Hacker News Reader

Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

The headline is disingenuous given the overall market decline. No doubt the Meta decision was a massive drag on Facebook. It would be interesting though to see an estimate of the loss due to poor management / vision, vs other factors.

Also, (as someone who thinks Meta - by which I mean the metaverse - is stupid) I want to defend Facebook and say that doing nothing would also have made them quickly irrelevant. It's not like they could have rested on their laurels and expected FB and IG to be long term drivers of their stock valuation. Meta was imo a poor direction, but it was a direction, which is better than nothing

View on HN

That depends on the meaning of "nothing."

I don't know what rate of return they get on their cash; probably more than you or I get. However, either of these would be better than the metaverse:

1) starting a venture fund to invest in other startups, which really are innovative but don't need $100's of millions yet.

2) paying a one-time or continuing dividend to shareholders, like Microsoft did in 2004: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/business/technology-micro...

"Meta was imo a poor direction, but it was a direction, which is better than nothing "

Facebook makes money by advertising. Apple closed the ability to track users over to 3rd party advertisers. Facebook is losing advertising money. Meta is just some ridiculous non issue. The problem is fundamental. They are losing the ability to give advertisers value. Put on all the meta head sets you want, but, FB needs to dig in and get a solution to advertiser tracking. [I am open to hire lol]

> get a solution to advertiser tracking.

Fuck. That. The "solution to advertiser tracking" is surreptitiously tracking people all across the internet without their informed consent. And when Apple's policy change required informed consent, surprise surprise, people also said "Fuck That".

Facebook has tons of data from their own sites to build extremely detailed profiles of individuals to target advertising to them. If they can't build a profitable advertising business with that information, they deserve to die.

I think there's too much stock in the Apple closing off their tracking and somehow advertisers stopped using their ads. That privacy control started in iOS 14.5 in April 2021 and I'm sure it's had some effect but I think it's overblown.

https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/facebook-ad-revenue Up 13% - https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... Down 1% - https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... Down 4% - https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

This was forced error. They didn't need the metaverse to be relevant.

Wouldn’t that be an unforced error?

From the context I think "own goal" is the sports analogy that was meant?

"unforced error" and "forced error" already are sports jargon (baseball) and from context "unforced error" must have been intended, which is similar to "own goal" but doesn't imply points being scored. (It's not possible for the defending team to score against itself in baseball anyway, so "own goal" would never really be applicable... though actually the pitcher can walk a run in, I guess that's like an own goal!)

Baseball doesn't distinguish between forced and unforced errors: a ball put in play that results in a baserunner is either a hit or an error. The forced/unforced distinction comes from tennis as far as I know.

I thought they were using tennis analogy, where player hitting the ball out or on the net without being forced to by the opponent counts as an unforced error.

Baseball just has "errors." Tennis has "unforced errors." American football has fumbles, interceptions, safeties, and lots of ways to draw a penalty. I'm probably leaving out other bad things you can do, too (hiking it over the punter's head, or stepping out of bounds, for instance).

I think if we're using it in a non-sports context, "own goal" and "unforced error" are both appropriate.

Doing nothing as you said.

This is the politicians fallacy:

>We need to do something.

>This is something.

>Ergo we must do it.

I can obviously think of any ways they could have done things worse. I can also think of many ways in which they could have done much better.

What’s one of your ideas?

You can pay me my usual $400/hour rate to get that report.

Do you mean unforced error?

They didn't need the metaverse, but they did need some sort of new direction; buying out nascent social networks was a stall tactic to prolong the time before they became uncool with the hip youths.

I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that Zuckerberg read Snow Crash as a teenager, loved it, and either missed the punk ethos or edited it out of his memory when he found himself in a position of respectable authority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com