Disclaimer: I'm a former Meta employee and I still hold a bit of love and nostalgia for the company.
The article is right to point out that Meta has by far the largest and most sophisticated ad targeting and tracking system in the market. The problem is that even if you don't count Apple's ATT the window of places where they can use it is getting smaller: Facebook the app is a shell of its former self, WhatsApp is un-monetiseable despite a lot of attempts to get companies to pay directly to talk to other users, and new acquisitions are impossible in this post-Obama era. Instagram is growing, but mostly in countries with relarively low ad spending levels.
And there comes the difference between this drop and the one in 2018: ads work when people want to spend money on products. The pressures of inflation, rising cost of living, and devaluation of almost every currency to the USD is putting a block in the one reliable source of income for the company.
I would bet on Meta's stock price rising if the economic and social crisis in Europe magically improves tomorrow. Otherwise, it's a matter of believing in the Metaverse and hoping the Oculus Pro becomes successful enough to at least provide another large source of revenue for the company.
I've really softened on Zuck in the last couple years. The Metaverse stuff looks stupid from the outside, but all else considered, isn't this exactly what we've been asking for out of FAANG for the last ten years? To put all of these insane resources into something that at least could be a cool future to live in?
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.
Yeah, I don't like Meta but it's great that they heavily invest their profit to xR/"metaverse". I don't know will finally "metaverse" used well , but it's exciting to see growing.
The All-In Podcast had a chart (https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter!
Just to be clear, "Apollo" here is the Apollo space program that invented and manufactured space flight and moon landing and return, over 13 years, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Through all the Meta-verse skepticism, I kept thinking that the payoff could be worth it if they capture the next big platform. But this put the scale of the investment in context, and now I doubt that even the wildest success will payoff for $250B of spending. And that's not even counting the opportunity cost of what else FB could do with that money.
I can't comment on how that 4B/quarter is being spent. However the Quest 2 has been the biggest success in VR to date. Why couldn't some of those billions have been spent on getting a Quest 3 ready for sale for Fall/Xmas 2022? It would be like Apple not releasing new iPhones level of missed opportunity.
Or perhaps it's a huge selfish gamble thinking, let's get our product perfected before everyone realizes how big this is. This sounds like a small startup more worried about having their unknown product's secrets stolen rather than how to market it so enough know it exists.
The business angle also doesn't make sense to me. Maybe during severe lockdowns it might have had a chance, but now we should be betting on the tech and performance/price improving in service of games first and foremost.
I hope SteamVR wins, otherwise I don't care whether Apple or Meta's device wins. And where is MS in this, too late as usual?
There's the meta quest pro which released last week, but the tech for something in the same price range as the Quest 2 but better probably isn't a thing yet. The Quest 2 did have a $100 price increase 6 months ago.
"Is [Metaverse] going to be a leap in humanity at the scale of the Apollo program?"
That is, IMO, the key question behind this entire discussion. Zuck certainly thinks so. I'm sure a lot of people at Meta and outside think so as well. And their detractors obviously don't.
There isn't going to be any consensus on whether Meta is spending too much money or not because ultimately it is a referendum on the concept of VR/AR/Metaverse itself.
The All-In hosts gave a reasonable comment: Meta may well get a leap in humanity, but it should at least show incremental progress to the investors given such a huge quarterly investment.
Is that an amount to create an initial iPhone? While it was awesome, if it stayed like that, it wouldn't change the industry. It would seem fair to add up all the R&D costs that went into getting iPhone to where it is today, which will be much higher.
I'm not sure how the numbers really compare. If they are showing development costs for a product before it entered the market then it should probably be $2B for Meta, since that's what they paid for Oculus.
What has Tesla changed? All it did was show a market for non-garbage electric cars. Other more established companies are running laps around it now. How much of that $25B went to the ever-retreating promises of self-driving?
Not a Tesla fanboy, but it seems you're dismissing many of Tesla's accomplishments here. Unless @Kye is the username secretly used by Jeff Bezos (hi Jeff!), I'd recommend you weigh how difficult it is to build something similar to Tesla.
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. More so than the cartoon office space vibe.
yeah, it's a bit weird that Marques Brownlee recently gave a better presentation on Meta/Metaverse than what Zuckerberg cooked up.
