Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook
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Facebook loses users for the first time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30186326 - Feb 2022 (395 comments)
"Before I get to that, I want to briefly touch on our Q4 results, which I know Sheryl and Dave are going to go deeper on. I'm proud of the work our teams did here. We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and businesses of all sizes turned to us to help them reach people. But there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business.
The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long-term. As is our work to make sure our apps are the best services out there for young adults, which I spoke about on our last call.
The second area, and related to this, is that we're in the middle of a transition on our own services towards short-form video like Reels. So as more activity shifts towards this medium, we're replacing some time in News Feed and other higher monetizing surfaces. So as a result of both competition and this shift to short-form video as well as our focus on serving young adults over optimizing overall engagement, we're going to continue to see pressure on impression growth in the near term. Now I'm confident that leaning harder into these trends is the right short-term tradeoff to make in order to get long-term gains. We've made these types of transitions before with mobile feed and Stories, where we took on headwinds in the near-term to align with important trends over the long term. And while video has historically been slower to monetize, we believe that over time short-form video is going to monetize more like feed or Stories than like Watch – so I'm optimistic that we'll get to where we need to be with Reels too."
"We're getting beat by Tiktok and we're going to catch up by being more like tiktok"
That doesn't exactly exude confidence.
Adding Stories to Instagram felt natural, but shoving Reels in, feels like a squeeze.
https://www.amazon.com/No-Filter-Inside-Story-Instagram-eboo...
At this point, IG is Facebook. The feed is a slurry of signal, random suggestions, shitty ‘memes,’ and ads. When I stumble onto a Reel somehow, it’s the same crap. Stories worked for me because it was my friends. Reels is just random flotsam, and it seems like a ton of it is just reposts from TikTok anyway.
Meta’s repeating pattern is to enter every new format, screw with the chronology and cram it full of robo-content until it’s unbearable to look at. That Zuck calls chasing short-form video fad a long-term strategy is pretty telling. They have nothing but crap to sell, and if (if) Metaverse turns out to be anything, it will just be more crap, but you’d have to have your face inside a helmet in order to to enjoy the boomer arguments, shitty ‘memes,’ TikTok reposts and whatever else the content slurry that yields the most engagement is.
Stories are best when created by people you know, and they're easy to create too. They're the type of content that would build off of Instagram's social strengths.
The type of content people consume on TikTok, as far as I understand, is largely made by creators though. This is similar to YouTube; they now even get financial compensation directly for it too [1] (although apparently this compensation is not as good as YouTube's).
This could be a Snapchat vs Instagram Stories situation, or it could be a YouTube vs Facebook Watch / IGTV situation. Facebook has historically been notoriously bad at creating a high-quality video platform, so if that's what it takes to beat TikTok I honestly wouldn't expect Instagram Reels to overtake TikTok anytime soon, especially considering a lot of what I've seen there are random accounts reposting TikTok content (which feels a bit like the type of content Watch became infamous for).
[1]: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/tiktok-creator-fund-your-q...
Snapchat DAUs today: 300M
TikTok DAUs today: 1B
They lost the next generation of kids!
If the youth are allergic to any FB networks there just needs to be a viable alternative for them to flee.
One is declining and reviled, and the other is growing and seen as fun.
That’s the only difference.
I'm wondering what kind of play would be successful long-term in this scenario with long-lasting social platform to capture next generation which is naturally inclined to be in opposition when it comes to parents way of life. Maybe creating some kind of "undercover" division not officially connected to parent company? Or even spinning it as some part of company "revolting" against main body and going "rogue". But in both cases mainly founding would uncover the plot. Of course buying competitors usually works too to some degree - or at least allows to buy some time.
FB: formal private (or special interest, in Groups);
Insta: close private (or public if you are a verified content producer);
TikTok: still about building ad hoc network effects based on content alone.
Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from people I don’t know that someone I do know shared, and the rest I can’t even classify but it’s utter garbage. The only useful piece of FB was Marketplace but they managed to cram it so full of paid content and the rest is clearly online stores pretending to be local sellers that are this point I have zero use for that as well. I am sure they’ll continue to be printing money with their “generate outrage => show ads” core loop but how long will that actually last?
There one or two days where you get the little ping in your brain to check the app (as an ex-smoker the sensation is not at all dissimilar to cravings), and after that you wonder why you spent time there in the first place. I can’t leave WhatsApp or Messenger because I have too many people I have on both, but that’s a different issue as far as I’m concerned.
Now I am spending some time on TikTok - but I’m get content from there that I actually generally enjoy, so that’s a net win as far as I’m concerned.
1. Subscribing to YouTube premium 2. Not using Facebook
I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two.
There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you've just accumulated groups and connections for a decade without doing anything to shape your feed, I could see how it wouldn't be very interesting.
But if you take a few seconds here and there to "like" things you want to see more of, hide things you want to see less of, mute the obnoxious people you don't want to hear from at all, and leave groups you're not interested in, it's not bad at all.
If you're not interested in content from people in your social network, then I don't understand what you're expecting to get out of a social network anyway. Facebook isn't a bad way to keep up with friends and family, but if you don't like your friends on any platform then you're probably not going to have a good time.
In other words: You're not their target customer. As with any business, trying to extrapolate your own use case on to the general public is going to be very misleading.
> I really hope the marketing via outrage culture doesn’t make its way there...
Reddit has been unusable for at least the past five years owing to how they tailor the homepage and r/all to be a wasteland of outrage designed to keep users seething at others. It's basically become the two minutes hate.
Overall not bad to be honest. Still not much I'm actually interested in but far from cancerous.
I removed the feed completely, but still kept my account so I can still engage with groups, which is the only thing keeping me there. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
When a friend posts, I want to see it. Simple. Sometime, years ago, FB decided to pick and choose what to show me from my friend's feeds. That's when I skipped out of FB, deleted my account.
Facebook turned everyone into bulk junk mailers. They pay the postage and then slap ads on the flyers everyone sends out. People get to spam their friends with basically zero effort.
If Facebook can weed out zero effort, low value posts from my friends with a high degree of accuracy that at least blunts some of the damage the platform itself has done.
So, yeah, if we're going with anecdata, then my experience doesn't match yours, even with this approach of trying to highly curate it.
Comprehension 101
The local expat group for my city
Vegan recipes
Updates from robot teams
Lame jokes / skits that I enjoy
Birthday posts
Cat pictures
Travel restrictions group (support group for those wanting to come to country X, which is difficult because for the last 2 years it been only charter flights and you need approval from 5 government agencies)
I’ve unfollowed almost everyone from my past and when I add someone new I unfollow them as soon as they post anything publicly that I don’t care about.
I am actually grateful b/c I was addicted to FB. I broke that addiction and the reintroduction hasn't been anywhere close to where it was. Now twitter has seemed to become better... but maybe I've changed.
HN is still well, still here, maybe I should leave and see what I think in 6 months.
Especially during pandemic when I get to see update from my friends. Their new born, or kids finally going to school. I have a suspicious feeling many of the negative and politics went somewhere else like Twitter. And the rest are there you could easily filter out. The place is now a lot more calm than it used to be. Although this may be confined to US and UK? My AUS friends are still on Facebook for political battle for some reason.
In other words, not the youth, which is an existential problem for a growth oriented social media company no?
