Facebook shares plunge on weaker-than-expected earnings | Hacker News Reader

Facebook shares plunge on weaker-than-expected earnings

cnbc.com

71 pointswhitepaint45 comments

FB went all in on Metaverse reminded me of Google between 2007-2012 when they mobilized the whole company and invested heavily around social with OpenSocial, Google Circle etc. Google eventually realized that's not their core strength and moved on, let's see what will FB do.

I think (and hope) you're right, but Google was just moving in a general direction. With the announcement and even -name change-, it feels way more invested than Google ever was. Would be really weird to undo all that.

Google is called alphabet now … so they clearly wanted to pursue other things.

Remember the time not too long ago when Google was gobbling up Robotics companies?

No it isn't, Google is still a company under the holding company Alphabet. Facebook is not a company.

To glom Buzz/Salmon/OpenSocial (the great intertwingularizing era, circa 2008) & Google Circle together is to marry night & day. These are opposite ends, opposite realms. Buzz, Salmon Protocol, OpenSocial: these were hopeful, strong, API oriented, pro-value-creation protocol-based interoperable ways of connecting the world, making new system creation possible. Engineers doing internet engineering things, trying to build an ecosystem for interconnection.

Google didn't realize building healthy, interoperable, internet technology wasn't their core strength & drop it. The story is much sadder. Their new head guy showed up & personally demanded things go his way & that everyone build his pet project, Google Plus. A vanity Facebook competitor with a real name policy, with no extropic/network benefits, no connection to the rest of the net (although you could send some data in to it: literally it's only api, one method): just another shitty little social app.

Google eventually realized this product was trash & insisting every team creatively find ways to interoperate with it was a mess, and canned this shitty little social app. (One I used & enjoyed, but which was of scant real enduring value, was deeply disconnected.)

There's two eras here. They look like opposite ends, to me.

As for Meta. Well. There is a lot of the vanity project bent, judging the book by it's cover. But I also think it's good to increase the engineering challenges, to go big. To find new hard problems. Google Plus was just a cheap knock off, a facsimile, with some narrow twists (Circles). Facebook is at least trying something. I have sincere doubts about headsets, but the idea of virtual place, & of re-materializing the virtual makes a lot of sense to orient & re-ground (what a pun) computing - could do a lot. But Meta could walk either of the two Google paths I just described: they could walk the open, interoperable, ecosystem path & kickstart a new era in computing with a buoyant healthy technical ecosystem, or they could walk the Google Plus era path & create a closed, proprietary product or series of products that try to succeed so strongly on their own that they inflate a new market singlehandedly.

I believe FB is gone metaverse because they made such a dramatic shift from desktop to mobile, what 10 years ago ? That was obviously widely successful but catching lightening twice is no easy feat.

They messed up their initial move to mobile. They tried to build it as a HTML5 application.

FB is going all in on Metaverse for the same reasons Ool companies are going all in on renewables and other ventures

Google didn't voluntarily move on from Google Plus. They were forced out because they lost, badly, and the company they lost to was Facebook. I wouldn't count Zuckerberg and co. out yet. Unlike Google management, he is not afraid to commit to a new direction completely.

Problem with Facebook is that they can’t acquire anyone due to their notoriety. They should have been able to use all the cash generated in the past five years to purchase a bunch of assets like Microsoft. At the end of the day, they have a bad branding problem. Need a fresh start with new management which we know is never going to happen.

They did use all that money to overpay market value for a lot of engineers, data scientist, etc. They were particularly aggressive the past 2 years during the pandemic, but a lot of those hires are now getting paid 20% less on their overall comp.

Not a fresh start necessarily. What they need is (a) changing how they're run and what their goals are (which apparently hasn't happened) and (b) sending honest signals [1] thay they have done so.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

I will make it simple: they need to buy Stripe/Shopify. They really need to own e-commerce vertical.

Should've done that in the past 2 years, now that Lina Khan is the head of FTC no way it will be approved.

Well hopefully they don't, y'know.

That’s not really why the market is reacting here, thats an old story as the potential monetization phase has already been replaced by actual monetization. The new story is that a bunch less people are willing to spend on ads at all, specifically citing broad market constrained budgets due to inflation and supply chain issues. This is a heavy indication of the state of many sectors, pretty fascinating ripple.

Also Apple protecting consumers and democracy from ad targeting is working, at least against Facebook.

> The new story is that a bunch less people are willing to spend on ads at all, specifically citing broad market constrained budgets due to inflation and supply chain issues

To be fair, Alphabet had a solid top and bottom beat attributed to ads revenue, citing increased spending on ads (mostly in retail, finance, travel)

I had noticed that, good point. Facebook is dependent on their apps being able to broker and target ads.

Maybe advertisers were getting less good results from their campaigns or were chilled by knowing that Apple would break the targeting ability of the Facebook ad platform.

Maybe there is overrepresentation of advertisers that use iphone and saw the crusade occurring, and that got them to avoid ad platforms that rely on that level of tracking.

