5 ms·

Why Meta is tanking and how Zuckerberg can fix it

14 points by fortran77 4y ago

bhouston 4y ago
I suspect if Elon can get away with charging many, and probably most, heavy users of the platform a monthly fee, Zuckerberg will as well. In many ways such an outcome makes sense given Apple's ATT changes decimated targeted advertising revenue.
- tmalsburg2 4y ago
  Charging the people who create content for you is not going to fly.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    Some twitter users are clearly willing to pay for whatever it is they get out of using twitter - one just paid $44 billion :)
  - aliqot 4y ago
    For you maybe, but people are vain enough to pay 20 bucks and more for a little blue check. There were insider rings charging much more for it. Time will tell though, if the easiness with which a blue checkmark is acquired will diminish the significance of having one, and to what degree.
    - hobs 4y ago
      It doesn't matter, charging all engaged users won't make enough money to be meaningful, the math just doesn't work out.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - aqme28 4y ago
        This. It's akin to charging YouTube creators $20/month. These are not the users that are making them money.
    - lupire 4y ago
      How many people will pay 2x the price of Disney+/Spotify/Netflix for a blue check on Twitter?
      - willcipriano 4y ago
        90% of the people who currently have them is my guess. Though the winds of social favor may shift as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought.
        jasonlotito 4y ago
        Blue checkmarks will be people paying to market to you. It won't take long to block people with blue checkmarks. Before it was some verification that this was a real person/official entity. As for twitter becoming open to more "diversity of thought" I mean, I guess if you want more ads, sure?
        matthewdgreen 4y ago
        There's a great Dr. Seuss book called "The Sneetches" I think would help you to understand what's about to happen.
        luddit3 4y ago
        Twitter devolving into 4chan or as you say "diversity of thought" will not lend itself to having journalists wanting to keep their status on the site.
        hutzlibu 4y ago
        "as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought." That remains to be seen. It might as well just lead to a shift of thought. Or that all opinions are welcome, but only those get traction and an audience, that happen to align to the opinions of Musk (and whoever else, who has invested heavily behind the scenes)
        AlexandrB 4y ago
        I use Twitter more than I should - though in a read-only context - and I don't understand what "diversity of thought" is missing at the moment. You can go on any leftist's Twitter and see replies calling them communist, calling trans people mentally ill, etc. The only stuff getting banned consistently is either incitement, like calling for "death con 3" on a group of people or outright racial/gendered slurs. There are mass-reporting campaigns (targeting individuals from both "sides"), but these are usually overturned and are not entirely Twitter's fault. Sure, better moderation would improve the outcome in mass-reporting cases, but it's less a case of bad policy and more a case of Twitter needing to invest more in moderation. Something I think is less likely now that Twitter is loaded up with debt.
    - _jal 4y ago
      We'll have to see. When it was "exclusive" and indicated some degree of notability, yeah, people who couldn't get it wanted it. Now it signifies you're willing to pay $250/year for a virtual hood ornament. A nice signal for scammers, but otherwise like listing yourself in "Who's Who".
      - usrusr 4y ago
        There are different ways it could work out. On Strava, more than half of the people I interact with are subscribers and that used to be more a signal of "willing to chime in for the platform to remain mostly ad-free" than a fee for extended freemium features (this has changed a bit, more paywalled features, and I'm not too happy about that despite being a subscriber). I believe that it would be possible (even if not likely) for Twitter to shift into a lean state where they focus on just keeping the boat running and fostering loyalty with those who can and want to afford a subscription that's more a supporter badge than a gateway to extended features. Certainly depends on how much of their current cost is essentially ad sales and how much of that they can (and want to) cut. At least they are certainly much closer to that than anything Meta ever created or bought (with the exception of Oculus, which might certainly have been on a path to becoming a viable hardware company had it not received the Zuck's kiss of becoming deeply untrustable)
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    But it will definitely temper my social media addiction, which will make me a lot more productive. So I'm rooting for it.
  - indymike 4y ago
    I think a lot of them would pay a small amount to keep the cash flowing. They many not like it, but the leverage is on the platform's side until the audience moves.
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    People have an extremely dependent relationship with Twitter. It’s more like gambling than media. They will absolutely pay.
