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Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app
- josefritzishere 5mo agoZuck has become as fickle as Google. That's never good for a corporate vision. If he wasn't sitting on a cash cow he'd be headed for the exit.
- ElProlactin 5mo agoPolymarket: "Trade on anything." Kalshi: "Trade the Future." Meta Arena: "They 'trust me.' Dumb f^^ks."
- Ancalagon 5mo agoHoly mimic batman - Mark, its ok to have a little of your own innovation and not copycat nor buy every single good idea.
- soperj 5mo agoHow did he come up with Facebook?
- Ancalagon 5mo agoI dont think he did
- ben_w 5mo agoHe copied the analog thing of the same name in his university that was taking too long to digitise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
- soperj 5mo agoThere's a whole movie about it. He was employed to create a social media platform, and ended up stealing the code to do it for himself instead.
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- gowld 5mo agoIt was already digitized. He wanted to make a version without security and privacy protections. He also copied Friendster.
- ahstilde 5mo agoFacebook innovation is their ads algo. They copy existing consumer success (which is incredibly difficult to create), and then execute it incredibly well.
- dgellow 5mo ago> and then execute it incredibly well ...sometimes
- rchaud 5mo agoFacebook hired a bunch of people from Google's search ads division to basically replicate their real-time bidding system. Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter. People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla. And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.
- eikeq1 5mo agoNot just that he hired Sheryl sandberg lmao. She basically ran the firm whilst Zuck thought about who to buy to secure a monopoly position. He got lucky more than anything else - had the instagam guys not given in, meta would not be worth anything close to what it is today.
- darth_avocado 5mo ago> not copycat nor buy every single good idea. I don’t know if I’ll call Kalshi and Polymarket “good ideas”.
- NikxDa 5mo agoI can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money. But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.
- rusk 5mo ago51% shareholding he’s free to make all the mistakes he wants
- idontwantthis 5mo agoCorey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...
- darth_avocado 5mo agoZuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.
- dgellow 5mo agoYoutube isn't really known to be highly profitable. I'm also not sure people would go to a Facebook YouTube when the normal YouTube exists
- darth_avocado 5mo agoBrother, YouTube is quite literally a money printing machine. I don’t know where you’re getting information from.
- autoexec 5mo agoHe wants to collect and profit from insider info by joining in on the newest unregulated gambling scheme. I'm sure plenty of cheaters and suckers will be happy to make him more money.
- Ghost_0 4mo ago[dead]
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- nertzy 5mo agoI just directed my cats to make a cryptocurrency.
- SirFatty 5mo agoRight after a nap...
- throwa356262 5mo agoHopefully it's the same geniuses that implemented his metaverse thingy.
- tmule 5mo agoHope so (ex-Meta, and hold a couple of million dollars of their stock, but quite dislike the company).
- etothet 5mo agoI've always felt that Mark Zuckerberg got lucky with Facebook and that he has no real lasting talent as a technologist or visionary. He seems to attempt to chase the latest "it" thing and has very few original ideas that actual stick long-term. He's quite the charlatan.
- glimshe 5mo agoI've never seen him saying anything particularly smart or insightful. My impression is that he has moderately above average intelligence and entrepreneurship. If he wasn't at the right place at the right time, he would be yet another founder of a random startup.
- nosioptar 5mo agoI've never seen him say or do anything particularly human. If I believed in such things, I'd think he was some kind of souless drone sent here by aliens/demons/etc to destroy humanity.
- tmule 5mo agoYour impression about his intelligence is way off. Mark was part of the study for mathematically precocious youth, which has a math cutoff at the 1/10K rarity. He also has ambition at the same level. What’s probably missing, of late, is good taste and judgment.
- glimshe 5mo agoIt is an impression, as you said. If his intellect is so vast (vs just scoring well on the math skill tests), we should have seen some sort of evidence in the things he writes or says. He was called a programming prodigy but we've seen other actual programming prodigies delivering much more impressive results (Bellard, Frankel, Carmack etc).
