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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'v
by omot 5y ago
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."
- Aperocky 5y agoWell all of those point seem to sum up to: "We're getting beat by Tiktok and we're going to catch up by being more like tiktok" That doesn't exactly exude confidence.
- sergiotapia 5y agoI 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.
- jackling 5y agoThey also have Instagram, Messenger and Oculus. I think without Whatsapp they'd still be doing decent, and not toast.
- ra7 5y agoDidn't they do the same thing when Snapchat took off and then blew it out of the water with Instagram Stories? There is a track record.
- omot 5y agoI will say Instagram is getting so crowded. Adding Stories to Instagram felt natural, but shoving Reels in, feels like a squeeze.
- whyenot 5y agoI 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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoThe hot garbage app makes almost as much money as Facebook, so... There's that...
- rurp 5y agoFor 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.
- whiplash451 5y agoThis book explains very well why and how FB destroyed Instagram from day one, cutting its core values (and therefore long-term value) into pieces. https://www.amazon.com/No-Filter-Inside-Story-Instagram-ebook/dp/B07TFB4R2S/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=no+filter+the+inside+story+of+instagram&qid=1643894964&sprefix=instagram+insid%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/No-Filter-Inside-Story-Instagram-eboo...
- eloisius 5y agoDuring 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.
- a123b456c 5y agoWhy not? It worked when they copied Snapchat's stories feature.
- IgorPartola 5y agoBecause so far their content is full of obviously fake poor quality videos and their selection algorithm for those is basically an RNG.
- zepto 5y agoIt’s too late. Nobody is switching from TikTok to Facebook.
- newsclues 5y agoI think the key is that youth are going to TikTok and not Facebook. They lost the next generation of kids!
- rdtwo 5y agoYeah idk I thought the same last time but somehow Facebook always comes back buy buying everything And copying everyone
- Longhanks 5y agoIt’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.
- newsclues 5y agoThey can acquire new users but copying them or buying them won’t necessarily keep them. If the youth are allergic to any FB networks there just needs to be a viable alternative for them to flee.
- 5y ago
- tmccrary55 5y agoBoomerTok
- IgorPartola 5y agoI 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.
- laurent92 5y agoI’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.
- gorgoiler 5y agoThe media format is the same but it is superficial and a shallow moat at best. The social networks are quite different: FB: formal private (or special interest, in Groups); Insta: close private (or public if you are a verified content producer); TikTok: still about building ad hoc network effects based on content alone.
- electrondood 5y agoIt'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.
- IgorPartola 5y agoSo 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?
- GekkePrutser 5y agoWow I left it around the time of the Cambridge analytica thing. Sounds like I haven't missed anything...
- jliptzin 5y agoI felt that way about 8 years ago and stopped using it then
- kdtsh 5y agoBy 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.
- michaelmcdonald 5y agoI’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.
- Ozzie_osman 5y agoIt'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.
- pier25 5y agoI wonder why they didn't buy TikTok when it was starting to become popular like they did with Instagram or Whatsapp. Maybe they thought it was going to fail like Vine and other short video platforms.
- prostoalex 5y agoConsidering the amount of gov-relations it took for Giphy acquisition https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/metas-acquisition-giphy-set-blocked-123626666.html https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/metas-acquisition-giphy-... it just seems very likely that a TikTok purchase would be blocked by at least one regulator.
- rkk3 5y ago> 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance
- cercatrova 5y agoI remember when it was still Musical.ly, man I'm old
- ssully 5y agoYup. I remember my younger cousin showing me Musical.ly and thinking how horrible the app seemed. Should have realized she was ahead of the curve!
- netheril96 5y agoTencent wanted to buy Bytedance, the company who made TikTok. The founder of Bytedance refused. Surely he would refuse Facebook too.
- stephenboyd 5y agoMy favorite thing about Reels is the videos have the TikTok watermark including the username so I can find new people to follow on TikTok.
- cwkoss 5y agoStories "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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- engineeringwoke 5y agoMaybe 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.
- cwkoss 5y agoAh, 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.
- colinmhayes 5y agoZuck 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> 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.
- whiplash451 5y agoSo, I don't use FB or TikTok, but isn't FB just trying to copycat TikTok? They would never do that, they've never done it in the past.
- smrtinsert 5y agoMy nana can't wait for the jump to short form video
- pg_1234 5y agoWooooooohooooooo facebook a all the corrupt exploitative shit it represents takes a hit!