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Zuck is learning theres a difference between shallow short term engagement and deeper long term engagement. Who could have seen this coming, except literally ev

Zuck is learning theres a difference between shallow short term engagement and deeper long term engagement. Who could have seen this coming, except literally everyone? It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself

const_cast 1y ago
In Zuck's defense, it's not just him, it's the entire American school of business. They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the interest they have to pay. It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision that makes the most money right now, every time, over and over and over again. Don't look at anything else.
- thephyber 1y ago
  What makes you think “they don’t understand the interest they have to pay”? They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The people there in the early days pull the ejection code when the “interest” is due. The company coasts until some private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are worth more than the whole. This is capitalism. You are using “interest” (a finance term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a moral / ethical term instead.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Corporate valuation isn't about short-term thinking. It's actually all very long-term. Plenty of companies are not paying out all their profits to shareholders, and their valuation is entirely based on expectation that it'll happen in the distant future and the discounted perpetuity value will equal the initial investment, probably after the current investors are dead. There are still plenty of vulture investors who find a way to trick the market in the short-to-medium term. I'm not convinced Facebook is a case of that, even though I hate what they do.
- grugagag 1y ago
  They need not learn, they do as they’re primed, to go for profit, squeeze and profit, profit and profit some more. Then profit even from the dead husk on the way out. That’s the hyper capitalist lifecycle of a business product.
- pyuser583 1y ago
  It really about interest rates. Higher interest rates means more immediate revenue needed. Social media was fueled by a decade of low interest.
  - ironmagma 1y ago
    The interest rate "right now" is only relevant if you are playing a short-term game.
- scheme271 1y ago
  They know, it's just that most of the people will be gone before the negative effects become apparent. Most senior people are only going to be around for 7.2 years so if they optimize for short/medium term benefits and cash out, the long term consequences won't affect them.
emseetech 1y ago
All I want is nice, non-toxic, non-addictive place to share photos and birthdays and life events with my family and close friends. I understand that's not going to net hundreds of billions in revenue, but surely a site like that could keep the lights on and the engineers paid at scale.
- bcrosby95 1y ago
  It can. The problem is getting users there, and it being built by someone who isn't interested in swallowing the world.
- egypturnash 1y ago
  All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free. But the number of people willing to pay for their accounts on this stuff is vanishingly small. So either you run this as a side project and accept that it's losing money, or you start running ads. And the moment you start running ads is the moment your most profitable choice becomes slowly turning your site more and more addictive, so that people spend more and more time on it and see more and more ads. (Or you can keep the place small and constrained to people who have a high chance of being able to kick some money in for the bills, I'm only paying about half my Mastodon instance's fees because of making this choice.) Or you can create a huge societal shift where we decide that having non-profit social sites is a good thing, and that they should be funded by the state, even if many of the views on them contradict the views of the giant bags of money pretending to be humans who are currently in control of the country. Ideally this societal shift would make it much harder for these giant bags of money to exist, as well. Oh also getting people to stick around on a site that's not built to be addictive is surprisingly hard.
  - emseetech 1y ago
    As positive social networking disappears, the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases. Pricing would be difficult but every year the average consumer learns more and more about how much "free" costs. I agree a non-profit approach might be the only option to avoid the same long term problems we've seen time and again.
p_v_doom 1y ago
> It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself So basically, what literally happened after the enclosure of the commons, lol

const_cast 1y ago

In Zuck's defense, it's not just him, it's the entire American school of business. They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the interest they have to pay. It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision that makes the most money right now, every time, over and over and over again. Don't look at anything else.

thephyber 1y ago
What makes you think “they don’t understand the interest they have to pay”? They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The people there in the early days pull the ejection code when the “interest” is due. The company coasts until some private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are worth more than the whole. This is capitalism. You are using “interest” (a finance term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a moral / ethical term instead.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Corporate valuation isn't about short-term thinking. It's actually all very long-term. Plenty of companies are not paying out all their profits to shareholders, and their valuation is entirely based on expectation that it'll happen in the distant future and the discounted perpetuity value will equal the initial investment, probably after the current investors are dead. There are still plenty of vulture investors who find a way to trick the market in the short-to-medium term. I'm not convinced Facebook is a case of that, even though I hate what they do.
grugagag 1y ago
They need not learn, they do as they’re primed, to go for profit, squeeze and profit, profit and profit some more. Then profit even from the dead husk on the way out. That’s the hyper capitalist lifecycle of a business product.
pyuser583 1y ago
It really about interest rates. Higher interest rates means more immediate revenue needed. Social media was fueled by a decade of low interest.
- ironmagma 1y ago
  The interest rate "right now" is only relevant if you are playing a short-term game.
scheme271 1y ago
They know, it's just that most of the people will be gone before the negative effects become apparent. Most senior people are only going to be around for 7.2 years so if they optimize for short/medium term benefits and cash out, the long term consequences won't affect them.

emseetech 1y ago

All I want is nice, non-toxic, non-addictive place to share photos and birthdays and life events with my family and close friends. I understand that's not going to net hundreds of billions in revenue, but surely a site like that could keep the lights on and the engineers paid at scale.

bcrosby95 1y ago
It can. The problem is getting users there, and it being built by someone who isn't interested in swallowing the world.
egypturnash 1y ago
All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free. But the number of people willing to pay for their accounts on this stuff is vanishingly small. So either you run this as a side project and accept that it's losing money, or you start running ads. And the moment you start running ads is the moment your most profitable choice becomes slowly turning your site more and more addictive, so that people spend more and more time on it and see more and more ads. (Or you can keep the place small and constrained to people who have a high chance of being able to kick some money in for the bills, I'm only paying about half my Mastodon instance's fees because of making this choice.) Or you can create a huge societal shift where we decide that having non-profit social sites is a good thing, and that they should be funded by the state, even if many of the views on them contradict the views of the giant bags of money pretending to be humans who are currently in control of the country. Ideally this societal shift would make it much harder for these giant bags of money to exist, as well. Oh also getting people to stick around on a site that's not built to be addictive is surprisingly hard.
- emseetech 1y ago
  As positive social networking disappears, the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases. Pricing would be difficult but every year the average consumer learns more and more about how much "free" costs. I agree a non-profit approach might be the only option to avoid the same long term problems we've seen time and again.

p_v_doom 1y ago

> It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself So basically, what literally happened after the enclosure of the commons, lol