But I think that's the intent. Because when you lay out Meta's strategy so naked, like Marques did, then you realize that no one is going to buy into it. You need early adopters and those are the ones that are going to sniff out that you're actually building a dystopian privacy-invading Skinner Box platform controlled 100% by Meta and they will predictably eviscerate you.
Marques brings up the part of what Meta is focusing on now, which is creating replacements for everyday functions with a VR twist. He claims some of them are actually quite good. But I think this is the way Google approached Google+. People don't want something good-as or marginally better. What Meta needs is a killer app. Something that can only be done in the Metaverse and is so compelling that people are willing to give Meta full control over their life and spend the money on the hardware. That's a tall order.
I don't think the "metaverse" needs to succeed as much as the hardware does. A set of AR glasses that aren't bulky or sci-fi enables a huge amount of brand new functionality, on maybe even more than smartphones did. In that case, if Meta has the best option on the market, it doesn't need to write the killer app, someone else can do it, just like the App Store enabled iPhone developers to do.
I'm less optimistic on the VR takeover, but I can imagine a future where VR headsets would be preferable to using laptops for daily use, and the same thing applies there.
Yeah, the zoom replacement looks really cool. Butt...
The biggest problem I have doing zoom calls with family is an unstable internet connection at their end and I don't think the metaverse is going to be able to solve that. And besides, I'm certainly not going to pay 500$ for a headset just for Awesome VR calls, if i can just use a phone call.
The biggest potential is being able to work remotely. Just imagine all the remote work Metaverse could make possible. And 500$ headset might just be in the budget for a midsized company looking to expand it's workforce.
I wonder how much it would have cost to simply recreate Google Earth VR, which is still one of the most compelling VR applications, period. It was released 6 years ago.
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.).
> 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.
They've actually already cultivated these affluent users almost by accident (they aren't interested in gaming, but they are interested in fitness). But these users tend to be older even if they are richer...it isn't a demographic that Facebook was going for.
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 of great work more than great work. The result was a lot of config changes making noise in metrics that could be read positively, without implementing the state of the art systems that took a year before you could write a fancy success workplace post about it. That would risk poor performance reviews and the shuffling of reasources away from your team as a result.
And now, it's becoming apparent that the very very smart people started leaving after the stock dropped and the replacements are both more expensive and less able to get used to Facebook's infra. The result on the ground looks like a very serious engineering death spiral that management has not signaled they understand or have a grip on.
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.
> management that rewarded the appearance of great work more than great work. T
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.
> The result was a lot of config changes making noise in metrics that could be read positively, without implementing the state of the art systems that took a year before you could write a fancy success workplace post about it. That would risk poor performance reviews and the shuffling of reasources away from your team as a result.
Meta has recently switched to a performance review cycle of 1 year (from 6 months). It sounds like one of the reasons this was done was to help make such work more possible.
I think the actual issue is the underlying culture. Google worked fine with multiple review cycles and you could get a good rating working on something hard that only shipped when it was ready.
However it is an optimistic sign in that leadership must get that part of the problem (long term vision is penalized) and is taking steps to address it. Maybe I judged them too harshly above; I don't know what I would do in their position to turn the ship around.
Embedding-similarity based retrieval for one. Probably shouldn't get into the details here but Google has made incredible advances in the retrieval step of your typical retrieval / ranking pipeline and for a variety of reasons meta has not implemented them in production, despite having open sourced tools in this area. There are a few other advances like this Google has been using for long enough to publish on, meta engineers have working prototypes, but nothing is in production and everything breaks all the time.
Channel your saltiness into uncovering illegal/fraudulent stuff happening within ads and become a whistleblower. Based on anecdotes (some within these comments!) stuff is clearly sideways with how ads are being delivered and attributed.
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"?
> Who are these people who are still using Facebook every day?
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.
Rural countryside in the Midwest here. Our dog decided to escape and go on an adventure a few weeks back. The person who found him went to the local Facebook group for lost dogs and after not seeing him there for a few hours finally called animal control (where we, as not really Facebook users, had reported him missing).
It's pretty wild what an alternate reality Facebook creates when you don't use it but others do.
I used to use Facebook, but the rampant ads and dark patterns drove me away. I can't stand FB pushing video content in my feed. Some ads are fine (sidebar-only preferably), I understand that you have to pay the bills somehow... but I really don't like "recommended" posts in my feed. The lack of autonomy drove me away.
