Threads has also now rapidly grown to 150m MAU with higher DAU than X.
It's an incredible achievement to bootstrap a social network to the leader in its category in less than a year. And it demonstrates the power of Facebook and Instagram in being able to drive traffic.
It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.
> It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.
reels is simply nowhere as addictive as Tiktok. Tiktok blows me away with how interesting/eclectic my feed is. Reels is like watching funniest home videos with Bob Saget by comparison.
The scaling aspect is indeed impressive but I have not seen anyone (exactly zero) that I want to follow on threads.
I want smart people and weird but interesting schizos, not my "friends" from Instagram and Facebook. I mostly like those friends but I know their opinions on most things already for example.
Also unless one is being particularly pedantic he already has the only tiktok competitor (Instagram reels).
Seriousy? They have higher daily active users than X??
I'm really surprised to hear that. I don't really use either but wow.
Of course Meta is doing everything to make Threads work, and Elon is doing everything to burn X to the ground, there's that :P But yes it is impressive.
They must have a very creative definition of "active user" because Zuckerberg gets 15-20k likes on his posts while I can scroll down X and find several posts a few hours old from random gimmick accounts with many times more. Taking that at face value to call Threads "the leader in its category" is comical.
It actually shows half of the post followed by …, making you think that by clicking it you’ll see the rest. But then you get taken to the App Store to download Threads.
Likewise, I wouldn't be shocked if I'm counted as an daily active Instagram user, despite not having an account or using it directly. The "shorts" are embedded in FB and occasionally interesting.
... Why would you expect Zuckerberg to get more likes than "random gimmick accounts", tho? Those, rather that rather boring billionaires, have traditionally been the major driver of engagement on Twitter, too.
I don’t know why people trust stats from any social media company without independent verification. Stats can be massaged and there are large incentives to do it.
We know that the former Twitter board certainly did this, for example.
Results look good to me, EPS about double yoy, reality labs still losing billions. Stock down 12% after hours though so I must be missing something I guess
It's so weird to me. My Facebook feed is dead, no one posts anymore. The last weeks they spam me with notifications about nothing to get me back in and creating fake engagement. "Peter you added as a friend in high school but have never spoken to since or ever interacted with on the platform commented on a meme page, check it out".
Facebook is just groups and marketplace, sprinkled with some ads, at least for my age group and area. But groups are very active, especially neighbourhood ones, where I get my hyper local news basically.
I stopped looking at facebook a month or two ago because it suddenly became 99% spam "suggestions" from people I've never heard of before. Complete turn off. I might peek once in a while to see if it's been unfucked, but I have zero interest until it is.
Revenue down from last quarter but q4 is usually good for adtech I think. Next quarters guidance seems decent to me but I guess market was expecting more. q1 2023 was definitely a bit of a low point for meta so the yoy stats might be a bit misleading but hard for me to be upset about anything here. Ad impressions up 20% again somehow lmao
I genuinely want to know how much of the ad revenue comes right from Elon.
Nearly every ad lately is either Tesla, or weird fan groups like "Elon musk highest iq to ever live" and someone has built a massive network of bots for "Elon musk sexiest man alive".
Oof, another $4 billion in the hole for Reality Labs. I really want VR to succeed but seeing the biggest player by far still struggling to find any path to profitability (or even breaking even) after iterating on it for a decade makes it hard to be optimistic.
The fact that they spend more than everyone else does in the space combined just blows my mind. Their Horizon worlds is literally just a worst VR chat which was developed for <$100 million. Their os frontent for the quest is great, but how many devs can you even realistically have having an impact.
And that $4 billion is just per quarter. I honestly would love to see a full breakdown. Nintendo's entire revenue is 12 billion, which is less than Meta VR spends alone, and that includes everything Nintendo does, including developing games. How has Meta spent so much and has so little to show for it?
Surprised to see so many people negative on meta in this thread. I've used VR at conventions and buddies houses but I've been holding off on picking up a headset for a couple of revisions until they are in their sweet spot of development. Where most of the kinks are worked out, there's a good library of Apps and games, and doesn't require enthusist level commitment which I don't have the time or patience for anymore.
