February 3, 2022

"Zuckerberg, in his trademark nasal drawl, seemed to acknowledge that the tide was turning against the business he has been running for 18 years as of this week."

"'The balance of content that people see in feeds is shifted a little bit more towards stuff that isn’t coming from their friends, which they may discuss with their friends, but it’s kind of shifting towards more public content,' he said. The upshot here is that the voyeuristic behaviors that made social media as we know it so profitable — what are my friends talking about? Who did my high school ex marry? — were actually starting to fade.... During the earnings call, [Zuckerberg] said he believed there was a kind of evolution of the internet, from text to pictures to short videos, and the next leap would be the kind of 3-D avatars being pushed for such thrilling things as business meetings and conference calls.... If people are buying Zuckerberg’s version of the internet’s future, they would be more excited about how he spent nearly $10 billion during the past year to build it. As of now, Facebook looks more and more like the past."

From "The Worst Day of Mark Zuckerberg’s Reign" (NY Magazine).

45 comments:

Skeptical Voter said...

Will that ship sail off into the sunset? I hope so. Facebook has been pernicious.

Jersey Fled said...

As of now, Facebook looks more and more like the past."

We can only hope.

Owen said...

So it turns out that guessing the future --with 100% accuracy-- and using those guesses to place bets that are both gigantic and irretrievable, is not such an easy business.

I imagine the vast train of sycophants is now recalculating the payoff of continuing to praise Saint Mark. Pass the popcorn.

Enigma said...

It's not what Zuckerberg says and it's not very complicated:

- Partisan election efforts in 2020 = loss of politically hostile users
- Partisan election efforts in 2020 = growth of alternative platforms
- EU requirement to disclose trackers and allow blocks = loss of predatory advertising
- Apple blocking tracking = loss of predatory advertising

No one in the history of the world has had nuanced second-by-second access to others' data. Tech profits over the last 10-20 years were driven the manipulative and predatory exploitation of data. This game is ending.

gilbar said...

i use facebook to see what my cousins are up to
i have No Interest in the " more public content" that they are pushing
i'd say, that few people have Any interest in the "more public content" they are pushing
the "more public content" they are pushing are ADS. The ADS are something i'd put up with for free access
The ADS are now the MAIN THING when you look at facebook... Unsurprisingly, they are losing members

Leland said...

the next leap would be the kind of 3-D avatars

That seems like a big step back. Heck the movie is 13 years old. Raise your hand if you rather do away with Zoom calls (wait...) but instead put on a VR helmet and be a cartoon character in a conference room that you can walk around yet can't see anything in the real world, such as your notes.

Wince said...

Peter meets Principle.

cubanbob said...

Zuck missed the boat when Tik Tok first came out. Plus his censorship hasn't helped the bottom line.

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

May his worst day be just the first of an infinite number. All subsequent days worse than the previous day. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

RideSpaceMountain said...

But where are the users? They're all searching now. Nowhere to be found. They haven't latched on to other platforms...so where are they?

Lehman bros. were amateurs.

JPS said...

"The balance of content [is] kind of shifting towards more public content,"

Lovingly curated to spin up rage at the other side. To make sure I see the worst and dumbest things my friends' political opponents have said and done since the last outrage. Since I never argue politics on Facebook, and my friends span a pretty broad spectrum, I get to see what pisses all of them off.

Whereas I can discuss just about anything commercial and if my phone is on me, I'll get related ads the next time I open up Facebook on my laptop. My favorite was the time some friends were discussing entertainment. One mentioned the Val Kilmer documentary and I said, "I'm your huckleberry."

Next time I opened Facebook there were ads for a pretty badass-looking Tombstone-themed Doc Holliday T-shirt bearing those words.

I'm quite sure I consented to this somewhere along the line. I mean, I must have.

Achilles said...

Web 3.0 is going to end his business model.

This is happening now because he is a terrible person.

He is just moving the timetable up a bit.

