Mass layoffs and absentee bosses create a morale crisis at Meta

A metaverse-like concept is conceivable, but a long long way out.

But you're making an error if you're lumping Bitcoin in with "crypto".

The fact of the matter is, if you have people you can hang out with in person you're not going to bother with VR, or the metaverse.

I am quite sure he had the data that growth with Facebook, Insta, etc. was limited and threatened by TikTok and others. The Meta stuff was an attempt to break out of that I to a different space, where they could be the early mover. And then being blinded by own fascination for the space. I think many share the assumption that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook never really understood what users actually want and had luck their platform matched the spirit for some time.

They could both fail but I don't think you can predict one from the other.

But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.

Do people really want to bet against the company that has had so many consumer product successes even ones for which there was widespread doubt e.g. Apple Watch, AirPods etc.

And what if it takes off ? There will need to be another platform similar to iPhone/Android and isn't that the type of bet Meta should be making.

Be it Ragnarok Online, Runescape, Ultima Online, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Minecraft, or whatever, anyone who has played multiplayer games of any kind know exactly what the "metaverse" was trying to sell to us and the common masses. We also know that multiplayer games, unlike practically every romanticized depiction, generally sucks to play with strangers. You absolutely need a tightly knit group of good friends to play with to be able to truly enjoy them.

So when we said the "metaverse" would never take off, it's because we have literally been there and done that.

Yes, there are other companies and products in similar spaces but Facebook would have been cash positive in each of those ventures pretty soon if not crazy profitable.

Whereas the Meta VR demos are almost close to what we can see from 80s, not to mention that they add no value to gaming, entertainment, communication or commerce.

This seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. At the time, the biggest concern Zuckerberg had was that they didn't own a platform. Apple had the iOS ecosystem, Google had Android, Microsoft had Windows, Amazon had AWS and their logistical moat. Zuckerberg made a bet that the world would move to VR similarly to the way the world moved to PCs in the 80s, which allowed Microsoft to take over a big chunk of the world.

Zuckerberg's fear wasn't unreasonable, he just bet wrong. Apple's privacy changes had a huge impact to Facebook, and the other FAANG without a "moat-defining platform", Netflix, is also in the most precarious position among the big techs.

That said, I agree with most of the other comments. I can see VR evolving a little beyond gaming I guess, but it's actually kind of a nightmare to imagine myself wearing a fucking headset all day. At this point I think Zuckerberg knows he bet wrong and AI is the future, and he's clearly trying to pivot, but it's really hard to move a big company like Meta quickly, and it also means he has to admit he just lit billions and billions on fire.

Were these reasonable people banking with Silicon Valley Bank like all the smart guys? Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k. Tether has survived something like 2x depegs so far.

We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.

Simultaneously, it is worth noting that major technology companies did not develop working generative AI. Examples include Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and even Google's search algorithms, they all fall short of user expectations. And they had years and years and billions of $$.

The parallel between virtual reality and artificial intelligence is intriguing. If some company can successfully develop a VR system which does not suck, it could revolutionize the industry in much the same way as a openAI.

But that company will not be any of these big ones…

I agree it's clear on day one that these models will be useful.

What's less clear is how useful they are -- a year ago most experts would have told you that an architecture that "predicts the next word" won't be powerful enough to make a model that could lead to AGI-alike abilities (and many people here still argue the same today), but here we are now.

> Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early

That's just a lack of vision. GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. He had plenty of time to commit to AI development instead of Metaverse.

In Denmark the highest income households have small cheap TVs they can hide away while low income households have big 4K TVs as the main attraction in their living room. The reason is that the former don't want to appear like passive mindless consumer zombies who watch TV.

It is a very superficial opinion but wearing a VR headset is literally the most 1984 consumer zombie thing you could possibly do.

Even though I feel technical right all these years i regret for not buying as many as i could have even back in 2017/18.

Centeral banks turned everything like a Ponzi scheme. How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving.

