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Metaverse is not bullshit. It's a sign of desperation. Facebook has _nothing_ for the future. * Blue app is already on it's death bed. * Instagram is already

Metaverse is not bullshit. It's a sign of desperation. Facebook has _nothing_ for the future. * Blue app is already on it's death bed. * Instagram is already seeing a massive decline in quality and engagement as its getting close to the end of its lifecycle. * They managed to survive Snapchat, but I think that made them think Instagram is too big to fail. Thus, they didn't go after TikTok. It was a mistake. * What's App is not monetizable. * Oculus is not becoming the next PS4/Xbox like they hoped. Facebook is usually being compared to the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon. It's nothing compared to them. It's not even gonna be able to do a Microsoft/IBM pivot as it has no monetizable developer ecosystem. I personally think they should've acquired TikTok last year when TikTok was looking to be acquired by Microsoft. They probably would've extended their survival for another 10-ish years (lifecycle of a social media)

schleck8 5y ago
> What's App is not monetizable It is, they talked about introducing ads to the status tab before. I agree on the rest though
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  The second they turn that on, Signal and Telegram will get an even larger influx of users than they got last year when the FB lawyers tried to weasel in some language enabling that and some other features in the Whatsapp terms of use. I still have not agreed to the terms of use since I continue to be able to opt out and am amused by FB basically chickening out requiring their users to actually agree. The normal course of action would be to eventually block access to the app. That hasn't happened. So, they could turn on ads but then they'd have to get me to agree to that first or risk losing me. They really want to do that but at the same time they are afraid of what will happen. In the same way they chickened out of their blockchain plans by simply not talking about it anymore. The Meta announcements featured a large absence of any of that. Which basically means they are probably giving up on the whole notion. I'm guessing Meta might turn out to be more of the same. FB is struggling to come up with things that actually work. A lot of their efforts just fizzle out. Facebook bots kind of never happened. Payments are dead in the water. They threw out the baby with the bathwater when they had an actual gaming platform with gamers on facebook and shutdown the platform in favor of a glorified ad platform. Actually a good plan for them would be to rewind fifteen years of bad decision making. Of course that would require getting rid of the chief decision maker.
  - names_are_hard 5y ago
    > I still have not agreed to the terms of use since I continue to be able to opt out and am amused by FB basically chickening out requiring their users to actually agree. The normal course of action would be to eventually block access to the app. That hasn't happened. Me too. Every couple of weeks they show me a popup asking me to accept the new terms and I just click the x and continue about my day. At first they were threatening me that I'd lose access to the app by some date but that date passed months ago and I still have access. I'm amused because I feel like I called their bluff and it turns out they're not as confident as they make themselves out to be. One day they'll probably block me but until then...shrug.
  - ushakov 5y ago
    But Telegram is testing its ad-platform as we’re speaking
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  The only thing whatsapp has going for it right now are network effects and the low friction of getting less-technically-inclined users to install a new app. Something like that that has no benefit to users is an absolute death warrant for them. The other apps only need to reach a tipping point and they will be absolute dead in the water, they're already creeping up.
__jerbl 5y ago
this.
Closi 5y ago
> I personally think they should've acquired TikTok last year when TikTok was looking to be acquired by Microsoft. They probably would've extended their survival for another 10-ish years (lifecycle of a social media) Eh, IMO I don't think that would have worked - I suspect it would have raised too much anti-trust attention and not have been allowed. The bigger picture is that in the UK at least, 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends. TikTok isn't really a replacement to insta/whatsapp/Facebook, it's a replacement to Youtube. I think Facebook is using the 'metaverse' as a metaphor to mean 'Facebook owning all forms of communication, as much as possible, both traditional messanger/audio but also extending into the real world as much as possible, and new media'. In that case, I think the metaverse is a much broader play (that nobody else can easily make, and that probably raises even more concerns!).
- pmlnr 5y ago
  > 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends Bring them back to email, because there are still many small email providers in the UK. See https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/ for email as IM.