    - kspacewalk2 4y ago
      If we don't fund-raise and pay for $position_X_on_political_spectrum voices on Twitter to spread virtue and truth, the conversation will be hijacked by those goddamn $position_Y_on_political_spectrum shills and traitors!
  - baxtr 4y ago
    It’s clearly a trade-off decision. If paying will give you access to a target audience people will pay. But I agree that you need some kind of business to be willing to pay.
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    Yes it will, if those people are creating the content for some other goal - e.g. political, commercial, publicity, etc.
  - guywithahat 4y ago
    I mean the entirety of Gab and the fediverse are based off of content producers paying to use the service
    - cloutchaser 4y ago
      People pay gab? What?
      - guywithahat 4y ago
        Yeah Gab Pro, it lets you upload higher quality content, videos, and some other stuff including applying to get verified. It's how they made most of their money for a long time, ads are a recent thing for their site to my understanding. It's $15/month
- aqme28 4y ago
  You're more optimistic than I am that charging for verification would be an effective way to make money for Twitter. More likely I think it'll just lead to far fewer blue checks and no significant change of revenue.
  - osrec 4y ago
    And it may also make the blue ticks meaningless, if just anyone can pay and get them.
    - cma 4y ago
      That's how universities with donor and alumni preference work. They let in notable people more easily and people that test well may even get a scholarship, and others can bribe to be included in the club.
      - giaour 4y ago
        Bribing your way into an elite college costs a lot more than $20/month, though. As a society, we also confer prestige on a lot of things that basically amount to spending a prohibitively large sum of money: running a foundation; being an angel investor; owning a sports team, champion racehorse, Lamborghini, etc. But if just anybody can afford something and the only barrier to entry is cost, then it has no social currency.
        usrusr 4y ago
        There are plenty of goods that work essentially like veblen goods but that are not really out of reach for anybody who is a non-zero amount of disposable beyond starvation. Converse shoes, Ray Ban shades, there's an endless list of brands that people pay a premium for to show off, despite not containing even the tiniest trace of that exclusivity that stems from being prohibitively expensive.
        giaour 4y ago
- vxNsr 4y ago
  People fundamentally use Facebook differently than twitter, even if fb can be used as a public square, most ppl still use it to network with ppl they know (or used to know). Whereas twitter’s entire use case is talking to people who you’ve never met and likely never will. The point is that engagement is very different and no one cares about verification on fb. Editable posts have been a thing for years and I’m blanking on what other features are part of twitter blue but I doubt it’ll be enough to charge people $19.99/m
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lupire 4y ago
  Heavy users as in frequent posters: is just selling native advertising. It doesn't change the ad-suported model.
  - krisroadruck 4y ago
    ^ Been on twitter since the early days. I'm not much of a social creature by nature, but as a marketing channel, twitter has by far generated the most business for me over the years. I just be helpful in public, and when we need a new customer I literally just tweet "had some hours open up if anyone is looking for X" and just like magic we get a new customer. I wouldn't scoff at paying a little to keep that, but remove the non-native/boosted advertising from my feed.
- zzuko 4y ago
  Facebook or Instagram doesnt have monitization problem. Wouldn't this be short sighted / greedy?
- cronix 4y ago
  I actually think we should pay for the things we use. Then we can retire the "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" excuse that many just automatically throw out to justify data collection.
  - egeozcan 4y ago
    Most keep collecting data (making you the product) even when you pay for the product. MS Windows, Smart TVs, your graphics card driver, your popular news source even with the ad-free plan... It looks like you cannot pay them enough to get rid of the tracking.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    You're going to be the product regardless. They'll just charge you on top of collecting and profiting from the data they collect on you.
- shagie 4y ago
  > I suspect if Elon can get away with charging many, and probably most, heavy users of the platform a monthly fee That's going really well so far... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
- pliftkl 4y ago
  I would absolutely be willing to pay a monthly fee for a Facebook that wouldn't serve me ads or "suggested" things in my feed, and only showed me things that I explicitly said I was interested in. I'm curious how much I'm actually worth to FB under the advertising model, since that's going to dictate how much fee they would need to ditch advertising.
patchorang 4y ago
https://archive.ph/K2qwE https://archive.ph/K2qwE