Recently picked up a Quest 3 and it's honestly astonishing. I (half) joking had the thought when they get to the Quest 5 or 6 and can get the cost down humanity is gonna be in serious trouble. I brought it to a family gathering and one person went out and bought one the next day. Another is going to pick one up as soon as they can find a good deal used.
Horizon worlds is admittedly a little goofy but this is one of the first revision of it. And it works well as drop in for some Apps like escape rooms which probably saves some dev work. I only breezed through the report but it looks like their numbers are up massively YOY.
Only complaints is passthrough is still a little distorted but an enormous improvement. Battery life could still be better but a battery pack helps balance the heatset anyway. Also you can't directly connect to steamVR without going through Quest link which I can't see any reason for other than being anti-competitive and user hostile.
The matrix is coming and I got a feeling metas gonna own it.
Anecdotally, the pattern many of us have seen keep happening over the last 5+ years is that enthusiasm and novelty is very very high when first discovering these modern lightweight headsets but then usage just falls off a cliff after a while.
You're in the first phase. Maybe the second phase won't arrive for you.
They're extremely exciting, but seem to get a little same-y or something. Only insiders really know, but there might be a bit of an invisible ceiling that somebody still needs to figure out how to break through in order to keep engagement up. It might be a killer app, it might be a further advances in mixed reality, it might be continued reduction in weight or increases in display quality, but it also might just be that there's an inherent limitation that prevents them from taking over the world. Not every cool gadget does.
I think VR will gradually and massively extend the capabilities of humanity but not revolutionize them. Regular screens, phones, etc will still exist, they will always have a place in our society. But VR will more and more become an accepted and common tool, for use cases that are different from regular devices. Until suddenly you realize that indeed they are everywhere and you use them all the time. It's not going to be an immediate "revolution" the way ChatGPT was (I think you could probably say the same about any hardware innovation).
I think the closest comparison is that VR right now is like PDAs in the 90s. Yeah, everyone knew they were the future, but the hardware absolutely blew, And it took another 10-20 years to arrive at the perfect form factor of a smartphone. Lots of hardware innovations need to happen for VR - hell, not a single consumer headset has shipped with a vergence-accommodation conflict solution. But give it another 10-20 years and I am certain we'll be seeing that smartphone type moment.
It's nice to know you're in the good old days before you've left them. :-)
I can definitely see the novelty wearing off given enough time, same as anything. Plus to your point you can clearly see apps follow one of a few formulas.
Im not surprised about the negative comments. I’d be more surprised if the negative commenters have even tried VR. VR and AR are just such a huge paradigm shift that according to the data, only tweens and children “just get it” as a demographic group without a lot of coaxing and explaining. I would say that it’s their generation’s NES. Being an adult VR enthusiast feels like being part of something like the homebrew computer club, well until Quest came along.
I've tried VR, have a bunch of friends with headsets (and a team headset for work, since I work adjacent to AR/VR) and find it mildly interesting when I do try it but not interesting enough to buy a headset with my own money. My kids have both been offered turns but declined.
I honestly don't see the trend that you've been describing among my kids or their older peers. Honestly, NES is this generation's NES; I was shocked that "Marios & Bowsers" is now a playground game (it's basically sharks & minnows), and my kid will spend hours playing MarioKart if given a chance. My kid is an avid gamer but his favorites are all the Tower-defense games you get on Google Play, as well as classics like Tetris or Candy Crush and racing games like MarioKart.
I think there's also a trend - particularly among affluent families - of going back to basics and going outside for face-to-face entertainment more. IMHO the 2010s were the high water mark for gaming, and that if anything the trend today has been to detach from devices and have more actual experiences.
I have 12-14 year old gamer nieces and nephews. They simply don't care about VR.
Even at a family gathering with the host having a Quest, no one cares to even try it out.
It was just absolutely nothing to do them.
Personally, I have been waiting for VR since the early 90s and the Lawnmower Man.
With having no interest in games, my experience is exactly the same as my nieces and nephews. Just a whole lot of nothing. I almost wonder if people who post things like this are not some kind of viral marketing because this is just not reality.
