skin in the game and face tangible consequences if they're wrong don't take these earnings estimates that seriously, and conversely the analysts who produce these estimates don't have much of any skin in the game themselves and suffer next to no consequences for being wrong.
This is what I've never understood. These estimates are just that, estimates. They are guesses, potentially educated guesses based on some data, but guesses/hopes/prayers none the less.
It's like sports teams and all of the talking heads giving their opinions on the upcoming matches. In sports, it's called betting. But in business, it's called investing. It's the same thing, only one is more widely accepted an legal.
The poor people can also buy stocks in an attempt to "win big". It's just much easier to approach a bookie that doesn't care about status compared to a broker who wouldn't be so welcoming to certain clientele.
Yea that’s why I don’t understand the big fuss surrounding sports gambling/online poker etc. There’s currently something called the options market, much larger than both those things combined, where people are betting one way or the other on minute differences in a company’s quarterly earnings reports. You want to ban online gambling? Ok fine, I can easily go bet my entire life savings on whether Facebook earnings will be 30 billion or 31 billion next quarter.
But it's not even a difference of billions like 31 to 30. It's these numbers were like the 3rd digit after the decimal different. Sure, in these numbers that's still millions but only single digit millions. It's literally a rounding error depending on least significant digits. In some places, they only had 2 digits. To get to the offsets, they had to increase the accuracy. Literal rounding errors.
The markets reward predictable businesses and guidance often matters more than the current quarter, assuming management has any credibility. Whether that predictability is from the companies own guidance or analyst estimates[1] is fine. If quarter after quarter and year after year a company can't meet or beat (or switches from consistently beating to only consistently meeting), then the stock is often punished. If it misses the current quarter and guides down, the markets typically re-calibrates valuations downward which is what appears to be going on here.
[1] For example, Apple used to play a sandbagging game with their guidance. After a few years most analysts caught on and if Apple didn't beat their numbers by a consistent amount, the stock would get hammered on earnings despite the fact that they beat guidance. When a company consistently sandbags (i.e. basically gives themselves an easy target to hit for the coming quarters/year), analyst estimates tend to matter more.
The reason is that any earnings miss is a signal that Facebook has already peaked and is on its way down and out. Especially considering all the other negative news around it, it might not be able to recover from a tailspin
not entirely, but revenue is a huge component of earnings. this might be sort of a miss but not a huge one (from my caveman point of view, but i don't really know what i'm talking about, hence my confusion)
Really, really curious to see how all this market volatility will affect their talent pool. Losing almost all gains over the last 18 months will certainly cause some people to reconsider their tenure — I know I have since my company's (Not FB) stock has been hammered along with everyone else in the tech growth sector.
A lot of golden handcuffs are being unshackled right now
Some of the companies whose stock price has been affected the most are making up for the loss by giving more stock. I’d expect Facebook to do the same to retain their talent if the stock drops significantly.
Off topic: when companies give out stock like this, where is it coming from? Are they printing shares out of thin air or buying back shares to give to employees?
Cash-rich companies (especially the large tech ones) do share buybacks very regularly. Facebook bought back $14.4B worth of shares in Q3 2021, and announced a further $50B worth of buybacks in the coming quarters (https://www.yahoo.com/now/facebook-warns-fourth-quarter-head...). Diluting existing shares to give out employee bonuses are comparatively a drop in the bucket.
Depends on the company. Dilution is normal, but some companies are buying back stock to use up excess cash; in this case, they can issue those shares to employees.
> Really, really curious to see how all this market volatility will affect their talent pool. Losing almost all gains over the last 18 months will certainly cause some people to reconsider their tenure
This would be an interesting but perilous pivot... trying to get into cloud infra at this point seems like an insane idea. What would even be the attraction for company to want to run on FB cloud vs one of the established players that now have a decade plus of real world operations experience from running 3rd party customer workloads?
If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Valve or build a gaming platform. I don't know how they can be successful in whatever the fuck the Metaverse is without a gaming/media platform.
>Meanwhile meta is at least sounds pretty interesting.
But does it? It sounds hopeful for someone that has no interest in the real world and only wants to create an imaginary world for themself. For those that actually like to step away from the keyboard and experience other aspects of the world around them, this is just another yawn.
In a world where Activision is worth $70b, Valve would be worth similar. And you would have to leave them alone post acquisition because of their eccentric organizational style. And hope that Gaben maintains and Mike stay centered despite receiving $35b in the bank overnight.
Anyway Facebook's cash position is $60b, they can't afford it
Besides, that $60-some B is after nearly $20B in buybacks from Q4 so they could've without it. But as they did, some two months of saved up FCF and they can again.
Well they are leading it right now and no one is really stepping up to do anything about it unfortunately.
Sony could if they were game enough to compete with the Oculus Quest and build something that would work either standalone or wirelessly with a PS5 to handle more intensive games. Same goes for MS ofc.
I think the big fuckup by FB/Meta here is not having the foresight to acquire Unity no matter the cost. They should have made a massive stock deal for it even if it caused their own stock price to take a massive hit in the short term.
The long term benefit of owning the most pervasive toolchain + the most dominant VR platform would have essentially ensured their market position for the foreseeable future. The only other engine that is half-decent for VR is Epic's UnrealEngine and there is a huge step up in complexity, pipeline etc from Unity to get there.
I just think they're out of time at this point to get in on B2B cloud computing... they may have the know how to build great data centers and stuff but there is a lot of work to go from "FB only" to "Anyone". Let's say they jump into this, what is the earliest they could realistically start taking customers 18 months? Then you need to convince companies to adopt or migrate stuff onto a fledgling new platform. They have near zero experience internally dealing with this kind of enterprise sales and support.
If they wanted to go down that route they needed to start around 2015.
while i'm sure they could get something out the door in 6-12 months that would satisfy somebody somewhere, I'd say more like 3+ years before you'd have anything that any companies would start betting the farm on.
> AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.
No, it really did not.
The reality is even if Meta has the best data center infrastructure in the world their infrastructure is focused solely on solving their problems and operates under the constraint that it is not consumable by any arbitrary company. aws was built more or less in isolation to amazon's original infrastructure and gcp was built as a layer on top of google's internal infrastructure. there is use in what exists internally but only to (re)build the product you'd sell.
The lead time for them to get even basic primitives out the door would be significant, not even considering the depth of features that more sophisticated cloud customers want.
Kevin Xu of Interconnected wrote an interesting analysis post about Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business[1] its worth a read, he points out that they have the tech for it but they don't seem interested and even if they were the hard part isn't necessarily the technical aspect its building the human part
>>"The tougher part is perhaps not technical, but human. Facebook will have to build out an enterprise sales and support team that is culturally and operationally very different from running an ad-supported social network. Google, also a primarily ad-supported company, suffered from this “identity crisis” and is still trying to catch up to AWS and Azure, despite offering what many believe is a superior technical product."
He also points out they also have a trust deficient due to all the privacy and misinformation scandals.