Regardless of how one might dislike it, the "generate outrage => show ads" thing has been working just peachy for Fox and friends. So my cynical take is that FB will continue to do just fine even as people shift to different consumption formats, and even if tiktok took over the world, because fundamentally, bored people will always exist and fads come and go.
As a random aside, there is a Facebook ‘experiment’ (a/b test basically) that disables all ads for your account permanently. It was customary, for a while at least, to opt your user id (and that of a few friends) into that particular experiment on your last day of working at the company. Best leaving gift ever!
But sometimes I get stuck scrolling forever. Maybe that ad revenue is enough for them. I still go to FB for groups and business' pages.
Then maybe a year ago they started focusing on non local/commercial sales and it rapidly degraded to the point where it's not worth using now. It seems like they have diverted all traffic to paid listings so my cheap yardsale-esque deals on stuff I'm trying to get rid of get no views (where a year ago I would get ten messages a day for the same item)
Wife had that happen when we moved last year.
Maybe A is a consequence of B?
If you don't let them track you, you get random advertising. And random advertising is painful to watch. I'm not advocating for targeted advertising, just stating a simple fact.
Maybe they thought it was going to fail like Vine and other short video platforms.
ByteDance was a large company before TikTok and had other successful products. TikTok actually developed out of a billion dollar acquisition Bytedance made[1]. It wasn't for sale. Sort of like how Tinder wasn't for sale because it was owned by IAC (Match, OkCupid).
Also regulatory environment in the US and in China would make it unfeasible.
Very minimally utilized in my social circle, I see maybe 1 suggested story per month, maybe click through 2-4 a year, watch 10 seconds of bland content by someone I haven't talked to in years, then close the tab wondering why I thought the it was going to be interesting this time.
Have they? They're better than Google. But most of Facebook's side gigs fizzled. Their last bold leap was from desktop to mobile, and that was only by averting disaster with their Instagram acquisition.
Facebook is betting the farm on the metaverse stuff but without meaningful financial results that’s not going to placate market concerns over what looks like a downhill future for the core businesses. Facebook’s less than fantastic record at making money on its other businesses doesn’t have the market terribly optimistic about about the future prospects metaverse stuff either. Net net stock down 20%.
and it's an odd bet.
Yes, there are issues to work out with the headbands, weight, general FPS and battery life, but I finally _get_ it. The amount of badassery you feel as you shoot headcrabs and combine in Half Life: Alyx is hard to describe in words.
Maybe that's not Metaverse persay (is that like, VR chat or something?), but it is the equipment that Facebook is selling, and they've got their own set of games that're pretty fun too.
Like you say, there are some issues with the tech, but they’ll be resolved in time, and it’s clear that this is the future of gaming at least, and maybe much of social media/virtual interaction.
- Half Life: Alyx
- Lucky's Tale
- Beat Saber
- Thumper
Lately I've been sinking time into:
Half-Life Alyx
I Expect You To Die (and its sequel)
The Climb (and eventually its sequel, I assume)
Creed
I don't believe for a moment that it'll extend into work interactions. Maybe family visiting type experiences, again for the subset that can enjoy the headset setup.
They plan on making it up via game sales in the Oculus Rift Store, and services. Same as what Sony did with the PS4 (which was quite successful). I see "Quest Season Passes" in VR's future.
At 1440p and above resolution isn't there yet and pushing multiple monitors through to the headset is still (to my knowledge) not practical. The remote desktop-like apps I've tried only do a single monitor.
I like the bet that Quest 2 made with making the headset do all the processing, but it fails for tasks like this.
I think eventually we'll get a headset where working in VR becomes practical and affordable, but we're not there yet. Maybe apple pulls off a Gear-VR-like setup where you plonk your phone in front of some lenses on your face. But AFAIK anything better than the Quest 2 is substantially more expensive.
My wild guess is that practical work VR is 2-3 years away. Meta's next headset iteration might do it + price drops.
As clunky an experience you describe, the rest were far far worse.
VR is a cool niche experience, but the friction is still far too high for me. I wear glasses, and it needs to be only slightly more friction than that. Whether AR or VR, I don't much even care, as software experiences will adapt to the hardware at some point.
That said, when I try my hardest to think objectively about the future of work, I think VR is going to be everywhere.
Workers going into factories will become exceedingly rare. The cost of humans is high both from a safety and headcount perspective, and more and more of manufacturing pipelines are becoming automated end-to-end. Service repairs will likely happen remotely and only require humans to be onsite if absolutely necessary in the future. It's good for business.
There is a ton on "dark factories" to be found online. Also, there are many startups that have significant traction which are bridging these two worlds via AR:
When it comes to knowledge work, I think anywhere where you have to work with visuals will become a predominant VR stomping ground. If you need to be working with 3D models (lots of engineering + manufacturing) or flat UIs (being able to point and pan and modify is more natural with hand gestures), VR will likely win out. I also think VR will create a space for completely new ways of constructing software architecture. This could be a bridge to creating architectures visually for the first time (want to define a service that automagically becomes a kubernetes service and node on the backend? create a box here and give it some parameters!). The interactivity of this kind of build feels very natural, and it's how we actually already do things in a more limited 2d context. My guess is the killer feature here with VR is the immersiveness allowing for better synchronous collboration.
I could be totally wrong about this stuff, but I think a lot of our lives will change with VR. There are some serious hurdles we need to get over, most notably form factor, weight, and nausea. I feel like these are solvable problems, but honestly that's mostly a hunch more than anything. Would love to hear from others who know more than me!
The iPad is a fantastic device, and it definitely changed the way many people use computers. People use them for all sorts of things, because they feature properties that make them more comfortable for plenty of work applications.
I'd argue however they haven't had the significant, "post-PC" impact people used to believe they'd have. I remember the narrative back then was predicting they would change the way most people interacted with computers, and PCs would stick around "like trucks" just for the "heavy" or specific jobs for which they'd the absolutely required.
What I've seen instead is that iPads (and all tablets really) act mostly as a utility or compliment, and when I had one I only casually used it for light tasks when my computer was out of reach or battery.
So in my case, I don't doubt a lot of places will have VR headsets for work, but I still don't think people will consider them indispensable except for very specific applications. I think we'll keep seeing more remote service repairs, for example, but not that workers going into factories will become exceedingly rare— only less extraordinary. I think it's probable VR will become as common for 3D artists as tablets are for 2D artists, but don't necessarily think it'll spill out into software architecture or other keyboard-centric applications like that.
In summary, I think VR will become more commonplace and be a fantastic tool in many contexts, but I don't think at the moment that it will signify a significant paradigm shift in most work contexts.
I agree with the other commenter that people are going to keep showing up in factories and repair shops, but there may be a decent sized niche of genuine utility.
Do us a favor: stay independent and stay interesting. Don't get acquired by Zuck. Maybe the MechE's in my family will use your stuff one day.
I do agree it's highly probable that VR becomes a utility until we have another leap in technology (contact-lens form factor?). We shall see!
> Do us a favor: stay independent and stay interesting. Don't get acquired by Zuck. Maybe the MechE's in my family will use your stuff one day.
