> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse
Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement the social network graph and keep it going longer than it otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.
The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous. Facebook is flailing.
In recent times I've cared more and more about what my friends and family are doing, because those are the people I'm connected with in actuality, in real life.
I've completely stopped using FB because I want to connect with my friends and family. After using the product for many years I realized that idly surfing past pictures of children, weddings, BBQs, etc, that despite FB's loud insistence, that's not connection. Even commenting on friends' posts isn't... really connection?
It was idle voyeurism, or drive-by socialization.
Now I make an active attempt to keep in touch with people by, well, directly talking to them. This isn't some brilliant insight on my part - let's be honest, online socialization has been moving towards this for some time. The group chats I'm a part of, and the virtual/IRL meetings are far more fulfilling to me than any amount of FB feed surfing.
>I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
>It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
>You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
We run a family Slack group. All the functionality of being connected, none of the bullshit.
How do they express what they are doing without content using Instagram? Can you walk me through this?
When you use Instagram do you see ads or posts from people who aren’t your friends or family members? I’ve never used it so I’m not sure how the algorithms work.
Personally if someone is my friend and has something worth sharing they’ll tell me about it directly or send me a picture. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I’ve had people I was friends with move and we’ve lost touch and so forth. I don’t see a reason to struggle to try and stop that myself. Been pretty happy this way but that is what works for me.
I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
Again just my perspective but I don’t see value in broadcasting experience to a wide audience. I would view that as “content”. I don’t think it has any positive qualities. The RSS feed is a good way of thinking about it, but I say just don’t post and who cares about your trip ya know? If you don’t care to tell someone in person or over a phone call or some other directed means I think you don’t need to share anything. Again just my perspective on that. Which is why I’ve really only ever used Twitter to complain into the void from time to time.
That worked great in a lot of senses. You never run out of content. FB have a lot more options for their optimisation efforts. It also made them more of a general media company.
But... it also devalued the social network/friends aspect. Now it's just about content and holding user attention. Well... that means competition is everything again. Anyone can post anywhere, or consume content anywhere.
I know it sounds overly reductionist or boogeyman-esque, but they captured a market and refuse to let go, doing every single thing they can to keep and monetize human attention.
Exactly. It's a bet-the-farm move from a company that has a track record of, best I can tell, a big fat zero in terms of in-house innovation. This is like Google deciding to shift the entire company to Google+, except Google+ was just a clone of an existing thing that actually worked. Meta has no precursor. It's an entirely new thing that Facebook is trying to will into existence without even so much as testing the waters first.
I have a feeling Zuckerberg is going to enrage investors enough that he has to flee Facebook in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness with the help of a few loyal toadies providing safe passage, or he's going to start building his Führerbunker and be the last man standing while Facebook turns to rubble. I'm slightly joking, but also... Zuck has to be in the running for the worse tech CEO ever. They paid $16 billion for WhatsApp and then started promoting their own Facebook Messenger which no one used. I feel like their intent was to kill WhatsApp in the crib. But the "crib" turned out to be the entire global population and was, in fact, too big for them to kill and get people to switch to their own garbage chat app.
It reminds me of this clip from Silicon Valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAeEpbtHDPw
But it won't be soon, and the ideas shown in the video--like the surfing game--were the kind of ideas that litter the floor of the App Store.
Compelling product experiences, especially on new platforms, are extremely difficult to craft.
The taste of the creators must be exceptionally good and in this case the hardware quality and onboarding experience must bowl over anyone who touches it.
The Facebook video for Meta looked very speculative. I suspect Meta was planned for 2023 or 2024, but was rushed out the door because the brand was getting pummeled.
In that way, changing to Meta was very effective at derailing the negative attention. But not actually having a there, there is a problem when the chicken comes home to roost.
Zuck may had well renamed his company "Flying cars".
The algorithmic feed can't handle the "lack" of new posts though so it keeps inserting lots of ads, videos, and whatever that I don't actually care about. I really like Facebook when it is about interacting with my friends but everything else is a distraction. The level of distraction in Facebook is just too high. It's okay if nothing is going on!
At least for me, the overheated political posts became a huge turn off. I think many people left after the election.
The Metaverse is the obvious next evolution of online. Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
>Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
How? A fair number of people prefer to shut off their video on calls. And my observation is that coming out of COVID people want more in-person interactions, not less.
Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your Facebook account.
If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Probably true but no one else would probably have made it work either.
