You mean, just like his pivot to VR?
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.
Or his pivot to threads?
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.
Right? Imagine if all of the money spent “building out” the metaverse had been invested in improving infrastructure in real life…
His is such a bad company but so poorly run by its dictator.
Publishing their LLM wasn’t such a bad idea. If China hadn’t caught up, everybody would be praising Meta right now.
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.
Has he picked a single winner since he stole the idea for facebook?
Probably only when he bought out Instagram and Whatsapp, that’s all I can think of
Those were already popular before he bought them, and then he made them worse.
…but no less popular
I feel like Oculus improved under them, but yeah - an exception proves the rule.
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.
Yeah, please tell me that he didn’t take oculus & vr and drove it into the ground. Where is a nice cheap vr set (not locked in with some turd)?
He bought 100 lottery tickets through acquisition (probably more) and 2 of them hit.
What’s the second one 😅
Two other things I don’t use.
And Oculus
I thought he actually stole the source code, not just the idea.
How on earth can you steal the working thing but not the idea? I mean if it was your idea.
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.
Oh yeah I misread that a bit. 👍🏼
Unfortunately for humanity, it seems that the pervert glasses are quite popular
amazing how many missteps you can make as a ceo these days without consequences…
It’s what happens when you own a controlling share of the company. You can freely run it into the ground.
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.
Reminder that he stole Facebook
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.
Oculus perhaps, although also bought
And immediately blew it up after buying it.
What is the state of VR? Still super niche?
always will be. I just don’t afford a couple hundred grand for the “bigger living room” optional accessory
If you have to ask, you probably know the answer :)
Well at least he has that thing he named the company after to fall back on, right?
There’s always money in the…poorly rendered virtual banana stand in a digital wasteland
He has the meta?
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.
Luck is a key part of success. Timing being one of the luckiest random factors.
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.
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bot.
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.
Over 40? I’d say over 60.
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.
Scary.
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.
ai wildfire footage and ai GOD PRAYER QUOTES.
I am just speechless.
He probably should have stuck with the Metaverse, I’m sure it would have worked eventually. I mean maybe, who knows…
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 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.
I’m wishing for more murderous things to blow up in his face.
For those that want to read about the fault of human psyche:
https://technophilosoph.com/en/2024/06/09/why-we-trust-ai-despite-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/
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.
Such a punchable face. He and his wife are evil people. Stains on humanity.
anyone who owns 8-plus-digits fortunes are profoundly evil
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
When you say better alternatives I suspect you do not mean a better town square?
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.
