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Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time.

P

philb2

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/meta-facebook-zuckerberg.html

To be clear, this is an op-ed piece. Still it is very interesting reading.Where I come from $80 Billion ain't exactly chicken feed.

There is a moment when internet companies get the stink of death on them. For AOL, it was 2003, when it became clear that its users were abandoning its clunky dial-up internet service for far-faster broadband. For Yahoo, it was 2015, when its last-ditch acquisition spree failed and it sold itself to Verizon.

For Meta, that time is now. I believe the company — one of the most powerful media organizations in the world and one of the most valuable members of the S&P 500 — is at the start of a long, slow decline that will trigger aftershocks to our economy and our society.

Thanks to that, we will all get to watch Mr. Zuckerberg drive the company into the ground. From 2021 to 2026, he poured $80 billion into the Metaverse in the firm belief that we would all want to don headsets and hang out in a virtual world populated by legless avatars. Even after shutting that project down, the company still loses billions a quarter on projects like selling $500 “smart” glasses that are not only unpopular but also give major creep-filming-you-without-consent vibes.
 
The odd thing about the metaverse is how stagnate they let the Oculus line become. The games that playdirectly on the Quest systems are mediocre at best which is understandable due to hardware limitations. But the way they let the Meta/Oculus desktop program on Windows start to decay was the more baffling one. They stopped selling the cables for the Rift and wireless connection is hoaky at best.

In fact if you want to actually enjoy the Quest headsets with high quality games you are better off buying games in Steam because Steam can stream wirelessly to your Meta headset better than the native Meta desktop could ever dream of. And it’s a great experience on Steam with a modern video card and fast WiFi router.

Strangely, while Yahoo has kind of faded here in the USA, in Japan they have become a very successful shopping platform offering something like Amazon (Yahoo Shopping) as well as becoming the equivalent of eBay over there (Yahoo Auction).
 
westrock2000 said:
Strangely, while Yahoo has kind of faded here in the USA, in Japan they have become a very successful shopping platform offering something like Amazon (Yahoo Shopping) as well as becoming the equivalent of eBay over there (Yahoo Auction).
Click to expand...

Yahoo Japan has been an independent entity from some time well before yahoo (us/global) entered terminal decline.
 
Companies have been repeating the same mistakes over and over again for 30+ years now when it comes to various iterations of 3D goggles, starting with the Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995.

Yes, the technology has improved dramatically. Games have improved dramatically. What hasn't changed is that it's not fun to wear a heavy bulky headset that is uncomfortable and sweaty.

And yeah, wearing glasses with built-in cameras does give off creep vibes, as it should. What's sad is the increasing percentage of people who think that there is nothing wrong with sticking cameras in people's faces all the time.

But while the "Meta" experiment is an objective failure, I don't think that Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon.
 
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that behind a paywall, but with meta revenue exploding 33% year over year last quarter (with 41% operating margin....), still slowly but still growing user base.. it could be an interesting take....

If it is not build on the idea that this past 80 billions failure matter at all in term of that money having been lost instead of having gone in buyback-divident
 
Lets not forget that Meta is also a central figure in the "age verification" scheme - https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings - a pattern of obfuscated funding and dark money going through shell companies and astroturf supposedly 'grassroots' advocacy groups, in order to push for age verification. It is no surprise as to why - not only will Meta receive a huge financial windfall in data broker and advertiser resources, they'll be able to vacuum up high value data points almost everywhere when you have to prove you're an adult with as picture of yourself, your real world ID next to you, and all matter of metrics that can be drained along the way. They also stand to benefit from of course offering these 3rd party validation services to others on contract - in exchange for both service fees and data (from both the company/site and the user accessing it).

This is one of the most pernicious threats to the open Internet, anonymity, and all the promise of the early days of the Internet and Web and they're seated at the middle of it; not surprising considering that since coming onto the scene they've brought nothing but ruinous surveillance capitalism, normalized predatory monetization and data mining, among other facets ; lets not forget Facebook wasn't the first social network but it was the first that normalized and later ostensibly required real world identity, when in the previous era it was commonplace to keep the two far, far apart. Watching Meta's stagnation of the VR "metaverse" does not portend tha the company is somehow teetering on the precipice of failure. They have many more irons in the fire, each one of them a far larger and more central threat. Anyone running a billion dollar company who sat on a dais during presidential inaugurations isn't going to be vulnerable to normal "market forces" if the little people don't like the widgets they make; that's the insurance bought with the concessions that got them onto the dias in the first place (to say nothing for the sheer scale of wealth , power, and connections lends to to-big-to-fail buffer in and of itself)
 
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GotNoRice said:
Companies have been repeating the same mistakes over and over again for 30+ years now when it comes to various iterations of 3D goggles, starting with the Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995.