Being able to buy drugs online was cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the billions of dollars invested and vast amounts of carbon emitted.

I wouldn't be too shocked if crypto did peter out or flatline over the coming years, just it doesn't seem a priori obvious, given my broad criticisms of it have not stopped its success to date.

And he would have been too late.

It’s been 18 months since they “pivoted”. Come back in 5-10 years to see who was right. Assuming the metaverse is a failure at this point is simply arrogant.

This is what Ron Paul and others have been saying about fiat currency for decades.

You'd think if anything they'd want to invest in that more now that LLMs could be used in combination to produce a much more natural home assistant experience.

That said, whilst I think VR doesn't have a huge amount of potential (the equipment is expensive and awkward), I think there is still a lot of space for making it easier to meet and communicate with people virtually. There's still a huge amount of friction where nowadays almost every service has limited public messaging and comments, etc., and online communities are fractured across dozens of Discord or Matrix servers. I think one of the main parts of Tiktok's success has been that it makes it easy to speak to new people either via public comments or video replies, etc.

I think it's clear they will (and are) be useful, but how useful is very much an open question

Maybe like 10 years ago when PG was more active on here he was participating in a thread (honestly forgot about what) where I ended up asking him “If Mark Zuckerberg applied to YC with objectively the worst idea you’ve ever heard, would you invest?”

And he said, “of course!”

I think at the time VR started making headlines, I thought was a pretty cool concept. I loved that Valve and Oculus (private at the time) were both going after it.

When FB bought Oculus I didn’t see an obvious connection, but like you’re saying I just assumed Zuckerberg knew exactly what he was doing.

Over time I’ve come to appreciate WHY they made the investment. If they had been right, they were going to be very right (and frankly in kind of a terrifyingly dystopian way imo).

I also wonder if FB could go back in time would they completely scrap VR investment? What (at the time) would have been their big bet instead?

I think he's just desperate to have what Apple has; A hardware platform on which to hang other services and applications.

And this is in contrast to what YC likes to call tarpit ideas, because there are lots of ideas that look good but everyone who tries to tackle them fails for whatever reason.

So we can say metaverse was a bad bet for Facebook, but that's sort of looking in hindsight at the struggles that tech has and the unknown market. And it appears to be a big bet and lost.

But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority seeing the progress and now seeing the excitement. But go back a couple of years, and more of us would be naysayers, talking about how bad the tech is, or various failure modes.

But they didn't really do much public messaging around it.

It's also important to remember that Facebook was staring down the barrel of a bunch of investigations regarding election misinformation and basically tailoring their products to be addictive to teenagers while they internally realized it was harmful. The rebrand was much more about rebranding than meaningfully changing the direction of the company. I think he just figured with ZIRP he could do the direction change as well at 0 risk.

In case it's a surprise to you; crypto, after one of the worst bear markets, has now around $1.2 Trillion market cap.

So sure maybe it's bullshit but so is facebook and tiktok. They still make money selling BS ads and toxic content. Crypto will be an upgrade comparing to their present business model (Zuck tried to get on crypto but was discouraged by regulators).

From the business perspective I think they failed in playing the Japanese console game old strategy (Nintendo and Sony): work obsessively to have great and high quality content and synchronize this with the console launch. Not saying that Nintendo and Sony are not nightmares for producers but they are very obsessive about details.

Google Glass had similar problems.

Eventually someone's going to nail both these things, we just haven't seen it yet.

Oh my. Such a good way to put it. Thank you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...

This became even more obvious when shortly after Facebook's pivot nobody, I mean like absolutely nobody was searching or reading up on VR news. It's a topic that people just don't care. They don't want VR in their life. People want more REALITY in their life, not less. Especially after COVID.

On the other hand, AI has sparked everyone's imagination. Only a few weeks ago I showed my wife ChatGPT and we used it for some work she had to do in her field (medicine) and she was completely amazed by it. She's got her own account with OpenAI now and uses it for a variety of things already. My wife is the most non tech person ever. This to me is a strong indication that AI has not even scratched on the surface of its potential.

