For the moment, that is. I'm not saying this is an issue specific to TikTok, just that it's very easy for them to change how things work, just as Instagram is changing to increase ads.
Wow, i wonder if Facebook realizes how complacent they've become through such a relatively short period of dominance.
They need to rely on the army of data scientists and smart people still left there to help guide their decision making through data. Increasing ad load solves the short term problem of depressed conversion reporting thanks to privacy changes in the Industry.
It DOES NOT solve the business problem of a rising competitor in TikTok, a failing ads business model (for growth that wall street expects) given present privacy challenges.
I have the absolute opposite take. Facebook/Instagram were good tools for staying in touch with friends and sharing photos with them. Then TikTok came on the scene, and it was much less about connecting with friends as it was seeing short form entertainment. I view TikTok as much closer to YouTube than I do Instagram.
So FB tried to chase TikTok, and ended up (a) making it much harder to follow and connect with your actual friends, and (b) ended up with a shittier version of TikTok.
I feel like the smart play here is de-politicizing Facebook. No more politicians, no more political groups, no more political ads. Bring it back to being about people and connections.
Far too late for that now, The place is a cesspit with no hope for decent discussion. The funny thing is they are redesigning groups to go in the opposite direction by copying Discord. True Insanity.
> I feel like the smart play here is de-politicizing Facebook. No more politicians, no more political groups, no more political ads. Bring it back to being about people and connections.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. A lot of people "connect" online by raging about political obsessions. A "no politics" rule will make a lot of people angry, especially if it wasn't like that from the start so violates their expectations.
I feel like this will be very difficult because mommy blogs and the like can get political around school policies. The line between political and non-political can get quite confusing. Eg. lesbians in $area meetup facebook group, but then they talk about anti-gay policies the local politicians of $area are implementing; maybe even organizing calling politicians/protesting in that group.
That's . . . a very good point and hadn't crossed my mind.
I do hope these large firms with such a wealth of smart people on the inside have robust debate on the nuances of what "success" looks like as you say. If someone pushed a formulaic approach of juicing metrics, you need a healthy ecosystem of pushback.
> They need to rely on the army of data scientists and smart people still left there to help guide their decision making through data. Increasing ad load solves the short term problem of depressed conversion reporting thanks to privacy changes in the Industry.
> It DOES NOT solve the business problem of a rising competitor in TikTok, a failing ads business model (for growth that wall street expects) given present privacy challenges.
You've got it backwards. The "army of data scientists and smart people...guid[ing] their decision making through data" will tell them to make tactical, nonstrategic decisions like this, because they're about measurable stuff.
i check Instagram maybe a couple of times a year and it's almost exactly like watching your college friends' kids age from afar. Each time you see them, the sensation of how much they've grown is so overwhelming that you can hardly resist saying something along the lines of "I can't believe how big they've gotten!".
except with Instagram it's, "this is so much less usable than the last time I tried it. Why does anybody put up with it?"
Yeah it's legitimately shocking how bad it is at this point. My feed feels like I have more ads than content from people I follow. And of the people I follow, they really don't post much there these days anyway? Maybe that's also to do with younger people preferring the more ephemeral forms of social media after we all grew up had Facebook pull up embarrassing posts from when we were 13, but I see a lot of stories but not many posts on the main feed.
Personally, I think the future is in messenger apps. Why login to Instagram or Facebook to see updates when you can have a family/friends group in Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal (pick your poison).
The fact that you don't desire a more granular spectrum of communication with different people in your life should not prevent you from understanding why many people do want that.
After grad school, I completely lost interest in keeping up with people I wasn't in at least semi-regular contact with. The drip feed of info on social media is irritating to deal with. I feel like a 5 minute catchup st a 5-10 year reunion would achieve the exact same thing and be more pleasant to hear about and engage with.
Why login to anything at all? Why use whatsapp, telegram, or signal when every phone already does this and has been doing this for years? I have all of my friends and family in specific groups devoid of any specific apps.
