Exactly. Zuck stole the original idea to Facebook. Then bought a ton of companies after that for innovation. He has no good ideas of his own, when he does think of stuff, they are wild big company pivots that fail.
Zuck has never had an original idea in his head, ever. His initial claim to fame, prior to FB, at least on college campus’ was making a “hot or not” clone utilizing photos from various Harvard facebooks. Every idea since then has been someone elses or he’s tried to take the Apple approach of “let someone else do it first, then we improve on it” except he has never been able to nail down the second part. The only reason FB became successful was the initial exclusivity and it filled the gap of a post 20-something myspace/ICQ/AOL IM world.
I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.
Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.
It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I’m neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn’t put money on the certainty of Facebook’s failures …
It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it
Fortunately there seems to be a limit as far as what people are willing to tolerate. While I agree these moves are extremely calculated, they’re being calculated by people who are almost completely disconnected from reality and whose egos cloud their judgment at every turn
Precisely. I make calculated decisions all the time. But I suck at math. Even “highly calculated” decisions can be very stupid. In fact, some levels of stupidity are only possible with some level of higher education.
They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it
Yes, someone else who’s actually intelligent will do those things but zuckerberg himself is a talentless bastard who won’t be able to execute those ideas.
I have to admit, I did wonder what his vr would look like and then he showed off something that looked like an early alpha release of a cheap second life clone in a giant global presentation, hilariously funny.
His is such a bad company but so poorly run by its dictator. He can’t be ousted as he holds majority shares. It’d be funny as hell if it wasn’t facilitating the progression of the end of our world. Dumping billions that could be used to feed and support people in need. Instead we got the metaverse and datacenters on every corner.
Yeah I don’t think that deserves much praise, personally for a company destroying regulation, lobbying to elect a despot, profiting off of sex trafficking, effectively spreading disinformation and misinformation about a wide variety of scientific fields, etc.
I recently saw a video of Zuckerberg being interviewed by Theo Von and I honestly thought it was AI slop at first. The way he sits, talks, even moves his head it’s like he’s constantly under interrogation. It’s like some PR manager spent a couple days with him teaching him how to act and the dude took it way too literally.
This video on how much of the debt these companies hold is hidden from their balance sheets is chilling. According to this, Meta “officially” owes $151B, but in reality has debt obligations closer to $572B.
That’s over 40% of Meta’s entire market capitalization, and they’re rapidly adding to that debt. Meta’s existing properties are losing users, and there’s just no fucking way they’ll be able to pay back this debt in the long term, because they have zero hope of deriving income from all this data center investment. At some point, BlackRock and the other private equity firms Meta owes money to are going to come looking for blood
I guess they’re waiting for Peter Thiel to save them, again, when he turns the data centers into data lakes for palantir and we go full surveillance state. I do believe there is some end game these tech billionaires believe is on the horizon that we aren’t really privy to, it’s just a matter of them making it come to fruition before reality crashes down on their heads. Bankrupting them faster through boycotts is a good way the average person can help speed up reality and slow down their progress.
Ugh. I’m so sorry and angry every time I think on this…
…Full surveillance state. I do believe there is some end game these tech…on the horizon…matter of them making it come to fruition before reality crashes down on their heads…
We should bankrupt them faster because it’s what they deserve, and the progress needs to be slowed at all costs.
But the reasons why all this is unfolding? Very clear to see, and you even referenced them without really pausing to consider.
Fascism isn’t stupider this time around (in so far as being beyond the already astronomical stupidity required to believe it’s a solution to fucking anything).
It’s desperate. They didn’t pivot away from their little spaceship dreams and into AI because it’s more profitable. They don’t care to come ahead in an economically sound world.
I’m sorry. Time has ran out on the climate and our biosphere, as far as them retaining the properties that allowed us the ‘Modern World’.
There is no longer an avenue that averts widespread desolation, and they’ve known it all along because they don’t actually all ignore scientific consensus, they just pay for the masses to ignore it.
It’s going to be a gnarly and awful time, but humans aren’t wired to just give up and die.
Hence the total surveillance state. Hence the mass casual cruelty with mass deaths. Hence the persecution of anyone who might oppose or see through it.
The world as we know it will be reduced to ashes, in our lifetimes, and we’ll have to scramble to do whatever our species will do just to barely persist in some form, as that is just what we do.
They dream of a techno feudalist dreamscape where each little Dragon has their manageable fiefdom composed of a diminished and controllable populace to continue to carry out their self-aggrandizing whims. They can burn all of the economy now, because they’re trying to trade it for straight power.