Based on my calculations, Facebook has more DC space/power than Google/Amazon/Microsoft. They have around 40 million sq ft of DC space, and likely ~5GW of power. They have 48 buildings in 18 locations, with 47 more under construction.
AWS Data centers are fairly small, ~180,000 sq ft or so generally, us-east-2 is about 900,000 sq ft. us-east-1 perhaps 8 million sq ft.
Google likely has more network capacity, but FB is catching up.
Spare data center capacity is worthless on its own. AWS and others have 15+ years worth of investments in infrastructure and services on top of it, and Facebook needs to have all of that and more to become a real public cloud. It is going to be next to impossible for them to catch up to the dozens of players already in that space.
So if FB doesn't need the capacity, why do they have it? Retail obviously has a big push in the ramp up to the holidays, so there's a reason to have had more capacity than always required.
Does FB see spikes like that, or is it more consistent? I don't see FB having "spare" capacity to lease. Then again, I'm not a data center manager type, and just sit here in my comfy armchair playing QB.
When I was working at a smaller social network, we saw huge spikes during holidays when people didn't have anything else to do. I would imagine new years eve is also huge for facebook, when everyone wishes each other happy new year.
Yes absolutely since that field will only continue to grow. Make cloud computing super beginner friendly like Heroku.
I think an opportunity can be found in approaching search. They already have so much data about what people are interested in, and they can start by perfecting Facebook Marketplace to a simple user-friendly successor to Craig's List.
My bad! I meant any exposure outside of mainland China. However it appears as if Alibaba Cloud may have almost none either. I also did not know Tencent cloud was in double digit Chinese market share now. So yeah, incorrect there. On the whole, Facebook is the one web giant across the world that does not do cloud computing at all or much enterprise.
Both Alibaba and Tencent cloud have presence outside mainland China. Hong Kong and the south east Asia most, but also in the Silicon Valley. You haven’t heard of that because they are not that successful in the US.
Ah interesting. I was trying to find market shares outside mainland China, but couldn't in my quick searching. I'll try looking again later.
Yeah, I've heard of trying ovh [cloud]. That's the only non-American company's cloud I've heard about trying. Oracle and one another, maybe IBM?, are the only non-big three clouds I've ever looked at. Mostly because of their better free tiers and/or healthy free credits.
Make that 18. With custom server designs and some of the best power efficiency out there.
Amazon also had built their DCs for Amazon, and Google for Google, so that's not a valid argument. But it does take a lot of work to turn that into a marketable product (and transform your company culture to support it), and I don't think it makes sense for Meta to go down that route.
This explains the shift to Meta. The current company is basically dying, and so they are going to bet the house on something new. Apple really did a number on them by restricting the data they can collect
Facebook is dying slowly in the developed world, that is true. However it is still growing in emerging markets. And most importantly: FB is still generating tons of cash to fund the other assets.
WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow.
Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization. Think fully embedded 1-click buying for things like fashion, gadgets, accessories. They could take a decent cut of Shopifys business if executed right.
Emerging markets still shown slightly north of 30% YoY ARPU growth. Combine this with a larger user base (7x NA's, 5x EU's) and it remains an important lever, one to potentially outgrow NA's + EU's share of revenue. They in fact, lumped together, earn more than EU, and is not even one doubling of ARPU (proportionally) away of outgrowing NA. If the trends remain in like 5 years AP + RoW will be their core business.
I largely agree with you, though I'm also rather skeptical.
> Facebook is dying slowly in the developed world, that is true. However it is still growing in emerging markets.
+1, though this is a slow and not necessarily viable bet. Meta makes about 12x more revenue from their USA/Canada ($52/Q) users than their Asia-Pacific users for example ($4.3/Q).
Market share in the USA is extremely valuable, not only for Meta, but for a lot of companies. Apple for example sits at a $3 trillion market cap in spite of Android dominating the global mobile market because iOS captures not the most users, but the most valuable.
> WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow.
I agree with this. I think there's a lot of potential in WhatsApp, though I also see two shortcomings with betting too much on it:
- WhatsApp is largely used in countries where users are harder to monetize. As stated above, user count matters, but it's not the only factor when it comes to generating revenue.
- Messaging is very competitive. A change in WhatsApp's TOS was widely reported to have triggered millions of new user sign ups on Telegram and Signal after just a few weeks [1]. I don't how accurate or overblown this correlation might be, but I do know anecdotally I text people through many different apps, and have switched the primary app I used to text different people multiple times in the last few years.
> Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization.
I think this is still the most straight-forward path to increasing revenue Meta has, and I imagine they're trying to make sure it doesn't fade away like Facebook is.
I feel like if instagram were to be driven further in the monetisation direction, we would no-longer have instagram, so someone else could innovate around photos, and take the still photo market.
I feel like instagram is no longer an actual photo sharing app, just a place where high profile users promote stuff to their followers.
I think maybe they banked too heavily on getting their crypto Libra/Diem going in order to power monetization of WhatsApp/Instagram. It could have been as slick as Weixin/WeChat pay and dominate the cross currency remittance market.
Except crypto is a pump and dump scam and most people know that. It was obvious from the start that libra was a “fellow kids” attempt to capitalize on the blockchain hype.
I disagree, Libra had absolutely massive potential with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp behind it. Stabilized by multiple fiat currencies it would hold value well, and it could power a global Venmo (via WhatsApp), capture a large portion of the entire remittance market, simplify e-commerce payments, and maybe even support micro transactions at scale. I’m sure I’m missing other large benefits.
The West is mostly so far behind on payment processing it’s a joke. Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 while WeChat Pay is 0.6% and Alipay .55%.
What the hell would be it’s point? Why would it need Satoshi’s Holy Blockchain? Nobody in the mainstream consumer space wants an irreversible cryptocurrency.
Why not just use a database?
FB picking up Libra is just another loop in the blockchain’s solution in search of a problem.
+1, though I imagine the motivation was probably skipping regulation related to handling international payments or something along that line. Riding the blockchain hype couldn't have hurt too (until it did, I guess).
relying emerging markets in developing countries has a lot of inherent risk. For one they have to comply to the local data collection laws or risk being censored or banned outright. Developing nations either see FB as a tool to surveil or a foe to restrict information.
I think this right there is the biggest issue for the companies that sell consumer data. Google has had so many golden eggs, office365 before Microsoft, the cloud infrastructure before AWS and so on, and they keep fumbling the ball because their organisation is geared toward a very different form of sales.
The fact that Instagram didn’t become an Etsy styled platform for artists when it was the main platform for sharing semi-professional “hobby” work should tell you everything you need to know about how little Facebook understands markets that aren’t selling privacy data. Because even if they opened up now that ship has sailed as less and less people who produce things rely on Instagram as a platform because the younger audiences aren’t there.
Which begs the question - why not focus efforts on those, rather than bet the company on an unknown like the Metaverse? Is Meta getting too distracted?
Revenues for the quarter jumped 20 percent to $33.67 billion from $28.07 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $33.41 billion for the quarter.