According to the data, it’s children and tweens that dominate the MAUs. Also just read Reddit about complaints of most online VR games being dominated by children as a counter to your anecdote of one family.
"Most VR users are children" is a very different statement from "Most children are VR users." The former can be very true without the latter being true at all; it just implies that "most people are not VR users", which is also true.
You have a point, but my comment is better than an anecdote.
There’s about 30 million children in the US in the right age group for using VR headsets, and over 20 million Quest headsets have been sold. It might not be accurate to believe that most children will accept VR, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility especially since the MAUs for adults are terrible.
The market for VR headsets is worldwide, so the right denominator is the ~600B children in the developed world. If you generously figure that half of those headsets are used by children, that's ~2% penetration, which seems more like it.
20M units sold is tiny for a consumer electronics product, BTW. I work on Android Tablets, and we have ~300M MAU. Phones are 3B. 20M makes VR only about 20% of the market size of AndroidTV, which has about 110M units sold.
That’s not a good way of framing it because the vast majority of the headsets were sold in the US. I would be surprised if there were even healthy sales in developing countries, so we shouldn’t be counting all of the children in the world. Not to mention that you probably have to exclude children under 10 give or take.
Yes, I agree that VR is not popular with most of the adult population. At the moment, VR has a similar stigma that computers, the internet, and video games once had. It will likely stay that way until these children become adults, unless Apple can refine “spatial computing” fast enough to overcome the stigma.
Tweens and children are the only ones with supple inner ear linings.
As a 40-yo VR enthusiast, I can't play anything that requires elective X/Y movement (first person shooter) without getting sick. The "teleport" mechanic is really clunky.
My kids can play anything and never get sick.
My parents can't even do a driving sim without getting dizzy in a couple of minutes.
I'm guessing a big chunk of those losses are from selling the hardware at a loss, which is a fine strategy if you're Sony or Microsoft and can easily make that money back from game licensing and subscriptions, but the Quest has (a) a reputation for people buying one and then barely using it, and (b) a subset of active users who only use it to play SteamVR games without ever giving Meta a cent after the initial purchase.
I don't know exactly how much they're losing on each Quest they sell, but the fact that it's significantly cheaper than any "dumb" headset that requires a PC or PS5 to do all of the heavy lifting, despite having what's effectively an entire smartphone built-in says it all really.
I think it's reasonable to assume that a pretty large portion of this is going into R&D. They've shown multiple prototypes that are addressing different technologies/techniques for improving the clarity and quality of VR experiences.
I could be mistaken, but I believe they were the ones to pioneer varifocal displays, a technology which has still yet to ship in an HMD. The earliest prototypes relied on physically moving the lens, where the latest prototypes are using some form of electrically charged lens that changes its focal distance based on voltage.
Once you start going down the rabbit hole of projects they've either announced or have been leaked it's easy to see how you could spend that kind of money, and that's only the stuff we know about.
I admit that I didn't like Zuck before. But I have to say, I am becoming a big fan of him, primarily due to his strategy in ML/AI for Meta, and his willingness to burn cash to solve the problems of VR. Zuck is many things good and bad, but certainly one of those things is that he's a nerd who loves technology and wants to move it forward, and I can't help but respect that massively especially given his results.
I respect the same about Musk. It's the only thing that I respect about either of them. But, boy, it's hard for me not to respect individual who are inventing the future.
Yes, Musk is in the same category. You can hate his opinions, sure, but to not respect him in some form or fashion just betrays an ignorant worldview IMO.
It's the hardware, man. The software practically doesn't matter until they figure out the hardware. If they went all in on adding all the necessary features to Worlds right now, they'd end up having to change things later on to accommodate whatever form the hardware ends up taking.
There are some crucial avenues of research Meta is working on. Varifocal, form factor, face / body tracking, resolution - once these things are nailed, and I'm pretty sure it'll be in the next 10 years, then suddenly we're gonna WANT to be in Horizon Worlds. But it can't happen without massive R&D on the hardware side.
In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs. This also includes Meta's fundamental AI Research laboratory FAIR which is now part of the Reality Labs - Research (RLR) division.