Yes, the technology has improved dramatically. Games have improved dramatically. What hasn't changed is that it's not fun to wear a heavy bulky headset that is uncomfortable and sweaty.

And yeah, wearing glasses with built-in cameras does give off creep vibes, as it should. What's sad is the increasing percentage of people who think that there is nothing wrong with sticking cameras in people's faces all the time.

But while the "Meta" experiment is an objective failure, I don't think that Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon.
Click to expand...
Entirely agreed with you about headsets, not sure I agree with your last point...depending on how long you mean by "soon." I am a professor and teach students who are senior undergrads, and graduate and professional students - that is, people in their 20s and 30s. Anecdotally, it seems like none of them use Facebook. Even Instagram isn't particularly popular with them. I'm in my 40s and fewer and fewer of my cohort have a Facebook account. It seems like the only demographic still consuming the bullshit culture war rage bait that Facebook stuffs on everyone's feeds is the boomers, and maybe older Gen Xers.
 
1778348198293.png


maybe because facebook is a total cesspool? the app is designed to be addictive for one. It's full of 'news' that is outright blatant lies. the political agendas....where do i start with that one? what a mess. And what does meta have besides FB? not much, more social media platforms. sure they have their VR headsets if you don't mind being robbed of all your personal information (not that google is much better there). VR headsets that most don't care about anymore.

so what does meta really have besides facebook? instagram i guess, the popularity is dying there.

unfortunately it seems i need a subscription to read the article, shame. i was actually ready to do so. from the snippet posted yes i'd agree that the stink of death is strong here.
 
Sorry, I didn't realize this article was behind a paywall. Here is the full text.

There is a moment when internet companies get the stink of death on them. For AOL, it was 2003, when it became clear that its users were abandoning its clunky dial-up internet service for far-faster broadband. For Yahoo, it was 2015, when its last-ditch acquisition spree failed and it sold itself to Verizon.
For Meta, that time is now. I believe the company — one of the most powerful media organizations in the world and one of the most valuable members of the S&P 500 — is at the start of a long, slow decline that will trigger aftershocks to our economy and our society.
It may be named Meta, but the company’s biggest asset is still Facebook. Started from a Harvard dorm, the original online social network has dominated our world for two decades. Its three billion users are still bigger than any single country. Its platforms can help sway an election, fuel an insurrection or spark a genocide.
But if you look carefully, you can see chinks in the armor. Meta’s earnings are starting to show the strain from years of growing consumer disaffection and reckless spending. The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures. And the slumping stock confirms what we have all known in our guts for a while: This is a company entering its zombie era.

Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.
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As a company’s brand ages, its founders leave. The excitement evaporates. The stock shrivels to a fraction of its former glory as the user base withers to those captured by an old email account or friend group. New owners often arrive — usually bean counters who are focused on cutting costs and maximizing profits. That’s when websites stoop to junk mode, spamming you with endless email “final sales” and loading up the pages with ads so gross and disturbing that they should be age-restricted.
Of course, Meta is a long way from hitting rock bottom. The online giant — which benefits from its ownership of WhatsApp, the world’s largest messaging app, and Instagram, the popular photo-sharing social network — made $200 billion in ad revenue last year. That was an astonishing 20 percent of the global ad market. Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is still firmly at the helm because of an unusual ownership structure that prevents him from being fired.
Thanks to that, we will all get to watch Mr. Zuckerberg drive the company into the ground. From 2021 to 2026, he poured $80 billion into the Metaverse in the firm belief that we would all want to don headsets and hang out in a virtual world populated by legless avatars. Even after shutting that project down, the company still loses billions a quarter on projects like selling $500 “smart” glasses that are not only unpopular but also give major creep-filming-you-without-consent vibes.
While its adventures in avatars were going nowhere, Meta’s revenues still soared as even more ad dollars moved online in the pandemic. Then in 2022, the revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT burst on the scene, and Mr. Zuckerberg jumped into the A.I. race with an open checkbook. Pontificating about the democratization of A.I., he sank about $100 billion into building an A.I. model that anyone could run on their own machine. But last year, when that model turned out to be too slow, too inaccurate and too unwieldy for most people to operate on their own, Mr. Zuckerberg abandoned the effort and plunked down another $14 billion for a new team to play catch-up with the other leading A.I. models. Now Meta has said it will spend another $115 billion (minimum) over the next year on its new effort, which thus far performs worse than the competition.

