Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?
What happens to React if Meta disappears? Will it limp along or is it disconnected enough to continue improving without Facebook Meta?
A sibling comment even said,
> Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead).
I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even.
Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfing with the execs.
Social is fickle. MySpace and Digg died in an afternoon. All of the centuries of dead and forgotten stored content isn't keeping people there. It's connections. And those can come and go easily. Just look at Snapchat and TikTok.
Meta employee compensation is going to begin decreasing both in terms of salary and stock equity. They won't be able to retain good talent, so initiatives will die. Meta is also in a narrative death spiral, and this will eat away at employee morale.
New startups will see blood in the water. They'll come after the Baby Boomers. They'll come after the photographers. Facebook won't have capital to fight battles from every angle.
They have a massive amount of infrastructure to maintain. This will become a giant thorn if they lose employees. How will they weigh keeping the lights on, finishing ongoing migrations, etc. vs fighting new battles to stay alive?
We now realize how little moat they actually have. Facebook really needed a device. They tried to build a handset and failed. Oculus is too little too late.
edit: Facebook ads will cost a lot less as advertisers demand more favorable rates and see diminishing value, perhaps even abandoning the platform for their ad spend.
And for what it’s worth there is almost nothing more I’d like to see than Meta vanishing. I hope you’re right.
While this may be true, what % of global internet DAUs did each of them house? I'm not sure if this relevant or not, but it seems the internet was just a much smaller place back then.
It sure felt a lot bigger than it does now.
Granted, the web was a much smaller place then, in terms of both users and revenue. But still, relative to its time, it was huge.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems to believe he is going to remain in total control forever, so who knows? Maybe one day the fact shareholders have no control will come back to bite him and the the share price will drop through the floor as confidence in him plumes to zero. Frankly maybe the last 48hours could be indicative of that.
In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday.
I suppose in some ways shares in Meta aren't really shares in Meta but shares in Zuckerberg himself.
[Source: I'm in my 40s and could easily imagine cratering a trillion dollar company I created in a quixotic quest to make the world a better place.]
I figured a similar dynamic existed when Google did their Class-A/Class-C split. Brin, Page, and Schmidt together hold voting control of the company, so I could envision a future where investors tried to buy up all the Class-A shares and enlist the cooperation of one of the founders to oust the remaining founder. For a long time I held onto my Class-A shares and sold the Class-C ones in case the voting rights premium spiked. But that didn't happen: they've all stepped away from operational roles at the company and in Schmidt's case even resigned from the board. Now the Class-A and Class-C shares largely trade in parallel, and in some cases Class-A even trades below C (which is slightly insane since they are strictly better, but market fluctuations).
How is it structured at a quick brief high level? Just the common "he owns 50.1% of the company in terms of # shares?"
He set it up that way to give him control of the company forever.
Source: https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-si...
> The Facebook shares that you and I, along with big investors like mutual funds, can buy are Class A shares, of which there are roughly 2.4 billion in the market. We get one vote for each share. But Zuckerberg and a select group of others own Class B shares, which afford them 10 votes per share. There are roughly 440 million Class B shares.
>Zuckerberg personally owns nearly 360 million Class B shares, and through agreements with other Class B shareholders, controls the vote of another 32 million. That gives him control of some 392 million Class B Shares, some 90% of the total.
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-si...
That's a strong claim. The stock only dropped 25%, other tech company stocks have dropped as much as 50% in the last few quarters (Snap, DocuSign, etc.) and haven't changed leadership.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-03/meta-set-...
Tech companies are notoriously bad at succession planning.
Car crash. Plane crash. Heart attack. Stroke. Slippery floor on your super-yacht.
There are a million ways for a CEO's tenure to suddenly and unexpectedly end. Yet the heads of these companies still act like nothing will ever change, even when they're old enough to know better.
The problem is that the tech business is fundamentally innovation-based, and this means that anyone capable of running the business as #2 is probably unsuitable to be #1. There's a classic a16z essay about this:
https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/
Basically, the personality traits to be a successful functional executive and those needed to be a successful tech CEO are often diametrically opposed. So if you pull from the existing exec team, your best case is that you get a caretaker (like Ballmer, Pichai, or Cook) who runs the business, optimizes earnings, keeps people happy, but misses the next tech cycle and eventually mortgages the company's future. Your worst case is that everyone quits and the company implodes because it can't service its existing commitments.