Joke’s on them, they’ll die by the masses too, and those that don’t, will die by the masses. It’s not that hard for thousands of angry and with nothing to lose people to go after them.
Their dream of Autonomous Weapon guardians is as laughable as the rest of the stupidity they’ve attempted and failed at throughout the years: It will be as imperfect a solution to what they’re attempting as anything else they’ve ever done.
But we collectively let them have control of the playground while it was fresh and clean, so now we gotta deal with their bullshit king of the hill fantasies and the results of their evil stupidity.
I do believe there is some end game these tech billionaires believe is on the horizon
I think it’s just a variant of the standard republican “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”. They think financial wealth is something they can just create out of thin air using AI (the way that government creates wealth out of thin air by printing money, allegedly), so as long as they acquire the data centers to fuel it, by whatever means necessary, they’ll be all right in the end.
They are all going into debt over datacenters. Google issued new shares… how? why? They all make so much money and still they can’t cashflow this expansion.
It’s all saturated and nobody really needs anything new anymore. There’s nowhere to go. We should expect to see some of these firms suddenly collapse like Silicon Valley Bank did.
Cynically though… they’ve been peddling nothing for two decades now. Big data, the cloud, SAAS, web 3.0, metaverse, nfts, llms, there’s always a new nothing born.
Steals an idea to get rich. Buys companies to produce ideas for him but still fails somehow.
Gets called innovative genius because he has lots of money? I guess all he is that he was opportunistic and was able to realize a good idea (perhaps by chance) a long time ago and stole it. Now he is constantly failing on choosing good ideas but because he is stinking rich he is somehow able to keep himself afloat.
We should also mention he probably gained lots of money from low hanging non-ethical fruits like illegally providing user data to companies that analyse political motivations.
If he made thin AR glasses, that could have been neat. Should have specialized in a set of consumer glasses that is smart enough to take over basic phone use. Including a type of FaceTime but through the glasses. They could have designed a weird system that uses fancy cameras and embedded AI to construct your face in real time. They could have specialized in making them very lightweight. All the stuff you might expect out of futuristic glasses, then allowed them to take eSIM. They could have reasonably considered entering consumer phone/data services under some weird niche.
They’ve been trying to build that, and they even demo’d a prototype after spending a few billion, but it was too expensive to sell.
Slim AR displays are science fiction technology, and the best they can do right now is still quite limited compared to passthrough VR. They can’t hit nearly the same FOV or resolution yet in transparent displays, you either get readable text or a wide FOV, but not both. There’s a reason Google Glass was only a tiny thing in the corner of your vision.
There was a brief period of time where they were actually on the “right” track IMO. You’d pop the headset on, call your friend(s), and when they answered, immediately your VR avatars would be standing in the same virtual space or in your room if you’re using passthrough mode, and you could “look at” and speak to each other in a way that felt extremely natural. You’d start gesturing and naturally moving your body as you speak in the same way you would in a face-to-face chat. The same way you can be at a Halloween party and after a few minutes, you’re having a completely normal conversation with Abe Lincoln or a frog or whatever. Even though the avatars weren’t perfect, there were times that three of us just stood around for 30-45 minutes just chatting and catching up before anyone suggested playing an actual game.
To me, the main selling point of VR is that it’s the best way to feel present with someone who isn’t physically there. It’s better than a video call or a traditional online game. It’s really the closest thing to just “hanging out” with someone who’s somewhere else.
Of course, it only worked that way for a month or two before they made it so that you couldn’t gather like that unless you were inside the horizon worlds app, which everyone always hated. Typical dark pattern enshittification as usual.
This is all beside the fact that it’s Zuck, Facebook, and all the other things everyone hates, but much like the perv glasses seem to be catching on, I think Zuck’s metaverse could have been somewhat popular if they hadn’t done… basically everything they’ve done to it.
If you are still actively using Facebook you are either over 40 or live in a rural area of the country. As an example, I live in a small rural town of less than 4000 people everybody still uses Facebook and the amount of AI that they are liking sharing commenting on is absurd.
I just recently learned that is only true for some places on earth. In Hungary if you want to find any event, you have to still use Facebook. I have seen people using Facebook messenger on a phone, which i have never seen before 🤣.
Exactly, I do still have a Facebook. I rarely use it anymore, but because of the ubiquity of everyone here using it, you still have to log on once in a while to stay informed of events or anything going on currently there is a wildfire close to my hometown and most of the information is posted on Facebook, but the crazy thing is a lot of local people have been posting AI footage of the wildfire or AI god prayer quotes asking for help and protecting the firefighters and are also trying to turn this fire political for some reason.
