Live data from Hacker News

Meta

stratechery.com

41–50 of 210 posts

Re: Meta

#41

Personally, I'm less bullish on FB/Meta now. Half of me believes if someone can turn it around it would be Zuck, and the other half believes that FB's culture has optimized the wrong the thing for the past 5 years. Consider this, and call me out if I'm wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB/YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and mo…

> betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.

Indeed. My biggest fear is that succeed.

I happen to prefer PCs (and there is no reason to argue for or against that). Apple has been incredibly successful at capturing market share and their devices are now mandatory at my new job. I might not like it, but it's not the end of the world: Apple behaves ethically.

Now imagine your [otherwise] dream job demands that you strap a Quest on and feed Zuck's data fetish.

Re: Meta

#42
post #35

Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on? The Metaverse isn't an unfamiliar or abstract thing, it's well represented in movies and TV, and it's a pretty dramatic territory to claim: full sensory immersion in an infinite, interactive world. No one has gotten even a fraction of those things "right" and a social media company is gonna bet the farm on i…

I think VR/AR Metaverse will happen but it is decades away.

Re: Meta

#43

Overall this new focus suggests to me that Facebook (Meta) sees limited potential future growth of their social media properties as such, and needs to look to new markets to sustain future growth. However, it is very rare for companies -- especially large, established ones -- to succeed in pivoting themselves to deal with new market realities and ways of doing business. The entrenched interests and culture inside the…

Except Microsoft, who did it a few times in the past.

Re: Meta

#44
post #6

>The fact that Facebook is uniquely held responsible for the societal problems engendered by the Internet does, I suspect, stem from the fact that Zuckerberg is an obvious target. How many people concerned about anti-vax rhetoric, for example, can even name the person in charge of YouTube, a far more potent vector? This article makes a very cogent point: Zuckerberg has too much baggage with the general public and Met…

The author of this piece pointed out on his podcast that Zuckerberg, despite his baggage, is a founder and thus the only person who can sell such a huge change to employees and investors.

If building a metaverse is a good idea, and that is a large if, then it will have been good for him to stay.

Re: Meta

#45
post #35

Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on? The Metaverse isn't an unfamiliar or abstract thing, it's well represented in movies and TV, and it's a pretty dramatic territory to claim: full sensory immersion in an infinite, interactive world. No one has gotten even a fraction of those things "right" and a social media company is gonna bet the farm on i…

I think Zuck is aware that they are a dying company (with a lot of cash and a cash cow) and instead of being a sitting duck they are embracing the "move fast, break things" and picked an un-exploited market (that involves hardware - to own the whole stack) and run with it. They still have the nuclear option anyways, it fails, they revert and Zuck leaves and becomes part of the board, keeping soft control of whoever yes-man from the c-suite gets the CEO position.

Re: Meta

#46
I don’t get the hype around metaverse. It’s between Zuck and Jensen. Sure those two guys can push a lot of eyes and start something but the products simply do not exist. It’s as if they’re living in this fantasy world to create…Habbo Hotel for 2025.

Re: Meta

#47

Overall this new focus suggests to me that Facebook (Meta) sees limited potential future growth of their social media properties as such, and needs to look to new markets to sustain future growth. However, it is very rare for companies -- especially large, established ones -- to succeed in pivoting themselves to deal with new market realities and ways of doing business. The entrenched interests and culture inside the…

Except Microsoft, who did it a few times in the past.

But not always successfully. It helps to have a big warchest so you can try more than once or keep a money-losing business running while you figure it out (XBox, Bing).

Re: Meta

#48
post #46

I don’t get the hype around metaverse. It’s between Zuck and Jensen. Sure those two guys can push a lot of eyes and start something but the products simply do not exist. It’s as if they’re living in this fantasy world to create…Habbo Hotel for 2025.

The metaverse they have a vision for won't exist, but social VR is on the rise, even if it won't take over everyday life. VRChat consistently has 25k players these days and that's not including the amount of people playing it on Quest devices.

Re: Meta

#49
post #31

it will be interesting to see what facebook turns into if/when they get a new ceo who is business success focused, like tim cook and satya nadella, who are just corporate mercenaries trying to run the most efficient business possible, which is not what the founders of those businesses did. then there’s the question of, will zuckerburg ever even get fb now meta to that point or will he insist on maintaining control an…

Nadella joined Microsoft in '92. Cook joined Apple in '98. I'm not sure I'd describe either of them as "mercenary".

Tim Cook told an investor to "get off the stock" over criticisms that investing in things that don't contribute to the bottom line (such as sustainability initiatives). "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI" is not something you expect a bean counter to say in a shareholder meeting.

Re: Meta

#50
post #41

Personally, I'm less bullish on FB/Meta now. Half of me believes if someone can turn it around it would be Zuck, and the other half believes that FB's culture has optimized the wrong the thing for the past 5 years. Consider this, and call me out if I'm wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB/YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and mo…

> betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife. Indeed. My biggest fear is that succeed. I happen to prefer PCs (and there is no reason to argue for or against that). Apple has been incredibly successful at capturing market share and their devices are now mandatory at my new job. I might not like it, but it's not the end of the world: Apple behaves ethically. Now imagin…

Apple behaves ethically with those file scanners on your devices? Iphone parts that show errors when replaced with the same parts from another phone? Lobbying against the right to repair? Blocking access to 3rd party app stores?

lol. It's just marketing, nothing more.

Post reply on HN