Meta
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Consider this, and call me out if I'm wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB/YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and more reactionary content as it was the only way to optimize time on site. The only way FB could grow was by pushing content that got people riled up. Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that? I started using TikTok as a joke and it's by far my most use social app now, and none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps; and clearly they are growing fast. There was another way but the local-maxima prevented FB from seeing it and as a result they have lost major brand cachet.
I don't know what is different about TikTok but the way I see it is Meta's problem will be avoiding their user base dying off and the USG will likely prevent any future acquisitions. Their standalone apps (M, Rooms, Riff, Gaming, Dating, Collab) haven't been major successes (although given the size of Facebook some of these have 10s of millions of users); and I'm not confident a VR platform will have major penetration outside of "Ready Player One" fanboys.
That said, FB is a trillion dollar company and betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.
I don't think this is fully accurate. The big differentiator for Tik Tok's algorithmic feed from FB's or Youtube's (in my mind) is not its accuracy or lack of polarization, it's actually that it draws much firmer and harder to cross lines between the parts of its userbase with an (IMO intentionally) nerfed search capability, so it's very difficult to break out of the demographic/interest bubble it decides you are in for feed purposes. So you, personally, probably receive literally no polarizing, political, etc content that you aren't happy to see. But that doesn't mean it's not there!
Here's an example: a researcher set up a new account, interacted with transphobic content, and was very quickly (in a few hours of viewing) seeing far-right conspiracy theory, antisemitic, white supremacy (and so on) content, some of which was endorsing violence. https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1445888305997000705
One might wonder what other content is suppressed on the platform. [2]
[0] https://www.dailydot.com/irl/tiktok-fat-lgbtq-disabled-creat...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50645345
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
Now over time it might devolve into bad content if there is no higher level moderation to keep it on lighter side of things. I would personally be okay with not all platforms being totally democratic.
Indeed. My biggest fear is that succeed.
I happen to prefer PCs (and there is no reason to argue for or against that). Apple has been incredibly successful at capturing market share and their devices are now mandatory at my new job. I might not like it, but it's not the end of the world: Apple behaves ethically.
Now imagine your [otherwise] dream job demands that you strap a Quest on and feed Zuck's data fetish.
edit: for reference https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-28/leaked-ph...
There was that whole no poaching thing.
caught attempting to be a book cartel
hostile to right to repair
browser render lockdown in iOS
slow moving PWA support in Safari
deliberate slowdown of older iPhones due to battery
Its very likely that a commercial Oculus device won't collect data (what company approves that?), so it might actually give FB a path to money that is free of data+ads.
Kissing by the number that have FB accounts, most?
lol. It's just marketing, nothing more.
b) iPhone parts showing errors issues was a bug that was already fixed and applied to TouchID security validation. If it's something new then it's almost guarenteed that this is a good thing i.e. you're trying to tamper/remove the biometrics components.
c) Apple's customers don't want 3rd party App Stores. It's not a computer to them but an appliance like a microwave. They want security, privacy, moderation, convenience and alternate stores trade those away for features e.g. flexibility, price that no one really wants.
2) Apple customer support has a history of being deceitful. In the US it is illegal for them to reject jailbroken devices from warranty and I've been told by apple they will void your warranty on their internal services if you bring them a device.
3) Not all customers want a 3p App Store. Some do. iPhones are not microwaves, they are computers.
> They want security, privacy, moderation, convenience
Like a microwave? Wtf. Also, all these things can come through 3p app stores. Security is provided by the OS not App Store. Privacy is by app. Moderation apple still doesn't do right. Convenience is IAP that apps will actually use.
It's not scanning on the client side, it's hashing. People on this site should really understand the difference. The alternative, as many have pointed out, is them uploading your whole image to be scanned server side.
Smart money is that this is a move in front of Apple encrypting your whole icloud backup, and they have to do something if they don't want the legal, political, and social liability of being a free encrypted cloud storage for CSAM.
There's lots of reasons to criticise Apple, this isn't one.
Privacy is #1 selling point for Apple phones for geeks, it for sure ain't some mediocre hardware catching what chinese manufacturers released 1-2 generations before, nor sheepish bragging mentality that is so popular in poorer parts of the world.