> 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 mention that you notice the ads for geeky t-shirts and cross body bags (what are those?), but what about the recommended content? Do Stories and Reels not get in your way? Don't you miss content from school pagse, kids clubs, activities, and team pages because the algorithm decides that it would rather show you yet-another-meme-post?
I'm glad that Facebook seems to work for you. But it really sucks for those of us who don't agree with Facebook's business practices, because you contribute to a network effect that actively excludes non-users. I don't like Facebook's dark patterns, their advertising, or their "recommended" posts. So I choose not to use it. It's absolute bollocks that I can't easily look at community event pages as a non-user, and it only makes me happier that I've opted out of such a toxic, exclusive community.
I’m glad you pointed out that Reddit gets a free pass. Aside from the fact that r/TheDonald flourished there, r/all regularly shows videos of people dying and men smacking women (r/pussypassdenied). There’s also a weird, self-congratulatory sense of community that leads to mob politics and pile ons in a way distinct from Facebook and Twitter. I think it means something that people identify as redditors, and not, say, as tweeters.
It's trivial that nice communities exist on Facebook. Positive, engaged people build good communities, regardless of platform or technology.
The same distributions of haves and have-nots exist on any platform. Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/everything else are composed of an ever changing and uncountable number of communities, a few of which are bound to be good because of the continuous efforts of their members, and everything else is varying degrees of toxicity, narcissism, hatred, and every other negative trait you can think of.
If someone stereotypes you as a "toxic racist Karen" because you mainly use Facebook, it seems to follow the same reasoning behind why you might perceive Reddit as "horribly toxic and depressing." You get out of X what you put in.
I think we have to adjust our understanding of what 'using' Facebook means.
Despite its flaws FB has done a good job of layering useful products on top of the social network despite the original purpose of Facebook seemingly losing popularity. In my circles, the typical news feed and posting updates part of Facebook is pretty much dead, and I never use those features personally anymore. BUT Marketplace, Messenger, and niche groups are all very valuable. It's changed from 'something cool' to a utility.
Also, given these DAUs are measured in billions and there are users all over the globe, chances are usage in different parts of the world and for different ages and demographics looks incredibly different.
Interesting point. I also found this passage intriguing:
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.
This makes it clear that Facebook/Meta's overlords don't think of these products as a social network; instead, they think of them as a conduit to show people ads. Ads recommended by AI.
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.
> who are these people who are still using Facebook every day?
I'm using it pretty frequently, often daily. It may not be the place where everyone is posting their frequent updates, but I still have hundreds of acquaintances who post periodic updates (or read mine), a few circles who use FB events to manage announcements/invites, and FB serves as well as it ever has as a Rolodex.
I get that people get cranky about their feeds and/or concern about psychological or social effects of social media, but FB isn't at all unique here. Any social media you aren't the customer of is going to make its money either directing/selling your attention (which means messing with the feed) or data about your attention, and so naturally most do and there's not really an alternative, there's just a perception of what's fashionable among a given circle.
Marketplace is part of it. In many regions, it's essentially replaced Craigslist for buying/selling random things like lawn equipment and children's toys.
Beyond that, I think it's pretty well documented (and also stands to reason) that the growth is mostly in communities with previously low penetration. If all of your family has reduced facebook usage over the last few years, that means you are in a community with previously high penetration. Of course you won't be able to anecdotally observe growth.
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 having a Jobs-esque visionary moment have realized, "Wait, maybe the critics were right and this is bullshit."
But as the article points out.. maybe none of this matters. Advertising spend is still going up, the recession may or may not be turning a corner, and there's enough cash buffer to walk things back and refocus on Meta's core advertising business and products that support that.
> Between TikTok, Roblox, Minecraft, call of duty (and other triple A multiplayer games), we’re already there.
I'm going to need a definition for "metaverse" here because that doesn't sound like what I would imagine. You have listed a social media site and some video games. Both social media and video games have been with us for a long time, and if Facebook had just said "we want to work on social media and video games" then nobody would bat an eye.
Of course, that's not what they said. They now call the company "Meta" and toss the "metaverse" label around. This implies that they at least view it as something different in some substantive way.
