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Meta Myths

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Re: Meta Myths

#61

Post by pevey »

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…

Your behind the scenes perspective is very interesting.

From a small business customer perspective: I have a small local business that I run on the side. It's a franchise type of business like what you would see in your local strip mall. We used to get our best leads from Facebook ads. More than 90% of the clicks were mobile. A high percentage of the clicks would set a tour and a decent percentage of those sign up their kid(s) for the program we offer. We went from about 20 good leads per month to 0-1 for the same ad spend. Yes, it really was that extreme. I don't know who facebook is showing our ads to, but they do not want our product.

I just got around to canceling with the agency that handles our ad spend today. The N of this story is 1, but if other businesses are experiencing anything close to the same, fb's revenue decline is just beginning.

Re: Meta Myths

#62

Post by Barrin92 »

Article seems to argue against something that not many people are arguing, which is that Meta is at risk of imminent death. It's a giant, if it dies it will be a very slow, boring and drawn out affair.

Without a doubt they are still a money printing machine with billions of users but the real debate is whether they at all still innovate and the Metaverse discussion which Ben barely spends a paragraph on should be at the center of it given that they've even staked their name on it.

Anything people like about FB is companies they bought or features they copied. WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. The blue app is the Java of social media, everyone uses it but nobody likes it. Meta has a governance model that should be very dynamic, Zuckerberg is literally dictator for life. But the thing they've only ever been successful at is making money, which if anything is owed to people like Sandberg, who now seem to be leaving.

A company that is run essentially by one person has the business model of something that's run by a committee, and the one creative decision he makes in decades seems like a total flop. That should at least be slightly alarming.

Re: Meta Myths

#63

Post by nvarsj »

ksec wrote: post #4

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.

2 billion DAU (and growing) seems to be a strong argument against "everyone hates FB".

Re: Meta Myths

#64

Post by eklitzke »

alerter wrote: post #37

I always wondered if it was a mistake for Facebook to try to rapidly casualise VR after acquiring Oculus. If they spent even a small fraction of their metaverse billions developing high-end, niche products (flight/mech sims etc.) then they could cultivate a loyal base of affluent users. It probably wouldn't be profitable by itself, but it would grow their user base and act as a nice showcase of what VR is capable of.…

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

Re: Meta Myths

#65

Post by voisin »

Spivak wrote: post #56
atirip wrote: post #34

> Reels usage is still growing But of course, as Meta put gun to the head of everyone - you WILL make Reels, or else - and now all the people I follow, increasingly make Reels. I hate Reels.

Yeah but they’re not really for you. They’re for making it easy for Tiktok creators to cross-post their content. IG, FB, and YT all realized that if they force creators to choose between making Tiktoks and posts/videos they’re going to make Tiktoks. The cost of making entirely separate content has to be worth the extra audience and you can change the calculus by making the cost really low.

The super annoying thing about reels is how they don’t just play fully in the feed the way Tik Tok does. You see a weird 2 second loop and on that have to choose whether to engage. And FB has a horrible history with video, filling the feed with videos 10x too long that had no point and not letting users track forward.

I cannot hate FB more than I do. If it wasn’t for Marketplace, my account would have been deactivated years ago. And even Marketplace is obnoxious in a myriad of ways.

Re: Meta Myths

#66

Post by AnotherGoodName »

alerter wrote: post #37

I always wondered if it was a mistake for Facebook to try to rapidly casualise VR after acquiring Oculus. If they spent even a small fraction of their metaverse billions developing high-end, niche products (flight/mech sims etc.) then they could cultivate a loyal base of affluent users. It probably wouldn't be profitable by itself, but it would grow their user base and act as a nice showcase of what VR is capable of.…

Yep slow and steady rather than trying to make it happen now would be the real long term play.

Apple tried to make the Newton happen a decade too early. It worked in the end but they did the right thing in not trying to repeatedly double down on making it work before all the pieces of the puzzle came into play (mobile networks, better touchscreens, efficient CPUs, enough storage to hold music, etc.).

Re: Meta Myths

#67

Post by cma »

> The long-term solution to ATT, though, is to build probabilistic models that not only figure out who should be targeted (which, to be fair, Meta was already using machine learning for), but also understanding which ads converted and which didn’t.

If Apple sees Meta as a threat now that Meta are getting into devices, all they have to do is add a rule that probalistic models of conversions beyond a certain scale of computation aren't allowed, and that anyone operating over $X amount of revenue on their platform is subject to invasive audit to make sure they aren't doing it. They can figure out a way to say it is for privacy but that they themselves can do it, or they can make it so users can opt in to probalistic models with different defaults and wording on the dialog for third parties vs for Apple like they do now for tracking (Apple calls others' tracking in the prompt 'tracking your activity', for their own they call it 'ad personalization').

Re: Meta Myths

#68

Post by sofixa »

miketery wrote: post #57
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…

The metaverse is not bombing. It’s simply not tied to one platform. Between TikTok, Roblox, Minecraft, call of duty (and other triple A multiplayer games), we’re already there. Meta can’t win this one. Same way that no single game publisher can dominate video games. Even the hardware, fine meta becomes the first “Nintendo”. So what? The PlayStations and Xbox’s will come. No one will let Meta have a monopoly.

> Between TikTok, Roblox, Minecraft, call of duty (and other triple A multiplayer games), we’re already there.

How are those "metaverse"?

Re: Meta Myths

#69

Post by dont__panic » 

  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 usage over the last few years because fewer and fewer people post meaningful content. And as more friends and family leave facebook entirely, I've noticed more and more family members who don't check their news feed at all -- they'll just occasionally respond to Facebook Messages.

Is Meta combining DAU numbers between Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp? Because I'm sure those Whatsapp numbers go up and up, since it's the default method of communication in a huge number of countries.

I know that my anecdotal experience isn't necessarily reality. But it's getting hard to ignore the fact that many friends and family have essentially abandoned Facebook and Instagram, to the point that these services aren't being used meaningfully by my friends and family any more.

Maybe developing countries are still growing userbases? Or maybe Meta's "DAU" definition just doesn't capture the slippage from "hooked on the news feed" to "responds to a message once per day"?

Re: Meta Myths

#70

Post by stephc_int13 »

rmvt wrote: post #58
stephc_int13 wrote: post #36

I am pretty sure that Kodak or Nokia had pretty healthy results when the wind turned for them. Those kinds of ships are so big that it is very easy for managers, investors and employees to convince themselves that everything is _fine_. The biggest problem, for Meta, in my opinion, is not the brand, not the business model and not the competition. The problem is much worse because it is internal and probably too late t…

> Their engineering culture as a whole is a one trick pony. what do you mean by this? what's their one trick?

The most important component of a technology company is its engineering culture.

This is something that is built early, most of the time with a strong influence from the founders/CTO.

Once it is built and scaled up, it can still change but very slowly.

You can hire extremely talented outsiders (John Carmack) but it won't do much.

A company like Meta is like an overfitted AI model, they can do one thing very well and almost everything else very bad.

Take a look at horizon universe, does it look like state of the art for you?

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