91–100 of 101 posts
It's interesting to apply Zuckerberg's views to his company 12 years later. Meta's actions towards social media make it seem like it's now a zero-sum game. They copy features from Snapchat and TikTok, or buy companies like WhatsApp and Instagram, precisely because those companies are taking value away from Facebook. The whole metaverse thing is a touch different. It does look like they're trying to build new value th…
> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity. Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at…
> Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. How did he make them poorer? He took money from them?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/20/22585470/jeff-bezos-blue-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jeff-bezos-thanks-amaz...
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-workers-react-jeff-be...
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>but what a given user spends their attention on I want to point out, since I have not seen it elsewhere in this thread, that user's do not need to be on the internet at all . Does no one remember what it was like to be bored? With respect to living everyday lives, social media addiction is becoming an issue. Instagram specifically is a huge item. So it would be contradictory to say Meta is responsible for manipulati…
I might not need to be on social media but I do need to be on the internet. - Vehicle and Public Transit Navigation - Apartment shopping - Amazon.com - Determining visa rules for extended travel - Obtaining medical records All of these are possible without the internet but all of them are a massive waste of time without the internet. I’m okay with being bored but some things would be an enormous waste of my life.
I think it is a stretch to say any of the things you listed are competing with social media for your attention. The "attention" social media is taking from its users was previously spent on being bored, not taking care of other pre-existing needs. Social media becoming mainstream has created new "needs" for people to stay in touch with their online network. These new needs spawned economic incentives. Facebook is arguably the reason social media is mainstream at all. They have certainly earned the right to claim they are not stealing economic activity from those other pre-existing needs. You previously could not create an economic model out of people who were checking in with friends because they were bored. They created that
A friend of mine who is a VC told me years ago, "I only get to meet crazy people: either they have a completely new product, and so will run out of runway before they manage to get the plane airborne, or they are going into an existing market, where the incumbents will crush the aircraft before it gets enough speed to leave the ground." Despite the amusing language it was a useful perspective.
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Most of those ads were free "back in my days" here.. you got a "postcard" in each of those magazines, and could post an ad (limited length, text only) for free... how do you thing people sold cars before the internet? And yes, facebook is more cost effective, because people don't get paid for their data... if people got paid for viewing ads and having their data gathered (like they used to be, market research groups…
>how do you thing people sold cars before the internet? You're not following the particular context of your subthread and inadvertently moving the goalposts. The side conversation you're replying to was niche businesses with niche customers e.g. gp's example of "small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes)" Buying ad space in a local newspaper is a waste of money for _small_ businesses like that because the s…
Zuckerberg is fundamentally right [1], and I think it's a good observation that many people fail to make. But I think it's companies other than Facebook/Meta that are creating the new value. [1] https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
I agree with you however truly innovative things that are not making anyone poorer are way rarer than author of this post suggests. Even Steve jobs devices, given here as an example, was taking part of the cake from someone else. First thing that came to my mind is original VCS made in 1972 by Bell Labs. This was an invention that genuinely created profit from place where no one else was making any money.
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Very strongly agree. If you work in tech in general you should probably be thinking about most decisions with this kind of positive sum mindset where one person’s gain is not another’s loss. For one thing, I think it feels better, but it is also very typically true.
I think you think that because you want to. But it's simply not true. Internet classifieds destroyed newspaper ads. Apple destroyed Nokia. It is a zero sum game to a certain degree. I'm not saying you should feel sorry because you improved things, but sometimes your success is someone else's downfall.
Facebook is different because it doesn't destroy anything, it purely adds to life and consumes time, with fairly minimal happiness involved. It acts more like an an obligation than a leisure activity even though it's purely voluntary.
The things that wind up getting displaced aren't technologies or jobs, which can often be replaced with a good riddance, they're things like "Having a conversation" or "learning a language" or "taking a walk" or anything else one might do in their spare time.
Zuckerberg is fundamentally right [1], and I think it's a good observation that many people fail to make. But I think it's companies other than Facebook/Meta that are creating the new value. [1] https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
Just not for the end users, but for the advertisement and data broker industries.
> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity. Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at…
> Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer. No, they both got richer. Maybe Bezos had a chance to make his employees slightly more rich and himself less so, but ultimately no-one got poorer here.
The reconstruction of the American retail landscape that consumers experience only as "buying I guess kind of a lot of my stuff from Amazon" (or Walmart, or a very few other entitities; and their lesser-known agricultural oligopoly peers),
is so total at the manufacturing/logistics/supply chain/fulfillment level, as to defy our comprehension.
The world that we live in has had the mechanisms of how it produces and delivers goods to its citizens changed in more far-reaching ways within the last two decades than since the industrial or agrarian revolutions.
AND,
this reorganization has meant millions of people worldwide have had their utility redefined, and "optimized," to their detriment in terms of opportunity, income, stability, benefits, etc. ad nauseum.
To pick one straw out of the tornado: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212124-nomadland
But that is literally one of a thousand examples; the "gig economy" and its infinitely examined (and litigated) sharp edges provide as many more as you would like.
Fast-fashion and next-day fulfillment and fungible goods from Chinese "companies" with machine-generated meaningless names clogging Amazon results pages, do not come at no one's expense.
TANSTAAFL.
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> We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else. Does Facebook still build anything? These days it seems like they mostly buy other companies that are still able to build and innovate.
Yes, they do, but they do it pretty quietly - think messenger, or their dating service, or their games section - these are all parts of Facebook, but they used to not be. Messenger and Games are the oldest ones. They're huge, they keep building stuff into what "Facebook" is, but it's really, *really* subtle. Also, off topic, but I'm fairly certain you're a former co-worker of mine :)
I am! Nice to virtually see you.