To be fair people were saying the same thing 20 years ago when AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo messenger were the big thing. All messaging platforms will eventually die is my experience thus far.
SMS is slow and bad at rich media. Unless you're talking about iMessage - then you are logged in with your Apple ID - it's exactly like WhatsApp/Telegram + closed for people outside of your hardware ecosystem.
I have people in my groups that are on android. Doesn't seem to be an issue for them. Then again, if I want to have a real conversation, I just call them.
In many countries, SMS isn't free (or didn't used to be). That's the reason why Whatsapp was successful in the first place, it was cheaper to use Whatsapp over data than to use SMS for texting.
A single data point: In Haiti, SMS was 1 HTG/message. With 10 HTG, you could activate a plan for the whole day that was more than enough to use WhatsApp for unlimited text and pictures (MMS was not a thing). Now, SMS is only used for carrier ads and 2FA.
Those systems don't scale past single digit membership numbers. You could maybe keep in touch with everyone if you all had lots of sharded, overlapping groups, but what a pain that would be!
Instagram is one of the last social media platforms I use. It's mostly about my dogs. I follow mostly greyhound people. My feed is about half greyhounds and half ads.
Increasing ad load from that? I guess it's time to retire my Instagram account.
This might be the thing that gets me to bite the bullet and actually check out Pixelfed.
You can host your own and it's federated. The "fed" part makes it a portmanteau of "pixel federated". There's also multiple other hosts you can sign up to.
FB/IG has a "Why am I seeing this ad?" and you can see what demographics being targeted are, e.g. location, gender, age range.
Funnily enough, Facebook has been showing me ads for lingerie the last few days, although I put in real age and gender (male), and it should know I'm single...
It is probably somebody trying to sell to a new market (men buying gifts for their dates). I got so many ads for dating sites and related crap when I set my FB status to single.
I will never get why FB shows so terrible ads when they supposedly know so much about us.
Instagram uses Facebook/Meta algorithms for serving ads, which includes behavior. I almost never post anything about diabetes in Instagram, but because many other sites (ie: reddit) use Facebook libraries for whatever reason they are using them, Facebook knows I'm diabetic, and I get served ads for diabetes products, bogus supplements that "cure" diabetes, health programs that use diabetes products for non-diabetes purposes (yes, this is a thing), and so on.
If a site uses a FB tracker library (which is going to be part of FB based auth), your usage is tracked and info based on that is used to serve ads across all Meta products.
Almost no greyhound related ads. I see occasional pet related ads, but not nearly as common as bogus health supplements, diabetes related stuff (I'm diabetic), random garbage I don't care about, Amazon, and other accounts.
I don't really care about all of that. Really, I'm more of the "shouting into the void" kind of situation as I know no one cares about my postings, but I do it anyway.
So Pixelfed wouldn't really change things for me except give me a better experience while shouting into the void.
It's probably a combination of things that exist today, that did not exist when Vine was around, which did have influencers and still failed.
Tiktok started as a Chinese only service. China has restricted access to the global internet, so having their own video social media platform was a big deal. It built up a huge audience.
When it went global, it had a built-in audience of viewers and creators. Yeah, they may be Chinese, but an American or British or what-have-you outside of China person posting a video on there and watching viewer counts go brrrrr makes you want to do it some more. It attracts other users and creators.
So a combination of timing, exclusivity to a region with restricted global internet, and simplicity in the design makes it attractive. An excellent trojan horse to collect data on a massive number of people around the world.
75% of the normal Instagram feed (not the stories) is now account promotions and recommendations. It's impossible to browse it and look at what you followed anymore.
At least on Instagram for iOS, you have the option to tap the Instagram logo on the top left corner and choose "Following". It will only show posts from the accounts you follow and, at least for me, there are barely ads there.
Sometimes I am surprised and annoyed about how many ads are on IG, but then I remember the original user proposition was for people to create ads about themselves, so why am I surprised? Social media posts are always ads, and SOMETIMES you get to choose which ones you want to see.
