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Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

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Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#61

Post by MisterBastahrd »

pessimizer wrote: post #16
jonathan-adly wrote: post #8

Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.

There's nothing about Facebook that anyone needs, that no one else provides. It could go as quickly as AOL.

Facebook has survived long enough that people are likely to stay just because they're so accustomed to using it. The marketplace is great and some people have tons of family photos on the site.

AOL tried to be all things to internet users and wanted to be a walled garden at a time when cheaper alternatives were coming out that gave users more freedom. Facebook is resigned to the fact that it isn't a walled garden, but it does things to try to retain and gain new customers anyway.

Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#62

Post by baq »

pessimizer wrote: post #16
jonathan-adly wrote: post #8

Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.

There's nothing about Facebook that anyone needs, that no one else provides. It could go as quickly as AOL.

There are others.

My kid’s class parent’s group is a Facebook group. In other places it’s a WhatsApp group. The only reason is everybody has a Facebook account.

I have one too, I just don’t log in anymore, so I have no idea what the other parents are talking about behind the scenes. This is the tyranny of a walled garden social network.

I’d welcome Meta crash and burn tomorrow.

Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#64

Post by samwillis »

mcast wrote: post #39
samwillis wrote: post #17

I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant. However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems t…

>In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday That's a strong claim. The stock only dropped 25%, other tech company stocks have dropped as much as 50% in the last few quarters (Snap, DocuSign, etc.) and haven't changed leadership.

Meta literally made the history books yesterday with the larges one day drop in market capitalisation of any company in history. That's $200B of shareholder value wiped out. If I was an intuitional investor I would be asking for his resignation.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-03/meta-set-...

Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#65

Post by kgwxd »

samwillis wrote: post #17

I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant. However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems t…

1 basic move and they'll likely have 3 more Oculus sales off of me (we already have 1). No Facebook account required, just a typical account that requires no proof of identity or ties to my personal identity in any way. Just like I can sign up for Steam, XBox, Epic, Nintendo, Blizzard, and every other damn service without it. My sister just told me the other day she'd probably get 2 if it weren't for that, she doesn't even game on other platforms. There has to be tons of people holding out because of it. The move was infinitely stupid.

Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#66

Post by adventured »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #27

If Meta dies the economy will follow. Meta isnt going anywhere. If Oracle is employees massive amount of people Meta will for a long time to come. Look past one quarters earning reports.

The US economy would barely notice if Facebook vanished over the course of the next few years.

It's a modest blip in the $23 trillion US economy and its economic presence would be absorbed by others relatively quickly. Other platforms would gobble up their ad dollars, other platforms would be born or step in to pick up the eyeball attention. Other marketplaces would absorb their local listings.

Ten years out people would barely remember Facebook ever mattered at all. It'd be like a 45 year old remembering the dominance of Atari in their youth, or IBM ruling over the PC industry for 15 minutes, or AOL's good ten year run in the early days of the consumer Internet.

Nobody really gives a shit about eg Instagram or TikTok. They don't really matter. Oh a trinket vanished, here comes the next trinket. The world didn't stop with AOL, MySpace, Flickr, Friendster, ICQ, AIM, Geocities and 327 other services that nobody cares about today; and it won't stop whenever Facebook gets around to dying (regardless of the difference in scale, that doesn't matter much per capita - you don't have 3,000 friends on Facebook in reality, you have 13). People care more about sitcoms than they do these toy services, and their beloved sitcoms go away all the time, replaced by the next distraction device. Most or all of these social networks will rot and die eventually, who cares. On with the next.

And I say that as someone entirely without any of the comical rage that most of HN has regarding Facebook. It's simply obvious Facebook isn't that important.

Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#67

Post by candiddevmike »

echelon wrote: post #23
parkingrift wrote: post #11

I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.

> A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen A sibling comment even said, > Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even. Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfi…

Meta technically is mostly B2B, the users are the product. There are probably businesses that have signed ad spend deals with Meta that they can float on. And I'm sure there's ways Meta can/is juicing their ad auction numbers since they control the both ends of it without a lot of transparency.

Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#68

Post by brundolf »

pier25 wrote: post #59

Even if Meta died today, React is too big to fail at this point. I'm sure the React team would quickly find funding.

My bet: Microsoft would hire them wholesale. They’ve positioned themselves at the center of web development, they’ve embraced JS and React already, and yet they don’t have a front-end framework of their own because they missed the boat.

Re: Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

#70

Post by ReaLNero »

willturman wrote: post #42
AlwaysRock wrote: post #27

If Meta dies the economy will follow. Meta isnt going anywhere. If Oracle is employees massive amount of people Meta will for a long time to come. Look past one quarters earning reports.

> If Meta dies the economy will follow Can you expand on this? I see a company that produces net-negative societal value going through a process of price discovery. Facebook/Meta offer nothing beyond a shrinking user base to advertisers.

A firm can be net-negative in societal value, while profitable in the value it captures. E.g. oil companies
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