​


Where is this money coming from? Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.
Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.
When an aging business starts to take on water, the quickest, easiest — and most destructive — solution is to make moves that will generate more money now but may cost the company later. And that’s exactly what Meta has started to do. In the first three months of this year, the company started cramming more ads onto its platforms while charging advertisers more. Those choices may have allowed the company to increase its revenue per user by a significant 27 percent in the first quarter of 2026, but they are also likely to further alienate users (and annoy advertisers).
At the same time, judges and juries are starting to penalize Meta for the societal harms of its products. In March, the company (alongside YouTube) lost a bellwether lawsuit alleging that its addictive design choices triggered anxiety, depression and body-image issues in a teenager. Waiting in the wings are over 100,000 similar cases seeking claims in the tens of billions of dollars.
There is a grim satisfaction in watching this organization hoist with its own petard. This is the company that profited from trafficking in lies, that tuned its algorithms to boost hatred and division, that stole our data and used it against us, that created the culture of toxic memes that are now central to our degraded public discourse. The fall of Facebook could even be a sign of a heartening turn in our national conversation: TikTok traffics more in inspirational content — prom videos are currently trending — than in the divisive narratives Facebook fostered.

But in the continued absence of any meaningful regulation, history shows us that internet companies can still wreak a lot of damage when they are in decline.
As it was being outpaced by Google on nearly every front, Yahoo failed to invest in cybersecurity and fell victim to what is still the largest data breach of all time. In 2014, Russian hackers gained access to 500 million Yahoo accounts, targeting Russian dissidents and journalists while stealing gift card and credit card numbers.
Meta’s properties, which are already riddled with fraud and scams, are likely to get even worse, given that the company has been slashing its work force in key areas focused on A.I. safety and identifying dangerous and illegal content. That means its apps are likely to grow even more polluted with everything from A.I. deepfakes to child sexual abuse material.
And Meta is still Meta. Even after losing that bellwether case on its efforts to addict users to its platforms, Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, recently bragged to Wall Street that the company is using A.I. to increase the amount of time users spend watching videos and interacting with content. Fortunately, given the company’s recent track record, there’s a good chance that at least some of these terrible ideas are likely to end up in the same graveyard where Meta’s other expensive flops are buried.
Meta may be dying, but rest assured it won’t go gently into that good night. Maybe this could be a good thing. The more users quit, and the more corroded Meta’s apps grow, the faster we can all log off and close this chapter of the social media revolution forever.
 
Gigantopithecus said:
I am a professor and teach students who are senior undergrads, and graduate and professional students - that is, people in their 20s and 30s. Anecdotally, it seems like none of them use Facebook. Even Instagram isn't particularly popular with them. I'm in my 40s and fewer and fewer of my cohort have a Facebook account. It seems like the only demographic still consuming the bullshit culture war rage bait that Facebook stuffs on everyone's feeds is the boomers, and maybe older Gen Xers.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've never used Facebook as a news/media consumption platform. And the entire time I've had an account on there (15+ years?) I've made maybe 3 "regular" Facebook posts. I've never used Instagram. But I've found a lot of value in some of the local community Facebook groups that I've become a member of, just to know what's going on in the local area. Facebook Marketplace seems a lot more active than Craigslist these days. I sell a lot of stuff on both Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, and the percentage has only continued to increase in Facebook's favor over the years. I think that there is also value from the very wide scope that Facebook has. I've found so many old friends on there that I had lost touch with. I don't see something like tiktok being able to replace all of those things.
 
