141–150 of 223 posts
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Whatsapp is really deeply embedded in business in Latin America and it's deeply concerning to me. It was already reading your conversations. At best, it's going to start serving ads soon.
How is WhatsApp embedded in business?
I further expect that, as Google becomes more desperate, more users will flock to non-Google products due to the poorer UX on e.g. YouTube.
Facebook may have a rough 2022, but I think they will probably be fine.
I am very bullish on FB: 1) Founder still has majority voting shares, gives a lot more freedom. 2) I think the Metaverse stuff will pay off in the long run 3) They are making the changes necessary to compete with TikTok. I am buying shares now at this price
I am bearish on FB for this reason. Companies with dual-class founder-dominated governance I think will increasingly see this where the founder fails to step aside for new leadership. More than that, FB more so than most other tech companies has constructed a cult of personality around its founder - even if the mechanisms existed for Mark to step aside it's unclear if the company can culturally withstand the change.
Think Ballmer-era MS, but except with zero corporate governance mechanism to replace him with their equivalent of Nadella.
I know we tend to worship founders around here but there are many instances where a founder is no longer the right leader for the company. My personal feeling has been for some time that Zuck is not the right leader for this stage of FB and seems to be doing more harm than good in the top post.
Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker. The first thing to know about Facebook is that they view the social media landscape in two dimensions: format and audience size. Format here means text -> audio -> video. So if you look at the match up between audience of 1:1,000,000 and text you'll find Twitter, for example. This has served FB quite well but what happens after video, if anything? Well, the company believes the next two ste…
Whatsapp. I still don't understand this purchase. Whatsapp is great but paying $21B for something something you have no idea how to monitize?
Metaverse. I like VR and appriciate the efforts from Facebook to really innovate here and potentially change the world. But the all Metaverse story is so cringy. I once watched an all hands with Zuck about the Metaverse and couldn't believe my eyes. I think starting small with one or two verticals would be a better approach (e.g., fitness and work meetings).
Acquisitions. Big tech relies on acquisitions and it's became much harder. Big problem for Meta that was pretty aggressive with acquisitions (e.g., Whatsapp).
Stock and talent. Yes the stock tanked and employees are "losing" money. But Meta is one of the highest paying companies so I don't see a mass exodus happening .
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Might want to watch this as it’s quite clear Meta knows exactly what’s required to make the Metaverse a reality. And if they achieve it then it will be a game changer as big as the internet or smart phone. https://youtu.be/2zHDkdkqd1I
Bingo! I'm always astonished by the amount of cluelessness displayed by HN crowd -- supposedly at the cutting edge of things. Like all other platforms, about 5% of the posters at HN provide extremely valuable content. The rest just parrot current popular pitchfork (anti-capitalism, anti-corporate, anti-advertisments -- stuff that I can get from TikTok in a more entertaining format).
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Comparing to 2021 can be misleading because the Covid year was a strange anomaly for digital businesses. That kind of profits may be a long way off for most of them. Meta's operating income (i.e. profit before taxes and interest basically) for this past quarter was $8.3 billion. That's roughly the same as Exxon did in its Q1. "Au revoir" seems premature when they're still raking in that much cash.
Also, they run three of the top five most used applications in the world. I love how people keep saying Facebook is dying, yet TikTok still doesn't have as many active users as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The only application that does is YouTube.
FB's products are trending downwards and TikTok is trending upwards. FB has pulled out the stops to stop the slide but has yet to find success doing so.
If FB doesn't arrest the slide from relevance it's only a matter of time until TikTok catches it in absolute terms. The salient question isn't whether or not FB is bigger right now (the answer is unequivocally yes) but whether or not they can halt/reverse the decline of their product.
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Meta doesn't use SREs. There is a position called Production Engineer[1] which has the same skills and does almost the same work as a SWE, but has different focus - scalability, reliability, security, automation. The ballpark ratio is 10 SWE to 1 PE. [1] - https://engineering.fb.com/category/production-engineering/
PE and SWE are't even remotely close in the pecking order at Meta. Also, the interview loops were slightly different for PE based on whether the candidate came from a SWE background or a systems background. I'm a former Meta PE who reinterviewed internally as a SWE and then left because I was told that I'd have to move countries to finalize the conversion (because my location was a non-SWE site).
I am very bullish on FB: 1) Founder still has majority voting shares, gives a lot more freedom. 2) I think the Metaverse stuff will pay off in the long run 3) They are making the changes necessary to compete with TikTok. I am buying shares now at this price
I'm not: 2) They will be facing increasing amounts of competition ex. apple. The metaverse is more than the hardware. The first big player in this space will be a game company, possibly one we aren't aware of yet. 3) Not enough to change anyone's usage habits. Just slows down the inevitable. 4) Privacy and the ads environment will continue to hurt them. There's no answer to this yet.
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Is there a reason corporations even pay taxes, versus just taxing individuals once they get money distributed to them from the corporation?
If that happens I’ll form a corporation, rent forever and have my employer pay my corporation and move to a state without income tax.
Except that you still owe taxes when your corporation gives the money to you (the individual).
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Re: #2, they also decided to merge Facebook with Oculus login, and I still refuse to buy an Oculus for that reason alone. I'm tired of my data being cross analyzed and seeing creepy ads follow me around the internet. Last thing I want to do is plug into some Facebook metaverse where even my eyeball movements are analyzed and processed. As a kid I thought I would love VR. And even as solid as the modern experiences ha…
re: The merging of facebook with oculus login -- next month you'll be able to create a standalone "meta" account, which are basically the equivalent of the old oculus accounts. You don't have to link them with a facebook account or any other existing account (but you will have the option). https://store.facebook.com/help/accounts/?intern_source=blog... Disclaimer: I work on a team that's helping out with this effort
No company or CEO deserves less trust than Meta and Zuckerberg.