Zuckerberg's Facebook Burns $500 Billion Becoming 'Meta'. Are They In Trouble? (nymag.com) 169
Slashdot reader McGruber shares a scathing column from New York magazine arguing that "There has never been a self-immolation quite like Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's social-media company has lost more than half a trillion dollars in market value since its August peak — about half of that vaporized in a single day, the biggest drop ever — as it starts to weaken from the constant siege of competitors and dissenters without and within.
"The fallout is so bad that Meta, once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent..."
They're calling it "an ignominious fall from a rarefied group of world-dominating companies." Facebook's once unbeatable ad-tracking system — the engine that made it a more than $1 trillion company — has effectively been neutralized by the likes of Apple, which allows users to block the company's trackers. (Google is set to start phasing in similar protections to its users over the next two years.) Facebook's user base has started to shrink after revelations by whistleblowers and leaks that showed how harmful social media could be to teen users, who are flocking to less toxic competitors like TikTok anyway. And Zuckerberg — clearly bored with the company he founded 18 years ago — has shifted his vision into an immersive version of the internet, complete with headsets and digital avatars, that he calls the metaverse, an ambition that sets up Facebook's competition not with another Silicon Valley company but with reality itself....
Apple and Google have decided they're going to allow their users to disable code that tracks people across the internet, which happens to be good for their business model. According to The Wall Street Journal, the fallout has been so severe that advertisers are shifting their entire ad budgets to Google since Facebook is no longer profitable.
The article's final point is that in the middle of all this, Zuckerberg has committed the company to a "metaverse" future — even though Wall Street investors seem almost unanimously unconvinced.
"Clearly, Zuckerberg has plenty of money to burn on his ambitions, but what's less clear is if he'll be able to bring back the armies of people who once believed in his ability to conquer the world."
"The fallout is so bad that Meta, once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent..."
They're calling it "an ignominious fall from a rarefied group of world-dominating companies." Facebook's once unbeatable ad-tracking system — the engine that made it a more than $1 trillion company — has effectively been neutralized by the likes of Apple, which allows users to block the company's trackers. (Google is set to start phasing in similar protections to its users over the next two years.) Facebook's user base has started to shrink after revelations by whistleblowers and leaks that showed how harmful social media could be to teen users, who are flocking to less toxic competitors like TikTok anyway. And Zuckerberg — clearly bored with the company he founded 18 years ago — has shifted his vision into an immersive version of the internet, complete with headsets and digital avatars, that he calls the metaverse, an ambition that sets up Facebook's competition not with another Silicon Valley company but with reality itself....
Apple and Google have decided they're going to allow their users to disable code that tracks people across the internet, which happens to be good for their business model. According to The Wall Street Journal, the fallout has been so severe that advertisers are shifting their entire ad budgets to Google since Facebook is no longer profitable.
The article's final point is that in the middle of all this, Zuckerberg has committed the company to a "metaverse" future — even though Wall Street investors seem almost unanimously unconvinced.
"Clearly, Zuckerberg has plenty of money to burn on his ambitions, but what's less clear is if he'll be able to bring back the armies of people who once believed in his ability to conquer the world."
Top 10 is now top 13? (Score:4, Funny)
Meta, once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent...
I'm pretty sure that's not how the top 10 works. You don't replace 1 company with 4 companies
Re:Top 10 is now top 13? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are in 6th, and you drop out of the top 10 then, yes, that does in fact mean there are (at least) 4 companies ahead of you now.
Re: Top 10 is now top 13? (Score:2)
Different word, different concept.
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That's not what 'replace' means. What they meant was 'passed by', 'lost 4 places to', 'is now behind', anything but 'replace'.
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About fifteen years ago there was a big debate about whether we needed professional journalists. The conclusion was: nah, bloggers are just as good and they do it for free!
So there you go.
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I'm not suggesting it was the best wording, or that the article wouldn't have have benefited from a competent editor. I'm not even suggesting that it was really "correct" as it was written.
But the idea the author was conveying was pretty easily understood and made perfect sense.
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Hmmm. The gods are fighting (Score:5, Interesting)
One clownshow company in SF is having its lunch eaten by two other clownshow companies in SF, all employing roughly comparable people with roughly identical value systems operating under largely interchangeable sets of policies and practices.
I suppose I would care if I subscribed to any of the affected religions. But I don't.