Mike Sylwester said...

I quit Facebook when Facebook banned Donald Trump. Since then, I have wondered how many other people quit for that reason.

mccullough said...

His speech sounds adenoidal, not nasal.

The Vault Dweller said...

he believed there was a kind of evolution of the internet, from text to pictures to short videos, and the next leap would be the kind of 3-D avatars being pushed for such thrilling things as business meetings and conference calls.

This sounds like an example of the human brain being absolutely amazing at finding patterns in nature even when there really is none.

Sebastian said...

Top ten companies by assets 50 years ago:

Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Texaco, Ford Motor, Intl. Business Machines, Gulf Oil, Mobil, ITT Industries, ChevronTexaco, General Electric.

Sic transit gloria.


mezzrow said...

At least one of next year's books about Zuckerburg will begin with that speech.
Maybe a dozen. Most will begin with today's events.
There is lot less sugar in his castle tonight. The earth just moved a little.

Humperdink said...

I thought Zuckerdork's charisma would carry the day with Wall Street (Sarc alert).

Michael K said...

I'm more interested about the $400 million he spent to steal the 2020 election.

Left Bank of the Charles said...

Zuckerberg is saying that new technology that he is developing will replace the old technology he developed. The stock market believes the second part but not the first part. Stories like this aren’t helping him.

tim in vermont said...

Zuckerbucks and drop off boxes. Apparently they used cell phone tracking, to determine that people were driving from drop box to drop box to drop off ballots, and there is video of them taking off rubber gloves after dropping the ballots, and the rubber gloves were to keep for leaving fingerprints

I am not sure how they tracked the cell phones, but I have a theory. Cell phones have and IMSI, which identifies the phone, and a TMSI, which is a temporary indentifier that is used to prevent identifying the owner of a cell phone, even if you listen in on the signalling. The TMSI doesn't change that often, so you could, in theory, without having access to the phone company's data, track phones as they moved around a city, without using a Stingray device. You just can't know exactly who the person is that owns the phone, or know what they are saying on their phone.

Watch the video, there really is no innocent explanation for what was discovered. The New York Times should be publishing this, and there should be a Pulitzer Prize, but of course that will not happen.

https://welovetrump.com/2022/01/30/2000-mules-ballot-traffickers-caught-with-cell-phone-gps-and-security-footage/

Zuckerberg wants the cheap labor that the Democrats offer by providing an endless stream of indentured programmers, excuse me H-IB visa holders, to undercut American STEM graduates' wages so that Zuckerberg can get even richer.

charis said...

There is a pernicious side to FB, but I still value it to keep up with my family and church. (I use it for nothing else.) FB has been invaluable especially to our tiny church, helping us stay connected during the pandemic.

tim in vermont said...

"Next time I opened Facebook there were ads for a pretty badass-looking Tombstone-themed Doc Holliday T-shirt bearing those words."

It's way worse than that. Apple promises me that any ad content is not identifiable to me personally, but I mentioned seeing a bobcat on my pool deck to my neighbor, and recently, I got a catalogue, to my personal address, for Bobcat equipment. I have neve done a web search on Bobcat equipment.

Howard said...

I only read Facebook for the interesting articles.

tim in vermont said...

I felt bad for a while that I had deleted my FB account, and lost all of my friend connections, etc, and he seemed to be doing better than ever, so this is good news to me, that it wasn't in vain.

Now Twitter is limiting my ability to read the people I like to read without creating an account, so I look at it as an opportunity to spend less time on Twitter.

Leland said...

I quit Facebook when Facebook banned Donald Trump. Since then, I have wondered how many other people quit for that reason.

I'm not sure how many quit but posting is way down. When you can't say anything not approved by the narrative, there isn't much conversation. However, if you want to smuggle things across the border, you can still reach out to human traffickers on Facebook to plan your trip. The next Jeffrey Epstein has to get their girls from somewhere, because the clients haven't gone away.