Thank you I really appreciate this compliment. :) My father is actually a MechE so this comment hits close to home. My background is in materials science as well as computer science. After this company, I think I'll go back to my roots in more physics, chemistry and biology and try to do something within bioengineering. Then again, who knows. I feel, as I get older, the only thing that's certain is that I have no idea what I'll value in 2-3 more years, and I think that's a good thing!
Hope you and your loved ones are doing well internet friend.
VR is not a daily use experience for me, and I assume for a lot of consumers, but it is still amazing.
I was into Pokerstars VR for a while but interacting with people through the microphone made me realize I don't really enjoy talking to strangers from around the country while playing poker.
Kind of!
I was developing neck pain from Pokerstars - it's not exactly table tennis. On the other hand, Moss was a very cool game but I found it annoying on my joints to reach under virtual corners and even get on all fours to look under something. Amazingly cool concept, but it's not exactly physical therapy after a computer posture.
I think it will take off when the gear becomes slim and light - like a much newer generation of glasses. Something that as far as I know is still in the realm of sci-fi - but not far.
I use it daily for HIIT workouts, and I use it to spend time with family and friends who are either far away or busy with life i.e. kids. It's way better than FaceTime or Zoom.
In addition to Beat Saber, you might want to check out games like Until You Fall and SynthRiders.
I've lost 20 lbs playing video games.
That being said, Quest 2 uses a USB-C cable that is quite a bit lighter and easier to manage than the Oculus' HDMI cable.
I do think it's amazing - Superhot is one of the best games I've ever played. But I get it - I don't know how to explain, but it seems like work to use it.
I'm a PC gamer and have a very capable PC but haven't bought any VR equipment because I don't know what I'd play.
The issue is probably that I'm not looking for an excuse to buy a headset, I'm waiting for a reason. I don't seek out information for VR and none of it is getting through to me.
1. A lot of people saying this are just older and with less free time. Do you still play video games a lot? I think the question is in part whether VR can engage kids for as long as video games do.
2. The headsets are still too early. Wireless latency is almost there, but not quite. The headsets are too heavy. I think the Quest 4 or 5 are going to be so vastly better that users won’t mind staying in VR for longer, and won’t get bored of it.
3. Content, content, content. Alyx is awesome, but there needs to be 10 of those per year. And with better headsets, and an ever expanding user base, I think content will continue to explode.
I felt incredibly lame shooting the headcrabs in half life alyx. They were fat and slow, and when I felt like they were going to hit me I tapped the left stick twice to teleport 20m away while they waddled towards me hopelessly. When they hit me, I just kind of shrugged because the experience of being hit in VR is so uninteresting. A lot of the times I would just be annoyed that aiming at a headcrab 10m was hard so I just waited for it to fall close to me then shoot it at point blank range 4 times.
In resident evil 4 (which is now vr but I've no experience with it) the zombies did this thing where they ran at you really fast, but when they got close, they walked slowly. This was because you had low mobility when aiming, so the enemies had to play nice to give you a chance. Half Life Alyx felt like that but way more so. Everything coddled you to the point of seriously breaking immersion for me.
Electric dog? Warns you that it's going to zap a path for like 10 seconds before doing anything.
Machine gunner guy? Shoots for 10 seconds then sits still for another 5 in plain sight while reloading.
Normal combine guys? Mostly just standing out in the open or failing to use cover effectively so you can casually snipe their weak spot.
Felt to me like a poorly curated house of dead line gun game.
Porn companies and sex workers will make money in VR environments, whether mainstream companies can remains to be seen.
I should note that I only play multiplayer experiences with PCVR because I'm afraid of getting banned for whatever reason and having my headset bricked. That's one area I'm worried about, but it's not related to the hardware/technology.
Interestingly, by revenue Apple is more of a one-trick pony than Facebook. iPhone sales are fully half their revenue, and almost all of their software income is totally dependent on iPhones as well. Meanwhile at Meta, Instagram revenue is roughly equal to Facebook revenue.
OP wanted to use "cool" companies as examples but the actually diversified giants are Microsoft and Amazon.
Must be why they paid Apple $15B last year to be default search on Safari, a mob fee that increases by the year.
And they have steadily introduced new revenue streams such as Watch, Music, TV+. Services is where it is at.
Meanwhile Facebook is "just" an app. It's pure software, and doesn't have the same ecosystem tie in. It's not a platform in the way that android/ios/windows are. Starting a new social network is much cheaper than creating a new mobile platform.
I fundamentally don’t think FB can innovate. And I don’t think the regulatory situation will allow them to continue acquiring to grow.
An example of this changing landscape is FB failed attempt to acquire Giphy. Can FB survive if they are forced to compete and innovate on their own? I doubt it.
Google and Microsoft have had the same business model forever .
Microsoft has Xbox, Office, Azure, etc.
Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc.
When you diversify your income streams you add more. It doesn't mean you get rid of your breadwinner.
Facebook's main model seems to becoming illegal and/or not viable via a tech perspective.
Alphabet is more than 80% advertising: https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735 . They are good at skewing how they are perceived but they are very close to being a one-business company. Not defending Facebook, but Google is not much better.
But yes, Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick and investment in video through YouTube has allowed them to capture the publisher and buyer side of much of the open web (and use the data to cut out competition - cf. Project Bernanke)
Edit: sure, it's true that they put ads on everything, from YouTube videos to Gmail mailboxes, but that's not comparable to the level of diversification that MSFT or AMZN have IMHO.
Google is probably screwed if search and ads go under, but they seem to be running an interesting experiment on how low quality their search results can get before they lose marketshare...
But their business models are not same at all, nobody is valuing MS at trillions of dollars for its Windows OS licencing business. In the last 20 years MS has diversifyer into gaming and cloud successfull that are a big chunk of its current business and future growth, even with older products like Office they successfully pivoted to O365 and converted it to a recurring revenue stream.
Amazon is making more money from AWS than retail and evolved a lot as a company.
If the metaverse gamble works Facebook could be looked on as a similar success but until then their growth is risky
How so? Revenue is up and there's more users. What decline are you referring to?
People have expressed Facebook being passe or not cool for a decade now. They keep growing anyway.
This isn't a project that benefits from any of Facebooks strengths - game development companies are much better positioned to make compelling social VR experiences like this.
"Metaverses" in general are a cool 80s sci-fi novel concept. But they're just video game environments with better-than-typical communication features - hyping them up with piles of marketing and betting the farm on your specific one being successful seems like an incredibly poor business move.
FB is really noncommittal about what a metaverse product would even be, which can be interpreted either as secrecy... or they just don't know themselves. From the little we've seen (notable that it's 100% CGI concept reels and 0% anything concrete) it really does seem like just social spaces.
One thing the game studios have figured out is that simple chat is insufficient - Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite have all developed genuine social spaces that center around some activity. FB's metaverse concept seems to have no unifying purpose and lacks some compelling purpose that the games do. To the extent these necessary unifying activities are discussed it's usually hand-waved away as something users themselves will concoct.
More generally, it seems that FB wants to be the substrate of a new social network - but it's not clear to me that that's what anyone wants? What's the role of FB as a platform when "VR socialization" can just be apps on a device - in which case FB's role is solely that of a device/OS vendor, which clearly is insufficient for their ambitions? What does FB bring to the table that Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc, would care about?
