Comment by jmyeet
2 days ago
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.
> Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI
I question whether the corpus is of particularly high quality and therefore valuable source data to train on.
On the one hand: 20+ years of posts. In hundreds of languages (very useful to counteract the extreme English-centricity of most AI today).
On the other hand: 15+ years of those posts are clustered on a tiny number of topics, like politics and selling marketplace items. Not very useful unless you are building RagebaitAI I suppose. Reddit's data would seem to be far more valuable on that basis.
> 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.
I wish Google circles were still a thing.
You're right about Instagram, I did forget them. That was a huge get. Was that skill or luck though?
Didn't they just buy it though? Then they proceeded to fuck it up just like they did to Facebook.
Depends on your interpretation. Maybe? I think there's a fair case that Instagram wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't bought by Facebook.
You could also level a similar question at Google about YouTube. I believe YouTube is one of Google's great successes (bias: I work at Google), and that it wouldn't have become what it is now outside of Google, but I think it would be hypocritical of me to not accept the same about Instagram.