Facebook leadership is essentially a cat reacting to a laser pointer. There seems to be no shiny object they won't chase. Their own C-Suite admit their latest reorganization is a disaster. Their "all in" on virtual worlds was a disaster. Their billion dollar AI guru purchase was a disaster. Their influencer heavy connected glasses will be a disaster.
There is no leadership here. However, you can be sure when the next round of layoffs happen, there will be no "mea culpa" from the C-Suite, lots of golden parachutes and the unemployed will be the cogs in their wheel.
Wait until 10,000 manosphere influencers start selling personalize aura coaching to incels who share their glasses recordings. We'll start seeing those glasses on every lame-ass wannabro.
Unfortunately they seem to be useful, if for no other reason than parents want to take picture of their children at a moment’s notice. AFAIK this is the killer app for these glasses.
I wonder if it's still a good thing to have taken the picture. There's something to be said for pausing and having the conscious thought "this is a nice moment". (though of course, moderation in all things)
They’re really very poor at this, the cameras are about what you’d get in a flip phone and are cropped vertical. I was expecting GoPro quality of capture but it’s a very limited field of view left to right and soft focus.
And that’s besides the point of psychological outcomes for the child of a parent always intermediating eye contact with eye-of-meta contact, like it’s one thing to be out in public and see someone who might be streaming, but growing up with the expectation that any action, any expression you give in a parents direction may be captured and played back? Awful.
Maybe for the dozens of people who are actually recording their feats of extreme sports the new oakleys are a good product market fit.
OTOH the audio experience was surprisingly good and if they made a pair without cameras I would buy them.
Man I wish they would just chase fads. They chase the most morally corrupt version of a fad every time, it's like their business is black mirror episodes as a service.
Sometimes I'm astonished how far they made it. But then again, they made their fortune by selling personal data to bad actors who manipulate opinions for polling and do all sorts of questionable dealings with it. And from there, they simply bought their competitors and maintained an extractive monopoly for people using social media for advertisement.
It's pretty much impossible that anything organic or creative could be created by Facebook at this point.
Truth is Zuckerberg doesn’t really like to succeed (and at this point he doesn’t even have to anymore, his family is set for life). He likes to struggle. It’s the only thing that gives that nostalgic feeling of being a scrappy startup trying to break into new markets.
At the end of the days, his legacy will be a few big wins and a long history of stuff he tried and failed at. That’s not really much different from any regular person’s life. Nothing to be ashamed of. As long as Meta still prints money, expect them to chase every trend for the next 40+ years.
They treat employees like shite, and the only folks left or willing to join are the mercenaries. It is a testament to their business model that it survives in spite of all this.
> It is a testament to their business model that it survives in spite of all this.
The business model is pure moat. When the competition is bought up and new competition has it very hard to enter the market because your position is so utterly dominant, you don't need to innovate, you just milk everything you got to death, it's not like people have much of an alternative.
The only threat Meta has is Tiktok, and if I were to guess, we'll see Tiktok end up in Meta in a few years. Forcing Bytedance to sell off Tiktok with only 19.9% remaining in BD's hands was a necessary move given the serious national security implications, but eventually Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emiratis will want their money back, and the "best" way for the grift to finally complete will be for everyone of these three to sell their stake to Meta before a new administration can bring in a new FTC leadership to prevent such a merger.
This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.
Agreed that Zuck is not very impressive, but what would another CEO do differently at this point? It's got a ton of money, and they are trying this and that. But the market wouldn't let them sit on a bunch of money either.
He's a bit of a wuss though. Not betting it all, just slowly iterating on the next miss, can never be fired. Pretty damn funny actually. Sad if you work there though.
The parent seems to mean that he is content financially, which is why he can now play around with whatever he feels like and if it costs copious amounts of money to do so who cares?
Zuck's a bit more private, but Musk putting his time into moderating Twitter demonstrates some of these people will never be content with finishing the game.
The guy has zero imagination, I guess. Even Facebook was a stolen and mostly unoriginal idea, it was just executed well for that era. I can only feel sad for him, all the money in the world yet not a single creative or interesting idea to allocate it on. And the unoriginal things it is allocated on end up being pretty bad most of the time.
The fact that someone has billions of dollars and still chooses to spend 40-60 hours/week going to the office to work on Facebook seems psychotic. He can do practically anything he wants, and he chooses to work on Facebook. It’s mind bending.
At that level it’s not the luxury hotels and fresh mangoes flown in from Miami that appeals, but the influence to effect outcomes on a global scale. Megalomaniacal more than psychotic.
This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.
I can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money.
But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.
Corey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market.
Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.