  - dicknuckle 5y ago
    or just use Signal. people around me have been flocking to it from WhatsApp, I even got my wife on it.
    - pmlnr 5y ago
      Signal is just another centralized service; email is a standard. You can self-host it, a company can make internal-only servers, etc. Signal disallows even custom clients, let alone real self-hosting.
- Le_Dook 5y ago
  I agree, while (at least in younger people) messenger is declining, Instagram is basically the only platform you can contact everyone you known on. They want to be the major player in virtual reality communication, VR Chat for the masses. While incorporating large scale advertising into the pitch
dustingetz 5y ago
Facebook also has nothing better to spend the cash on – $60bn cash reserves in 2020 and revs are $120bn/yr growing at 30% y/y, what do you even do with that?
- Yajirobe 5y ago
  What is the income though? How much of that $120bn/yr is left?
  - tim333 5y ago
    $40bn which is still an awful lot. I can see punting on a VR metaverse could make sense if the spend is only 25% of their profits.
- Oddskar 5y ago
  I think there's an obvious answer to that question: don't focus so much on profit and ensure that the net benefit of your product for humanity is greater than it currently is.
  - dicknuckle 5y ago
    Nah that's too obvious. MUST. MAKE. PROFIT. FOR. SHAREHOLDERS. The machine must march on and grow at all costs.
    - Valakas_ 5y ago
      Unfortunately if we bring up 'ethics' we're the laughing stock of the room "aww he's so cute thinking about the good of humanity, what a nice guy. Anyway, as the adults were saying..."
- rajamaka 5y ago
  Pay dividends
tjpnz 5y ago
>Metaverse is not bullshit. It's a sign of desperation. Or a sign that Zuckerberg's read all the popular fiction on the subject but failed to comprehend how much of it was either satirical or meant as a warning.
dataexporter 5y ago
Facebook did have a budding developer ecosystem back in late 2000s with game developers and app developers using Facebook's platform to build their businesses. While it did have tons of privacy issues and data leaks, they could have built it into a sustainable ecosystem instead of making endless changes forcing developers to leave their ecosystem.
- tim333 5y ago
  Aw - I remember Cow Clicker. I wonder what happened to all that stuff.
  - redisman 5y ago
    They changed the game spamming algorithms from insane to useless. It was many orders of magnitude less traffic so I’d imagine most of those games are in life support or shut down
  - edwinyzh 5y ago
    I wonder that too, since I didn't watch closely nor use facebook frequently. IIRC there was a Russian company was hot since it has a bunch of popular games based on the FB platform.
- atribecalledqst 5y ago
  I remember I used to use a kanji memorization app on Facebook in the 2000s. It was pretty neat. Too bad stuff like that is gone now.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> Metaverse is not bullshit. It's a sign of desperation. Ha ha, so, in fact, bullshit. I'm so happy someone called it out. Being a developer, tech-savvy person, I should be all into BitCoin, VR, meta ... but I have recoiled from more or less the last decade of crap (including, I might add, "social" and maybe even phones — although they are great for navigating). Maybe I am just getting old (that is true) or maybe this is in fact a load of bullshit: just Big-Internet trying to make "meta" a thing. Pass.
- herodotus 5y ago
  with you all the way...
  - HellDunkel 5y ago
    same
orasis 5y ago
Sorry, have you seen their profits? Facebook is not going away any time soon.
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  I know it's not. Im talking about long term survival. They are gonna be like Yahoo: Years in decline. Except a little worse. Yahoo was incredibly diverse.
- short12 5y ago
  They wouldn't be the first high power and highly profitable tech company to fade away...
parasubvert 5y ago
I think this is optimistic. Oculus is winning the early rounds of the VR market war. Google in 1998 was just another search engine. Netflix mailed DVDs. Amazon grew from $150 to 600m revenue and had just started selling music and movies. Facebook non-ad revenue is $3b annually and growing. Oculus store and devices account for easily half or more of that number. Beat Saber on the Quest 2 alone has cracked $100m. Beat Saber! The biggest drag on Oculus right now is the need for a Facebook account. The switch to Meta fixes this, makes Facebook just one of many properties, with an eye on the prize. It’s like Microsoft pivoting to Azure and away from Windows years before Nadella did. Valve could step up, or Apple, or Google. But otherwise Facebook is running away with VR, and that will have a massive impact on all of us.
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  > The biggest drag on Oculus right now is the need for a Facebook account. Maybe within the tech circles and HN crowd. But outside these circles nobody even feels like something is off.
  - parasubvert 5y ago