They broke privacy. It ain't some super bendy term that you can argue about and twist to suit your current needs, in similar vein as ie truth. Lets break it down - private means mine and mine only, 0 other access, here, there, everywhere. Anything else is not private, whatever 'noble' cause you wrap it in that keeps shifting with time, location, political regime etc..
They claimed they had it. Many honestly believed them. They openly kicked it out and failed at it so badly they didn't even grok it could be an issue. Then whole clusterfuck happened as we all saw from first row.
Apple doesn't have privacy, period. It can claim to have some other features, and with some they are correct. And that's about it.
They are (their code is) looking at every item and reviewing it opaquely to us, and deciding if they should have an employee look at tiny thumbnails to tell the cops the owner is a pedophile. Its (a) not real hashing - its "perceptual" which is fancy math that says they're looking at thumbnails and (b) cycling through every item in a list and running an Algo against it is what I'd call scanning - lets not get bogged down on the terms.
We all know the tech details they shared, people on this site all understand the difference. We know the algorithm is easy enough to produce collisions. We know that apple said multiple 3 letter agencies can determine what goes in the bloom filter, and it would be downloaded from the internet and not audited. We know they are going to open it up to other countries governments too. We know that its on if you want to use opt-out services.
> The alternative, as many have pointed out, is them uploading your whole image to be scanned server side.
> Smart money is that this is a move in front of Apple encrypting your whole icloud backup
The whole image is being uploaded server side anyways.
My smart money says that this won't lead to encrypted backups anytime soon. Too many other things in those backups.
> social liability of being a free encrypted cloud storage for CSAM
I don't really think there is much tbh. That said, it is clear people would rather have non-absolutely-private cloud than a non-absolutely-private personal device. I know I would!
People criticize apple for "not letting you own the device" and this is a much bigger step down that road. I would rather a less-absolutely-private cloud service than an absolutely-private-everything where my local stuff is scanned.
> There's lots of reasons to criticise Apple, this isn't one.
There's lots of reasons to criticize Apple. Including this one.
First, the FBI (which supposedly stopped the last attempt to introduce E2E) has more concerns than CSAM.
Second, the current scanning system + E2E will have significant weaknesses* compared to server side scanning. As it is, Apple will pay the same legal costs as it would be if it had implemented E2E without scanning.
The only way to answer both concerns is to have way more invasive scanning than Apple told us it would do. IMHO, iCloud E2E is just a made up slogan to justify Apple snooping on the device. The real future is just way more scanning.
* The scanning database must receive updates after the images have been uploaded, because the hash as described inherently cannot catch most offenders right away. It's an issue of both space (the proposal is based on a perceptual hash, but the hash must be far smaller than the original, so similar images can't all get the same hash) and timing (NCMEC can't find new CSAM right away).
However, the images were likely deleted on the device, so neither side has access to allow rescanning in the E2E scenario. Unless.. The solutions here all involve more scanning than the original proposal.
1. Apple has blocked apps as objectionable because they were political even though simply factual. [1]
2. Apple's lock on the App Store facilitates government blocks on apps that Apple itself would otherwise deem fine. [2]
3. Apple blocks "adult" oriented apps. How many times do people have to rehash the lines between art and porn with authority gatekeepers instead of making their own choices?
4. Apple blocks game streaming apps, and other apps that act as front ends to other app-like worlds on the web, a whole new category of innovation cancelled. [3[
5. Apple inserts itself into otherwise peer-to-peer transactions, i.e. in-app non-code content purchases. This economic tax is both unfair, but also a dampener on innovation.
6. Apple on iOS restricts the downloading of code within apps to educational situations. (Currently rule 2.5.2 [4]) This is a huge dampener on innovation. Coding, including no-code coding, should be available to anyone wanting to be code literate or want to make their own tools. I get that their are safety issues, but those can be addressed with sandboxes, etc. Again, another layer of innovation killed off.