This isn't good news. I spoke with a 20 y.o. neighbor and she said that Insta was starting to fail. Her friends all noted that their posts weren't getting the number of likes they expected. When they all noticed this, they decided it was because the ad ratios were changing because they needed the cash.
I am a bit sad about the decline of Instagram. For a few years, I could watch the daily life of all my friends and acquaintances. Lots of organic communication and mutual engagement happened. Now only businesspeople, narcissists and (wannabe) influencers are left.
At this point I feel embarrassed to upload anything. Not that it matters, engagement from other people is at an all time low. Comments seem to be mostly bots.
TikTok is an echo chamber of narcissists and people with unwarranted self importance, but dialed to 11, just like twitter, but with more ADHD. Reddit is the embodiment of mediocrity, ruled by wrongthink policing moderators.
I am not enjoying social media anymore, I feel there is no place for me.
BeReal? I haven't tried it but the people I know who generally hate FB are having fun with it. It doesn't have ads yet though so it's in the honeymoon period.
I think this might just be the natural end state of all social networks once the user base ages. I can't imagine sharing like I used to in college and it has more to do with my mindset than any feature issues on my preferred social networks.
Why does a company that still has majority founder votes, and founder CEO do something like this? Zuckerberg can't be this dumb, his bonuses don't depend on the share price, so why destroy your company like this?
I just don't get it. If you think further than the next quarter this seems like a terrible long term choice. Can someone explain how a company like Meta arrives at a decision like this?
You are giving this person too much credit. His only other big thing besides getting lucky with Facebook itself is the metaverse, a soulless "Second Life 2 with VR and blockchain support".
> Can someone explain how a company like Meta arrives at a decision like this?
Maybe everyone just gave up, they know they have no way to fix Meta, so they are just gonna squeeze the lemon really, really tight one last time?
Yeah this is a very silly and ignorant argument, especially when so many other smart people say Zuckerberg is insanely ambitious and smart. If building a $1trn company would be this easy everyone would be doing it.
> If building a $1trn company would be this easy everyone would be doing it.
He didn't build 1 trillion dollar company -his team did. He was just there at the right time and did the right thing when he developed the initial version of Facebook, something any somewhat competent full stack developer can do -and I am explicitly talking about the initial version, not the planet scale real time super systems his team later came up with.
I'd argue if any of us were sent back in time just one year before he started working on Facebook, we could easily be the Facebook founder of that timeline.
Others did try, before and after he did. Are you arguing that all that was needed to get Facebook to where it is now is owning Facebook at the time and having the access to engineering team? There is the whole problem of hiring them, managing their manager,and in addition to the tech, there's the whole domain of the business.
Mark is famous for keeping decision privileges to himself and for being central managed who's very involved in the business. Are you arguing that the successful results of his decisions are arbitrary? That doesn't make sense - like I said, others tried before him, even got some traction but lost the game. Others tried afterwards, Google for example, and lost. He survived snap. He incorporated Insta and Whatsapp. Do you really think that any average fool with the ship and the money could get some smart guys to sail the seas for him?
I see comments like this all the time on HN. It's a bit pointless replying, because your views are so black and white, but you really have no idea how much value there is in taking risk, leading a team, and executing well. These are gifts given to very few people on the planet. That's WHY there are so few 1trn companies.
The ultimate question is:
There are hundreds of thousands of good dev teams, why don't they all build $1trn companies.
No joke, on Facebook I'm already seeing one ad for every 2 real posts. On Instagram it's about 1:3 on the home and 1:5 on the reels (but I suppose it depends on how fast you scroll).
It's already quite disgusting at this stage. Are they going to flip it to 2 ads every one post? How long before unskippable 30-second ads?
Increasing ad load on instagram could result in a decrease of users because of worse usability of the platform. Are they choosing short term profitability over long-term user base stability/growth?
The rise and fall of all social networks is inevitable. Like many things they follow this dynamic where they go out of fashion when too many use it. Currently everybody is moving to TikTok and there's lots of good content there. But that platform too will fade eventually and another one appear.