GotNoRice said:
Yeah, I've never used Facebook as a news/media consumption platform. And the entire time I've had an account on there (15+ years?) I've made maybe 3 "regular" Facebook posts. I've never used Instagram. But I've found a lot of value in some of the local community Facebook groups that I've become a member of, just to know what's going on in the local area. Facebook Marketplace seems a lot more active than Craigslist these days. I sell a lot of stuff on both Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, and the percentage has only continued to increase in Facebook's favor over the years. I think that there is also value from the very wide scope that Facebook has. I've found so many old friends on there that I had lost touch with. I don't see something like tiktok being able to replace all of those things.
Click to expand...
Problem with FB MP is the random account banning, had my primary and spare accounts get a totally random MP ban over a dozen times and I use it may be 2-3x a year to sell random stuff (my heatware can speak to me as a trader). Last year I was selling my car, one person wanted to come after 2 days and in the meantime someone came in with a 4k higher offer and took it off my hands. This dude leaves a bad , salty review and 2 weeks later my account js banned again, there is no actual support to speak to so while it's fun and games for me (my primary account has MP again as of last week lol), I'd never use it for actual business (ebay has a far more robust support system for all its flaws and CL is a good as a min supervision DYOD system, FB MP is totally reliant on Suck's Psycho AI's mood whims).
 
Gigantopithecus said:
Entirely agreed with you about headsets, not sure I agree with your last point...depending on how long you mean by "soon." I am a professor and teach students who are senior undergrads, and graduate and professional students - that is, people in their 20s and 30s. Anecdotally, it seems like none of them use Facebook. Even Instagram isn't particularly popular with them. I'm in my 40s and fewer and fewer of my cohort have a Facebook account. It seems like the only demographic still consuming the bullshit culture war rage bait that Facebook stuffs on everyone's feeds is the boomers, and maybe older Gen Xers.
Click to expand...
Facebook started to decline when the kids discovered that their "cool" moms started using it.
 
GotNoRice said:
Yeah, I've never used Facebook as a news/media consumption platform. And the entire time I've had an account on there (15+ years?) I've made maybe 3 "regular" Facebook posts. I've never used Instagram. But I've found a lot of value in some of the local community Facebook groups that I've become a member of, just to know what's going on in the local area. Facebook Marketplace seems a lot more active than Craigslist these days. I sell a lot of stuff on both Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, and the percentage has only continued to increase in Facebook's favor over the years.
Click to expand...
I use Reddit for local community groups - Reddit does a much better job of not polluting my feed with bullshit IDGAF about. I am glad FB MP works for you, but where I am, it has only two kinds of users: lowballers and cretins!
 
Facebook's prime years may be behind it, but it's not dying completely any time soon.

It's like in Citizen Kane, when Charles Foster Kane responds to Mr. Thatcher's report that they lost a million dollars.

Kane: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years.
Click to expand...

In all seriousness, though, they're on a much more firm ground than what Myspace was on in its dying days.

That being said, I know that my Facebook account has been shadow banned and / or de-emphasized, since a lot of my friends who follow me weren't seeing most of my posts.
 
westrock2000 said:
The odd thing about the metaverse is how stagnate they let the Oculus line become. The games that playdirectly on the Quest systems are mediocre at best which is understandable due to hardware limitations. But the way they let the Meta/Oculus desktop program on Windows start to decay was the more baffling one. They stopped selling the cables for the Rift and wireless connection is hoaky at best.

In fact if you want to actually enjoy the Quest headsets with high quality games you are better off buying games in Steam because Steam can stream wirelessly to your Meta headset better than the native Meta desktop could ever dream of. And it’s a great experience on Steam with a modern video card and fast WiFi router.

Strangely, while Yahoo has kind of faded here in the USA, in Japan they have become a very successful shopping platform offering something like Amazon (Yahoo Shopping) as well as becoming the equivalent of eBay over there (Yahoo Auction).
Click to expand...

I had zero interest in the Meta store except for one reason, they gave you free credit. I did get and play Zero Caliber (good shooter) for free because of it. I bought Zero Caliber 2 on Steam because it is superior and will rebuy Zero Caliber 1 on Steam for the better graphics. Only advantage of the meta versions is they can install directly to the headset. It is true the wireless isn't very good on the Quest (2 in my case), it can be stuttery at times. The software isn't the greatest. Steam VR also sucks, in my experience.

But I do appreciate they are affordable. $350 now with the price increase, but the $200 for a Quest 2 was quite a deal, and the $300 for a 3S was not bad. If Valve is able to get a similar $500 headset the Quest line is done. If Valve can get a $300 VR headset, even better. But with hardware increases that is not happening anytime soon. I assume the Frame will be $800-900.
 
RanceJustice said:
Lets not forget that Meta is also a central figure in the "age verification" scheme - https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings - a pattern of obfuscated funding and dark money going through shell companies and astroturf supposedly 'grassroots' advocacy groups, in order to push for age verification. It is no surprise as to why - not only will Meta receive a huge financial windfall in data broker and advertiser resources, they'll be able to vacuum up high value data points almost everywhere when you have to prove you're an adult with as picture of yourself, your real world ID next to you, and all matter of metrics that can be drained along the way. They also stand to benefit from of course offering these 3rd party validation services to others on contract - in exchange for both service fees and data (from both the company/site and the user accessing it).