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I suppose I would care if I subscribed to any of the affected religions. But I don't.
That's right. Don't EVER care what happens to biggest companies in the world economy.
That way you will never be affected by the world economy.
Smart.
Re: Hmmm. The gods are fighting (Score:2)
How exactly will following the ins and outs of palace intrigue possibly have any effect on it and what it can do to me?
I have an android phone and a gmail account. The wife has an iphone and a gmail account.
Everything else...vr headsets, facebook pages, twitter, teslas, all of it...we don't use and see no need to engage with given how little benefit we judge it go provide us and how damaging it can be to some people.
Companies...even big ones...rise and fall all the time when time is measured in decades. I'm
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Facebook/Meta is located in Menlo Park, CA; Apple is located in Cupertino, CA; Google is located in Mountain View, CA. Of those, Menlo Park, at about 27 miles away, is the closest to SF. Why was their home city even relevant to your point?
I like Meta (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Zuckerberg made a good move. Facebook is very fragile- social media trends come and go. So I think he has to put the money somewhere else. I think Virtual Reality is a good place to put that money. People like to dump on Facebook, as if Facebook was everything that is wrong with Social Media. It makes for a good black sheep. But the problems are human nature, as I see it- not Facebook specifically, in my opinion.
Re:I like Meta (Score:5, Informative)
Its a terrible bet. Even with the somewhat impressive state of current commercial VR, the market just isn't interested. Big players like Microsoft , Samsung, HTC and Valve have all tried to throw their resources behind it and failed to make VR mainstream. Its odd that Facebook think it would be different for them, particularly in terms of the low trust in that brand in the community.
Re:I like Meta (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone I know who think VR is super cool and have spent money on it is an uber-dork who gets excited about things that normal people do not, and do not understand why normal people find their interests so dorky. I'm not talking nerds, I'm talking dorks. There's an important distinction.
Mark Zuckerberg is a dork. That's why he was so quick to buy up Oculus. He probably believed VR was the future before Facebook was even around. He's that dumbass who bought a Virtual Boy, shows all his friends, and then doesn't realize why no one else wants to buy one. He's one of the dweebs that was surfing the net with a Microsoft CE cell phone with a stylus who didn't understand why everyone else still had a flip phone.
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My niece is a Gen-Z and just bought a Quest 2 a month ago (or rather her parents bought her one) after playing with my Rift S. What's your point?
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I have a sample size of one. You have a sample size of whatever you manage to scrape out of your anus. Maybe come up with some data if you want to have a meaningful discussion.
Expecting a better level of discourse than baseless bullshit you come up with doesn't make me a "tough guy". It makes me normal.
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I don't think that's a particularly good argument.
Computers, games, talking to people online all that was dorky in the beginning. I remember my parents not understanding what on earth could I be spending so much time doing. They warned me about giving out any personal details. Now my mom is on various social media almost her entire waking time.
"Dorky" in this sense IMO easily parses out to "insufficiently developed for the average person". There's not that much fundamental difference between my participatio
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Mark Zuckerberg is a dork. That's why he was so quick to buy up Oculus. He probably believed VR was the future before Facebook was even around. He's that dumbass who bought a Virtual Boy, shows all his friends, and then doesn't realize why no one else wants to buy one.
Yeah it's Zuckerberg alone. Certainly Sony, HTC, Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Samsung aren't even remotely interesting in VR. /sarcasm.
I mean these are just major companies loaded to the brim with analytics with teams and teams of market research staff. What would they know. It's just Zuckerberg being a dork.
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Both technology and social trends have a history of moving from dorky to nerdy, to mainstream, to a crucial piece of technology that business can't live without. (eg. cash registers, computers, video games, anime, cryptocurrency, cringy dancing, ...) The trick is to be the one that brings the tech from "nerdy" to "mainstream" because that is where the money is. Maybe Zuckerberg is too early. Or maybe VR will never progress along that spectrum. I think Zuckerberg might be at the right spot in time, or m
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It's a desperate bet. FB's customers are advertisers and FB's hitting market saturation with the quality and quantity of the product they're providing which, if anything, is getting worse. To maintain projected growth it's either overpay for companies behind the current shiny trend or, when they ain't no trends, launch a moonshot.
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Even with the somewhat impressive state of current commercial VR, the market just isn't interested.
