Zuckerberg’s empire collapses
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
No one in the community likes Zuckerberg. No one wants him to win. Meta - the company - could restore its image and rebuild trust with a new leadership. But not while he is there.
Not commenting on whether this is just - whether he has gotten a bad rap or not. Am speaking just to the reality of the perception.
If it were me - I would step away, not just for the sake of the company - but for my own as well. I would want to take my wealth and see what else I could do with it - how else might I be able to contribute and give back? Think of both Gates and Jobs when apart from MS and Apple. It's not just a chance for the company to reinvent itself, but the leader as well.
I agree with you that Zuck should walk away and the company should bring new leadership that can change the image and culture of the company.
And the insane crazy moderation drives her up the wall. Just the other day, she posted an announcement to a private group, asking for parents to volunteer at the school. Almost immediately, Facebook removed it, because it contained "nudity". There was absolutely nothing in the picture but text, and a coloured background. It was obvious why their software thought it was "nudity" though – she'd chosen a pinky-peach background, roughly that of pale human skin.
Barely a week goes by when she doesn't complain to me about some mindless Facebook moderation inconsistency. If Facebook don't improve, eventually someone else will move in and take over that particular market segment, just like TikTok/Snapchat/etc have already taken over others.
With creating Facebook - maybe. But with trust to Facebook - I know many regular people who uses FB to run all kinds of local groups, and I never heard from one of the "we use FB because we trust Zuckerberg". His name may come up when something is not working or when people get randomly banned for nothing, but never in the context of trust. And, TBH, I can't remember anything Zuckerberg has ever done to make people trust FB more as a company.
PS: Oh, and nobody gives a flying about "Meta". The idea that people are itching for bad-graphics boring super-expensive gadget that would allow them to do something they never wanted to do... that's why this company is in trouble.
Even Google and Amazon are starting to face reality.
that's a very compelling dataset size of 1.
uber, for one, publishes number of its users and rides, and in 2021 it was about 100 million active users who did a few billion rides. For a public company that delivers a physical service, kind of hard to fudge that.
I was an early adopter of virtual reality (since sold it and moved on). Even the most energetic VR games pale in comparison to a typical gym workout, provided the person actually works out at the gym rather than practicing fuckarounditis
I find the gym/outdoor running is much more effective for both weight loss (running being the most effective way to burn energy) and muscle gain (which generally requires weight-based resistance training)
With VR, the games are distracting and fun enough that they don’t come off as overly tedious, BeatSaber is better but also less fitness oriented, FitXR is less so, but I can still get through it without expending lots of willpower. The best exercise is the exercise you do, when I was in my 20s and some of my 30s, I could push myself to go running and hit the gym, now VR fills that role.
... only if your r&d pays off. If you keep spending ten billion each year on something that looks like a second rate version of second life ca. 2010 combined with VRChat it's fair to say you may have a problem.
Most of the people I know left Facebook long ago or never had an account to begin with. For people below a certain age (which includes myself and I'm not young) it will resemble a ghost town.
If Zucc's bets on acquiring whatsapp and instagram were plays on time spent/attention, should track that he understands the killer app of VR is going to be time spent/attention. VR isnt just a new medium to tell stories, if it taps into something more primal than anything a screen can convey, then the "next platform" race has already started and META is ahead by leagues
> that should've become apparent to everyone with NFTs/crypto
Right, that's why FB, Meta and its metaverse are so highly regarded in the crypto community.
What do you mean by that? It's bad now because it's expensive? I think it's bad now because the tech is not ready (bulky, low resolution, low quality graphics, causes nausea, etc) and because Meta's value prop is incoherent. Team meetings in VR? Catching up with friends in VR? Having legs in VR? (How many people does this appeal to?) If it was 100x cheaper now do you think it would have been much more popular?
Zuckerberg is doing something different. He amassed a gigantic fortune and built a huge company. Now he's trying to innovate rather than simply sit on his hoard and extract value. He's spending his money on real innovation - actual technology. That's good. Plus, he's doing it in complete defiance of media, investors, business types, etc. That takes courage. Good for Zuckerberg.
What is the point of getting control over such vast capital if not to try and build the future?
What do you think is the innovation he's trying to do? So far it looks to me like "let's do SecondLife, but with walled gardens, and we'll sell expensive hardware for it". We could argue whether this is useful in some context and whether maybe some specific kind of meetings would actually benefit from VR, but... VRChat exists - if they bought that and did "VRChat for business", they'd be already better off.
But actual innovation? I just don't see it.
I think your comment illustrates to me the disconnect. The criticism is hyper focused on that one app. The quest 2 is a fantastic device. And the software for it is actually fantastic. The hardware and software coming out of reality labs is by far the best as a whole.
