Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

The downvote arrow as slowly become a "truths I don't want to hear" button on HN.

Too much cheap money and a grow at any costs mentality has lead to exactly this is problem where every tech company is very tightly coupled with every other tech company.

I'm in the B2B space for one of the many non-profitable, recently IPO'd companies. As far as companies goes, this one is pretty sane. Healthy growth, a product that makes sense, thoughtful leadership. However when I look at our customers the vast majority are small tech startups, many of which will obviously cease to exist in a down turn.

When I look at our spending, it's mostly to other larger tech companies, those big tech companies everyone wants to work for.

But those small startups, that have weird products that don't make sense, price sensitive customers, unsustainable growth and crazy leadership, they make up a huge amount of our revenue. When they start to collapse, we'll have to downsize, both in headcount and in services we pay for. And we won't be alone.

On top of that, I look at my own spending. My other tech friends and I have no problem paying what would have been crazy amounts for services like Door Dash, or a constant stream of slightly over price but so convenient stuff from Amazon. Why not subscribe to another streaming services, it's only $10/month. So many of these direct to consumer companies mostly exist because of highly paid techworkers that have more cash than they need.

I get laid off I'll just pick up my food myself, I'm not going to be ordering everything of Amazon, I'm cancelling all but my most active subscriptions.

There are a lot of positive feedbacks in the current tech ecosystem what will continue to be triggered and continue to bring down the massive, massive tech bubble we're in.

> iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements

A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS).

Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the OS nor the browser.

They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.

I don’t know if there’s any merit to this idea, but it seems to me that saturation can become a real problem.

At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me.

Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks.

Sure, I was curious for a second, but it seems strange that Meta can’t tell that I’m not interested anymore just by monitoring basic usage of the UI.

At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions.

Somewhat related, I am a little surprised Meta hasn’t tried a Discord-like revenue model where paid annual memberships bestow quality of life and cosmetic social status types of benefits. Even if it wasn’t their main source of revenue it could at least diversify the business and lend some stability to their revenue.

Facebook’s revenue per user is less than $10. Discord charges $99/year for Nitro. I feel like Meta has such a one-track mindset on advertising that it doesn’t consider different revenue models for its businesses.

Meta spends a lot of time talking about the metaverse but Discord is already the metaverse. Why isn’t there a subscription Meta Quest game pass with Discord-like social features? It’s a no-brainer.

Where’s the “pro” paid version of Instagram? Why doesn’t Instagram sell subscription access to things like exclusive camera filters, stickers, and editing tools?

I feel like the company is full of missed business opportunities.

Problem with snapchat is that no one older than 25 uses it. They've already saturated their user base and stuffed as many ads as they can into the app. There's not really anywhere for them to go and they're still losing money.

> I don't think there is anything substantial here to suggest this is anything other than a normal recession

Then I'm guessing you haven't been paying much attention to anything.

Have you seen what's happening in the bond market these days? Looked at the insane actions the BoE is taking coupled with their insane tax policy? Have you seen the rising dollar are you aware the threat that makes to the entire global credit system?

This is literally just getting started.