All the ai research is under reality labs through FAIR. Theyre spending billions on GPU buy alone. You can claim gen ai is a necessity for the metaverse but I do think its a bit misleading to say VR lost 4 billion this quarter when a huge amount of that went to an open source LLM
Yeah horizon worlds is really bad. In their push to make it child friendly the whole thing has become a bland playground for kids with nothing to offer adults.
After all, when I go to the movies I don't go for a Disney cartoon but an action movie.
The user-generated content in VRChat is so much more compelling. It also looks better. And it's actually harder to do it.
Why don’t they just hire devs who have clearly spent years building their own 3d projects alone, bootstrapping themselves? Tbf they tried to interview me during my peak where I had already made my own networking engine and a custom 3d env but I was too scared to interview after hearing they prefer fresh code monkeys out of college .
Just offering some advice I think they reap what they sow with their unfortunately overfitting in their main? choice of applicant.maybe I’m wrong
To be fair to Facebook - they actually did offer me an interview
TLDR; im a self made millionaire now I’m just saying the people you want are the ones that don’t apply, too busy coding instead of applying to FAANGS
Maybe. It is nice to see cash transactions and subscription models in the space. There’s a chance (maybe it’s slim) that new computing paradigms will bring new business models without ads. Maybe I’m just an optimist.
> new computing paradigms will bring new business models without ads
My fear about LLMs emerging as a commonplace computing tool is that they seem like such an obvious target for a whole new type of advertising & propaganda. Whatever you think about the potential for something like "superhuman AGI", it seems clear to me that LLMs have the potential to become better and better at generating text that can convince and persuade.
My nightmare dystopia is that we end up in a society where we're constantly interacting with LLM agents all the time, and they're so undeniably useful that we don't want to abandon them, but buried deep in each of their prompts is something along the lines of "prioritize being really good at your main task, cultivate trust and dependence in the user, but in the background always be looking for ways to subtly influence them to be more likely to support our sponsors; here's the current list of sponsors with weights based on how much they're paying us ..."
Sounds much closer to an apologist than an optimist if you ask me.
Although more charitably, a future apologist—who maybe has good intentions, but hasn’t stepped back to gain context and realized that their projection is at odds with the systemic incentives in play.
I wouldn't bet on it. Meta is leading the pack right now and they're an advertising company. I wouldn't expect an advertising company to choose a model without advertising.
But they are the dominant player, and have been for many years.
Their only real competitor in terms of market share right now are Sony's Playstation VR headsets, and Meta is easily outcompeting them. The HTC Vive is far behind in sales, and Apple hopes to sell as many headsets in an entire year as the Playstation VR2 sold in the first 6 weeks (which is still impressive considering the order of magnitude price difference). Everyone else seems to be in enterprise-sales mode, which drives profit but not market share. Well, except for ByteDance's Pico, but they don't seem to be doing great outside of China.
The days of interesting tech have been gone for a couple of decades now. Every technology is now being quickly enshitified. It's ALL about selling you crap.
The nerd Internet was the best, but it's never coming back.
The bandwidth gave us streaming - okay, I'll give you that, but we had that before. It's more of an infrastructure thing than "interesting" tech.
There's literally an ad on the front page right now for a YC startup hiring engineers to protect patient privacy. Follow the link? The company exists to better sell ads based on patient data (but in a "compliant" manner).
Gone now -- I don't remember the name (unless this was the fastest pivot ever recorded, it was not Glass Health, which currently has a now hiring ad up[1])
Hah, happened to see this mentioned in another comment today. It was FreshPaint, whose website includes this gem:
"You need to install ad trackers on your website to get the most out of ad platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. Ad trackers can create issues for healthcare marketers by sending visitor identifiers and health information to platforms that aren't HIPAA-compliant."
I'm sure they are good folks, but what an absurd premise. Something about the best minds of our generation selling ads....
I think "interesting" becomes a psychological term. Things were interesting because they made our brains react in strange ways. All relative to what we knew or dreamed about. I find the ultrafast paced technology ear incompatible with human life. You don't get to wish, dream and go deep into something on your own, with a proper crowd size. Now it's 7b of people all locked in this dopamine ride of neverending updates, all that on top of drama, social rules..