> It’s a slight earnings miss. The price will rebound in the morning and it’ll be back up in a week or two.
They're going the wearable route starting with Oculus which is the main reason they missed Wall Street's short term expectations. AR in the form of glasses is their end goal, with Apple trying to cut them off by next year at the latest.
imo Apple will help Meta by helping make XR more socially acceptable, along with Apple's premium pricing which locks some people out. I do not believe VR's current form factor is socially acceptable right now. Even if you remove problems such as cost, tech complexity, and even the toxicity surrounding Facebook's brand; the masses still will not accept it until Apple ships their solution.
It’s not helpful to say it’s inevitable if no timeline is given. If it won’t happen for 30 years, there is little point in talking about it right now. Though looking at history, when one of these tech giants do fall, a lot of people who were saying it would happen will act like prophets.
Especially funny because the downfall of Facebook has been predicted for a decade now. Since Friendster and MySpace each did not last that long.
Which sort of pundits? You said "pundits...their monopolies". Are you referring to people with a vested interest in the companies/monopolies? If so, that makes sense. They have no reason not to say that, whether they believe it or not.
Yes you're right. However on HN and similar tech/geek areas, the common theme regarding FB for a decade now has been direct or indirect implying of its coming demise. Which was what I was saying in my comment. Those people are not correct. It is being said in this thread and other recent threads too. If FB is still a $5-600B+ company in 2025, then these recent comments are also not correct.
Which is to say, it's hard to imagine FB dropping lower than the ~11th biggest US company and ~15th biggest worldwide[0] company at a $600B market cap in 2025. A valuation they did not cross until May 2020.
[0] Right now they are 8th in the US and world. Top 5 for earnings. Usually 5th-6th.
HN, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, and similar places online have been talking about the downfall of most of the tech giants and a plethora of sizable medium sized tech companies: Netflix, Paypal, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, Atlassian. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch. Besides Atlassian, the rest are all $150-300B companies right now. That's been the same thing for ~15 years now. That's how long I can attest to that behavior for.
The phone carriers. They charged a fortune for data, restricted useful features on your phone (I remember one model which wouldn't play non-DRMed music because they wanted to boost their revenue), and things like mobile apps were held back by the way the carriers would look at your finances and decide how much to charge just for the privilege of being listed. When Qualcomm was getting started with BREW we looked into it for a few customers but even a modest business would get something like the _MINIMUM_ $50k listing fee for each carrier, adjusted up based on your perceived ability to pay, and they wanted more than 30% of the app pricing, too.
How did Apple change any of this? (Genuine question - I am not well versed in cellular network technologies or their history, but I would love to read about how Apple led to improvements in the US infrastructure.)
It wasn't on the network side but rather the business side, where Apple had an unexpected amount of leverage due to its popularity: the iPod was incredibly popular — not just selling well but being a prestige item with an outsized cultural impact — and AT&T was eager enough to get the iPhone that they were willing to give up a significant amount of control over the device and its data plans.
Previously, the U.S. carriers were basically king-makers selecting which devices were available for sale and what features were enabled on them — to the point where I knew a couple of people who imported phones from Europe to get something which either wasn't available from a U.S. carrier or was restricted to one they didn't wish to be a customer of for some reason (e.g. poor coverage), and it wasn't uncommon to hear about people reflashing phone firmware to remove things like the carrier's wallpaper or preinstalled apps which the user was prevented from deleting. I refreshed a phone simply to change the audio codec settings because Cingular had restricted it to the lowest-bitrate which was painfully garbled.
It's actually kind of hard to articulate how bad things were in the early-mid 2000s with respect to carriers all trying to push their own garbage and monetize absolutely everything possible.
Thank you for linking the article. I purchased my first cellphone in 2004 so I experienced the era, but I've never used AT&T or an iPhone, so this is all news to me. I also was a late adopter of 'smartphones' and didn't purchase one until 2013 so take my experiences with a grain of salt. (I also visited Japan in '04 and remember being blown away by their phone technology - "large" color screens!)
Balckberry, Treo, AIM, XMPP, and Windows Mobile blazed the trails. Apple's role in ramping up data usage likely helped, though I suspect much of that change would have happened eventually regardless.
2 of those aren't phones, did you mean something else?
On the other three, that's kind of like saying that the IBM Selectric blazed the trail for the PC — not wrong, but minimizing how much room there was still to go. If you used a Blackberry, it was good at message, tolerable for email, and bad at everything else. The Treos had some nice ideas but were agonizing slow, PalmOS was unstable, the software selection was limited, and the UI was … uninspired. Windows Mobile was at least stable but held back by mediocre hardware, and it had the lowest-common denominator problem that developers had to deal with the same OS running on a wide range of hardware and thus apps weren't usually tailored to work with the hardware.
The major trailblazing things added by the iPhone were the first touchscreen UI which was often better than a desktop UI — the Palm-style touchscreens with a stylus were much clumsier – and a desktop-grade web browser. Yes, other devices had mobile browsers earlier but they had significant compatibility issues and the UIs were uniformly clumsy — I briefly had a work Blackberry which was one of the last non-Android devices they made and despite coming out later, it was worse that an iPhone 1 in every way except messaging, and that's only if you excluded the App Store because that wasn't in the first release.
One of the big things which people underestimated was how much bigger the iPhone screen felt: when you were used to having something that size which was half controls, the iPhone had significantly more usable space (at higher quality than the displays common on many phones at the time, too) and the touchscreen keyboard could adapt to the context so it was much easier to use than the various systems like A9 which some phone manufacturers had invented. One nice side-effect of this is that it made localization better since the manufacturer didn't need to ship different hardware for different languages and multilingual users could just switch.
The final big thing was that breaking the carrier roadblock wasn't just about cheaper data. It also meant that the carriers didn't disable features based on marketing plans or try to force you to use some terrible app or services they got a kickback on (iOS 1 didn't support other apps but the bundled ones were quite good compared to the field and the App Store shipped shortly afterwards, which finally unleashed the mobile development industry which had been held back by the carriers).
With the help of the FCC (1968 Carterphone) and US Justice (1974 US v ATT), no?
If Apple (and IBM) had been banned from communicating through long distance lines, except with ATT's permission, then it's hard to see how Western Electric (aka ATT) wouldn't have taxed all the nascent PC companies and retained enough profits to remain larger.
Edit: And on the later, iPhone side, that was the luck of power dynamics (single strong device manufacturer, bargaining against multiple competing cellular providers) coupled with phone company executive shortsightedness. If the cell phone industry has been less diverse (e.g. original ATT above), nobody would have felt the need to grant Apple any concessions.
Do you have more information about how Apple disrupted Ma Bell? It is also worth noting that the iPhone was originally released as an AT&T exclusive...
I wrote this in another FB thread but they need to own e-commerce vertical: Stripe and Shopify. Others here mentioned opening up their data centers too.