A year later, Facebook ends 50% higher. Another year later, Facebook is 30% again higher. And it happens for another year. In the end, what gets Facebook is Apple AAT but it still ends up 60% higher than when that comment was posted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058

The problem is that the tech cannot actually do things even close to this caliber yet. The fidelity has not reached the uncanny valley yet, much less gotten over it. Zuckerberg clearly thought he could make this possible with Meta's resources, but that just didn't happen.

Just looked it up. Between BTC, ETH & top stablecoins, crypto has $900B+ market cap and $60B+ in 24-hour volume. I'm not saying your conclusions are wrong (though I disagree), just that you're calling the game "over" at the end of the first quarter based on one hype-cycle. I remember people doing something similar in the dotcom bust: "WWW is dead."

It's not about whether or not there is value there to be provided. VR and cyrpto provide value too, it's just that the markets for that tech are way more "niche" than companies were hoping for.

And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software.

The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now?

Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for.

Right now what I am observing is a phenomenon that is way too common in our industry. Companies are rushing to go to market with some AI "thing." 99.9999% of those "things" will end up being more versions of the Metaverse and crypto. Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people. It's all so novel and abstract and people are seeing dollar signs with very little understanding of how they are going to put it to use.

Where it finds its uses, I predict will be limited to the same applications that we're already using ML for. Chat bots, entertainment, generating document outlines etc. Just because we made a big breakthrough with the technology doesn't mean that we've actually created a solution to real world problems that real world people are having here and now in the real world. No one, other than maybe Open AI, is going to get rich on "generative AI." If they get rich and change the industry, it will be finding a use for it that many people want.

The Metaverse is coming along just fine. Roblox, Fortnite, VRchat, and Second Life all work. None are ad-supported. It's not compatible with Facebook's business model.

There's no real role for "brands" in the metaverse. Or even ads. All the successful systems charge the user, although many have a free to play tier. As a branch of gaming, the metaverse works reasonably well, and is getting better. Gaming itself is huge, has passed Hollywood, and is going on from there. See the current issue of The Economist.

It all comes back to how Meta makes its money - data collection.

Facebook is in a really tricky position right now. They don't control the hardware or OS that it runs on, or the app stores. That means that at any time, Apple or Google can screw them over and deny Facebook from collecting data.

However, what if they had their own hardware (Oculus) running their own OS? Then, they could collect as much data as they wanted without any interference from Google or Apple. That means significantly more profit! There's no way in hell they're going to break into the mobile phone market, so VR was their best option.

That's why they pushed VR so hard. They need it to work because otherwise they have no control over their main source of income, and the squeeze on them is getting tighter ever day.

None of this needs ideology about the consensus layer or fandom about how transactions are settled with claims of “hard money” thats going to take over the world, but that sentiment does harden it and is intrinsically intertwined. But you can ignore it and still recognize the parts that are valuable, even if there is no value to you.

The hilarious thing is how much these use cases will fold back into AI.... how else do you expect an autonomous agent to manage its finances? Or for a global autonomous economy to emerge?

You should do yourself a service and read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Learn about Ethereum. Learn about the drama and history surrounding the space; who the good guys and bad guys are. It's a really complex subject and I understand if you don't want to set aside the time to fully learn about it, but you do yourself a disservice by sharing an ignorant perspective of the space. At least have the courtesy in such case to recognize that your opinions are not fully informed.

I think fundamentally Facebook is not a product company and is consequently bad at actually making products. Apple has been moving very cautiously on the AR/VR front in contrast. Granted, Apple moves cautiously on everything, but they do seem more intentional about what to leave up to users to figure out on their own vs the Facebook approach of assuming you can just solve the interesting engineering problems and have the cool technology and people will just figure out how to use it. Smart watches and smartphones existed for a while before the Apple Watch and the iPhone, but what really kicked off the market for them was just a design that put it out there for people to explore with it so Apple could then iterate and figure out what the real niche was. But that will never happen if your initial test cases are just tech nerds. Tech nerds love the technology qua technology too much to figure out why things are interesting outside that.

