Don’t you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone.
Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs.
Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly any original videos show up there.
As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is going to feel the pinch.
Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators starting “clip” channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts and reposts to TikTok?
Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if it will accelerate or just be a slow death?
And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it.
Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of history… or if you will, psychohistory.
> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse
Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement the social network graph and keep it going longer than it otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.
The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous. Facebook is flailing.
I joined FB in 2004 as a stanford student. I used it religiously in college because it was the cool new thing at the time, but after that I mostly didn't see the appeal. I really never gave a shit what some guy from high school who I haven't spoken to in 10+ years is posting about. When there is so much more interesting content to consume in the world, why would I bother with the crap someone is posting just because we happened to touch paths at some point in the past? I care about good content, not content just because it comes from someone I know. If it's coming from a close friend, like news about a new job or a baby, I'll find out about it anyway when I see them. So for the last decade or so I sign into Facebook on avg once / month for maybe a minute at a time (only when someone tells me I need to check something), and it always perplexed me how people could spend so much time there. If everyone used Facebook like I did, it probably would have folded long ago. So I am either just a hermit or ahead of the curve, I guess time will tell.
Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care about content anymore, it's really just mind numbing drudgery. There's a reason there's a meme about getting addicted to HN and doing "deep work" with "digital minimalism".
In recent times I've cared more and more about what my friends and family are doing, because those are the people I'm connected with in actuality, in real life.
I agree with your position - but I don't think it necessarily means you disagree with the other post.
I've completely stopped using FB because I want to connect with my friends and family. After using the product for many years I realized that idly surfing past pictures of children, weddings, BBQs, etc, that despite FB's loud insistence, that's not connection. Even commenting on friends' posts isn't... really connection?
It was idle voyeurism, or drive-by socialization.
Now I make an active attempt to keep in touch with people by, well, directly talking to them. This isn't some brilliant insight on my part - let's be honest, online socialization has been moving towards this for some time. The group chats I'm a part of, and the virtual/IRL meetings are far more fulfilling to me than any amount of FB feed surfing.
That's true, I have group chats in in as well, but FB and IG serve somewhat of a different purpose for me. See my other comment:
>I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
>It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
>You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
I prefer direct communication even though the surrounding culture seems to be less comfortable with that these days. While I will still post an update
on FB every few months, I got annoyed with how the algorithm made the feed harder to follow so many years ago. In the early days I was a big proponent of blasting out a post to whoever might see it, but I have too many “friends” and even if I curated that list I’d still miss so much amidst the clutter because the algorithm made it so some important-to-me stuff will never appear in my feed. And so often the people I want to see something don’t see my posts. Hence directly texting and emailing them photos! If there were a social media tool that had my best interests in mind, perhaps I could trust it to show my people the content I want to share. Maybe I’m old school since I appreciate getting email and snail mail letters from people, but now if I want to tell people something I send it to them directly. If there are too many people to email/text/call, maybe I should rethink what I’m doing and why. Some people respond positively to that and I’m guessing others find it too forward, but I don’t feel bad about being too forward. Decades ago we used to knock on front doors without telling them in advance that we were dropping by, so I don’t feel an unsolicited texted photo of my baby is so uncomfortably forward compared to that. :)
I don’t understand why you need Facebook or TikTok or Instagram to stay connected with friends and family. What even is “being connected”? I think people hold on to friends they meet too hard. People come and go. If you don’t maintain a friendship outside of social media then that’s ok. Let them go. Move on.
We run a family Slack group. All the functionality of being connected, none of the bullshit.
I can follow all my friends and family on Instagram and see what they're doing. I don't necessarily need all my friends and family to talk to each other like in a big group chat. It's a one to many relationship (me to them) versus many to many (everyone to everyone else).
I mean content as in what reddit or HN has, articles, posts, videos about a topic etc. Of course on Instagram people need to post stuff, photos and videos, but I don't think that when people say content they mean interpersonal photos and videos.