The market has seen a constant rise in both headsets delivered, player base, and apps created for VR. It's following the curve every new technology is and at a not too dissimilar pace.
I don't understand why your post is past tense. HTC, Valve and Microsoft are very much still investing in it, as is Sony, Facebook, HP, Google and Apple. Now I challenge you, just how much hubris do you actually need to think that you random Slashdot account holder #159032 think you know more about the market than these compan
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Big players like Microsoft , Samsung, HTC and Valve have all tried to throw their resources behind it and failed to make VR mainstream.
Gee, I wonder where I've heard this before. Oh, its ridiculous that Apple could think it could become a phone manufacturer. During the Gates/Ballmer era, I would pretty much presume anything they attempted would result in failure; from its pre-palm pilot product, to tablets, to when they bought out Nokia in an attempt to "make" a Microsoft presence in the Apple/Google smartphone era. The reason why VR isn't mainstream is that the technology isn't quite there yet, and that two of those companies are known
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It might be the only bet open to Facebook, terrible as it is. FB is the product of the advertising revolution, like Google, but they made a strategic error. Apple makes the hardware and OS people use to run FB, and so they can turn off the data spigot whenever they want. Google doesn't really make hardware, but they do make an OS and strong-arm hardware companies into using it.
Facebook is just a web page, at the mercy of the browsers and OSes. So while Apple leisurely plays secret inventor in their spaceshi
Re:I like Meta (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I like Meta (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Virtual Reality is a good place to put that money.
Perhaps, but execution has been terrible. It's clear that the Meta people don't (or don't care) what they are doing. The commercials have nothing to do with their product, and their product is cringe (the graphics look like a 90s demo, [youtu.be] and the avatars have no legs but that isn't the ugliest thing about them).
Basically, if you want to create a virtual world, it has to be a world worth exploring. VR by itself won't engage anyone.
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True. But Meta/FB do want to be the platform. Because selling the tools is where it's at - or in this case, the platform. Been true since at least the gold rushes, probably before that too.
Samsung sells more handsets that Apple. But Apple makes *the* money from iPhones. Because Apple owns the platform.
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True. But Meta/FB do want to be the platform.
ok, but what are they doing to create a platform people will use?
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I think Zuckerberg made a good move. Facebook is very fragile- social media trends come and go. So I think he has to put the money somewhere else. I think Virtual Reality is a good place to put that money. People like to dump on Facebook, as if Facebook was everything that is wrong with Social Media. It makes for a good black sheep. But the problems are human nature, as I see it- not Facebook specifically, in my opinion.
Social media is nothing like as fragile as VR/3D.
Human nature may be the underlying issue but this is a bit like saying that drug pushers are not the problem, the ability to create addictive substances is. If that's the problem, then you need to avoid pandering to it.
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I despise Zuckerberg as a person and a CEO, but you (and he) are absolutely right that Zuckerberg needed to rebrand Facebook and plow money into new products. The only thing I find irritating about the article is that its a total hit piece; mocking Zuckerberg's moves in the past quarter and blaming the moves for the huge drop in revenue. No, the huge drop occurred because Apple basically gored Zuckerberg's profit potential with its moves (and Google closely following suit), and the stock market is crazyla
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Facebook amplifies the worse of human nature in its social media software. It's one thing to blame human nature generally for social media's side effects, but its much worse because of Facebook's deliberate actions.
Re: I like Meta (Score:2)
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
"users, who are flocking to less toxic competitors like TikTok anyway"
And lead consumption is less toxic than arsenic.
Less toxic...really?
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The situation with Facebook and tictoc makes 4chan look normal.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
TikTok shares a lot of facebook's toxicity. Including the poor moderation and algorithmic rabbit-hole. Watch a few political videos and TikTok recommends more of the same, and soon you are into all manner of conspiracy theories and quite a lot of racism.
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I love the racism on 9gag, though. Shitlording is very entertaining. Problems usually arise when someone who doesn't get shitlording joins the fray.
But yeah, I've been pulled into bubbles time and again and I use mostly youtube, not even Facebook. I thought I'm so smart and I've been on the net so long, nothing can phase me and I know how to spot a troll.
And then repetition and algorithms kicked my ass.
These days I just don't trust anyone anymore... it's a strategy but it certainly ain't healthy.
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Less toxic...really?