ewzimm 4y ago
It would be interesting to know why Mark didn't choose this option because Alphabet had already structured their company exaclty like this, separating Google from Other Bets, and so there was a clear precedent from a peer. Did Mark ever explain why he thought this was the wrong path for the company?
Invictus0 4y ago
Zucc knows what he's doing. No investor was ever going to love the $40B capex on metaverse, they would happily ride the Facebook cash cow into the ground and suck the life out of the company dividend by dividend. Zucc just doesn't care about the quarterly reports, he's going to execute on his vision regardless.
- mola 4y ago
  Never liked Zuckerberg, but you seem correct. Facebooks trajectory was pretty obvious. Creating a TikTok clone or such would just be chasing your own tail. The only real future for Facebook is something new. It's very high risk, and can rarely be done in a public company the size of meta, but he positioned himself to make it possible. Time will tell if this bet was good (for him, for us I'm pretty sure a successful metaverse is awful)
- c7b 4y ago
  Zuck's vision is btw directly taken from an explicitly dystopian narrative of how VR tech could play out. It is a vision that would be a net positive for humanity if it failed (and its fate is btw not tied to the success of AR/VR tech in general - it's quite conceivable that the one takes off without the other). It's driven by greed for money and power, and it is quite ironic that it happens to be Wall Street that's delivered the strongest negative verdict so far (which doesn't mean that it has to fail, btw - I was short Meta since they announced this vision, but I might consider realizing those gains soon).
- fullshark 4y ago
  Why is it binary? Why is 40B capex going to make it a reality and 30B/20B/10B not?
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    To be clear, I don't think any amount of money will make it work, I don't believe in the vision. My point is only that Zucc is not the hapless dolt the article sort of makes him out to be.
ouid 4y ago
facebook is bad because it is run with an iron fist by a single person. Eventually Zuckerberg was surrounded by yesmen. This is almost impossible to avoid. With wealth inequality on the rise, the yesman industry has developed a lot of tradecraft that has made them better at the extraction of that wealth. This creates mania, and with no oversight, the entire company is subject to his manic whims.
- fullshark 4y ago
  I'd like to think this is the final nail in the coffin in dual stock structures, but of course the next great growth company will be built somewhere sometime, and the public markets will be desperate to get a piece and will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Strange. I think Facebook is bad because they've turned a decent, useful product into a cash-generation machine... to the detriment of the original product. So much so that many have decided that it's not worth dealing with the cash-generating cancer to access the compromised functionality of the core product. Zuck is in a unique position where he has full control over Facebook. He could declare today that Facebook doesn't need to generate this much profit, add an option for a chronological news feed, and turn down the ads to "KTLO" level from the current "fund the metaverse, maximum profit" levels. I loathe Zuck because he refuses to do anything like this, despite the obvious social ills of Facebook. Maybe corporate yesmen have something to do with his choice, but it seems more likely to me that Zuck has decided to keep Facebook a cancerous mess all on his own.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  My coworker just told us a story in this morning's meeting about signing up for Facebook. He created an account about a week ago, but didn't upload anything, post, or put in any optional information. Yesterday he received an email notifying him that his account was suspended because it 'violated community guidelines'. The just lost what would have been a new customer, over what, exactly? Who knows...
nimbius 4y ago
the one thing the article tap dances around is the fact that Meta as a company has been horribly overvalued for about the past decade. Its managed to avoid its market haircut largely with smoke and mirror efforts like marketplace and a video chat device (not to mention the strategic rebrand as 'meta.') but the billion dollar metaverse at the cusp of a market recession and record inflation was clearly more than investors were ready to pretend was a viable strategy. people are drawing comparisons to twitter? and im not sure why. Twitter has always been a massive underperformer and basically just serves as a safe harbor for brand engagement. its worst bug is permitting any political discussion whatsoever as thats generally not brand-safe. Musk can work to lock it down a little more to appease major marketing players --which in doing so will accellerate its user exodus-- or he can start charging users for the pleasure of airing their hot takes and reduce the advertising footprint on twitter drastically, but he cannot do both. Zuck cant do much to staunch the bleeding at Face, er, meta. Methinks its time to do what he should have done a decade ago: sell the shares and do something else if hes capable of it. if not, well, Gates has proven you can recycle your own cash endlessly as the cow chews the cud through an obtuse network of your own charities that serve no greater purpose than to launder money and perpetuate your legacy in a way that cant be cancelled or removed from the public square if youre posthumously outed as a villain.