I see. I definitely think it is content (I wouldn’t draw a distinction between origin), but I can see how you have a different interpretation.
When you use Instagram do you see ads or posts from people who aren’t your friends or family members? I’ve never used it so I’m not sure how the algorithms work.
Personally if someone is my friend and has something worth sharing they’ll tell me about it directly or send me a picture. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I’ve had people I was friends with move and we’ve lost touch and so forth. I don’t see a reason to struggle to try and stop that myself. Been pretty happy this way but that is what works for me.
Ads yes, usually from random B2C companies, but I adblock so I don't see any. People who aren't your friends, no, you only see those who you follow.
I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
> It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something.
Again just my perspective but I don’t see value in broadcasting experience to a wide audience. I would view that as “content”. I don’t think it has any positive qualities. The RSS feed is a good way of thinking about it, but I say just don’t post and who cares about your trip ya know? If you don’t care to tell someone in person or over a phone call or some other directed means I think you don’t need to share anything. Again just my perspective on that. Which is why I’ve really only ever used Twitter to complain into the void from time to time.
Again, it's too many people to tell individually, it's easier for me to broadcast it and those who are interested will automatically reach out to me. There's no need on my end to do additional work so to speak, ie I don't have to message every party in the hopes that they might be interested, that's why I liken it to something like a broadcast.
There's an element of having shot themselves in the foot. FB moviled from content driven purely by your friends and what they post to content that FB have decided to feed you.
That worked great in a lot of senses. You never run out of content. FB have a lot more options for their optimisation efforts. It also made them more of a general media company.
But... it also devalued the social network/friends aspect. Now it's just about content and holding user attention. Well... that means competition is everything again. Anyone can post anywhere, or consume content anywhere.
Yeah, whenever I see others scrolling through content at Facebook, I can't help but wonder who would voluntarily subject themselves to so much garbage information. It is similar with Twitter, which I use for "science communication". But the amount of miscellaneous memes and low quality click bait ads that one has to endure is almost physically painful.
Pretty sure some people’s brains are just stuck in an infinite dopamine kick loop. I consider it similar to the opioid epidemic, where people’s brains have been re-wired to compulsively do things they might not want to do. Next time try asking someone you see scrolling Facebook if they’re actually enjoying themselves and I guarantee they will express some form of regret (but then will continue doing it).
Isn't the short answer to "why are people subjecting themselves to this" just dark patterns?
I know it sounds overly reductionist or boogeyman-esque, but they captured a market and refuse to let go, doing every single thing they can to keep and monetize human attention.
> The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt
Exactly. It's a bet-the-farm move from a company that has a track record of, best I can tell, a big fat zero in terms of in-house innovation. This is like Google deciding to shift the entire company to Google+, except Google+ was just a clone of an existing thing that actually worked. Meta has no precursor. It's an entirely new thing that Facebook is trying to will into existence without even so much as testing the waters first.
I have a feeling Zuckerberg is going to enrage investors enough that he has to flee Facebook in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness with the help of a few loyal toadies providing safe passage, or he's going to start building his Führerbunker and be the last man standing while Facebook turns to rubble. I'm slightly joking, but also... Zuck has to be in the running for the worse tech CEO ever. They paid $16 billion for WhatsApp and then started promoting their own Facebook Messenger which no one used. I feel like their intent was to kill WhatsApp in the crib. But the "crib" turned out to be the entire global population and was, in fact, too big for them to kill and get people to switch to their own garbage chat app.
I concur. At some point I started looking for the best contest over caring about yahoo classmates engaging in political wars. It’s entertainment for them but not for me.
I couldn't agree with you more here. To me, it's a clear sign that he "wears no clothes". The Metaverse presentation was the most idiotic presentation I've ever seen. He must be completely surrounded himself by people that just agree with him.