Yes. We're talking about perception of toxicity here. Facebook is the root of all evil. TikTok is the new hip kid on the block. That's what "toxic" means in this context. The fact that they are both data hoovering soul sucking social media platforms which will be the downfall of our humanity is not withstanding.
Facebook did not spend $500 billion (Score:5, Interesting)
What it did was lose $500 billion of its market capitalization.
To say that Facebook "burned" $500 billion implies that they spent the money. They actually didn't even have the money; market capitalization is the sum total of the value of all outstanding shares of stock. The money is in the hands of the individual shareholders, not facebook itself.
Re: Facebook did not spend $500 billion (Score:3)
Re: Facebook did not spend $500 billion (Score:5, Informative)
I share your sentiment about Mark Zuckerberg. This loss of value did indeed affect him personally, since most of his wealth is tied up in Facebook shares.
On the other hand, it's called a bubble. Facebook shares have been way over-priced, based on price-to-earnings ratio. Now, it's underpriced compared to other major companies. Because of that, it's likely to bounce back.
Stocks go up, stocks go down, usually it doesn't mean a whole lot.
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Re: Facebook did not spend $500 billion (Score:2)
They go up, and the fanboys crow.
They go down and the haters celebrate.
Journalists pick which they prefer and promote them as "the truth" (lately going further to decry the other side as "fake news".
Which of these parties is being the most dishonest?
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Re: Facebook did not spend $500 billion (Score:2)
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The stupid, it hurts (Score:5, Insightful)
As an active stock trader I have point out that it is absolutely ludicrous to think that changing the name of the company has any effect at all on the stock price.
The stock went down, because during the pandemic the Federal Reserve was dumping liquidity into the economy, and that let to popular stocks becoming overpriced. It came down off of silly highs that everybody knew weren't sustainable. A lot of that was because there wasn't a "safe haven." In the old days, gold and bonds were safe havens, places to park your money when the future is uncertain, but gold has fallen from that because first no currencies are gold-backed anymore, and second most countries sold off their gold reserves. So it no longer consistently moves in the opposite direction than the stock market. Bonds simply became too popular with foreign buyers (mostly in China) who want a stable place to park their money. That's driven bond yields down below inflation. That's a good safe haven if you're from a country with higher systemic risk, but for Americans that's not a reasonable investment compared to the stock market, because your money effectively shrinks instead of growing. So a basket of big-name stocks were used as an artificial safe-haven. As soon as the Fed started to taper their economic supports, those stocks started going back down as people shifted their investments back into normal things based on the new economic situation.
Furthermore, FB had a recent quarterly report that showed user shrinkage. They beat earnings estimates, which is good, but a big part of their stock price was based on continued growth. It was pricing in future earnings being even higher. So good earnings now, but losing users, naturally leads to a (relatively small) additional drop in the price. Also there are numerous accusations that FB failed to properly disclose risks related to recent and ongoing scandals to investors. That lowers investor confidence.
Re:The stupid, it hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
As an active stock trader I have point out that it is absolutely ludicrous to think that changing the name of the company has any effect at all on the stock price.
First, it's absolutely ludicrous to suggest that changing the name doesn't effect the stock price. This is an example of what they call "headline risk". The stock market is by and large an emotional beast- headlines- positive or negative, can and do have an enormous effect on the price. (See Tesla, which even Musk thinks is way overvalued).
Second, it wasn't just a name change. It was a ham-fisted attempt to distance themselves from all the scandals Facebook has racked up the past few years and instead pretend to pivot to a "new technology", ie, the so-called "metaverse". And as anyone who has read the constant stream of metaverse-related news on Slashdot can tell you- it's mostly just a pyramid scheme to convince fools to invest in "virtual property". That can't be giving investors a lot of reassurance for the future.
Third, the trillions of dollars the Fed printed the past few years haven't magically disappeared. The market will inevitably return to where it was and continue to go higher. The current volatility has more to do with a certain maniac in Eastern Europe putting the world on the brink of World War 3 than anything else.
Being a moron (Score:3)
You might want to look in the mirror before accusing others of being morons. Or, at least my perception is that you fell back to the accusation because you don't actually have a coherent rebuttal for it, so you had to go for the personal attack rather than go for the argument. Thus, at least to many readers on slashdot, making his argument more compelling.
