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Meta Myths

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Re: Meta Myths

#141

Post by wwweston »

dont__panic wrote: post #108
nineplay wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are these people who are still using Facebook every day? Me. Most everyone I know. Move from the tech bubble to the suburban parent bubble and I think you'll that nothing is replacing FB anytime soon. The school pages are there, the kid's clubs and activities and team pages are all there. The neighborhood pages are all there, NextDoor exists of course but it tends to be poor imitation of the FB group. I know wh…

I used to use Facebook, but the rampant ads and dark patterns drove me away. I can't stand FB pushing video content in my feed. Some ads are fine (sidebar-only preferably), I understand that you have to pay the bills somehow... but I really don't like "recommended" posts in my feed. The lack of autonomy drove me away. > Today is full of cute Halloween photos, reports on last weekend's high school sports team's result…

> Do Stories and Reels not get in your way?

I've made a pretty concerted effort to avoid clicking on them. I might click on one once every two months. Over time this seems to have resulted in modest levels of presentation.

OTOH -- this July my feed showed me an old friend's daughter had posted "Miss you mom" on friend's wall, and I thought "that's odd, they don't live far away." So I clicked on friend's profile to see that her funeral was the week before and then saw five months of posts documenting her discovery of an aggressive cancer that had killed her. Nowhere in there had FB shown me any of them.

That's an algorithm failure if there ever was one, though of course there's no way to communicate that to FB and likely no internal incentives to care, so there's really nothing to do but remember that unless you're the customer, the feed will only be about where you'd like to direct your attention to the minimum degree they have to engage you in order to keep selling their privilege to direct your attention.

Re: Meta Myths

#142

Post by smeagull »

nicolashahn wrote: post #139
jpeter wrote: post #137

It would be a smart move for meta to quickly build a twitter clone. The twitter self destruct countdown is ticking

Twitter is already just a subset of Facebook

There is value in pulling that subset out of the extra bullshit. I'd love a twitter alternative that I could use for publicly broadcasting short messages.

Especially if it didn't require people be logged in to scroll down.

Re: Meta Myths

#143

Post by fbn79 »

r00fus wrote: post #77
eklitzke wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the Meta Quest Pro is a pretty high-end product.

For $1500. Who's buying?

The First iPhone cost was ~900$ (inflaction adjusted) and was not able to record video (many other less expensive phone coulded).

Re: Meta Myths

#144

Post by whoisjuan »

dont__panic wrote: post #69

Myth 1: Users Are Deserting Facebook ..The problem with this narrative is that Meta is still adding users: the company is up to 2.93 billion Daily Active Users (DAUs), an increase of 50 million, and 3.71 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs), an increase of 60 million.. I've been wondering about this for a while now: who are these people who are still using Facebook every day? All of my family has reduced facebook usag…

Groups and Marketplace are huge products. I presume they are larger or have become larger than the newsfeed.

Re: Meta Myths

#145

Post by edmundsauto »

drh wrote: post #52
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm not sure how to say this politely, but your argument does not map to my understanding of how FB ads worked (I was there from 2013-18, predominantly working on ads). Steps 1-3 are correct, step 4 is not. What actually happened is that you'd say I want to spend $10 on FB ads. There's a system called pacing that reduces your bid most of the time so that you don't run out of budget before the end of the day…

Fascinating. Hadn’t thought about the pacing factor. So given this is the case, how does any advertiser scale up their spending without getting disillusioned and abandoning FB ads?

If you think about it as a diminishing returns curve, it becomes something that can be understood and explored. Of course, the sales people will try to get you to expand quickly and your most efficient spend will come first - after your inflection point, your incremental return will decrease.

However, fighting that pull is the optimization opportunities enabled only at scale. If I run 1 ad, I know how that performs. If I run 1000 ads, I know which ad performs best.

Re: Meta Myths

#146

Post by candiddevmike »

saltythrowaway wrote: post #26

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I joined to work on meta ads semi-recently. My thinking was that they were under invested in techniques I knew were successful from my time at Google. What I found was a lot of smart people who knew they were under invested and we're capable of closing the gap, but the infrastructure they sat upon was too hard to use to do anything different, and management that rewarded the appearance…

Channel your saltiness into uncovering illegal/fraudulent stuff happening within ads and become a whistleblower. Based on anecdotes (some within these comments!) stuff is clearly sideways with how ads are being delivered and attributed.

Re: Meta Myths

#147

Post by fumar »

noncoml wrote: post #87

Maybe I’m being a bit too cynical, but why would someone take time to write this article if they think Meta is doing great? My guess is that they are stuck with a lot of shares and want the price to go up to get rid of them. If I thought Meta is doing great, I wouldn’t try to convince others that, I would take the opportunity to buy and horde as many stocks as possible.

Ben Thompson always writes positive Meta and FB content. I was a paid subscriber until I realized his strong bias for all things Zuck.

Re: Meta Myths

#148

Post by paxys »

hintymad wrote: post #44

The All-In Podcast had a chart ( https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126 ) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter !

"Is [Metaverse] going to be a leap in humanity at the scale of the Apollo program?"

That is, IMO, the key question behind this entire discussion. Zuck certainly thinks so. I'm sure a lot of people at Meta and outside think so as well. And their detractors obviously don't.

There isn't going to be any consensus on whether Meta is spending too much money or not because ultimately it is a referendum on the concept of VR/AR/Metaverse itself.

Re: Meta Myths

#149

Post by jimlongton »

colinmhayes wrote: post #96
TwoNineA wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time. No, people want Meta/Facebook to fail because frankly, they are evil. - Instagram is toxic to young girls: https://childmind.org/blog/instagram-is-harmful-to-teenage-s... - Misinformation: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=facebook+misinformation - How many people died because of Covid consp…

Meta literally facilitated genocide in Myanmar as well as sex slavery by failing to properly screen ads and in some cases didn't even have anybody who could read the language they were in.

Also psychologically experimenting on their users intentionally making them unhappy [1], knowingly facilitating terrorism [2] and enabling race based advertising which blocked black people accessing housing [3].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/07/10/facebook...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/a-look-at-bo...

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-racial-ad-targeting-multic...

Re: Meta Myths

#150

Post by endofreach »

nemothekid wrote: post #53
mjr00 wrote: post #33

Interesting article. People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time. Since the pivot and rename happened a year ago, the metaverse has probably bombed -- and I say probably only because nobody can define exactly what it is, still , beyond people having VR meetings with odd pseudo-Mii avatars -- and the investors convinced that Zuckerberg was…

> People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time I believe people want Meta to fail because the spent the better part of last 5 years completely eviscerating their reputation and goodwill. While Facebook, at its prepandemic peak was hemorrhaging young users and becoming known as the platform for misinformation and arguments due to the chase f…

Lets just stop calling them meta. They are still the evil facebook.
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