I wouldn't describe the presentation as idiotic but it was hard to take seriously. The dream of immersive VR experiences showcased in Snow Crash and Ready Player One will be realized.
But it won't be soon, and the ideas shown in the video--like the surfing game--were the kind of ideas that litter the floor of the App Store.
Compelling product experiences, especially on new platforms, are extremely difficult to craft.
The taste of the creators must be exceptionally good and in this case the hardware quality and onboarding experience must bowl over anyone who touches it.
The Facebook video for Meta looked very speculative. I suspect Meta was planned for 2023 or 2024, but was rushed out the door because the brand was getting pummeled.
In that way, changing to Meta was very effective at derailing the negative attention. But not actually having a there, there is a problem when the chicken comes home to roost.
It's realized right now -- as a heavy sweaty low res tech demo not many people would want to for long. I don't doubt something like that will eventually be possible as promised. However, the tech is so far from being there, I don't think it'll happen in our lifetime.
Zuck may had well renamed his company "Flying cars".
Even in my older demographic (i.e. those of us who got in when you still needed edu addresses or shortly thereafter) which is supposedly more the core audience for Facebook this days, I don't see people "rage quitting." But I do see essentially everyone in my circles (including myself) having dialed down usage a lot.
Mid 30's here and I joined right after the .edu requirement was dropped. Everyone in my age group is on Facebook but they rarely post anymore because they are busy! They all have kids and jobs and house projects they are working on and the novelty of updating about everything has worn off so they post very infrequently. When Gen-Zers make jokes about Facebook being for old people, that's us!
The algorithmic feed can't handle the "lack" of new posts though so it keeps inserting lots of ads, videos, and whatever that I don't actually care about. I really like Facebook when it is about interacting with my friends but everything else is a distraction. The level of distraction in Facebook is just too high. It's okay if nothing is going on!
Mid 40's here. I have a single friend that still posts frequently. Everyone else has either dropped off entirely or rarely posts. My wife is on facebook all the time, but it's for her social groups, like Mom, teacher groups.
At least for me, the overheated political posts became a huge turn off. I think many people left after the election.
I agree he’s been a good steward of the graph — even people who hate Facebook and don’t use Facebook are actually using Facebook! — but I suspect he needed Sandberg to turn it into the big money.
It's very unclear to me why Second Life v2 would be of interest to more than a tiny sliver of the population. The last thing I'd want from Facebook is to turn into a more immersive experience.
>Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
How? A fair number of people prefer to shut off their video on calls. And my observation is that coming out of COVID people want more in-person interactions, not less.
Zuck moved first in “metaverse” with Oculus 7 years ago and what does he have to show for it?
Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your Facebook account.
If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Probably true but no one else would probably have made it work either.
VR tech isn't really there today but even if it were better, it's still more of a niche use case than its fans would have it be. (Certain types of gaming, maybe virtual tourism...) People don't want things to be immersive most of the time. Ask me to wear a VR headset for a routine work meeting? That will be a big "nope" from me.
>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best selling VR headset by far.
In my account they definitely failed.
As you say, they did a great job with the hardware but the only real software they are even advertising for it is a worse version of vrchat that they took way too long to clone.
I don’t know how to chock it up other than as a failure, they acquired instagram only 2 years earlier. Instagram is now a Snapchat tiktok and a little YouTube wrapped into one.
If this isn't a lie and Apple flipping that switch cost Facebook $10bn, then that tells me my personal information is worth a lot. What I was getting from Facebook in exchange for my data was too little. I use Google a lot more than Facebook and frankly what I get from them in exchange for my data is probably also way too little.
I wish there was some type of consumer union where we could negotiate with these companies as a block.
It's not perfect but you can look at average revenue per user on Facebook. There are huge differences based on the country (note this is quarterly):
Q4 '20
Worldwide: 10.14
US: 53.56
Europe: 16.87
Asia Pacific: 4.05
Rest of world: 2.77
So you're worth just over $200 a year. This has gone up a lot over time and is considerably higher than other social networks. Just a year ago, it was 41.41 (23% less) and a year before that is was 34.86 (15% less).
