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Comment by wavemode | Hacker News Reader

lol it's so explicit

at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle

The ironic thing is that he lists monetization last, but simply by uttering that sentiment he tells us that they are really thinking about monetization first, aka the end goal of the product.

Even if he didn't say it, it's implicit in who they are. Do you really think a massive social media corporation is going to launch another social media platform, just for funsies?

They opened it up for brands days ahead of the general public. Of course they're thinking of monetization first.

I mean, did you think he was pouring money into this out of the goodness of his heart?

No, no, just pointing out the blatant contradiction in the statement. Although I do wish an app intended for a billion people had a component of goodness to it!

I don't think he's ever suggested Facebook is anything but a for profit enterprise, but I think it is an extremely cynical take that "build a product a billion people would use before thinking about monetization" actually means "think about monetization first".

The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.

I think your altruism is misplaced because they most certainly are thinking of $$$ first and foremost.

> The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.

No it’s only a theory that emerged in the 70’s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine).

Framing things this way suggests that the reason the metaverse is failing so hard is because facebook insists on jumping straight to enshitification without spending time on the stages users actually enjoy.

I think you've actually got it a bit backwards.

Meta did not spend enough time thinking about monetization in the long term, realized they were in a really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to come up with a new platform they could monetize.

They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think about monetization early.

It will always be a fascinating piece of historical trivia that Zuckerberg was represented as an iconoclastic hacker in The Social Network, when he had already turned into a turgid adtech executive by the time the movie came out.

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