Personally, I also think that renaming a company can absolutely affect the stock price, because as DrSpock11 mentions, the stock market is highly emotio
Re:The stupid, it hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
As an active stock trader, it's ludacris to think it doesn't. You have to ask "What does the name change signal?" Name changes are expensive and its throwing away an existing brand. Why would they do that? What are they trying to get out of it, and what are the odds of success?
Here there's a couple answers to that:
1) The FB brand was becoming toxic, and they wanted to separate it from other properties (IG, Whatsapp). This is either a negative sign if you think it had value, or possibly a positive sign if you think they were ignoring their brand issues and think it will work. I don't think it will work, so I'd view it as a negative distraction to the company.
2)They really believe the metaverse is the next big thing. A bet the company type play for it. Which if you agree, is a positive sign, although risky. If you think the metaverse isn't actually wanted, it means they're betting the company on something you have no faith in.
So yeah, changing the name like this will absolutely effect the price. Now I think the size of the decline was more due to them announcing their quarterly results and how much they've sunk into the metaverse with no return so far. But the name change gets added into that.
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Now I think the size of the decline was more due to them announcing their quarterly results and how much they've sunk into the metaverse with no return so far.
No, the reason why the stock price tanked (besides the crazy stock market conditions), was because Apple's move to wall off its customers from Facebook's advertising bot (which operates outside of Facebook) meant that Facebook was going to lose access to a huge number of consumers, for advertising & 3rd party data collecting. Its going to be a bigger loss when Google does the same thing as Apple in the next few quarters. Remember, Google owns Chrome; the browser that owns the Internet (but not Apple's
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As an active stock trader I have point out that it is absolutely ludicrous to think that changing the name of the company has any effect at all on the stock price.
The stock went down, because during the pandemic the Federal Reserve was dumping liquidity into the economy,
As an active stock trader surely you know that's been going on for a decade now and isn't connected to the pandemic in any substantive way.
gold has fallen from that because first no currencies are gold-backed anymore
As has been the case since 1971ish, yet gold's peak was in 2020.
That's driven bond yields down below inflation.
Bonds have been driven down by massive bond buying by central banks, which has destroyed the normal market. China is a relatively minor player - or at least not unusually large one - in this particular shenanigans. BoJ now owns most of the Japanese bond market, a situation which would have been unthinkable i
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Bonds simply became too popular with foreign buyers (mostly in China) who want a stable place to park their money
That is no doubt a factor, but the bigger issue for bonds is that quantitative easing actually involves the fed creating money to buy up bonds in huge quantities. This adds a ginormous new buyer to the bond market - far in excess of the Chinese - which drives their prices up and yields down. In fact, this is precisely what the fed hoped to achieve with QE - to force terrified investors back out onto the risk curve by destroying the attractiveness of government bonds.
Now the fed is reducing QE, bond yields w
Let's hope. nt (Score:2)
So, these kids are the future?
A New Hope (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, Facebook is in trouble; but Zuckerberg is hoping to give the company a second life!
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Call it Second Life maybe? (Score:2)
Buy up that company so we'd be relieved from that pile of crap as well.
FB is in trouble because it's not fun, that's it!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing is fun about facebook. Let's be real, posters think it is fun to talk about privacy and certainly, THEY think they sound intelligent opining about it when a company declines after some bad news, but facebook's decline is related to the fact that the majority of people on it, don't have fun when they're on it. No one but a few weirdos really cares about their privacy policies. I'm tech-savvy and I can't point you to a single tangible instance in which facebook or google made my life worse with tracking. If a career software professional who keeps up to date can't point to tangible downside, casual users certainly won't care.
Find a way to make Facebook fun and people will come back.
Right now, it's a chore. I go on there for school groups for my kids and community organizations. It's indispensable for that. However, going on is work. I do it, I leave as fast as I can. It's about as pleasant as the DMV or voting. I don't hang around. I don't keep it on my phone. When I do browse around, I never think "hey, this is cool...I should do this more often when I get more time."
If facebook was enjoyable, we wouldn't be having this conversation. No one would care about theoretical esoteric tracking. No one would care about Apple's decision. It would be a mild setback.
Facebook is an entertainment-first venture. It's designed to entertain people. When it stops being entertaining for the majority of people, they decline and fail.