I been hearing this term 'enshitified' a lot lately. I am curious to its source and why it seems so much more prevalent recently. Do you have any insight into that?
I hate the recent "enshittification" trend. It seems to come from some place of entitlement in which people think they deserve to get everything for free. Surprise: you only get what you pay for.
My new high end washer and drier come with an iphone app that notifies you when it’s done. It comes with non-optional spam notifications for their other products and subscriptions. It seems that the market of “pay more to get a product without ads” is increasingly disappearing.
Well, there's still no killer app. The productivity use case is a gimmick. Apple vision pro is also not selling well. The big promise is entertainment but it's not there yet.
I don’t see VR becoming mainstream. At least today anyways. It’s very niche. Hardware is clunky. The software is locked to Apple or Meta APIs. It’s difficult to explore when the manufacturers put up so many walls within their walled up ecosystems.
Today's VR is good, but not $100B market good. The SV managerial class has read too much into all the NYT bestsellers about "disruptive innovation" and now every goddamn product category must be "disruptive". Nothing can "just exist" anymore...
That's why the actual end goal for everyone working in this space is Mixed Reality (AR/MR/XR) in a glasses form factor that replaces your phone. It's obvious that's what Apple is targetting, and Meta have also demo'd similar tech they're working on at the Quest events they've held the last couple of years.
Within a decade, full VR will be available in a standard pair of glasses.
Eventually we’ll probably move to a single OS that runs everything, your phone , computer , vr, will all be a single device( or course us old folks will probably still prefer monitor so).
Just like fusion is juuuuust 20 years away... for the last 30 years.
Not saying they're the same level of difficulty/tech, necessarily, but there's a reason we have the term Hype Cycle. We had one for VR about 25-30 years ago. Recently, we've had Second Hype Cycle... maybe next it'll be for realsies or it'll be Third Hype Cycle for VR?
Apologies for the jadedness, but... you see enough of the meta at some point :)
EDIT: What's the actual killer app for VR for the general population ? We're already over-saturated with a plethora of entertainment.
Imagine being able to put on glasses, and instantly have your computer. Your hands are tracked so you can type without a keyboard.
This replaces the computer for most people. With Windows on ARM you could probably build something like this today, but it's still too billy.
If I had a billion dollars I'd be working on a single device that replaces everything. Your phone, your TV( or at least sync to it so content is seamless). Then I'd sell it below cost with a subscription of some sort.
With an open source model at a reasonable markup.
That's the endgame for Meta. You'll never leave their new ecosystem.
> Imagine being able to put on glasses, and instantly have your computer. Your hands are tracked so you can type without a keyboard.
How, exactly, would that work? You'd stare intently at the virtual keyboard? Or just think about "thing" and it'd magically appear? Voice recognition is actually pretty decent as a non-magical thing that sort-of-works-well-enough.
> If I had a billion dollars I'd be working on a single device that replaces everything. Your phone, your TV( or at least sync to it so content is seamless). Then I'd sell it below cost with a subscription of some sort.
With an open source model at a reasonable markup.
I love the gusto! I hope that -- once you have a billion dollars -- you'll stick to your principles. I think getting to a billion dollars is -- in itself -- a selection effect/bias, so...
> That's the endgame for Meta. You'll never leave their new ecosystem.
If they're good enough... even their employees won't want to.
It's money IRL that Meta wants. That's the end game.
EDIT: Just to add: Absent truly Matrix-level VR, people will still be able to tell and unless you're a FULLY committed to solipsism or almost-as-absurd levels of apathy... well, it's going to cause tensions :)
Assuming it ships that's already half way there. Another way to accomplish what I'm thinking of would be to basically cloud sync your user sessions between your phone, computer and headset.
I'm very skeptical about that. We don't even have the technology for such display can be implemented on transparent glass. Also we don't have that good battery tech which can drive such gear and smaller enough to be hidden in a glasses.
Even if we have all of those tech today, it will take long time to make it a mass production. IMH it will take at least decades to get that level.