After the 20% Drop, Meta will have a market cap of $700B. Compared to ( Using billion for comparison )
$2850B Apple
$2350B Microsoft
$1950B Alphabet
$1500B Amazon
I mean you need to be at least Trillion dollar market cap to join the club, the only other trillion dollar market cap crop is Saudi Aramco. But I think we should ignore that. May be dropping Meta from the MAMAA? Even Amazon is twice its size, and at the top Apple is Four times the size.
It is also interesting around Facebook IPO in 2011 / 2012, I actually expected Google and Facebook will destroy each other and become one. either Google winning Social or Facebook took over Search within next 10 years. That didn't happen. Google tries to enter social but have absolutely not a god damn idea what they are doing. It wasn't clear to me then at the time Google had no product mindset.
Had that happened the combined company would be the same size as Apple.
It will be interesting to see Amazon's report in a few hours time. I am wondering if they will join the 2 Trillion dollar club soon.
Yay, another platform without the possibility to become decentralized, with a leader who basically opposes standards based development, great step forwards.
Monolithic platforms are significantly more feature-full and user-friendly than standards based development, and thus are the ones that actually experience significant adoption. This is just a fundamental reality.
Most people use Gmail. Email is a standards based legacy technology that has inertia, like fax machines; it doesn't mean people prefer standards based technologies.
We had a campaign to switch to signal, it fizzled out pretty quickly. I am part of 6 active groups from school to work days, and 1 of them split and exists on both WhatsApp and Signal - signal for sports talk, WhatsApp for everything else, but every other group that tried, moved back. WhatsApp has too much "moat".
It is very common for stocks to significantly rise or fall after the release of earnings reports. If stocks always went up after their earnings report, it would make sense to buy the stock beforehand and sell immediately afterwards. Conversely, if the stock always went down after earnings, it would make sense to sell the stock right before the report was released and rebuy afterwards.
I noticed that often times these dips lead to sensationalist headlines like "Apple shares tank 5% after abysmal earnings". When I looked into these headlines, I often noticed that the stock often "plummeted" to the price it was at a week or two prior.
To counter this, one metric I use is, "When was the last time the stock was at this new price?"
Today Facebook shares are trading at ~$238. The last time it was trading at this price was June 2020.
Apple vs ad-tech is a really interesting battle. It shows the immense power Apple has in the consumer market today, where they can affect some of the largest businesses in the US unilaterally. Meta is in a very tricky position in that unless they put up an actual paywall users don’t really have any incentive to allow tracking. But putting up a paywall introduces a lot of friction, not to mention the adverse selection (the affluent people you most want to advertise to are probably the most likely to pay to not be tracked).
I know most people on here really dislike targeted advertising. I’m not going to speculate on the potential future problems that tracking could lead to, and I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned. But so far targeted advertisement has been a net positive for me. I’ve gotten to use some really good applications for free, and I’ve gotten ads that are actually relevant.
It's much more difficult to scale price (user pays more) than it is to scale ad revenue (user sees no difference, more / more-per advertiser).
At the end of the day, that's why Google and Facebook will fight tooth and nail to avoid subscription offerings.
And fundamentally... Facebook's stock should be hammered. They're effectively a legacy platform attempting to milk more revenue from their existing users.
They missed the 2010-2020 opportunity to diversify away from ad-based revenue, and now they look more like 2000s Microsoft, unable to imagine outside their core revenue generator. Which is why their acquisitions have been "new Facebook" instead of "different than Facebook."
Google is up 7.5% today. Google had one of the best valuation growths in the past 2 years of mega cap companies.
It makes little to no financial sense, compared to other tech and web companies, for Facebook stock to remain down 25%. Their PE is going to be like 17.5 now.
Aren't all current tech valuations still playing chicken with future growth expectations? So when sentiment with regards to them changes, it compounds back on the current price.
But the whatever% is after hours trading, so we'll see what the market does tomorrow when it's open.
Yeah. I mean even besides the playing chicken...it's playing chicken in general with sentiment and stuff too. I guess that is saying the same thing you are saying. Like Apple's PE going from a fairly low number to now being around 30. I don't know what to say or think of that or anything.
It's funny and silly. Not misinformation, but a stretch to say the drops and gains of stocks on a day to day basis is honesty to the general person.
If instead, if by default, numbers in charts and articles talked about these one day changes in stock prices alongside trailing 3, 5, or X day/week percentage changes.
Sure. Snap is up 45% today. However it was down 25% yesterday. Really, it went from $32.XX to $35.XX across two days and the entire week. A solid 10% gain.
It’s anecdotal but the adds I get on DuckDuckGo by it matching what I search for tend to be better than the targeted adds I get on Google or Facebook which are typically advertisements for things that I have just bought.
Like when I search for hiking shoes, that’s when you should advertise, now for the next two months. I’m not going to buy a second pair for another 20 years after all, and if it’s to reassure me I made the right purchases then they shouldn’t be for variating brands.
But I mean, you’re probably right, why else would various sales decision spend so much money on advertisement companies?
I think the “pay with your privacy” model is probably coming to an end though. At least here in the EU that seems to be the long term plan, and I think Apple might agree with me.
I think that people here (rightly) dislike advertising and having their privacy invaded to target them, not specifically targeted advertising vs. untargeted.
As an aside, something happened to my instagram ad-targeting profile a few months ago and the ads that I normally get (tech-industry stuff, photography, art shows, books...) were replaced by what I assume were lowest-common-denominator general population ads (replica-of-expensive-items scams, crypto scams, investment scams, sports, populist politicians, pawnshops, wedding services...) for a couple of weeks; it was as if looking in a nightmarish mirror universe.
No, Android. I dislike notches or holes in screens, so I don't have much choice (I don't have much choice even with Android, but there are a few high-spec phones without those).
I noticed the ads got worse on Facebook lately. They used to be more relevant, now they're just totally random amazon products that I only click on because I have no idea what they are. I actually used to like the ads on Facebook because they were pretty relevant.
I think the tracking backlash helps the big consumer goods conglomerates and hurts the startup niche product marketers. Look at Dollar Shave Club and all the other consumer products underdogs that were able to take massive marketshare from Proctor and Gamble and the like through smart ad targeting.
>Apple vs ad-tech is a really interesting battle. It shows the immense power Apple has in the consumer market today, where they can affect some of the largest businesses in the US unilaterally.
It shows that Facebook positioning itself as a "platform" in the first place is total nonsense. That's why Zuck wanted Oculus to succeed so bad. He knows he is at the mercy of actual platform providers like Apple and Google for everything.
I don't see why it needs to be a binary descriptor. They can be a platform that's itself built on platform(s): in fact, most platforms are. Full vertical integration is not that common.
Apple dislikes ad-tech for reason x because it's a fundamental threat to their business from their compitators making money though it or mindshare being pushed towards other products; the further the reach and the lower the cost the worse it is for them
I think TikTok has it figured out. They have a thing called "Live" and there are people throwing money at the hosts every single day, and guess what : the company gets the 30% (I suspect did not calculate) cut. This may not be enough to pay the bills, but starts the virtuous circle where people buy your (FB) currency and start subsidizing the platform.