I guess, either way, it's a failure. If it's just a trick to seem innovative by slapping a new label on old things, then that's a failure, because people now seem to expect them to do something more. If they view it as something novel that's going to "eat the world," that's also a failure (at least so far), since it clearly hasn't.
As far as I can tell, the metaverse is a medium. Much like web forums, social networks, different genres of video games (FPS, RTS, block-builders, etc), television, radio, and books.
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.
This is exactly what I mean when I say "nobody can define exactly what [the metaverse] is." The metaverse is simultaneously VR-based business collaboration software, but also decade-old sandbox video games. Web3 and NFTs often pop up in explanations, too.
Zuckerberg fancies Meta is "IOI" from Ready Player One. Let's leave alone the fact that the state of the art is simply not capable with our technology.
What is the Minecraft/Roblox economy as opposed to the rest of the economy? Like .05%? Growth given the lack of actual capabilities is likely flatline.
Metaverse was obviously a BS pivot. Question is what Zuckerberg is covering up before they pivot back.
The defining quality of a hypothetical Metaverse is its immersiveness. The existence of multiplayer games, social media apps and the internet in general does not by itself qualify until it moves beyond flat screens and mouse clicks and successfully incorporates AR/VR/mixed reality and a slew of other emerging tech in the area.
I think the best case scenario here is something like the iPhone, yes the Androids did come, but they took a long time to catch up (some would say they still haven't), and owning the platform is very lucrative.
It's about being the first one to reach mass market, and holding onto that position as long as possible.
>People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time
I believe people want Meta to fail because the spent the better part of last 5 years completely eviscerating their reputation and goodwill. While Facebook, at its prepandemic peak was hemorrhaging young users and becoming known as the platform for misinformation and arguments due to the chase for engagements at all costs, Zuckerberg was bust cosplaying as presidential candidate. People want Facebook to fail and I think that's a consequence of how terrible their reputation has become.
Exactly. I also want Meta to fail because the company has proven itself to be immoral and a poor steward of meaningful social contact over the internet, but my biggest beef is with the rotting Facebook platform that has turned into something awful over the past 10 years.
That being said, I want Meta's involvement in a "metaverse" to fail too, because I can't imagine living in a world where Zuck sinks his dark pattern and advertising fangs into an even more immersive version of today's manipulative social media. They've done enough damage as is.
I don't think it's a question of can Meta walk things back but whether Zuckerberg has the humility to do so. It certainly doesn't seem like Zuckerberg possesses that ability so it's more likely they'll just double down on "the metaverse".
But, yeah, he's too desperate to be/have the next great (hardware) platform. He wants the "metaverse" to be what Apple and Google have with their hardware and app stores. There's no way he walks it back.
I don’t think they actually have to walk anything back. Facebook seems like it’s going to still be successful even if the metaverse loses money forever.
The only real question that meta has is Mark. As far as I can tell there is no reason for mark to ever listen to investors and scrap his passion projects in order to increase profitability. Sure he'll crank up the ads to keep them happy, but in the end he has unlimited money and can't be fired, and that's not changing even if meta literally loses money for the next decade. It seems that with the metaverse he's embraced that which is why he effectively told wall st. to fuck off on the earnings call last week.
Meta literally facilitated genocide in Myanmar as well as sex slavery by failing to properly screen ads and in some cases didn't even have anybody who could read the language they were in.
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.
Readit News
The article is right to point out that Meta has by far the largest and most sophisticated ad targeting and tracking system in the market. The problem is that even if you don't count Apple's ATT the window of places where they can use it is getting smaller: Facebook the app is a shell of its former self, WhatsApp is un-monetiseable despite a lot of attempts to get companies to pay directly to talk to other users, and new acquisitions are impossible in this post-Obama era. Instagram is growing, but mostly in countries with relarively low ad spending levels.
And there comes the difference between this drop and the one in 2018: ads work when people want to spend money on products. The pressures of inflation, rising cost of living, and devaluation of almost every currency to the USD is putting a block in the one reliable source of income for the company.
I would bet on Meta's stock price rising if the economic and social crisis in Europe magically improves tomorrow. Otherwise, it's a matter of believing in the Metaverse and hoping the Oculus Pro becomes successful enough to at least provide another large source of revenue for the company.
That's a good "30,000 foot view" summary of how consumer advertising businesses work.
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.
Why wouldn't I play Minetest, OpenTTD, or whatever other social videogame for which I can host a server myself?
