Comment by LarsDu88
6 days ago
I think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.
Your idea of what would "make the user experience better" can be very different from what actually makes the experience more profitable to Meta.
As far as I can tell, the things that actually drives engagement are ragebait political videos, thirst traps, and fake AI generated videos of cats robbing liquor stores.
The investors have rewarded Meta with something like 5x stock increase since abandoning the Metaverse.
It's time to realize that "embrace the stupid" is indeed a viable business strategy and an accurate reflection of our society.
The evolution of Meta/FB is quite interesting.
It started off seemingly innocent - the mission of connecting folks. However, there was no money in that.
Where is the money? Content production. What content generates a continuous growing stream of earnings? Content that appeals to the senses of all kinds - including selling a get rich fast dream to girls promoting their OF pages.
What you have is an environemnt that preys and feeds off of consumers who have a lack of discipline with their money and are easy to manipulate - providing a nice ROAS. This is Meta in a nutshell.
Zuck enjoys roll playing a roman emperor - I have no doubt behind the scenes he laughs at his contribution toward the declining tastes, standards and self control of individuals.
Man, I hate to admit it but there's an element of truth here.
Sometimes I think there's a perspective from which suppliers (politicians, social media producers) are right thinking their customers as idiots and manipulatble even though customer-driven ought to be the goal.
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Their financial stability all hinges on having lot's of user engagement. As we've seen, optimizing for engagement tends to be a pretty awful user experience. That doesn't matter to them if the numbers go up that they want to go up.
Or, the guy who cheats at Catan just needs the constant ego boost to be able to say "yeah I'm kind of a big deal in Next Big Thing"
Facebook Libra, Metaverse, etc.
Zuck is having a real hard time admitting to himself that Facebook was just luck.
Bezos is also having a hard time admitting amazon was just luck and gates is having a hard time admitting windows was just luck and … :)
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