If socializing in VR is going to be a thing (big if, but let's assume for a second), why would I go to FB? Why would I not directly go to any number of apps and vendors who have created focused products? I don't need a single unifying platform when I can just... install a number of different ones?
1. Identity management 2. Network management
But then realistically, are these really pain points?
I don't think that's true. Game developer company culture is heavily oriented towards making and selling products to consumers. They know how to make games people will pay for, and the entire business and culture revolves around that.
With Meta and other ad-driven companies, the people aren't the consumers, they're the product. The whole incentive structure and architecture of the company is fundamentally different. Think about how a company like Facebook or Google has an entire army of sales people and enormous apps like AdWords and Facebook Ads Manager that are how the company actually makes money. Game companies don't have that kind of stuff.
What they have is a bunch of programmers who know 3D rendering and networking. But Meta can simply hire those people—and game devs are used to bouncing around every couple of years—and they are. Several of my old EA coworkers are at Meta know working on it.
I cant understand why people think a consumer-hostile company would be able to improve the experience enough to reach broader audiences.
People will try it for an hour or two when they boot up their oculus. Realize being in a room of shouting tweens is not fun, and then never try it again.
I'd like to take advantage of this moment to share furries making fun of Metaverse, on VRChat (1m 30s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGmlhHvm-Tc
Game companies haven't been stuck in the 2000s. Nowadays they are legitimate media businesses. Just look at what Riot did with Arcane, or Epic with Travis Scott's Fortnite concert. That actually felt metaverse-ish compared to the geriatric experience of Facebook's VR games.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeFAlVC8qU)
If you look at China its even more clear that game companies are way beyond just making games. Moving into ads isn't that hard, delivering actual content and really understanding young people very much is.
If you mean the data mining and trading, I wouldn't believe that for a second. Sure, it can't go on so openly and monopolised like before, but there is a huge industry built on it already, each new digital service opening up opportunities for a bit of side income. Facebook was an easy target to aim at - but there's your webshop, food delivery service, electricity supplier in the line.
Unless Zuck can pull a Bezos with convincing investors, Meta's stock will be in trouble for a few years until their metaverse division starts becoming profitable; which will be at least a decade if they're focused on growth.
a similar pattern is happening on instagram although to a lesser degree
the metaverse bet is a good one to try and make something new where the value requires you to be on the fb platform. we will see if it works. i personally don’t see it going anywhere
- Earnings per share: $3.67 vs $3.84 expected
- Revenue: $33.67 billion vs $33.4 billion expected
- Daily Active Users (DAUs): 1.93 billion vs 1.95 billion expected
- Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.91 billion vs 2.95 billion expected
- Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $11.57 vs $11.38 expected
- Q1 revenue guidance was $27 billion to $29 billion, while analysts were expecting sales of $30.15 billionSlow growth (the low end number on guidance for next quarter is 3% growth) and not making the DAU numbers support that thesis for them.
Live by the growth, die by the growth.
A basic quantitative analysis of earnings estimates reveals that they are not particularly accurate when compared to the earnings guidance given by the company itself, and in the rare cases where companies provide no guidance, estimates are almost worthless.
All this is to say don't confuse the term "Wall Street estimates" with what people who actually buy and sell stock estimate. The actual people who have skin in the game and face tangible consequences if they're wrong don't take these earnings estimates that seriously, and conversely the analysts who produce these estimates don't have much of any skin in the game themselves and suffer next to no consequences for being wrong.
It's like sports teams and all of the talking heads giving their opinions on the upcoming matches. In sports, it's called betting. But in business, it's called investing. It's the same thing, only one is more widely accepted an legal.
One incentivizes people to build iPhones and the other takes money from poor people.
[1] For example, Apple used to play a sandbagging game with their guidance. After a few years most analysts caught on and if Apple didn't beat their numbers by a consistent amount, the stock would get hammered on earnings despite the fact that they beat guidance. When a company consistently sandbags (i.e. basically gives themselves an easy target to hit for the coming quarters/year), analyst estimates tend to matter more.
Is earnings guidance typically included within quarterly filings, or is it usually given on earnings calls?
This seems more like a symptom of the market being generally skittish, with a small side of "expected" earnings actually being a low-biased estimate, so it's more like a 10% miss.
The miss is also against future guidance. This could be answering a question of “Is Facebook too distracted to grow their core business?”
Anyone who thinks they’re more rational than the market can take the other side of these large moves. (Many quant hedge funds do)
FBs P/E ratio was well into the value stock territory of ~22 before this dip. They were trading at the lowest multiple of any other big tech company by far, now they're even more insanely undervalued from a fundamentals perspective. I realize that doesn't matter in the age of the meme stock, but personally I'm still pretty bullish in the long term and that's assuming the XR stuff is just a giant money furnace and returns nothing.
FB at it's worst is growing much faster than average, it's balance sheet is healthier than almost every other company beside MAAG, and yet it is valued below average.
Make of that what you will.
Also, re: the parent comment, a P/E of 22 would traditionally never be called "value stock territory"...whether or not that valuation is too pessimistic about Facebook's growth prospects.
Historically, around 15 is the mean, not 25
Zuck is also kind of saying that their slice of the pie is getting smaller due to competition like Tiktok. That just kills sentiment.
Hard to say if the metaverse will play out favorably or if it is going to just be hype. If I were to tell my past self 10 years ago that this is the world we live in now with EVs and cryptocurrencies etc being mainstream I would certainly not believe it nor would I have bet the farm on Elon or Bitcoin
Stimulus checks combined with broad accessibility of trading platforms (Robinhood, etc.) led to fund inflows growing 71% https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/global-markets-etf-gr...
And that's just ETF inflows aside from mutual funds and options markets.
The top recipients, according to the article linked above, were VOO, VTI and SPY. All follow an index that's market-cap-weighed, benefiting top 10 holdings more than the rest of the market.
The explanation I've seen floated is retail investors treating VOO and VTI as their savings account (for the lack of any decent yield opportunities). That money is eventually going to be withdrawn and spent, punishing those top 10 holdings excessively compared to the rest of the market.
Inflows into market cap-weighted index funds should spread the gains evenly.
Despite having just about every living human as their customer they are expected to grow.
A lot of golden handcuffs are being unshackled right now
One can hope...
Look at Apple's share count over time if you want to see a buyback not overpowered/diluted by employee equity.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/meta-platforms/...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/aapl/apple/shares-...
It's possible these new rounds of buybacks are far in excess of employee comp though, just saying historically speaking.
They might want to become a cloud infrastructure provider for some side money and buy themselves some time to figure out this Metaverse fantasy :)
Hey, AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.
Yeah, I've heard of trying ovh [cloud]. That's the only non-American company's cloud I've heard about trying. Oracle and one another, maybe IBM?, are the only non-big three clouds I've ever looked at. Mostly because of their better free tiers and/or healthy free credits.
If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Valve or build a gaming platform. I don't know how they can be successful in whatever the fuck the Metaverse is without a gaming/media platform.
I like these Zuck spitball ideas tho.
Is the idea really that the metaverse is their big next market? I like VR but who the heck believes FB will lead it?
Sony could if they were game enough to compete with the Oculus Quest and build something that would work either standalone or wirelessly with a PS5 to handle more intensive games. Same goes for MS ofc.
