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MidnightMoon1331 t1_itwu2n1 wrote

Meta goes down, my smile goes up.

320

Chippopotanuse t1_itwvgsu wrote

That’s funny…the same thing happens to me.

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Hifivesalute t1_itxrved wrote

I don't know.... iffy one.

On one hand I get it. Facebook sucks now and is nothing compared to what it started out as. It has become a hyper targeted ad centered news aggregate for most people instead of the social connector it once was. It will likely fail in the end due to this and honestly it should because something better could and should exist by now.

But on the flipside the worse things get for Meta the more I worry they will begin using more and more of the (now historical for almost two decades for some accounts) data they have to open new revenue streams. That really scares me.

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vix86 t1_ityecpi wrote

> I worry they will begin using more and more of the (now historical for almost two decades for some accounts) data they have to open new revenue streams

That data ain't worth jackshit. If it actually was, Facebook would have tapped into it long ago when they were more directly beefing with Google.

Plus, the older data gets, the less useful it is. No advertiser cares what 21 year old, Joe, was into now that he's in his 30s and only occasionally posts baby pictures.

As it stands, Google has shown that knowing consumer habits always trumps what you are writing on your Feed/Wall.

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Redd575 t1_ity7fj4 wrote

They haven't been keeping on that profitable without already selling our data. Remember Cambridge Analytica?

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appleflaxen t1_itxxw9m wrote

The value of having Facebook gone is worth 100x the data that might be lost.

If it's important: export it

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Nazamroth t1_ityb37l wrote

He said use, not delete. Losing your knife is bad. Finding it in your gut is worse.

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255001434 t1_itz0hnw wrote

Facebook has always maximized what they can use people's data for. If it was worth something, they already squeezed the value out of it and as others have pointed out, old data isn't valuable.

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techleopard t1_ityeh9k wrote

I think people also forget that Facebook is still a major social hub and it does fill a niche, even if many of Meta's revenue streams are down.

Sure, there's other social networks out there, but many of them are geared towards younger audiences and, if we're being honest, are more about feeding into extremely low attention spans and entertainment drive, like Tiktok and Snapchat. Some do not work well on anything but a mobile device, if at all, while others, like MeWe, simply don't have the infrastructure in place to create big networks of people.

As an example: As much as I love Reddit and traditional forums, Facebook remains the absolute best method to participate in special interest discussions, especially in a way that would be relevant for you. For example, if I wanted to ask someone to evaluate my dog for an upcoming show, the only place I can get near-instantaneous feedback from other breeders that are local to me and familiar with the specific show circuits I'd be attending is on Facebook.

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DirkDiggler_Chiraq t1_ityfzn9 wrote

Social spaces only work if people inhabit them. You just explained that its user base is literally dying. FB may be fantastic for dog breeder feedback but it’s not a growing social network and has not been for sometime.

I’m not sure if its current evaluation supports its apparent utility of sucking blood from an ever shrinking stone.

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techleopard t1_itzf6ty wrote

Nothing I stated suggested it's dying. You're just angry about it and will literally say anything in support of the site shutting down. Please, quote the part of my post that is evidence of it dying and explain why you feel that way.

I could say, "The moon is in a stable orbit" and you are like, "See!? It's going to explode!" and everyone claps like a bunch of red caps at a Trump rally because you just keep repeating what they want to hear.

I'm not denying the company's business practices are tricky, but y'all act like Facebook isn't still the biggest social network there is.

If you want FB to die, you have to have a network that does it's job better that will drain it's userbase. I'm sorry, but none of the existing networks hold a candle to FB's userbase and you won't force people into the other networks just by making Facebook inaccessible because they don't have the infrastructure in place to do what they need.

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DirkDiggler_Chiraq t1_itzlfxd wrote

…uh sure lol

> Sure, there's other social networks out there, but many of them are geared towards younger audiences and, if we're being honest, are more about feeding into extremely low attention spans and entertainment drive, like Tiktok and Snapchat. Some do not work well on anything but a mobile device, if at all, while others, like MeWe, simply don't have the infrastructure in place to create big networks of people.