The idea of buying something based on an advertisement and not a need is foreign to me. What is a kind of ad that you consider to be “relevant”? I just block all of them so I might just not be aware of the potential.
Just because you block ads doesn't mean you are immune to advertisements. How many of your interests are shaped by media campaigns. Even if you go and choose to buy things based on "need" (which I doubt). How do you choose which to buy of the various things that satisfy your needs? Maybe you go to one of many consumer reporting sites? Maybe you look at reviews? How do you know those are truly unbiased, they aren't most of the time.
Naturally, that’s true, but it wouldn’t affect my decision. If I could unilaterally ban billboard ads, I would; but the fact that certain kinds of ads are not block-able does not affect my decision to keep blocking other kinds of ads, and limiting the effectiveness of ads I can’t block.
No entity has the innate right to psychologically manipulate me into contributing to its bottom line.
> Naturally, that’s true, but it wouldn’t affect my decision
Your decision for what you buy or your decision to block ads? Which is completely beside the point of my comment. My point is that you are going to be manipulated whether you like it or not. That cute Bernie Sanders slogan, that "Eat the rich" slogan, all the beautiful art produced by your favorite political cause, it's all psychological manipulation by your definition (and it is). And by that point, all human interaction is manipulation.
I wonder.. I don't think that applies to everyone.
Most of the stuff I buy is either commodity (clothes, always the same t-shirts, pants, shoes, my colleagues joke it's my 'uniform'), food, or weird-ass stuff that nobody advertises for. Like second hand computers or electronic components to build cool stuff.
And reviews I usually get in depth from other users on tech forums like XDA and local ones. Before I buy a phone I know pretty much every little thing there is to know about it :) Not just the gloss, all the annoying bugs too.
The only thing I buy that's really advertising sensitive is games I think. Or some hacker/maker stuff you'd see on hackaday. I know advertising affects me. But I'm pretty certain not a lot of my purchasing is driven by advertising.
I've seen a comment like this quite a few times now and I am curious: what exactly is the goal of pointing out that advertisement affects your life somehow, to someone who said they can't think of a relevant ad? It's not like they claimed they're immune to advertisement. They just can't think of a relevant ad, and I'm in the same boat, unless you twist the implied definition of "an ad" enough; a common trait for these threads is to start attacking the "marketing doesn't affect me" straw man, which is of course easy to attack when you go down the everything is marketing line of thought.
Quite likely, if you twist the implied meaning of "an ad" enough.
I'd take it for granted that zwkrt is not talking about reviews and glowing endorsements and sponsored videos or placement on store shelves or .. you get the idea. They're talking about ads! The crap that surrounds the real so-called content when you try to read an article without an adblocker. The nonsense that interrupts a movie on TV (or any video on YouTube) every three minutes. The trash results that gets a special place in front of all the other trash when you search on Google. All unsolicited, not sought for. I'd say if uBlock Origin doesn't block it, then it likely isn't an ad in the sense zwkrt means?
Buying something after seeking out reviews and seeing one that was biased and paid for could happen but it's not necessarily happening to everyone, and it's probably not what the fellow upstream meant when they said they find buying things based on an advertisement foreign.
It's usually more that the ad results in someone buying something they were already planning to buy from you instead of someone else. There's pretty much 3 types of online advertising, Intent based where you show an add when someone is actively searching for a place to buy the thing, remarketing where you show an add because you were able to detect they were shopping for it recently, and then the window shopping ones which just show you things you might be interested in (these are the lowest converting) Online ads objectively work though. Online ads basically drive the revenue of millions of small and medium sized businesses.
An ad that is “relevant” to me is an ad that leads me to think “yes, this item is exactly what I was looking for”. Sometimes you know you want to buy something (let’s say a backpack) but you don’t know which brand/model to go for.
This is where ads come in: a backpack company can run ads that should be shown to people interested in buying backpacks, and it’s potentially a win-win: you find a cool item that you buy, and the company gets a new customer.
It's only really a win-win if the backpack was the best choice you could have made if you were fully informed about the entire market.
And that best choice is probably from the manufacturer that spends the most on making their product. Not the one spending the most on advertising. This undermines the win-win concept.
While some ads drive impulse purchases, much ads are getting brands into your decision consideration.
E.g When you need something of you have 100's of options. If you saw an ad previously it now might be 1 of several products you compare as you are aware and familiar. The product still has to impress you on price and quality etc but the ad drove you to consider it. That is hugely important in a crowded marketplace. Also that ad might have shifted you perception of quality or features.
And ultimately 'need' is a very subjective thing. I highly doubt if you look around your house there is nothing you couldn't throw away and not get on with life as normal. Ads can make you feel like you need something at the time. That's why so many ads rely on fear based propositions, this emotion is strong in creating need like showing negative events for insurance.
I don't particularly want to be tracked and generally block as much as it pratically possible (browser plugins, piholes etc.), but I occasionally encounter useful ads (for example an interesting temporary exhibition I wouldn't have known about, the reprinting of a book that I had been looking for or a better offer for some service that I'm already paying for).
I think you're forgetting about the reason why they switch names in the first place. Meta is signaling that they are all in with their own hardware platform.
It's not about hardware really. The hardware is just to sell the service in the best way possible. They had to make it. Because there was no good affordable standalone headset so far. The metaverse idea is all about the platform/service.
I'm a big VR fan and even I'm not sure whether the metaverse will take off. But without hardware like the quest 2 it wouldn't have a chance.
I think they will restrict it at first, to control the user experience. In the starting phase it'll be crucial to avoid bad reviews due to substandard hardware. Google did exactly this with their cardboard headset. People lost interest in VR because they watched a rollercoaster vid on a crappy cardboard setup and thought they had seen it all. All these $5 eBay headsets flooding the world didn't promote VR at all. They just imprinted the idea "VR is just a gimmick" in people's minds. As a VR enthusiast I still need to explain the difference between 3DOF and real interactive 6DOF all the time. It took a long time to build interest in real 6DOF VR back up.
But I think once (or, if) the metaverse has proven its value to the consumer their goal is to be the leading platform and opening it up would make sense there, it would be key to maximising marketshare. Especially as they're not even making money on the hardware, it's being sold at a loss. That'll change too once the platform proves itself but still I don't think they expect it to be a major money maker.
Zuckerberg mentioned in his keynote that they want to go for a different business model. They want to sell the platform and enable creators to sell their designs, taking a cut in the Apple store way. And they can still take a cut on third party hardware by licensing. Which means revenue without even having to bother manufacturing anything.
I think hardware to Meta will be what hardware is to Microsoft. Setting a good baseline standard, promoting new designs and usecases (e.g. the surface pro convertible) and directing the market. But not being the sole vendor.
But I may be wrong of course. It'll be interesting times ahead!