This is one of the most pernicious threats to the open Internet, anonymity, and all the promise of the early days of the Internet and Web and they're seated at the middle of it; not surprising considering that since coming onto the scene they've brought nothing but ruinous surveillance capitalism, normalized predatory monetization and data mining, among other facets ; lets not forget Facebook wasn't the first social network but it was the first that normalized and later ostensibly required real world identity, when in the previous era it was commonplace to keep the two far, far apart. Watching Meta's stagnation of the VR "metaverse" does not portend tha the company is somehow teetering on the precipice of failure. They have many more irons in the fire, each one of them a far larger and more central threat. Anyone running a billion dollar company who sat on a dais during presidential inaugurations isn't going to be vulnerable to normal "market forces" if the little people don't like the widgets they make; that's the insurance bought with the concessions that got them onto the dias in the first place (to say nothing for the sheer scale of wealth , power, and connections lends to to-big-to-fail buffer in and of itself)
Click to expand...
Best comment on this thread. I took my iron out of the Fakebook fire around 6 years ago, when a family member decided likes were more important than family. I had stopped tagging/posting photos years previously, when it became clear what nefarious plans they had for datamining. I briefly, anonymously rejoined and tried to sell my car on Fakebook marketplace a year ago, met a buyer, then they randomly banned my account and wanted me to submit a full video facescan - possibly, because I was using an untraceable email that they could not track. Fakebook marketplace does appear to have drained users away from Craigslist, which is a better platform in every way and without the blatant data mining. Unfortunately, people are too often like lemmings.
GotNoRice said:
Companies have been repeating the same mistakes over and over again for 30+ years now when it comes to various iterations of 3D goggles, starting with the Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995.

Yes, the technology has improved dramatically. Games have improved dramatically. What hasn't changed is that it's not fun to wear a heavy bulky headset that is uncomfortable and sweaty.

And yeah, wearing glasses with built-in cameras does give off creep vibes, as it should. What's sad is the increasing percentage of people who think that there is nothing wrong with sticking cameras in people's faces all the time.

But while the "Meta" experiment is an objective failure, I don't think that Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon.
Click to expand...
I always wanted one, but never bought one, not because of the hardware, but because they're too expensive. I assume that's the reason for many others, as well - you aren't going to be scared away from buying one, because of discomfort, if you've never owned/used one. Also, I'll be damned if I am letting Meta scan my retinas with their Occulus. I don't care if they pay me to own one.

You have to have at least three things to get into VR: 1. Money 2. Technical know how 3. Games. VR appeals to a limited demographic, not because of desire. If that was the new, default platform for Nintendo, there were games and it cost <$500, everyone would have it. It still hasn't reached that level yet. It's a luxury that few can afford.
 
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sleepeeg3 said:
Best comment on this thread. I took my iron out of the Fakebook fire around 6 years ago, when a family member decided likes were more important than family. I had stopped tagging/posting photos years previously, when it became clear what nefarious plans they had for datamining. I briefly, anonymously rejoined and tried to sell my car on Fakebook marketplace a year ago, met a buyer, then they randomly banned my account and wanted me to submit a full video facescan - possibly, because I was using an untraceable email that they could not track. Fakebook marketplace does appear to have drained users away from Craigslist, which is a better platform in every way and without the blatant data mining. Unfortunately, people are too often like lemmings.

I always wanted one, but never bought one, not because of the hardware, but because they're too expensive. I assume that's the reason for many others, as well - you aren't going to be scared away from buying one, because of discomfort, if you've never owned/used one. Also, I'll be damned if I am letting Meta scan my retinas with their Occulus. I don't care if they pay me to own one.

You have to have at least three things to get into VR: 1. Money 2. Technical know how 3. Games. VR appeals to a limited demographic, not because of desire. If that was the new, default platform for Nintendo, there were games and it cost <$500, everyone would have it. It still hasn't reached that level yet. It's a luxury that few can afford.
Click to expand...

You haven't been keeping up with VR at all.

