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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Facebook on adjacent projects, and would have predicted a year ago that FB will give up on these audio creator initiatives as soon as Zuck's attention is somewhere else.

The only reason these audio-focused projects were started was that at the start of 2021 people believed it was a "Mark priority", and everyone wanted to ship something by the end of H1 2021 so it would make it into their performance reviews. (This is also the explanation for why so many companies including Twitter, FB and Spotify shipped audio products around May-June 2021. Everybody ran on the same review cycle.)

It's hard to exaggerate how much of FB's flailing is explained by internal beliefs in something being a Mark priority, which then shifts to something else by the next half. It's a downside of being a founder-owned company at this scale – the signals from the top become caricatures of "Great Leader probably wants X now."

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From an outsiders perspective, it seems that FB is chronically late to the party.

* The world adopts something (ie podcasting)

* It starts becoming mainstream

* All the big players become established

* Facebook shows up with a half hearted attempt

* You never hear about the FB product again.

Nepotism too. Anecdotally, I know someone who is skilled and became a top creator on one of those early audio-focused platforms, but she ran into a couple toxic members of the community who knew the FB PMs, and managed to get her and others they didn't like removed through moderation.

The bear is sticky with honey

Are you implying his beliefs are not clear? That is, that it was just a rumor that audio products were his priority?

Or that they are clear but changing on a whim?

Yeah, it sounds like it was his priority until he was bored with it, but also the leadership up top sometimes uses Mark priority as a stick to get what they want?

I worked at FB in a partner team and this isn’t exactly what happened.

When these products were chartered Clubhouse was in the middle of a massive upswing and the industry was convinced that live audio was the next format threat akin to TikTok’s short form videos or Snap’s stories format. Just as we’ve seen with those formats, every big company got the wheels turning to compete in the space.

It turned out that the hype around Clubhouse was because it was a particularly great product for tech influencers (VC and media), but consumer experience wasn’t enough to cross the chasm and retain users at scale. When it became clear that Clubhouse was destined to be more like Houseparty than TikTok, all the big platforms except for Twitter basically cooled on the space and focused elsewhere.

Exactly, everyone got burned by TikTok (assuming it would die like Vine did) and so now anything that appears to be the "next TikTok" causes a flurry of activity.

It kind of works when the leader is a visionary like Steve Jobs and somewhat an Elon musk. They're troubled humans but being confident and aggressive works often works. I don't see Zuch with the same charisma and gusto though. He strikes me more an engineer than a visionary.

> He strikes me more an engineer than a visionary.

This doesn't add up with Facebook going "all-in" on the metaverse imo.

I still think Metaverse was a branding/distraction strategy from taking a bath financially. The lack of substance is telling.

This is a perfect example. Zuckerberg wants to be a visionary. But the "metaverse" is a terrible vision whereas visionaries are typically labelled as such because they manage to envision things that others don't AND those visions turn out to be great.

The jury is still out on that, we'll find out in a few years.

Zuck is absolutely a better presentation speaker than Elon. I don't know how you calculate charisma but Elon is a great leader despite his inability to give an presentation that is interesting vocally.

I'll agree with you there. I've always appreciated that Elon gives presentations if just for the fact that if he can pull it off, hopefully I can too. I hate public speaking but it gives me hope that some people will still listen. lol

I have to admit I've never watched an Elon presentation. Now I'm going to. But:

One thing I always tell people like you is: concentrate on your content. Anticipate every possible question, and have an answer for it. Don't think about hand gestures, eye contact, and all that Toastmasters stuff at all.

Have little note cards with reminders to yourself on what points to hit.

You can only think of ONE thing while you're talking. So let it be this:

I know the stuff.

They don't.

They want to know it.

Maybe that's three things.

"hope that some people will still listen" : Yes, they will, If those three things are true.

Yeah if the content is there... And you run someone of the worlds most exciting companies... You can be terrible and people will still listen. Elon has a bit of awkward charm sometimes but other than that its really all content.

To be fair, while he's clearly a bad presenter, at least I generally get the feeling that Elon is genuinely passionate about what he's presenting on, while Zuck generally gives off heavily polished PR speak vibes.

I definitely fine myself more engaged by Elon's presentations despite his performance.

I'm not sure if that counts as charisma, but it's not nothing.

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