Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app

However, this is temporary. When people have seen enough fpv content it will stop getting engagement and the glasses will be forgotten.

"Oops, all broken."

Quite easy to subsidizes 100s of billions in complete vaporware when you can make it up with a single BU that generates 90% of your revenue.

The business model is pure moat. When the competition is bought up and new competition has it very hard to enter the market because your position is so utterly dominant, you don't need to innovate, you just milk everything you got to death, it's not like people have much of an alternative.

The only threat Meta has is Tiktok, and if I were to guess, we'll see Tiktok end up in Meta in a few years. Forcing Bytedance to sell off Tiktok with only 19.9% remaining in BD's hands was a necessary move given the serious national security implications, but eventually Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emiratis will want their money back, and the "best" way for the grift to finally complete will be for everyone of these three to sell their stake to Meta before a new administration can bring in a new FTC leadership to prevent such a merger.

No no no, didn’t you see the MMA training. He’s a real tough guy. Very masculine and strong.

Those two things are not the same thing.

Facebook has no content production experience though, and when they do dip their toes into that market its via AI slop (like their official AI accounts on instagram). I think this is because they don't value the human element of art at all.

They would be entirely reliant other content providers, which is a rough place to be in when you have to deal with actual studios and not just independent creators. Independent creators are easier for Facebook to exploit since they are usually small operations and dependent on facebook/instagram for market reach.

...sometimes

Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter.

People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla.

And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.

You never heard of MySpace?

Social networks were all the rage. He executed the best of all and had the right strategy to build the user base.

They have released some good open source technology, but as the OP said, Meta hasn't much going for it apart from addictive apps for showing ads

Seriously? Of course they did. An easy counter-example is MySpace, which launched several months before Facebook's very first appearance as a Hot Or Not mimic (which predates Zuck by 3 years), and had many millions more users for years (especially while FB was restricted to colleges).

Major competition and a lot of money was going into social media around then (and for a couple years prior), FB is just the eventual winner.

My dude, no one in your reply thread is making that claim. We bristling at the claim that "Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook". Unless you're saying FB's innovation is its business model and is what made it dominate, well, your original statement just didn't substantiate that.

IMO, the only thing I'd credit Zuck for is sticking (at least at the start) to his singular vision of what a social network should be; first it was just open for .edu emails, then when it was released more broadly their product roadmap stuck to fostering a social environment online.

And then he lost that vision. I'd say it was circa Cambridge Analytica when engagement---often ragebait because it gave them more and stronger of that sweet sweet monetizable ad signals---replaced fostering an online social environment. Others would say it's the algorithmic news feed. Either way, losing that vision started FB's demise.

IME, FB was best when it was a supplement and not a replacement for real life. FB had value to me because we could plan parties there and even keep in touch after, get that social buzz going for a little while longer. But it was _never_ the party.

But their recent efforts---Metaverse, all the AI crap---has all the hallmakrs of trying to replace real life. They now want to be the party but good luck with that. Judging by the blowback and lack of adoption consumers see what they're up to a mile away. Zuck has no idea how to stay relevant so now we have a platform more concerned with its market cap than having actual utility.

That’s not to take anything away from the success of early Facebook, but the idea of a social network was not created by fb.

I will ask though, has he been honest when he’s testified before Congress? At best, I think we can say he hasn’t been very transparent many of those times. If that’s not for power and/or financial gain, what is it? [0]

- [0] https://dispatch.techoversight.org/top-report-mark-zuckerber... - which was previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060486

> “we're told to not like Facebook…”

I didn’t have to be “told” to not like Facebook or Meta. The company’s actions for well over a decade and those of its executives, including the CEO, allowed to form that opinion on our own. I’d be willing to bet that experience is not unique to me.

as for the newsguidelines, I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things