Tangurena2 4y ago
Zuckerberg could help meta by retiring.
VLM 4y ago
Follow the money not the tech for this story. Facebook sold to individuals as a workforce automation platform for teenage girl relationships-as-a-pattern that anyone can use, AND double dipped selling to biz and gov as a propaganda outlet and that makes huge revenue until people get tired of it, disillusioned, and move on. It seems to mostly be bots and addicts now, I wouldn't go there in 2022, to actually socialize or be propagandized to. Meta's story is "lets do the same thing over again but technologically more complicated and expensive" No Facebook enduser ever wanted to do the same stuff as FB but requiring a more expensive graphics card or shorter battery life. Meta doesn't seem to have a purpose to endusers. To technical people its an interesting challenge, but to end users its this generation's superconducting supercollider. "Well it burns stacks of cash to entertain techie people and nobody else cares". Best of luck with that biz model...
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  You’re right to say follow the money, but you didn’t actually do it. Revenue is basically flat. Ad impressions up around 20% this year. Engagement is not going down. Meta stock is down 70% this year because mark just said he’s going to lose 15 billion on reality labs next year even though ever single investor is saying that number is at least 5x too high. Investors no longer trust mark has their best interest at heart.
vlunkr 4y ago
Zuckerberg seems to really think that VR is the next ”big thing” like the iPhone. I’m curious what people here think about that. I’m currently on the skeptical side for a couple of reasons. The tech isn’t there. These headsets are bulky and ugly, only very dedicated users are willing to wear them for hours a day. Maybe someday they’ll be the size of Google glass, but it’s certainly too early to bet your company on it. The killer app is basically VR Chat. This already exists and has existed in non-VR forms (second life) for ages. It’s definitely a successful idea, but it appeals to a relatively niche crowd, mostly very online teens. A phone doesn’t fully occupy your senses like VR. We have responsibilities in the real world that keep us from staying fully in VR. NFTs. Why would they bring NFTs into the marketing? NFTs appeal to a certain crowd for sure, but everyone else is repelled by that crowd, and is sick of everything about NFTs. Lastly, they need to work on marketing. Especially a new spokesman. I think VR is probably here to stay this time, but they should focus on gaming. It actually works, but there needs to be some fresh ideas before people get tired of it. Send dev kits out and incentive really creative developers to get involved. Man cannot live on Beatsaber alone.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
  There is already great "experiences" in VR. One issue being that for a lot of them you need a room dedicated to it. Another issue is, If you happen to be addicted to your couch, a lot of games doesn't work... Because you have to stand up to play them.
- helen___keller 4y ago
  Idk about VR but I think AR could possibly become a winner (assuming fundamental problems like battery life and headset weight are solved) Everyone has this mindset that VR must be coupled with greater immersion. I think the real “value unlock” will be when it’s just for casual side browsing alongside daily life, like how most people use smartphones Will the tech ever get there? Will this even be good for daily life? Probably not. But it might be addictive enough to displace smartphone usage. Immersion is too intense. Nobody wants to be immersed for more than maybe an hour, so VR will always just be a toy
  - 4y ago
LatteLazy 4y ago
Facebook is a mature company. That represents 2 problems: * Zuck doesn't want to run a mature company, it's boring trying to squeeze 0.001% efficiency out of mature business models. * It's price/earnings ratio assumes there is a shit tonne more growth coming. Right now, the Metaverse is just the best (or least bad depending on your opinion) opportunity to NOT just accept Facebook is now in it's middle age. Maybe that will work. Maybe it won't. But that's what is happening here IMHO.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
Levy is suggesting Meta break into FB “OG” and Metaverse. It sounds a little like an amputation where a limb has developed gangrene. I’m still not sure the patient will survive. And not even sure which is the patient and which the limb.
throw7 4y ago
I've honestly hated this "social graph" mentality from the beginning. When I install your "app" I don't want everyone in the world to know and contact me now. Obviously I'm in the minority, but with some say changes to the "social graph" that puts me in control, you could actually grow your market to include people like me.