Bob Boyd said...

Dat muttafuggin' Zukabug...he don't give a shit.

Paul Zrimsek said...

Classic use of the passive voice, worthy of a hack politico. You take your eye off that balance of content one second and there's no telling what the crazy thing will go and do.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

facebook is for losers.

MikeD said...

For people cheering the possible demise of Facebook; if you don't think the next stage of "social media" will be orders of magnitude worse you're delusional.

Fred Drinkwater said...

I hope Facebook collapses, because that would prove me right. A couple years ago I got an extensive tour of their Mountain View HQ, and explained to my friends later what "Edifice Complex" means, and what it portends.
Next up: Apple.

JaimeRoberto said...

I deleted my account last year. I wasn't using it much anyway. I'd rather be blind to the idiocy of my former classmates and coworkers, and I was happy to decrement Facebook's user count.

Joe Smith said...

Myspace disagrees...

SteveWe said...

Zuckernerd bought Oculus, so naturally he wants everyone to buy and use 3-D avatar headsets made by Oculus. He is not as smart as he thinks he is. In fact, many people think he's stupid. Even AOC doesn't like him (not that her opinions really matter much).

DanTheMan said...

>>I'm more interested about the $400 million he spent to steal the 2020 election.

C'mon Mike. He bought it fair and square.

PM said...

I don't care who hates him, that's a rough day.

SteveWe said...

Howard said...
I only read Facebook for the interesting articles.

Is that why you, as an adolescent, read Playboy?

walter said...

Facebook groups ok for landing occasional gigs (my next two days) and niche sales classifieds.

pacwest said...

FB, er Meta, lost $10b on its VR/AR division in 2021. The "Metaverse" he's pushing is not wholly based on VR, but it plays a large roll.

I've been a VR enthusiast since the late 80's and have watched 4 waves of 'this time VR is going to take over everything" crash against the shores of reality. In the mid 90's the VRML 'revolution' that was driven by Sun Microsystems was in vouge with the young set of programmers that were mostly Zuckerberg's age. I was suprised by these very bright people's surety of an imminent shift from 2D to 3D for all information. 25 years later they are still pushing something as far away now as it was then. Don't get me wrong, I love mucking about in digital 3D representations, but it is and will remain a bad substitute for the real world for a long time. Zuckerberg is making a poor bet on VR unless he is planning many many decades down the road. And even then it's a crapshoot.

Note that Microsoft and Apple are producing AR hmds, but they are shooting for the business and training markets rather than the popular market like Meta. I have my doubts about how successful that strategy will be, but it's a lot more likely to succeed than counting on wide adoption by gamers and social media users.

God bless them all for trying though!

walter said...

I suspect in the frenzy of Madison's Democracy in the Park effort some ballots erroneously got delivered in lieu of pizzas.

Ralph L said...

I don't see ads on FB (or here), even when it's whitelisted. I think there's an adblocker on Chrome that I forgot I activated years ago.

The changes to Twitter are really irritating. My viewing has plummeted to near zero. Whenever I went to one of Ace's animal video tweets, there'd be a long string of lefties under it.

Gospace said...

Censorship is killing Facebook. No one is forced to communicate with anyone else. If you don’t want to see my political posts- unfriend me. It will mean you’re a liberal because statistics show conservatives are open to read things they disagree with. Many liberals live in self created bubbles. And by them all conservative friends their actions create what they call the conservative echo chamber. And with liberals doing the “fact check” they smile smugly as only conservative memes ever get fact checked proving the superiority of their views.

JPS said...

tim in vermont, 4:51:

Only just saw that, but that’s the best example I’ve heard of yet! Thanks.

matism said...

Zuckerberg is Jewish. What else would you expect???

Dan said...

Perhaps if Facebook would stop reaching in to private groups (like the one I used to share with my brother and sister) to add their own comments about our discussion topics, I might still be using it.