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Comment by 2devnull | Hacker News Reader

Meta is lame company that’s never had a good product or an original idea. They stole the idea of Friendster/MySpace and used anticompetitive tactics to monopolize. Instagram is sort of cool, but that was just an acquisition. They are the first company that comes to mind when I hear Peter Thiel talk about stagnation. Not that the other fangs are impressive, but Facebook is by far the most underwhelming of the lot. All that money and talent and what have they built. 15 years later and it’s still just a MySpace data mining advertising machine.

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> Meta is lame company that’s never had a good product or an original idea.

The React framework is a pretty good product that originated from them.

Sure but react isn’t a monetizable product.

Perhaps then, their best product, and one that will survive their inevitable collapse

Good point. React is extremely popular. I give them points for that. But when I compare react against say the many technologies that have come from google, I’m still pretty underwhelmed.

There's PyTorch, which even Google seems to prefer over TensorFlow.

> They are the first company that comes to mind when I hear Peter Thiel talk about stagnation.

Was the irony intentional, or just a happy accident?

What ways have they been anti-competitive? I hear lots of people refer to fb specifically as a monopoly, and talk about the need to break them up or punish them for behavior. Compared to other fangs, I don’t know what they’ve done? I’m not denying it but genuinely curious what people have to say.

Eg Apple has taken heat for its restrictions on App stores and the double standards they impose on competitors. I’ve also heard of Google slowing down YouTube on competitors browsers to push chrome.

I can’t think of any direct anticompetitive behavior beyond building a product that benefits from the network affect.

They've bought their way into controlling the majority of the social media space with the acquisitions of IG and WhatsApp. TikTok has helped put a dent on that, but outside the US (and its strange fixation for the colour of the online messages' background) they still control almost all the private messaging space (of course, I'm ignoring markets like China and Russia, where there are other things at play).

If you look globally they built initiatives like "internet.org" or "free basics" where they pay telcos to make access to Facebook/Meta sites free. In those markets calling somebody on a phone is expensive, but WhatsApp is free. Looking up a business's website costs expensive data traffic, but checking the business's Facebook page is free. Big pockets finding to make Facebook the internet.

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