YouTube has a lot of revenue, profit isn't known as far as I'm aware. Alphabet doesn't report YouTube earnings separately, and when they were still sharing that information it was a pretty large amount of losses IIRC. But if you have sources I'm happy to change my mind
They report YT's earnings, iirc it is about 60B (40B ads + 20B subs) annually, with 10% YoY growth. They don't disclose youtube's profits outside of Google Services (which has ~40% margins), so yes youtube is a money printing machine.
And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.
> Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure
Facebook has no content production experience though, and when they do dip their toes into that market its via AI slop (like their official AI accounts on instagram). I think this is because they don't value the human element of art at all.
They would be entirely reliant other content providers, which is a rough place to be in when you have to deal with actual studios and not just independent creators. Independent creators are easier for Facebook to exploit since they are usually small operations and dependent on facebook/instagram for market reach.
Zuck has not accountability and total veto powers at the board level. If this was some other CEO making so many mistakes starting with the brain dead Metaverse, they would have been either fired or investigated for fraud. At Meta only the low level engineers are held accountable.
considering his casual disregard for the feelings of fellow Harvard students back in the day, I doubt he cares what his legacy is. Just being rich and famous is plenty reward.
People forget that Meta already did this years ago, before prediction markets became the next big consumer trend for them to chase.
The app was called Forecast, and launched in June 2020. (Around the same time that Kalshi and Polymarket launched, actually!) It was framed as a way to make the comments and activity on Facebook actually productive rather than toxic, and build expert reputation signaling mechanisms.
He wants to collect and profit from insider info by joining in on the newest unregulated gambling scheme. I'm sure plenty of cheaters and suckers will be happy to make him more money.
Oh sure, why not. I suppose they’ve already ruled out selling vapes or meth, or at least haven’t added those business units to their annual filings yet.
I truly wonder if Meta’s Downfall as a Service umbrella has ever rejected an idea as being too detrimental to society, and if so, how awful did it have to be?
its not very expensive for a company like Meta to create a platform like this that could see them extract value as a middleman passively for a while.
despite the ethics of it, business wise it pays for itself, and because of the complicated ethics of it Meta is the best biggest company for it too. Everyone hates meta, their own employees hate meta, who cares. It will probably make money.
not only that, but I think when a big platform comes into play it gets users from the other platforms easily. As the opportunities for market mismatch are abound being a smaller platform in the beginning.
anyway, I think this is a smart move by Meta. And I'm positive everyone in the gambling space is happy with it too, as Meta comes with a good lobbying effort.
They even call it "Arena". The place where gladiators kill each other, lions eat christans , criminals are exectuted brutally and animals are hunted. What an apt name chosen by the most moral company of our times.
I wonder how/if they'll use AI for this. maybe this would give them access to some very highquality pretrain data (like who made which bet on what at what time), which I can definitely imagine them needing. I've heard they have a lot of spare compute they run experiments on, and if this goes well for them maybe they could make a really good prediction bot
Facebook innovation is their ads algo. They copy existing consumer success (which is incredibly difficult to create), and then execute it incredibly well.
Facebook hired a bunch of people from Google's search ads division to basically replicate their real-time bidding system.
Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter.
People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla.
And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.
She basically ran the firm whilst Zuck thought about who to buy to secure a monopoly position. He got lucky more than anything else - had the instagam guys not given in, meta would not be worth anything close to what it is today.
So many baby boomers are about to lose their savings. Meta knows their bread is buttered by the 55+ age group and capitalizing on the vulnerable social media addicted elders will be extremely profitable.
My university admissions interview took place next to an old tech nerd's model train layout. Today, the same kind of person would be up all night posting about trans people on X. I blame a lot of our current problems on the decline of model trains and stamp collecting. You are spot on about social media addiction among the olds.
I've always felt that Mark Zuckerberg got lucky with Facebook and that he has no real lasting talent as a technologist or visionary. He seems to attempt to chase the latest "it" thing and has very few original ideas that actual stick long-term. He's quite the charlatan.
I've never seen him saying anything particularly smart or insightful. My impression is that he has moderately above average intelligence and entrepreneurship. If he wasn't at the right place at the right time, he would be yet another founder of a random startup.
I've never seen him say or do anything particularly human. If I believed in such things, I'd think he was some kind of souless drone sent here by aliens/demons/etc to destroy humanity.
Your impression about his intelligence is way off. Mark was part of the study for mathematically precocious youth, which has a math cutoff at the 1/10K rarity. He also has ambition at the same level. What’s probably missing, of late, is good taste and judgment.
It is an impression, as you said. If his intellect is so vast (vs just scoring well on the math skill tests), we should have seen some sort of evidence in the things he writes or says. He was called a programming prodigy but we've seen other actual programming prodigies delivering much more impressive results (Bellard, Frankel, Carmack etc).
I don’t know what definition of intelligence you’re using, but scoring extremely well on math tests qualifying him for that study is fully aligned with the psychometric POV.