In summary, instead of being a bicycle shop for the mind, Apple's app stores block many kinds of innovation, tax providers in ways unrelated to Apple's role as phone provider, and routinely censor useful apps that are politically unappealing to Apple or governments, threaten Apple's lock on development tools, or based on Apple's sensitivity to safe (from a tech point of view) material where legitimate opinions vary as to what is desirable or not.
This is all user hostile.
Noting that there are alternative phones isn't a good response, as Apple's phones are at the center of tightly knit ecosystems. Customers do not have the ability to mix and match products between a few ecosystems and get the same value.
I view the App Store as Apple's new Achilles heal.
Apple's gatekeeper role has created perverse incentives for Apple to block significant innovation, economic viability, and freedom of expression on devices at the center of many of our lives.
Perverse incentives don't go away. They tend to metastasize (pun very much intended) [5].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/apple-drone-striking-app-remo...
[2] https://www.vox.com/recode/22680010/russia-apple-app-store-s...
[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/07/apples-block-of-x...
[4] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/29/facebo...
How can a company claim to be privacy friendly because it blocks ads while sharing private messages with a genocidal government?
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-knowingly-used-child-l...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mining-children-trfn/...
TikTok is the epitome of content augmentation through engagement. They literally will push more and more of what you're engaging with. Their algorithm is highly optimized to put you into very deep rabbit holes of content.
During the BLM protests you could see two very different feeds depending what content were you liking and engaging with. After a few minutes of browsing it would literally feed you only pro-BLM or anti-BLM. No middle grounds.
Not sure if I've ever believe it was the only way for them to grow. I hate Facebook (product) for what it has become but it is an excellent tool for its original use, which is keeping in touch with friends/family/communities.
1. No guaranteed-attention obligation from your circle, so you're free to share more things
2. Algorithms for YOUR attention so you see what you want to see in the order of importance. If you have very little time, you only see the most important things.
Email, Slack etc. are not even in the same category, it's like comparing a postcard to a newspaper headline
Maybe. But if money could buy product adoption we'd all be using Microsoft phones right now.
It is inevitable.
On Facebook, I see potentially divisive posts from friends with very different political views. The difference with TikTok is that those friends don't post content.
I think if you explicitly seek out problematic content you can end in a rabbit hole on any large algorithmic app.
The moment you watch a few seconds of a polarizing video, out of curiosity, they will start recommending more of the same. This is how people fall into more radicalized bubbles.
Only on Tiktok have I seen teen girls dancing along to clearly white supremacist content about racial superiority.
Anyone who thinks these issues are somehow unique or exclusive to Facebook is simply being dishonest. They are a byproduct of the anonymous, unfettered free speech we get from the internet not something intrinsic to recommendation algorithms.
They have allowed anti-vaxxer, conspiracy, misinformation etc communities to thrive and flourish and it's happened without recommendation algorithms. It happened because when people can see other's peoples comments they are able to follow them to discover more people like that.
On Reddit this is somewhat true, but it's a well-known part of Reddit culture (though this has been changing as they've been kicking out more subs) that each sub has its own set of cultural mores, opinionated mods, and memes. There's lots of drama/hate on subs from other subs but you'll see the same phenomenon on the Fediverse or, for that matter, in a neighborhood gossip group.
It's not like these views go away without algorithmic newsfeeds, it just that algorithmic feeds accelerate their spread.
Unless leadership changes, nothing good will be in store for society at large.
The tide is correctly turning against the manifest abuses of this organization, regardless of what it asks to be called; with any luck it will be systematically dismantled and defanged.
The pathology and amorality inherent in its DNA goes back to Zuckerberg; the fish has rotted from the head from the start. That pathology leads to market valuation is not a surprise but it's also not conducive to survival.
Zucc said this is our future vision for end users, here's what and why. Whether or not you like the idea or company, at least he stuck his neck out and articulated it.
This is just because Apple never talks about future things, but they certainly have a picture internally. Plenty of reporting supports the existence of AI/VR glasses of some sort and a car of some sort being designed within Apple.
I can't say that I care at all about what trillion dollar companies' visions of the future are.
Google believes in a customized, personal assistant in every pocket: a you-shaped facet of a gem that is all the data on the Internet. Getting there involves understanding what "you-shaped" looks like, hence all the data harvesting.