    Well, what’s off is that kids are rejecting classic Facebook in favour of Snap, Tiktok or Instagram. Who wants to hang out with family members and aggrieved conservatives?
- enneff 5y ago
  Nobody cares about VR.
  - tourist2d 5y ago
    Great contribution to the discussion!
  - parasubvert 5y ago
    Get off my lawn! Reminds me of when no one cared about native mobile (vs the Web), or before that, no one cared about GUIs (command line is where it’s at)
13415 5y ago
Whatsapp is monetizable. They're tapping into the almost realtime conversations of a billion users, their images and videos. They can extract a ton of information from that to sell to advertisers. And unlike Facebook, Whatsapp is still used actively,
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  The money are coming from the FB app/site though, trying to sell ads in WA would probably kill it.
deanCommie 5y ago
> Thus, they didn't go after TikTok. It was a mistake. What are you talking about - they went after TikTok exactly the same way as they did after Snapchat: By cloning the feature and making it prominent in the app, then double-listing them in the main Big Blue App, too. Instagram added Stories to copy Snapchat and they are still prominently at the top of the app. Then they added Reels to copy Tik Tok and it's the primary central bottom button of the app, and also one of the first things you see in the Facebook app. The hilarity though is that Tiktok watermarks exported videos. Vast majority of "Reels" on Instagram have Tik Tok watermarks. They're failing to destroy Tik Tok the way they succeeded in destroying Snapchat (effectively) for a couple of reasons though: 1) Snapchat was primarily for person-to-person communication (their attempts at highlighting "creators" was always awkward. Instagram already had all the celebrities, and what grows success in "social networks" these days isn't the social graph between peers but parasocial graphs with big time creators 2) Snapchat was always technologically inferior. The quality of the photos and videos was awful. The AR filters were slow. Instagram offered higher quality and better performance. TikTok doesn't have that problem. It's blazing fast and for the kind of meme content it is best for, video quality isn't important. 3) TikTok's For You Page (FYP) recommendation algorithm is truly groundbreaking, and will be remembered in 10 years the way we remember panning around on Google Maps and not having the page reload. It is truly incredible how effectively it learns content you might be interested in after some engagement, and crafts an FYP that feels like it's speaking directly to your anxieties, sense of humor, neurosis, aspirations, goals, etc. You can call it creepy and you can worry about how all this information about your personality is going to the Chinese government, but that's a separate issue...
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  That's exactly what Im talking about. They thought they can win this round by copying features of TikTok into Insgagram, just like they did with Snapchat. They were wrong. They should've gone after TikTok by acquiring it. Just like they did with Instagram.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
> What's App is not monetizable That seems shortsighted. I’m not even talking about destroying the app by adding ads or selling user data. They could add payments between individuals, it would instantly become the default method in many countries. Expand it to pay businesses then, via QR codes like they have in China. Make sure you’re cheaper than cards and Apple/Google Pay, especially for small sums. They could sell business accounts, and allow customers to message any business by searching them by name (without having them as a contact). Give them a url and QR code that opens a conversation directly. Develop tools for pros to efficiently handle customers. Let customers book a business directly from the app for example. Given the reach of Whatsapp in many places you’d have a lot of interested businesses. They have a place in the phone dock of entire first-world countries, billions of people literally have the app open all day, and they can’t monetize?
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  I'm sure they can find ways to monetize it but they will ever be monetized enough for Facebook's size as one of their major revenue streams. How much of Apple/Google's revenue is due to their payment systems? When Facebook thinks of monetizing Whats App as one of their major/only assets, it needs to find a business plan that'd allow billions of dollars.
- rapiz 5y ago
  That's what wechat is like in China and tech folks hate it.
SergeAx 5y ago
I don't think it is a good idea to go after TikTok. TikTok is a massive waste of cash without any viable way to profits and under a constant threat of being banned by US or China authorities. And already banned in India. By the way, a hefty portion of that cash was pocketed by Facebook and Instagram. Facebook's deathbed is gold laden. Ads targeted to 45+ users are 2-3 times more expensive than ads for 16-25. By the way, ads targeted to 30+ women (hello, Instagram!) are even more expensive.