I dunno he made a few very wise purchases (Instagram, WhatsApp). But yeah he hasn't had a single first party hit apart from Facebook, and the Metaverse is 100% emperor's new clothes. Even worse than Alexa's "people will buy things through a janky voice interface right"?
While I know criticizing Meta is popular, I'm not sure I'd agree with above.
Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook. Understanding the potential market that could be created and turning down a $1B acquisition from Yahoo 20-years ago, at the time, seemed insane.
Also making the shift to mobile, when people thought that would be the death of FB is a remarkable story.
Identifying to acquire WhatsApp & Instagram, both laughed at when bought for the acquisition price at that time, now massive businesses for Meta (and their market cap value).
Meta AI glasses are surprisingly popular and growing. And more...
Note: I have no affiliation with Meta (not now or in the past)
---
EDIT: Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique. Maybe, but the product is only like 10% of the problem. 90% of the work (and hard part) is execution.
He was also a wealthy kid with connections. People place far too much weight on execution. Most of it is being in the right place at the right time and having existing connections.
That's not true though. Social network sites existed, just not so "centralized" and "viral". Facebook created a simple and more user-friendly interface.
WhatsApp as it understand, does not make much if any money. Instagram is a cash cow due.
They have released some good open source technology, but as the OP said, Meta hasn't much going for it apart from addictive apps for showing ads
>Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.
Seriously? Of course they did. An easy counter-example is MySpace, which launched several months before Facebook's very first appearance as a Hot Or Not mimic (which predates Zuck by 3 years), and had many millions more users for years (especially while FB was restricted to colleges).
Major competition and a lot of money was going into social media around then (and for a couple years prior), FB is just the eventual winner.
> Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique.
My dude, no one in your reply thread is making that claim. We bristling at the claim that "Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook". Unless you're saying FB's innovation is its business model and is what made it dominate, well, your original statement just didn't substantiate that.
IMO, the only thing I'd credit Zuck for is sticking (at least at the start) to his singular vision of what a social network should be; first it was just open for .edu emails, then when it was released more broadly their product roadmap stuck to fostering a social environment online.
And then he lost that vision. I'd say it was circa Cambridge Analytica when engagement---often ragebait because it gave them more and stronger of that sweet sweet monetizable ad signals---replaced fostering an online social environment. Others would say it's the algorithmic news feed. Either way, losing that vision started FB's demise.
IME, FB was best when it was a supplement and not a replacement for real life. FB had value to me because we could plan parties there and even keep in touch after, get that social buzz going for a little while longer. But it was _never_ the party.
But their recent efforts---Metaverse, all the AI crap---has all the hallmakrs of trying to replace real life. They now want to be the party but good luck with that. Judging by the blowback and lack of adoption consumers see what they're up to a mile away. Zuck has no idea how to stay relevant so now we have a platform more concerned with its market cap than having actual utility.
Those are fair points, though I didn't say he wasn't a good business person. I could probably concede that he is, but I don't see him as the tech visionary he's often propped up to be.
Social networks definitely existed, they just didn’t gain the same momentum/popularity as Facebook. As others have pointed out there was MySpace - but even before that there was Friendster and Asian Avenue. I’m sure there were probably another one or two.
That’s not to take anything away from the success of early Facebook, but the idea of a social network was not created by fb.
He built a hell of a machine for buying political/cultural influence or filling your sales funnel, no matter the dubiousness of your product, with pinpoint precision. Doing that takes vision and talent, and extremely flexible ethics.
In what way has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain, as befitting the word charlatan? He is the CEO of Facebook and we're told to not like Facebook, but when has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain? He's one of the richest people in the world and has been using that money to do things he wants to do. I don't think he's ever claimed to eg be a PhD AI researcher and for people to give him money because of a made up claim like that. People give Facebook money and it ends up in his pockets and he does things with that.
Perhaps “charlatan” in the literal sense isn’t true. I was speaking more colloquial, but that was lazy of me.
I will ask though, has he been honest when he’s testified before Congress? At best, I think we can say he hasn’t been very transparent many of those times. If that’s not for power and/or financial gain, what is it? [0]
I didn’t have to be “told” to not like Facebook or Meta. The company’s actions for well
over a decade and those of its executives, including the CEO, allowed to form that opinion on our own. I’d be willing to bet that experience is not unique to me.
um, I'm not sure exactly why what motivated that comment, but its extremely possible to believe every word there from a purely logical perspective, as opposed to an emotional one. yes we shouldn't post personal attacks, but saying 'Zuckerberg got lucky' and 'seems to chase the latest "it" thing' doesn't need to qualify as a personal attack. these can just be normal observations. see I wouldn't say the same things about sama, because I don't think they're true, and I dislike the both of them.
as for the newsguidelines, I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Much of the language in the GP is pejorative, and therefore emotional, and therefore not possible to treat "from a purely logical perspective".