The social platform where young people spent most of their time kept changing in the past - I think it went something like this: Netlog > Facebook > Instagram > TikTok. There have been lots of other social networks that have been popular at some point and then eventually declined or even disappeared: Google+, Snapchat, Vine, StudiVZ (German speaking countries), the list goes on...
Only US-centric ones are failing after years of dominance, and even then, most have accumulated enough money to pivot into something even more horrifying.
I thought the same was true as reddit has become terrible imo, but it's still very popular and users seem heavily engaged. The key I think is human curation, even if reddit mods are frequently found to be terrible in odd ways, they keep things healthy compared to AI moderators that eventually end up killing the network.
I got off Facebook about 7 years ago and went to Instagram as it was much simpler.
I recently went back on Facebook and couldn’t believe how shit and bloated it is.
I advertise pretty heavily on Instagram because, of all the platforms I advertise on, it's the most bang for the buck. I get more conversions from Instagram than anywhere else by almost a factor of 5.
This is going to kill engagement. I'd rather pay more for clicks than now be jammed into a crowded feed for hostile eyeballs.
I recently deleted my instagram account after noticing a steady drop in the frequency of new posts from friends. However I always used the browser version and I was never served a single ad.
Maybe this was because I was in some long lived experiment group (unlikely) or maybe because the mobile web app doesn’t have ads (also unlikely). I’m curious the reason.
It seems so obvious to us that this is a short term win at the expense of the long term. I wonder if data driven companies like this are locked into local minimums via tons of short term optimizations to boost metrics.
In optimization algorithms like stochastic gradient descent, some form of entropy (crucially temporarily decreasing fitness) or exploration (having parallel evaluations of the fitness function) is necessary to not get stuck. What mechanism incentivizes this in a large corporation, where every initiative must aim to improve the business and there is the capability to actually measure it all?
In this case the CEO's stated vision is to dominate the AR/VR market. So in that context it makes sense for Meta to treat legacy properties like Instagram as cash cows and maximize short-term revenue at the expense of long-term growth. That revenue can be used to finance new AR/VR products.
We'll find out in 10 years if Mark Zuckerberg was a visionary genius or an idiot.
As Google is finding out though that user trust is easy to break and can greatly impact your future products’ success.
If Meta continues destroying users’ faith in Instagram the way they have in Facebook, it will gravely hurt any attempt by Meta to build their AR/VR empires.
A good counter example is Apple, a company which actually realized how impactful this can be with their Mac business.
Apple’s Mac business is their second smallest, ahead only of the iPad (which thanks to shared development costs and components with iOS is almost certainly more profitable) and behind accessories, services and iPhone.
And yet, Apple invested significant R&D, and spent years publicly apologizing for the state of the mac, humiliatingly reversing course in some decisions and promising they would do better until they actually did better.
Because Apple recognized that their commitment to the Mac meant their customers could trust them. And the years they were ignoring it (probably in a misguided belief that the relatively small size of the segment meant it didn’t matter) led to a massive loss of trust that was clearly spilling over into their iOS products as well.
Specifically, Mark has allowed Facebooks mission to change from "giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" to "optimize ad revenue from a pre-existing group of users", and is now doing the same to Instagram. Look at the changes made to Facebook in the last five years and tell me, with a straight face, that they were all made with the original mission statement in mind.
A Visionary CEO would chase the mission and expect revenue to follow.
"They trust me — dumb fucks," says Zuckerberg in one of the instant messages, first published by former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider, and now confirmed by Zuckerberg himself in Jose Antonio Vargas's New Yorker piece. Zuckerberg now tells Vargas, "I think I've grown and learned a lot" since those instant messages.
Gawker didn't get it quite right. Here's what the New Yorker article [1] actually says:
> When I asked Zuckerberg about the IMs that have already been published online, and that I have also obtained and confirmed, he said that he “absolutely” regretted them.
It doesn't say that Zuckerberg confirmed the particular quotation that you offered.
That said, I take your point. The New Yorker author said that he had confirmed the message containing the quote, and Zuckerberg didn't deny sending the message, and he expressed regret about it.