Facebook has the cash to buy Microsoft?

I do not want to see that happen

The actual earnings report from the company itself:

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4...

Notice how much they are being hurt by apples ios policies. (Growth in revenue drops from 37 to 20 - corresponding to some 20 b pr year)

Tells you why Google is paying Apple and how much Apple potentially could extract.

What's more surprising to me is DAU's dropping. Has Facebook penetrated every person on the planet, or is the Facebook empire starting to shrink?

You mean growth rate is dropping? From what I can tell it says DAU grew by 5%.

Amusingly most analysts had Facebook as a buy: https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1488997491693469697

Down 25% or so, currently. Would you buy at this point? Why or why not?

wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole - and for the same reason I won't own tobacco stocks.

I don't use Facebook, but I wont turn down an opportunity to make some $$$

And that is the serious problem in this world.

The lack of awareness and smugness to be able to invest in a majority of the stock market when the line is drawn at Meta/Facebook is a problem too.

The problem is the endless requirement of the growth of public companies. It drives for situations/behaviour like Meta/Google/Amazon. But that is capitalism and only regulation can balance it out, sadly.

I wanna quit my job and never have a boss by the time I turn 40. Need to procure assets for that.

Surely there will be a rebound after a drop like this; they are still growing and making money.

"Dead cat bounce": risky, but it can often work. You just have to stick to the plan and not hold it. Let it bounce, sell. Called such because if you drop it from a sufficient height, even a dead cat will bounce once. Would I buy? If it weren't the tech equivalent of Exxon-Mobil I would probably take a small position for the lulz, put a tight stop on it, and see what happens in the next day or two.

Hey, at least XOM is up 26.88% YTD

I bought 0.5 shares on Revolut :)

I rarely use Facebook, but recently got into ebikes and it seems the best communities are using Facebook Groups, so I've been using FB more in the past month than in the past decade.

It's awful.

Rather than just showing me a chronological feed of new group posts, Facebook wants to control the stream so they can 1) monetize it with ads and 2) increase engagement by suggesting other content. And they're so devious about it - the first half dozen posts in your feed are from your subs, but then Facebook starts to slip in recommended content in the middle of your subs.

Amusingly, because I've got ad blocking at various levels (browser and DNS), Facebook's systems apparently have no idea of my preferences or even my general profile or demographic. If an ad does sneak through because it's served off a non-blacklisted server, it's always completely irrelevant and many times offensive: Meeting singles, anything MAGA, essential oils, etc. The group recommendations and inserted posts are random as it gets: Spider-Man Fans, Kittens, Dallas Cowboys, Love Quotes, Old School Hip-hop, Soup Lovers, and more. (These are real suggestions I just pulled right now).

What's amazing about this is that Facebook has all my info. It knows where I live, how old I am, what topics I've explicitly chosen to follow. And yet it ignores all that and relies on data gathered from spying on you instead.

Add to this the fact that scrolling for any amount of time through my groups will 100% crash the tab in Chrome on my Android tablet. 100% of the time. This is all Facebook is! How can their development be so bad for their basic functionality? Because they hate the open web and want you to use their app, which I refuse to do.

Facebook's number one priority before anything else is monetization. Any feature or setting which may be beneficial to the end user is secondary.

- Why can't I pay money and turn off ads?

- Why can't I set my feeds to chronological order permanently?

- Why can't I turn off suggested content?

- Why aren't my profile information and interests I explicitly entered respected?

- Why can't I filter my feed to strip out any news items and only see updates and photos?

- Why does Facebook's web app crash so much doing basic scrolling?

I've been amazed for over a decade at Facebook's continued growth. But my son and his friends never use it, so I think like all social networks, it will soon go away. Another 10 years and they might literally have more deceased users than active ones.

Please don't use HN as your personal blog. This is a place for serious discussion.

I agree it may have been written like a blog.. but this was the best thing ive read on hackernews today. I hope I get a Soup Lovers ad some day.

Thanks. I know I write long. It's a habit from a misspent youth working as a journalist.

Here's the Soup Lovers group, since you liked the idea so much: https://www.facebook.com/groups/491105414344063

(Seriously, that was suggested to me.)

LOL. I'm trying to figure out how someone using an account that's 34 days old would feel that they need to tell someone who's been here since 2010 how to contribute to the site. Did you forget you're using an alt account, or are you really that much of a jerk?

Besides, what in the world are you criticizing? The length? Learn to read full paragraphs with complete thoughts sometime, it'll help your attitude.

Maybe if they spent less time censoring/de-platforming they would have eyeballs to sell those ads to.

Speaking of censorship, I swear there was once a parody of Right Said Fred that went "I'm too meta..." and yet Google finds no evidence. Not even when using keywords like "yankovic" or "demento". I want the lyrics!

Maybe you're thinking of the "I'm So Meta Even This Acronym..." line?

It could be the Mandela effect, but I'm not going to accept that easily.

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