And while I don’t think monolithic apps like horizon worlds are going to be more than a gimmick for a long time. Logging in for the first time on the quest pro and chatting with strangers was something else. Of all the hyped marketing in the presentations I rolled my eyes at the focus on “presence” and feeling like you are there with someone but it already lives up to that in my opinion. It was pretty damn cool.
Now that I think about it. Maybe he doesn’t have to give a damn about marketing vr well. Apple will come in and do that work for him soon.
It's a platform. If they want to restrict the avatars to boring blobs and the environments to virtual offices, that's what they could do. Similar to how both Skype and Skype for business existed.
Specifically it's a very well built out platform with capabilities to integrate with a lot of types of usage. I share the view of "furries are to VR as porn is to video media". If you have experts in extensive VR usage, you may as well learn from them.
> The criticism is hyper focused on that one app.
What are the other good apps? What is the innovation? I can only refer to what is published and known.
1. addictive enough that a very large chunk of humanity will visit it daily (ideally many times a day)
2. attractive to advertisers (I am including shopping in that)
In this context having fantastic software or a fantastic device is not a convincing argument. Facebook.com wasn't a fantastic piece of software when it blew up, hardware is mostly irrelevant (in the sense that it should be so good that it's basically unnoticeable to the user). The metaverse is not a coherent idea - it's a product of an obsessive mind with almost unlimited resources (for now at least).
This experiment has failed already. When early games with very primitive graphics were first released on home computers, they attracted a very dedicated following. People _wanted_ to play even primitive games. Same with many popular desktop applications and websites. Looking at something that is receiving overwhelmingly bad reviews from all target audiences and saying that we just need to invest $50B more does not make sense. The idea has to work at a smaller scale and has to experience organic growth for it to be viable and attractive to investors.
This is why I hedged a little in my original comment and said that this is at least the kind of thing Facebook should be doing. I really hope they aren't spending all, or even most, of their money on the demos we are seeing. I don't necessarily think their specific strategy is right, but trying to do something is right.
Personally, I'd be spending everything on brain-computer interfaces - because that's the only way I can see VR working. What would happen if you gave a team of scientists billions of dollars a year with the mandate to get a brain-computer interface for the highest level animal on which you could ethically and legally do unlimited experiments? Get that down, work your way up to a less intrusive device targeting apes and then humans, and then you could do real, serious VR.
> Then, when they hit adulthood, they are natives in the technology.
That is kinda circular argument. What's the use of being native of technology that nobody is actually using for anything interesting? At least in Minecraft you can learn a living on Youtube maybe...
I don’t use Facebook, Instagram, etc. Nor do I hold stock in any of these company’s (or Meta). But I think it takes a lot of strength to move in this direction, so kudos to Zuckerberg. I hope something good comes out of it for all.
Everyone wants another iteration of iPhone and more stupid software. It's all the same. The tech industry is becoming boring and uninspired.
The only tech that gets me as excited as when I was a child is VR/AR. Fun and exciting new hardware. Give me something that I can create and play with.
Supposedly Oculus has a young userbase as well.
really hard problems requiring actual innovation? so-called tech guys can only sell ads and personal data, sorry.
Four years ago, the Facebook founder revealed his admiration for Augustus Caesar. Zuckerberg honeymooned in Rome (his wife joked that Augustus was the third party on their trip), one of his daughters is called August, and his strange haircut is reportedly inspired by Augustus’s style. But as he fiddles in the metaverse, ignoring the fact that the rest of his empire is crumbling, he is beginning to more closely resemble Nero.
Nero wasn’t all that bad. Ok, he was but are they saying Zuck ain’t bad?
Zuckerberg copied an idea someone else came up with, used shady business tactics to screw his cofounders, was lucky enough to start at Harvard which helped differentiate and legitimize his me-too product, then rode network effects to success (mostly because it was managed by competent adults who were as unscrupulous as he is). He's done nothing else. Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus were acquisitions, and the company's core product has become simply a disinformation machine which no one under the age of 25 will touch.
The only thing Zuckerberg has done is make money. Which is all well and good, but his "vision" is non-existent, as demonstrated by his insane focus on VR when he could be doing so much with the platforms he already has.
Back in the day, he was basically an insanely good, detail-oriented product manager that kept relentlessly innovating Facebook. Other social networks kept making mistakes, he didn't. Facebook worked and kept getting better, for many years. And it made money because he brought in Sheryl, since he was good at product but not good at business.
But that's all he was, just a really really good product manager. So you're right -- nothing visionary about it. And he had no idea what to do when the News Feed began actually affecting elections and civil wars around the world -- totally and utterly out of his depth.
And now he wants to be the "visionary"... and is taking down the entire company in the process. It's really a sight to behold. And it's the kind of egotistical indulgence that's only able to happen when investors allow founders to keep control.