I think the big fuckup by FB/Meta here is not having the foresight to acquire Unity no matter the cost. They should have made a massive stock deal for it even if it caused their own stock price to take a massive hit in the short term.
The long term benefit of owning the most pervasive toolchain + the most dominant VR platform would have essentially ensured their market position for the foreseeable future. The only other engine that is half-decent for VR is Epic's UnrealEngine and there is a huge step up in complexity, pipeline etc from Unity to get there.
If you’re paying retail for GCP, you are getting fleeced.
If they wanted to go down that route they needed to start around 2015.
He would step in a long queue, and would get the same answer everyone in front of him: Gaben wouldn't let it slip out even from his cold dead hands.
Maybe that's an idea
All of these growth idea sounds incredibly boring. More likely? Maybe, but incredibly boring. Meanwhile meta is at least sounds pretty interesting.
There need to be some fun for him to just not permanently retire on his Hawaiian Island.
But does it? It sounds hopeful for someone that has no interest in the real world and only wants to create an imaginary world for themself. For those that actually like to step away from the keyboard and experience other aspects of the world around them, this is just another yawn.
Anyway Facebook's cash position is $60b, they can't afford it
Ever heard about non-all cash deals?
Besides, that $60-some B is after nearly $20B in buybacks from Q4 so they could've without it. But as they did, some two months of saved up FCF and they can again.
Amazon also had built their DCs for Amazon, and Google for Google, so that's not a valid argument. But it does take a lot of work to turn that into a marketable product (and transform your company culture to support it), and I don't think it makes sense for Meta to go down that route.
I think an opportunity can be found in approaching search. They already have so much data about what people are interested in, and they can start by perfecting Facebook Marketplace to a simple user-friendly successor to Craig's List.
AWS Data centers are fairly small, ~180,000 sq ft or so generally, us-east-2 is about 900,000 sq ft. us-east-1 perhaps 8 million sq ft.
Google likely has more network capacity, but FB is catching up.
That's 26 million sq ft vs Facebook's 40.5 million.
Does FB see spikes like that, or is it more consistent? I don't see FB having "spare" capacity to lease. Then again, I'm not a data center manager type, and just sit here in my comfy armchair playing QB.
No, it really did not.
The reality is even if Meta has the best data center infrastructure in the world their infrastructure is focused solely on solving their problems and operates under the constraint that it is not consumable by any arbitrary company. aws was built more or less in isolation to amazon's original infrastructure and gcp was built as a layer on top of google's internal infrastructure. there is use in what exists internally but only to (re)build the product you'd sell.
The lead time for them to get even basic primitives out the door would be significant, not even considering the depth of features that more sophisticated cloud customers want.
>>"The tougher part is perhaps not technical, but human. Facebook will have to build out an enterprise sales and support team that is culturally and operationally very different from running an ad-supported social network. Google, also a primarily ad-supported company, suffered from this “identity crisis” and is still trying to catch up to AWS and Azure, despite offering what many believe is a superior technical product."
He also points out they also have a trust deficient due to all the privacy and misinformation scandals.
[1]https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud...
WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow.
Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization. Think fully embedded 1-click buying for things like fashion, gadgets, accessories. They could take a decent cut of Shopifys business if executed right.
Meta made in Q4-2020 53.56B in ad rev in the US and Canada. Meta only made 4.05B in Asia Pacific in Q4-2020.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
I feel like instagram is no longer an actual photo sharing app, just a place where high profile users promote stuff to their followers.
The West is mostly so far behind on payment processing it’s a joke. Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 while WeChat Pay is 0.6% and Alipay .55%.
Why not just use a database?
FB picking up Libra is just another loop in the blockchain’s solution in search of a problem.
Venmo and Zelle are both irreversible and mainstream but can't be used globally.
I think this right there is the biggest issue for the companies that sell consumer data. Google has had so many golden eggs, office365 before Microsoft, the cloud infrastructure before AWS and so on, and they keep fumbling the ball because their organisation is geared toward a very different form of sales.
The fact that Instagram didn’t become an Etsy styled platform for artists when it was the main platform for sharing semi-professional “hobby” work should tell you everything you need to know about how little Facebook understands markets that aren’t selling privacy data. Because even if they opened up now that ship has sailed as less and less people who produce things rely on Instagram as a platform because the younger audiences aren’t there.
> Facebook is dying slowly in the developed world, that is true. However it is still growing in emerging markets.
+1, though this is a slow and not necessarily viable bet. Meta makes about 12x more revenue from their USA/Canada ($52/Q) users than their Asia-Pacific users for example ($4.3/Q).
Market share in the USA is extremely valuable, not only for Meta, but for a lot of companies. Apple for example sits at a $3 trillion market cap in spite of Android dominating the global mobile market because iOS captures not the most users, but the most valuable.
> WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow.
I agree with this. I think there's a lot of potential in WhatsApp, though I also see two shortcomings with betting too much on it:
- WhatsApp is largely used in countries where users are harder to monetize. As stated above, user count matters, but it's not the only factor when it comes to generating revenue.
- Messaging is very competitive. A change in WhatsApp's TOS was widely reported to have triggered millions of new user sign ups on Telegram and Signal after just a few weeks [1]. I don't how accurate or overblown this correlation might be, but I do know anecdotally I text people through many different apps, and have switched the primary app I used to text different people multiple times in the last few years.
> Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization.
I think this is still the most straight-forward path to increasing revenue Meta has, and I imagine they're trying to make sure it doesn't fade away like Facebook is.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/24/whatsapp-...
> It’s a slight earnings miss. The price will rebound in the morning and it’ll be back up in a week or two.
Never underestimate the blue message bubble y'all. That's real leverage.
Never mind that Walmart displaced the former unstoppable Sears monopoly, and Amazon did the same to Walmart.
IBM which people predicted was unstoppable, was going to rule the world. IBM's descent into irrelevance (I B What?) has been profound.
The only interesting thing is people still insist that this time it's gonna be different.
If Apple (and IBM) had been banned from communicating through long distance lines, except with ATT's permission, then it's hard to see how Western Electric (aka ATT) wouldn't have taxed all the nascent PC companies and retained enough profits to remain larger.
Edit: And on the later, iPhone side, that was the luck of power dynamics (single strong device manufacturer, bargaining against multiple competing cellular providers) coupled with phone company executive shortsightedness. If the cell phone industry has been less diverse (e.g. original ATT above), nobody would have felt the need to grant Apple any concessions.
The deal was done with Cingular ( Later acquired and merged with AT&T ). Neither AT&T and Verizon wants to deal with Apple at the time.
It's actually kind of hard to articulate how bad things were in the early-mid 2000s with respect to carriers all trying to push their own garbage and monetize absolutely everything possible.
Previously, the U.S. carriers were basically king-makers selecting which devices were available for sale and what features were enabled on them — to the point where I knew a couple of people who imported phones from Europe to get something which either wasn't available from a U.S. carrier or was restricted to one they didn't wish to be a customer of for some reason (e.g. poor coverage), and it wasn't uncommon to hear about people reflashing phone firmware to remove things like the carrier's wallpaper or preinstalled apps which the user was prevented from deleting. I refreshed a phone simply to change the audio codec settings because Cingular had restricted it to the lowest-bitrate which was painfully garbled.