14 points by fortran77 4y ago

I suspect if Elon can get away with charging many, and probably most, heavy users of the platform a monthly fee, Zuckerberg will as well. In many ways such an outcome makes sense given Apple's ATT changes decimated targeted advertising revenue.

tmalsburg2 4y ago
Charging the people who create content for you is not going to fly.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Some twitter users are clearly willing to pay for whatever it is they get out of using twitter - one just paid $44 billion :)
- aliqot 4y ago
  For you maybe, but people are vain enough to pay 20 bucks and more for a little blue check. There were insider rings charging much more for it. Time will tell though, if the easiness with which a blue checkmark is acquired will diminish the significance of having one, and to what degree.
  - hobs 4y ago
    It doesn't matter, charging all engaged users won't make enough money to be meaningful, the math just doesn't work out.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - aqme28 4y ago
      This. It's akin to charging YouTube creators $20/month. These are not the users that are making them money.
  - lupire 4y ago
    How many people will pay 2x the price of Disney+/Spotify/Netflix for a blue check on Twitter?
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      90% of the people who currently have them is my guess. Though the winds of social favor may shift as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought.
      - jasonlotito 4y ago
        Blue checkmarks will be people paying to market to you. It won't take long to block people with blue checkmarks. Before it was some verification that this was a real person/official entity. As for twitter becoming open to more "diversity of thought" I mean, I guess if you want more ads, sure?
      - matthewdgreen 4y ago
        There's a great Dr. Seuss book called "The Sneetches" I think would help you to understand what's about to happen.
      - luddit3 4y ago
        Twitter devolving into 4chan or as you say "diversity of thought" will not lend itself to having journalists wanting to keep their status on the site.
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        "as Twitter becomes open to more diversity of thought." That remains to be seen. It might as well just lead to a shift of thought. Or that all opinions are welcome, but only those get traction and an audience, that happen to align to the opinions of Musk (and whoever else, who has invested heavily behind the scenes)
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        I use Twitter more than I should - though in a read-only context - and I don't understand what "diversity of thought" is missing at the moment. You can go on any leftist's Twitter and see replies calling them communist, calling trans people mentally ill, etc. The only stuff getting banned consistently is either incitement, like calling for "death con 3" on a group of people or outright racial/gendered slurs. There are mass-reporting campaigns (targeting individuals from both "sides"), but these are usually overturned and are not entirely Twitter's fault. Sure, better moderation would improve the outcome in mass-reporting cases, but it's less a case of bad policy and more a case of Twitter needing to invest more in moderation. Something I think is less likely now that Twitter is loaded up with debt.
  - _jal 4y ago
    We'll have to see. When it was "exclusive" and indicated some degree of notability, yeah, people who couldn't get it wanted it. Now it signifies you're willing to pay $250/year for a virtual hood ornament. A nice signal for scammers, but otherwise like listing yourself in "Who's Who".
    - usrusr 4y ago
      There are different ways it could work out. On Strava, more than half of the people I interact with are subscribers and that used to be more a signal of "willing to chime in for the platform to remain mostly ad-free" than a fee for extended freemium features (this has changed a bit, more paywalled features, and I'm not too happy about that despite being a subscriber). I believe that it would be possible (even if not likely) for Twitter to shift into a lean state where they focus on just keeping the boat running and fostering loyalty with those who can and want to afford a subscription that's more a supporter badge than a gateway to extended features. Certainly depends on how much of their current cost is essentially ad sales and how much of that they can (and want to) cut. At least they are certainly much closer to that than anything Meta ever created or bought (with the exception of Oculus, which might certainly have been on a path to becoming a viable hardware company had it not received the Zuck's kiss of becoming deeply untrustable)
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  But it will definitely temper my social media addiction, which will make me a lot more productive. So I'm rooting for it.
- indymike 4y ago
  I think a lot of them would pay a small amount to keep the cash flowing. They many not like it, but the leverage is on the platform's side until the audience moves.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  People have an extremely dependent relationship with Twitter. It’s more like gambling than media. They will absolutely pay.