schleck8 5y ago

> What's App is not monetizable It is, they talked about introducing ads to the status tab before. I agree on the rest though

jillesvangurp 5y ago
The second they turn that on, Signal and Telegram will get an even larger influx of users than they got last year when the FB lawyers tried to weasel in some language enabling that and some other features in the Whatsapp terms of use. I still have not agreed to the terms of use since I continue to be able to opt out and am amused by FB basically chickening out requiring their users to actually agree. The normal course of action would be to eventually block access to the app. That hasn't happened. So, they could turn on ads but then they'd have to get me to agree to that first or risk losing me. They really want to do that but at the same time they are afraid of what will happen. In the same way they chickened out of their blockchain plans by simply not talking about it anymore. The Meta announcements featured a large absence of any of that. Which basically means they are probably giving up on the whole notion. I'm guessing Meta might turn out to be more of the same. FB is struggling to come up with things that actually work. A lot of their efforts just fizzle out. Facebook bots kind of never happened. Payments are dead in the water. They threw out the baby with the bathwater when they had an actual gaming platform with gamers on facebook and shutdown the platform in favor of a glorified ad platform. Actually a good plan for them would be to rewind fifteen years of bad decision making. Of course that would require getting rid of the chief decision maker.
- names_are_hard 5y ago
  > I still have not agreed to the terms of use since I continue to be able to opt out and am amused by FB basically chickening out requiring their users to actually agree. The normal course of action would be to eventually block access to the app. That hasn't happened. Me too. Every couple of weeks they show me a popup asking me to accept the new terms and I just click the x and continue about my day. At first they were threatening me that I'd lose access to the app by some date but that date passed months ago and I still have access. I'm amused because I feel like I called their bluff and it turns out they're not as confident as they make themselves out to be. One day they'll probably block me but until then...shrug.
- ushakov 5y ago
  But Telegram is testing its ad-platform as we’re speaking
Griffinsauce 5y ago
The only thing whatsapp has going for it right now are network effects and the low friction of getting less-technically-inclined users to install a new app. Something like that that has no benefit to users is an absolute death warrant for them. The other apps only need to reach a tipping point and they will be absolute dead in the water, they're already creeping up.

__jerbl 5y ago

this.

Closi 5y ago

> I personally think they should've acquired TikTok last year when TikTok was looking to be acquired by Microsoft. They probably would've extended their survival for another 10-ish years (lifecycle of a social media) Eh, IMO I don't think that would have worked - I suspect it would have raised too much anti-trust attention and not have been allowed. The bigger picture is that in the UK at least, 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends. TikTok isn't really a replacement to insta/whatsapp/Facebook, it's a replacement to Youtube. I think Facebook is using the 'metaverse' as a metaphor to mean 'Facebook owning all forms of communication, as much as possible, both traditional messanger/audio but also extending into the real world as much as possible, and new media'. In that case, I think the metaverse is a much broader play (that nobody else can easily make, and that probably raises even more concerns!).

pmlnr 5y ago
> 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends Bring them back to email, because there are still many small email providers in the UK. See https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/ for email as IM.
- dicknuckle 5y ago
  or just use Signal. people around me have been flocking to it from WhatsApp, I even got my wife on it.
  - pmlnr 5y ago
    Signal is just another centralized service; email is a standard. You can self-host it, a company can make internal-only servers, etc. Signal disallows even custom clients, let alone real self-hosting.
Le_Dook 5y ago
I agree, while (at least in younger people) messenger is declining, Instagram is basically the only platform you can contact everyone you known on. They want to be the major player in virtual reality communication, VR Chat for the masses. While incorporating large scale advertising into the pitch

dustingetz 5y ago

Facebook also has nothing better to spend the cash on – $60bn cash reserves in 2020 and revs are $120bn/yr growing at 30% y/y, what do you even do with that?

