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Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

>It sounds like they don't really know where to make the cuts they want.

Metaverse. Nuke the entire thing from orbit. It's clearly the wrong thing for them to be focused on.

I think the sentiment will be popular on HN but this is Meta's moonshot to stay relevant to young people. I mean it's an absolute dumpster fire and somehow more cringy than NFTs but this is the horse they bet on to try and get a piece of "gaming as a social network" that they were legitimately completely caught off guard by. They aren't going to be able to buy their way into pc, console, or mobile so this is their attempt to create a new market where they can be a player.

Without this their outlook is slowing growth on their existing properties and a sword of damocles hanging over Facebook. They're not going to be able to swing 20-30% annual growth for much longer without getting into other markets.

Nah their AR/VR division is the only thing they’ve got to dangle in front of long term investors. I think it’s giving them about 24 months of runway before the sky starts falling for them.

I would argue it's probably almost the only thing they're working on that has any real value too. Most of their other products don't, or even have negative value, in terms of their usefulness to society and humanity.

Metaverse has negative value too, but at least it has novelty...

There's useful applications for AR and VR. I don't know that Meta would actually pursue those instead of harmful applications, but at least it's easy to imagine the positive potential for these technologies.

I'm not sure this is true. Their metaverse stuff could easily actually be a drag on their share price right now. There's 2 ways to view Meta: The bull case is that Facebook/Insta absolutely churn out money and that's great, but for future growth their going into the metaverse and they're going to win there and unlock more explosive growth. But there's the bear case: Facebook/Insta absolutely churn out money but they're not growing because the CEO has lost focus on the core business, and share holders aren't going to get to enjoy that money because the CEO who has absolute total control of the company is going to plough all that money into a nebulous new business that's incredibly unlikely to pay off.

It could very well be that right now Meta's stock is trading at a discount, because investors are discounting the revenue streams because they don't think it's going to go to share holders. So instead of strangling the golden goose by cutting across the core facebook business, you could massive bring down spend on VR, refocus on your core business and the stock price would shoot through the roof.

They would have to accept being a drastically smaller company going forward which I doubt they are prepared to do. It seems like they want to recapture the glory days and it is all or nothing.

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