Privacy nuts want to blame their tracking for the decline. Conservatives love to blame cancel culture. Liberals love to blame the racists on FB and the algorithms that amplify their voice. However, that's all noise. Facebook is declining because it's not fun. We'd tolerate all those things if we had joy when we're using it, but few under 65 likes facebook all that much.
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Facebook literally becoming meta (Score:3)
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Hell yeah, a Riftwar reference! :)
Ehh, they'll be fine (Score:4, Informative)
They still own Facebook, and people are not going to stop using Facebook for a while. Plenty of money to be made there. Their stock was just overvalued, that's all.
The whole "Meta" thing is a distraction. It's not going to be big anytime soon, and it's not going to replace what we have now. Most people don't want to jack into some expensive, state-of-the-art VR experience like they're in a William Gibson novel. They just want to tweet things on their phone.
Weird how they didn't spend a penny on... (Score:5, Interesting)
...not making it looks dystopian and horrifying. Every video they've put out looks like it was created by aliens trying to pacify the humans but they don't understand our psychology and have no idea what we want.
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Don't run! We are your friends!
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Don't run! We are your friends!
It's not unusual to have fun with anyone. (Ghak-gnak-gnak!)
He should have called it Wild Palms instead (Score:2)
Just go for it, damn it! lol :)
Church Windows - starring Mark Zuckerberg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Metaverse is useless (Score:3)
FaceBooks US user base has been on the decline for 5 or 6 years and the rest of the world finally caught up.
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I disagree. Second Life is still..Second Life. It's not dead and a lot of the riff-raff is gone.
Most of the users are now eight to sixteen year veterans. Still closer to a metaverse than anyone has gotten.
The Meta/Oculus produced applications on the other hand are garbage.
Tiny worlds with soft textured graphics and a crappy simplistic lighting model.
Meta's graphic designers seem to be targeting 8 year old refugees from Veggie Tales.
If this is their direction, they might as well just burn the cash in a barre
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I think they are targeting everyone - gamers of all description, businesses seeking remote conferencing solutions, casual socialisers, tech enthusiasts. The result is elevator music: So bland it cannot be considered bad or good.
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Second Life has gotten better and better. The sl hype bubble from 15 years ago is gone, but the virtual world is still there and keeps improving.
Let's check Zuck's movie watching history (Score:3)
Seriously though... The whole "Meta 3D online universe" thing is far from around the corner. 3D technology has been pushed repeatedly and then dries up because there just isn't a demand for it. Getting to the 3D environment isn't convenient. You can't just whip it out of your pocket. 3D TVs were such a hugely hyped "new thing" and they died even though you didn't need to clear out a safe area so users wouldn't crash into their surroundings. VR headsets are lots of fun for most people but VR games are an extremely limited market compared to the huge social media/marketing companies. (If my 3D LG ever dies I'm going to be pissed because there are a few older games that really rock in 3D.)
Currently the best niche usage of VR is to make YouTube videos of people freaking out and running headlong into walls or smashing their flatscreen TVs.
The tragic thing about Facebook (Score:3)
Seeing Facebook sink slowly, I'm not really too sad about as I just do not like the platform...
However what does make me a bit sad, is the many great companies Facebook has absorbed that will go down with it. Kind of wish a lot of them could escape the orbit of that doomed star, but I doubt many will.
No fucking way (Score:2)
Seriously, I feel like everything we have seen so far regarding the Meta platform could have been developed for a 20 million bucks. You can't tell me they needed more than 1,000 people ($200k salary average.) Bullshit. How many fools are needed? I seriously haven't seen anything that couldn't have been built with just a couple hundred people.
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Remind me to read the article before commenting. Though my comment is still valid btw.
Try not calling your users terrorists! (Score:4, Interesting)
I lost 12 years of my life, apps I developed, pages and groups I managed, because I pasted something from Wikipedia explaining what Hamas was, in the context of the recent israel conflict. The censor bot claimed I supported terrorism and my account was immediately canceled.
Good riddance.
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Ugh, that sucks.
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They did you a favor.
Second Life for people who haven't got a first one (Score:4, Funny)
It's dead, Jim.
Could not be happier! (Score:2)
Script flip! Zuck has an unforced goal flipping the book into a face plant of his own net worth.
Can he make something that people value?
Back to first principles
Crypto (Score:2)
They should measure their own worth in their own made-up currency, to fully detach it from real reality
well (Score:2)
We can only hope this hastens the demise of Facebook.