Right, and those social networks are populated by young people. Facebook isn’t. Young people don’t like FB and find it to be something for dog show enthusiasts. The user base is dying. This is well known and widely reported.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/09/30/facebook-scrambles-to-escape-death-spiral-as-users-flee-sales-drop.html

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2022/06/facebook-set-to-lose-14-million-users.html?m=1

https://fortune.com/2021/10/25/facebook-teens-usage-harm-studies/amp/

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/teens-abandoned-facebook-pew-study/amp/

> You're just angry about it and will literally say anything in support of the site shutting down.

You seem weird af.

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techleopard t1_itzxp7g wrote

You're funny if you think a platform designed for a younger audience means that another platform is automatically dying. Young people DO still use Facebook, whether you want to admit it or not. They're using both. Fact is, those other platforms hold a fraction of users.

You're talking about billions of users. Facebook losing 14 million preteens to Tiktok is not signaling the death of the website. FB has nearly 3 billion active users, with 1.7 billion daily active users -- other networks are less than a few hundred million. Would you like me to draw you a picture of the difference that makes?

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mell02020 t1_itwv92u wrote

Good. It’s a cancer on society.

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[deleted] t1_itxa328 wrote

[removed]

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gaslacktus t1_itxe02h wrote

Somewhere on a distant secluded farm, a helicopter lands and two men in dark suits approach a man chopping wood. The man looks up.

"You're needed, Tom."

"I left that life a long time ago. I told you people I'm out."

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chooxy t1_itydiv1 wrote

You're a hard man to find, Tom. But farming... Really? Man of your talents?

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Girth_rulez t1_ity3eyo wrote

>"You're needed, Tom."

All right you son of a bitch. I'm in.

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SpotifyIsBroken t1_ity7fme wrote

It's fun to say that...but remember...he was one of the catalysts for all this stuff.

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MaximumEffort433 t1_itww9t4 wrote

It's not like I'm boycotting Meta or anything, I just don't see the point, virtual reality meeting software seems like a product intended to create a market demand for itself.

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TechyDad t1_itx8iru wrote

I get ads for the metaverse all the time in a mobile game that I play. It touts how useful the metaverse will eventually be, but I keep noticing that people can do this using existing computers without expensive VR headsets that die after an hour.

For example, the ad said that city planners could study traffic patterns to lessen congestion. They show a bunch of people around a table with a holographic city display showing roads/traffic. Except, you don't need 3D virtual reality to model traffic. You can do this right now using any computer off the shelf.

The metaverse is a very expensive solution in search of a problem.

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Nf1nk t1_itxlbst wrote

I have a Rift and I bought a couple of art programs for it (Medium and Gravity Sketch). They are lovely for doing character work but if I want to do anything with any sort of precision it is very hard to work with it.

The biggest issue for me is that I generally do a hand sketched dimensioned drawing and coming out of VR to refer to it breaks the work stream.

I guess I could scan and import it but that isn't ideal either.

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bittabet t1_ityftql wrote

Their vision is a little more complicated than that. The idea is that these people in a meeting can be spread across the world but still collaborating like they’re in a room together. So if you’re in some smaller city you can still get maybe a great city traffic planner from across the country to come to your meeting and help you work through it.

I also think the pandemic made them tunnel vision in on improving remote work, whether or not people will really still be so heavily working remote in five years is questionable.

I’ve tried the latest Quest headset and honestly you get a glimpse of what they’re aiming for but it’s all very rudimentary and prototypey for now. Like they’ve implemented hand tracking that lets you interact without holding the controllers but right now it can only track the thumb and index finger somewhat acceptably and it was mostly an exercise in frustration compared to just holding a controller. They also have color video passthrough now but because it has to run at a very high framerate to avoid motion sickness the picture quality is mediocre. But with more powerful hardware and sensors from 2-3 years in the future I could see this being a genuinely desirable product. They’re basically trying to use VR headset technology to do the more advanced AR that Microsoft and Magic Leap have attempted but failed due to tiny field of views that destroy immersion.

I think given enough time and money they’ll make a desirable product. The risk here is that someone who already has access to more powerful chips and image processing like Apple enters the market and perfects it before Meta does, in which case all their massive R&D spend to figure this out was just money thrown into a furnace.

Honestly they need a partner who could address a lot of their shortcomings to pull this off sooner and to share costs. They’ve partnered with Qualcomm but I think someone like Nvidia would make more sense for what they need to accomplish.

