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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

7x earnings seems egregiously low. It’s gotta bump back up 20% within a month. This is a total mispricing of the stock

They have one of the worst brand reputations in tech. Their business model in general is being targeted by regulators and policymakers in jurisdictions big and small all over the world, and the various abuses of their specific platform is often used as a clear example of why. TikTok is giving them very strong competition, and their efforts to play copycat are not being received well by users. Investors are now far less enamored with tech, and capital is tight in general since the economy is in a precarious situation. Their CEO is unaccountable, and people he relied on to build a successful business to begin with (eg. Sheryl Sandberg) are gone, and he’s spending all his focus on a completely different product that lacks traction. He insists on centering himself as a personality in media, despite the fact that he is uncharismatic and his appearances tend to reinforce the brand’s negative reputation.

Even if VR is the future, there’s no indication that Meta is the company that knows how to build something people want here, let alone profit it at, but it continues to pour massive amounts of money, talent and executive attention into this, and it sounds like they’re not planning to change course.

Meta has earned its price drop.

Well, it also makes 40B a year, so, there’s that.

For now.

I don't know about that. I want to see Facebook fail. I think the world would be a better place without Facebook. I am pretty confident I am not the only one who thinks that and I think the number of people who see things that way is increasing.

If I knew someone was engaging with Facebook, I would think less of them. In the same way Facebook grew due to social factors, it can also wither due to social factors.

Facebook has gotten so much negative press that I can't imagine there being anyone but mercenaries working there now.

I certainly would not invest in that.

Dictatorships work great until they don't. Dictators get high off of their yes men until they lose touch with reality and start making critical errors.

I'm no fan of Facebook either, but if they collapse and die one day soon, one thing I'll really miss is FB Messenger. I just haven't found anything remotely like it that works as well for keeping a friends list, letting me chat with them, and letting me do video chats, both on my phone and (very importantly) on a PC.

Everything else fails in some way, usually the PC part. Most chat apps have some video chat function, but it sucks and is totally useless because it's only on the phone; there's no way to do it on a PC, so what's the point? I don't want to see shaky video from someone holding their phone in their hand. I can chat with people using Zoom, but that's a pain because it requires a native application, it's only for video chats (not for keeping a long-running text chat), so while it's great for business meetings it sucks for personal use.

> keeping a friends list

This was the early genius of facebook and why the WhatsApp purchase was (in retrospect) genius. Facebook wanted to replace your phones contact list. They wanted to be the authoritative list of your friends.

After having de-facebooked myself, the contact list as authoratative friends list works ok, but it is a downgrade. The video is too.

I am relatively happy with signal, but yeah, not as good in terms of usability.

>After having de-facebooked myself, the contact list as authoratative friends list works ok, but it is a downgrade.

Yeah, that doesn't work for me at all, because I don't actually have anyone's phone number, outside of a couple of family members. Who uses phones (voice calling) any more? Almost everyone I know now uses LINE.

I don't participate for ethical reasons which implies that I believe those who do are unethical, ignorant, or trapped. Some call me radical, but I take it as a compliment.

Yes and no, alternatively if investors believe the trend will continue then they will just wait for the earnings to come down and then it isn't mispriced.

or not.

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