2 of those aren't phones, did you mean something else?
On the other three, that's kind of like saying that the IBM Selectric blazed the trail for the PC — not wrong, but minimizing how much room there was still to go. If you used a Blackberry, it was good at message, tolerable for email, and bad at everything else. The Treos had some nice ideas but were agonizing slow, PalmOS was unstable, the software selection was limited, and the UI was … uninspired. Windows Mobile was at least stable but held back by mediocre hardware, and it had the lowest-common denominator problem that developers had to deal with the same OS running on a wide range of hardware and thus apps weren't usually tailored to work with the hardware.
The major trailblazing things added by the iPhone were the first touchscreen UI which was often better than a desktop UI — the Palm-style touchscreens with a stylus were much clumsier – and a desktop-grade web browser. Yes, other devices had mobile browsers earlier but they had significant compatibility issues and the UIs were uniformly clumsy — I briefly had a work Blackberry which was one of the last non-Android devices they made and despite coming out later, it was worse that an iPhone 1 in every way except messaging, and that's only if you excluded the App Store because that wasn't in the first release.
One of the big things which people underestimated was how much bigger the iPhone screen felt: when you were used to having something that size which was half controls, the iPhone had significantly more usable space (at higher quality than the displays common on many phones at the time, too) and the touchscreen keyboard could adapt to the context so it was much easier to use than the various systems like A9 which some phone manufacturers had invented. One nice side-effect of this is that it made localization better since the manufacturer didn't need to ship different hardware for different languages and multilingual users could just switch.
The final big thing was that breaking the carrier roadblock wasn't just about cheaper data. It also meant that the carriers didn't disable features based on marketing plans or try to force you to use some terrible app or services they got a kickback on (iOS 1 didn't support other apps but the bundled ones were quite good compared to the field and the App Store shipped shortly afterwards, which finally unleashed the mobile development industry which had been held back by the carriers).
Especially funny because the downfall of Facebook has been predicted for a decade now. Since Friendster and MySpace each did not last that long.
Other giant companies have fallen as well. RCA, Xerox, GE, Kodak, on and on.
The reasons are well known. They become bureaucratic, wasteful and ossified, and become unable to adapt to a changing marketplace.
I've seen this play out again and again and again in my lifetime.
Yes you're right. However on HN and similar tech/geek areas, the common theme regarding FB for a decade now has been direct or indirect implying of its coming demise. Which was what I was saying in my comment. Those people are not correct. It is being said in this thread and other recent threads too. If FB is still a $5-600B+ company in 2025, then these recent comments are also not correct.
Which is to say, it's hard to imagine FB dropping lower than the ~11th biggest US company and ~15th biggest worldwide[0] company at a $600B market cap in 2025. A valuation they did not cross until May 2020.
[0] Right now they are 8th in the US and world. Top 5 for earnings. Usually 5th-6th.
imo Apple will help Meta by helping make XR more socially acceptable, along with Apple's premium pricing which locks some people out. I do not believe VR's current form factor is socially acceptable right now. Even if you remove problems such as cost, tech complexity, and even the toxicity surrounding Facebook's brand; the masses still will not accept it until Apple ships their solution.
Only in north America. Like it or not, there is faaarrrrrr more future money to be made with the 3B ish people of china+india than the 0.4B americans.
$2850B Apple $2350B Microsoft $1950B Alphabet $1500B Amazon
I mean you need to be at least Trillion dollar market cap to join the club, the only other trillion dollar market cap crop is Saudi Aramco. But I think we should ignore that. May be dropping Meta from the MAMAA? Even Amazon is twice its size, and at the top Apple is Four times the size.
It is also interesting around Facebook IPO in 2011 / 2012, I actually expected Google and Facebook will destroy each other and become one. either Google winning Social or Facebook took over Search within next 10 years. That didn't happen. Google tries to enter social but have absolutely not a god damn idea what they are doing. It wasn't clear to me then at the time Google had no product mindset.
Had that happened the combined company would be the same size as Apple.
It will be interesting to see Amazon's report in a few hours time. I am wondering if they will join the 2 Trillion dollar club soon.
That is shortsighted. Email, which is standards based, has been around for 50 years.
I have a strong sense that Signal won't be around in 2064.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/11/eu-parliament-takes-fi...
I noticed that often times these dips lead to sensationalist headlines like "Apple shares tank 5% after abysmal earnings". When I looked into these headlines, I often noticed that the stock often "plummeted" to the price it was at a week or two prior.
To counter this, one metric I use is, "When was the last time the stock was at this new price?"
Today Facebook shares are trading at ~$238. The last time it was trading at this price was June 2020.
I know most people on here really dislike targeted advertising. I’m not going to speculate on the potential future problems that tracking could lead to, and I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned. But so far targeted advertisement has been a net positive for me. I’ve gotten to use some really good applications for free, and I’ve gotten ads that are actually relevant.
No entity has the innate right to psychologically manipulate me into contributing to its bottom line.
Your decision for what you buy or your decision to block ads? Which is completely beside the point of my comment. My point is that you are going to be manipulated whether you like it or not. That cute Bernie Sanders slogan, that "Eat the rich" slogan, all the beautiful art produced by your favorite political cause, it's all psychological manipulation by your definition (and it is). And by that point, all human interaction is manipulation.
> The idea of buying something based on an advertisement and not a need is foreign to me.
My point is that despite believing they have not bought something based on an advertisement, they have in all likelihood.
I'd take it for granted that zwkrt is not talking about reviews and glowing endorsements and sponsored videos or placement on store shelves or .. you get the idea. They're talking about ads! The crap that surrounds the real so-called content when you try to read an article without an adblocker. The nonsense that interrupts a movie on TV (or any video on YouTube) every three minutes. The trash results that gets a special place in front of all the other trash when you search on Google. All unsolicited, not sought for. I'd say if uBlock Origin doesn't block it, then it likely isn't an ad in the sense zwkrt means?
Buying something after seeking out reviews and seeing one that was biased and paid for could happen but it's not necessarily happening to everyone, and it's probably not what the fellow upstream meant when they said they find buying things based on an advertisement foreign.
Most of the stuff I buy is either commodity (clothes, always the same t-shirts, pants, shoes, my colleagues joke it's my 'uniform'), food, or weird-ass stuff that nobody advertises for. Like second hand computers or electronic components to build cool stuff.
And reviews I usually get in depth from other users on tech forums like XDA and local ones. Before I buy a phone I know pretty much every little thing there is to know about it :) Not just the gloss, all the annoying bugs too.
The only thing I buy that's really advertising sensitive is games I think. Or some hacker/maker stuff you'd see on hackaday. I know advertising affects me. But I'm pretty certain not a lot of my purchasing is driven by advertising.
This is where ads come in: a backpack company can run ads that should be shown to people interested in buying backpacks, and it’s potentially a win-win: you find a cool item that you buy, and the company gets a new customer.
And that best choice is probably from the manufacturer that spends the most on making their product. Not the one spending the most on advertising. This undermines the win-win concept.
E.g When you need something of you have 100's of options. If you saw an ad previously it now might be 1 of several products you compare as you are aware and familiar. The product still has to impress you on price and quality etc but the ad drove you to consider it. That is hugely important in a crowded marketplace. Also that ad might have shifted you perception of quality or features.