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BaaBaaTurtle t1_itz9rfs wrote

>So if you’re in some smaller city you can still get maybe a great city traffic planner from across the country to come to your meeting and help you work through it.

Traffic is usually modeled in 2D, not 3D. There's no added benefit to a 3D visualization.

I model complicated fluid flowfields and while we've used the NASA 3D virtual reality visualization, it's usually just confusing. It's much easier for us as human beings to process the information in 2D.

The only area where the 3D really can be helpful is 6DOF modeling but again, we're talking a very specific application.

Jenny in accounting doesn't need a 3D representation of a spreadsheet on an expensive headset with shitty cartoon renderings of her coworkers.

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axonxorz t1_itzgmd1 wrote

> But with more powerful hardware and sensors from 2-3 years in the future I could see this being a genuinely desirable product.

This is where people just don't know. Oculus hardware is already 2-3 years behind on release, they've got 5+ years of R&D to catch up by that metric. The Valve Index was released in 2019 and it's still the best hardware in the game, with rumors of new hardware on the horizon with recent hires.

Inside-Out tracking as on the Quest is great for portability, but unless you are massive enough to curve light around you, tracking fidelity will always be sub-par in comparison.

Not being tethered is nice, but the system is a glorified cell phone mainboard and screen in a case for your face, the necessary battery and performance limitations will be there.

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TheStumbler83 t1_ityoj6w wrote

Wouldn’t someone have to develop all the 3d modelling and traffic flow data to present it in the meta verse. It’s like adding more work for no real benefit. Why not just use existing software that exists for such a specialised use case.

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O0O00O000O0000O t1_itx1lto wrote

My last year of college was during the pandemic. I was taking a business of entertainment class. My teacher was straight up bad and was a producer in 5 different projects during the semester.

Anyways, the only grade we received would be over our final project. She never put us into group for the project and we had to go to other professors just to get in contact with the department. Again, she was too busy making money on broadway.

The department chose our product to be based in VR. As we were now being judged by a different professor, this new one basically said “all VR is terribly unprofitable”. Forced to give a presentation on a vr product that doesn’t exist we come up with a virtual music festival in VR.

When the time to present comes the professor is magically back in class. The professor and all her fat cat business friends who are here to get free ideas from the next generation spent like thirty minutes shitting on our idea with basically the only problem being VR is unprofitable. She gave us the lowest grade without failing us.

TLDR spent 6 months of my life trying to get in contact with my professor while she demanded we do a project on VR as she’s making it big on broadway, we present the meta verse and her and all her fat cat friends are appalled we would present on VR after we were forced to, and they are disgusted that we didn’t somehow come up with the new revolution in entertainment for absolutely free.

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gaslacktus t1_itxe9c6 wrote

That's appalling. Did anyone file a complaint with the school's administration?

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r0botdevil t1_itximwt wrote

As a former university lecturer myself, this is something I would absolutely expect the administration to take action over. I mean if you have six months worth of unanswered emails to your professor, that alone is enough to warrant administrative action.

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O0O00O000O0000O t1_itxrled wrote

This was at The university of Texas at Austin. During this time they had an English professor ask students to send feet pics.

He wasn’t fired.

Also had a business law and ethics professor illegally charging students for ATTENDENCE.

Also not fired.

I tell everyone I know not to go there. Terrible school. Luckily I took the opposite of that professors advice and now I work at a theatre that isn’t owned by live nation and Ticketmaster. And I’m not on broadway with people who only care about margins and not art.

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r0botdevil t1_itzoaeq wrote

Holy hell, seriously??