In all honesty everyone of all ages here use Facebook religiously it’s kinda impressive. As an example, I have a coworker who is five years older than me. We were talking about old music from the 90s and I told him to look up a YouTube channel of old 90s rock music and he looked at me confused and said “what is YouTube?” I gave him a basic rundown of what YouTube is and his response was it sounds like woke bullshit. If it’s not on Facebook, I’m not watching it as far as I know that is his only connection to the outside world other than basic cable.
I don’t know if “improved” is as accurate as “accelerated” in that case. Oculus was already doing cool stuff they just needed the resources to really get going, and now Meta is all up in it so the service kinda blows.
I’m suggesting that he didn’t run back to his dorm room and recreate what he saw someone else do all quick like and rather stole their completed or nearly completed code.
Tells you a lot about success and merit. He has absolutely no fucking clue what’s going to be successful and what won’t. He was just super lucky with Facebook.
The reason he’s a billionaire is because the system is totally fucked up. He’s a bug, not a feature.
The current Economic structure is designed so that the thing that makes the most Money is having Money and tilted so that the more the Money the bigger the effect.
This is why, for example, many if not most countries have higher taxes on income from work than on income from dividends.
It’s not by chance that Social Mobility has collapsed to pretty much non-existence in most of the World, especially the US (were the saying “You can be anything” actually used to be true, but not anymore, not even close) - the Economy is so extremelly rigged for Money to make Money that the dumbest, laziest, most inept rich kid will keep on getting richer their whole lives no matter how much they fuck up.
Outside of Facebook what has he been responsible for that didn’t blow up in his face? The only other things Meta has that aren’t thus far miserable failures are Instagram and Whatsapp, both of which they bought.
And Google built a search engine. Everything else they’ve tried to build has failed, other than maybe Gmail which was just a Yahoo Mail / Hotmail clone. Everything else that has been successful has been an acquisition: Maps (Keyhole), YouTube, Android, Google Photos (Picasa), Doubleclick…
We really need robust antitrust. How many of these acquisitions would be thriving companies in their own right, competing with the big tech giants if the tech giants hadn’t been able to absorb them.
Google+ is an example of what happens when companies have to compete instead of acquiring other companies. Google poured billions into it and it flopped completely.
IMO it’s almost worse than if G+ flopped completely. Google+ was actually awesome for the specific world of smalltime pen and paper RPGs. But of course, that one creative community of people designing & publishing cool stuff wasn’t enough to justify its cost, or challenge Facebook for supremacy, so they pulled the plug even though plenty of people were still using it. Just a waste.
If it takes multiple billions of dollars to create a product that is useful for a niche group of pen and paper RPG players, that product is probably not going to succeed.
But, also, if Facebook didn’t have such an unassailable monopoly on social networking, small, focused social networks that targeted a niche group of people might have a chance of surviving.
The only way to get him out of the CEO chair is for him to retire or die. He never gave up voting control during the IPO and controls more than 50% of the vote.
At least he didn’t have to spend all that money on higher salaries. How you boys liking the rocket game? I’m thinking about blowing a few dozen billion on that, just as a hobby. Not trying to make money off it.
I believe a lot of these people had the right idea at the right time but are by no means a good judge for these kinds of things. And should not in the least bit believe everything they touch turns to gold. You were FaceBook, you did good once. Enjoy your money and just stop.
greed by money can lead to infinity of chase happiness that they will never touch repeat the cycle until major diversion (usually lose everything) also you are correct as altman was going to be fired by cofounders for his malice had the timing didn’t hit it’s worst causing employees to almost leave to microsoft had they didn’t hire him and fired themself and you know why did empolyees were doing this because they were gonna lose money that was tied to altman which is gonna be their biggest mistake cause in exchange of temporary wealth they sold themself and everyone into a resession making there wealth from $ to 0
I’ll give it a go. It’s not that terrible, just mostly a lack of punctuation.
Being greedy for money can lead to infinite time spent chasing happiness that they will never obtain. The cycle repeats until something happens to stop it - usually they lose everything.
Your comment is spot on - Altman was going to be fired by cofounders for his malice. [I’m a little unsure here and didn’t pay attentio to Almatn’s difficulties, but I think the point is that he screwed up to the point of driving Microsoft employees away, but he stepped away rather than being fired. Employees were pushing for this because if they left, they would have lost money [vested, I assume] so in exchange for trying to protect thier wealth, they put up with Altman and that was a mistake. Also that contributed to recession that is going to hurt everyone’s wealth]
I believe that’s the gist. Granted, as it went on, it got a bit worse, but I think we can get much of the basic idea, which I think boils down to asshats seeking money at the cost of everything else will always contribute to everyone being hurt.
