I can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money.
But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.
Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.
> Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure
Facebook has no content production experience though, and when they do dip their toes into that market its via AI slop (like their official AI accounts on instagram). I think this is because they don't value the human element of art at all.
They would be entirely reliant other content providers, which is a rough place to be in when you have to deal with actual studios and not just independent creators. Independent creators are easier for Facebook to exploit since they are usually small operations and dependent on facebook/instagram for market reach.
YouTube has a lot of revenue, profit isn't known as far as I'm aware. Alphabet doesn't report YouTube earnings separately, and when they were still sharing that information it was a pretty large amount of losses IIRC. But if you have sources I'm happy to change my mind
They report YT's earnings, iirc it is about 60B (40B ads + 20B subs) annually, with 10% YoY growth. They don't disclose youtube's profits outside of Google Services (which has ~40% margins), so yes youtube is a money printing machine.
And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.
Corey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market.
He wants to collect and profit from insider info by joining in on the newest unregulated gambling scheme. I'm sure plenty of cheaters and suckers will be happy to make him more money.
They even call it "Arena". The place where gladiators kill each other, lions eat christans , criminals are exectuted brutally and animals are hunted. What an apt name chosen by the most moral company of our times.
I wonder how/if they'll use AI for this. maybe this would give them access to some very highquality pretrain data (like who made which bet on what at what time), which I can definitely imagine them needing. I've heard they have a lot of spare compute they run experiments on, and if this goes well for them maybe they could make a really good prediction bot
Facebook innovation is their ads algo. They copy existing consumer success (which is incredibly difficult to create), and then execute it incredibly well.
So many baby boomers are about to lose their savings. Meta knows their bread is buttered by the 55+ age group and capitalizing on the vulnerable social media addicted elders will be extremely profitable.
My university admissions interview took place next to an old tech nerd's model train layout. Today, the same kind of person would be up all night posting about trans people on X. I blame a lot of our current problems on the decline of model trains and stamp collecting. You are spot on about social media addiction among the olds.
I've always felt that Mark Zuckerberg got lucky with Facebook and that he has no real lasting talent as a technologist or visionary. He seems to attempt to chase the latest "it" thing and has very few original ideas that actual stick long-term. He's quite the charlatan.
I believe you when you say you didn't intend it that way, but unfortunately the meaning of a message has more to do how it lands than how it was intended—in the sense of the effects that it has on the receivers and also on the channel. Certainly from a moderation point of view we have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's not that you owe Zuckerberg or any other specific person better, but rather that you owe this community better if you're participating in it. (And by 'you' of course, I don't mean you personally, but all of us.)
um, I'm not sure exactly why what motivated that comment, but its extremely possible to believe every word there from a purely logical perspective, as opposed to an emotional one. yes we shouldn't post personal attacks, but saying 'Zuckerberg got lucky' and 'seems to chase the latest "it" thing' doesn't need to qualify as a personal attack. these can just be normal observations. see I wouldn't say the same things about sama, because I don't think they're true, and I dislike the both of them.
as for the newsguidelines, I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Much of the language in the GP is pejorative, and therefore emotional, and therefore not possible to treat "from a purely logical perspective".
I doubt that a purely logical evaluation is possible of any statement at all, outside of formal languages, but let's not digress. (Or maybe we should! it's at least more interesting to talk about than $Billionaire-CEO having just gotten lucky, lacking talent, or being a charlatan.)
> I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Oh yes, that's quite possible, but if one is venting indignation then one is doing something different.
Just to digress again: "intellectual curiosity" is a funny phrase, one I don't entirely care for - it verges on pretentious and reminds me of Hemingway's line about ten-dollar words*. But I've stuck with it because you can't just say "curiosity", because there are other kinds of curiosity and they are quite different.
While I know criticizing Meta is popular, I'm not sure I'd agree with above.
Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook. Understanding the potential market that could be created and turning down a $1B acquisition from Yahoo 20-years ago, at the time, seemed insane.
Also making the shift to mobile, when people thought that would be the death of FB is a remarkable story.
