Meta Myths

  The problem with this line of reasoning is that Meta’s
  capital expenditures are directly focused on both of
  the two main reasons for alarm: TikTok and ATT. That
  is because the answer to both challenges is more AI,
  and building up AI capacity requires a lot of capital
  investment.

With growing concern over censorship, political manipulation, and platform moderation, I wonder how long the "AI-recommended ad" cash cow can continue. You can only show people so many political and gambling app ads before they stop using your product or run out of time/money.

tldr: all the $$ still comes from commoditizing community building by subjecting them to ads and counting conversion.

Conversion is always a tricky beast to count, even in our intense tracking of individuals and attempt/successes at tracking users across time, applications, sessions and devices and I'm just honestly not sure how much more humans can handle being advertised to or even spend as things get tighter and tighter. At some point cool new [insert object here] doesn't matter when you are calculating the gas needed to warm your home and thinking about using your hot bathwater to do so.

In the social network space, Facebook created a monopoly by buying up their competition until they became inescapable in most countries via the network effect. As a result, Facebook effectively holds a monopoly on social media to this day. They squat on that monopoly and extract value through ads, keeping anyone else from meaningfully competing, like some kind of medieval bridge troll.

In the metaverse space, Facebook wants to create the first viable product so they can extend their trolling and rent seeking to that medium as well. If they can absorb competitors, I think they have a chance. If the US government meaningfully enforces anti-trust law, I don't see any way that such a soulless, awful company that routinely churns out unpleasant products can possibly attract enough users to establish and maintain a monopoly. It seems that Zuck is betting that they can build the tech first, patent the shit out of it, and the users will have no choice but to play in his walled metaverse garden. I suspect folks will opt out before they do that.

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.

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 what stereotypes exist but I also don't see toxic Karens, nasty open bigoty and racism, or lying political propaganda. Maybe it's just not a SoCal thing? Or maybe I am a toxic racist Karen and I'm blind to it? Today is full of cute Halloween photos, reports on last weekend's high school sports team's results ( our marching band won the regionals!), and not much else. If there's a vicious underbelly than I am blind to it.

You get out of FB what you put in. The ads I see are all geeky T-shirts and practical cross body bags ( I haven't found a good one yet )

I find reddit horribly toxic and depressing and am surprised it doesn't get more attention. The front page tells us only that we are doomed, our country is doomed, our planet is doomed, and reminds us of how much smarter we are than everyone else. I really wish I had the self control to stay away from it.

Stereotype alert: I do know some parents who've dropped FB but it is always the dads. It's often easier for them as they rarely have to keep track of what day is wacky hair day.