1) De-proprietorizing user data

2) Handing identity from identity providers (like meta) to open systems

3) Allowing foreign content into the walled garden

So Meta built the least useful but snazziest part of the meta-verse, the verse part. And they built it in the face of a bunch of other already extant "verses", like Roblox which offer a more intersting landscape for interaction.

I don't think so -- generative AI doesn't really provide strategic advantages to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp the way it seems to hold promise for search (Google/Bing) and productivity software and certain jobs. Same way crypto isn't strategic to Meta either.

You don't have to pivot your company. If you're still raking in cash, it can be much smarter to just continue that, rather than make a giant bet that might ultimately sink everything.

Sure, but VR isn't, they're different things. For VR they've sold somewhere around 15-20 million headsets, and many people use it quite a bit. I have no doubt VR is/will be big, but the path to finding what's compelling in VR will be strange. Personlly I rediscovered a love for table tennis and play every single day now, I'd probably pay $2-3k for a Quest 2 if I had no choice.

That said I think trying to build the "Metaverse" in a top-down way will be very difficult, and Meta will probably not be the ones pulling it off since they don't have much good will, people actively avoid their social platforms if they can. But to me, what we need is not a Metaverse, but a good OS/platform with integrated social/identity, where friends can easily join each other's games, voice is enabled by default and provided as part of platform, not individual apps etc. Meta has been working on making this easier, but with my friends group the friction is still too high. And it's super annoying when third party apps (like Rec Room) needs their own login, friends/social features etc making it cumbersome to find your friends in there.

I consider myself to be a pretty reasonable person and I think the value in something like Bitcoin is as a backup or alternative to the traditional system. Similar to how someone would invest in gold. Except Bitcoin is much easier to transfer, requires much less space to store, etc., vs gold. I think 95% of crypto is bullshit though, and there are a lot of scams.

If you look at recent bank collapses, high inflation, etc., I think a reasonable person might question how long modern monetary theory can go on like this. I'm not a gloom and doom person. I still hold fiat, haven't given up on banks, still invest in US treasuries, stocks, etc. But I think holding some in crypto and gold, etc., also makes sense.

I don't think so.

I just think the massive spending is a bit premature. Keeping a R&D division inside Meta makes sense. Betting the farm does not.

VR has enormous potential but we are still lacking more ergonomic headsets and killer apps. I want to do 3D modelling in VR - except for some simple apps, I can't do that.

Companies that get big and then score repeated out of the park hits do so by attracting and nurturing talent[1] - they don't do so by having one brilliant star that shines eternal.

1. And that is a really good and honestly rare talent in the modern marketplace - it can be hard to let creativity thrive.

> But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.

The faithful have managed to get BTC up over $30K again, though. Saw Tim Bray posit the other day that if the US Gov just dumped all of it's BTC holdings (mostly seized from criminals) they could crash crypto quickly since the liquidity isn't there.

As far as I know the last bust wasn’t much different to the ones that came before it.

This is essentially how fiat currency works, isn’t it?

Zuck doesn't care about the metaverse, he's chasing the next consumer device since he missed the smart phone. He knows that if he doesn't control the hardware, his business is at risk. Apple has reinforced this.

Save for tax cheats (even though the laws are clear) and speculators, crypto just doesn't provide that much value. There are some neat use cases but they are just that.

The "metaverse" stuff... I don't think it was a bad bet to buy up Occulus, they still haven't found a great nail for that hammer but pivoting the entire company seems questionable. There is so much toxicity on the internet, why would you want to be "immersed" in it?

I'm not anti-generative AI, I don't want to sound that way but Zuck and company have some interesting data on large scale systems with giant amounts of data and information, they certainly have invested in it too. Maybe it's wasn't "luck" so much as they might have some intuitions about the negatives uses of the technology. It's seriously cool stuff but I think we're still collectively in the honey-moon period. I do forecast a world where we will need to exponentially strengthen our BS meters.