Identifying to acquire WhatsApp & Instagram, both laughed at when bought for the acquisition price at that time, now massive businesses for Meta (and their market cap value).
Meta AI glasses are surprisingly popular and growing. And more...
Note: I have no affiliation with Meta (not now or in the past)
---
EDIT: Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique. Maybe, but the product is only like 10% of the problem. 90% of the work (and hard part) is execution.
That's not true though. Social network sites existed, just not so "centralized" and "viral". Facebook created a simple and more user-friendly interface.
WhatsApp as it understand, does not make much if any money. Instagram is a cash cow due.
They have released some good open source technology, but as the OP said, Meta hasn't much going for it apart from addictive apps for showing ads
Social networks definitely existed, they just didn’t gain the same momentum/popularity as Facebook. As others have pointed out there was MySpace - but even before that there was Friendster and Asian Avenue. I’m sure there were probably another one or two.
That’s not to take anything away from the success of early Facebook, but the idea of a social network was not created by fb.
Those are fair points, though I didn't say he wasn't a good business person. I could probably concede that he is, but I don't see him as the tech visionary he's often propped up to be.
> Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique.
My dude, no one in your reply thread is making that claim. We bristling at the claim that "Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook". Unless you're saying FB's innovation is its business model and is what made it dominate, well, your original statement just didn't substantiate that.
IMO, the only thing I'd credit Zuck for is sticking (at least at the start) to his singular vision of what a social network should be; first it was just open for .edu emails, then when it was released more broadly their product roadmap stuck to fostering a social environment online.
And then he lost that vision. I'd say it was circa Cambridge Analytica when engagement---often ragebait because it gave them more and stronger of that sweet sweet monetizable ad signals---replaced fostering an online social environment. Others would say it's the algorithmic news feed. Either way, losing that vision started FB's demise.
IME, FB was best when it was a supplement and not a replacement for real life. FB had value to me because we could plan parties there and even keep in touch after, get that social buzz going for a little while longer. But it was _never_ the party.
But their recent efforts---Metaverse, all the AI crap---has all the hallmakrs of trying to replace real life. They now want to be the party but good luck with that. Judging by the blowback and lack of adoption consumers see what they're up to a mile away. Zuck has no idea how to stay relevant so now we have a platform more concerned with its market cap than having actual utility.
>Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.
Seriously? Of course they did. An easy counter-example is MySpace, which launched several months before Facebook's very first appearance as a Hot Or Not mimic (which predates Zuck by 3 years), and had many millions more users for years (especially while FB was restricted to colleges).
Major competition and a lot of money was going into social media around then (and for a couple years prior), FB is just the eventual winner.
He was also a wealthy kid with connections. People place far too much weight on execution. Most of it is being in the right place at the right time and having existing connections.
He built a hell of a machine for buying political/cultural influence or filling your sales funnel, no matter the dubiousness of your product, with pinpoint precision. Doing that takes vision and talent, and extremely flexible ethics.
I've never seen him saying anything particularly smart or insightful. My impression is that he has moderately above average intelligence and entrepreneurship. If he wasn't at the right place at the right time, he would be yet another founder of a random startup.
I've never seen him say or do anything particularly human. If I believed in such things, I'd think he was some kind of souless drone sent here by aliens/demons/etc to destroy humanity.
Your impression about his intelligence is way off. Mark was part of the study for mathematically precocious youth, which has a math cutoff at the 1/10K rarity. He also has ambition at the same level. What’s probably missing, of late, is good taste and judgment.
In what way has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain, as befitting the word charlatan? He is the CEO of Facebook and we're told to not like Facebook, but when has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain? He's one of the richest people in the world and has been using that money to do things he wants to do. I don't think he's ever claimed to eg be a PhD AI researcher and for people to give him money because of a made up claim like that. People give Facebook money and it ends up in his pockets and he does things with that.
Has he been honest when he’s testified before Congress? At best, I think we can say he hasn’t been very transparent many of those times. If that’s not for power and/or financial gain, what is it? [0]
I didn’t have to be “told” to not like Facebook or Meta. The company’s actions for well
over a decade and those of its executives, including the CEO, allowed to form that opinion on our own. I’d be willing to bet that experience is not unique to me.
