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I find myself generally wondering the same thing about half the things coming out of SV over the past several years. I have worked with competent product organ
by TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
I find myself generally wondering the same thing about half the things coming out of SV over the past several years.
I have worked with competent product organizations. I know they exist. A few even exist in SV. But for some reason the largest players have just absolutely lost the plot beyond what can get them to favorable quarterly earnings, and that game eventually and fairly consistently doesn’t end well in the long term.
Meta in particular is clearly rudderless, lacking in vision and strategic leadership, and throwing whatever it can find at the wall hoping to find something that sticks. Facebook turned into a cesspool, Instagram isn’t as popular with the newest demographics Meta has traditionally wanted to court (young people), and Threads turned out to be a nothing burger. Their grand quest to unify messaging was a disaster, and mores the putty because they’ve basically delineated their ecosystem by demographic generation in what has to be an unintentional series of missteps. Their “metaverse” projects weren’t even compelling to the teams working on them, their foray into crypto was over almost as soon as it began, and their business products are a nearly unusable mess for those of us who have had the misfortune of using them.
You’d think eventually someone at Meta would hit upon an idea that goes somewhere. It’s like a more pathetic version of Google’s stagnation.
- ryandrake 2y agoStonk prices are going up, so whatever they are doing, the only real feedback they care about is positive. These AI products are not made for users. They're made for Wall Street. Wall Street expects big companies to 1. talk about AI in their earnings calls, and then 2. do something, anything, with AI. All of BigTech seems to be doing this now, and investors are rewarding them by buying their stock. So they're going to continue the cycle of building useless AI products and then canceling them when they have served their purpose (pleasing investors).
- jpc0 2y agoWe aren't a big org and I know we spend several hundred if not thousands of USD a month on meta ads and WhatsApp business. For larger orgs I can imagine that number is larger and we definitely get a ton of positive interaction from that. That might be swayed by demographics but I can tell you age isn't one of them because our interaction (on WhatsApp Business which is mostly where I interact with Meta products) is decently in the 20-40 range.
- SoftTalker 2y agoIt's pretty simple in my view. It's "where does the money come from" and at Meta it's not from their users. So they are motivated to entrap and wall in and build funnels to try to deliver their users to the people who are actually giving them money. They aren't building things users want. They are building things that they think will keep the users from leaving.
- johnvanommen 2y agoThat makes a lot of sense. My Facebook feed is almost 100% hobby stuff now. Sometimes my wife will say "hey did you see this thing that [family member] posted" and I haven't. And I assume the reason I haven't, is because the content from my hobbies is crowding out the original purpose of Facebook (connect with friends and family.) Worst of all, is that Facebook is a terrible platform for hobby stuff. Plain ol' PHP forums are much better for that; they're much easier to navigate, easier to search, easier to host pictures on, etc. I frequently find myself posting something on one of the Facebook hobby forums, then realizing that: * the signal to noise ratio isn't great, because there's a ton of people spamming those forums with products and other social media that they're trying to promote, YT in particular. * Facebook isn't great for long posts.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoObligatory PA comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2025/01/03/the-mirror-d-hall https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2025/01/03/the-mirror-d-h...