Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective • Hacker News Board

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#21

Post by danpalmer » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:48 PM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #10

basisword wrote: post #3

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into anoth…

Success from your perspective, or the market's? The market seems generally pleased that he's taken more than a quarter of global ads, and dominates in social media advertisement. By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.

I think there's a measure of success in thought leadership and/or product.

Apple is wildly successful at both, arguably more so the leadership than the actual product. Amazon, despite its faults, has a ton of businesses many of which do well, and it continues to innovate. I'm biased but I think Google is also in that category, with many new products that are widely well regarded (yes some were acquisitions, but typically smaller ones).

Meta on the other hand... Facebook was huge, no doubt. Instagram too, but that was already semi locked in on acquisition, they already had product/market fit at least. WhatsApp has languished under Zuckerberg, having had their explosive growth independently.

Oculus? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. Crypto? Nope. AI? Nope, or at least not yet.

By business metrics, very successful. By innovation in ads, very successful. But building new consumer businesses? Not really.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#22

Post by nathan_compton » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC

qarl2 wrote: post #15

> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. I can.

This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#23

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what?

This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg:

> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected

Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.

I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#24

Post by NathanielK » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

ctkhn wrote: post #9

basisword wrote: post #3

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into anoth…

It feels like the only thing it's really big in now in the states for is facebook marketplace, which is just a slightly higher trust (but still scam and flake prone) version of craigslist using the existing user base. Feels like all his big swings have been strikes

Facebook marketplace also keeps people scrolling which means theres just way more prospective buyers.

Search is bad at finding what you want but good at keeping you searching.

Here in Canada, kijiji(ebay classifieds) was popular and has accounts and ratings. People still have moved to marketplace.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#25

Post by radicalbyte » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #12

mrits wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, other than being the dominate social media platform for the original few years (2 decades) he is a total failure I guess

They maintained the 2 decades dominance by either knifing the baby (vine) or buying (Instagram, whatsapp) every upstart. The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)

They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#26

Post by weego » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

basisword wrote: post #3

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into anoth…

It really seems like its a testament to the other c-levels and higher management that facebook has managed to become what it is despite Zuck

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#27

Post by ctkhn » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

NathanielK wrote: post #24

ctkhn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like the only thing it's really big in now in the states for is facebook marketplace, which is just a slightly higher trust (but still scam and flake prone) version of craigslist using the existing user base. Feels like all his big swings have been strikes

Facebook marketplace also keeps people scrolling which means theres just way more prospective buyers. Search is bad at finding what you want but good at keeping you searching. Here in Canada, kijiji(ebay classifieds) was popular and has accounts and ratings. People still have moved to marketplace.

True, it is pretty bad at getting right to what I want. A genuinely useful integration of AI would be to process and classify listings on upload so that I can have more filters on attributes of items for sale. I'm not holding my breath for that though

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#28

Post by saidnooneever » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

nathan_compton wrote: post #22

qarl2 wrote: post #15

> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. I can.

This is definitely a why not both sort of situation. In fact, I think being dimwitted is often associated with being evil, since goodness is (often) just rational self-interest.

negativity is usually the easy path so evil and dimwittedness go together quite well.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#29

Post by embedding-shape » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #18

AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.

[dead]

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#30

Post by threetonesun » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #19

basisword wrote: post #3

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into anoth…

According to my peers Microsoft has no market share, and literally nobody is willingly using PHP or Java. But that's obviously not true. Facebook is still dominant, Meta is an infinite money printing machine. The company can take a lot of risk for a very long time without problem

Always good to remember with large tech companies that they can have millions or hundreds of millions of people very vocally opposed to them and still have billions of users.