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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

Most tech giants are one hit wonders. Microsoft is the exception, not the norm.

The playbook now is get product-market fit -> own 99% market share -> build, buy, exterminate everything that could threaten this market share -> when the disruption comes, pivot to it.

Zuck inspired the playbook. He's done it to perfection. He's been in the ring for 20 years. Yahoo dominated for about 5-7 years. By no means is he a bad CEO.

Facebook's decline was always a part of his strategy, and whatever the employees say about there being a bazillion active daily users doesn't reflect that their time is near. But Instagram still runs strong and Threads has half a billion active users.

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Think that's fair. He's generally been excellent at pissing off users in ways which grow his reach without them leaving and he's been willing to spend big on nascent competitors and actually managed not to destroy their platforms, but I do get the feeling (i) real activity on Facebook actually is tailing off now and (ii) he left a money on the table going for low value ads based on click patterns rather than building events and marketplace into genuinely useful services. But that wasn't his thing and the thing he did have made him enough money to give him bragging rights over an entire room of other billionaires.

Managed not to lose it all on his stillborn metaverse or trying to outcompete AI startups too.

i) I'm sure everyone agrees with this, except maybe a few fans. The best thing he did was slowly wean the whole company off FACEBOOK, even if it's with the Meta smokescreen. Instagram is their core now.

ii) I would disagree on this. Meta is king of low value ads. Google is great at targeted ads, but sometimes you want something to reach as many eyes as possible, as cheaply as possible.

They've barely avoided many of the dark patterns like chumboxes and forced repetition of screens, just because they have enough people scrolling through it. Of course, there's other dark patterns here, but I give them a B+ for low value ads.

The marketplaces and events still provide massive value to the world, for free, as long as they lasted. In the end, it's nearly a trillion dollar company, which is a remarkable thing to build on low value ads.

Oh, they're A+ at low value ads (I don't even think it's the ads that's ultimately consuming the platforms, it's the unpaid content also being overoptimized for clickbait so people end up seeing fewer of the friend updates that brought them to the platform and more of the politics and clickbait videos they can get literally everywhere else). Just feels like they could easily have leveraged their user base into a slice of AirBnB's business and eBay's business and even stuff that's been difficult to scale without Facebook's user base like a much bigger Eventbrite, and that being useful would have given it more sticking power.

Instagram was clearly a great acquisition, much better than it looked at the time. But I'm not sure it's ever been as big or that it's destined to last longer or make more money. WhatApp is where it's at for me and a non-trivial number of others, and they're not making money off those conversations.

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