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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

It feels like, when the history of Facebook is written, it will be clear that the company destroyed itself.

The problem is, what were their other options? They made a ridiculous amount of money on a social network. Where do you go from there? VR and AI were and are attempts to remain relevant, but not every company succeeds in doing that, and Facebook is particularly unsuited to it - you don’t just pivot from web dev to innovating in new fields.

One of the common private equity playbooks recognizes this - they’ll often jettison anything resembling an R&D department from a new acquisition, and run the company as a cash cow. If its market dies, so be it. Leave the innovation to the startups who are focused on it.

The problem with Facebook is that the founders have ambitions beyond their capabilities (apparently).

Unfortunately, the Metaverse happened during the COVID bubble, so there was no shareholder discipline then. Meta did crash after interest rates went up - there were large layoffs - but then they got a boost to their stock due to their AI strategy, which seemed competitive until Llama 4 in early 2025, although they were never on the frontier. Even since then they’ve been burning a ton of cash on AI with no discernible results.

The private equity strategy of putting Meta into maintenance mode and focusing purely on their social media business would have been much better.

Breaking/destroying the thing that put you on the map would seem to be a bad idea. But they so fucked up the algorithm on Facebook, turned the whole site into a political cesspool, that everyone I know left the site in droves.

I think I left 10 or 12 years ago?

It feels like Facebook will be written as a warning business case in allowing a single person to retain too much decision making control.

Zuckerberg had 2.5 good ideas: Facebook (shared), prioritizing mobile early, and buying competing social platforms with high growth

Everything else they've thrown big money at has been a dumpster fire.

Worst still, they destroyed social media, perhaps even contributed to destroying mobile (destroyed in the sense that, well, they became dumpster fires).

I'm not sure a growth-obsessed Facebook could have done anything other than destroy social media, in the same way that a growth-obsessed Google couldn't have done anything other than destroy the web.

The only plausible alternate reality I can see would have been one where US anti-trust was vigorously enforced and kept Instagram and WhatsApp from being bought.

But that would have required expansions of US anti-trust law to allow for more proactive deployment.

> But that would have required expansions of US anti-trust law to allow for more proactive deployment.

A nice hint for legislators to come.

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