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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

It is like musical one hit wonders, but for software.

Some dumb idea which just hits at the right moment and makes a bunch of money.

In this case in particular it looks like an acquihire.

Meta just saw two engineers actually execute on the joke about "building Facebook in a weekend" except that it then really took off in its target niche and generated a ton of press.

I don't doubt that they're interested in the AI aspect, but I suspect that a significant contributor was that they demonstrated competence right in the middle of Meta's wheelhouse so why not just grab these guys?

It's also part of their longer-term trend of buying or burying any company that starts to get any press as a social media site of note outside of major players where that hasn't been an option.

This is really it. At Meta's scale, even if it's an long-shot for a competitor to hurt them, it's worth turning those low odds into zero odds.

Yet Zuck can somehow argue with a straight face FB has competition (apparently they straight up used to delete links to competitors like Google+ at the time, and also the constant copying of Snapchat) and Hacker News can split hairs over trivial definitions like "wdym fb no competition? email exists" or whatever

Does anyone remember the Iphone IFart app that was sold for $1 million?

Probably not because it never happened. They did try to sell it though.

The person that got the top spot for "flashlight" in the app store back in the days made about $600k on it before apple made it a built in function. Just copied existing apps and got lucky. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/92ybl/erik-ble-app-millionaer-de...

it's the AI wave of the original viral app store apps like "Yo" and "I am Rich".

To this day I swear I want Yo. I’d use it daily.

It's not even one hit software. The software is horrible. It's a one hit PR website.

Those “early” ai generated avatars created from you sending in a handful of your own photos. Absolutely printed money, hit right as mildly technical people could use the tech + the tech was developed enough, but before normal people could easily do it.

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