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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Is breathtaking the amount of effort Facebook has spent xeroxing other products.

I’m still amused by how they had their own online game show because of the success of HQ Trivia.

Facebook... and Spotify, and Twitter. They've all got Clubhouse clones going now. Sometimes I find the state of 'innovation' in large tech companies a little depressing...

The big players can only copy or buy up.

> only

That’s a bold statement.

On the surface it is. But I think if you pause and look closely at the state a lot of the big tech firms these days, they're not run by visionaries and innovators any longer. They're run by C-levels trying to appease stockholders, and middle managers trying to appease the C-levels. That's why startups continue to thrive and occasionally outflank the incumbents.

There are very few visionary people left in tech these days. Most have died, retired, or gone on to other things.

I'd like to see a list of people that HN people think are currently "visionary." I have a few in mind, but I'd like to see what other people think, because I'm sure I've missed a few.

In Facebook's case, they are being run by nobody. Never witnessed a more haphazard, disorganized company before working there. Truly frustrating place to work at, ruled by people with no vision and managed through a Kafkaesque system designed to create conflicting incentives for teams supposed to collaborate. I don't miss it at all.

Ever heard of a hyperbole?

Discord, too.

It's probably true that they cannot resist cloning existing feature that's already working.

But to cheer you up, FB is putting lots of efforts (rumor goes 10000 folks) working on AR/VR. That's quite a lot innovation :)

Working on putting ads in VR by the sounds of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27532243

Yeah, that's the part I don't quite appreciate what FB is doing on VR. They heavily subsidize the hardware, pushed lots of competitors out (e.g. Vive is really struggling), then start selling ads once they got dominant position.

And 200 are working on "how to show ads in 3d"

It's hard to grow as a social media startup now. If you're successful, Zuckerberg and the rest will spend tens of millions cloning you.

Only a select few reach escape velocity. Snapchat, TikTok.

How do you survive without being trampled by the giants?

You can't. They can spend 200 engineers to study everything about your product and clone it. And it won't even make a dent in their revenue.

You focus on things people aren’t willing to post on their Facebook feed. Snap and TikTok remain strong despite being copied because it allows people to essentially shitpost without their close friends and family seeing it.

I wonder how VSCO is faring compared to Instagram, which is another similarly "anti-social" network. TikTok has the benefit of being owned by a larger conglomerate, ByteDance. Supposedly Pinterest was in talks to acquire VSCO.

Once, in a tech interview a long long time ago, the hiring manager asked me some questions about my experience and how I would do this and that... and I gave him my answer and he said:

"Good, I am so tired of hearing from these young folks coming in and saying "well, the way we did it at Facebook was XYZ" and "Facebook does it right by doing it like this" and "FB this and that"

"these kids think they know the best way to do everything because they did something one way, one-time at facebook - and it was their first job, they have no wisdom."

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The company; Twitter.

I mean, isn't Facebook just a xerox of MySpace?

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