New one to me, love it. Synonymous with ideology, IMO — keep zooming in, the answers are there, we promise! Those who zoom out are lost!

- Lack of relevance on the big blue site.

- Huge slide in ad revenue.

- Expensive acquisition of Oculus with not much revenue to show for it. $2bn is not a bet-the-company amount of money for Facebook, but it is something, and that $2bn spent on Oculus is op cost taken from somewhere else.

- Reduction in moats for FB, Web shifted to mobile, FB tried bets on mobile + gaming, but those moats have receded.

I imagine Mark wanted something that could increase ad spend, new revenue stream (increase revenue from micro transactions, digital asset ownership) and something to give them some platform strength to shore up their future.

If you look around there is no other technology that is offering itself as a platform to own apart from the meta verse.

Now, I absolutely do not think this bet will pay off - but I can see how he would think it would.

BTC/crypto is a natural alternative to USD settlement. If you believe the USD is sunsetting as the global reserve currency then crypto, especially btc is probably a good long term investment.

Every single time I've asked ChatGTP or Bard a "simple" question that I know the answer to, there has always (always!) been something simply outright wrong. It is just not ready to be trusted right now, but I look forward to the day when hallucinations are solved.

Until we can be sure that LLMs do not hallucinate, I struggle to see the value to everyday-people for LLMs beyond use cases where accuracy and facts are unimportant. So ignore google-killing search engines, ignore medical diagnosis, ignore programming, ignore legal advice, and instead embrace making up stories or poems about unicorns or whatever where facts, accuracy, and correctness simply don't matter. It will still have a big impact sure, but I don't think it will be as world-changing as people think once the novelty wears off and people realise that LLMs are generally not very reliable when it comes to giving accurate info, and are better suited to "creative" tasks where correctness/accuracy doesn't matter. E.g. with stable diffusion (remember that?) no one expected a perfectly anatomically accurate picture of a dog or whatever - it did a passable picture of a dog eating a burrito or whatever the prompt asked for, but no one confused it with reality or treated it as fact. This is where I feel that we are with LLMs right now - passable, but does not hold up to detailed scrutiny.

But obviously yes the metaverse is obviously total bullshit and facebook have totally jumped-the-shark on this. They're currently deep in restructuriung to undo over-hiring during the pandemic - it would not surprise me at all to see them also re-pivot away from the metaverse too (couching it as some sort of "focusing on efficiency" or whatever, i.e. continue working on FB, instagram and whatsapp core features)

Metaverse stink: "This could have been an email" in 3-D!

Bitcoin has 2 stinks:

A)Find a lot of computing energy. Think about building power plants to make coins, and you're starting to get somewhere.

B)Price will rapidly drop and spike, maybe thousands of dollars per day. That's a feature!?

LLM AI: 60% of the time, it's right every time! This tech includes very nice graphics to back up any of its highly confident and hallucinogenic bullshit. Until this phenomenon is well understood, it stinks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...

You say that, but crypto bubble hasn't really popped. At 30K, BTC is only down around 55% from the highs, that's about in the same league as many tech stock declines this year. A true bubble pop should be like 90%+ down. The masses clearly don't agree that it's bullshit so far.

You know, I never really though these founders were visionary geniuses. For the most part they are well connected/already well off, and did the right thing at the right time. I think the last couple of years have made that even more clear.

Facebook really started taking off about the time that a second golden age of tech was starting, fueled largely by near-zero interest rates and a focus on massive IPO exits without any proof of profitability. Nobody had to make any money for years, if at all. Uber hasn't made any money and neither has Spotify. Tesla does make cars, but its real product is arguably its absurdly valued stock that has allowed it a large runway fueled for the most part by the delusions of grandeur of its CEO. During this time larger companies simply acquired everything in sight, hoping that it would pay off. I mean, of all these acquisitions by Meta, which have been worth it? They're not all Instagrams.

https://www.techwyse.com/blog/general-category/facebook-acqu...