But we still don't have such a display tech or do we? I've never heard something like that.
Probably someone can invent such tech within a decade. But seeing it in a consumer product takes time. So it's safe to assume that it won't happened within a decade if we don't even have such tech today. Especially in this context of investment.
That's not a VR glass. It's AR. They are completely different. For full VR, the display must be completely opaque. The side must be sealed to block environment.
It's impossible to make it with a normal glasses shape with current tech and I don't think we can make it in a near future.
It is possible that now is the right time to keep investing in it. They already have huge sunk costs, but a lot has changed since they began. LLMs became a thing. Display tech has continued to evolve quickly. There is more information on the market after seeing how products from Sony, Apple, and others have done. Meta also recently announced their new OS and their more-open platform strategy. Mobile processors are also evolving quickly. All of these things can open up possibilities - and even if it isn’t a sure thing, maybe it is worth placing a bet?
Placing a bet is one thing, but Facebook is spending enough money to fund a moderately sized country. I don't mind that they are doing it though, even though I think it's a terrible business decision. Facebook spends plenty of money on things that are worse for the world and maybe we'll eventually get some interesting tech out of it.
If you see how poor Horizons is compared to something like VRChat that operates on a shoestring budget compare to meta's. Or something like viverse.
Their hardware is OK, but not groundbreaking. Their metaverse platform is really poor compared to the competition, although what they do have over the others is the ability to create in-world instead of in Unity. But really that doesn't stop creators. The environments in VRChat are much more compelling. I think part of this is Meta's way too strict moderation and content policy. Because really for adults a rubber-tile child playground is really just no fun. We need a bit of gritty.
So yeah really they're doing it wrong. I don't know how they do it exactly but clearly all that money goes to the wrong places.
I don't think this means VR is a bad idea. It can work, just not the way Meta thinks it can.
> "But seeing the biggest player by far still struggling to find any path to profitability"
I would have agreed if Reality Labs was its own startup but they are supported by Meta. With that said, $12BN profit in one quarter for Meta is somehow "struggling"?
Wait until you see the wave of unprofitable AI startups and companies raising capital forever without a path to profitability in sight.
Meta can afford to spend billions into Reality Labs, until that unit itself becomes profitable. They are totally fine and it is still business as usual and they will be sitting comfortably for another decade.
The rest of the so-called AI startups taking in VC capital on the other hand...
I think OPs concern is not for Meta, but ability of startups to raise funds. If Meta can't make profit or product even after spending 10s of billions, the chance of a startup is near 0.
Why the drastically lower effective tax rate? I don't see an increase in operating expenses enough to make that big of an impact and I'd expect the increased income to raise it.
Tesla promised self driving taxis and autonomous robots and cheaper new undisclosed products due to release soon, and investors bought it like they always do.
The stock market is a measure of what investors think the company will be worth over the next 10 years or so, essentially. Because if someone came along and wanted to buy the company, they’d typically pay around that amount. So take that amount (what the company is valued at) and divide by number of shares, there’s your share price. Like anything, it’s worth what someone will pay for it.
This is continuously adjusted as investor sentiment changes about where the company (and the economy at large) is going and what that “10 year valuation” is. A single quarterly result certainly could change that number if there’s a big surprise in there, but for the most part companies are good at predicting their revenue and expenses and that is priced into the stock already.
For Tesla, there was a wide expectation that they weren’t going to have a great quarter, it was pretty much known. So the stock was already significantly down before the earnings call. What was not expected was that Musk dedicated the company to building a cheaper car in the coming years. Investors thought this was a good move, stock goes up.
Now look at Meta, it was widely expected they’d have good results this quarter, so stock price is already up recently. What changed in this report is their expenses are much higher than what they previously estimated. So the stock goes down.
The actual quarterly results are a factor in the price but generally those are priced in already, unless you get some big surprise. What’s more important is the investor sentiment about whether the company is going in the right direction, which can change on a whim and for no reason at all.
It isn't that hard to figure out that one has been extraordinarily bullish and priced to perfection and one has been extraordinarily bearish as if they are going out of business.
There you go, spouting facts. Serves you right for being downvoted!