I doubt that a purely logical evaluation is possible of any statement at all, outside of formal languages, but let's not digress. (Or maybe we should! it's at least more interesting to talk about than how $Billionaire-CEO just got lucky, lacks talent, or is a charlatan.)
> I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Yes, that's possible, but if one is venting indignation then one is doing something different.
To digress again: "intellectual curiosity" is a funny phrase, one I don't entirely care for - it verges on pretentious and reminds me of Hemingway's ten-dollar words*. But I've stuck with it because you can't just say "curiosity", because there are other kinds of curiosity and they are quite different.
I believe you when you say you didn't intend it that way, but unfortunately the meaning of a message has more to do how it lands than how it was intended—in the sense of the effects that it has on the receivers and also on the channel. Certainly from a moderation point of view we have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's not that you owe Zuckerberg or any other specific person better, but rather that you owe this community better if you're participating in it. (And by 'you' of course, I don't mean you personally, but all of us.)
Facebook leadership is essentially a cat reacting to a laser pointer. There seems to be no shiny object they won't chase. Their own C-Suite admit their latest reorganization is a disaster. Their "all in" on virtual worlds was a disaster. Their billion dollar AI guru purchase was a disaster. Their influencer heavy connected glasses will be a disaster.
There is no leadership here. However, you can be sure when the next round of layoffs happen, there will be no "mea culpa" from the C-Suite, lots of golden parachutes and the unemployed will be the cogs in their wheel.
Wait until 10,000 manosphere influencers start selling personalize aura coaching to incels who share their glasses recordings. We'll start seeing those glasses on every lame-ass wannabro.
If so, they will become an obvious red flag sitting right on their faces, become cringe and stop selling.
If the manosphere stopped doing cringe, what would be left?
The glasses, sadly, and unlike everything else, are incredibly popular and selling faster than they can make them
Unfortunately they seem to be useful, if for no other reason than parents want to take picture of their children at a moment’s notice. AFAIK this is the killer app for these glasses.
So many photos taken these days that are never going to be seen.
if only there was a place to share them, and that place actually showed them to the people who indicated that they wanted to see them.
Whatever AI the feds buy will see them.
I wonder if it's still a good thing to have taken the picture. There's something to be said for pausing and having the conscious thought "this is a nice moment". (though of course, moderation in all things)
They’re really very poor at this, the cameras are about what you’d get in a flip phone and are cropped vertical. I was expecting GoPro quality of capture but it’s a very limited field of view left to right and soft focus.
And that’s besides the point of psychological outcomes for the child of a parent always intermediating eye contact with eye-of-meta contact, like it’s one thing to be out in public and see someone who might be streaming, but growing up with the expectation that any action, any expression you give in a parents direction may be captured and played back? Awful.
Maybe for the dozens of people who are actually recording their feats of extreme sports the new oakleys are a good product market fit.
OTOH the audio experience was surprisingly good and if they made a pair without cameras I would buy them.
Until society decides it doesn't want them again and deals with it.
The glasses are a great way to make content, for better or worse. I’ve only really seen the worse side of it on my feed.
However, this is temporary. When people have seen enough fpv content it will stop getting engagement and the glasses will be forgotten.
Man I wish they would just chase fads. They chase the most morally corrupt version of a fad every time, it's like their business is black mirror episodes as a service.
Fail fast and iterate.
Wait no, not like that.
"Move fast and break things!"
"Oops, all broken."
Sometimes I'm astonished how far they made it. But then again, they made their fortune by selling personal data to bad actors who manipulate opinions for polling and do all sorts of questionable dealings with it. And from there, they simply bought their competitors and maintained an extractive monopoly for people using social media for advertisement.
It's pretty much impossible that anything organic or creative could be created by Facebook at this point.
They've only made it this far because they stumbled head first into a monopoly while also being lucky enough to own the platform their monopoly is on.
Quite easy to subsidizes 100s of billions in complete vaporware when you can make it up with a single BU that generates 90% of your revenue.
Let's not forget the cryptocurrency play (Libra)
Facebook (META) is the man in the arena.
Truth is Zuckerberg doesn’t really like to succeed (and at this point he doesn’t even have to anymore, his family is set for life). He likes to struggle. It’s the only thing that gives that nostalgic feeling of being a scrappy startup trying to break into new markets.
At the end of the days, his legacy will be a few big wins and a long history of stuff he tried and failed at. That’s not really much different from any regular person’s life. Nothing to be ashamed of. As long as Meta still prints money, expect them to chase every trend for the next 40+ years.
> There is no leadership here
They treat employees like shite, and the only folks left or willing to join are the mercenaries. It is a testament to their business model that it survives in spite of all this.