This is a very narrow way to look at Apple's future products and innovation. A lot of things Apple has done over the years such as introducing Macs with M1 chips, focusing on fitness (ex: ECG monitoring) and privacy based features, widespread adoption of contactless payments through services like Apple Pay are all great innovations in their own rights.
The problem is that it's only an investor's view. It's quite dismissive of Facebook's very real political problems, and doesn't acknowledge that for many people - especially, but not exclusively younger users - Facebook is a terminal combination of boring, evil, and cringe.
But more than that, Facebook isn't in a unique position to own the metaverse. The rest of MANGA will be converging on similar space. If there's any possibility at all of open hardware - or at least of an open standard - it's likely the real competition will come from an unexpected direction.
Social and AR/VR are fundamentally different spaces and Zuckerberg's idea of what's supposed to happen in those spaces is fundamentally weird and very possibly ridiculous.
Between the absence of consumer-friendly hardware - nothing is going to happen until the tech fits into very wearable low-effort glasses - and Facebook's eccentric history, I would expect Meta to fail and the metaverse to happen elsewhere, leaving FB to carry on as a kind of AOL for an ever-decreasing userbase until it's sold off for far too much money to some other large corporation which should know better.
This was a funny bit when i saw it on twitter yesterday, but if we're actually going to update our top 5 tech companies acronym let's do it comprehensively.
Google has been Alphabet for a while, so MANGA should be MANAA. And I haven't understood why Netflix is in there for a while now, I think we should swap it for Microsoft.
What do we think about MAMAA?
Mapping FB onto AOL here feels like an effective way of summing things up. Although I'm trying to remember because it was a long time ago: did AOL make any grandiose product moves that ended up signalling its decline? I'm inclined to say no, but I could be completely wrong and forgetting something. What I recall was just a complete lack of innovation from AOL and a regression to money printing mode on the antiquated ISP with fancy user portal model.
Although perhaps you weren't trying to make a direct comparison between the two.
He's not going to let that happen again.
If the point of a true metaverse is a persistent, always-on, digital universe that exists parallel to our own, it seems like the company that defined "social media" is well-positioned to define that universe as well.
Big VR bets makes less sense to me. AR is the next smartphone. VR is the next... TV or workstation monitor, and even then, only for some use cases. Just seems like a much smaller opportunity.
Even for industrial use, its only cases I've heard about have been to transmit manual labor over a network. There are very limited cases where we need to do that, although I have no doubt that VR will be useful for undersea or outer space welding, or something, with a very skilled operator. Otherwise, the accuracy necessary is going to make the machine (at the endpoint) far more expensive to build and maintain than it is to just send the human.
edit: It'll be good for killbots. They'll be largely autonomous other than Tesla autopilot-style nudges. The work doesn't require a lot of accuracy, and there are still a few social hangups about totally autonomous killing machines that would make an operator in a VR set more acceptable, even if they don't have much to do.
I think it's always worth considering the timeframe with these sorts of things.
Right now, yes, you're probably right.
But in 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
I see widespread VR/AR (especially AR) as being inevitable at some point in the future. But we still have a long way to go. It could still tangibly be decades away before the technology evolves into the right "shape".
Even with the current generation of VR hardware we're still looking at the equivalent of Charles Babbage's difference engine and trying to predict the iPhone from it.
Theranos, when they pivoted from a medication-delivering patch to a blood testing analytics company. Neither of which they ever actually had the tech for!
This article makes a very cogent point: Zuckerberg has too much baggage with the general public and Meta would be much better off if he stepped out of the light.
I was "defending" the metaverse to a friend outside of the tech bubble last night and I talked a lot about how much I learned about socialization/human connection when I used to play Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft. That those relationships which started somewhat "metaverse"-first meant as much as my "real" connections did... and that's what I feel the essence of Meta/metaverse is really trying to bring to everyone.
If building a metaverse is a good idea, and that is a large if, then it will have been good for him to stay.
Interestingly, the most vocal opponents of Facebook are... traditional medias. The same medias that are competing (and losing!) against Facebook for add revenue.