It's harder to do a comparison to google, but I'm sure you're very valuable to them as well, increasingly so.
Maybe, but I'm not sure a working professional adult is an ad-clicker, and I'm not sure that the ads they click on can con them into doing something they wouldn't normally do very often.
> Maybe, but I'm not sure a working professional adult is an ad-clicker, and I'm not sure that the ads they click on can con them into doing something they wouldn't normally do very often.
As a working professional adult, who has access to many others working professional adults, I assure you, ads work.
You’re simplifying ads to a barebones click to rate exchange. Ads are way more subtle than that.
I don't doubt they work. I doubt the margin of work done by facebook ads on working professional adults over the work of ads that they are exposed to through other means and by word of mouth. And not that that margin doesn't exist and not that it's not worthwhile to advertise on facebook, but the doubt is that as compared to any other demographic being advertised to that it's worth so much more.
Advertising to impulsive spenders is worth more than advertising to less impulsive spenders. Less impulsive spenders are informed by ads, more impulsive spenders are convinced by ads.
Ads are extremely successful for high-ticket offers. If you'll selling a multi-thousand dollar product or service, you can afford a lot of impressions to get just the few clicks that convert for you.
Except the government is a monopoly with its own agenda. In addition it already kind of owns us (well a large percentage), what would it gain if it negotiated this deal for us? I would argue it can gain more power by making a deal with facebook.
So let’s say I’m in CA voting for my two Senators. How much does my vote actually count when 10 other states combined have the same population but 20 Senators?
How much does my vote count even for representatives if I’m in a state that’s heavily gerrymandered?
How do you propose the mayor legislate BigTech? Even on the state level, gerrymandering effects representation. Most of the population in GA (where I live), Florida, and Texas don’t support the state laws. Those three states are passing all kinds of laws to make it harder for people to vote. Especially after the “stolen election” that saw GA turn blue.
And before the whataboutism replies start, I’m sure the same happens on the other side. I just know more about my own state.
Just because it was done by design doesn't mean it's a non-issue. The Senate is an extremely undemocratic organization. The population discrepancy between States is much higher now than when the country was founded.
Nor do the reasons the founders did it this way exist anymore.
People confuse the arguments made out of political expediency for political gospel.
Even though many points made about the constitution were rooted in political theory, and make good sense even today, that doesn’t change the fact that the people involved were politicians who were looking to make the best deal possible within the context of a rapidly failing state under the articles of confederation.
The irony is that always gets brought up as though it was actually meant to represent the value of the slave’s humanity.
The large slaveholding states actually wanted 5/5ths whereas states will small slave populations wanted 0/5ths. Slaves couldn’t vote, their interests were ancillary to the whole discussion. The compromise was about pure political power for those that dominated them.
The repeal of the 3/5ths clause along with the subsequent legal restrictions and terrorism against the black population of the south that followed, gave the south more power, and subsequently made it harder to dislodge Jim Crow.
But your point is still very valid. Somehow people are comfortable compartmentalizing the notion that the constitution is/was perfect, except for that one part that somehow doesn’t count and was “inevitably doomed” anyways.
Simply because something was designed a certain way 250 years ago, doesn’t mean it’s a non issue.
The political problem they were trying to solve at the time (balancing the interests of independent sovereign political entities with respect to land claims and future political power) doesn’t necessarily map onto the problems we have today.
If we assume that Switzerland is probably closest to the ideal of a direct democracy please take note that voters can not directly vote for the executive government (The Bundesrat, or federal council).
They elect members of the two houses, which in turn elects the 7 executives. Usually this is based on the recommendation by the parties and with a specific formula considering party, language and area of the country.
We also can't fire government members this afternoon. It's just like everywhere else. We can just not re-elect them.