1. Money - The Quest 2 was only $300 at one point, the current cheap Q3 model is $350 and the end model is $600.
2. Technical know how - you don't need any, you put the headset on and it's ready to play, anywhere in your house.
3. Games - the kids are playing active social games specifically made for VR. The popular titles that sell millions are not the sort of stuff your typical PC gamer is into. Gorilla tag has made 100s of millions of dollars.


Most people here think VR is an enhancement to PC gaming. For that actual purpose it is a niche.

But there are tens of millions of kids using it for something else daily and it's more popular than xbox.
 
Isn't Meta responsible for age verification lobbying all over the world? Doesn't sound like they're dying.
 
erek said:
“With around 8,000 layoffs scheduled for May 20, capital expenditure climbing to a record $125–145 billion this year, and internal morale at all-time lows, Zuckerberg told analysts Meta is rebuilding itself around small, AI-powered teams of outsized contributors.“

https://hardforum.com/threads/major...ayoff-from-ai-splurge.2046046/post-1046321923
Click to expand...
that one way to present one of the best year/turnaround ever in business history, %22 year on year revenu growth at those level with superbe 40% margin, 5x the stock value from the 2022 lows right now...
 
One of the things about Meta is that it doesn't feel like anything has managed to replace what they do best. They still dominate the social space with 2 different platforms. When companies start gasping for air, it's usually because something (at least in some form) replaced them.
 
GotNoRice said:
Companies have been repeating the same mistakes over and over again for 30+ years now when it comes to various iterations of 3D goggles, starting with the Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995.

Yes, the technology has improved dramatically. Games have improved dramatically. What hasn't changed is that it's not fun to wear a heavy bulky headset that is uncomfortable and sweaty.

And yeah, wearing glasses with built-in cameras does give off creep vibes, as it should. What's sad is the increasing percentage of people who think that there is nothing wrong with sticking cameras in people's faces all the time.

But while the "Meta" experiment is an objective failure, I don't think that Facebook is going anywhere anytime soon.
Click to expand...

there is a cycle, like every 10 years they try it again and then find out no one really cares, wants it, or its too expensive. I remember a PC Gamer magazine from the mid 90s all about VR on the PC.

3D glasses also existed for console, if you want to throw that into the mix also. Sega master system had it with the shutter glasses.
 
LukeTbk said:
that behind a paywall, but with meta revenue exploding 33% year over year last quarter (with 41% operating margin....), still slowly but still growing user base.. it could be an interesting take....

If it is not build on the idea that this past 80 billions failure matter at all in term of that money having been lost instead of having gone in buyback-divident
Click to expand...

philb2 said:
Sorry, I didn't realize this article was behind a paywall. Here is the full text.

There is a moment when internet companies get the stink of death on them. For AOL, it was 2003, when it became clear that its users were abandoning its clunky dial-up internet service for far-faster broadband. For Yahoo, it was 2015, when its last-ditch acquisition spree failed and it sold itself to Verizon.
For Meta, that time is now. I believe the company — one of the most powerful media organizations in the world and one of the most valuable members of the S&P 500 — is at the start of a long, slow decline that will trigger aftershocks to our economy and our society.
It may be named Meta, but the company’s biggest asset is still Facebook. Started from a Harvard dorm, the original online social network has dominated our world for two decades. Its three billion users are still bigger than any single country. Its platforms can help sway an election, fuel an insurrection or spark a genocide.
But if you look carefully, you can see chinks in the armor. Meta’s earnings are starting to show the strain from years of growing consumer disaffection and reckless spending. The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures. And the slumping stock confirms what we have all known in our guts for a while: This is a company entering its zombie era.

Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.
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As a company’s brand ages, its founders leave. The excitement evaporates. The stock shrivels to a fraction of its former glory as the user base withers to those captured by an old email account or friend group. New owners often arrive — usually bean counters who are focused on cutting costs and maximizing profits. That’s when websites stoop to junk mode, spamming you with endless email “final sales” and loading up the pages with ads so gross and disturbing that they should be age-restricted.
Of course, Meta is a long way from hitting rock bottom. The online giant — which benefits from its ownership of WhatsApp, the world’s largest messaging app, and Instagram, the popular photo-sharing social network — made $200 billion in ad revenue last year. That was an astonishing 20 percent of the global ad market. Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is still firmly at the helm because of an unusual ownership structure that prevents him from being fired.
Thanks to that, we will all get to watch Mr. Zuckerberg drive the company into the ground. From 2021 to 2026, he poured $80 billion into the Metaverse in the firm belief that we would all want to don headsets and hang out in a virtual world populated by legless avatars. Even after shutting that project down, the company still loses billions a quarter on projects like selling $500 “smart” glasses that are not only unpopular but also give major creep-filming-you-without-consent vibes.
While its adventures in avatars were going nowhere, Meta’s revenues still soared as even more ad dollars moved online in the pandemic. Then in 2022, the revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT burst on the scene, and Mr. Zuckerberg jumped into the A.I. race with an open checkbook. Pontificating about the democratization of A.I., he sank about $100 billion into building an A.I. model that anyone could run on their own machine. But last year, when that model turned out to be too slow, too inaccurate and too unwieldy for most people to operate on their own, Mr. Zuckerberg abandoned the effort and plunked down another $14 billion for a new team to play catch-up with the other leading A.I. models. Now Meta has said it will spend another $115 billion (minimum) over the next year on its new effort, which thus far performs worse than the competition.

