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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#831

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #216
CarbonCycles wrote: post #51

I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave… I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.

Correct me if I am worng, but hasnt Twitter has seen more growth in the last week than it has in some time? 15 million new users isn't a meltdown, nor is thinning a bloated and wasteful enterprise. Also, if twitter goes completely belly up, Musk would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Grave? I'm game for some hyperbole, but not this early.

"Twitter usage is at an all-time high lol"

November 7th: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589784134691741696

The questions are: can they monetize that, and will it continue? But as far as twitter dying, the opposite is currently true. It's never been more alive.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#832

Post by dbg31415 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #670

I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help. The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obli…

Hold up. You know they got money from the government not to lay people off, right?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#833

Post by vippy »

leesec wrote: post #829
Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

>Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent This is a really malicious way to describe showing two users the same button but in different locations

Yeah, because that's definitely what folks are concerned with. A/B testing of button locations, and not feed algorithms designed to manipulate users.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#834

Post by prezjordan »

leesec wrote: post #829
Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

>Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent This is a really malicious way to describe showing two users the same button but in different locations

This is not what happened https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#835

Post by metalliqaz »

leesec wrote: post #829
Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

>Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent This is a really malicious way to describe showing two users the same button but in different locations

Oh come on, you know that's not what he is talking about. He is talking about algorithmic engagement-keeping.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#836

Post by smsm42 »

Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

So, Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has been used as a source of electioneering data for years before that. See for example Eitan Hersh's testimony. In fact, I've read articles bragging about how inventive the political technology using social networking profiles is, for a couple of electoral cycles before that - they may still be somewhere in HN archives even. And of course, selling the very same data to advertisers, maybe repackaged a bit differently but the same source and same data set, is the whole business model of Facebook. And it somehow never bothered anyone until Cambridge Analytica. Why is that?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#837

Post by Eupraxias »

belval wrote: post #518
cnees wrote: post #455

"We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas [like] our long-term vision for the metaverse" Imagine laying off eleven thousand people so you can keep clinging to the disintegrating corpse of the metaverse.

I have this (maybe wrong) opinion that Meta can't be the one to bring an actual VR/Metaverse project because they are too "on the radar" of medias. Adoption of new technologies is always done by more fringe members and then picked up by critical mass. You can't successfully build a metaverse without accepting the kind of weird deviant stuff that goes on in VRChat and Meta can't accept the weird deviant stuff because…

Agreed - kind of like how Friendster and MySpace paved the path for the little startup called Facebook?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#838

Post by arbitrary_name »

pmontra wrote: post #41

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://…

The same HR/layoff consultants were used by both leadership teams, i believe.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#839

Post by nonameiguess »

asdfman123 wrote: post #749
princevegeta89 wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.

People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it. He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.

This is the key thing that people need to realize. Being a very nice person is simply not enough to be a good person. Hitler was famously kind to his dogs and domestic staff. He even personally intervened to save Ernst Hess, his Jewish CO from WWI. Big-time "but I have black friends" vibes.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#840

Post by fullshark »

hbn wrote: post #420

> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable. Literally how could that acceleration be p…

That is the premise behind the metaverse, more and more activity going online.
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