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Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

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Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#251

Post by mancerayder »

evilantnie wrote: post #218
jmknoll wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you on this. I received a Quest as a Christmas gift and basically went from 0 to 100 on VR and the Metaverse. It finally makes sense to me. Like you say, there are some issues with the tech, but they’ll be resolved in time, and it’s clear that this is the future of gaming at least, and maybe much of social media/virtual interaction.

I'd be curious if you feel the same way in a year or so. When I first got into VR I felt very strongly it was the future, but that novelty wore off over the course of a year. I go back every few months to catch up on experiences I've missed and try out new tech, but the novelty has still worn off. VR is not a daily use experience for me, and I assume for a lot of consumers, but it is still amazing.

I find that a) the bulkiness of the headset (and the added wires and external sensors of the Valve Index) and b) the fact that I don't always feel like waving my arms around or reaching stuff after sitting in front of the PC all day, made it wear off for me.

I was into Pokerstars VR for a while but interacting with people through the microphone made me realize I don't really enjoy talking to strangers from around the country while playing poker.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#252

Post by bentcorner »

civilized wrote: post #189
jmknoll wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you on this. I received a Quest as a Christmas gift and basically went from 0 to 100 on VR and the Metaverse. It finally makes sense to me. Like you say, there are some issues with the tech, but they’ll be resolved in time, and it’s clear that this is the future of gaming at least, and maybe much of social media/virtual interaction.

For the sake of argument let's take you folks' word that it's the future of gaming (for the subset that can tolerate and enjoy the headsets). How much money is in that? I don't believe for a moment that it'll extend into work interactions. Maybe family visiting type experiences, again for the subset that can enjoy the headset setup.

I've tried working in VR and it's... ok. If you're ok with working on a single monitor at At 1440p and above resolution isn't there yet and pushing multiple monitors through to the headset is still (to my knowledge) not practical. The remote desktop-like apps I've tried only do a single monitor.

I like the bet that Quest 2 made with making the headset do all the processing, but it fails for tasks like this.

I think eventually we'll get a headset where working in VR becomes practical and affordable, but we're not there yet. Maybe apple pulls off a Gear-VR-like setup where you plonk your phone in front of some lenses on your face. But AFAIK anything better than the Quest 2 is substantially more expensive.

My wild guess is that practical work VR is 2-3 years away. Meta's next headset iteration might do it + price drops.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#253

Post by Miraste »

magicjosh wrote: post #74
nappy-doo wrote: post #42

The vitriol on HN for FB is something else. The earnings for this company are truly staggering. They made 11$/user. Their earnings were up 34% year-over-year – on a base of 29B dollars. They made 10B more this year than they did last year, and the comments in here are all about, "boy Apple fucked them, and Meta suxor!" You people are nuts. While I don't love FB as an entity, as a business they are making fucking bank…

This is a tech community, not a "making bank" community. You may be looking for a subreddit on investing for the reactions you're expecting.

Y Combinator is a venture capital company that focuses on tech. This board has a sizable investment focused community.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#254

Post by jliptzin »

dylan604 wrote: post #236
Kranar wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to do a deep dive on the meaning and nature of earnings estimates, and you'll find it's mostly just a service that exists because it gives the appearance of legitimacy to various financial institutions. Earnings estimates do not come down from God and there's no one single earnings estimate either, different sites and sources will report different estimates. Typically it's just the average or the median of…

This is what I've never understood. These estimates are just that, estimates. They are guesses, potentially educated guesses based on some data, but guesses/hopes/prayers none the less. It's like sports teams and all of the talking heads giving their opinions on the upcoming matches. In sports, it's called betting. But in business, it's called investing. It's the same thing, only one is more widely accepted an legal.

Yea that’s why I don’t understand the big fuss surrounding sports gambling/online poker etc. There’s currently something called the options market, much larger than both those things combined, where people are betting one way or the other on minute differences in a company’s quarterly earnings reports. You want to ban online gambling? Ok fine, I can easily go bet my entire life savings on whether Facebook earnings will be 30 billion or 31 billion next quarter.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#255

Post by dylan604 »

intrepidsoldier wrote: post #71

The data center infrastructure that Facebook (Meta) has is probably in the top 5 in this world (behind only Amazon, Microsoft, Google). They might want to become a cloud infrastructure provider for some side money and buy themselves some time to figure out this Metaverse fantasy :) Hey, AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.