Facebook made it, but not because Zuckerberg made the best PHP site ever. Right place, right time, maybe among the first to realize that any engagement is good engagement, and I doubt it was Zuckerberg himself who had that realization.

On top of that, Google, Meta, and advertising companies in general have grown mostly on the theory that the mass amounts of data that they collect and use to sell hyper-focused ads is worth something. Recently it's been revealed that this isn't true, and you get just as good or better results by simply advertising the last thing somebody looked at, or whatever they are currently standing next to IRL. Knowing that you looked at hemorrhoid cream 3 years ago doesn't help you sell anything today. So it's arguably based on lies as well.

Now with interest rates up, I think we'll see how that plays out as advertisers finally start pulling back due to economic conditions. Uber turned off 2/3 of its ad spend in 2017 after it found that most of "conversions" were in fact fraud. Curious to see what other companies experience on this front. We'll find out how many of these founders are true geniuses or were just burning cash. I mean shit, give me a billion dollars and I'll give you something that looks like the next big thing no matter what...

Because at the end of the day, Facebook didn't have much to lose. The social media wars were over, FB and especially Instagram had won. As long as they didn't actively break anything, the information->ads->money pipeline will keep flowing until the entire space gets disrupted by something fundamental shifting under their feet.

A VR-2ndLife that actually caught on could honestly be a relatively believable such shift. Ultimately it didn't, but that's still alright news for FB: no big changes means the gravy train is still rolling.

That's some frustrating shit, because it rewards the least patient and surface-level analyses which (correctly!) identify deficiencies and lulls in activity, but mislabels them as stagnation or dead-ends or fundamental flaws.

It took us 20 years from General Magic to a passable iPhone.

VR will take time, and AI is likely more fruitful to prioritize currently (not saying that's a bad idea!) - but we don't yet have enough historical perspective to declare VR - or even (ick) crypto - as bad directions.

I couldn’t help but think that I have zero interest in a stadium or any size meeting where I have to put a VR helmet on….

I can imaging Zuck and Carmak and others would love that people listen to them in stadium sized meetings, but I’m not sure how users feel. I’m sure one day there will be such experiences, but there seems to be nothing appealing to many individuals about them now.

God help me when some CEO declares a VR mandatory meeting…

Metaverse seems like a top down driven thing.

OTOH: Whether generative AI has any value beyond mass desinformation and making "creative people" unemployed only the future may show. Also: Given than you need super-computers to do the training it's unlikely it will become a technology that can be used by everyone. (The situation here is imho similar to "open hardware": You may be able to design the hardware but you're not able to actually build it in your basement—like it's the case for open source software, which made kind of a revolution possible. AI will likely remain purely a toy for the few richest companies on this planet, without any access for the masses, beyond being "customers").

Regarding VR (the "metaverse"): This was a dead idea already as Second Life was hyped. VR pops up every 10 - 20 years since the 60's, but never caught on; and likely never will for practical reasons. Even Bitcoin has more real wold applications average people would care about than VR (e.g. you can at least buy "stuff" with Bitcoin, or send and receive money against the will of your government).

These statements do not contradict- they can both be true

I'm pretty sure that I agree with you, but what would Facebook/Meta do with LLMs? You wouldn't want to generate fake people to interact with (well, someone might, but Facebook wouldn't). Because that's what data they had would have been useful for. I mean, if you can predict what a person will say, or how they will react to an ad, that has value... but I'm not sure I know where that value is for a Facebook, outside of better targeting of ads.

Maybe predicting consumer/voter sentiment about a policy or product before it's released?

The same applies to Google in aa certain respect actually. I assume they have enough data from gmail to effectively recreate a conversation with me. This could be lucrative for some targets (not me!), but probably not in a way that Google would be able to legitimately capture.