VR tech isn't really there today but even if it were better, it's still more of a niche use case than its fans would have it be. (Certain types of gaming, maybe virtual tourism...) People don't want things to be immersive most of the time. Ask me to wear a VR headset for a routine work meeting? That will be a big "nope" from me.
Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best selling VR headset by far.
I wish there was some type of consumer union where we could negotiate with these companies as a block.
Q4 '20
Worldwide: 10.14
US: 53.56
Europe: 16.87
Asia Pacific: 4.05
Rest of world: 2.77
So you're worth just over $200 a year. This has gone up a lot over time and is considerably higher than other social networks. Just a year ago, it was 41.41 (23% less) and a year before that is was 34.86 (15% less).
It's harder to do a comparison to google, but I'm sure you're very valuable to them as well, increasingly so.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
As a working professional adult, who has access to many others working professional adults, I assure you, ads work.
You’re simplifying ads to a barebones click to rate exchange. Ads are way more subtle than that.
Advertising to impulsive spenders is worth more than advertising to less impulsive spenders. Less impulsive spenders are informed by ads, more impulsive spenders are convinced by ads.
https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_presentations/2022...
Certain ads being seen by certain people might be a lot more valuable than average? It might be interesting to know who these people are.
How much does my vote count even for representatives if I’m in a state that’s heavily gerrymandered?
Still, the best proportional representation for you is local. So mayor, state rep, governor.
And before the whataboutism replies start, I’m sure the same happens on the other side. I just know more about my own state.
Proportional representation occurs in the House.
Nor do the reasons the founders did it this way exist anymore.
Even though many points made about the constitution were rooted in political theory, and make good sense even today, that doesn’t change the fact that the people involved were politicians who were looking to make the best deal possible within the context of a rapidly failing state under the articles of confederation.
The large slaveholding states actually wanted 5/5ths whereas states will small slave populations wanted 0/5ths. Slaves couldn’t vote, their interests were ancillary to the whole discussion. The compromise was about pure political power for those that dominated them.
The repeal of the 3/5ths clause along with the subsequent legal restrictions and terrorism against the black population of the south that followed, gave the south more power, and subsequently made it harder to dislodge Jim Crow.
But your point is still very valid. Somehow people are comfortable compartmentalizing the notion that the constitution is/was perfect, except for that one part that somehow doesn’t count and was “inevitably doomed” anyways.
This is exactly why the Senate was designed this way.
> Nor do the reasons the founders did it this way exist anymore.
Federalism still exists even if you don’t see it.
The political problem they were trying to solve at the time (balancing the interests of independent sovereign political entities with respect to land claims and future political power) doesn’t necessarily map onto the problems we have today.
https://www.fairvote.org/votes_vs_seats_in_the_people_s_hous...
If we assume that Switzerland is probably closest to the ideal of a direct democracy please take note that voters can not directly vote for the executive government (The Bundesrat, or federal council).
They elect members of the two houses, which in turn elects the 7 executives. Usually this is based on the recommendation by the parties and with a specific formula considering party, language and area of the country.
We also can't fire government members this afternoon. It's just like everywhere else. We can just not re-elect them.
You appear to make up your own extreme definition of what the words "direct democracy" should be and what they should mean. But it's not like that. There are ways words and condepts are commonly used. [1]
That would certainly be clearer :)
But I'm always happy to learn if you can come up with a counter example.
You can't have a democracy with 100 IQ idiot majority, because their decisions are governed by whatever gets poured into their poorly working brains that week, so you end up with corporatocracy or fascism, pretending to be a democracy.
Tough choice, but I think I'll opt in for the latter.
Uh! Oh! But if not democracy, then what? Then fascism and corporatocracy - what we have had for as long as you've been alive. You just don't know it :)
Why are supposing that all rich people made their money through online advertising? It’s clearly untrue and certainly not a robust enough a conclusion to feel bad about your relative success.
> Why are supposing that all rich people made their money through online advertising
If you replace "all" with "most," which is how I phrased it, then your sentence sounds like this:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money through online advertising
Ok now we're onto something interesting, but I can see how you might be still struggling with the phrasing. May I suggest to reformulate as follows:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money by selling something for more than they paid for it?
Perfect! So we just have to answer if in the context of most people who became rich, "online advertising" = "selling something for more than they paid for it." I would argue that you can sell things without advertising them, but you certainly have to make people aware that you're selling those things one way or another (and mind you, in the context of rich people, you have to do that at a very large scale). So when answering how MOST rich people attracted attention in 2021, and that AT SCALE, I think the above is not so untrue (you will certainly find many who ALSO used TV and other channels, but very few people with a TV budget had a $0 paid social budget).