And ultimately 'need' is a very subjective thing. I highly doubt if you look around your house there is nothing you couldn't throw away and not get on with life as normal. Ads can make you feel like you need something at the time. That's why so many ads rely on fear based propositions, this emotion is strong in creating need like showing negative events for insurance.
As an aside, something happened to my instagram ad-targeting profile a few months ago and the ads that I normally get (tech-industry stuff, photography, art shows, books...) were replaced by what I assume were lowest-common-denominator general population ads (replica-of-expensive-items scams, crypto scams, investment scams, sports, populist politicians, pawnshops, wedding services...) for a couple of weeks; it was as if looking in a nightmarish mirror universe.
At the end of the day, that's why Google and Facebook will fight tooth and nail to avoid subscription offerings.
And fundamentally... Facebook's stock should be hammered. They're effectively a legacy platform attempting to milk more revenue from their existing users.
They missed the 2010-2020 opportunity to diversify away from ad-based revenue, and now they look more like 2000s Microsoft, unable to imagine outside their core revenue generator. Which is why their acquisitions have been "new Facebook" instead of "different than Facebook."
It makes little to no financial sense, compared to other tech and web companies, for Facebook stock to remain down 25%. Their PE is going to be like 17.5 now.
But the whatever% is after hours trading, so we'll see what the market does tomorrow when it's open.
It's funny and silly. Not misinformation, but a stretch to say the drops and gains of stocks on a day to day basis is honesty to the general person.
If instead, if by default, numbers in charts and articles talked about these one day changes in stock prices alongside trailing 3, 5, or X day/week percentage changes.
Sure. Snap is up 45% today. However it was down 25% yesterday. Really, it went from $32.XX to $35.XX across two days and the entire week. A solid 10% gain.
Would be nice if the culture would include
I think the tracking backlash helps the big consumer goods conglomerates and hurts the startup niche product marketers. Look at Dollar Shave Club and all the other consumer products underdogs that were able to take massive marketshare from Proctor and Gamble and the like through smart ad targeting.
It shows that Facebook positioning itself as a "platform" in the first place is total nonsense. That's why Zuck wanted Oculus to succeed so bad. He knows he is at the mercy of actual platform providers like Apple and Google for everything.
I'm a big VR fan and even I'm not sure whether the metaverse will take off. But without hardware like the quest 2 it wouldn't have a chance.
But I think once (or, if) the metaverse has proven its value to the consumer their goal is to be the leading platform and opening it up would make sense there, it would be key to maximising marketshare. Especially as they're not even making money on the hardware, it's being sold at a loss. That'll change too once the platform proves itself but still I don't think they expect it to be a major money maker.
Zuckerberg mentioned in his keynote that they want to go for a different business model. They want to sell the platform and enable creators to sell their designs, taking a cut in the Apple store way. And they can still take a cut on third party hardware by licensing. Which means revenue without even having to bother manufacturing anything.
I think hardware to Meta will be what hardware is to Microsoft. Setting a good baseline standard, promoting new designs and usecases (e.g. the surface pro convertible) and directing the market. But not being the sole vendor.
But I may be wrong of course. It'll be interesting times ahead!
When is the last time a huge company really went "all in" on a completely unproven idea and have it become a success?
They already do. It's called Quest 2. Their 1st version of the "metaverse" is Horizon and Venues, though 3rd parties on meta's platform like VR Chat and RecRoom are also metaverse plays.
Like when I search for hiking shoes, that’s when you should advertise, now for the next two months. I’m not going to buy a second pair for another 20 years after all, and if it’s to reassure me I made the right purchases then they shouldn’t be for variating brands.
But I mean, you’re probably right, why else would various sales decision spend so much money on advertisement companies?
I think the “pay with your privacy” model is probably coming to an end though. At least here in the EU that seems to be the long term plan, and I think Apple might agree with me.
the stock had gone up so much since then that expectations had gotten too high.
FB/Meta still makes a crapload of money, just not as much as some analysts had expected.
1. The CEOs insistence on "Competition" as the cause for the increased focus on short term impression rates seems pointed at regulators and Congress rather than at investors. This is silly too, Google had no such pressure on impressions and performed rather well just days before.
2. The cat is out of the bag. Facebooks secret sauce was their very HEAVY focus on bottom funnel advertising where they would ascribe suspect numbers that were not Industry standard to "Conversion" objectives (RoAS anyone?). Anyone, anywhere sees an ad at any point in their conversion journey and Facebook would assign a large weighted portion of conversions leading from that individual in their reporting.
3. The big scary underlined headline here should be HOW POWERFUL APPLE IS. They sneeze and change one small thing in the way apps can access their platforms and we see an entire industry shaken.
4. They won't die out quick. These numbers, though not "Growing" as fast as befor or expected to grow as fast (which is the bigger concern), still is much, much , much higher than they need to sustain their business over the next two decades. The big risk though, is the stock price drop which is how the bulk of their pricy talent is paid dropping. Everyone there is currently staring at a 25% pay cut on their stock based comp and that is not a pretty picture for attracting the best kids graduating this year with ambitions of joining a fast growing tech firm or pulling in talent from places like MSFT or GOOG or AAPL who will not want to jump aboard a perceived sinking ship.
I highly doubt all of the Apple defenders would feel the same way if Microsoft was charging 30% fee for substantially all commerce on windows. It's a huge transfer of wealth from the entire ecosystem of developers to a single company, when that company added very little marginal value to the developer's offering.
They can change their name all they want, they are slowing turning into the AOL of our decade. I'm willing to take bets on where this is all going.
I own an Oculus - it sucks. The founder of Oculus admits it sucks. Instagram sucks more than it did last year. I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole.
Eventually FB will lose because their entire business model is based on outrage, and that cant last forever. It's very clear it is having catastrophic consequences for societies everywhere.
What is the saying .. ?
"The chickens will eventually came home to roost"
Palmer Luckey? I believe you, but I was wondering if you had a quote/reference for that.
I will admit it's possible I'm putting words in his mouth.
Why? Which model?
> I dont have a FB account, but it sounds like it's an ad-driven hell-hole.
Don't you need a Facebook account for Oculus?
Yes, it is required. I liked it to my brother's account.
It sucks for a few different reasons.
1. It's very uncomfortable when you sweat, which you do for any of the active sports games. The Oculus falls off your head and causes you to break out.
2. If you have glasses but cant wear contacts (my issue) it's a lot harder to use.
3. Lack of interesting games. I like golf, the golf game is actually cool, one free course with the option of paying for 1 other course, so 2 total courses.
The current version is no where people are going to spend a lot of time in the near future.
That's fixed by replacing the strap. The default one is extremely uncomfortable for anything but viewing movies.
> 2. If you have glasses but cant wear contacts (my issue) it's a lot harder to use.
There are magnetic lens addons that can be used with eye prescriptions. I have this myself. They are magnetic so you can switch them out if there are multiple users.
> 3. Lack of interesting games. I like golf, the golf game is actually cool, one free course with the option of paying for 1 other course, so 2 total courses.
There are about four different golf games now. They aren't all equal and take different directions.
