I'm not ready to believe that a person can never change. I've said some dumb stuff in the past too. A person that runs a social network for 4000 people in their dorm room is not the same person that runs a company worth hundreds of billions. And the goal of Facebook is not to abuse our privacy as such. It's to make money. If they have another way of making money I'm sure they'll be just as happy.

However, I have much less faith in the ability of a company to change. Even if Zuckerberg (and more importantly, the board) wants this change, the company has spent the last decade hiring people with the skills and mindset of gathering personal data and exploiting it for maximum profits. The entire organisation is built towards this purpose. Institutional inertia is a big thing, you don't turn such a company around in a month. Employees hate change, they will continue doing what they're good at if you give them the chance.

It will take reinforcing this new message over and over and taking hard action, like firing people and entire departments who continue to work against the new direction. Otherwise things will just stay the same. Are Zuckerberg and the company board ready for this? The "all-in" approach on the Metaverse project is kind of a good sign. But I'll wait for them to prove it. They have a lot of consumer trust to recover too. Once they do I will start believing again but right now they have to prove themselves.

>I'm not ready to believe that a person can never change. I've said some dumb stuff in the past too. A person that runs a social network for 4000 people in their dorm room is not the same person that runs a company worth hundreds of billions.

People do not change unless they're faced with signifigant consqeuences -PAINFUL consequences, and often-times not even then.

We've all done dumb stuff -but the rest of us paid a price for it.

I'm not convinced he ever has. just the opposite, from what I'm able to see he's been insulated from any real (read:painful) consequences and as a result he doubtlessly has a Trump-like belief that consequences are for other people. So far, he would be correct in that belief.

That's the difference right there; our mistakes cost us. His -have not (in any real sense).

That sums up the entirety of the "metaverse."

Zuckerberg's business model isn't making products that people want, it's selling marketing and finance people the lies they want to hear.

No one is going to a zoom meeting in a Facebook virtual reality world. In fact, no one is going to a virtual reality world period, it's a failed concept from the 1990s right up until today. But the fact remains that Facebook is only valued by an audience that will soon be dead (boomers who like posting about politics all day), so they have to have some carrot to dangle which distracts from that reality.

Everyone does dumb things when they're that age. The difference is that he's never been forced to face any signifigant consquences. As a result, that attitude is clearly un-changed and is readily apparent to anyone with even a casual familiarity with facebook.

"Dumb fucks" indeed.