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    If we don't fund-raise and pay for $position_X_on_political_spectrum voices on Twitter to spread virtue and truth, the conversation will be hijacked by those goddamn $position_Y_on_political_spectrum shills and traitors!
- baxtr 4y ago
  It’s clearly a trade-off decision. If paying will give you access to a target audience people will pay. But I agree that you need some kind of business to be willing to pay.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  Yes it will, if those people are creating the content for some other goal - e.g. political, commercial, publicity, etc.
- guywithahat 4y ago
  I mean the entirety of Gab and the fediverse are based off of content producers paying to use the service
  - cloutchaser 4y ago
    People pay gab? What?
    - guywithahat 4y ago
      Yeah Gab Pro, it lets you upload higher quality content, videos, and some other stuff including applying to get verified. It's how they made most of their money for a long time, ads are a recent thing for their site to my understanding. It's $15/month
aqme28 4y ago
You're more optimistic than I am that charging for verification would be an effective way to make money for Twitter. More likely I think it'll just lead to far fewer blue checks and no significant change of revenue.
- osrec 4y ago
  And it may also make the blue ticks meaningless, if just anyone can pay and get them.
  - cma 4y ago
    That's how universities with donor and alumni preference work. They let in notable people more easily and people that test well may even get a scholarship, and others can bribe to be included in the club.
    - giaour 4y ago
      Bribing your way into an elite college costs a lot more than $20/month, though. As a society, we also confer prestige on a lot of things that basically amount to spending a prohibitively large sum of money: running a foundation; being an angel investor; owning a sports team, champion racehorse, Lamborghini, etc. But if just anybody can afford something and the only barrier to entry is cost, then it has no social currency.
      - usrusr 4y ago
        There are plenty of goods that work essentially like veblen goods but that are not really out of reach for anybody who is a non-zero amount of disposable beyond starvation. Converse shoes, Ray Ban shades, there's an endless list of brands that people pay a premium for to show off, despite not containing even the tiniest trace of that exclusivity that stems from being prohibitively expensive.
        giaour 4y ago
vxNsr 4y ago
People fundamentally use Facebook differently than twitter, even if fb can be used as a public square, most ppl still use it to network with ppl they know (or used to know). Whereas twitter’s entire use case is talking to people who you’ve never met and likely never will. The point is that engagement is very different and no one cares about verification on fb. Editable posts have been a thing for years and I’m blanking on what other features are part of twitter blue but I doubt it’ll be enough to charge people $19.99/m
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lupire 4y ago
Heavy users as in frequent posters: is just selling native advertising. It doesn't change the ad-suported model.
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  ^ Been on twitter since the early days. I'm not much of a social creature by nature, but as a marketing channel, twitter has by far generated the most business for me over the years. I just be helpful in public, and when we need a new customer I literally just tweet "had some hours open up if anyone is looking for X" and just like magic we get a new customer. I wouldn't scoff at paying a little to keep that, but remove the non-native/boosted advertising from my feed.
zzuko 4y ago
Facebook or Instagram doesnt have monitization problem. Wouldn't this be short sighted / greedy?
cronix 4y ago
I actually think we should pay for the things we use. Then we can retire the "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" excuse that many just automatically throw out to justify data collection.
- egeozcan 4y ago
  Most keep collecting data (making you the product) even when you pay for the product. MS Windows, Smart TVs, your graphics card driver, your popular news source even with the ad-free plan... It looks like you cannot pay them enough to get rid of the tracking.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  You're going to be the product regardless. They'll just charge you on top of collecting and profiting from the data they collect on you.
shagie 4y ago
> I suspect if Elon can get away with charging many, and probably most, heavy users of the platform a monthly fee That's going really well so far... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
pliftkl 4y ago
I would absolutely be willing to pay a monthly fee for a Facebook that wouldn't serve me ads or "suggested" things in my feed, and only showed me things that I explicitly said I was interested in. I'm curious how much I'm actually worth to FB under the advertising model, since that's going to dictate how much fee they would need to ditch advertising.