While the current library doesn't compare to Valve's, it's a decent size and there's something for everyone. If you've only played one golf game before dismissing it, then you're missing out on the start of the next paradigm.
Also, I wouldn't think of it as just a gaming console. You can watch movies in it inside a virtual movie theater, you can use it for light CAD and art, and one of the most common uses for it is for fitness. I've lost 20 lbs so far. Another use is being able to "hangout" with friends and family who are either really far away or are busy due to life circumstances eg. people with children
Also now retail platforms give the r/WSB crowd even more ways to punt and gamble in the after hours.
Point is, see where the stock ends up over the next day or two...
The second item here was rebranded to Meta, but the Facebook site and app are still Facebook. It's just the overarching company is Meta
Google is a behemoth, and I wouldn't bet against them. I wouldnt buy their stock either
The tech sector as a whole dropped 13% in Jan, same as FB shares,following a massive (overdue) correction. Most likely FB did a flat return once market/sector residualized. What's all the fuss about?
It is a screaming buy signal.
The earnings for this company are truly staggering. They made 11$/user. Their earnings were up 34% year-over-year – on a base of 29B dollars. They made 10B more this year than they did last year, and the comments in here are all about, "boy Apple fucked them, and Meta suxor!"
You people are nuts.
While I don't love FB as an entity, as a business they are making fucking bank. They are running a printing press, and the world is eating it up. Y'all need to switch to decaf or something. Their numbers are truly staggering.
Some people can't be bought. What about you?
Yes, I’d take a high paying job at Facebook. I live in a status quo, unfair, corrupt capitalist society in the west. I know I have to play the game.
Sure, if we're just talking about comparing generalizations or wild scenarios, but in context that person probably has access to other opportunities that rival or exceed Facebook's comp or social impact.
Were you like a very early employee or are you just that naive?
FB's intent became quite clear, quite fast in their history. Like, remember when they became so famous for their lack of ethics that even a hollywood movie came out whose plot is pretty much only about that?
And that was 12(!) years ago ... so, I am truly wondering, from where exactly did you get this idea of a company trying to change the world for good?
Oh wow, they made $11! Let's forget everything else.
What you're saying may be true – I've no idea. But I'm not sure we can yet dismiss the idea that social technology like Facebook, used as it is, might push us over a line we wouldn't otherwise cross.
https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/white-supre...
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-facebook-russia...
So outrageous it's easy to find evidence for all of them?
At one point the crowd here was like oh fb ipo so embarrassing, to oh fb eng so hot much react, to oh fb so evil now, crash and burn pls. Such fickleness. Surely we can do better than that.
There is also a popular claim that Facebook contributed to genocide. Here's an article [2]. Facebook hired an investigator that concluded that their involvement was without their knowledge. Tragic and reckless, sure. Intentional? I doubt it. I think it's an issue of scale and navigating complex regulatory and social structures.
Shadow profiles are another hot topic. The big issue is that, if you agreed to let Facebook read your contacts, it linked your friends phone numbers to distinct 'profiles' in the background. Presumably these could also be tied to their advertising profiles.
Cambridge Analytica was a company that abused a bug in API access (allegedly unbeknownst to Facebook - this exploit was available to all 3rd party apps) to collect information not only about willing participants, but their friends as well.
As for VR, there are numerous claims and hesitancy about privacy abuse through tracking and sensing technologies that are essential to VR development. I appreciate some hesitancy, but it is a bit sensationalized.
Beyond all of this, there are lots of claims of monopoly abuse. There is actually an FTC lawsuit that could lead to a landmark antritust case, but that is yet to be seen. I don't really think they have a monopoly as there are numerous competitors.
I apologize as I don't have links for everything, but that's an overview of my thoughts. I think Facebook is simply navigating the regulatory and social landscape in a way that any novel company or platform would be required to navigate. I think we often forget that this technology is new and will experience growing pains, even if at such massive scale. I think a lot of the blame for the fraying of U.S. democracy, the decline in mental health, and other social issues are incorrectly attributed to things that have brought change in the past few decades. More realistically, I think the U.S. (where most of the claims are relevant) is simply declining after several hundred years of abusive reign as the world's superpower.
[1]: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
It seems like you simply take Facebook at their word.
> More realistically, I think the U.S. (where most of the claims are relevant) is simply declining after several hundred years of abusive reign as the world's superpower.
You do realize that you have provided no actual explanation for the decline.
Can you explain how your account, with a meaningless username, was created in 2014, only to become active around 9 months ago?
Who should be held accountable for all of this? Facebook? What a joke. If they are truly guilty, regulators have all the power in the world to hold them accountable.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
Yes, and Facebook is contributing to the acceleration of those things.
Is that not something you have considered?
Do you think Facebook or other social media are the main contributors to the acceleration of those things? Why?
Can you explain why your account was created in 2014 but was only activated 9 months ago to begin defending Facebook?
The point your parent poster is making is that sensationalism and the easily outraged tend to ignore the nuance between unintended butterfly effect consequences that are hard to prevent vs deliberate malice by the company itself for its own profit.
It's a good idea to reflect a bit on hatred to see if it's really warranted. It's very easy to think "oh look at all these negative things I heard, facebook should shut down". What's hard is to realize that what you read online and your mental categorization of things doesn't always neatly mirror reality accurately. Nobody thinks we should ban chocolate on the grounds that violent people eat it and the rest of us would still have food even if chocolate was gone; we only get molded to think this way about things like Facebook because of media narratives.
What matters more than the article we're all commenting on?
FAANG stock trends, like it or not, dictate the larger tech sector, and right now 2/5 just took a 20% hit in the space of a week.
While there is no such thing as a perfectly-ethical company within a Capitalist framework, there are degrees of ethical behavior that rightly influence a company's reputation.
Would I choose to work or support a company that clubs baby seals?
Less hyperbolic, would I choose to support a company that continually seeks to profit from promoting extremism in dialogue, creating self-perpetuating echo-chambers which have real-world consequences (re: the very real danger to American democratic processes), in addition to brainwashing people's parents into believing in utter hogwash and tearing families apart?
Yes, they are making bank. But at what cost? And should that cost influence your interaction with said company?
I hope Zuckerberg pulls off Meta and what he's trying to do. He's an extremely good CEO, and the alternative is more power in the hands of TikTok and CCP controlled social media which I think is a lot worse.
I'm glad to see the investment they're making in trying to build a new platform, I hope we see AR hardware from Apple soon too.
I wouldn't say FB represents everything I hate, as I mainly use it as a contact book.
"Hacker News" also hates crypto, Tesla, Brave, and other random things and I don't think the same way about. (I wonder why that is? </rhetorical>)
TLDR: speak for yourself, not all "hackers".
Precisely. It's actually a very long term battle between Meta, Apple and Google. Not even a widespread outage can stop them.
It would be a mistake to write them off immediately over this atrocious earnings call, no matter how much I think of them as a mafia. Business-wise, it is far from over.
> The earnings for this company are truly staggering. ...
> You people are nuts.
> While I don't love FB as an entity, as a business they are making fucking bank. ...
Purdue Pharmaceuticals made a lot of money, too.
Well, that settles it. :)
Over time they've changed the "feeds" to work on principles that are good for advertisers, "influencers", and viral shit in general... at the expense of regular human contact and normal trusted social circles.