I dunno he made a few very wise purchases (Instagram, WhatsApp). But yeah he hasn't had a single first party hit apart from Facebook, and the Metaverse is 100% emperor's new clothes. Even worse than Alexa's "people will buy things through a janky voice interface right"?
I can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money.
But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.
Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.
They tried. Facebook Watch. It's a total disaster.
> Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure
Facebook has no content production experience though, and when they do dip their toes into that market its via AI slop (like their official AI accounts on instagram). I think this is because they don't value the human element of art at all.
They would be entirely reliant other content providers, which is a rough place to be in when you have to deal with actual studios and not just independent creators. Independent creators are easier for Facebook to exploit since they are usually small operations and dependent on facebook/instagram for market reach.
Youtube isn't really known to be highly profitable. I'm also not sure people would go to a Facebook YouTube when the normal YouTube exists
Brother, YouTube is quite literally a money printing machine. I don’t know where you’re getting information from.
YouTube has a lot of revenue, profit isn't known as far as I'm aware. Alphabet doesn't report YouTube earnings separately, and when they were still sharing that information it was a pretty large amount of losses IIRC. But if you have sources I'm happy to change my mind
They report YT's earnings, iirc it is about 60B (40B ads + 20B subs) annually, with 10% YoY growth. They don't disclose youtube's profits outside of Google Services (which has ~40% margins), so yes youtube is a money printing machine.
And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.
Cliché cynic's comment: the end users they are concerned about are the companies they sell ads to. If you're not that, tough luck.
> why nobody ever stops for a moment
What, you want to get fired?
51% shareholding he’s free to make all the mistakes he wants
Corey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...
He wants to collect and profit from insider info by joining in on the newest unregulated gambling scheme. I'm sure plenty of cheaters and suckers will be happy to make him more money.
Polymarket: "Trade on anything."
Kalshi: "Trade the Future."
Meta Arena: "They 'trust me.' Dumb f^^ks."
Hopefully it's the same geniuses that implemented his metaverse thingy.
Hope so (ex-Meta, and hold a couple of million dollars of their stock, but quite dislike the company).
This is the obvious next iteration of online based life
Facebook gave life to communities where people draw identity and social belonging from a screen
It only makes sense to continue bearing down into that simulacra
They even call it "Arena". The place where gladiators kill each other, lions eat christans , criminals are exectuted brutally and animals are hunted. What an apt name chosen by the most moral company of our times.
> lions eat christans
Could you explain this bit ?
I don't think he meant you ate Christians, more that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...
I wonder how/if they'll use AI for this. maybe this would give them access to some very highquality pretrain data (like who made which bet on what at what time), which I can definitely imagine them needing. I've heard they have a lot of spare compute they run experiments on, and if this goes well for them maybe they could make a really good prediction bot
This will fail, he'll throw money at Kalshi and or Polymarket and, if he acquires either, chase some sort of regulatory capture scheme.
I just directed my cats to make a cryptocurrency.
Right after a nap...
Holy mimic batman - Mark, its ok to have a little of your own innovation and not copycat nor buy every single good idea.
> not copycat nor buy every single good idea.
I don’t know if I’ll call Kalshi and Polymarket “good ideas”.
I bet (pun intended) that's pretty good for the owners pockets
fair point
Facebook innovation is their ads algo. They copy existing consumer success (which is incredibly difficult to create), and then execute it incredibly well.
> and then execute it incredibly well
...sometimes
How did he come up with Facebook?
He copied the analog thing of the same name in his university that was taking too long to digitise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
There's a whole movie about it. He was employed to create a social media platform, and ended up stealing the code to do it for himself instead.
It was already digitized. He wanted to make a version without security and privacy protections.
He also copied Friendster.
I dont think he did
yes.
no.
Whatever happened to that Facebook cryptocurrency?