> It is a testament to their business model that it survives in spite of all this.
The business model is pure moat. When the competition is bought up and new competition has it very hard to enter the market because your position is so utterly dominant, you don't need to innovate, you just milk everything you got to death, it's not like people have much of an alternative.
The only threat Meta has is Tiktok, and if I were to guess, we'll see Tiktok end up in Meta in a few years. Forcing Bytedance to sell off Tiktok with only 19.9% remaining in BD's hands was a necessary move given the serious national security implications, but eventually Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emiratis will want their money back, and the "best" way for the grift to finally complete will be for everyone of these three to sell their stake to Meta before a new administration can bring in a new FTC leadership to prevent such a merger.
they got tiktok wrapped up and sold to an american consortium.
Smartphone
Dating
Cryptocurrency
AR/VR
AI
Gambling <— Zuck is here
This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.
all he needs to do is put a competent CEO
Agreed that Zuck is not very impressive, but what would another CEO do differently at this point? It's got a ton of money, and they are trying this and that. But the market wouldn't let them sit on a bunch of money either.
1. Rename the company to "Facebook"
2. Spin out the other garbage into different companies.
He's a bit of a wuss though. Not betting it all, just slowly iterating on the next miss, can never be fired. Pretty damn funny actually. Sad if you work there though.
> He's a bit of a wuss though
No no no, didn’t you see the MMA training. He’s a real tough guy. Very masculine and strong.
Okay, imagine if he did, he would've lost everything 4 times
He has already finished the game and just explores the side quests. He is more than content, he’s way more content than the rest of us.
he is richer than any of us, but he doesn't strike me as someone who is even remotely content.
Those two things are not the same thing.
The parent seems to mean that he is content financially, which is why he can now play around with whatever he feels like and if it costs copious amounts of money to do so who cares?
He will never be generally content, no.
Zuck's a bit more private, but Musk putting his time into moderating Twitter demonstrates some of these people will never be content with finishing the game.
not to mention rage posting dozens of time a day doesn't scream contentedness
The guy has zero imagination, I guess. Even Facebook was a stolen and mostly unoriginal idea, it was just executed well for that era. I can only feel sad for him, all the money in the world yet not a single creative or interesting idea to allocate it on. And the unoriginal things it is allocated on end up being pretty bad most of the time.
> rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad
He is content with his billions. That is why he can piss it away on stupid ideas now.
But wait, there’s more! Mark is also a big Dana White fan so now you also have Meta AI UFC Fighter Rankings
https://www.mmamania.com/ufc-mma-rankings/452601/ufc-finally...
The fact that someone has billions of dollars and still chooses to spend 40-60 hours/week going to the office to work on Facebook seems psychotic. He can do practically anything he wants, and he chooses to work on Facebook. It’s mind bending.
At that level it’s not the luxury hotels and fresh mangoes flown in from Miami that appeals, but the influence to effect outcomes on a global scale. Megalomaniacal more than psychotic.
Smartphone
Dating
Cryptocurrency
AR/VR
AI
Gambling <— Zuck is here
This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.
I can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money.
But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.
51% shareholding he’s free to make all the mistakes he wants
Corey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...
Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.
Youtube isn't really known to be highly profitable. I'm also not sure people would go to a Facebook YouTube when the normal YouTube exists
Brother, YouTube is quite literally a money printing machine. I don’t know where you’re getting information from.
YouTube has a lot of revenue, profit isn't known as far as I'm aware. Alphabet doesn't report YouTube earnings separately, and when they were still sharing that information it was a pretty large amount of losses IIRC. But if you have sources I'm happy to change my mind
They report YT's earnings, iirc it is about 60B (40B ads + 20B subs) annually, with 10% YoY growth. They don't disclose youtube's profits outside of Google Services (which has ~40% margins), so yes youtube is a money printing machine.
And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.
Thanks, I will look into it, my mental model is outdated of what you say is true
When people talk about breaking Google up… YT has always seemed an obvious candidate for separation
They tried. Facebook Watch. It's a total disaster.
I thought that was a hardware device for your wrist. Wow.
> Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure
Facebook has no content production experience though, and when they do dip their toes into that market its via AI slop (like their official AI accounts on instagram). I think this is because they don't value the human element of art at all.
They would be entirely reliant other content providers, which is a rough place to be in when you have to deal with actual studios and not just independent creators. Independent creators are easier for Facebook to exploit since they are usually small operations and dependent on facebook/instagram for market reach.
> why nobody ever stops for a moment
What, you want to get fired?
Cliché cynic's comment: the end users they are concerned about are the companies they sell ads to. If you're not that, tough luck.