This is yet another reason to be apprehensive about Occulus and the "Facebook metaverse". I think it is only a matter of time before the mission for Occulus and the "Facebook metaverse" become similar to Facebook's current mission.
Merely having statistics won't lead you to local optima, it's the incentive structure. Public companies need to have a positive second derivative on their revenue, which trickles down to PMs and directors doing anything in their power to improve the quarterly numbers at long-term costs.
Yeah that's more of a startup mentality where you're trying to prove to your next round of investors that your growth is going to be 10x then 100x then 1000x and will then eat an entire industry. If someone's buying Meta stock at this point it's pretty obviously not on an infinite growth trajectory.
I suspect they're still pretending it has growth left; once it's clear that they DO NOT have much growth left, the stock will slowly settle to a "reasonable" p/e. Or suddenly plummet to one, who knows.
There it no reason to kill existing product when you have a new. Merging instagram into metaverse won't make sense until people have some reasonable way to experience metaverse - and majority does not and wont have for a foreseable future.. And even then it wont be appropriate in many context where people watch instagram these days - public transport, work, toilets.. cant imagine anyone bringing their vr/ar goggles to these places..
It takes a better alternative for people to change though.
Spotify is borderline unusable to me now, it's about 50/50 ads/songs. But I still haven't uninstalled it. I think my usage is now something like, after listening to 5 songs and 5 ads, I get frustrated and switch to a podcast. But, I don't know of any alternative with less ads that works on my phone, so I'm still a user (despite listening for an hour a week instead of 40 hours a week).
The current internet media giants got huge by burning VC money for years to operate with few or no ads, and now Insta/Youtube/Spotify are all basically as bad as broadcast TV and radio for ad density. But is anyone going to give a new upstart a billion dollars and 5 years to host ad-free content to establish a new competitor?
I don't use Spotify much (afaict they've done more to damage artist economics than outright piracy), but at least they have a paid/premium layer of service that one can pay for and focus on specific desired content without add interruptions.
Facebook and Instagram? Nope. You can't even pay them for an experience which lets you focus on what you want. Which means that the only economic incentives come from the ad revenue side, and the user engagement side will be seen primarily in terms of manipulation.
Not as good as the main part is audio discovery and auto playlists which are crap. Only pointed out since a lot of people tend to think its a 1:1 replacement not including the tech knowhow.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadI am considering using ejabbered and wondering what your thoughts are on it today. Thanks
Why? Facebook's decline doesn't mean social media's decline. They'll just go to TikTok, which I understand is even worse [1].
[1] And by worse, I mean a slicker and more addictive product. It might feel more enjoyable, but that's actually worse, IMHO.
They need to rely on the army of data scientists and smart people still left there to help guide their decision making through data. Increasing ad load solves the short term problem of depressed conversion reporting thanks to privacy changes in the Industry.
It DOES NOT solve the business problem of a rising competitor in TikTok, a failing ads business model (for growth that wall street expects) given present privacy challenges.
So FB tried to chase TikTok, and ended up (a) making it much harder to follow and connect with your actual friends, and (b) ended up with a shittier version of TikTok.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. A lot of people "connect" online by raging about political obsessions. A "no politics" rule will make a lot of people angry, especially if it wasn't like that from the start so violates their expectations.
"We did an A/B test and figured out that we can increase ad revenue by x if we increase amount of ads shown to users by y! We are geniuses!"
I do hope these large firms with such a wealth of smart people on the inside have robust debate on the nuances of what "success" looks like as you say. If someone pushed a formulaic approach of juicing metrics, you need a healthy ecosystem of pushback.
> It DOES NOT solve the business problem of a rising competitor in TikTok, a failing ads business model (for growth that wall street expects) given present privacy challenges.
You've got it backwards. The "army of data scientists and smart people...guid[ing] their decision making through data" will tell them to make tactical, nonstrategic decisions like this, because they're about measurable stuff.
And that problem was clear long before the ascendance of data-worshiping computer nerds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy.
except with Instagram it's, "this is so much less usable than the last time I tried it. Why does anybody put up with it?"