But it is doomed to fail unless they act like a startup and can be nimble and pivot quickly. They should have at least had something to demo that anybody could play with before talking about it publicly. This whole thing reeks of "big design upfront". They are gambling tons and tons of money and political capital on something that is completely unproven.
When is the last time a huge company really went "all in" on a completely unproven idea and have it become a success?
> They should have at least had something to demo that anybody could play with before talking about it publicly.
They already do. It's called Quest 2. Their 1st version of the "metaverse" is Horizon and Venues, though 3rd parties on meta's platform like VR Chat and RecRoom are also metaverse plays.
How much would it have cost you to use those applications if you had to offset the ad revenue? 10 bucks a year? 50? Do you really value your attention that low?
1. The CEOs insistence on "Competition" as the cause for the increased focus on short term impression rates seems pointed at regulators and Congress rather than at investors. This is silly too, Google had no such pressure on impressions and performed rather well just days before.
2. The cat is out of the bag. Facebooks secret sauce was their very HEAVY focus on bottom funnel advertising where they would ascribe suspect numbers that were not Industry standard to "Conversion" objectives (RoAS anyone?). Anyone, anywhere sees an ad at any point in their conversion journey and Facebook would assign a large weighted portion of conversions leading from that individual in their reporting.
3. The big scary underlined headline here should be HOW POWERFUL APPLE IS. They sneeze and change one small thing in the way apps can access their platforms and we see an entire industry shaken.
4. They won't die out quick. These numbers, though not "Growing" as fast as befor or expected to grow as fast (which is the bigger concern), still is much, much , much higher than they need to sustain their business over the next two decades. The big risk though, is the stock price drop which is how the bulk of their pricy talent is paid dropping. Everyone there is currently staring at a 25% pay cut on their stock based comp and that is not a pretty picture for attracting the best kids graduating this year with ambitions of joining a fast growing tech firm or pulling in talent from places like MSFT or GOOG or AAPL who will not want to jump aboard a perceived sinking ship.
It really does demonstrate the "utility" like nature of high market share OS platforms. It's inevitable that Apple will be regulated, just a question of what shape or form.
I highly doubt all of the Apple defenders would feel the same way if Microsoft was charging 30% fee for substantially all commerce on windows. It's a huge transfer of wealth from the entire ecosystem of developers to a single company, when that company added very little marginal value to the developer's offering.
They can change their name all they want, they are slowing turning into the AOL of our decade. I'm willing to take bets on where this is all going.
I own an Oculus - it sucks. The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Instagram sucks more than it did last year. I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole.
Eventually FB will lose because their entire business model is based on outrage, and that cant last forever. It's very clear it is having catastrophic consequences for societies everywhere.
Yes, it is required. I liked it to my brother's account.
It sucks for a few different reasons.
1. It's very uncomfortable when you sweat, which you do for any of the active sports games. The Oculus falls off your head and causes you to break out.
2. If you have glasses but cant wear contacts (my issue) it's a lot harder to use.
3. Lack of interesting games. I like golf, the golf game is actually cool, one free course with the option of paying for 1 other course, so 2 total courses.
The current version is no where people are going to spend a lot of time in the near future.
> It's very uncomfortable when you sweat, which you do for any of the active sports games. The Oculus falls off your head and causes you to break out.
That's fixed by replacing the strap. The default one is extremely uncomfortable for anything but viewing movies.
> 2. If you have glasses but cant wear contacts (my issue) it's a lot harder to use.
There are magnetic lens addons that can be used with eye prescriptions. I have this myself. They are magnetic so you can switch them out if there are multiple users.
> 3. Lack of interesting games. I like golf, the golf game is actually cool, one free course with the option of paying for 1 other course, so 2 total courses.
There are about four different golf games now. They aren't all equal and take different directions.
While the current library doesn't compare to Valve's, it's a decent size and there's something for everyone. If you've only played one golf game before dismissing it, then you're missing out on the start of the next paradigm.
Also, I wouldn't think of it as just a gaming console. You can watch movies in it inside a virtual movie theater, you can use it for light CAD and art, and one of the most common uses for it is for fitness. I've lost 20 lbs so far. Another use is being able to "hangout" with friends and family who are either really far away or are busy due to life circumstances eg. people with children
Meta is the most owned stock (2% of all invested) by institutional and superinvestors with an hold medium price of 339$ (source DATAROMA https://www.dataroma.com/m/stock.php?sym=fb). This crash would not be painless for the whole market.
Not really. After-hours "mostly" set the trajectory for stock's next day journey. It rarely reverses, but often times just continues the path set earlier.
Meta should just double down on trying to be not just an ads company by buying Valve or some other prestigious gaming company and some business software company to have better gaming and business tools in their metaverse.
I don't recall a company ever the size of Meta dropping 20% in one day of trading. That's immense. People must think the company is broken in some way, or I might be over-reacting.
It dropped 20 percent in after hours... Volumes are different than regular market hours. Nbbo doesn't apply. So prices can be pushed around easily by relatively few players.
Also now retail platforms give the r/WSB crowd even more ways to punt and gamble in the after hours.
Point is, see where the stock ends up over the next day or two...
Not 1 mention of Tiktok? IDFA is probably not the main reason they had a bad report. Tiktok is quickly dominating time spent and the reason active users are plateauing.
TikTok is referred to in their discussion of more heavily focusing on Reels. I use both only tangentially and find Reels to very clearly be less enjoyable than TikTok, but I am probably not the target market.
Alphabet broadly allows Google to continue-on as Google, in the event that Waymo or its other broader subsidiaries fail (and conversely, allows Google to be cut if that part starts to die). Alphabet is probably one of the most tactical "renames" out of the bunch.
Alphabet isn't quite the same thing, though. They kept the Google name around, and created Alphabet as a kind of holding company. This way they retained the value of their brand while also getting to have a kooky company with a fun name.
Facebook used to mean two things
- Facebook.com and the Facebook mobile app
- The company Facebook which owned the two aforementioned products, instagram, messenger, whatsapp, oculus, portal...
The second item here was rebranded to Meta, but the Facebook site and app are still Facebook. It's just the overarching company is Meta
Facebook hasn't gone away. I get that it's not literally a child company under the parent Meta, but the product is still very much alive and is not going anywhere
The tech sector as a whole dropped 13% in Jan, same as FB shares,following a massive (overdue) correction. Most likely FB did a flat return once market/sector residualized. What's all the fuss about?
paypal also had a really bad dip (again) for really no good reason. everyone i know in the US uses paypal to split payments and to send money to others.
The earnings for this company are truly staggering. They made 11$/user. Their earnings were up 34% year-over-year – on a base of 29B dollars. They made 10B more this year than they did last year, and the comments in here are all about, "boy Apple fucked them, and Meta suxor!"
You people are nuts.
While I don't love FB as an entity, as a business they are making fucking bank. They are running a printing press, and the world is eating it up. Y'all need to switch to decaf or something. Their numbers are truly staggering.
This is a venture-backed tech community, so it's pretty much about making bank. Also, it regularly celebrates big rounds and exits for other ethically questionable companies, so there's really no moral high ground to be had here.