Is this sarcasm? The web is a dark place because of targeted advertisement. I’d rather pay than be tracked and my data sold through bidding processes.
The problem with current internet is that everyone is trying to get the ad money so they don't really align their interests with us who want quality content.
Apple is a cartel and Google pays the protection money that Facebook failed to. If Apple really cared about privacy and not money, they'd block Google from the platform too.
A single policy changed wiped 25% of a trillion dollar company's market cap. That's a gravitational wave that shows what kind of overwhelming monopoly power Apple wields.
To be clear, I hate Facebook and ads, but Apple is an incredibly dirty business and is doing massive amounts of harm to startups and our industry as a whole.
Apple owns "America's computer" (50+% of average American's internet usage), and they control it like a dictatorship. High taxes, close inspection of every deploy, arbitrary rulings, forced use of Apple platform pieces, no possible business relationships with your customers.
The DOJ needs to step in and remove the App Store monopoly, its tax, and its arbitrary rules. When you run a device this pervasive and entrenched, it's no longer a platform. It's a common carrier. App installs need to happen over web, where they'd still be just as safely sandboxed, monitored, and remote killswitchable.
To be fair, they didn't block Facebook from their platform. Users now just need to agree that they want to be tracked (spoiler: practically no one wants to be tracked).
I don't disagree with your general take and save for an iPod classic I don't own any Apple gear. But in my book that was one of the better moves that Apple ever pulled.
If Apple didn't give their users tools to control tracking, wouldn't that be more dictatorial?
I would be fully on board with that. 100% pro-consumer, pro-small business.
Apple needs to protect its consumers, but the US government needs to protect businesses against the Apple monopoly.
Why is that more fair? I bought an iPhone a month ago (my first) in part because I want their version of the App Store and I want more privacy controls. I actually like that Apple's requirements push developers to make a native app rather than a web app (for example).
I'm certainly sympathetic to the argument that 30% is too large of a cut and it's well past time for payment reform. However, I think consumers would be worse off losing Apple's more tightly controlled app store implementation. If you want more options, go Android. That's what I did for more than a decade.
I've already enumerated my problems with Apple here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30196852
I would be fine if Apple removed tracking if the DOJ removed their app store.
Your problems outside of the 30% (which is valid) is that you want to be able to ship crappy cross platform web apps and know more about your users (which I don’t want).
Apples change has fundamentally damaged ad conversion attribution from the Facebook/Instagram apps on iOS, we have seen it it ourselves.
It may be that the exact figure of $10B is inflated, it could even be an underestimate. Meta may have an agenda in how they are spinning it, almost certainly do in fact. However I can assure you that the fundaments of the article and what they are saying is true.
80% of Facebook users exclusively use mobile, and iOS has the largest market share in Facebook's largest market by revenue.
Twitter on the other hand I use in the browser as I like to be able to open threads in tabs to come back to.
Presumably this is because they can gather much more data via a mobile app.
As an example, I spent $13,580 shorting Facebook on Wednesday, which I haven't sold but will probably later today. Yesterday, those short contracts were worth north of $200k. I did it within a Roth IRA, too, which makes it even higher conviction.
Truth is, it was a gamble. No one really knows. If you can truly predict where Facebook will be in 5 years, 2 years, even next quarter, you can be really rich.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10311...
So you can sell covered puts / calls, or buy puts /calls. Those do not require margin. You cannot sell uncovered calls / puts, which would require margin.
Part of my position was buying $280 weekly puts which were $1.39 each, now $49.5 each ( still haven't sold lol).
Options have a strike price and an expiration date. You buy a CALL option, with a strike price, that gives you an option to buy that stock for that price. Or you can buy a PUT option, that gives you the option to sell at that strike price.
Example using made up numbers. FB is $240. You look on the options tab and you can see various expiration dates. Lets pick 3 months out. You may see a Call option for a strike of $250 for $20. That means that you have until 3/4/2022 to exercise that option, if FB is trading for > $260, you will make a profit. ($240 + $20). If FB doesn't trade you make nothing.
Puts work similarly. The strike would just be $230. Note, you don't have to exercise, if next week FB goes to $300, your call's value will skyrocket to ~$60-70. You can sell the option any time, you don't have to wait.
