Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

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

by donsupreme • 4 years ago

71 30 4 years ago

boxmonster7• 4 years ago

I've read "cyberpunk" novels so I had a certain vision of what a virtual world would look like that I probably share with a lot of people. Believe me, it's not the worlds biggest online cyber mall with cyber mall cops telling me to behave myself. Metaverse is a corporate wet dream. I regret spending money on my Oculus glasses.

I'd hoped the virtual world would start out and be built organically by people because it was fun, useful and anyone could make a little money, just like the early internet.

Foisting this mall world on us is not going to work. I hope they adjust.

Sohcahtoa82• 4 years ago

I regret spending money on my Oculus glasses.

The "Metaverse" might be a flop, but what about other VR games? There's tons of good ones out there.

And if you have a decent gaming PC, you can use your Oculus with it and play all the games on SteamVR.

boxmonster7• 4 years ago

That's my second disappointment. I prefer programming to playing games. Programming is my game. If I could stake a claim in the Metaverse and build Spalding Gray world (boxmonster comes from his Monster in a Box) so that Spalding was part of the virtual world then I would. Something similar to how I can build a website. Spalding Gray world just an example of what I'd like to be able to freely do for very little cost. The Metaverse should be more like Minecraft and less like AOL.

seydor• 4 years ago

What you describe exists in opensimulator worlds. It's friday night, so a lot of virtual parties going on: https://opensimworld.com/events

boxmonster7• 4 years ago

Cool, this is closer to what I think will ultimately be successful. From the FAQ: What is OpenSimWorld? OpenSimWorld is a directory of 3D worlds that use the open source OpenSimulator software and are connected to each other via the hypergrid functionality. OpenSimWorld is not a Grid, and we don't host or rent regions, we only provide an easy way to discover amazing virtual worlds and to advertise your own region.

n4r92• 4 years ago

Not to detract from your point about Meta, but isn't the online world in books like Snow Crash just as much of a corporate wet dream? I suppose it's more libertarian-corporate than what you might call the liberal-corporate of today, but it's still a brutal and gritty world.

boxmonster7• 4 years ago

brutal and gritty world

I think that's the attraction for early adopters who build much of the foundations. Sort of like crypto, web3, DeFi and all that right now. A Wild West were only the smart survive and you can buy drugs and guns if you know how.

Zuckerberg's vision of the Metaverse is blessed by human resource managers who insist everyone follows the code of conduct and no one has genitals. It's bland and comfy, like a mall.

gdulli2• 4 years ago

I'd hoped the virtual world would start out and be built organically by people because it was fun, useful and anyone could make a little money, just like the early internet.

The early internet having been so organically developed for fun and utility happened because money wasn't yet involved/in charge.

At this point could there ever again emerge any major new technology that wasn't either developed by a huge corporation or quickly acquired by a huge corporation?

Will we ever see a scenario again where such an important technology is allowed decades to emerge while it's ignored by industry for being too academic, too early, too much for nerds?

Today, even Wordle couldn't stay independent. How could anyone build a multiverse popular enough to have a network effect but not get invaded by spam, money, predation?

boxmonster7• 4 years ago

The early internet was funded and created by the US government and DNS was run by them too. Then open standards committees were created to make sure everyone spoke the same tech language. No one owns the internet. There's no reason this can't be recreated.

QuadmasterXLII• 4 years ago

If the weird, unmonetized, organic virtual world existed now, there would be correlation between it being unmonetized, organic, and weird, and us not knowing about it.

aligray• 4 years ago

Do you have any recommendations? Or must-reads in the genre?

CynicusRex• 4 years ago

Glad to see my quitfacebook.org is finally getting some sweet action.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

The US is a small percentage of FB usage. It is the internet in some countries.

Amazing that an iOS update did this though.

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

And it’s difficult for facebook to argue that apple giving users the option to keep their data private was anticompetitive.

This is the classic problem of building on someone else’s platform. I know facebook tried their own phone and bubble based android launchers, but they seemed to give that up too easily. In comparison to the money being spent on meta, attacking their weaknesses on the device front might have been a better avenue. They could have bought their way in rather than building it.

nier• 4 years ago

According to this article [1] in the New York Times the introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency isn’t among the four biggest challenges for Facebook. Daring Fireball has it summarized [2] like so:

“The age problem”: Young people aren’t using Facebook at all and are using Instagram less, but the success of both platforms as advertising revenue bonanzas is predicated on usage by the youth demographic.

“The innovation problem”: Facebook hasn’t invented a new hit since the blue app itself and its other successes were all acquired.

“The metaverse problem”: They’re betting the company on AR/VR, but it remains to be seen whether that’s going to be a big thing.

“The antitrust problem”: No summary necessary.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/briefing/facebook-metaver... [2] https://daringfireball.net/2022/08/facebooks_problems

bdangubic• 4 years ago

how much money do you think they make in countries where they are "the internet..."?

ergocoder2• 4 years ago

In Thailand, the new Bangkok governor do Facebook live almost every day on his work. 100,000+ views on almost every video from a city of 8m.

It is truly refreshing to have this kind of transparency.

I have faith in FB. It is a good communication/community tool. They have to tone down the VR thing a bit. It is not the time for VR yet.

hirvi74• 4 years ago

I'd rather FB tone down the blatant anti-privacy practices against their users first.

russiasux• 4 years ago

Examining away the current FB disaster with an iOS update completely missed the point.

Facebook has one customer: advertisers and billions of products.

The only way for them to fuck this up is to screw their advertisers (mostly small businesses) to the extent that THE ADVERTISERS LEAVE. Yes users leaving is bad, but if they continued to evolve their ad product it would easily be possible to compensate for that... except they aren't about evolving things so much as they are about breaking things... At their customers expense (advertisers).

Having spent many many years with a Facebook ad budget measured in percentages of a multimillion dollar gross, which is now zero due to being sold bot impressions constantly, and having my ability to remove those bot impressions... removed.. My guess is that at this point I am not alone.

Going from 8% gross to zero is going to hurt if it happens across every small business in the country.

If you own FB stock... Consider yourself warned. It's WAY worse than Musk's estimate of 20% bots on Twitter (because the bots are written to... Well... Engage with ads and thereby avoid being banned by generating revenue for FB).

The Metaverse will not solve this problem. Ever.

rchaud• 4 years ago

$6.7b in quarterly profit and $40b in cash on hand. Plenty of money to burn on selling people the idea of virtual real estate and Nintento Mii quality avatars.

They're trying to juice ad numbers by jamming more Tiktok style reels into people's IG feeds, which will likely cause an even bigger exodus among IG's biggest accounts.

IronWolve• 4 years ago

Many of my friends moved off due to censorship, even my state republican group moved over to mewe, my gf's book club moved to mewe, few of my family members closed their fb due to politics on their hobby groups.

Seems like all the big platforms are running off users. I use to watch my podcasts on youtube, now its at least a 3rd on rumble.

Its kinda neat that the big corps politics are spawning up tons of other platforms.

antifa• 4 years ago

This must be why I suddenly started receiving emails for things I normally only get push notifications for.

Facebook scrambles to escape stock’s death spiral as users flee, sales drop

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