I hope that the whole facebook downfall and the inevitable enshitification of other facebook servies like instagram und whatsapp only accelerates the adoption of better alternatives, we’ll see if people are actually willing to leave whatsapp if its gotten bad enough
I hope so too, but I’m not holding my breath. People keep showing that critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with. In short, not happening! 🤣
critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with
Critical thinking is a mechanism for digesting large amounts of information over time, in order to make informed policy decisions.
If you don’t have useful information, you don’t have spare time, and you don’t have any actual input into policy, it lacks value.
I see folks consistently trying to make this an individualist problem. “I figured it out because I think critical! You didn’t because you’re a dumb-dumb!”
But more often than not, it’s two people talking past each other, working off different bodies of data (of debatable quality) that they’ve incompletely digested. And then all they know how to do with their conclusions is yell “You’re an idiot!” at people who disagree.
How do you reach large numbers of people to form a consensus? How do you collaborate with them towards a tangible benefit?
Curiously enough, Facebook used to provide a mechanism for this purpose. And the fact that it doesn’t anymore - that it is largely a trap for weak, confused, vulnerable people to scream at one another while they get scammed - speaks more to the profit engine of the service than the core competency of any of its members
I actually don’t mind this concept of a „town square“, but I think that it doesn’t work with so many people all just shouting into the void. The best form of social media seems to be this Reddit/lemmy forum style with categoriesed conversations in sub spaces
I agree. Micro-blogging was always bad, even in the early Twitter days. The people that used it back then and yearn for an equivalent now are the most opinionated, self-absorbed wankers online.
Becoming a billionaire really does seem to get to people’s heads, the younger the billionaire the worse.
Zuck is being completely reckless, burning through hundreds of billions of dollars hopping on every futuristic idea, and doesn’t listen to anyone’s fair criticism anymore.
He probably even thinks he is some great visionary and everyone else is holding him back, and that’s why they work for him, not the opposite.
In a sane socioeconomic system we wouldn’t people get this rich and powerful for their own good, especially young people.
We shouldn’t give up, but not everything that is possible happens, so just be aware that most ventures fail. But of course keep trying. Like with Lemmy.
A good product and marketing strategy can bootstrap an audience. You likely need to provide something beyond just a phone book. Even outside of Facebook there’s a million of those but getting an audience for a new product is far from impossible, tons of new games do it all the time.
The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that
You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years
Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.
So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america
I think you can start with niches or regional groups, they then start inviting others in.
WhatsApp and Discord basically had to bootstrap themselves and did it through niches and meeting a clear market need but we’re then bought up by Facebook. There were plenty of group chat competitors and voice chat competitors.
Discord is privately owned still but you bring up another key point: the players you’re up against are so powerful, with so much wealth and the most comprehensive legal representation, that even if you manage to have some success they will either buy you or destroy you. Meta has a presence on the fediverse, even
Hmmmm people like services which are actually better than what Facebook currently offers. Maybe free dating apps, cool games and meet up services could attract new users. Get me a team and some beers and pizza, and I will make new Facebook.
However I will never be able to outcompete META. That is a different story. That is an insane company with the craziest infrastructure.
The popular author Michael Crichton named this effect after his physicist friend Murray Gell-Mann, who had noticed how newspaper readers, for example, after studying an erroneous article on a subject in which they themselves are very knowledgeable, just shake their heads and find the reporting on it distorted, erroneous and lacking in understanding. However, if they then turn the page and read an article on another topic in which they themselves have little knowledge, they trust the information in this article almost without reservation.
Gonna go out on a limb here and say that getting into AI was the best thing Zuckerberg ever did for humanity, specifically the decision to release Llama as open weight (albeit obnoxious license) early on. That was the thing that showed the whole world open weights could work. Even if modern open weight models aren’t direct descendents of Llama, and even if Meta subsequently pivoted to closed weights, that’s still something that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Facebook’s AI auto summarizer that it passes to Google et al, is currently rewriting The National’s reporting of Rod Liddle’s death to say “he dies of alcoholism, suicide or cancer, a short illness followed by a heart attack”.
Bad uses and implementations of AI is being reversed and also being reclaimed by people-owned open source alternatives which is good
However, robotics needs way more done to be put back into peoples hands, and also to have more people-owned alternatives to become industry standards (same should be done for people-owned ai to be industry standards)
Lots to do but we got this and decent amount of people are doing for both AI and Robotics to make it for us and not for those who wish to shit on us all
I have to say I’m a bit worried he’s banking on receiving unlimited access to an insane level of surveillance data to use in the the $50B digital prison he’s building in Louisiana