Zuck has not accountability and total veto powers at the board level. If this was some other CEO making so many mistakes starting with the brain dead Metaverse, they would have been either fired or investigated for fraud. At Meta only the low level engineers are held accountable.
Zuck simply cannot come to terms with the fact that his legacy is having built the world greatest ad platform.
Maybe he should start a launch company with the stated goal of sending humans to Uranus or wherever it is he's from.
Second greatest.
Facebook is the 21st century version of the tabloid newspaper and daytime Jerry Springer. Highly lucrative, but bottom of the barrel stuff.
Launching a prediction market is exactly the type of thing I would expect from them.
considering his casual disregard for the feelings of fellow Harvard students back in the day, I doubt he cares what his legacy is. Just being rich and famous is plenty reward.
People forget that Meta already did this years ago, before prediction markets became the next big consumer trend for them to chase.
The app was called Forecast, and launched in June 2020. (Around the same time that Kalshi and Polymarket launched, actually!) It was framed as a way to make the comments and activity on Facebook actually productive rather than toxic, and build expert reputation signaling mechanisms.
I think they sunset it after about a year.
He wants to collect and profit from insider info by joining in on the newest unregulated gambling scheme. I'm sure plenty of cheaters and suckers will be happy to make him more money.
Polymarket: "Trade on anything."
Kalshi: "Trade the Future."
Meta Arena: "They 'trust me.' Dumb f^^ks."
Funnily enough it's not their first attempt at launching a prediction market. They tried exactly the same in 2021 -> https://qz.com/2069284/facebook-is-shutting-down-its-experim...
How to tank morale even harder
Zuck has become as fickle as Google. That's never good for a corporate vision. If he wasn't sitting on a cash cow he'd be headed for the exit.
Hopefully it's the same geniuses that implemented his metaverse thingy.
Hope so (ex-Meta, and hold a couple of million dollars of their stock, but quite dislike the company).
Oh sure, why not. I suppose they’ve already ruled out selling vapes or meth, or at least haven’t added those business units to their annual filings yet.
I truly wonder if Meta’s Downfall as a Service umbrella has ever rejected an idea as being too detrimental to society, and if so, how awful did it have to be?
its not very expensive for a company like Meta to create a platform like this that could see them extract value as a middleman passively for a while.
despite the ethics of it, business wise it pays for itself, and because of the complicated ethics of it Meta is the best biggest company for it too. Everyone hates meta, their own employees hate meta, who cares. It will probably make money.
not only that, but I think when a big platform comes into play it gets users from the other platforms easily. As the opportunities for market mismatch are abound being a smaller platform in the beginning.
anyway, I think this is a smart move by Meta. And I'm positive everyone in the gambling space is happy with it too, as Meta comes with a good lobbying effort.
this is reality, folks.
Makes sense, get the kids addicted to gambling and pull them into the platform.
They even call it "Arena". The place where gladiators kill each other, lions eat christans , criminals are exectuted brutally and animals are hunted. What an apt name chosen by the most moral company of our times.
> lions eat christans
Could you explain this bit ?
I don't think he meant you ate Christians, more that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...
Man. Just enjoy your vast fortune. Quit flailing into new things and disappear into the woods.
With this being just "toy money" I predict it'll go as well in trying to copy the winners as threads did vs twitter.
Well, I guess they are familiar with how to make products addicting so this is right up their skill set?
I wonder how/if they'll use AI for this. maybe this would give them access to some very highquality pretrain data (like who made which bet on what at what time), which I can definitely imagine them needing. I've heard they have a lot of spare compute they run experiments on, and if this goes well for them maybe they could make a really good prediction bot
This is the obvious next iteration of online based life
Facebook gave life to communities where people draw identity and social belonging from a screen
It only makes sense to continue bearing down into that simulacra
Is it just me or is this really not that crazy of an idea?
Polls are already a thing, and people love giving their opinion on things.
Combining social media and gambling while maybe not morally great. Seems like has potential to make a shitton of cash.
Betting is all over the place right now.
Imagine being assigned to work on this only to be laid off a year later before quarterly earnings
This will fail, he'll throw money at Kalshi and or Polymarket and, if he acquires either, chase some sort of regulatory capture scheme.
I just directed my cats to make a cryptocurrency.
Right after a nap...
Morale must be so in the dumps at Meta. No direction, no clear next thing... :(
A betting market??
Holy mimic batman - Mark, its ok to have a little of your own innovation and not copycat nor buy every single good idea.
How did he come up with Facebook?
I dont think he did
yes.
no.
He copied the analog thing of the same name in his university that was taking too long to digitise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
There's a whole movie about it. He was employed to create a social media platform, and ended up stealing the code to do it for himself instead.
It was already digitized. He wanted to make a version without security and privacy protections.
He also copied Friendster.
