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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

#321

Post by lhorie »

IgorPartola wrote: post #234
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…

So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads. Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from pe…

The overarching theme I'm seeing is one of FB jumping into whatever format bored people turn to, then slowly cramming it w/ ads until those eyeballs drift to the next fad, rinse and repeat.

Regardless of how one might dislike it, the "generate outrage => show ads" thing has been working just peachy for Fox and friends. So my cynical take is that FB will continue to do just fine even as people shift to different consumption formats, and even if tiktok took over the world, because fundamentally, bored people will always exist and fads come and go.

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

#322

Post by vhiremath4 »

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 want to disclose a bias I have here: I run a video startup, so I'm pretty incentivized to believe VR will become a standard in several work contexts.

That said, when I try my hardest to think objectively about the future of work, I think VR is going to be everywhere.

Workers going into factories will become exceedingly rare. The cost of humans is high both from a safety and headcount perspective, and more and more of manufacturing pipelines are becoming automated end-to-end. Service repairs will likely happen remotely and only require humans to be onsite if absolutely necessary in the future. It's good for business.

There is a ton on "dark factories" to be found online. Also, there are many startups that have significant traction which are bridging these two worlds via AR:

https://www.mirareality.com/

When it comes to knowledge work, I think anywhere where you have to work with visuals will become a predominant VR stomping ground. If you need to be working with 3D models (lots of engineering + manufacturing) or flat UIs (being able to point and pan and modify is more natural with hand gestures), VR will likely win out. I also think VR will create a space for completely new ways of constructing software architecture. This could be a bridge to creating architectures visually for the first time (want to define a service that automagically becomes a kubernetes service and node on the backend? create a box here and give it some parameters!). The interactivity of this kind of build feels very natural, and it's how we actually already do things in a more limited 2d context. My guess is the killer feature here with VR is the immersiveness allowing for better synchronous collboration.

I could be totally wrong about this stuff, but I think a lot of our lives will change with VR. There are some serious hurdles we need to get over, most notably form factor, weight, and nausea. I feel like these are solvable problems, but honestly that's mostly a hunch more than anything. Would love to hear from others who know more than me!

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

#323

Post by chaostheory »

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…

> 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.

Unless Zuck can pull a Bezos with convincing investors, Meta's stock will be in trouble for a few years until their metaverse division starts becoming profitable; which will be at least a decade if they're focused on growth.

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

#324

Post by paulryanrogers »

acdha wrote: post #147
paulryanrogers wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What phone monopoly did Apple disrupt? Nokia? Symbian? Java mobile? Palm? Blackberry?

The phone carriers. They charged a fortune for data, restricted useful features on your phone (I remember one model which wouldn't play non-DRMed music because they wanted to boost their revenue), and things like mobile apps were held back by the way the carriers would look at your finances and decide how much to charge just for the privilege of being listed. When Qualcomm was getting started with BREW we looked into…

Balckberry, Treo, AIM, XMPP, and Windows Mobile blazed the trails. Apple's role in ramping up data usage likely helped, though I suspect much of that change would have happened eventually regardless.

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

#325

Post by GekkePrutser »

chaostheory wrote: post #84
librish wrote: post #5

Apple vs ad-tech is a really interesting battle. It shows the immense power Apple has in the consumer market today, where they can affect some of the largest businesses in the US unilaterally. Meta is in a very tricky position in that unless they put up an actual paywall users don’t really have any incentive to allow tracking. But putting up a paywall introduces a lot of friction, not to mention the adverse selection…

I think you're forgetting about the reason why they switch names in the first place. Meta is signaling that they are all in with their own hardware platform.

It's not about hardware really. The hardware is just to sell the service in the best way possible. They had to make it. Because there was no good affordable standalone headset so far. The metaverse idea is all about the platform/service.

I'm a big VR fan and even I'm not sure whether the metaverse will take off. But without hardware like the quest 2 it wouldn't have a chance.

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

#326

Post by kritiko »

endisneigh wrote: post #219
kergonath wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc. Alphabet is more than 80% advertising: https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735 . They are good at skewing how they are perceived but they are very close to being a one-business company. Not defending Facebook, but Google is not much better.

Their "ads" are driven from more sectors than Facebook. Whatsapp has no ads, so it's basically FB and Insta

FB has Audience Network which extends their targeting off platform.

But yes, Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick and investment in video through YouTube has allowed them to capture the publisher and buyer side of much of the open web (and use the data to cut out competition - cf. Project Bernanke)

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

#327

Post by dastbe »

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.

> AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.

No, it really did not.

The reality is even if Meta has the best data center infrastructure in the world their infrastructure is focused solely on solving their problems and operates under the constraint that it is not consumable by any arbitrary company. aws was built more or less in isolation to amazon's original infrastructure and gcp was built as a layer on top of google's internal infrastructure. there is use in what exists internally but only to (re)build the product you'd sell.

The lead time for them to get even basic primitives out the door would be significant, not even considering the depth of features that more sophisticated cloud customers want.

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

#328

Post by IgorPartola »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #307
IgorPartola wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I could just go follow different groups I care about on Reddit. I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

> I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me. If you're not interested in content from people in your social network, then I don't understand what you're expecting to get out of a social network anyway. Facebook isn't a bad way to keep up with friends and family, but if you don't like your friends on any pla…

I have meaningful conversation with people on other social networks. Discord, Instagram, Twitter, even TikTok. Facebook is the exception: it throws content at me that I explicitly don’t want and as its user base ages the content becomes less and less interesting. Topic-based groups are good but other networks simply do them better. And the idea of keeping up with what Karen from high school is doing isn’t all that fun at least to me.

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

#329

Post by chaostheory »

misiti3780 wrote: post #283

Google / Google+ === Facebook/Metaverse. They can change their name all they want, they are slowing turning into the AOL of our decade. I'm willing to take bets on where this is all going. I own an Oculus - it sucks. The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Instagram sucks more than it did last year. I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole. Eventually FB will lose because their entire b…

> I own an Oculus - it sucks.

Why? Which model?

> I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole.

Don't you need a Facebook account for Oculus?

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

#330

Post by alasdair_ »

IgorPartola wrote: post #234
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…

So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads. Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from pe…

> I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people

As a random aside, there is a Facebook ‘experiment’ (a/b test basically) that disables all ads for your account permanently. It was customary, for a while at least, to opt your user id (and that of a few friends) into that particular experiment on your last day of working at the company. Best leaving gift ever!

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