This is why you want to be a financier. Sell the companies at the top of their growth curve and fund the up-and-comers that will eat their lunch.
Exactly, there's no way Meta will suddenly disappear and go poof, barring some kind of extreme government action or bizarre corpora-cidal action by its controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg.
Nothing popular becomes unfashionable that quickly.
Advertising revenue is obviously more fragile, but I don't think Facebook cresting the high water mark says all that much about the tail trajectory.
There's no site on the planet other than Facebook that lets me interact with my entire family all at once in a way that I know will reach them.
AOL tried to be all things to internet users and wanted to be a walled garden at a time when cheaper alternatives were coming out that gave users more freedom. Facebook is resigned to the fact that it isn't a walled garden, but it does things to try to retain and gain new customers anyway.
My kid’s class parent’s group is a Facebook group. In other places it’s a WhatsApp group. The only reason is everybody has a Facebook account.
I have one too, I just don’t log in anymore, so I have no idea what the other parents are talking about behind the scenes. This is the tyranny of a walled garden social network.
I’d welcome Meta crash and burn tomorrow.
Personally, somewhere on my project backlog is a plan to set up a personal Matrix server for this exact reason, as most of the public ones I've found stop just short of actually supporting bridging for any Meta platforms yet.
(And even if they did, E2E bridging is still WIP at the spec level anyway if memory serves, which would mean still having to roll my own for the time being... Because naturally, if I'm concerned enough about my dependence on other people's cloud services, or their harvesting of my data, to consider going to lengths like these, then I'm obviously not just going to just wantonly funnel a collection of DMs spanning about half my lifetime through a third party's servers.)
The JS ecosystem cycle has slowed way down. React is 9 years old now. Vue is 8 years old. Svelte, the new kid on the block, is 5 years old.
If React is halfway dead, and I doubt that given how much $$ is being invested in new React apps today, then that is still another 9 years of React.
I do agree that Meta will be around for longer than 9 years though! :)
The other thing people don't realize is that React Native is huge. It has been ported all over the place, the basic idea of "universal UI primitives that you write native backings for" is a pretty good one, and JSX is a really nice templating language.
I'm not a fan of quite a few things about React, but its design is solid enough that it isn't going anywhere.
Either that or it will be forgotten like KnockoutJS was (and for the same reasons).
React is Java now. At most it could start a gradual multi-decade decline (I don’t think this will happen, but it’s imaginable), but I’d bet consultants will still be getting paid to maintain/fix legacy React apps 40 years from now.
Rich Harris is now working at Vercel. On the last Svelte Summit, Steph Dietz (a Vercel dev rel) literally said "Svelte is the future of web dev".
Can you expand on this? I see a company that produces net-negative societal value going through a process of price discovery. Facebook/Meta offer nothing beyond a shrinking user base to advertisers.
It's a modest blip in the $23 trillion US economy and its economic presence would be absorbed by others relatively quickly. Other platforms would gobble up their ad dollars, other platforms would be born or step in to pick up the eyeball attention. Other marketplaces would absorb their local listings.
Ten years out people would barely remember Facebook ever mattered at all. It'd be like a 45 year old remembering the dominance of Atari in their youth, or IBM ruling over the PC industry for 15 minutes, or AOL's good ten year run in the early days of the consumer Internet.
Nobody really gives a shit about eg Instagram or TikTok. They don't really matter. Oh a trinket vanished, here comes the next trinket. The world didn't stop with AOL, MySpace, Flickr, Friendster, ICQ, AIM, Geocities and 327 other services that nobody cares about today; and it won't stop whenever Facebook gets around to dying (regardless of the difference in scale, that doesn't matter much per capita - you don't have 3,000 friends on Facebook in reality, you have 13). People care more about sitcoms than they do these toy services, and their beloved sitcoms go away all the time, replaced by the next distraction device. Most or all of these social networks will rot and die eventually, who cares. On with the next.
And I say that as someone entirely without any of the comical rage that most of HN has regarding Facebook. It's simply obvious Facebook isn't that important.
The second life clone is going to fail. Facebook will go right on making profit.
React is open source, and seems to have zero dependence on Facebook from my perspective.
Vue is as old as React and seems like it’s relegated to being in Reacts shadow
I'm sure the React team would quickly find funding.
True, but they do have TypeScript though.