You appear to make up your own extreme definition of what the words "direct democracy" should be and what they should mean. But it's not like that. There are ways words and condepts are commonly used. [1]
Looks like I need a new word to describe a system where everyone rules, rather than certain people or organization, since both democracy and direct democracy are apparently taken to describe systems where all people don’t actually rule. Maybe “actual true direct pure democracy” should do.
So many towns where I live put issues on the agenda for town meetings. How this works in practice is that, if there's some issue that someone (like a developer) feels strongly about, they pack the town meeting with allies and push it through because most people probably don't care much and don't even attend the meeting.
You can't have a democracy with 100 IQ idiot majority, because their decisions are governed by whatever gets poured into their poorly working brains that week, so you end up with corporatocracy or fascism, pretending to be a democracy.
I know this isn't the point, but you do realize that the IQ is rearranged to fit a bell curve with 100 being the exact middle average, right? By literally the definition of IQ, 100 IQ is not "an idiot".
Then we need to fix the apparent problem of idiot majority. If you say most people are stupid why would you want them to vote every 4 years. Can you trust their vote? Do you still advocate for the current form of “democracy”? Maybe we should go back to monarchy and have only one glorious ruler rather than one glorious government.
You can fix most people, or you can just abandon one idea because it's incompatible with how most people are.
Tough choice, but I think I'll opt in for the latter.
Uh! Oh! But if not democracy, then what? Then fascism and corporatocracy - what we have had for as long as you've been alive. You just don't know it :)
Your reply is confusing. So you maintain that most people are stupid, and still want to give them voting rights. What is the logic behind that? To clarify, I don’t think most people are stupid, and I advocate for direct democracy.
“ In short, if you're excited about iOS 14, you are more likely to be poor than not”
Why are supposing that all rich people made their money through online advertising? It’s clearly untrue and certainly not a robust enough a conclusion to feel bad about your relative success.
> Why are supposing that all rich people made their money through online advertising
If you replace "all" with "most," which is how I phrased it, then your sentence sounds like this:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money through online advertising
Ok now we're onto something interesting, but I can see how you might be still struggling with the phrasing. May I suggest to reformulate as follows:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money by selling something for more than they paid for it?
Perfect! So we just have to answer if in the context of most people who became rich, "online advertising" = "selling something for more than they paid for it." I would argue that you can sell things without advertising them, but you certainly have to make people aware that you're selling those things one way or another (and mind you, in the context of rich people, you have to do that at a very large scale). So when answering how MOST rich people attracted attention in 2021, and that AT SCALE, I think the above is not so untrue (you will certainly find many who ALSO used TV and other channels, but very few people with a TV budget had a $0 paid social budget).
How do you know what you are getting from them is too little until the service itself is gone? I suppose you can estimate but I feel like without targeted advertising the web would be a dark place. Personally I don’t pay for much (prime, Netflix, NY Times) and expect a lot. The people I know are the same
This comes up again and again. People will continue creating and posting even without ad money. They will post for art, for study, hobbies, social issues or just to organize events. There are also those who publish free content and make a profit on something related. That's how the good old internet was working back in the day.
The problem with current internet is that everyone is trying to get the ad money so they don't really align their interests with us who want quality content.
The problem is the freeloaders of the internet far outweigh the people that want to pay for services. Until that changes, we will continue to see the internet dominated by targeted advertising. Honestly, it will be interesting to see what happens to services like DDG. I think it will be a true test of what the world wants, an extremely well funded machine like Google or a more lean privacy centric tool. Capitalism is an interesting thing though. Targeted advertising naturally brings in more money (back to the freeloaders point)
Your data are only as valuable to Facebook as your buying power. Obviously that's not the same across all people, and while the average revenue per US user might be in the teens per month, many US consumer are in the single digits. So presumably a consumer union might get you a fraction of that value back - a few bucks per month. Why not - who wouldn't want a free monthly cup of coffee? I suppose the only catch here is the more excited you get about this concept, the less money your union could negotiate on your behalf.