Facebook innovation is their ads algo. They copy existing consumer success (which is incredibly difficult to create), and then execute it incredibly well.
> and then execute it incredibly well
...sometimes
Facebook hired a bunch of people from Google's search ads division to basically replicate their real-time bidding system.
Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter.
People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla.
And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.
Not just that he hired Sheryl sandberg lmao.
She basically ran the firm whilst Zuck thought about who to buy to secure a monopoly position. He got lucky more than anything else - had the instagam guys not given in, meta would not be worth anything close to what it is today.
> not copycat nor buy every single good idea.
I don’t know if I’ll call Kalshi and Polymarket “good ideas”.
fair point
I bet (pun intended) that's pretty good for the owners pockets
So many baby boomers are about to lose their savings. Meta knows their bread is buttered by the 55+ age group and capitalizing on the vulnerable social media addicted elders will be extremely profitable.
My university admissions interview took place next to an old tech nerd's model train layout. Today, the same kind of person would be up all night posting about trans people on X. I blame a lot of our current problems on the decline of model trains and stamp collecting. You are spot on about social media addiction among the olds.
Whatever happened to that Facebook cryptocurrency?
Never launched, given to org that dissolved, sold to bank that is now shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)
I've always felt that Mark Zuckerberg got lucky with Facebook and that he has no real lasting talent as a technologist or visionary. He seems to attempt to chase the latest "it" thing and has very few original ideas that actual stick long-term. He's quite the charlatan.
I've never seen him saying anything particularly smart or insightful. My impression is that he has moderately above average intelligence and entrepreneurship. If he wasn't at the right place at the right time, he would be yet another founder of a random startup.
I've never seen him say or do anything particularly human. If I believed in such things, I'd think he was some kind of souless drone sent here by aliens/demons/etc to destroy humanity.
Your impression about his intelligence is way off. Mark was part of the study for mathematically precocious youth, which has a math cutoff at the 1/10K rarity. He also has ambition at the same level. What’s probably missing, of late, is good taste and judgment.
It is an impression, as you said. If his intellect is so vast (vs just scoring well on the math skill tests), we should have seen some sort of evidence in the things he writes or says. He was called a programming prodigy but we've seen other actual programming prodigies delivering much more impressive results (Bellard, Frankel, Carmack etc).
I don’t know what definition of intelligence you’re using, but scoring extremely well on math tests qualifying him for that study is fully aligned with the psychometric POV.
This has no bearing on anything.
Did Steve jobs have any of that? No. But he shits all over any tech ceo in history and it’ll probably stay that way.
Huh? I was addressing a specific claim - not even sure what you’re trying to refute.
That becomes more clear by the day.
Zuck has no insight. His sole ambition is to be rich and taken seriously.
I dunno he made a few very wise purchases (Instagram, WhatsApp). But yeah he hasn't had a single first party hit apart from Facebook, and the Metaverse is 100% emperor's new clothes. Even worse than Alexa's "people will buy things through a janky voice interface right"?
Thought the same thing even before I saw your comment!
This is basically the case with most of the tech billionaires. They have one, maybe two real successes and it's mostly inertia after that.
While I know criticizing Meta is popular, I'm not sure I'd agree with above.
Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook. Understanding the potential market that could be created and turning down a $1B acquisition from Yahoo 20-years ago, at the time, seemed insane.
Also making the shift to mobile, when people thought that would be the death of FB is a remarkable story.
Identifying to acquire WhatsApp & Instagram, both laughed at when bought for the acquisition price at that time, now massive businesses for Meta (and their market cap value).
Meta AI glasses are surprisingly popular and growing. And more...
Note: I have no affiliation with Meta (not now or in the past)
---
EDIT: Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique. Maybe, but the product is only like 10% of the problem. 90% of the work (and hard part) is execution.
Insane how? Google had already done it, and it's pretty clear that if someone wants to buy for $1B, it might be worth more than $1B.
> Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.
You never heard of MySpace?
> Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook
Social networks were all the rage. He executed the best of all and had the right strategy to build the user base.
He was also a wealthy kid with connections. People place far too much weight on execution. Most of it is being in the right place at the right time and having existing connections.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...
Not what I'd call great execution anyways.
And then Thiel money. That tends to help too.
That's not true though. Social network sites existed, just not so "centralized" and "viral". Facebook created a simple and more user-friendly interface. WhatsApp as it understand, does not make much if any money. Instagram is a cash cow due.
They have released some good open source technology, but as the OP said, Meta hasn't much going for it apart from addictive apps for showing ads
They also had the right audience to build the early adopters: top university students.
>Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.
Seriously? Of course they did. An easy counter-example is MySpace, which launched several months before Facebook's very first appearance as a Hot Or Not mimic (which predates Zuck by 3 years), and had many millions more users for years (especially while FB was restricted to colleges).