Yajirobe 5y ago
What is the income though? How much of that $120bn/yr is left?
- tim333 5y ago
  $40bn which is still an awful lot. I can see punting on a VR metaverse could make sense if the spend is only 25% of their profits.
Oddskar 5y ago
I think there's an obvious answer to that question: don't focus so much on profit and ensure that the net benefit of your product for humanity is greater than it currently is.
- dicknuckle 5y ago
  Nah that's too obvious. MUST. MAKE. PROFIT. FOR. SHAREHOLDERS. The machine must march on and grow at all costs.
  - Valakas_ 5y ago
    Unfortunately if we bring up 'ethics' we're the laughing stock of the room "aww he's so cute thinking about the good of humanity, what a nice guy. Anyway, as the adults were saying..."
rajamaka 5y ago
Pay dividends

tjpnz 5y ago

>Metaverse is not bullshit. It's a sign of desperation. Or a sign that Zuckerberg's read all the popular fiction on the subject but failed to comprehend how much of it was either satirical or meant as a warning.

dataexporter 5y ago

Facebook did have a budding developer ecosystem back in late 2000s with game developers and app developers using Facebook's platform to build their businesses. While it did have tons of privacy issues and data leaks, they could have built it into a sustainable ecosystem instead of making endless changes forcing developers to leave their ecosystem.

tim333 5y ago
Aw - I remember Cow Clicker. I wonder what happened to all that stuff.
- redisman 5y ago
  They changed the game spamming algorithms from insane to useless. It was many orders of magnitude less traffic so I’d imagine most of those games are in life support or shut down
- edwinyzh 5y ago
  I wonder that too, since I didn't watch closely nor use facebook frequently. IIRC there was a Russian company was hot since it has a bunch of popular games based on the FB platform.
atribecalledqst 5y ago
I remember I used to use a kanji memorization app on Facebook in the 2000s. It was pretty neat. Too bad stuff like that is gone now.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> Metaverse is not bullshit. It's a sign of desperation. Ha ha, so, in fact, bullshit. I'm so happy someone called it out. Being a developer, tech-savvy person, I should be all into BitCoin, VR, meta ... but I have recoiled from more or less the last decade of crap (including, I might add, "social" and maybe even phones — although they are great for navigating). Maybe I am just getting old (that is true) or maybe this is in fact a load of bullshit: just Big-Internet trying to make "meta" a thing. Pass.

herodotus 5y ago
with you all the way...
- HellDunkel 5y ago
  same

orasis 5y ago

Sorry, have you seen their profits? Facebook is not going away any time soon.

emilsedgh 5y ago
I know it's not. Im talking about long term survival. They are gonna be like Yahoo: Years in decline. Except a little worse. Yahoo was incredibly diverse.
short12 5y ago
They wouldn't be the first high power and highly profitable tech company to fade away...

parasubvert 5y ago

I think this is optimistic. Oculus is winning the early rounds of the VR market war. Google in 1998 was just another search engine. Netflix mailed DVDs. Amazon grew from $150 to 600m revenue and had just started selling music and movies. Facebook non-ad revenue is $3b annually and growing. Oculus store and devices account for easily half or more of that number. Beat Saber on the Quest 2 alone has cracked $100m. Beat Saber! The biggest drag on Oculus right now is the need for a Facebook account. The switch to Meta fixes this, makes Facebook just one of many properties, with an eye on the prize. It’s like Microsoft pivoting to Azure and away from Windows years before Nadella did. Valve could step up, or Apple, or Google. But otherwise Facebook is running away with VR, and that will have a massive impact on all of us.

emilsedgh 5y ago
> The biggest drag on Oculus right now is the need for a Facebook account. Maybe within the tech circles and HN crowd. But outside these circles nobody even feels like something is off.
- parasubvert 5y ago
  Well, what’s off is that kids are rejecting classic Facebook in favour of Snap, Tiktok or Instagram. Who wants to hang out with family members and aggrieved conservatives?
enneff 5y ago
Nobody cares about VR.
- tourist2d 5y ago
  Great contribution to the discussion!
- parasubvert 5y ago
  Get off my lawn! Reminds me of when no one cared about native mobile (vs the Web), or before that, no one cared about GUIs (command line is where it’s at)