So if FB doesn't need the capacity, why do they have it? Retail obviously has a big push in the ramp up to the holidays, so there's a reason to have had more capacity than always required.

Does FB see spikes like that, or is it more consistent? I don't see FB having "spare" capacity to lease. Then again, I'm not a data center manager type, and just sit here in my comfy armchair playing QB.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#256

Post by wombat-man »

p1necone wrote: post #211
JCM9 wrote: post #93

Facebook’s core business model appears to be in decline. They don’t have a very diversified revenue stream despite trying various side businesses. This is the market worried that Facebook’s best days are behind it. Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff but without meaningful financial results that’s not going to placate market concerns over what looks like a downhill future for the core businesses. Face…

I don't get metaverse - they seem to be throwing lots of money and people at it, and hyping it up like it's the future. But from what I've seen so far they've just built VRChat, but worse. It's been done before by other people, it's not a new thing at all (Second Life released almost 20 years ago). This isn't a project that benefits from any of Facebooks strengths - game development companies are much better position…

It sounds like an extremely mediocre video game and I'm going to go ahead and skip it

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#257

Post by ripper1138 »

endisneigh wrote: post #216
dymk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using a roommate's Quest 2 for a few days. A few years ago I was using an OG Oculus. The Quest 2 is so much staggeringly better in every way. So much so that I can see a future where people are spending hours in VR games rather than hours playing games on a monitor. Yes, there are issues to work out with the headbands, weight, general FPS and battery life, but I finally _get_ it. The amount of badassery you…

I felt the same way, I literally bought a Quest 2 for everyone in my family. We have 4 of them and over $200 worth of games. After a couple months no one uses it anymore. It's sad lol. I do think it's amazing - Superhot is one of the best games I've ever played. But I get it - I don't know how to explain, but it seems like work to use it.

It seems like they sold a ton over the holidays this year. I and at least 4 of my friends got a quest 2 and all of us have already not used it since early Jan. VR has been looking for a killer app for 5 year and the most popular app so far is basically VR guitar hero but only for one player.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#258

Post by foxfluff »

friedman23 wrote: post #223
foxfluff wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a comment like this quite a few times now and I am curious: what exactly is the goal of pointing out that advertisement affects your life somehow, to someone who said they can't think of a relevant ad? It's not like they claimed they're immune to advertisement. They just can't think of a relevant ad, and I'm in the same boat, unless you twist the implied definition of "an ad" enough; a common trait for thes…

> It's not like they claimed they're immune to advertisement. > The idea of buying something based on an advertisement and not a need is foreign to me. My point is that despite believing they have not bought something based on an advertisement, they have in all likelihood.

Quite likely, if you twist the implied meaning of "an ad" enough.

I'd take it for granted that zwkrt is not talking about reviews and glowing endorsements and sponsored videos or placement on store shelves or .. you get the idea. They're talking about ads! The crap that surrounds the real so-called content when you try to read an article without an adblocker. The nonsense that interrupts a movie on TV (or any video on YouTube) every three minutes. The trash results that gets a special place in front of all the other trash when you search on Google. All unsolicited, not sought for. I'd say if uBlock Origin doesn't block it, then it likely isn't an ad in the sense zwkrt means?

Buying something after seeking out reviews and seeing one that was biased and paid for could happen but it's not necessarily happening to everyone, and it's probably not what the fellow upstream meant when they said they find buying things based on an advertisement foreign.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#260

Post by sergiotapia »

Aperocky wrote: post #212
omot wrote: post #169

This is from Mark Zuckerberg's post. I think it's a decent explanation of their performance. Historically Facebook always made these longer-term bets and they've typically paid off. "Before I get to that, I want to briefly touch on our Q4 results, which I know Sheryl and Dave are going to go deeper on. I'm proud of the work our teams did here. We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and businesses of al…

Well all of those point seem to sum up to: "We're getting beat by Tiktok and we're going to catch up by being more like tiktok" That doesn't exactly exude confidence.

I don't know a single person under 30 that still uses Facebook for real. They mostly are still there to talk to grandma or parents. If Facebook hadn't bought whatsapp they would be toast. The writing is on the wall, the beginning of the MySpace curve happening before our very eyes.
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