- tmule 5mo agoI don’t know what definition of intelligence you’re using, but scoring extremely well on math tests qualifying him for that study is fully aligned with the psychometric POV.
- wnevets 5mo agoWhatever happened to that Facebook cryptocurrency?
- nosioptar 5mo agoNever launched, given to org that dissolved, sold to bank that is now shut down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)
- Aboutplants 5mo agoSo many baby boomers are about to lose their savings. Meta knows their bread is buttered by the 55+ age group and capitalizing on the vulnerable social media addicted elders will be extremely profitable.
- Zigurd 5mo agoMy university admissions interview took place next to an old tech nerd's model train layout. Today, the same kind of person would be up all night posting about trans people on X. I blame a lot of our current problems on the decline of model trains and stamp collecting. You are spot on about social media addiction among the olds.
- cdrnsf 5mo agoThis will fail, he'll throw money at Kalshi and or Polymarket and, if he acquires either, chase some sort of regulatory capture scheme.
- seydor 5mo agoThey even call it "Arena". The place where gladiators kill each other, lions eat christans , criminals are exectuted brutally and animals are hunted. What an apt name chosen by the most moral company of our times.
- leosanchez 5mo ago> lions eat christans Could you explain this bit ?
- JsonDemWitOster 5mo agoI don't think he meant you ate Christians, more that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...
- sometimelurker 5mo agoI wonder how/if they'll use AI for this. maybe this would give them access to some very highquality pretrain data (like who made which bet on what at what time), which I can definitely imagine them needing. I've heard they have a lot of spare compute they run experiments on, and if this goes well for them maybe they could make a really good prediction bot
- gos9 5mo agoThis is the obvious next iteration of online based life Facebook gave life to communities where people draw identity and social belonging from a screen It only makes sense to continue bearing down into that simulacra
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- paxys 5mo agoSmartphone Dating Cryptocurrency AR/VR AI Gambling <— Zuck is here This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.
- dralley 5mo agoHow to tank morale even harder
- uberman 5mo agoFacebook leadership is essentially a cat reacting to a laser pointer. There seems to be no shiny object they won't chase. Their own C-Suite admit their latest reorganization is a disaster. Their "all in" on virtual worlds was a disaster. Their billion dollar AI guru purchase was a disaster. Their influencer heavy connected glasses will be a disaster. There is no leadership here. However, you can be sure when the next round of layoffs happen, there will be no "mea culpa" from the C-Suite, lots of golden parachutes and the unemployed will be the cogs in their wheel.
- code_lettuce 5mo agoFail fast and iterate. Wait no, not like that.
- ceejayoz 5mo ago"Move fast and break things!" "Oops, all broken."
- dkarl 5mo agoWait until 10,000 manosphere influencers start selling personalize aura coaching to incels who share their glasses recordings. We'll start seeing those glasses on every lame-ass wannabro.
- adammarples 5mo agoThe glasses, sadly, and unlike everything else, are incredibly popular and selling faster than they can make them
- zipy124 5mo agoWell, I guess they are familiar with how to make products addicting so this is right up their skill set?
- voidfunc 5mo agoMakes sense, get the kids addicted to gambling and pull them into the platform.
- rob74 5mo ago[dead]
- paxys 5mo agoSmartphone Dating Cryptocurrency AR/VR AI Gambling <— Zuck is here This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.
- winfredJa 5mo agoall he needs to do is put a competent CEO
- gedy 5mo agoAgreed that Zuck is not very impressive, but what would another CEO do differently at this point? It's got a ton of money, and they are trying this and that. But the market wouldn't let them sit on a bunch of money either.
- tantalor 5mo ago1. Rename the company to "Facebook" 2. Spin out the other garbage into different companies.
- swader999 5mo agoHe's a bit of a wuss though. Not betting it all, just slowly iterating on the next miss, can never be fired. Pretty damn funny actually. Sad if you work there though.
