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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

#341
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…

Stories "paid off"? Are there ads in them? Are they popular with other people?

Very minimally utilized in my social circle, I see maybe 1 suggested story per month, maybe click through 2-4 a year, watch 10 seconds of bland content by someone I haven't talked to in years, then close the tab wondering why I thought the it was going to be interesting this time.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> game development companies are much better positioned to make compelling social VR experiences like this. I don't think that's true. Game developer company culture is heavily oriented towards making and selling products to consumers. They know how to make games people will pay for, and the entire business and culture revolves around that. With Meta and other ad-driven companies, the people aren't the consumers, the…

VR Chats made by consumer-first game developers are already only minimally compelling to niche groups (furries, anime weebs, etc).

I cant understand why people think a consumer-hostile company would be able to improve the experience enough to reach broader audiences.

People will try it for an hour or two when they boot up their oculus. Realize being in a room of shouting tweens is not fun, and then never try it again.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ironic considering that Apple displaced the former unstoppable phone monopoly. Never mind that Walmart displaced the former unstoppable Sears monopoly, and Amazon did the same to Walmart. IBM which people predicted was unstoppable, was going to rule the world. IBM's descent into irrelevance (I B What?) has been profound. The only interesting thing is people still insist that this time it's gonna be different.

It’s not helpful to say it’s inevitable if no timeline is given. If it won’t happen for 30 years, there is little point in talking about it right now. Though looking at history, when one of these tech giants do fall, a lot of people who were saying it would happen will act like prophets. Especially funny because the downfall of Facebook has been predicted for a decade now. Since Friendster and MySpace each did not la…

Who has been proven wrong are all the pundits who proclaimed their monopolies were unstoppable.

Other giant companies have fallen as well. RCA, Xerox, GE, Kodak, on and on.

The reasons are well known. They become bureaucratic, wasteful and ossified, and become unable to adapt to a changing marketplace.

I've seen this play out again and again and again in my lifetime.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm still a Facebook user (over 30, with kids, friends all over the world, and lots of groups that I care about), but the Reels thing is making me seriously consider leaving for good. It's awful, cringeworthy intrusive clickbaity videos from random kids I've never heard of every few posts on my feed. I clicked the X to make it go away but surprise, it's back. At this point their demographic is not the TikTok demograp…

>their demographic is not the TikTok demographic

In other words, not the youth, which is an existential problem for a growth oriented social media company no?

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

#346
post #341
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…

Stories "paid off"? Are there ads in them? Are they popular with other people? Very minimally utilized in my social circle, I see maybe 1 suggested story per month, maybe click through 2-4 a year, watch 10 seconds of bland content by someone I haven't talked to in years, then close the tab wondering why I thought the it was going to be interesting this time.

Maybe I'm a generation younger than you, but if you were young when Snapchat was cool, then you probably transitioned to stories from the "main" IG content and dropped Facebook altogether. I spend 90+% of my time on IG on stories and it is a really good way to keep up with people as far as generally knowing where they are/what they're up to. I probably post once a month for reference.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My feed is full of shit I don’t want I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two. There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you'…

Finally, someone with a similar Facebook experience to my own. I've been reading threads about how horrific the FB feed is for years, but my own is literally 99% updates from friends I don't get to see, and an occasional ad (that is interesting more often than not). Glad to know I'm not completely alone!

You do realize all these platforms ramp up ads the more you use them right?

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

#348

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.

I think their brand is the antithesis of the data protection wants of the majority of cloud webservice customers.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My feed is full of shit I don’t want I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two. There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you'…

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 am not on FB but I use Reddit and I’m a little worried about how they will try to monetize when they go public. I have a feeling eventually it will become unusable. I’ve been a Redditor for 10 years now and I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there but I feel like it’s only natural.
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