It's more about my privacy being worth a lot more than what Google is willing to pay in the form of services. As an individual, the only thing I can do is stop using Google and Google wouldn't miss me.
Apple is a cartel and Google pays the protection money that Facebook failed to. If Apple really cared about privacy and not money, they'd block Google from the platform too.
A single policy changed wiped 25% of a trillion dollar company's market cap. That's a gravitational wave that shows what kind of overwhelming monopoly power Apple wields.
To be clear, I hate Facebook and ads, but Apple is an incredibly dirty business and is doing massive amounts of harm to startups and our industry as a whole.
Apple owns "America's computer" (50+% of average American's internet usage), and they control it like a dictatorship. High taxes, close inspection of every deploy, arbitrary rulings, forced use of Apple platform pieces, no possible business relationships with your customers.
The DOJ needs to step in and remove the App Store monopoly, its tax, and its arbitrary rules. When you run a device this pervasive and entrenched, it's no longer a platform. It's a common carrier. App installs need to happen over web, where they'd still be just as safely sandboxed, monitored, and remote killswitchable.
To be fair, they didn't block Facebook from their platform. Users now just need to agree that they want to be tracked (spoiler: practically no one wants to be tracked).
I don't disagree with your general take and save for an iPod classic I don't own any Apple gear. But in my book that was one of the better moves that Apple ever pulled.
Yeah. More privacy by getting rid of third-party cookies and having the prompt for apps is a great thing. That it also reduces the revenue of the two monopolists who didn’t even bother to differentiate that revenue (Facebook is 98% ads, Google is at something like 81%) is the cherry on top.
> It would be fair business if the DOJ removed the app store, but Apple removed APIs that allow tracking.
Why is that more fair? I bought an iPhone a month ago (my first) in part because I want their version of the App Store and I want more privacy controls. I actually like that Apple's requirements push developers to make a native app rather than a web app (for example).
I'm certainly sympathetic to the argument that 30% is too large of a cut and it's well past time for payment reform. However, I think consumers would be worse off losing Apple's more tightly controlled app store implementation. If you want more options, go Android. That's what I did for more than a decade.
Because this article is not about developers having to pay 30%
Your problems outside of the 30% (which is valid) is that you want to be able to ship crappy cross platform web apps and know more about your users (which I don’t want).
While I agree with you that Facebook (the app) is in decline and Facebook/Meta are rushing to diversify as the market changes, the premise of the article that Apples change has significantly effected Facebooks revenues is not a lie.
Apples change has fundamentally damaged ad conversion attribution from the Facebook/Instagram apps on iOS, we have seen it it ourselves.
It may be that the exact figure of $10B is inflated, it could even be an underestimate. Meta may have an agenda in how they are spinning it, almost certainly do in fact. However I can assure you that the fundaments of the article and what they are saying is true.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. This privacy change only affects apps on iOS?
I only use the facebook.com website. Ad tracking in that context hasn't changed?
Among my peers where I've observed how they use FB, I think it's an even split. For me, if there's a web site, I skip installing the app. And of course a majority of news and social and commerce web sites now prompt you to install the app.
Personally when I occasionally use Facebook its via the app so that I am not logged in in by browser. Don't want them spying on everything I do online.
Twitter on the other hand I use in the browser as I like to be able to open threads in tabs to come back to.
This seems like post-hoc confirmation of "I knew it! I told you guys so!" like
people who claim a catastrophic recession is around the corner, quarter after next. If you have some special insight that the wider market doesn't and hasn't price in, then the odds and prices are asymmetrically tipped in your favor.
As an example, I spent $13,580 shorting Facebook on Wednesday, which I haven't sold but will probably later today. Yesterday, those short contracts were worth north of $200k. I did it within a Roth IRA, too, which makes it even higher conviction.