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- yellow_lead 5mo agoImagine being assigned to work on this only to be laid off a year later before quarterly earnings
- qoez 5mo agoWith this being just "toy money" I predict it'll go as well in trying to copy the winners as threads did vs twitter.
- mmayberry 5mo agoZuck simply cannot come to terms with the fact that his legacy is having built the world greatest ad platform.
- morkalork 5mo agoMaybe he should start a launch company with the stated goal of sending humans to Uranus or wherever it is he's from.
- titzer 5mo agoSecond greatest.
- Chu4eeno 4mo agoYeah, the humble facebook pixel has nothing on google with everything from recaptcha to google fonts when it comes to stalking people across the net.
- nmfisher 5mo agoFacebook is the 21st century version of the tabloid newspaper and daytime Jerry Springer. Highly lucrative, but bottom of the barrel stuff. Launching a prediction market is exactly the type of thing I would expect from them.
- damnesian 5mo agoconsidering his casual disregard for the feelings of fellow Harvard students back in the day, I doubt he cares what his legacy is. Just being rich and famous is plenty reward.
- Predivex 5mo ago[flagged]
- ddp26 5mo agoPeople forget that Meta already did this years ago, before prediction markets became the next big consumer trend for them to chase. The app was called Forecast, and launched in June 2020. (Around the same time that Kalshi and Polymarket launched, actually!) It was framed as a way to make the comments and activity on Facebook actually productive rather than toxic, and build expert reputation signaling mechanisms. I think they sunset it after about a year.
- LucasLanglois 5mo agoFunnily enough it's not their first attempt at launching a prediction market. They tried exactly the same in 2021 -> https://qz.com/2069284/facebook-is-shutting-down-its-experimental-app-forecast https://qz.com/2069284/facebook-is-shutting-down-its-experim...
- sergiotapia 5mo agoMorale must be so in the dumps at Meta. No direction, no clear next thing... :( A betting market??
- kstrauser 5mo agoOh sure, why not. I suppose they’ve already ruled out selling vapes or meth, or at least haven’t added those business units to their annual filings yet. I truly wonder if Meta’s Downfall as a Service umbrella has ever rejected an idea as being too detrimental to society, and if so, how awful did it have to be?
- jerojero 5mo agoits not very expensive for a company like Meta to create a platform like this that could see them extract value as a middleman passively for a while. despite the ethics of it, business wise it pays for itself, and because of the complicated ethics of it Meta is the best biggest company for it too. Everyone hates meta, their own employees hate meta, who cares. It will probably make money. not only that, but I think when a big platform comes into play it gets users from the other platforms easily. As the opportunities for market mismatch are abound being a smaller platform in the beginning. anyway, I think this is a smart move by Meta. And I'm positive everyone in the gambling space is happy with it too, as Meta comes with a good lobbying effort. this is reality, folks.
- aleksiy123 5mo agoIs it just me or is this really not that crazy of an idea? Polls are already a thing, and people love giving their opinion on things. Combining social media and gambling while maybe not morally great. Seems like has potential to make a shitton of cash. Betting is all over the place right now.
- howdyhowdy 5mo agoMan. Just enjoy your vast fortune. Quit flailing into new things and disappear into the woods.
- zugi 5mo agoYears ago the US government allegedly proposed prediction markets, in part to encourage the exact kinds of behavior that the US Special Forces soldier exhibited. Of course they wanted it from adversaries, not from allies. By creating prediction markets with points rather than dollars, Meta probably avoids a lot of the legal issues current prediction markets are facing. But it also loses the one real value of prediction markets: when people put their own real money at stake, their decisions should be based more on actual knowledge and estimation than wishful thinking. So what use is a prediction market of points for anyone?
- Ghost_0 4mo agoMeta has the one thing every prediction market has lacked, which is enough warm bodies to make the order books deep. Whether that helps depends on what they list, and an engagement feed is going to surface 'will this celebrity break up' long before anything a decision hangs on.