Keep in mind that before Facebook, for a story to get any traction it had to be approved by the "editorial board" of a legacy news outlet. What do you think happened if the owner of the TV station or newspaper didn't want a story to hit the front page?
Facebook's potency is in the reshares, and in the "headline only" feed format where lies in headlines are persuasive even when the linked content is not. YT algorithm shows one person more bad content, but doesn't spam their friends. And in a video the viewer has time to think if the claims make sense.
Facebook and Zuckerberg were fairly blamed because they actively developed features that amplified misinformation, and refused to take any action to curb their damage.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-an... (2021)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/youtub... (2019)
(And, yes, there's a larger question about how companies like YouTube and Facebook should be approaching moderation at all, who gets to decide what is and isn't misinformation, who watches the watchmen, etc. But if we presume there's a rationale for moderation at all, then YouTube should be getting way more scrutiny than it generally receives.)
And while the original Oculus shows you what promise there is from a hacker in the garage, the Quest 2 shows you what can be done when significant capital is invested in development.
I bought a Quest for my little brother across the country, and hanging out in VR is pretty cool. I can definitely believe there's something here. I don't know if Meta will actually end up being the platform in the future, but I certainly think there will be a platform, it will be good in a lot of ways, and because of this frankly audacious move by Meta we'll be getting there sooner.
Facebook's algorithms seems very good at dectecting and pushing content that makes users have an emotional response.
They now have developed a feature where is someone or a page posts a comment to a page or group that I am not subscribed to, Facebook will push that content on to my feed.
It is just about the most annoying thing ever. I am profoundly not interested in people who I follow on what they post on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Why is Facebook pushing Ted Cruz on to my feed if I am not subscribed to him? I want to see my friends posts, but not their responses to Ted.
Facebook sucks ass now, and I am going to convert over to mastidon or something.
Algorithmic content is great when it shows us things we want to see, but by it’s very nature it can be exploited to show us that which we most despise in an attempt to increase engagement.
I’m willing to go so far as to say the Algos in question are actually just optimized for engagement, not necessarily nefarious, but because we’re human, most people have an innate desire to make the world better in whatever way they can. Many believe discourse can help, but that’s obviously turned out to be flawed in the context of online conversation, where others can distance themself behind an online facade.
As long as we are optimizing for engagement, I feel all social media is doomed to the same fate.
FB sold users to advertisers. Very Web 2.0.
Well the potential decentralization of Web3 potentially destroys that business model and the Meta strategy seems like it reflects this potential change in the way Amazon saw the world going to digital?
What in world is Mark offering here? He's investing $10B into... what? AWS/Cloud was a reasonable business pitch (which seemed crazy but essentially: outsource your IT ops to AWS and we can help you scale like crazy very quickly).
What's Mark's pitch here? VR is nowhere near prime-time - just read around even on HN. It's got major issues and still lacks a killer app.
It's a vanity project that only a fantastically rich, out of touch person can indulge in. That or FB is toxic.
Apple was able to catch the paradigm shift of us starting to use our phones for everything, and make loads of money by offering services to a captive audience and sharecropping opportunities to app developers.
Facebook tried to become a platform during the last paradigm shift and failed. Selling users to advertisers has been lucrative but clearly isn't as sticky as the platform model (which is why they have to keep buying up their competitors). So they're trying to push another shift to VR and be the platform for that.
Apple leveraged the power of its brand in that transition (and created a flywheel of sorts to strengthen its brand), whereas the current FB brand wouldn't likely extend as well.
So helps show one reason why FB likely saw the need to change naming and start building a new brand (whereas Apple (and Amazon) went the other way).
Alphabet is just a holding (that's also why the name is rather boring), Google didnt wanna damage it's on brand by rebranding everything. There is no need, its positive and people like it.
Facebook tries to distract from its negative press to give the company an entire Facelift.
Many people are already updating that they work at Meta and not Facebook anymore on LinkedIn - quite interesting to observe.
Most Googlers or people working at one of the Alphabet companies would proudly state they work at Google to this day.