Truth is, it was a gamble. No one really knows. If you can truly predict where Facebook will be in 5 years, 2 years, even next quarter, you can be really rich.
Incredibly good bet!!!
Congrats all around.
I made the opposite bet (whoops!) but on a much smaller scale. A tiny 300-270 put spread that lasted 2 days. Then, right before the earning, exactly 7 minutes before 4pm, I kid you not, I had a premonition. Something in my head said "Get out get out get out". So I closed out my spread, pocketed my measly gain of $775 and walked out the door to pick up my kid from school. So I'm back home at 4:30pm, I just login to ib for curiosity sake, just to see what would have happened if I had stuck to my guns. Jesus Mary & Joseph I was so shell shocked...would have lost well over 50K if I hadn't pulled the trigger !!! I was so glad I danced a jig & took my kid out for icecream. He wanted to know why, but explaining all this shit...$775 profit over 2 days for pushing a couple of buy & sell buttons & narrowly avoiding a major, major $50,000 loss. Definite icecream day. I just said Daddy is happy lets buy icecream.
That seems a pretty smart short (in retrospect). I guess you were banking on them releasing concrete numbers on the iOS changes and people panicking from it? Seems really obvious in retrospect and relies on pretty common knowledge so I'm surprised that worked so straightforward. Good job.
I've noticed they stopped showing ads from actual businesses. Instead, it was sponsored posts from individuals self-promoting for purely vain reasons as opposed to some commercial reason.
So you can sell covered puts / calls, or buy puts /calls. Those do not require margin. You cannot sell uncovered calls / puts, which would require margin.
Part of my position was buying $280 weekly puts which were $1.39 each, now $49.5 each ( still haven't sold lol).
On a more general note, anyone know of any good guides/articles describing these sorts of bets? I often have a sense of where a stock price will go but have no idea how to take advantage.
Just note, the poster most probably did not actually 'short' facebook, the poster used options to do this. Its pretty simple for the buy case.
Options have a strike price and an expiration date. You buy a CALL option, with a strike price, that gives you an option to buy that stock for that price. Or you can buy a PUT option, that gives you the option to sell at that strike price.
Example using made up numbers. FB is $240. You look on the options tab and you can see various expiration dates. Lets pick 3 months out. You may see a Call option for a strike of $250 for $20. That means that you have until 3/4/2022 to exercise that option, if FB is trading for > $260, you will make a profit. ($240 + $20). If FB doesn't trade you make nothing.
Puts work similarly. The strike would just be $230. Note, you don't have to exercise, if next week FB goes to $300, your call's value will skyrocket to ~$60-70. You can sell the option any time, you don't have to wait.
You may have noticed the cost of the option is greater than the delta between the exercise price and the value of the share. In my example this is roughly due to the time between now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks, this is called beta-decay.
> Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
I don't think HN reader's friends are Facebooks growth market. You might be looking at a biased sample. This is their growth levels of the last 3 years.
Looking at something from 2 years ago in social media isn't really relevant, trends change FAST. This TikTok trend has taken over the world quite a bit over the last few months.
Also, annual growth worldwide tends to hide one key things. It might mean Facebook is arriving in markets where internet penetration was poor (poor/slow data, etc..), however you have to look at their core market where advertisers spend money. In those markets, have they been gaining users? It's been said that they were losing eyeballs in core markets while expanding in markets that didn't bring much money.
If they lose customers in their core market, that means the service has been going down from their saturation point instead of stabilizing. And a worldwide growth would hide this data.
Honestly it's a really poor experience compared to TikTok - ignoring the whole Chinese State controlled thing - the algorithm on YT just doesn't match TT's ability for content discovery.
I haven't installed the app either but on the odd occasion will doomscroll in a private browser session.
Yeah I guess the only one I can think of is the vscode channel that does some of those ... they're actually kinda 50/50 annoying / helpful. It's a weird thing to do a short on.