You may have noticed the cost of the option is greater than the delta between the exercise price and the value of the share. In my example this is roughly due to the time between now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks, this is called beta-decay.
I think you mean theta decay. Theta is the time factor of an option's value.
Beta is, roughly, a comparison of a security's (or portfolio's) volatility versus market vol.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beta.asp
Beta decay is studied in a completely different industry.
I don't think HN reader's friends are Facebooks growth market. You might be looking at a biased sample. This is their growth levels of the last 3 years.
Quarter Year MAU Q Growth A growth
Q4 2021 2.912 0.07% 4.11%
Q3 2021 2.91 0.52% 6.20%
Q2 2021 2.895 1.47% 7.22%
Q1 2021 2.853 2.00% 9.60%
Q4 2020 2.797 2.08% 11.97%
Q3 2020 2.74 1.48% 11.88%
Q2 2020 2.7 3.73% 11.85%
Q1 2020 2.603 4.20% 9.60%
Q4 2019 2.498 2.00%
Q3 2019 2.449 1.45%
Q2 2019 2.414 1.64%
Q1 2019 2.375
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Also, annual growth worldwide tends to hide one key things. It might mean Facebook is arriving in markets where internet penetration was poor (poor/slow data, etc..), however you have to look at their core market where advertisers spend money. In those markets, have they been gaining users? It's been said that they were losing eyeballs in core markets while expanding in markets that didn't bring much money.
If they lose customers in their core market, that means the service has been going down from their saturation point instead of stabilizing. And a worldwide growth would hide this data.
Agreed with everything in this comment up until that point.
s/knows/hopes/
Granted I'm also not going out of my way to watch it so not a big win for YT.
I haven't installed the app either but on the odd occasion will doomscroll in a private browser session.
I suspect youtube is trying to do both at the same time and... doesn't work.
But for me and a rando one off clip, I'd rather see it on youtube.
I don't see it on any of the news or review channels but more common on the food, instructional etc ones.
The only way the Metaverse would be a viable replacement for Facebook would be if Occulus (or similar VR headset) adoption was to rise to the level of iPhone adoption, and subsequent integration into nearly every aspect of daily life. This seems to be incredibly unlikely to me.
I have an Occulus quest. The first week I had it I thought it was the most amazing device I ever owned. A month later I used it less, and now, a few years later, it's gathering dust on a shelf. VR is great, but it takes a fair amount of energy, space and time to use. Even from solely the perspective of gaming, the low-power, light weight Switch has had a much bigger impact on my life than the Quest. I can play BotW for 4 hours without fatigue if I have time, with VR more than an hour and I start to feel very tired of the experience.
Now compare the Quest with the iphone, I'm looking at my iphone as I type this on my laptop. I use my iphone to order food, find directions around town, communicate with my family, check up on work. 8 or so years back I tried going back to a "dumb" phone and ultimately went back. I switched to android for a few years and still went back to the iphone since it has so many services nicely integrated.
I simply can't imagine any world where the "metaverse" comes anywhere near the adoption of facebook, even if Meta mailed an occulus to everyone on the planet for free.
Imagine believing this
It's an online VR based world that is very cool and fun and most people spend there times there instead of the real world.
On the other hand, Apple's actions are part of an overall trend that represents an existential threat, for the exact reasons you mention and others. The main issue is probably something like the innovators dilemma: they've become reactive, and slow in those reactions. Their largest successes in recent year haven't come from their own creations, but from acquisitions. NYT has a pretty good analysis of some of its systemic flaws [1]
[0] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files...
TikTok users in the West skew young (ie poor) and it's all short form video, which fb calls out as harder to monetize, so I can't see how TikTok is a threat to soak up the ad spend. We'll see what happens when they try to pivot from growth to profit. For reference, with similar userbase, ig brings in 6x the ad revenue of TikTok.
The markets are unreasonably obsessed with growth imo.
NO! Because I don't care about stupid content creators.
Facebook was never really about content creators, youtube and tiktok are all about that. It's a different thing. Not that I am a Facebook fan either but yes eyeballs are going to youtube and tiktok and other content creators but it's a different business and that is why Facebook is stuck versus these.
Don’t you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone.
Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs.
Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly any original videos show up there.
As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is going to feel the pinch.
Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators starting “clip” channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts and reposts to TikTok?
Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if it will accelerate or just be a slow death?
And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it.
Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of history… or if you will, psychohistory.