A lot of us work for tech companies we may own shares in, or have options to buy. Knowing where the leaders in the market are going (up, down, flat) is, at worst, a weak signal of how tangential markets will trend in the coming months. Maybe this is less relevant to someone under 30, but as a lot of us creep into our early and late 40s, having a clearer picture of where we might end up in retirement is something many people have a keen interest in.
FAANG stock trends, like it or not, dictate the larger tech sector, and right now 2/5 just took a 20% hit in the space of a week.
To be fair to the other commenters, they're also talking about the nature of the article, but more about what these financials mean for the tracking products, Facebook, and the "tracking industry" broadly.
HN is worse than default subreddits when it comes to a handful of topics, and <any big tech company> is the most prominent category. There's plenty to criticize FB for, but the commenter community here gets truly unhinged whenever one of these topics comes up.
> While I don't love FB as an entity, as a business they are making fucking bank. They are running a printing press, and the world is eating it up. Y'all need to switch to decaf or something. Their numbers are truly staggering.
Precisely. It's actually a very long term battle between Meta, Apple and Google. Not even a widespread outage can stop them.
It would be a mistake to write them off immediately over this atrocious earnings call, no matter how much I think of them as a mafia. Business-wise, it is far from over.
We can't be critical of a company that makes people miserable? That weakens democracy? That enables violence and hate? Just because they make a lot of money we should be cheering?
Oh wow, they made $11! Let's forget everything else.
Be critical all you want, just don't try to gaslight by saying they're on the verge of collapse and everyone hates them. They're extremely popular and billions log in every day because they apparently get some kind of value out of the product
Literally nobody was arguing this, though. The OP's outburst about the "vitriol" on this topic also seems pretty overly dramatic, tbh, and has done wonders to derail things because it hurls personal insults.
Everyone that knows the extent to which they're complicit in destroying societies does hate them. As for their popularity, yeah I guess you could call a monopoly "popular" but that's just because there isn't effective competition... because of Facebook's anti-competitive practices.
There’s a difference between hating Meta for its ethics and hating Meta as a money making machine. People are doing the latter and that’s pretty silly. Meta is, however unethically, a good entity at the goal of making money.
I mean, if you don't have a stock position, why parrot the same tired narrative? It's not adding any insight and it's not like their stock never had downswing before.
At one point the crowd here was like oh fb ipo so embarrassing, to oh fb eng so hot much react, to oh fb so evil now, crash and burn pls. Such fickleness. Surely we can do better than that.
I am interested in the virtual reality space, and started posting because I was frustrated by the spread of misinformation/propaganda. Ironically, there is a lot of misinformation about Facebook. I'm sure my contributions are mostly meaningless, but it has at least been interesting to follow discussions.
How about we start with the claim from the recent leaks that they cause depression or body image issues? The leaked document in question [1] should be considered for further research, but it is hardly evidence of this claim.
There is also a popular claim that Facebook contributed to genocide. Here's an article [2]. Facebook hired an investigator that concluded that their involvement was without their knowledge. Tragic and reckless, sure. Intentional? I doubt it. I think it's an issue of scale and navigating complex regulatory and social structures.
Shadow profiles are another hot topic. The big issue is that, if you agreed to let Facebook read your contacts, it linked your friends phone numbers to distinct 'profiles' in the background. Presumably these could also be tied to their advertising profiles.
Cambridge Analytica was a company that abused a bug in API access (allegedly unbeknownst to Facebook - this exploit was available to all 3rd party apps) to collect information not only about willing participants, but their friends as well.
As for VR, there are numerous claims and hesitancy about privacy abuse through tracking and sensing technologies that are essential to VR development. I appreciate some hesitancy, but it is a bit sensationalized.
Beyond all of this, there are lots of claims of monopoly abuse. There is actually an FTC lawsuit that could lead to a landmark antritust case, but that is yet to be seen. I don't really think they have a monopoly as there are numerous competitors.
I apologize as I don't have links for everything, but that's an overview of my thoughts. I think Facebook is simply navigating the regulatory and social landscape in a way that any novel company or platform would be required to navigate. I think we often forget that this technology is new and will experience growing pains, even if at such massive scale. I think a lot of the blame for the fraying of U.S. democracy, the decline in mental health, and other social issues are incorrectly attributed to things that have brought change in the past few decades. More realistically, I think the U.S. (where most of the claims are relevant) is simply declining after several hundred years of abusive reign as the world's superpower.
> Facebook hired an investigator that concluded that their involvement was without their knowledge
It seems like you simply take Facebook at their word.
> More realistically, I think the U.S. (where most of the claims are relevant) is simply declining after several hundred years of abusive reign as the world's superpower.
You do realize that you have provided no actual explanation for the decline.
Can you explain how your account, with a meaningless username, was created in 2014, only to become active around 9 months ago?
Just as with Facebook it seems I am guilty until proven innocent. If you want to believe that they intentionally enabled genocide in a foreign country with politics that neither of us could likely begin to understand, then fine. I have been more than clear, and yet you ask for more. How can I offer explanation to the decline of a regime? Is it not obvious that mental health has been in decline for decades? Or that economic inequality is ever-growing? The average lifespan is in decline. Houselessness is on the rise. You balk at genocide? Our government regularly commits genocide on the scale of the holocaust [1] [2] [3], _with intent_.
Who should be held accountable for all of this? Facebook? What a joke. If they are truly guilty, regulators have all the power in the world to hold them accountable.
> How can I offer explanation to the decline of a regime? Is it not obvious that mental health has been in decline for decades? Or that economic inequality is ever-growing? The average lifespan is in decline. Houselessness is on the rise.
Yes, and Facebook is contributing to the acceleration of those things.
No. These problems would certainly exist even if Facebook never did. Like I said, Facebook could be dismantled by regulators today. It won't do anything.
Do you think Facebook or other social media are the main contributors to the acceleration of those things? Why?
I've no horse in the game, but it sounds like you have a pet hatred towards Facebook, to the extent that you don't seem to realize that there's a difference between "facebook was used as a tool in an undesirable way by people with ill intent" (similar to how Parler was used by a specific segment of the voter base around the last US presidential election) vs the much more farfetched "facebook employees deliberately rigged the system somehow to promote violence in myanman and anyone that could be remotely perceived to be siding with FB must be shilling for it" conspiracy theory. It's an entirely reasonable position to shake one's head at the media's portrayal of a political instability through a interwebz-colored lens, but also dislike what did happen in the FB platform as a result of the simple fact that people involved in the conflict happen to use the internet.
The point your parent poster is making is that sensationalism and the easily outraged tend to ignore the nuance between unintended butterfly effect consequences that are hard to prevent vs deliberate malice by the company itself for its own profit.