patchorang 4y ago

https://archive.ph/K2qwE https://archive.ph/K2qwE

ewzimm 4y ago

It would be interesting to know why Mark didn't choose this option because Alphabet had already structured their company exaclty like this, separating Google from Other Bets, and so there was a clear precedent from a peer. Did Mark ever explain why he thought this was the wrong path for the company?

Invictus0 4y ago

Zucc knows what he's doing. No investor was ever going to love the $40B capex on metaverse, they would happily ride the Facebook cash cow into the ground and suck the life out of the company dividend by dividend. Zucc just doesn't care about the quarterly reports, he's going to execute on his vision regardless.

mola 4y ago
Never liked Zuckerberg, but you seem correct. Facebooks trajectory was pretty obvious. Creating a TikTok clone or such would just be chasing your own tail. The only real future for Facebook is something new. It's very high risk, and can rarely be done in a public company the size of meta, but he positioned himself to make it possible. Time will tell if this bet was good (for him, for us I'm pretty sure a successful metaverse is awful)
c7b 4y ago
Zuck's vision is btw directly taken from an explicitly dystopian narrative of how VR tech could play out. It is a vision that would be a net positive for humanity if it failed (and its fate is btw not tied to the success of AR/VR tech in general - it's quite conceivable that the one takes off without the other). It's driven by greed for money and power, and it is quite ironic that it happens to be Wall Street that's delivered the strongest negative verdict so far (which doesn't mean that it has to fail, btw - I was short Meta since they announced this vision, but I might consider realizing those gains soon).
fullshark 4y ago
Why is it binary? Why is 40B capex going to make it a reality and 30B/20B/10B not?
- Invictus0 4y ago
  To be clear, I don't think any amount of money will make it work, I don't believe in the vision. My point is only that Zucc is not the hapless dolt the article sort of makes him out to be.

ouid 4y ago

facebook is bad because it is run with an iron fist by a single person. Eventually Zuckerberg was surrounded by yesmen. This is almost impossible to avoid. With wealth inequality on the rise, the yesman industry has developed a lot of tradecraft that has made them better at the extraction of that wealth. This creates mania, and with no oversight, the entire company is subject to his manic whims.

fullshark 4y ago
I'd like to think this is the final nail in the coffin in dual stock structures, but of course the next great growth company will be built somewhere sometime, and the public markets will be desperate to get a piece and will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
dont__panic 4y ago
Strange. I think Facebook is bad because they've turned a decent, useful product into a cash-generation machine... to the detriment of the original product. So much so that many have decided that it's not worth dealing with the cash-generating cancer to access the compromised functionality of the core product. Zuck is in a unique position where he has full control over Facebook. He could declare today that Facebook doesn't need to generate this much profit, add an option for a chronological news feed, and turn down the ads to "KTLO" level from the current "fund the metaverse, maximum profit" levels. I loathe Zuck because he refuses to do anything like this, despite the obvious social ills of Facebook. Maybe corporate yesmen have something to do with his choice, but it seems more likely to me that Zuck has decided to keep Facebook a cancerous mess all on his own.
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artificialLimbs 4y ago
My coworker just told us a story in this morning's meeting about signing up for Facebook. He created an account about a week ago, but didn't upload anything, post, or put in any optional information. Yesterday he received an email notifying him that his account was suspended because it 'violated community guidelines'. The just lost what would have been a new customer, over what, exactly? Who knows...

nimbius 4y ago

the one thing the article tap dances around is the fact that Meta as a company has been horribly overvalued for about the past decade. Its managed to avoid its market haircut largely with smoke and mirror efforts like marketplace and a video chat device (not to mention the strategic rebrand as 'meta.') but the billion dollar metaverse at the cusp of a market recession and record inflation was clearly more than investors were ready to pretend was a viable strategy. people are drawing comparisons to twitter? and im not sure why. Twitter has always been a massive underperformer and basically just serves as a safe harbor for brand engagement. its worst bug is permitting any political discussion whatsoever as thats generally not brand-safe. Musk can work to lock it down a little more to appease major marketing players --which in doing so will accellerate its user exodus-- or he can start charging users for the pleasure of airing their hot takes and reduce the advertising footprint on twitter drastically, but he cannot do both. Zuck cant do much to staunch the bleeding at Face, er, meta. Methinks its time to do what he should have done a decade ago: sell the shares and do something else if hes capable of it. if not, well, Gates has proven you can recycle your own cash endlessly as the cow chews the cud through an obtuse network of your own charities that serve no greater purpose than to launder money and perpetuate your legacy in a way that cant be cancelled or removed from the public square if youre posthumously outed as a villain.