13415 5y ago

Whatsapp is monetizable. They're tapping into the almost realtime conversations of a billion users, their images and videos. They can extract a ton of information from that to sell to advertisers. And unlike Facebook, Whatsapp is still used actively,

tsimionescu 5y ago
The money are coming from the FB app/site though, trying to sell ads in WA would probably kill it.

deanCommie 5y ago

> Thus, they didn't go after TikTok. It was a mistake. What are you talking about - they went after TikTok exactly the same way as they did after Snapchat: By cloning the feature and making it prominent in the app, then double-listing them in the main Big Blue App, too. Instagram added Stories to copy Snapchat and they are still prominently at the top of the app. Then they added Reels to copy Tik Tok and it's the primary central bottom button of the app, and also one of the first things you see in the Facebook app. The hilarity though is that Tiktok watermarks exported videos. Vast majority of "Reels" on Instagram have Tik Tok watermarks. They're failing to destroy Tik Tok the way they succeeded in destroying Snapchat (effectively) for a couple of reasons though: 1) Snapchat was primarily for person-to-person communication (their attempts at highlighting "creators" was always awkward. Instagram already had all the celebrities, and what grows success in "social networks" these days isn't the social graph between peers but parasocial graphs with big time creators 2) Snapchat was always technologically inferior. The quality of the photos and videos was awful. The AR filters were slow. Instagram offered higher quality and better performance. TikTok doesn't have that problem. It's blazing fast and for the kind of meme content it is best for, video quality isn't important. 3) TikTok's For You Page (FYP) recommendation algorithm is truly groundbreaking, and will be remembered in 10 years the way we remember panning around on Google Maps and not having the page reload. It is truly incredible how effectively it learns content you might be interested in after some engagement, and crafts an FYP that feels like it's speaking directly to your anxieties, sense of humor, neurosis, aspirations, goals, etc. You can call it creepy and you can worry about how all this information about your personality is going to the Chinese government, but that's a separate issue...

emilsedgh 5y ago
That's exactly what Im talking about. They thought they can win this round by copying features of TikTok into Insgagram, just like they did with Snapchat. They were wrong. They should've gone after TikTok by acquiring it. Just like they did with Instagram.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

> What's App is not monetizable That seems shortsighted. I’m not even talking about destroying the app by adding ads or selling user data. They could add payments between individuals, it would instantly become the default method in many countries. Expand it to pay businesses then, via QR codes like they have in China. Make sure you’re cheaper than cards and Apple/Google Pay, especially for small sums. They could sell business accounts, and allow customers to message any business by searching them by name (without having them as a contact). Give them a url and QR code that opens a conversation directly. Develop tools for pros to efficiently handle customers. Let customers book a business directly from the app for example. Given the reach of Whatsapp in many places you’d have a lot of interested businesses. They have a place in the phone dock of entire first-world countries, billions of people literally have the app open all day, and they can’t monetize?

emilsedgh 5y ago
I'm sure they can find ways to monetize it but they will ever be monetized enough for Facebook's size as one of their major revenue streams. How much of Apple/Google's revenue is due to their payment systems? When Facebook thinks of monetizing Whats App as one of their major/only assets, it needs to find a business plan that'd allow billions of dollars.
rapiz 5y ago
That's what wechat is like in China and tech folks hate it.

SergeAx 5y ago

I don't think it is a good idea to go after TikTok. TikTok is a massive waste of cash without any viable way to profits and under a constant threat of being banned by US or China authorities. And already banned in India. By the way, a hefty portion of that cash was pocketed by Facebook and Instagram. Facebook's deathbed is gold laden. Ads targeted to 45+ users are 2-3 times more expensive than ads for 16-25. By the way, ads targeted to 30+ women (hello, Instagram!) are even more expensive.