It's a good idea to reflect a bit on hatred to see if it's really warranted. It's very easy to think "oh look at all these negative things I heard, facebook should shut down". What's hard is to realize that what you read online and your mental categorization of things doesn't always neatly mirror reality accurately. Nobody thinks we should ban chocolate on the grounds that violent people eat it and the rest of us would still have food even if chocolate was gone; we only get molded to think this way about things like Facebook because of media narratives.
I agree with you on almost everything but we can't blame meta for weak democracy, underpaid teachers, private schools, lack of social programs, absent social services et al are weakening democracy
Sure, but try being critical about something that they can actually be faulted for rather than their incredible earnings. The OP was just pointing out that a lot of the criticism here made no sense.
So it went from 'these claims are outrageous' to they wouldn't hold up in a court of law? You're a facebook shill and you're embarrassing yourself. You're not fighting misinformation, you are the disinformation campaign.
If democracy can't survive Facebook then it probably was doomed already. Similarly with trying to live in civil society when there are already fellow citizens full of violence and hatred; FB might give voice to what is already there and already broken but isn't really the cause.
Although that's sort of like saying "if an ant can't survive being scorched by a magnifying glass, it was probably doomed to burn in the sun anyway".
What you're saying may be true – I've no idea. But I'm not sure we can yet dismiss the idea that social technology like Facebook, used as it is, might push us over a line we wouldn't otherwise cross.
Growth is plateauing looking at earnings and guidance, so their market cap will reflect fair market value. Growth stocks need to accelerate to maintain high valuations. That and the market is extra sensitive right now IMO. Their numbers are staggering, but earnings and guidance isn’t.
I worked at Facebook thinking it was trying to improve and have a positive impact on the world. Working there made me realize that the #1 goal was to increase active users, user engagement, and profitability, and having a responsible impact on the world would take a back seat to this. Additionally, it was clear that Zuck’s vision for the world is to create a universal platform through which the world connects and socializes, and the recent metaverse push is a dystopian continuation of this vision.
>thinking it was trying to improve and have a positive impact on the world
Were you like a very early employee or are you just that naive?
FB's intent became quite clear, quite fast in their history. Like, remember when they became so famous for their lack of ethics that even a hollywood movie came out whose plot is pretty much only about that?
And that was 12(!) years ago ... so, I am truly wondering, from where exactly did you get this idea of a company trying to change the world for good?
I wouldn't go so far to say that FB would ever be a resume negative. It really depends on what their experience there was like. Some really great people went to work for FB after making bank a Google in the early days and I would gladly work with any of the folks from that stage of FB. Post that period there was some serious internal culture problems (performance culture SMH) and yeah... I would say most of the good folks (that weren't properly isolated from that misery) left and there was a dark age of FB engineering as a result.
I think they recovered from this somewhat but these days it would need to be a case by case basis when I interview a candidate and get an understanding of their time at FB, what they worked on etc and with who.
I would never even consider working for Facebook no matter their interview process. They are a loathsome company led by a psychopath. They could offer me a job right now with no interview and I wouldn't take it.
Nearly every one can be bought. Choosing to be holier than thou while drawing a line of Facebook is awful, they can’t buy me, but otherwise not doing the same to the majority of public/big companies who are also ethically compromised, is not so much better.
Yes, I’d take a high paying job at Facebook. I live in a status quo, unfair, corrupt capitalist society in the west. I know I have to play the game.
Sure, if we're just talking about comparing generalizations or wild scenarios, but in context that person probably has access to other opportunities that rival or exceed Facebook's comp or social impact.
Betting against HN sentiment is usually a good way to make money.
I hope Zuckerberg pulls off Meta and what he's trying to do. He's an extremely good CEO, and the alternative is more power in the hands of TikTok and CCP controlled social media which I think is a lot worse.
I'm glad to see the investment they're making in trying to build a new platform, I hope we see AR hardware from Apple soon too.
While there is no such thing as a perfectly-ethical company within a Capitalist framework, there are degrees of ethical behavior that rightly influence a company's reputation.
Would I choose to work or support a company that clubs baby seals?
Less hyperbolic, would I choose to support a company that continually seeks to profit from promoting extremism in dialogue, creating self-perpetuating echo-chambers which have real-world consequences (re: the very real danger to American democratic processes), in addition to brainwashing people's parents into believing in utter hogwash and tearing families apart?
Yes, they are making bank. But at what cost? And should that cost influence your interaction with said company?
Fendi entered the chat. "We object! We don't use barbaric clubs anymore, we use proper pistols to dispatch baby animals in order to steal their hides to make Predator human trophy garmets from them. Please browse our winter collection."
I use my son as a sounding board on many things and it's been working pretty successfully for me. He was HIGHLY interested in VR, I got him an Oculus, and a bunch of other headsets before that, he went to play with Microsoft's at their stores, but today he has absolutely no interest - neither of his friends is into it either, none of the multitudes of sources he follows are interested either! You keep trying to abuse a corpse! I just cannot imagine a psychologically sane adult who would put on a headset and become an infantile avatar in a virtual world. It's sickening on any level! It's like the 3D movies which nobody cares about now! Gimmicks are always temporary.
What you say sounds like someone from the 70's bashing video games as a gimmick because their son got bored of playing Pong. As I said, it's too early for VR to catch on; there is still a huge space to explore there. Infantile avatars in VR is Pong in the 70's. Headset itself may be a temporary gimmick as we will surely get better ways to connect our senses to virtual worlds, but VR isn't going away.
No, everybody liked video games; I know nobody who likes VR. I'm sorry to ruin your assumptions, but I'm am a pathological case of an early adopter and have been for over 30 years!
People spend more time on an app where they feel comfortable. If FB did nothing to clean up feeds, it would probably drive away both those eyeballs and the advertisers who don't necessarily want their brand to be displayed next to unfiltered user-generated content.
One might argue FB is trying to "clean up" a problem that it caused/promoted in the first place.
Over time they've changed the "feeds" to work on principles that are good for advertisers, "influencers", and viral shit in general... at the expense of regular human contact and normal trusted social circles.
I don't use the main FB app but when I have before it'd constantly show me stuff from pages/people/whatever that I didn't follow. I think it was mostly friends of friends, or stuff friends liked. Have they got rid of all of that now?
i just logged in to my account (i look about once a week) and everything i see that is not an ad is something i actively opted into or was shared by someone i chose to follow/friend.
Thing about Facebook is, it pushes stuff at you. Not stuff you'll like, stuff you'll _engage_ with. Last time I logged in it offered me a weird anti-trans Economist article. Life is too short to invite a robot to irritate you; that's why I don't use Facebook anymore.
I think Meta and Tesla should consider merging because of the great synergy it will create. Imagine being driven to all your destinations while being plugged in to the Metaverse headset. You could enjoy beautiful sceneries while experiencing awesome real world g force. Tesla would also suddenly get billions more potential customers through their social network platforms. I would be so hyped!
I am a true believer in Tesla and I think it will have a great future. I believe that in the future (maybe a year from now) we will be able achieve what I said above. I believe you will be convinced too.
Facebook loses users for the first time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30186326 - Feb 2022 (395 comments)