41–50 of 210 posts
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…
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…
Two reasons: 1. The management can't really differentiate appearance from substance. 2. The management is not incentivized to reward great work. Either way, it shows the failure of Meta's culture.
> but the infrastructure they sat upon was too hard to use to do anything different
Ironically, so many Meta engineers had such superficial understanding of their platforms and infrastructure that they couldn't even pass the most basic interview discussions on systems design. Seems another sign that Meta grossly over hired or had a culture that focused only on some so-called impact.
Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. But the real story is simply Human Nature at work. Everyone ( or at least a sufficient amount of people with Power ) hates Facebook. And they need a good story to shit on it.
> Everyone hates Facebook No, not everyone. Everyone on Reddit, and 50% on HN hate Facebook. All the power they have is to post snarky comments, upvote, and (maybe) downvote.
Easier said than done, as I know because I still use Messenger.
“The long-term solution to ATT, though, is to build probabilistic models that not only figure out who should be targeted, but also understanding which ads converted and which didn’t.” What does this even mean? Is it really possible to build models where the conversion label itself is not deterministic due to ATT and has to be predicted by another probabilistic model?
My understanding of how FB advertising worked as the following: 1. You purchase ads on FB 2. You tell FB how much a conversion is worth to you (let's call that $W) 3. You link your site to FB (via a pixel etc) so that they can automatically measure conversions. They say this is for you so that you can see which ads are actually working. 4. In reality, FB now knows what a conversion is worth to you so they can keep up…
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.
Separate to this, FB estimated how likely a user was to click/convert on your ad, and multiplied your bid by this probability (times 1000). This number was used to rank your ad against other ads/content.
So, what would actually happen is that you'd see amazing performance on that $10 budget, and you'd be like FB rocks spend all the money. Unfortunately, because of the way the above worked, when you 10xed the budget it would all far apart.
If FB had actually wanted to maximise short term revenue they might have behaved like you said, but the reason they've made so much money over the years is that they were always much more focused on the longer-term revenue.
TikTok is a large niche social network, as are all major social networks in the West except for Facebook. That's why it'll find a lower plateau than FB core in terms of users, as with Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp (if one even cares to consider WhatsApp & Co. social networks, either way).
Walmart hasn't been a great investment during the Amazon era. 20 years ago WMT was ~$55 / share. Inflation adjusted that's around $90 per the BLS (likely there has been more inflation than that). Today WMT is $142. So 20 years to add 57%. And sure, they pay a dividend, that merely makes the return a bit less mediocre - the S&P 500 is up 336% in that time for example.
Meta, as with many (previously) overvalued tech stocks from this era, is in for a long stagnation vs the recent highs. It'll remind you of Microsoft ~2001-2015. Future returns were massively pulled forward. The pandemic remoting hyper activity era also pulled returns massively forward in other areas, which will be paid for via many years of stagnation in areas like advertising, ecommerce and remote tech (eg Zoom is an excellent example of said future returns being pulled forward; growth in remoting that might have taken a decade gradually, was zoomed forward courtesy of the pandemic; now the hangover).
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…
I was the biggest skeptic on earth when they bought Oculus, and assumed it was the death of VR. But they've been steadily grinding at it, and the newly released Meta Pro is, as someone with extensive experience with all of the consumer headsets, the first product that looks like an actual generational leap above the initial headsets. They are really nailing the big problems with VR, which are control (the inside-out tracked controls with Meta Pro are an industry first), and form factor ease of use.
Look at what literally every other company is doing right now. Apple's keynotes consist of new emojis and better cameras. Google I/O is literally just an ad for GCP at this point. Amazon isn't even trying to pretend they are doing anything innovative, beyond adding to the AWS hairball. I think Zuck has about a 5% chance of success here, but the fact that he's trying something new is better than anything else in tech ATM.
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…
A healthy cashflow is obviously vital for any big corporation, but tech is not about cashflow, it is mainly about innovation.