HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is Meta Going to Take over the World?

5 points by brucethemoose2 ↗ HN
Consider these very plausible, imminent outcomes.

- TikTok gets banned in many countries, users mostly move to Instagram rather than YouTube.

- Twitter collapses, users move to Threads.

- Reddit deteriorates at a modest rate.

- Meta buys out at least one WhatsApp competitor (Discord? Telegram?).

- Generative mods hide or degrade swathes of the "Googlable" internet, which Meta has more resources to combat.

... That leaves Meta with a disturbing amount of world's social media marketshare.

7 comments

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smoldesu
Yep. My dad works at the United Nations, he has an advance copy of Zuckerberg's "Emperor of the World" coronation speech written by a LLaMA finetune of Shel Silverstein. Can't wait to see you all there!
brucethemoose2
But will Zuckerberg even be there if he loses the cage match?
archo
Virtual Cage Fight?
PaulHoule
He’ll win. Musk is a bullshiter, Zuck is almost as good at Judo as Vladimir Putin.
scarface_74
Have you not been following the trends? Facebook is for old people. Younger people don’t want to be on the same platform as their grandparents.

And the regulators are not going to let FB acquire any competitors.

anonymous_sorry
> Meta buys out at least one WhatsApp competitor (Discord? Telegram?).

I would be surprised if they would be allowed to. They never should have been permitted to buy Instagram, but I think regulators have woken up a bit since then.

Also, their whole ad-targetting business model, already damaged by iOS privacy settings, is increasingly looking like it might be illegal in the E.U.[0]. Oops.

[0] https://fortune.com/2023/07/04/meta-facebook-cjeu-privacy-co...

favourable
> Twitter collapses, users move to Threads

IMHO only those already on FB and Insta will use Threads, since it's an easy jump, as they're already in the Meta ecosystem.