I could completely see how other actors would be able to use LLMs to predict or impersonate people on the Facebook/Google platforms, just not how the platforms themselves would be able to generate value.

Google at least could merge generic LLMs into their search mission to catalog the world's information. But that's a harder pitch to figure out how Facebook would generate value from it.

Am I missing something, or am I thinking too much about this like West World?

I'd give those two another 5-10 years before I expect to see real results — so much needs to be built first at the foundational layer.

Crypto seems to have been an easy money scam from almost day one.

So rather than just putting on your goggles from wherever you are and working, Meta wants you to drive into the office, sit in a tiny cubicle, put your goggles on and work there.

Hopefully it’s just stupidity and culture clash and not maliciousness.

It’s similar to an early push at my org for “return to office” that involved everyone coming in and zooming all day with people in mostly different spots. Some people like this, but for many it seemed like a waste.

Aren't users mostly forming parasocial relationships with "creators" and consider them friends, and want to be with those friends, regardless what they'll do?

I never understood the reaction videos and found them boring and stupid, if I wanted to have an idiot constantly pause the video and say something dumb that shows they didn't understand it, I'd watch it together with my 15yo self. But when I read discussions about it, users commented that they like it because it's something they can do "with" the content creator and they'll get signals to what their famous friend thinks about some topic etc.

Arguably, the proliferation of cheap generative AI content will cause the value of that “fake” content to decrease. Users may begin to value the “real” content created by one’s friends. So Meta’s social graph may become increasingly valuable in the age of AI content.

At some point, the social internet started existing primarily to make people feel good about their own strongly held controversial opinions.

Why would I go on Facebook, where the experience is seeing an old friend hold some dumb half baked opinion they picked up from Fox/CNN then bicker with them, when I could go to twitter and watch the top influencer in my ring dunk on the top influencer in the competitions ring, making myself instantly feel more right?

I'm still interested in keeping up with friends, but Facebook has undermined this by anti-patterns that show me more ads, more trashy content, more recommendations, and less actual content from friends. If Facebook wasn't incentivized to maximize the number of ads it showed, maybe it would be able to actually deliver on that value proposition to users.

This is it. FB was actually super fun in college: it was a virtual dorm hall. It was a party. You could post crazy shit, post party pictures, and hope that girl you liked saw it.

Now it's a combination of a class reunion and your aunt's 70th birthday party, but the usual social restraint is conspicuously absent.

Meta as a company seems unable to recognize the change, because doing so would have threatened their cash cow.

You can't infer what people want to do from what they are doing when the platform is trying to influence their behavior.

Facebook has not been a good platform for keeping up with your friends in 10+ years. The main reason is that Facebook is a business that needs a business model. It's not enough to provide a useful service to the users, but you must also be able to monetize it. For FB that meant ads, and then it meant an addictive algorithmic feed to make more money.

That happens often when you run an online service as a business. First you have a good service that attracts a lot of users, and then you gradually destroy it and replace it with something similar but worse to make money. When young people started preferring other social networks, it was a clear sign that Facebook had done that.

You can do this on TikTok with a new generation today, and Facebook is banking on being able to do this in VR tomorrow.

Tell us what makes you happy and sad. Tell us everything about you. Tell us for free and we will give you an endless stream of content/notifications/things to do that make you feel less lonely. We will then work with companies that inject ads that directly prey on your insecurities. You need these things or you can't be happy. All your friends have these things. We will reinforce this message several times per hour.

The only way for Facebook to "double down" on its core principle within its current platform is to do something like buy QVC and start to really focus on bleeding seniors. There's a lot of money to be made on Social Security Wednesdays.

I thought the same thing about the sample size but if a third of the company gets chopped, you’re going to have major morale problems. It points to many, many leadership and management problems.

Also important to remember that FB is a competitor to legacy media.

> absentee leadership,

> Mr. Zuckerberg, 38, is on parental leave after the birth of his third child

> The company’s stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago

This is pretty disingenuous, considering nearly all tech stocks fell off, and Meta stock has more than doubled since bottoming out at around 90/share several months ago.