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O0O00O000O0000O t1_itzqxma wrote

Yes, also had a director call a student the N-word. I also had a weather professor who only taught us about outdated meteorological instruments instead of tornados and hurricanes. Another professor in scenic design wanted us to fully learn architecture software in one weekend and replicate the interior of the Albany theatre, again in one weekend. Two kids were murdered while I was there. During one of them, they didn’t even send out a warning text so everyone on campus was sheltering based off word of mouth. Two of my most prominent professors were divorced and would argue about their marriage in the basement that’s how I figured out one had been cheating on the other. During one year, our theatre department, which was the largest in the world at the time, had one role for males in the entire year… a villain role. They also wanted to put on a play that included black people in white face and white people in blackface. Me personally, I was in a severely abusive relationship and I lived in a building that was a civil war hospital. I was terribly haunted and items would appear in my car like a bag of salt inside my taillight, a strange painted stone inside the crawl space I had previously cleaned out, or a drawing of a man hiding his face appearing inside my room. I have a fear of men hiding their faces ever since a man tired to attack me on my street but hid his face with his hands and ran when I saw him. I also would randomly throw up blood and the doctors didn’t know what it was. And I got arrested on false premises for drugs I didn’t have.

College was rough to say the least.

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cremaster_shake t1_itxf6r0 wrote

It's a terrible version of a stale idea, promoted as if the people behind it don't know a damned thing about the thing they're doing.

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supercyberlurker t1_itx2fj8 wrote

Yeah, basically idgaf about it. Rather replay cyberpunk again than do Metaverse

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KateCobas t1_itwyw1x wrote

I still don't know what problem this VR environment is supposed to solve.

I mean, why buy all this expensive equipment, set up the software, and train dozens or even hundreds of employees how to use it when a simple Zoom or Skype conference call would suffice?

This Meta thing seems like a solution in search of a problem.

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smackson t1_itx21rp wrote

Remember when myspace got, like, 65% of the formula right but the other pieces weren't in place / the world wasn't ready yet?...

Then fb figured out the gap, and the tech, a couple years later and created their rocketship?

Zuckerberg is helming the "myspace of the metaverse"... he's hoping he can bridge the gap. But the future is not predictable (just ask Tom from myspace).

I hope he gets taken down a peg. The metaverse should be an open protocol, not a corporate product.

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verrius t1_itxar0s wrote

Not even. We've seen other companies tackle VR, and we've seen other's tackle "Online virtual world that's just a replacement for a real world". Both of them have been massive failures, because at their core, there's no main stream reason for either. Sure, most people can enjoy VR for 30 minutes, but to most people shoving a heavy appliance on their face that 100% blocks their view isn't something they want to do every day. And most people don't want to have a fully 3d avatar to do their online meetings. Combining them doesn't turn this into something most people want. He's taken two dead end technologies and combined them, and is surprised they're not printing money like they do in the books he read growing up.

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saga_of_a_star_world t1_ity2542 wrote

If VR meant I could put on a headset and visit the Louvre, Hermitage, Uffizi, stroll down Vienna's Ringstrasse, walk through Angkor Wat or Macchu Picchu, visit the Valley of the Kings, I'd buy a set in a heartbeat.

But walking down Facebook boulevard, entering Facebook store and spending virtual Facebook money to buy a virtual Facebook soda, getting VR credits when posting said soda on my FB page...I'll pass.

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r0botdevil t1_itxix4m wrote

>But the future is not predictable (just ask Tom from myspace).

I mean Tom cashed out for like half a billion dollars when he sold MySpace though, so I bet he's feeling pretty good about how things ended up playing out for him.

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FakeKoala13 t1_itx0oa3 wrote

It's a ploy to dominate the market share of a new technology. Like uber and eventual self driving cars. They hope to make it mainstream and tie the technology to their own ecosystem.

Knowing what their goal is here, watching it fail is pretty satisfying.

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last-resort-4-a-gf t1_itx0xka wrote

Operate in VR instead on a real person

VR excavator Military training

Etc

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neoblackdragon t1_itx6hi8 wrote

Which makes sense but the execution is poor.

Or

The problem isn't VR itself but the strange way Facebook is going about it.

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John_Durden t1_itx8ykl wrote

Crazy pitch.

Arma V.

Exclusively on Oculus rift.

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Fanatic97 t1_itx6z7e wrote

But they already have Call of Duty for that.

1

T4coT4ctical t1_itxm5de wrote

You aren't thinking about it like a sociopathic CEO-

This whole "remote work" thing is clearly not going anywhere, so might as well force employees to show up to the Meta Office so they aren't even free in their own homes.

