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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.
I will die on the hill that "Meta" had a winning play available to it that was implied by the name.
Design the website/app so that it centralizes all of the other information feeds everyone else has into a single dashboard.
Make it so you can receive messages across EVERY other major messaging app, from Discord to Signal on your Meta app.
Be the app that flies over all other apps so users don't have to maintain 16 different logins and have their friends spread across all the other different messengers, but can instead respond through one handy chat window.
That does present a killer solution in my book because I'm sick of having to coordinate with my friends across text messaging, Discord, Whatsapp, snapchat, signal, telegram, gmail, twitter/x, Steam, slack, etc. AND Facebook messenger.
Give me a single app where I can send a text blast out to EVERYONE at once, including a link to an event or something else I want to show them, regardless of how I'm connected to them and you'll have my loyalty. I can even tolerate some ad injection.
Doesn't this exist? I used to use something like this called Pidgin back when MSN messenger was the most popular messaging program. I haven't used it in years though. I don't know how well it still works.
Pidgin is what you're thinking of. It does that for instant messaging services, including apparently having a plugin for Facebook Messenger that has recent issues on GitHub, so it seems to still be working for some people. There's also XMPP and it's modern competitor/replacement Matrix which have a concept of bridges which means you log into your one Matrix account but have that account bridged to other protocols (so similar concept, just putting the multi-protocol support in a different place in the architecture).
Needless to say, none of this is terribly user-friendly, largely because none of the companies running these services want third-party clients to work, so there's a continual arms race of protocol changes. For similar reasons, there will never be a commercial product because third-party clients are likely explicitly against the terms of service. Back when MSN and its ilk were popular, the arms race was less heated and they were more usable.
Also, this is all about instant messaging. Maybe that's all you care about, but if you want to keep track of non-chat-structured posts, then the closest I know of to a similar multi-protocol client for social media posts is setting them all up in an RSS reader. And for similar reasons, social media companies make it difficult to access posts that way, although it works for some / has worked for others in the past (e.g., I used to follow Twitter feeds via RSS).
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