Comment by danpalmer

For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors: Apple and Google. Apple has been very hostile to Facebook, because Facebook make a shitload of money off Apple's platform and they refused to pay a certain percentage to Apple - unlike Google who is paying 20B a year to access iOS users. Apple tried to cut Facebook off with ATT on iOS 14, but it didn't work.

Because of this, Zuckerberg has to be incredibly paranoid about controlling his company destiny, to stop relying on others' platforms to deliver ads. It would be catastrophic for Facebook to not be a main player for the next computing platform, and they're currently making a lot of money from their other businesses. Zuckerberg is ruthless and he is paranoid, he has total control of Facebook and he will use all the resources to control the next big thing. I think it comes down to this: Zuckerberg believes it's cheaper to be wrong than to miss out on the next platform, and Facebook can afford to be wrong (to a certain extend).

Don't forget gaming back in the day! Facebook games started taking off, then Facebook decided that the _only_ way you could get paid on the Facebook platform was with Facebook Credits, and to incentivize Facebook as the gaming platform of choice, Facebook would give out free Credits to players to spend on Facebook games. Of course, if your game was the one they chose to spend those Credits on, you wouldn't actually get paid, not with promotional credits, what, are you crazy?

No, I'm not still bitter from that era, why do you ask?

Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples. Hence the continuous string of increasingly over-hyped "game-changing technologies" they all (not just Meta) keep rolling out.

VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.

It's important to analyze decisions within the context at the time, not the modern context.

When Facebook went into gaming, it was about the time they went public and they were in search of revenue. At the time, FB games were huge. It was the era of Farmville. Some thought that FB and Zynga would be the new Intel and MIcrosoft. This was also long before mobile gaming was really big so gaming wasn't an unreasonable bet.

Waht really killed FB Gaming was not having a mobile platform. They tried. But they failed. We could live in a very different world if FB partnered with Google (who had Android) but both saw each other as an existential threat.

After this, Zuckerberg paid $1 billion for Instagram. This was a 100x decision, much like Google buying Youtube.

But in the last 5-10 years the company has seemed directionless. FB itself has fallen out of favor. Tiktok came out of nowhere and has really eaten FB's lunch.

The Metaverse was the biggest L. Tends of billions of dollars got thrown at this before any product market fit was found. VR has always been a solution looking for a problem. Companies have focused on how it can benefit them but consumers just don't want headsets strapped to their heads. It's never grown beyond a niche and never shown signs that it would.

This was so disastrous that the company lost like 60%+ of its value and seemingly it's been abandoned now.

Meta also dabbled with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Also abandoned.

Social media really seems to have settled into a means of following public figures. Individuals generally seem to interact with each other via group texts.

Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI. But what does Meta do with AI? Can they build a moat? It's never been clear to me what the end goal is.

Maybe he can work on making Facebook not be such a piece of shit. I feel like he got his one lucky break and should just give up on trying to make more money. He already has billions. Is he proud of Facebook as a product? Because as a user it feels sluggish, buggy, inconsistent, and just full of low quality trash. I would be embarrassed if I was him.

Metaverse was a flop maybe, but meta makes something like $1 billion a week from its mobile apps, it'd be crazy to say that is not successful.

The fact that it was so successful, and that zuck picked mobile to be the next big thing before many of his peers and against what managers in the company wanted to do is probably what has made him now overconfident that he can do it again

>Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment.

That's a charitable description of a massive bonfire of cash and credibility for an end product that looks worse than a 1990s MMORPG and has fewer active users than a small town sports arena.

I think Meta's real talent is to make niche tech mainstream, and then as a result they get their ass kicked in that sector. They're getting pretty good at that.

> Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing...

An unforced error on the scale of HBO switching to MAX, except likely far more expensive. What is the Metaverse anyway?

Oh, I'm sure one day he'll chase the next big thing, but like the proverbial dog who chases the car, what will he do once he catches it?

He, as many other billionaires, confused luck for skill. Just because they were at the right time in the right place to launch something, doesn't mean their other ideas are solid or make sense.