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Comment by NikxDa | Hacker News Reader

I can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money.

But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.

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Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.

Youtube isn't really known to be highly profitable. I'm also not sure people would go to a Facebook YouTube when the normal YouTube exists

Brother, YouTube is quite literally a money printing machine. I don’t know where you’re getting information from.

YouTube has a lot of revenue, profit isn't known as far as I'm aware. Alphabet doesn't report YouTube earnings separately, and when they were still sharing that information it was a pretty large amount of losses IIRC. But if you have sources I'm happy to change my mind

They report YT's earnings, iirc it is about 60B (40B ads + 20B subs) annually, with 10% YoY growth. They don't disclose youtube's profits outside of Google Services (which has ~40% margins), so yes youtube is a money printing machine.

And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.

Thanks, I will look into it, my mental model is outdated of what you say is true

When people talk about breaking Google up… YT has always seemed an obvious candidate for separation

They tried. Facebook Watch. It's a total disaster.

I thought that was a hardware device for your wrist. Wow.

> Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure

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.

51% shareholding he’s free to make all the mistakes he wants

Corey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...

Cliché cynic's comment: the end users they are concerned about are the companies they sell ads to. If you're not that, tough luck.

> why nobody ever stops for a moment

What, you want to get fired?

Zuck has not accountability and total veto powers at the board level. If this was some other CEO making so many mistakes starting with the brain dead Metaverse, they would have been either fired or investigated for fraud. At Meta only the low level engineers are held accountable.

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