There are as many people playing it on Quest as there are on Steam, which is wild considering just how many more Quest owners without a gaming PC there must be.
It's amazing how much bike-shedding there is here around the name and logo, and how little capacity most have for what these changes actually mean.
Meta is going full in on the metaverse... so that's going to be hitting some critical mass fairly soon (less than a decade). And that's nuts. We should take this time to enjoy living before that moment. Who knows what changes it will bring, but surely enough that there will be no going back.
The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses".
Given my experience in Alt Space thus far, I think there's a really good chance you're right.
The first experience you have is being dropped into your "home" and mine defaulted to a big mountain side house, warm wood, fireplace, massive window looking out into a beautiful valley.
It was virtual but convincing enough and I still sometimes enjoy just taking in the virtual view before or after playing a VR game.
I remember thinking it a bit odd, the actual world around me could be awful, but in here it was just good enough to trick my brain. Throw $10B at that experience and I'm curious to see what happens. Maybe a scarcity-free utopia where everyone can "live" in whatever beautiful environment they want to, maybe a dystopia where you get home and enter your unadorned concrete cube and plug in to your real home, needing just enough physical space to use the VR.
If they can ever get it fully jacked into your brain, I could see people just plugging in and never coming out.
edit: home is also a place to work on projects, so I guess that VR fulfills that in a minecraft-type fashion.
That's a stretch. Tech history is littered with big companies who went hard on a technology only for their attempt to flop. See: Newton, Virtual Boy, Windows Phone, and most recently Google Stadia. There's also little reason to think that CEO Mark Zuckerberg of 2021 is as in-touch with the what the public wants and tech trends as college student Mark Zuckerberg was in 2004.
Edit: Another way to look at is: Has Facebook ever launched a product as successful as their primary business?
They've acquired some wildly successful properties (I'm thinking Instagram & WhatsApp) - but their in-house product efforts outside of Facebook itself have either flopped or been marginal at best - Facebook Phone, Facebook Portal. Oculus might be the exception - for now - but there's healthy competition in the VR headset space and the market isn't yet big enough for a "metaverse" to be widely accessible like the Facebook website was in 2004.
However, it is very rare for companies -- especially large, established ones -- to succeed in pivoting themselves to deal with new market realities and ways of doing business. The entrenched interests and culture inside these organizations tend to resist significant change. There's an irony that the bigger the company, the less power a CEO actually has.
Time will tell if they succeed.
Phone/ARM tablets were not.
[0] https://news.scott.services/microsoft-bing-usage-and-revenue...
I'm not sure anyone (other than some geeks) really understands what the "metaverse" is... or cares.
The name/symbolism/demo were uninspiring and vague at best.
Not to mention Mark isn't the best salesman for this. It seems so egotistical of him to assume HE needed to be the front-man for this effort other than to say "all of this... it's about me".
They are investing heavily in AR/VR and they have a proven track record in new product categories e.g. smartphone, tablet, headphones, watch.
Once the technologies improve such that the glasses/headsets are light and small enough then it's going to be something you can bring and use everywhere. And then the popularity will increase which in turn will attract developers. Repeat this cycle a few times and you have another $100+ billion App Store business on your hands.
I don't think it makes sense to conflate those two distinct use cases as the tech is different and user experience is vastly different as well.
Can you name a "digital space" or is this still vapor?
Zuck is interested in this Metaverse vision and not in fixing the issues with his existing properties. Announcing this now is two fingers to those affected by these problems. If he gets massive regulatory intervention now he’s brought it on himself and deserves it.
I don't know why he didn't pursue it if he is so sure in Metaverse VR/AR thing.
Not to mention all that sweet, sweet game developer data and owning one of the most popular social multiplayer games out there today.
FTC is another problem but they would probably allow this acquisition no matter how big it is because Facebook is not in the business of making video games or game engines.
Besides owning Fortnite and major content creation engines for the metaverse like you said another good synergy is boosting Facebook's Twitch and YouTube Gaming competitor Facebook Gaming with Epic's expertise.