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Where is this money coming from? Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.
Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.
When an aging business starts to take on water, the quickest, easiest — and most destructive — solution is to make moves that will generate more money now but may cost the company later. And that’s exactly what Meta has started to do. In the first three months of this year, the company started cramming more ads onto its platforms while charging advertisers more. Those choices may have allowed the company to increase its revenue per user by a significant 27 percent in the first quarter of 2026, but they are also likely to further alienate users (and annoy advertisers).
At the same time, judges and juries are starting to penalize Meta for the societal harms of its products. In March, the company (alongside YouTube) lost a bellwether lawsuit alleging that its addictive design choices triggered anxiety, depression and body-image issues in a teenager. Waiting in the wings are over 100,000 similar cases seeking claims in the tens of billions of dollars.
There is a grim satisfaction in watching this organization hoist with its own petard. This is the company that profited from trafficking in lies, that tuned its algorithms to boost hatred and division, that stole our data and used it against us, that created the culture of toxic memes that are now central to our degraded public discourse. The fall of Facebook could even be a sign of a heartening turn in our national conversation: TikTok traffics more in inspirational content — prom videos are currently trending — than in the divisive narratives Facebook fostered.

But in the continued absence of any meaningful regulation, history shows us that internet companies can still wreak a lot of damage when they are in decline.
As it was being outpaced by Google on nearly every front, Yahoo failed to invest in cybersecurity and fell victim to what is still the largest data breach of all time. In 2014, Russian hackers gained access to 500 million Yahoo accounts, targeting Russian dissidents and journalists while stealing gift card and credit card numbers.
Meta’s properties, which are already riddled with fraud and scams, are likely to get even worse, given that the company has been slashing its work force in key areas focused on A.I. safety and identifying dangerous and illegal content. That means its apps are likely to grow even more polluted with everything from A.I. deepfakes to child sexual abuse material.
And Meta is still Meta. Even after losing that bellwether case on its efforts to addict users to its platforms, Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, recently bragged to Wall Street that the company is using A.I. to increase the amount of time users spend watching videos and interacting with content. Fortunately, given the company’s recent track record, there’s a good chance that at least some of these terrible ideas are likely to end up in the same graveyard where Meta’s other expensive flops are buried.
Meta may be dying, but rest assured it won’t go gently into that good night. Maybe this could be a good thing. The more users quit, and the more corroded Meta’s apps grow, the faster we can all log off and close this chapter of the social media revolution forever.
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Archive, my friends.

https://archive.ph/oKrGS
 
Armenius said:
Archive, my friends.

https://archive.ph/oKrGS
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thanks,

can be a bit misleading meta usersbase did shrink a little bit from the 3.6 billions but not facebook-instagram that still grew, whatapp ban/restriction in Iran-Russia hurt usage could be quite restricted in time and not representative of a trend, anyway they are not valuable users like facebook-instagram.
 
sharknice said:
You haven't been keeping up with VR at all.

1. Money - The Quest 2 was only $300 at one point, the current cheap Q3 model is $350 and the end model is $600.
2. Technical know how - you don't need any, you put the headset on and it's ready to play, anywhere in your house.
3. Games - the kids are playing active social games specifically made for VR. The popular titles that sell millions are not the sort of stuff your typical PC gamer is into. Gorilla tag has made 100s of millions of dollars.


Most people here think VR is an enhancement to PC gaming. For that actual purpose it is a niche.

But there are tens of millions of kids using it for something else daily and it's more popular than xbox.
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Followed enough, but you're forgetting price for graphics card and PC - $1.5K - $2k nowadays. You generally have to be technically savvy to build your own PC, otherwise even richer!