Major competition and a lot of money was going into social media around then (and for a couple years prior), FB is just the eventual winner.
> Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique.
My dude, no one in your reply thread is making that claim. We bristling at the claim that "Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook". Unless you're saying FB's innovation is its business model and is what made it dominate, well, your original statement just didn't substantiate that.
IMO, the only thing I'd credit Zuck for is sticking (at least at the start) to his singular vision of what a social network should be; first it was just open for .edu emails, then when it was released more broadly their product roadmap stuck to fostering a social environment online.
And then he lost that vision. I'd say it was circa Cambridge Analytica when engagement---often ragebait because it gave them more and stronger of that sweet sweet monetizable ad signals---replaced fostering an online social environment. Others would say it's the algorithmic news feed. Either way, losing that vision started FB's demise.
IME, FB was best when it was a supplement and not a replacement for real life. FB had value to me because we could plan parties there and even keep in touch after, get that social buzz going for a little while longer. But it was _never_ the party.
But their recent efforts---Metaverse, all the AI crap---has all the hallmakrs of trying to replace real life. They now want to be the party but good luck with that. Judging by the blowback and lack of adoption consumers see what they're up to a mile away. Zuck has no idea how to stay relevant so now we have a platform more concerned with its market cap than having actual utility.
Those are fair points, though I didn't say he wasn't a good business person. I could probably concede that he is, but I don't see him as the tech visionary he's often propped up to be.
Social networks definitely existed, they just didn’t gain the same momentum/popularity as Facebook. As others have pointed out there was MySpace - but even before that there was Friendster and Asian Avenue. I’m sure there were probably another one or two.
That’s not to take anything away from the success of early Facebook, but the idea of a social network was not created by fb.
He built a hell of a machine for buying political/cultural influence or filling your sales funnel, no matter the dubiousness of your product, with pinpoint precision. Doing that takes vision and talent, and extremely flexible ethics.
Same for Elon and Paypal
In what way has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain, as befitting the word charlatan? He is the CEO of Facebook and we're told to not like Facebook, but when has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain? He's one of the richest people in the world and has been using that money to do things he wants to do. I don't think he's ever claimed to eg be a PhD AI researcher and for people to give him money because of a made up claim like that. People give Facebook money and it ends up in his pockets and he does things with that.
Perhaps “charlatan” in the literal sense isn’t true. I was speaking more colloquial, but that was lazy of me.
I will ask though, has he been honest when he’s testified before Congress? At best, I think we can say he hasn’t been very transparent many of those times. If that’s not for power and/or financial gain, what is it? [0]
- [0] https://dispatch.techoversight.org/top-report-mark-zuckerber... - which was previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060486
> “we're told to not like Facebook…”
I didn’t have to be “told” to not like Facebook or Meta. The company’s actions for well over a decade and those of its executives, including the CEO, allowed to form that opinion on our own. I’d be willing to bet that experience is not unique to me.
Please don't post personal attacks to HN, regardless of $Person.
A comment like this does not gratify curiosity, only indignation, and we're here for the former not the latter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
um, I'm not sure exactly why what motivated that comment, but its extremely possible to believe every word there from a purely logical perspective, as opposed to an emotional one. yes we shouldn't post personal attacks, but saying 'Zuckerberg got lucky' and 'seems to chase the latest "it" thing' doesn't need to qualify as a personal attack. these can just be normal observations. see I wouldn't say the same things about sama, because I don't think they're true, and I dislike the both of them.
as for the newsguidelines, I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Much of the language in the GP is pejorative, and therefore emotional, and therefore not possible to treat "from a purely logical perspective".
I doubt that a purely logical evaluation is possible of any statement at all, outside of formal languages, but let's not digress. (Or maybe we should! it's at least more interesting to talk about than how $Billionaire-CEO just got lucky, lacks talent, or is a charlatan.)
> I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Yes, that's possible, but if one is venting indignation then one is doing something different.
To digress again: "intellectual curiosity" is a funny phrase, one I don't entirely care for - it verges on pretentious and reminds me of Hemingway's ten-dollar words*. But I've stuck with it because you can't just say "curiosity", because there are other kinds of curiosity and they are quite different.
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/26/dictionary/
I definitely didn't mean this as a personal attack.
>He's quite the charlatan.
This is where it crossed from critique to attack.
While it may be so, what product of Meta's hasn't been a joke?
I believe you when you say you didn't intend it that way, but unfortunately the meaning of a message has more to do how it lands than how it was intended—in the sense of the effects that it has on the receivers and also on the channel. Certainly from a moderation point of view we have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's not that you owe Zuckerberg or any other specific person better, but rather that you owe this community better if you're participating in it. (And by 'you' of course, I don't mean you personally, but all of us.)