Fortnite seems to have the virtual event model working pretty well. Movies and concerts with friends and random annoying people jumping around.. but it does work,
(Also, /s)
"Yes, we know who you are."[0]
IMO this point is just a single example of the pattern we've seen. Everything done at Facebook is to drive that network data even if it harms the individual component. That's why Meta is so different from Alphabet. Alphabet is legitimately a collection of pretty independent companies - some of them synergize but never unnecessarily[1]. I purchased a VR headset last year and I ended up getting an Index after being mightily tempted by the Oculus - it's my first headset and I wasn't sure how much I'd like VR so I was really hesitant to drop a grand on it but... the likely future where all my activity is forcefully broadcast to all my family and friends on Facebook is a price I'm not willing to pay.
Facebook's non-Facebook products suffer from the fact that they so habitually pipe data right back to Facebook.
1. Oh - I'll add a caveat here about google accounts and Youtube. Google did try to merge the two at one point, but they got a huge amount of negative PR and ended up stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools.
PdM: "Oh, users don't want one account? OK, let them make aliases they think are different, and log in that way. They won't realize it's all still one account, even when we show them their picture and list all these ~~aliases~~, er, "different accounts" they can log in as ..."
Users: "Yay, different accounts!"
Analytics: "Yay, one account!"
Advertisers: "Hey, thanks for tying even more of their identities together for me."
Sometimes major upfront investments can create situations where its own size and expectations cannibalize their own potential.
But until you change the business model, it's just shuffling deck chairs on a ship we're now, sadly, almost all passengers on.
Tim Cook told an investor to "get off the stock" over criticisms that investing in things that don't contribute to the bottom line (such as sustainability initiatives). "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI" is not something you expect a bean counter to say in a shareholder meeting.
> I care about this existing, not just virtual and augmented reality existing, but it getting built out in a way that really advances the state of human connection...
> I think we’ll have hopefully an opportunity to shape the development of the next platform in order to make it more amenable to these ways that I think people will naturally want to interact.
I mean, how can you read stuff like this and not laugh?
I am not sure they can keep the evil from spreading. How can they contains it without blocking large amounts of users.
I see the platform as a dark forest where there is no path toward profit unless they allow evil content to be spread widely and therefore allow more adds to be seen by more people.
This, at least, I can completely agree with. I’m happy that someone is expending so much effort to make what I want a reality. It’s just a bit unfortunate that it is Facebook.
Would it work? I suspect that it's too early for the tech. Haven't seen much yet in the way of compelling apps - and first mover advantage isn't what it used to be.
He has never been one of our species and that gnaws at him. Do girls like him? Do we like him?
His favorite historical figure is Caesar, he looks like Caesar with his haircut, which is also called "the Caesar". This man drifts away in meetings when they talk about boring money stuff, but he DOES care a buttload about the number of users and those users not leaving. It's power, it's influence - it's what he craves.
But. The man who pivoted on his idea of rating chicks - by stealing a better idea - may have run out his lucky streak, which started by winning the birth lottery in Upstate New York. He may have been at the right place at the right time, of prime age, and of means enough to have access to computers and the Internet (a very common thread, see: Bill Gates), but now that The Facebook brand has literally become toxic (RIP), he has to come up with an actual world-changing idea, and that, as he will find out, is hard.
And it doesn't help that not only is it hard to hire people at Facebook now, I will bet you the farm that those working there are walking it in for the nice paycheck. Why do you think the TikTok algorithm makes Reels look like a high school project? Those people don't have their heart in it, and why would they? The company repeatedly, shamelessly lies to them.
This move reminds me of Elon Musk's brain implant garbage that is sure to fail. It's like these people can't just do a good job of providing a simple thing people want/need, they want to believe they can do something big. They can't, and they won't, but they will waste billions of dollars making other fools believe it.
I wonder when the music finally stops and these tech billionaires are revealed to be the lottery ticket ego-maniac hacks that they are. I wonder.
If you try out a few ideas, some will pan out.
And brain implants are certainly coming. Parkinsons and other diseases are already being treated with them.
That's not to say that they'll actually deliver on this idea, but we've definitely seen the transformative power of tech on society. Whether that's a good thing or not is left as an exercise to the reader.