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Comment by a2128 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Meta has been making baffling bets lately. They spent tens of billions building a metaverse with the belief that people want to spend their days in a creepy legless 3d avatar of themselves that is pretty effective at simulating what it feels to have body dysphoria, playing with their other legless friends and spending a lot of money customizing their dysphoric avatars.

Now they believe what users really want from social media is less social human connection. What users really want is AI spam and parasocial relationships with corporate AI celebrities. They don't want Facebook to tackle the problem of fake celebrities and fake profiles of handsome men sending friend requests in an attempt to romance scam them, what they really want is more fake profiles

I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find any other sane explanation for this

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I know it's selling him short but I can't help but feel like Zuckerberg is one of the luckiest tech CEOs out there. From all the way back in the mid 2000s when FB totally whiffed on smartphones (Google bought Android and pivoted hard, Facebook could have done the same and just... didn't) I've never come away with any clear sense of what Zuck thinks Facebook is or should be. He took initial market advantage and made a bunch of really smart acquisitions from people who actually do have ideas and then just disappeared into a weird world of VR and whatever.

In a way I'm not surprised by this AI stuff. I don't think Zuckerberg uses Facebook in any meaningful way and I think he's so off in his own world that he doesn't even understand how the average person operates any more. It's just like when they pivoted too hard to video, or too hard to chatbots. AI profiles = traffic growth = good. That's all there is to it. There's no overarching vision at work.

Network effect is strong. That’s why they buy already successful networks. I’m sure he recognizes that he has no clue how to build another one and that it was mostly luck of being at the right place at the right time.

His smartest move was ignoring any non-poaching agreement and exploding developer salaries in order to build out a trillion dollar company / ad network. For that I will always appreciate him.

Why do you appreciate building an ad network?

Like good for him I guess but it doesn't make me happier.

Developer market salary. FB helped bring up total developer compensation.

I mostly use Facebook for posting tiling/tesselation art in a moderated speciality group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/tiling) that has 72,000 people in it. There are some really nice speciality groups you don't find anywhere else. Facebook's UI is horrific for comments, I think even a bad AI design couldn't be much worse, but the comments are generally pleasant.

I check my regular facebook friends occasionally, but not very often. I ignore everything else.

I always thought reddit would be a better place for such topics, and before reddit, forums.

Car forums are still active but a lot pf younger generations use Fb groups or even worse, discord. Discord is by far the worst for speciality groups.

Reddit never really had much appeal to me in the niche world, there was always a forum that was better. Facebook has surpassed Craigslist for classifieds.

> I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find any other sane explanation for this

The most likely explanation is that Zuck and others of his generation that have hit the infinite money glitch in tech have no interest in statesmanship, in helping the less fortunate in the real world. I say "of his generation" because even a jaded monopolist like Bill Gates shifted his interests to actual global challenges (not saying he's perfect though).

For Zuck, Musk, Dorsey, the Snapchat guys, it seems that every ounce of their industry, charisma and delusion is targeted towards maximizing their wealth and notoriety further.

I think Musk is actually out to build a dynasty. That's the reason for his political ambitions and for having tons of kids.

Same here, I am baffled by making llama free for all to use. Only incentive I see for them is to remove barriers to ai slop generation. So, their platforms become stickier.

Risky bet if you ask me.

That's about commoditizing the competition. Also it wasn't the original plan potentially, the LLAMA weights leaked and maybe they shifted strategies as a result.

If they gave us Ready Player One or Necromancer they would have crushed it. Gibson knows what possessed them to make the best possible impression of an office space in Purgatory.

Yeah what's crazy is that VRchat has existed for years, aside from getting sick and looking like an idiot, what people want out of VR seems like a solved problem...

Maybe we are thinking of different things, but my first thought was "We don't have DNI down yet for VR."

They probably looking at their metrics and finding their primary user base loves AI content.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/sienaegiljum/ai-images-facebook-boo...

I’m pretty sure everyone involved is a bot. The con is pulled on the ad buyers

No, there are people on Facebook really do like AI slop.

My Nonna unironically loves the AI Jesus gifs and AI gifs of dogs washing babies.

Many elderly people, I think, don’t know or care if an image is AI generated.

Yeah, when I listen to the videos my mother is watching on Facebook, 90% of the content is narrated by a bot. I'd imagine AI content is also super popular on TikTok. Folks on HN should keep in mind they are not representative of the average person when it comes to tech.

This really made me think that the distinction is not age, but rather the people who have ever used computers to create things, and those who use smart phones as a source of entertainment only.

People who create things, have a sense of the time and effort that goes into making something meaningful. So most of the 'hackers and makers' on HN fit into that and show a disdain for GenAI generated content. We've even coined the term AI slop for it.

OTOH if you don't create things, or at least don't create digital things (writing, code, whatever), then you probably don't care if something is AI or not.

From the typical HN POV the rise of LLMs and GenAI has been a seismic shift and there's been debate ad nauseum about the ethics, safety, and capabilities of these tools.

Grandma has done none of that reading, writing or thinking about this technology.

To grandma it's basically an extension of gifs and emojis and memes, silly little novelty distractions.

I think you’re putting people who make art on a pedestal.

Remember there was an AI image that won an art contest.

> To grandma it's basically an extension of gifs and emojis and memes, silly little novelty distractions

Yeah of course, but that doesn’t change what I was saying.

That makes me really sad for some reason.

AI content is replacing something for the elderly. Is that good or bad? I don't know but it feels sad.

Feels Black Mirror

Nope, my mother sends these to me all the time and even said that Facebook was getting more interesting every day. She's completely addicted to her phone that at Christmas this year, I felt like I was the parent. She couldn't stop scrolling through her phone while her grandkids were opening presents. I thought she was recording video, but no. A perfect user in Zuck's eyes.

My mom is also like that :(

Half my friends and family are like that, too. Put a movie on the home theater, and just 5 minutes into it, everyone's tuned out and scrolling their phones. Addiction is rough.

Buzzfeed also went in the direction of churning out slop, if I remember correctly. They were more respectable when they were about their dumb quizzes.

I think a lot of his decisions can be boiled down to being hellbent on disrupting Apple.

I think the metaverse was his first crack at it until Wall Street gave him the hook for over spending.

Then when AI came around he again became fixated on the meta verse but using AI as the means of generating content for it.

I think these are all moon shot bets and meta still has no track record of success in hardware despite multiple attempts.

It seems that the next great hardware platform is probably a long ways away and will require some breakthrough that hasn’t happened yet and likely to come from a person with maniacal focus on a single application because that seems to have been the pattern in the past.

In other words I think it’s highly unlikely a current incumbent fosters the next hardware platform. I remember a time not so long ago when a lot of smart people were saying that Alexa was going to disrupt everything as we know it.

Also this AI shit on Facebook these days just seems really weird. But maybe there’s a vision of the future that suddenly makes it’s indispensable. Who knows?

according to CEO Satya Nadella “The metaverse is not just transforming how we see the world. It’s changing how all of us actively participate in it”

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