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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Stock market seems to be "meh" about it. It popped on the announcement but after hours is pretty much back down to the close now.

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Companies are still not being penalized for spending exorbitant amounts of money gambling on AI "scaling"

The market punished meta for Mark going rogue and ignoring wall st. advice during covid. The stock is up 7x since then. Clearly investors are happy to have mark even if we wastes 10 bil a year on reality labs.

Meta seems like a zombie company, no. They have one product, WhatsApp, thats isnt monetized or at least isn't monetized where I am. Their other product Facebook I dont use nor do I know anyone my age who does, and Instagram, which they are ad-polluting to the point of un-usability.

I think not "zombie", but rather, "mature". Which is almost as bad from the point of view of people who bought their stock thinking it was still a growth stock.

Their user base can't get much bigger, they haven't ever really had a hit product after the first one, and they have a record of pouring billions into things (like AR) that never pay off.

Now, they have done ok with buying other companies and keeping them running (Instagram), which to be fair lots of tech companies have failed at. So I don't think they're a zombie. But they may be something more like IBM, Cisco, or Oracle; a mature tech company that will go up and down, but whose big growth days are behind it.

> Which is almost as bad from the point of view of people who bought their stock thinking it was still a growth stock.

The stock did +50% in 6 months.

46.05% in the last 6 months 69.10% in the last year 235.05% in the last 5 years

Just the facts

> they haven't ever really had a hit product after the first one

Threads is the fastest growing app in history.

And its insane growth showed quite starkly the raw power of Instagram and Facebook in being able to drive large volumes of traffic and bootstrap new products overnight.

I would be surprised if they didn’t try this again to launch a new dedicated TikTok competitor.

Fair. I am on threads and it’s fairly interesting.

However it suffers from what I’d call most of the content being unantheutic. No one is making content just for Threads. They’re sharing videos or tweets from other platforms and it’s their secondary platform.

I’m not sure there’s some niche this isn’t true. But to me threads feels like the personal version of LinkedIn. Lots of self advertising, very little authenticity.

The stock went up 70% in the last year. In what fantasy world is Meta not a growth stock?

What's the definition of a growth stock? Is Walmart a growth stock, for example (it went up 77% in the last year)?

A growth stock has no relation to being innovative. You could grow by just having a giant patent portfolio and litigating aggressively.

I would argue that Meta is just reaping the benefit and profits from some very old IP, some of which they don’t know how to monetise.

A few hours in the "metaverse" destroyed any faith or confidence I might have had in their ability to develop usable products that might interest people. It was like using a product that had been designed and developed by the wrong species with absolutely no interest in the actual user experience. Billions were flushed down a product toilet chasing something that just... stinks.

The experience is so overwhelmingly bizarre, frustrating, eery and depressing from a user pov that the only conclusion I could draw was that no one cared, that it was never actually tested, that no one actually was developing it for a user.

So I don't know. I don't think the company is functionally capable of developing usable, engaging products for people. If it were, it wouldn't have made that shambling abomination public, or it would have taken a very different form. I think it's just stuck enshitifying itself.

Frankly I don't really want to know more than I do about Meta, but it really does make me wonder whether there were actual voices ringing alarms from day one that the product was a dumpster-fire with horrific fundamentals, or if somehow the reporting on it came up all lilies from up-talking yes-yappers.

a) We have an ageing population which is why you still see solid usage in Facebook. And their Groups/Marketplace features are strong drivers of growth.

b) Meta launched Threads a year ago which is at about 300m MAUs and every month taking more and more users away from X.

This read just like someone complaining about every level in the food pyramid being junk food

Zombie companies don't keep growing at astronomical rates. I've been hearing about the imminent decline of Facebook for the best part of a decade.... still waiting.

And yet Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users: https://www.demandsage.com/facebook-statistics/

I'm now one of those people, the ones talking about how they dropped FB.

Eventually I logged on and noticed that as I was scrolling, like 2/3rds of the content wasn't from my friends at all, not even re-shared stuff, it was all ads or shorts from randos or random group pages that somehow appeared on my feed. And of course a lot of the things from my friends were, in fact, re-shares.

I felt like, if only like 20% or less of the content is original stuff from my friends, what's the point of even being here? This is terrible. So I gave up.

When I look at Facebook now, I immediately click Feeds > Friends. It's not 100% perfect, but so so much better. And I see what I "need" with so much less wasted time.

I entirely agree with you.

surely 3 billion accounts

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