The YouTube recommendation algorithm prefers longer videos than that. It is specifically trained to optimize for “watch minutes,” and longer videos seem more effective than extremely short ones.
Youtube has recently started recommending short videos too, varying from 10 sec to 1 min, but that depends on your viewing habits. They even have a "#shorts" feature to compete with TikTok.
> I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago
The only way the Metaverse would be a viable replacement for Facebook would be if Occulus (or similar VR headset) adoption was to rise to the level of iPhone adoption, and subsequent integration into nearly every aspect of daily life. This seems to be incredibly unlikely to me.
I have an Occulus quest. The first week I had it I thought it was the most amazing device I ever owned. A month later I used it less, and now, a few years later, it's gathering dust on a shelf. VR is great, but it takes a fair amount of energy, space and time to use. Even from solely the perspective of gaming, the low-power, light weight Switch has had a much bigger impact on my life than the Quest. I can play BotW for 4 hours without fatigue if I have time, with VR more than an hour and I start to feel very tired of the experience.
Now compare the Quest with the iphone, I'm looking at my iphone as I type this on my laptop. I use my iphone to order food, find directions around town, communicate with my family, check up on work. 8 or so years back I tried going back to a "dumb" phone and ultimately went back. I switched to android for a few years and still went back to the iphone since it has so many services nicely integrated.
I simply can't imagine any world where the "metaverse" comes anywhere near the adoption of facebook, even if Meta mailed an occulus to everyone on the planet for free.
> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it.
Facebook videos are super annoying. Simple bait stretched out just long enough to get ads in the middle. Even if a video looks interesting I have to first ask myself if it’s worth 2.5 minutes of fluff and a 10 second ad for only a few seconds of payoff. Facebook has incentivized this behavior to the point I now simply refuse to click on their videos.
It's the same thing the marvelverse is... a way of referring to all of facebook's products. They're just trying to generate some hype and make their products look more forward thinking.. even though they're exactly the same as always.
It's a concept originally popularized in Snowcrash, that Facebook is attempting to latch on to as a marketing campaign to make their products seem future looking, but in reality havent changed one bit. To further this marketing effort, they created a VR chat that is a trash product that no one will ever use.
I don't think it's a (complete) lie. In the short term I think it is very much the truth: 2021 once again saw record revenue for them [0] so, absent a specific threat like Apple, there is no reason to project a $10B loss over expected revenue gains during the short 1-year term at issue during the call.
On the other hand, Apple's actions are part of an overall trend that represents an existential threat, for the exact reasons you mention and others. The main issue is probably something like the innovators dilemma: they've become reactive, and slow in those reactions. Their largest successes in recent year haven't come from their own creations, but from acquisitions. NYT has a pretty good analysis of some of its systemic flaws [1]
YouTube already saw this with Vines, though. TikTok is just a thousand times better than Vine. But ultimately the access to long-form content is going to help YouTube more because of the inherent access to more advertising. From what I know, people on TikTok make almost nothing from view counts. YouTube going to shorts is going to start eating away at those creators.
TikTok users in the West skew young (ie poor) and it's all short form video, which fb calls out as harder to monetize, so I can't see how TikTok is a threat to soak up the ad spend. We'll see what happens when they try to pivot from growth to profit. For reference, with similar userbase, ig brings in 6x the ad revenue of TikTok.
The markets are unreasonably obsessed with growth imo.
"Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators@
NO! Because I don't care about stupid content creators.
Facebook was never really about content creators, youtube and tiktok are all about that. It's a different thing. Not that I am a Facebook fan either but yes eyeballs are going to youtube and tiktok and other content creators but it's a different business and that is why Facebook is stuck versus these.
Don’t you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone.
Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs.
Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly any original videos show up there.
As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is going to feel the pinch.
Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators starting “clip” channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts and reposts to TikTok?
Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if it will accelerate or just be a slow death?
And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it.
Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of history… or if you will, psychohistory.