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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

#391

Post by balaji1 »

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…

For me, Facebook used to be a place to connect with people as I met them IRL. Now LinkedIn has taken over this purpose of being a digital address book.

But sometimes I get stuck scrolling forever. Maybe that ad revenue is enough for them. I still go to FB for groups and business' pages.

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

#392

Post by civilized »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #322
civilized wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This was surprisingly persuasive. You're thinking about actual productivity and not just dreaming of avatars sitting at a virtual conference table. (Ick.)

I agree with the other commenter that people are going to keep showing up in factories and repair shops, but there may be a decent sized niche of genuine utility.

Do us a favor: stay independent and stay interesting. Don't get acquired by Zuck. Maybe the MechE's in my family will use your stuff one day.

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

#393

Post by ohashi »

aierou wrote: post #308
zepto wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is a machine that makes people parrot tired narratives that are devoid of insight.

Apparently so is HN

So do you work for facebook or is your only purpose on HN to try to defend the company?

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

#394

Post by spywaregorilla »

dymk wrote: post #120
mjfl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff and it's an odd bet.

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've been posting a lot of comments recently about how much Half Life Alyx disappointed me, not with any sort of motive but here we go again.

I felt incredibly lame shooting the headcrabs in half life alyx. They were fat and slow, and when I felt like they were going to hit me I tapped the left stick twice to teleport 20m away while they waddled towards me hopelessly. When they hit me, I just kind of shrugged because the experience of being hit in VR is so uninteresting. A lot of the times I would just be annoyed that aiming at a headcrab 10m was hard so I just waited for it to fall close to me then shoot it at point blank range 4 times.

In resident evil 4 (which is now vr but I've no experience with it) the zombies did this thing where they ran at you really fast, but when they got close, they walked slowly. This was because you had low mobility when aiming, so the enemies had to play nice to give you a chance. Half Life Alyx felt like that but way more so. Everything coddled you to the point of seriously breaking immersion for me.

Electric dog? Warns you that it's going to zap a path for like 10 seconds before doing anything.

Machine gunner guy? Shoots for 10 seconds then sits still for another 5 in plain sight while reloading.

Normal combine guys? Mostly just standing out in the open or failing to use cover effectively so you can casually snipe their weak spot.

Felt to me like a poorly curated house of dead line gun game.

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

#395

Post by spookthesunset »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #351
chaostheory wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The service is key, but I somehow doubt they will open their platform to 3rd party hardware like Valve. imo The hardware is just as important.

I think they will restrict it at first, to control the user experience. In the starting phase it'll be crucial to avoid bad reviews due to substandard hardware. Google did exactly this with their cardboard headset. People lost interest in VR because they watched a rollercoaster vid on a crappy cardboard setup and thought they had seen it all. All these $5 eBay headsets flooding the world didn't promote VR at all. The…

But it is doomed to fail unless they act like a startup and can be nimble and pivot quickly. They should have at least had something to demo that anybody could play with before talking about it publicly. This whole thing reeks of "big design upfront". They are gambling tons and tons of money and political capital on something that is completely unproven.

When is the last time a huge company really went "all in" on a completely unproven idea and have it become a success?

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

#396

Post by swyx »

mathattack wrote: post #174
dmurray wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really plausible that the market can predict Facebook's earnings to within 5% and that such a small miss would cause a rational investor to value Facebook 20% lower. This seems more like a symptom of the market being generally skittish, with a small side of "expected" earnings actually being a low-biased estimate, so it's more like a 10% miss.

It’s not about accuracy. If a stock is priced at a huge multiple to earnings and sales, the market consensus is enormous profit growth for a sustained period. When the slope of the curve moves (or changes direction) the NPV (Net Present Value) of future cash flows drops dramatically. The miss is also against future guidance. This could be answering a question of “Is Facebook too distracted to grow their core business…

at the same time, dont take guidance misses literally out of context. many companies habitually sandbag guidance (so they can “beat” guidance every quarter) and then analysts play kremlinology to figure out what the “real” guidance is.

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

#397

Post by chaostheory »

spookthesunset wrote: post #395
GekkePrutser wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they will restrict it at first, to control the user experience. In the starting phase it'll be crucial to avoid bad reviews due to substandard hardware. Google did exactly this with their cardboard headset. People lost interest in VR because they watched a rollercoaster vid on a crappy cardboard setup and thought they had seen it all. All these $5 eBay headsets flooding the world didn't promote VR at all. The…

But it is doomed to fail unless they act like a startup and can be nimble and pivot quickly. They should have at least had something to demo that anybody could play with before talking about it publicly. This whole thing reeks of "big design upfront". They are gambling tons and tons of money and political capital on something that is completely unproven. When is the last time a huge company really went "all in" on a…

> They should have at least had something to demo that anybody could play with before talking about it publicly.

They already do. It's called Quest 2. Their 1st version of the "metaverse" is Horizon and Venues, though 3rd parties on meta's platform like VR Chat and RecRoom are also metaverse plays.

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

#398

Post by xkfm »

mjfl wrote: post #106
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 and it's an odd bet.

I think it'll play out in five to seven years. I'm also in the group that bought a Quest 2 over the holidays and am really, really, really impressed. It's very close to being more than a novel experience. Immersed works well, but because of the res of the headset, you can't actually see any more text than you would on your monitors in real life, the monitors are just bigger. For games, FPSes and driving games seem to be "solved", but almost every other genre still needs work. Basically, if a game genre is normally played first person, it'll work well in VR already. Movies, TV, manga/comics are there too. I'm at the point now where I don't plan on buying another monitor unless I absolutely have to.

I should note that I only play multiplayer experiences with PCVR because I'm afraid of getting banned for whatever reason and having my headset bricked. That's one area I'm worried about, but it's not related to the hardware/technology.

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

#399

Post by max49 »

omot wrote: post #268
max49 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Never underestimate the blue message bubble y'all. That's real leverage. Only in north America. Like it or not, there is faaarrrrrr more future money to be made with the 3B ish people of china+india than the 0.4B americans.

Don't most rich Chinese use iPhones?

.......

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

#400

Post by operatingthetan »

skinnymuch wrote: post #226
nathanaldensr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never even consider working for Facebook no matter their interview process. They are a loathsome company led by a psychopath. They could offer me a job right now with no interview and I wouldn't take it. Some people can't be bought. What about you?

Nearly every one can be bought. Choosing to be holier than thou while drawing a line of Facebook is awful, they can’t buy me, but otherwise not doing the same to the majority of public/big companies who are also ethically compromised, is not so much better. Yes, I’d take a high paying job at Facebook. I live in a status quo, unfair, corrupt capitalist society in the west. I know I have to play the game.

>Nearly every one can be bought.

Sure, if we're just talking about comparing generalizations or wild scenarios, but in context that person probably has access to other opportunities that rival or exceed Facebook's comp or social impact.

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