That's generous.
Also, it’s worth noting that HN isn’t exactly representative of the population at large.
To be fair people were saying the same thing 20 years ago when AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo messenger were the big thing. All messaging platforms will eventually die is my experience thus far.
Increasing ad load from that? I guess it's time to retire my Instagram account.
This might be the thing that gets me to bite the bullet and actually check out Pixelfed.
Funnily enough, Facebook has been showing me ads for lingerie the last few days, although I put in real age and gender (male), and it should know I'm single...
I will never get why FB shows so terrible ads when they supposedly know so much about us.
Instagram uses Facebook/Meta algorithms for serving ads, which includes behavior. I almost never post anything about diabetes in Instagram, but because many other sites (ie: reddit) use Facebook libraries for whatever reason they are using them, Facebook knows I'm diabetic, and I get served ads for diabetes products, bogus supplements that "cure" diabetes, health programs that use diabetes products for non-diabetes purposes (yes, this is a thing), and so on.
If a site uses a FB tracker library (which is going to be part of FB based auth), your usage is tracked and info based on that is used to serve ads across all Meta products.
So Pixelfed wouldn't really change things for me except give me a better experience while shouting into the void.
Tiktok started as a Chinese only service. China has restricted access to the global internet, so having their own video social media platform was a big deal. It built up a huge audience.
When it went global, it had a built-in audience of viewers and creators. Yeah, they may be Chinese, but an American or British or what-have-you outside of China person posting a video on there and watching viewer counts go brrrrr makes you want to do it some more. It attracts other users and creators.
So a combination of timing, exclusivity to a region with restricted global internet, and simplicity in the design makes it attractive. An excellent trojan horse to collect data on a massive number of people around the world.
It has no ads, but needs to be killed and reopened for a full feed refresh. I say that's a plus.
At this point I feel embarrassed to upload anything. Not that it matters, engagement from other people is at an all time low. Comments seem to be mostly bots.
TikTok is an echo chamber of narcissists and people with unwarranted self importance, but dialed to 11, just like twitter, but with more ADHD. Reddit is the embodiment of mediocrity, ruled by wrongthink policing moderators.
I am not enjoying social media anymore, I feel there is no place for me.
I just don't get it. If you think further than the next quarter this seems like a terrible long term choice. Can someone explain how a company like Meta arrives at a decision like this?
You are giving this person too much credit. His only other big thing besides getting lucky with Facebook itself is the metaverse, a soulless "Second Life 2 with VR and blockchain support".
> Can someone explain how a company like Meta arrives at a decision like this?
Maybe everyone just gave up, they know they have no way to fix Meta, so they are just gonna squeeze the lemon really, really tight one last time?
To take something like Facebook from very successful college site into the behemoth it is now with luck alone one needs a particularly shining star.
He didn't build 1 trillion dollar company -his team did. He was just there at the right time and did the right thing when he developed the initial version of Facebook, something any somewhat competent full stack developer can do -and I am explicitly talking about the initial version, not the planet scale real time super systems his team later came up with.
I'd argue if any of us were sent back in time just one year before he started working on Facebook, we could easily be the Facebook founder of that timeline.
Mark is famous for keeping decision privileges to himself and for being central managed who's very involved in the business. Are you arguing that the successful results of his decisions are arbitrary? That doesn't make sense - like I said, others tried before him, even got some traction but lost the game. Others tried afterwards, Google for example, and lost. He survived snap. He incorporated Insta and Whatsapp. Do you really think that any average fool with the ship and the money could get some smart guys to sail the seas for him?
The ultimate question is:
There are hundreds of thousands of good dev teams, why don't they all build $1trn companies.
It's already quite disgusting at this stage. Are they going to flip it to 2 ads every one post? How long before unskippable 30-second ads?
They don’t increase ads in feed, but add them to new places like explore.
I just don't see that applying to any of those, certainly not G+ :)
Only US-centric ones are failing after years of dominance, and even then, most have accumulated enough money to pivot into something even more horrifying.
