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sPh's avatar

Two things about Facebook:

1) Apple changed the allowable level of PII tracking on the iPhone and this has apparently cratered Facebook's revenue. (this also gave the lie to Facebook's claim that is was only tracking very specific PII it needed to tweak its ad display algorithm - they were clearly trading/selling that info as well)

2) that said, I do use Facebook to keep track of close family, high school friends, and the world of ammeter potterymaking. From about 3 years ago to 12 months ago Facebook was actually showing me relevant, amusing, not-obnoxious ads and I did click through a few of them and make purchases - and I am pretty immune to ads in every form. But 12 months ago Facebook apparently implemented one of its famous "algorithm tweaks" and since then it has been showing me nothing but irrelevant junk ads. No, I don't need a 35-ton hydraulic excavator; what happened to the ads for pottery knives? And I choose that example specifically because Facebook knows I follow pottery sites without needing any data from Apple. I think they outsmarted themselves with their smartest guy in the room software updates and killed their own goose.

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grufinprog's avatar

Facebook’s willing acceleration of its own collapse into irrelevance (as every other social network has experienced) is absolutely astonishing. Not even content to milk the money on the way down, Zuckerberg is setting it all on fire. Rather than even say he will try to make Facebook more useful, he brags about spending that money on a VR product absolutely nobody has asked for. I have an Oculus headset and the experience is very good as far as VR goes, but I haven’t picked it up and used it in six months because it turns out that VR isn’t all that interesting except as a gimmick. Even for games, it makes you intensely motion-sick for first-person movement. Nobody will want to spend any significant amount of time wearing a headset. Nobody. And without VR, the metaverse is just another avatar chat room, of which there have been dozens already, none terrifically successful.

The badness of the products seems to me the result of the founder’s Vision being incomprehensible to anyone else. I’ve seen that many times but at much smaller scale. Nobody will tell the boss, of course, and they’ll build SOMETHING, but what they build will be garbage because there is nothing coherent to latch onto. Steve Jobs, by contrast, always had something he could describe that people could understand wanting, even if the delivery (especially first versions) was much more limited.

Musk’s secret skill has been finding and hiring those people who have their own vision that is somewhat aligned with his, and letting them rip. My experience at the tech giants is that past the first few thousand employees, the ability to identify those absolutely critical people gets lost, and risks being corrupted into hiring people who are instead completely incapable, and so you see steadily decreasing ability to execute except incrementally or by cloning.

And cloning is great but many companies seem to feel too proud to really go for it. Facebook tried its own version of TikTok but it was never close enough to substitute. The urge to believe you can do better by innovating serves your pride but not the market. Especially once your ability to innovate is fading.

What Musk will do with Twitter, I don’t know. The people I talked to about it pretty much agree you could do it with 75% of the staff. The problem is how to get there from here.

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