If "Gorilla tag" doesn't appeal to PC gamers, but you have to build a gaming PC to play it, wel l... Seems like a problem!
 
sleepeeg3 said:
Followed enough, but you're forgetting price for graphics card and PC - $1.5K - $2k nowadays. You generally have to be technically savvy to build your own PC, otherwise even richer!

If "Gorilla tag" doesn't appeal to PC gamers, but you have to build a gaming PC to play it, wel l... Seems like a problem!
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You don't need one. The quest has the hardware built into the goggles.
 
Domingo said:
One of the things about Meta is that it doesn't feel like anything has managed to replace what they do best. They still dominate the social space with 2 different platforms. When companies start gasping for air, it's usually because something (at least in some form) replaced them.
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Yeah, I don't think they're going anywhere any time soon. I do think their social media business has largely peaked though. Pretty much everyone who wants a FaceBook account and has a phone or computer already has an account. The only way it'll really grow is 3rd world countries getting richer and incrementally adding to their userbase. Unless they can come up with something new and cool in a different market they're basically going to turn into dividend stock.

The biggest near-term threat I see to Facebook is AI slop. They let whoever post whatever, so I can go grab some AI tool, make some slop, and dilute their content. It's not going to be too long before anyone can just write a script with some help from an AI chatbot, feed it into an AI video tool, and post the result. Basically it's a threat to the "post to the world" model that made FaceBook big. I don't think it's going to kill FaceBook, but too much AI slop or aggressive content moderation to keep it under control could both decrease user engagement. That could also leave them vulnerable to some upstart with an AI slop resistant model for a social media site.
 
zandor said:
Yeah, I don't think they're going anywhere any time soon. I do think their social media business has largely peaked though. Pretty much everyone who wants a FaceBook account and has a phone or computer already has an account. The only way it'll really grow is 3rd world countries getting richer and incrementally adding to their userbase. Unless they can come up with something new and cool in a different market they're basically going to turn into dividend stock.

The biggest near-term threat I see to Facebook is AI slop. They let whoever post whatever, so I can go grab some AI tool, make some slop, and dilute their content. It's not going to be too long before anyone can just write a script with some help from an AI chatbot, feed it into an AI video tool, and post the result. Basically it's a threat to the "post to the world" model that made FaceBook big. I don't think it's going to kill FaceBook, but too much AI slop or aggressive content moderation to keep it under control could both decrease user engagement. That could also leave them vulnerable to some upstart with an AI slop resistant model for a social media site.
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Welcome to the dead internet. The line for admission starts a few years ago.
 
DanNeely said:
Welcome to the dead internet. The line for admission starts a few years ago.
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IMHO the Internet started dying in 1995. I got on it in 1993. 1995 the unwashed masses got web browsers and flooded onto the Internet. It hasn't been the same since.
 
zandor said:
IMHO the Internet started dying in 1995. I got on it in 1993. 1995 the unwashed masses got web browsers and flooded onto the Internet. It hasn't been the same since.
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Irony, the internet isn't dying because of the unwashed masses. The exact opposite in fact.
 
zandor said:
Yeah, I don't think they're going anywhere any time soon. I do think their social media business has largely peaked though. Pretty much everyone who wants a FaceBook account and has a phone or computer already has an account. The only way it'll really grow is 3rd world countries getting richer and incrementally adding to their userbase. Unless they can come up with something new and cool in a different market they're basically going to turn into dividend stock.

The biggest near-term threat I see to Facebook is AI slop. They let whoever post whatever, so I can go grab some AI tool, make some slop, and dilute their content. It's not going to be too long before anyone can just write a script with some help from an AI chatbot, feed it into an AI video tool, and post the result. Basically it's a threat to the "post to the world" model that made FaceBook big. I don't think it's going to kill FaceBook, but too much AI slop or aggressive content moderation to keep it under control could both decrease user engagement. That could also leave them vulnerable to some upstart with an AI slop resistant model for a social media site.
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Yep. I understand why they don't see it though. Facebook invests heavily into AI which will, in turn, seriously threaten its core business. But, they see the short term investment returns and don't seem to give a shit about how AI slop will make people use their service less. I'm sure they think people will love the AI slop and I'm sure some people will but as they keep pushing more slop into people's feeds who just want to see their friends and family's posts then those people will engage less because they won't get what they want out of the service.
 
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