I see little value in artificial scarcity coupled with complete surveillance, and awkward and expensive hardware requirements.
Would META spend $25 billion/year indefinitely without earning a profit? I don't know but other scenarios seem plausible too.
Or perhaps it's a huge selfish gamble thinking, let's get our product perfected before everyone realizes how big this is. This sounds like a small startup more worried about having their unknown product's secrets stolen rather than how to market it so enough know it exists.
The business angle also doesn't make sense to me. Maybe during severe lockdowns it might have had a chance, but now we should be betting on the tech and performance/price improving in service of games first and foremost.
I hope SteamVR wins, otherwise I don't care whether Apple or Meta's device wins. And where is MS in this, too late as usual?
That is, IMO, the key question behind this entire discussion. Zuck certainly thinks so. I'm sure a lot of people at Meta and outside think so as well. And their detractors obviously don't.
There isn't going to be any consensus on whether Meta is spending too much money or not because ultimately it is a referendum on the concept of VR/AR/Metaverse itself.
Is that an amount to create an initial iPhone? While it was awesome, if it stayed like that, it wouldn't change the industry. It would seem fair to add up all the R&D costs that went into getting iPhone to where it is today, which will be much higher.
Dtto Tesla. For Apollo, we know the total.
Huge citation needed. You can't just lie and will it to be true. :D
But I think that's the intent. Because when you lay out Meta's strategy so naked, like Marques did, then you realize that no one is going to buy into it. You need early adopters and those are the ones that are going to sniff out that you're actually building a dystopian privacy-invading Skinner Box platform controlled 100% by Meta and they will predictably eviscerate you.
Marques brings up the part of what Meta is focusing on now, which is creating replacements for everyday functions with a VR twist. He claims some of them are actually quite good. But I think this is the way Google approached Google+. People don't want something good-as or marginally better. What Meta needs is a killer app. Something that can only be done in the Metaverse and is so compelling that people are willing to give Meta full control over their life and spend the money on the hardware. That's a tall order.
I'm less optimistic on the VR takeover, but I can imagine a future where VR headsets would be preferable to using laptops for daily use, and the same thing applies there.
The biggest problem I have doing zoom calls with family is an unstable internet connection at their end and I don't think the metaverse is going to be able to solve that. And besides, I'm certainly not going to pay 500$ for a headset just for Awesome VR calls, if i can just use a phone call.
The biggest potential is being able to work remotely. Just imagine all the remote work Metaverse could make possible. And 500$ headset might just be in the budget for a midsized company looking to expand it's workforce.
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.).
They've actually already cultivated these affluent users almost by accident (they aren't interested in gaming, but they are interested in fitness). But these users tend to be older even if they are richer...it isn't a demographic that Facebook was going for.
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 of great work more than great work. The result was a lot of config changes making noise in metrics that could be read positively, without implementing the state of the art systems that took a year before you could write a fancy success workplace post about it. That would risk poor performance reviews and the shuffling of reasources away from your team as a result.
And now, it's becoming apparent that the very very smart people started leaving after the stock dropped and the replacements are both more expensive and less able to get used to Facebook's infra. The result on the ground looks like a very serious engineering death spiral that management has not signaled they understand or have a grip on.
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.
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.
Meta has recently switched to a performance review cycle of 1 year (from 6 months). It sounds like one of the reasons this was done was to help make such work more possible.
However it is an optimistic sign in that leadership must get that part of the problem (long term vision is penalized) and is taking steps to address it. Maybe I judged them too harshly above; I don't know what I would do in their position to turn the ship around.
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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"?
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.
It's pretty wild what an alternate reality Facebook creates when you don't use it but others do.
> 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 mention that you notice the ads for geeky t-shirts and cross body bags (what are those?), but what about the recommended content? Do Stories and Reels not get in your way? Don't you miss content from school pagse, kids clubs, activities, and team pages because the algorithm decides that it would rather show you yet-another-meme-post?
I'm glad that Facebook seems to work for you. But it really sucks for those of us who don't agree with Facebook's business practices, because you contribute to a network effect that actively excludes non-users. I don't like Facebook's dark patterns, their advertising, or their "recommended" posts. So I choose not to use it. It's absolute bollocks that I can't easily look at community event pages as a non-user, and it only makes me happier that I've opted out of such a toxic, exclusive community.
