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What will become of Mark Zuckerburg's empire of shit?
I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network. At one point, most of my friends and family posted updates about their lives. I knew all about my friends from high school and college. I even connected to members of my extended family. And I could easily ask questions to my network and receive answers. It was great.
That was a long time ago. Zuckerberg pissed it all away. At first, he tried to replace the news media. Later, when that failed, he went all in on maximizing ad revenue. Facebook is now a wasteland of ads, AI, and clueless boomers. Nearly 100% of its value proposition is gone. No one I care about posts there any more.
Zuckerburg did a few things right, all more than a decade ago:
He figured out that people will give you all their personal info for free and that this is worth a lot to advertisers. In his words, "they trust me, dumb fucks".
He made sure his voting shares didn't get diluted so he has, in theory, monarchal control of Facebook
He bought Instagram for cheap in 2012
He has reaped the rewards of these decisions handsomely and currently is the world's 4th richest person with a net worth north of $200 billion.
But what has he done more recently?
Bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and promised to never advertise on the platform. Even though he has broken the promise, it's unclear how they will ever recoup this
Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction
Made "Stories", "Reels", and "Threads" – blatant knockoffs of existing products which failed to win in the marketplace
Made an open source LLM called LLAMA which was initially a success but has been blown out of the water by a Chinese startup that trained a superior model for just $6 million
I recently read the book "Titan", about John D. Rockefeller. Despite being history's greatest philanthropist, Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay."
Bill Gates folllowed that model. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks the same way. But it's unlikely that anything he can do with his billions can undo the damage his social networks have done, and continue to do to the social fabric. The irony is that if he had just focused on making Facebook the best version of itself, he would probably be even richer today, and beloved for making the iconic product of the age.
But instead we have Instagram, Reels, and a bunch of other shit that just makes people miserable. Will it stand the test of time? I doubt it.
This might be your elite user opinion.
My mother, a great grandmother in her 80s, is from another world. Despite being in a household with computers since the 1990s, she has never been able to use computers to do anything.
I tried to teach her once to use a desktop PC and she picked up the mouse and waved it around in the air, confused. She never figured out web browsers or email.
When cell phones had SMS, she ... never once sent a message. Same with smartphones really.
But what she is able to use is Facebook on an iPad. Not perfectly, she still gets into trouble and needs tech support from time to time (gets lost in a deep tree of settings menus and can't figure out how to get back to her timeline, or gets logged out and can't remember how to log back in).
And I tell you every tech company in the world can burst into flames right now and she would not give a fuck so long as Facebook kept working. Facebook connects her to a steady drip of pictures of her cute grandkids and in touch with life updates from her extended family and it is literally all that matters. The entire computer revolution has been a useless gimmick to her, except for Facebook. Facebook is the only thing SV has done that has brought her actual joy.
I suspect for at least a billion people Facebook is great.
But if you're at all tech savvy it's a cringe wasteland and you keep in touch some other way.
Nevertheless, I think it's an enduring contribution. It makes computers actually useful, even joyful, to a whole mass of humanity that had been left out.
That is how I used to feel about Facebook until around 2019 and I am in my 20s. Everyone I know was actively on it and all the social events were organized using it. I fondly remember throwing house parties with Facebook events or having an active feed where actual friends and family would both share wholesome photos but also their opinions about stuff or music etc. I could post anything I found interesting and expect a bunch of comments and chatter about it. Picture/video/algorithm based social media is such a bad replacement in comparison.
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That’s the sad thing. It could have been that for everyone. My parents don’t get to see their cute grandkids on Facebook because I’m not there. All they see is AI bullshit and insane political opinions. Facebook could have been great. But Zuckerberg murdered it.
I agree Facebook is not as great as it could be, and I consider myself forced to use Facebook to provide the cute stream of grandkid pics to my mom.
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