Never launched, given to org that dissolved, sold to bank that is now shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)
So many baby boomers are about to lose their savings. Meta knows their bread is buttered by the 55+ age group and capitalizing on the vulnerable social media addicted elders will be extremely profitable.
My university admissions interview took place next to an old tech nerd's model train layout. Today, the same kind of person would be up all night posting about trans people on X. I blame a lot of our current problems on the decline of model trains and stamp collecting. You are spot on about social media addiction among the olds.
I've always felt that Mark Zuckerberg got lucky with Facebook and that he has no real lasting talent as a technologist or visionary. He seems to attempt to chase the latest "it" thing and has very few original ideas that actual stick long-term. He's quite the charlatan.
Please don't post personal attacks to HN, regardless of $Person.
A comment like this does not gratify curiosity, only indignation, and we're here for the former not the latter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I definitely didn't mean this as a personal attack.
I believe you when you say you didn't intend it that way, but unfortunately the meaning of a message has more to do how it lands than how it was intended—in the sense of the effects that it has on the receivers and also on the channel. Certainly from a moderation point of view we have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's not that you owe Zuckerberg or any other specific person better, but rather that you owe this community better if you're participating in it. (And by 'you' of course, I don't mean you personally, but all of us.)
>He's quite the charlatan.
This is where it crossed from critique to attack.
um, I'm not sure exactly why what motivated that comment, but its extremely possible to believe every word there from a purely logical perspective, as opposed to an emotional one. yes we shouldn't post personal attacks, but saying 'Zuckerberg got lucky' and 'seems to chase the latest "it" thing' doesn't need to qualify as a personal attack. these can just be normal observations. see I wouldn't say the same things about sama, because I don't think they're true, and I dislike the both of them.
as for the newsguidelines, I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Much of the language in the GP is pejorative, and therefore emotional, and therefore not possible to treat "from a purely logical perspective".
I doubt that a purely logical evaluation is possible of any statement at all, outside of formal languages, but let's not digress. (Or maybe we should! it's at least more interesting to talk about than $Billionaire-CEO having just gotten lucky, lacking talent, or being a charlatan.)
> I think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" to think about what motivates tech ceos and talk about how they do things
Oh yes, that's quite possible, but if one is venting indignation then one is doing something different.
Just to digress again: "intellectual curiosity" is a funny phrase, one I don't entirely care for - it verges on pretentious and reminds me of Hemingway's line about ten-dollar words*. But I've stuck with it because you can't just say "curiosity", because there are other kinds of curiosity and they are quite different.
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/26/dictionary/
While I know criticizing Meta is popular, I'm not sure I'd agree with above.
Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook. Understanding the potential market that could be created and turning down a $1B acquisition from Yahoo 20-years ago, at the time, seemed insane.
Also making the shift to mobile, when people thought that would be the death of FB is a remarkable story.
Identifying to acquire WhatsApp & Instagram, both laughed at when bought for the acquisition price at that time, now massive businesses for Meta (and their market cap value).
Meta AI glasses are surprisingly popular and growing. And more...
Note: I have no affiliation with Meta (not now or in the past)
---
EDIT: Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique. Maybe, but the product is only like 10% of the problem. 90% of the work (and hard part) is execution.
That's not true though. Social network sites existed, just not so "centralized" and "viral". Facebook created a simple and more user-friendly interface. WhatsApp as it understand, does not make much if any money. Instagram is a cash cow due.
They have released some good open source technology, but as the OP said, Meta hasn't much going for it apart from addictive apps for showing ads
They also had the right audience to build the early adopters: top university students.
Social networks definitely existed, they just didn’t gain the same momentum/popularity as Facebook. As others have pointed out there was MySpace - but even before that there was Friendster and Asian Avenue. I’m sure there were probably another one or two.
That’s not to take anything away from the success of early Facebook, but the idea of a social network was not created by fb.
> Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.
You never heard of MySpace?
Those are fair points, though I didn't say he wasn't a good business person. I could probably concede that he is, but I don't see him as the tech visionary he's often propped up to be.
> Many people I see underestimate what it takes to build a business. It is the classic “I could have built that in a weekend” critique.
