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Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

cnbc.com

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Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#21

Post by boxmonster »

gdulli wrote: post #19
boxmonster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early internet was funded and created by the US government and DNS was run by them too. Then open standards committees were created to make sure everyone spoke the same tech language. No one owns the internet. There's no reason this can't be recreated.

There was an innocence that hadn't yet been lost then. We didn't have to worry about security, toxicity, and money in the early hobbyist/enthusiast internet of the 90s. We were able to let it be "built organically by people because it was fun". The reason not everything was a mall was because it wasn't yet mainstream and there was a years-long head start before monetizing it at scale was solved. Today, the monetizati…

Sure it can. Give me some way to build a virtual location on my desktop machine - virtual server vs. web server - and then design a protocol that lets people visit it, plus a discovery service that let's people find it. The discovery service could warn people if my site was harmful, like Google does now with web sites.

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#23

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

gdulli wrote: post #12
boxmonster wrote: post #3

I've read "cyberpunk" novels so I had a certain vision of what a virtual world would look like that I probably share with a lot of people. Believe me, it's not the worlds biggest online cyber mall with cyber mall cops telling me to behave myself. Metaverse is a corporate wet dream. I regret spending money on my Oculus glasses. I'd hoped the virtual world would start out and be built organically by people because it w…

> I'd hoped the virtual world would start out and be built organically by people because it was fun, useful and anyone could make a little money, just like the early internet. The early internet having been so organically developed for fun and utility happened because money wasn't yet involved/in charge. At this point could there ever again emerge any major new technology that wasn't either developed by a huge corpor…

If the weird, unmonetized, organic virtual world existed now, there would be correlation between it being unmonetized, organic, and weird, and us not knowing about it.

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#24

Post by withinboredom »

gdulli wrote: post #19
boxmonster wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early internet was funded and created by the US government and DNS was run by them too. Then open standards committees were created to make sure everyone spoke the same tech language. No one owns the internet. There's no reason this can't be recreated.

There was an innocence that hadn't yet been lost then. We didn't have to worry about security, toxicity, and money in the early hobbyist/enthusiast internet of the 90s. We were able to let it be "built organically by people because it was fun". The reason not everything was a mall was because it wasn't yet mainstream and there was a years-long head start before monetizing it at scale was solved. Today, the monetizati…

There was all the same things we have now. But back then, being toxic was acceptable and when it went too far, admins came down with a ban hammer. Unlike back then, those banned people wouldn’t run away to some other place and cry out about how unfair the world is, especially that place they just got banned from. Mostly because there wasn’t “another place.”

The “innocence” wasn’t as innocent as you remember. The only reason it wasn’t monetized was because global payment systems weren’t really a thing yet. People sold things online anyway, it was just riskier than it is today. Today you can absolve your risk in a 2,5% + €0.30 flat rate, thanks to those trail-blazers of yesteryear.

Then people fixed bugs, and saw their sales decline. So they unfixed those bugs and consumers called them “dark patterns.” Some people started doing it on purpose, after hearing about fixing those bugs and what they did to sales.

Back then wasn’t so great. VR won’t be so great either. At least until we figure out how to spend more than a few hours in it, comfortably. Then it might get better.

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#25

Post by aligray »

boxmonster wrote: post #3

I've read "cyberpunk" novels so I had a certain vision of what a virtual world would look like that I probably share with a lot of people. Believe me, it's not the worlds biggest online cyber mall with cyber mall cops telling me to behave myself. Metaverse is a corporate wet dream. I regret spending money on my Oculus glasses. I'd hoped the virtual world would start out and be built organically by people because it w…

Do you have any recommendations? Or must-reads in the genre?

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#26

Post by IronWolve »

Many of my friends moved off due to censorship, even my state republican group moved over to mewe, my gf's book club moved to mewe, few of my family members closed their fb due to politics on their hobby groups.

Seems like all the big platforms are running off users. I use to watch my podcasts on youtube, now its at least a 3rd on rumble.

Its kinda neat that the big corps politics are spawning up tons of other platforms.

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#27

Post by russiasux »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #7

The US is a small percentage of FB usage. It is the internet in some countries. Amazing that an iOS update did this though.

Examining away the current FB disaster with an iOS update completely missed the point.

Facebook has one customer: advertisers and billions of products.

The only way for them to fuck this up is to screw their advertisers (mostly small businesses) to the extent that THE ADVERTISERS LEAVE. Yes users leaving is bad, but if they continued to evolve their ad product it would easily be possible to compensate for that... except they aren't about evolving things so much as they are about breaking things... At their customers expense (advertisers).

Having spent many many years with a Facebook ad budget measured in percentages of a multimillion dollar gross, which is now zero due to being sold bot impressions constantly, and having my ability to remove those bot impressions... removed.. My guess is that at this point I am not alone.

Going from 8% gross to zero is going to hurt if it happens across every small business in the country.

If you own FB stock... Consider yourself warned. It's WAY worse than Musk's estimate of 20% bots on Twitter (because the bots are written to... Well... Engage with ads and thereby avoid being banned by generating revenue for FB).

The Metaverse will not solve this problem. Ever.

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#28

Post by hirvi74 »

ergocoder wrote: post #20
mensetmanusman wrote: post #7

The US is a small percentage of FB usage. It is the internet in some countries. Amazing that an iOS update did this though.

In Thailand, the new Bangkok governor do Facebook live almost every day on his work. 100,000+ views on almost every video from a city of 8m. It is truly refreshing to have this kind of transparency. I have faith in FB. It is a good communication/community tool. They have to tone down the VR thing a bit. It is not the time for VR yet.

I'd rather FB tone down the blatant anti-privacy practices against their users first.

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#29

Post by therealdrag0 »

boxmonster wrote: post #16
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I regret spending money on my Oculus glasses. The "Metaverse" might be a flop, but what about other VR games? There's tons of good ones out there. And if you have a decent gaming PC, you can use your Oculus with it and play all the games on SteamVR.

That's my second disappointment. I prefer programming to playing games. Programming is my game. If I could stake a claim in the Metaverse and build Spalding Gray world (boxmonster comes from his Monster in a Box) so that Spalding was part of the virtual world then I would. Something similar to how I can build a website. Spalding Gray world just an example of what I'd like to be able to freely do for very little cost.…

Do you program both for day job and after work as hobby? I love coding but sorta don’t let myself after work because I don’t wanna get burned out.

Re: Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

#30

Post by ergocoder »

hirvi74 wrote: post #28
ergocoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Thailand, the new Bangkok governor do Facebook live almost every day on his work. 100,000+ views on almost every video from a city of 8m. It is truly refreshing to have this kind of transparency. I have faith in FB. It is a good communication/community tool. They have to tone down the VR thing a bit. It is not the time for VR yet.

I'd rather FB tone down the blatant anti-privacy practices against their users first.

We are talking about how FB can survive, not how it would be nice for you.

Also, this may come as a surprise to you, but, in many other parts of the world, privacy is low in priority to solve, especially in developing countries.

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