2

hodorhodor12 t1_ity8v6s wrote

VR is great for certain types of games. I love my oculus. VR might eventually find a use for business but in its present form, it’s not going to work. It’s not comfortable to use for extended periods of time and the resolution and needs to be a lot higher to the point where you can’t see the pixels. Even then it would be for some niche use cases.

2

cremaster_shake t1_itxf3p7 wrote

Zuckerberg is not some business or technology visionary. He's a shemp who stole a frankly unoriginal online yearbook idea from some guys he knew and then cashed in increasingly on how exploitive it could be. He's done nothing else whatsoever to suggest that he's a genius. He's not even Elon Musk, let alone Bill Gates, let alone, I don't know, Bob Forward, or something.

He's not a genius. He has clout because he has money. He has money because he had luck and gall. He's throwing his moneypower down a bad Sims version of The Sierra Network and he doesn't even seem to know that the concept (never mind the execution) is stale even to know-little venture capitalists.

I'm not saying he can't succeed, especially if Meta just weasels out in another direction that turns out to be an easier path. But if he had less money, he'd sure have less success.

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hodorhodor12 t1_ity934g wrote

I don’t like the guy but taking his company from almost nothing to a public company that has been profitable is an achievement. That takes talent.

−2

drekwithoutpolitics t1_itzhzdo wrote

I don’t think it takes talent. It takes connections, wealth, and a staff of people. But talent doesn’t have a ton to do with it. It’s not like he took the company public, the company had thousands of employees at that time.

Being a sociopath might help, but that’s not a talent either.

Also, “almost nothing” is kind of misrepresenting how privileged he was as a kid.

Talent. Ok. 🙄

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hodorhodor12 t1_iu084q1 wrote

I'm not saying the privilege wasn't a big part of it - I would say it's the biggest component of his success. But to say that it doesn't require talent to take a company public and maintain the user base and profitability didn't take talent is delusional and reeks of knocking down others to make yourself feel better.

1

drekwithoutpolitics t1_iu096f0 wrote

I still don’t think that’s talent, but I appreciate the weird “knocking down others to make yourself feel better.” That’s me, knocking down Mark Zuckerberg to make myself feel better!

What a weird way to spend your time, defending Mark Zuckerberg’s supposed “talent.” Are you sure we have the same definition of “talent?”

Talent: a natural aptitude or skill. That asshole absolutely did not have any natural aptitude for taking companies public, he barely had a natural aptitude for programming. He had tutors from a young age. He stole an idea and got others to help him run with it.

As if a whole company didn’t do the things you’re listing. Give me a break.

But keep going! Apparently there are Zuckerberg apologists and I’m here for them.

1

_boob t1_ityu9d8 wrote

You realize they to get accepted and then drop out of Harvard, you have to be pretty smart, right?

−4

thebigpink t1_itxhgts wrote

Lord not sure to where even begin with all the rest but isn’t that how most business start new products? Less money this wouldn’t even be a thing. Plus he has already succeeded far more then any person on this site will ever dream of.

Not a fan or anything just shit made zero sense

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Thetimmybaby t1_itwyrsq wrote

This belongs in Uplifting News

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adamAlexanderGreen t1_itwya86 wrote

Yeah nobody knows or cares about this. And all the old people on Facebook have no idea what it means🤣

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CrywolfAndrew t1_itwxrma wrote

Oh no! Not a another dead blogging site!

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F5PPu6kGqj t1_itx1v60 wrote

> The company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, is struggling as companies cut advertising budgets in the face of economic uncertainty, changes to Apple's privacy settings undercut its targeted ads, and competition from rivals such as TikTok heats up.

Good news.

> Meta continues to generate large profits - nearly $4.4bn in the three months ended in September, but it has also fended off a decline in users.

Oh...

> The company said 2.93 billion people were active on one of its platforms daily in the three months ended in September, up from 2.88 billion in the quarter before.

Not going away anytime soon then.

7

Maxpowr9 t1_itxr8mi wrote

WhatsApp is where a lot of the "users" are but it doesn't really generate that much money.

3

Nightshade238 t1_itx27u2 wrote

Isn't it funny how a company thought it could just change its name and dodge its privacy issues that way? Hilarious how that all just backfired and made things even worse for them.

5

NotMrBuncat t1_ity4jat wrote

Sell what? Did they run out of personal information to mine?