My dude, no one in your reply thread is making that claim. We bristling at the claim that "Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook". Unless you're saying FB's innovation is its business model and is what made it dominate, well, your original statement just didn't substantiate that.
IMO, the only thing I'd credit Zuck for is sticking (at least at the start) to his singular vision of what a social network should be; first it was just open for .edu emails, then when it was released more broadly their product roadmap stuck to fostering a social environment online.
And then he lost that vision. I'd say it was circa Cambridge Analytica when engagement---often ragebait because it gave them more and stronger of that sweet sweet monetizable ad signals---replaced fostering an online social environment. Others would say it's the algorithmic news feed. Either way, losing that vision started FB's demise.
IME, FB was best when it was a supplement and not a replacement for real life. FB had value to me because we could plan parties there and even keep in touch after, get that social buzz going for a little while longer. But it was _never_ the party.
But their recent efforts---Metaverse, all the AI crap---has all the hallmakrs of trying to replace real life. They now want to be the party but good luck with that. Judging by the blowback and lack of adoption consumers see what they're up to a mile away. Zuck has no idea how to stay relevant so now we have a platform more concerned with its market cap than having actual utility.
>Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.
Seriously? Of course they did. An easy counter-example is MySpace, which launched several months before Facebook's very first appearance as a Hot Or Not mimic (which predates Zuck by 3 years), and had many millions more users for years (especially while FB was restricted to colleges).
Major competition and a lot of money was going into social media around then (and for a couple years prior), FB is just the eventual winner.
> Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook
Social networks were all the rage. He executed the best of all and had the right strategy to build the user base.
He was also a wealthy kid with connections. People place far too much weight on execution. Most of it is being in the right place at the right time and having existing connections.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...
Not what I'd call great execution anyways.
Insane how? Google had already done it, and it's pretty clear that if someone wants to buy for $1B, it might be worth more than $1B.
He built a hell of a machine for buying political/cultural influence or filling your sales funnel, no matter the dubiousness of your product, with pinpoint precision. Doing that takes vision and talent, and extremely flexible ethics.
I've never seen him saying anything particularly smart or insightful. My impression is that he has moderately above average intelligence and entrepreneurship. If he wasn't at the right place at the right time, he would be yet another founder of a random startup.
I've never seen him say or do anything particularly human. If I believed in such things, I'd think he was some kind of souless drone sent here by aliens/demons/etc to destroy humanity.
Your impression about his intelligence is way off. Mark was part of the study for mathematically precocious youth, which has a math cutoff at the 1/10K rarity. He also has ambition at the same level. What’s probably missing, of late, is good taste and judgment.
That becomes more clear by the day.
Zuck has no insight. His sole ambition is to be rich and taken seriously.
Thought the same thing even before I saw your comment!
In what way has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain, as befitting the word charlatan? He is the CEO of Facebook and we're told to not like Facebook, but when has he claimed special expertise to deceive others for financial gain? He's one of the richest people in the world and has been using that money to do things he wants to do. I don't think he's ever claimed to eg be a PhD AI researcher and for people to give him money because of a made up claim like that. People give Facebook money and it ends up in his pockets and he does things with that.
Has he been honest when he’s testified before Congress? At best, I think we can say he hasn’t been very transparent many of those times. If that’s not for power and/or financial gain, what is it? [0]
- [0] https://dispatch.techoversight.org/top-report-mark-zuckerber... - which was previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060486
> “we're told to not like Facebook…”
I didn’t have to be “told” to not like Facebook or Meta. The company’s actions for well over a decade and those of its executives, including the CEO, allowed to form that opinion on our own. I’d be willing to bet that experience is not unique to me.
Same for Elon and Paypal
I dunno he made a few very wise purchases (Instagram, WhatsApp). But yeah he hasn't had a single first party hit apart from Facebook, and the Metaverse is 100% emperor's new clothes. Even worse than Alexa's "people will buy things through a janky voice interface right"?
This is basically the case with most of the tech billionaires. They have one, maybe two real successes and it's mostly inertia after that.