Re:Yes but not because of the $500 billion (Score:5, Interesting)
It's clear Zuck finds FB "boring". He's been searching for things other than FB for a while. Before Meta, there was Libra Coin. And before that there are plenty of failed attempts that no one bothers to remember. Everything FB has done successfully in recent history is because of who they bought. There's no innovation left there.
Political or not (Score:5, Interesting)
And I don't have to inject politics. Politics injects itself and everything. Americans like to pretend that's not the case and treat politics as some dirty little thing that we don't need to involve ourselves and except for every two years or so.
As someone currently struggling to buy a house because antitrust law wasn't enforced allowing a handful of companies to buy up every apartment complex within about 30 miles of me, I'm painfully aware of how politics affects me and every aspect of my life. And I'm sick and tired of people telling me that I'm wrong for acknowledging that basic reality of modern Life.
Re:Political or not (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard a lot of stories lately about these investment companies who are buying up rentals, rv parks, etc and just squeezing every dime out they can but jacking up rents while cutting back on services, maintenance. etc. it's just horrible. The housing market is bad enough vultures like this are just making it worse and widening the wealth gap even further.
Re: Political or not (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not it (Score:3)
They're the worst kind of parasites. But we can't do anything about them because with all that money comes power. We could take that power away, but it would require taking that money away, and whenever you sug
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Nice FP branch and I'm beginning to understand why the mindless trolls dislike you so much.
Have you ever considered the solution approach of a progressive tax on profits, but linked to market share rather than size of the company? If a company is too dominant in its market, then the natural path to higher retained earnings would be for the company to divide itself into smaller companies that are honestly competing for that market.
Re: Political or not (Score:2)
Facebook did not lose $500B. Not even a dime (Score:2)
Facebook shareholders lost. Facebook the company lost nothing at all. Their surplus cache and cash flow was not affected one iota by the change in share price. The book value is unchanged. The profit potential is unchanged by the stock market.
The only ways the stocks price change affects Facebook is hypothetical. If they needed to issue new shares to raise capital then a higher share price is better but even then it's not necessary . If they had excess capital in reserve they could consider a buyback
Re: Political or not (Score:2)
Re:Yes but not because of the $500 billion (Score:4, Interesting)
It's clear Zuck finds FB "boring". He's been searching for things other than FB for a while. Before Meta, there was Libra Coin. And before that there are plenty of failed attempts that no one bothers to remember.
And he needs to as well. Facebook is facing a huge problem in that it has completely saturated its own market while at the same time having cemented itself as the root of all evil in the universe.
There's no additional market to capture, no growth opportunities. Any remotely competent CEO would be looking to do something different. Any remotely competent CEO would be looking to create a new market (via crypto or VR as the emerging technologies).
Zuckerberg is remotely competent, though I doubt he's competent enough to actually have a proper success in creating new markets. He's no Steve Jobs, but at least he realises Facebook is boring, just like Jobs realised the iMac was.
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That's just one more reason to not get in touch with that, Oculus or any other thing FB/Meta owns.
Re:Yes but not because of the $500 billion (Score:5, Informative)
Old people do not have a huge amount of disposable income as a demographic...
This is just not true. In fact, "Baby Boomers remain the nation’s biggest spenders overall": https://resources.datadrivenma... [equifax.com]
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Re:The boomers aren't quite old yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Lol. The boomers are the richest generation in history, not just in absolute terms, but also by proportion. You can look it up. The myth of the poor pensioner might have been true for their parents, but it's not for them.
The greatest transfer of wealth in history will occur, not when the boomers fritter away the last of their money on soft candies and funeral plots, but when their children inherit it and can finally retire themselves.
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Old people do not have a huge amount of disposable income as a demographic
Yeah, all those ads for the latest medical devices and medications are just hilarious jokes. Old people can't actually afford them.
There's not enough money there (Score:2)
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Unfortunately, they can. Medicare distorts the every fiscal aspect of the healthcare industry, and the politicians that can manage where it goes are perfectly fine making it a cash cow for the health care industry. How many 85 year olds could afford a titanium hip replacement, if it wasn't for Medicare?
When a health tech innovation comes about, its not about how the patent holder will mass market the device such to drive down its cost, but to maximize its profits gaming Medicare and health insurance compa
Re: Yes but not because of the $500 billion (Score:2)