Like an erp or something.
This is going to kill engagement. I'd rather pay more for clicks than now be jammed into a crowded feed for hostile eyeballs.
Hopefully they really think about this before doing something so stupid
Maybe this was because I was in some long lived experiment group (unlikely) or maybe because the mobile web app doesn’t have ads (also unlikely). I’m curious the reason.
So given that this is so obvious, why are they doing it? Are they really that desperate?
I know it's a public company, but shouldn't Mark Zuckerberg have enough pull to not run into these short term this-quarter issues?
In optimization algorithms like stochastic gradient descent, some form of entropy (crucially temporarily decreasing fitness) or exploration (having parallel evaluations of the fitness function) is necessary to not get stuck. What mechanism incentivizes this in a large corporation, where every initiative must aim to improve the business and there is the capability to actually measure it all?
We'll find out in 10 years if Mark Zuckerberg was a visionary genius or an idiot.
If Meta continues destroying users’ faith in Instagram the way they have in Facebook, it will gravely hurt any attempt by Meta to build their AR/VR empires.
A good counter example is Apple, a company which actually realized how impactful this can be with their Mac business.
Apple’s Mac business is their second smallest, ahead only of the iPad (which thanks to shared development costs and components with iOS is almost certainly more profitable) and behind accessories, services and iPhone.
And yet, Apple invested significant R&D, and spent years publicly apologizing for the state of the mac, humiliatingly reversing course in some decisions and promising they would do better until they actually did better.
Because Apple recognized that their commitment to the Mac meant their customers could trust them. And the years they were ignoring it (probably in a misguided belief that the relatively small size of the segment meant it didn’t matter) led to a massive loss of trust that was clearly spilling over into their iOS products as well.
A Visionary CEO would chase the mission and expect revenue to follow.
If that was ever the case. In words of Mark Zuckerberg "dumb fucks".
"They trust me — dumb fucks," says Zuckerberg in one of the instant messages, first published by former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider, and now confirmed by Zuckerberg himself in Jose Antonio Vargas's New Yorker piece. Zuckerberg now tells Vargas, "I think I've grown and learned a lot" since those instant messages.
https://www.gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-callin...
> When I asked Zuckerberg about the IMs that have already been published online, and that I have also obtained and confirmed, he said that he “absolutely” regretted them.
It doesn't say that Zuckerberg confirmed the particular quotation that you offered.
That said, I take your point. The New Yorker author said that he had confirmed the message containing the quote, and Zuckerberg didn't deny sending the message, and he expressed regret about it.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
Merely having statistics won't lead you to local optima, it's the incentive structure. Public companies need to have a positive second derivative on their revenue, which trickles down to PMs and directors doing anything in their power to improve the quarterly numbers at long-term costs.
I don't think that's true. In fact I don't think very many public companies have accelerating revenue.
Which law of physics is this the result of?
Note that “reasonable” may not be Buffet’s desired p/e.
All IG/FB can do now is squeeze as much ad revenue as possible while there are still hundreds of millions using it daily.
Spotify is borderline unusable to me now, it's about 50/50 ads/songs. But I still haven't uninstalled it. I think my usage is now something like, after listening to 5 songs and 5 ads, I get frustrated and switch to a podcast. But, I don't know of any alternative with less ads that works on my phone, so I'm still a user (despite listening for an hour a week instead of 40 hours a week).
The current internet media giants got huge by burning VC money for years to operate with few or no ads, and now Insta/Youtube/Spotify are all basically as bad as broadcast TV and radio for ad density. But is anyone going to give a new upstart a billion dollars and 5 years to host ad-free content to establish a new competitor?
Facebook and Instagram? Nope. You can't even pay them for an experience which lets you focus on what you want. Which means that the only economic incentives come from the ad revenue side, and the user engagement side will be seen primarily in terms of manipulation.
Course, we have the family plan, and UK prices, so I get ruined. But now I have Netflix I hate ads with a passion, so there we go.
You should consider paying for the service because what you're doing is self torture.