Conventional wisdom last week: Facebook is a world-spanning monopoly that spreads disinformation, hurts our children, and is answerable to no one but the messianic Mark Zuckerberg. The only answer is for the government to break it up.
Conventional wisdom as of 4 pm yesterday: Facebook is hemorrhaging its most lucrative users, Apple has destroyed its ad business, and its VR business will continue to lose huge amounts of money for at least a decade. It's all but dead.
Things sure do change fast in the metaverse! Sometimes all it takes is one earnings call.
I don't necessarily believe either of those things (the truth is a mix of both, really) but Facebook's value has always been in its user base. If no one else was on it, no one would want to use it. And I've been around long enough to know that the potential for newer, better platform to steal away all its users has always been there. Not easy to achieve, but something that will probably happen eventually under the right conditions. Maybe Facebook will be smart and be able to gobble up and incorporate the newcomers before they get displaced, but I've always found it crazy how big and valuable Facebook is considering much of that could evaporate faster than most people think.
I have heard they've mined enough data from users to keep them wealthy for a long time, and that's certainly a possibility. But if their user base cratered, I'd have to think it would really cripple them.
(None of these thoughts have anything to do with whether FB is evil, which, yeah, it pretty much is.)
Breaks my heart, I tell ya.
I feel nothing for FB or Zuckerberg. Both suck.
I haven’t used FB for years. No loss here.
My wish is that Proud Virginia Bois Zuckerberg & Snowden finish out their days immiserated on the streets of Moscow & vomiting into each other's mouths for sustenance.
You know, I went and read three or four news articles about this earnings report and none of them reported loss of users per se. Mainly they pointed to changes in Apple's privacy settings.
There is a network that everyone is already on. It is called the Internet. You can talk to people, and exchange messages on it.
What I think will ultimately eat up Facebook is topic-based social media. One does not have to defend one's identity all the time on topic-based social media. There is also family-group social media, which is sort of what FB is becoming, but that's only a low portion of the traffic.
* topic-based social media* ?
Woo hoo, the rebirth of usenet! comp.lang.java.gui and suchlike!
It's a noble dream, but I get the feeling that more people like the current setup (where you can wave your virtue signaling flag in any conversation whatsoever, whether on FB or Twitter or, heck, in blog comments) than want a rigidly structured system whereby they'll be shut down as soon as they try to derail any conversation by bringing irrelevant side issues.
The urge to convert is one of the more primal human urges, and you're proposing that it will be easy to shut it down? hah!
You know, Reddit is chugging along being quite successful. Musicians are tending to use TikTok to have musical conversations.
The big plus of these things is that one can have a fragmentary identity, and this often takes much less effort and no constant engagement.
Constantly defending one's political identity can be exhilarating but it can also be exhausting. People burn out and drop out of the conversation all the time.
There's a lot of turnover in social media. I haven't heard anything from MySpace lately. Facebook could keep going for decades, or it could wither and die just as fast as MySpace did.
Tom won.
Cashed our for 600 million from NewsCorp in 2006, & living his best life out of the limelight ever since.
If Facebook folded tomorrow, I don't expect Zuckerberg would be left poverty stricken either.
If true it couldn't happen to a shittier outfit.
Both those things can be true.
Apple destroyed its ad business?
I never thought I’d write this, but god bless Apple!
Someone turn off the caviar fountain!
Bbbut it is Big Tech! It can’t ever be affected by anything other than government-directed intervention…
When the Facebook Borg puts an ad on my stream, I report it as either sexually objectionable or a scam. After a bit the Borg notices and the ads disappear for a while.
Nobody uses Facebook anymore because there are too many people on it.
Basically what happened was that Facebook stopped growing. Their user base shrank by an infinitesimal fraction, i.e., it's basically holding steady.
And the number it's holding steady at is around 2 billion. That's more than a quarter of all human beings on earth.
In other words: Facebook has won. It has gotten as big as it's possible to get.