Tangurena2 4y ago

Zuckerberg could help meta by retiring.

VLM 4y ago

Follow the money not the tech for this story. Facebook sold to individuals as a workforce automation platform for teenage girl relationships-as-a-pattern that anyone can use, AND double dipped selling to biz and gov as a propaganda outlet and that makes huge revenue until people get tired of it, disillusioned, and move on. It seems to mostly be bots and addicts now, I wouldn't go there in 2022, to actually socialize or be propagandized to. Meta's story is "lets do the same thing over again but technologically more complicated and expensive" No Facebook enduser ever wanted to do the same stuff as FB but requiring a more expensive graphics card or shorter battery life. Meta doesn't seem to have a purpose to endusers. To technical people its an interesting challenge, but to end users its this generation's superconducting supercollider. "Well it burns stacks of cash to entertain techie people and nobody else cares". Best of luck with that biz model...

colinmhayes 4y ago
You’re right to say follow the money, but you didn’t actually do it. Revenue is basically flat. Ad impressions up around 20% this year. Engagement is not going down. Meta stock is down 70% this year because mark just said he’s going to lose 15 billion on reality labs next year even though ever single investor is saying that number is at least 5x too high. Investors no longer trust mark has their best interest at heart.

vlunkr 4y ago

Zuckerberg seems to really think that VR is the next ”big thing” like the iPhone. I’m curious what people here think about that. I’m currently on the skeptical side for a couple of reasons. The tech isn’t there. These headsets are bulky and ugly, only very dedicated users are willing to wear them for hours a day. Maybe someday they’ll be the size of Google glass, but it’s certainly too early to bet your company on it. The killer app is basically VR Chat. This already exists and has existed in non-VR forms (second life) for ages. It’s definitely a successful idea, but it appeals to a relatively niche crowd, mostly very online teens. A phone doesn’t fully occupy your senses like VR. We have responsibilities in the real world that keep us from staying fully in VR. NFTs. Why would they bring NFTs into the marketing? NFTs appeal to a certain crowd for sure, but everyone else is repelled by that crowd, and is sick of everything about NFTs. Lastly, they need to work on marketing. Especially a new spokesman. I think VR is probably here to stay this time, but they should focus on gaming. It actually works, but there needs to be some fresh ideas before people get tired of it. Send dev kits out and incentive really creative developers to get involved. Man cannot live on Beatsaber alone.

w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
There is already great "experiences" in VR. One issue being that for a lot of them you need a room dedicated to it. Another issue is, If you happen to be addicted to your couch, a lot of games doesn't work... Because you have to stand up to play them.
helen___keller 4y ago
Idk about VR but I think AR could possibly become a winner (assuming fundamental problems like battery life and headset weight are solved) Everyone has this mindset that VR must be coupled with greater immersion. I think the real “value unlock” will be when it’s just for casual side browsing alongside daily life, like how most people use smartphones Will the tech ever get there? Will this even be good for daily life? Probably not. But it might be addictive enough to displace smartphone usage. Immersion is too intense. Nobody wants to be immersed for more than maybe an hour, so VR will always just be a toy
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LatteLazy 4y ago

Facebook is a mature company. That represents 2 problems: * Zuck doesn't want to run a mature company, it's boring trying to squeeze 0.001% efficiency out of mature business models. * It's price/earnings ratio assumes there is a shit tonne more growth coming. Right now, the Metaverse is just the best (or least bad depending on your opinion) opportunity to NOT just accept Facebook is now in it's middle age. Maybe that will work. Maybe it won't. But that's what is happening here IMHO.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

Levy is suggesting Meta break into FB “OG” and Metaverse. It sounds a little like an amputation where a limb has developed gangrene. I’m still not sure the patient will survive. And not even sure which is the patient and which the limb.

throw7 4y ago

I've honestly hated this "social graph" mentality from the beginning. When I install your "app" I don't want everyone in the world to know and contact me now. Obviously I'm in the minority, but with some say changes to the "social graph" that puts me in control, you could actually grow your market to include people like me.