The same distributions of haves and have-nots exist on any platform. Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/everything else are composed of an ever changing and uncountable number of communities, a few of which are bound to be good because of the continuous efforts of their members, and everything else is varying degrees of toxicity, narcissism, hatred, and every other negative trait you can think of.
If someone stereotypes you as a "toxic racist Karen" because you mainly use Facebook, it seems to follow the same reasoning behind why you might perceive Reddit as "horribly toxic and depressing." You get out of X what you put in.
Despite its flaws FB has done a good job of layering useful products on top of the social network despite the original purpose of Facebook seemingly losing popularity. In my circles, the typical news feed and posting updates part of Facebook is pretty much dead, and I never use those features personally anymore. BUT Marketplace, Messenger, and niche groups are all very valuable. It's changed from 'something cool' to a utility.
Also, given these DAUs are measured in billions and there are users all over the globe, chances are usage in different parts of the world and for different ages and demographics looks incredibly different.
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.
I'm using it pretty frequently, often daily. It may not be the place where everyone is posting their frequent updates, but I still have hundreds of acquaintances who post periodic updates (or read mine), a few circles who use FB events to manage announcements/invites, and FB serves as well as it ever has as a Rolodex.
I get that people get cranky about their feeds and/or concern about psychological or social effects of social media, but FB isn't at all unique here. Any social media you aren't the customer of is going to make its money either directing/selling your attention (which means messing with the feed) or data about your attention, and so naturally most do and there's not really an alternative, there's just a perception of what's fashionable among a given circle.
Beyond that, I think it's pretty well documented (and also stands to reason) that the growth is mostly in communities with previously low penetration. If all of your family has reduced facebook usage over the last few years, that means you are in a community with previously high penetration. Of course you won't be able to anecdotally observe growth.
Maybe it is users that are forced to use it to check some restaurants or likes Facebook page? And even then be annoyed about the popups...
But as the article points out.. maybe none of this matters. Advertising spend is still going up, the recession may or may not be turning a corner, and there's enough cash buffer to walk things back and refocus on Meta's core advertising business and products that support that.
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.
I'm going to need a definition for "metaverse" here because that doesn't sound like what I would imagine. You have listed a social media site and some video games. Both social media and video games have been with us for a long time, and if Facebook had just said "we want to work on social media and video games" then nobody would bat an eye.
Of course, that's not what they said. They now call the company "Meta" and toss the "metaverse" label around. This implies that they at least view it as something different in some substantive way.
I guess, either way, it's a failure. If it's just a trick to seem innovative by slapping a new label on old things, then that's a failure, because people now seem to expect them to do something more. If they view it as something novel that's going to "eat the world," that's also a failure (at least so far), since it clearly hasn't.
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.
How are those "metaverse"?
What is the Minecraft/Roblox economy as opposed to the rest of the economy? Like .05%? Growth given the lack of actual capabilities is likely flatline.
Metaverse was obviously a BS pivot. Question is what Zuckerberg is covering up before they pivot back.
It's about being the first one to reach mass market, and holding onto that position as long as possible.
I believe people want Meta to fail because the spent the better part of last 5 years completely eviscerating their reputation and goodwill. While Facebook, at its prepandemic peak was hemorrhaging young users and becoming known as the platform for misinformation and arguments due to the chase for engagements at all costs, Zuckerberg was bust cosplaying as presidential candidate. People want Facebook to fail and I think that's a consequence of how terrible their reputation has become.
That being said, I want Meta's involvement in a "metaverse" to fail too, because I can't imagine living in a world where Zuck sinks his dark pattern and advertising fangs into an even more immersive version of today's manipulative social media. They've done enough damage as is.
But, yeah, he's too desperate to be/have the next great (hardware) platform. He wants the "metaverse" to be what Apple and Google have with their hardware and app stores. There's no way he walks it back.
No, people want Meta/Facebook to fail because frankly, they are evil.
- Instagram is toxic to young girls: https://childmind.org/blog/instagram-is-harmful-to-teenage-s...
- Misinformation: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=facebook+misinformation
- How many people died because of Covid conspiracy theories they read on Facebook?
A healthy cashflow is obviously vital for any big corporation, but tech is not about cashflow, it is mainly about innovation.
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.
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.
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.