5

not_aquarium_co-op t1_itx10d9 wrote

Meta doesn't appeal to the youth as long as tiktok is around.

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GhettoChemist t1_itx021b wrote

Damn my dad bought a bunch after i told him to hold cash. Said the financials still reflect positive NI, but so did Enron's.

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Less-Astronaut-8904 t1_itx696g wrote

If you look at their financials they are up considerably year over year in most categories. The thing that caused this reduced profit is from increased spending on their VR and AR research and product design.

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drekwithoutpolitics t1_itzjx5m wrote

But that’s still a very bad sign to me, given that most people seem to know their VR research isn’t likely to pay off for a long time, if at all. Net income down 35%? Holy shit, even if 15% of that was for the (vanity) VR investment, that’s insane to me!

The VR investment reminds me a little bit of Microsoft buying Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. It was Microsoft’s biggest purchase ever at the time, and you could argue it absolutely didn’t pay off investment-wise for MS. The tech isn’t worth $8.5 billion.

The difference is that Microsoft had other things going for it. Meta has WhatsApp and Instagram, but it’s not clear to me how they’ll recoup their losses on this VR stuff without shutting it down in a few years in another embarrassment.

1

Less-Astronaut-8904 t1_iu1kuxj wrote

I have a headset from them so I might be biased but I 100% believe that VR will be the future and make a ton of money for whatever company makes the best and highest quality headsets. Right now that's Meta, at least in Western countries. But yea, I eventually see them having to slow things down with all the VR investment. On their financials page, they only have about 1 billion in free cash flow, however, they plan to spend 97-108 billion total next year.

1

ghos_ t1_itxd7jl wrote

The return on investment of those who bought "real state" in the metaverse has to be to roof /s.

3

MoskvaSinkingEnjoyer t1_ity07rl wrote

You know, the smaller market segment meta holds, the larger market segment tiktok holds. Not that they are the only two competitors in the industry. Just pointing out that the market isn't shrinking. Only that Meta receding leaves more room for competitors like tiktok to expand.

I think it's worth asking if you would like to be spied on and manipulated by American billionaires or the Chinese communist party.

I don't know the answer, and I don't want to insinuate that one is better, but it is a question worth asking.

2

Rogaar t1_ityfogs wrote

Time to short the META stock...

2

HermanDinklemyer t1_ityhpwe wrote

It's a effin mess. They were truly not prepared for this roll out. The boost for business pages is utterly a disaster .

2

Actual__Wizard t1_itwy8jl wrote

Maybe they should invest in not making their current projects not completely suck?

1

RefrigeratorNo3088 t1_itxnsxu wrote

I'm somewhat interested in a VR headset but to me it's still a toy, I'd consider getting one around $150 but when you get to console prices I'd just get the console instead.

1

Mortlach78 t1_itxs186 wrote

It's only 66% down from it's peak a year ago, so I guess it'll all work out fine...

1

Rhomega2 t1_itxt4l9 wrote

Remember PlayStation Home and the huge success that was?

1

Dahnlen t1_ity8h4j wrote

The sequel to The Social Network is going to be so dry

1

Solkre t1_itz9ya0 wrote

I will say the Quest 2 is amazing for what it used to cost. Probably still a good deal but I'm salty at the precedent of raising console costs after release so I don't recommend it anymore. Same with PS5.

I do thank Facebook for helping Oculus get to where it is. But it's sad the penultimate app they're pushing is the shittyverse.

1

Elocai t1_itzq7et wrote

I wonder why.. their new HMD is exactly like the old one except 4 times more expensive

1

BD_9x t1_iu839c5 wrote

Good hope it's goes downer

1

outofvogue t1_ityrw6d wrote

Honestly, I think it's a cool concept, if we were more advanced in processing power (for cheap) this could work. Unfortunately for Zuck, his implementation sucks, we are at least a decade away from this being a major thing, that looks and feels normal.

0

GlassWasteland t1_itwvvv1 wrote

Facebook? Their still around?

−10

Deranged40 t1_itwxis2 wrote

Someone who can't be bothered to understand simple grammar doesn't know about the company that has had a front-page post on this sub every day for the past month still exists?

Not at all surprised.

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[deleted] t1_itx1ne5 wrote

[removed]

−6