The metaverse is stupid and nobody wants it!

> While the company has sold 20 million virtual reality headsets — more than any other company producing similar tech —

So a variety of metrics are down after layoffs, general online negativity, and bad press. In other news, water is wet. And doubtless execs are concerned. But is that really a "morale crisis" or just what to expect in a belt-tightening era at just about any company (and certainly one whose employees expected great stock appreciation and job stability and now don't have either)?

That's exactly it: you're actually interacting with people. In the beginning, Facebook had _only_ people: your friends. If you logged into Facebook then and had 0 friends, arguably nothing would happen.

Today, only about every 3rd post is by a person, even if you have hundreds of friends. There probably is a ratio of algorithmically-generated v.s human content that is acceptable to their users.... but I'm chasing the 100% too :)

It's slowly, inevitably moving towards / increasing the farming of humans.

Another point of view is that VR sucks for what it is, even if all the technical glitches were resolved tomorrow and everything worked perfectly.

Why? People just don't want to zone out and spend that much time in a made-up universe. It's just not an appealing or interesting or useful experience for most folks (outside the niche universes of gaming, porn and certain teleconferencing use cases).

Meanwhile the recent past is bursting with example of technologies that not only worked, but positively exploded from the get-go -- despite offering a plainly crappy experience on basic sensory levels. Hand-held TVs, VCRs (until something infinitely better came along), the first 20 years of the internet by and large -- for example. People didn't have to look past their shortcomings because they fulfilled obvious, basic needs and desires.

It feels like you are actually interacting with people.

Sorry, but if you're referring to the current state of the art here (overtly cartoon-like 3D avatars that sort of look like your friends) - that's plainly ludicrous.

Misaligned incentives.

Imagine being on the 50 yard line of the superbowl for $10.

Imagine being in the stands of your kids volleyball game from your hotel room on a work trip.

Live events, large or small, are the killer app, I think.

But IG reels and Tik Tok are insanely addictive to many of my peers.

I suspect there is still more useful work in the area happening there.

Generative AI is a major part of Zuck’s metaverse hopes and investment priorities.

The technology is not there yet. The Quest is nice but gets boring pretty quickly. They still don't have a killer app. That doesn't mean they won't find one in the next few years. As we saw with ChatGPT, many years of work can turn to an overnight success with one killer app.

Conversations internally are all about monetizing users and not losing any revenue due to new privacy regulations.

Apart from the Metaverse which is also cloaked in "connecting people" there is no effort to take the technology and capabilities in the company and conquer new domains. Like Google getting into Office collaboration and Cloud computing etc.

So that spiel about "connecting people" while being a bunch of whitewash is also restricting possibilities for the company

Hindsight is 20/20

Every algorithm seems to end up optimizing for engagement, which basically means car wrecks, conspiracy theories, and other outrageous controversial stuff.

Youtube will never stop recommending Jordan Peterson, no matter how many times you vote it down, because the algorithm has figured out that if it can get you into JP, it will open up a whole new world of engagement as you head further and further down the alt-right rabbit hole. So it's worth a periodic try at the hail mary, even for users who previously showed active aversion to JP.

I think we can be sympathetic to the insecurity these people have without considering whether they put themselves in that position. There is a combination of internal (psychological) and external (environmental) factors at play here.

And going all out building stuff, like the Metaverse -- that people just plainly don't want.

I have a Quest 2 and a Steam Deck. Definitely my Steam Deck is getting more use, though it's initial "wow" factor was smaller.

> gun to my head, I could not give even a rough definition of what the metaverse is or is supposed to be

I don't think you're as deep as you think you are then. Come on give it a try - what is the metaverse?

Yeah, but who actually needs that "problem" solved? Money launderers? Drug dealers? Scam artists? Adolescent boys whacking off to Ayn Rand books in their mother's basement?