But really, this is exactly it folks. META has gone up like crazy over the past year. Do you think it will continue doing so ad infinitum?
> Facebook daily active users estimate: 2.11 billion
> Facebook monthly active users estimate: 3.08 billion
> Average Family service users per day estimate: 3.16 billion
> Average Family service users per month estimate: 3.97 billion
If I'm parsing this correctly, they have around 3.16 billion DAU across all services. That's an insane number of people.
Which really makes me wonder why their social media platforms suck so much. I recently re-opened Facebook and it was a desert wasteland with a handful of people I knew years ago sharing memes. Instagram has a few more users than Facebook, but aside from catching the occasional story update from a couple people, I mostly use it to follow artist accounts. And nobody that I know is participating on Threads at all.
It seems really difficult to find anything interesting on their platforms. On Facebook I looked up groups for some of my interests, and they're either completely dead or being kept alive by occasional posts of creators sharing their latest releases.
So what are these 3 billion people even doing on Meta's platforms?
The GP comment sounds like a conspiracy theory because advertisers really care about getting their money's worth for actual, genuine impressions and click-throughs. Otherwise, it would be massive fraud.
When Facebook says "users" in claims like these, what they actually mean are accounts. This statistic includes all the multi accounts, fake accounts, spam accounts, and bot accounts. They have been getting sued over the past several years for charging advertisers when a bot or fake account engages with the advertised content.
For the same reason Google's and Apple's results also reach the front page. HN users upvote the posts. Maybe it's because Meta is one of the largest tech companies in the world and for many people their results are interesting news.
Because it’s one of the biggest tech companies and its results foreshadow earnings for other tech companies. Just look at the after hours price movements of most of the tech stocks.
Man, I bought some stock a bit after IPO, it dropped a bunch, and I idiotically sold later at a slight loss in 2013 after people all around me constantly went on about how they would never make money. It's now worth 17 times what I sold at.
I also remember around Google's IPO people questioning how they'd ever make money.
I used to pay a lot of attention to the comments of certain HN users who made well reasoned but (with the clarity of hindsight) mostly doomer predictions about various topics. I wish I hadn't listened to them.
i think i sold my apple stock at $10/share. I also had my finger on the buy button for AIG at around $1/share in the depths of the financial crisis but didn't do it. Now I just stick to code, my 401k, and company RSUs heh.
It's an incredible achievement to bootstrap a social network to the leader in its category in less than a year. And it demonstrates the power of Facebook and Instagram in being able to drive traffic.
It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.
They already did. It's called Reels.
I want smart people and weird but interesting schizos, not my "friends" from Instagram and Facebook. I mostly like those friends but I know their opinions on most things already for example.
Also unless one is being particularly pedantic he already has the only tiktok competitor (Instagram reels).
I'm really surprised to hear that. I don't really use either but wow.
Of course Meta is doing everything to make Threads work, and Elon is doing everything to burn X to the ground, there's that :P But yes it is impressive.
Feels a bit misleading by FB
And the audience on Threads is very different from X so engagement will not be all that comparable.
I don’t know why people trust stats from any social media company without independent verification. Stats can be massaged and there are large incentives to do it.
We know that the former Twitter board certainly did this, for example.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...
Their engaged audience is skewing older which is why it "feels" weird to you but not to everyone.
Nearly every ad lately is either Tesla, or weird fan groups like "Elon musk highest iq to ever live" and someone has built a massive network of bots for "Elon musk sexiest man alive".
And that $4 billion is just per quarter. I honestly would love to see a full breakdown. Nintendo's entire revenue is 12 billion, which is less than Meta VR spends alone, and that includes everything Nintendo does, including developing games. How has Meta spent so much and has so little to show for it?
Recently picked up a Quest 3 and it's honestly astonishing. I (half) joking had the thought when they get to the Quest 5 or 6 and can get the cost down humanity is gonna be in serious trouble. I brought it to a family gathering and one person went out and bought one the next day. Another is going to pick one up as soon as they can find a good deal used.
Horizon worlds is admittedly a little goofy but this is one of the first revision of it. And it works well as drop in for some Apps like escape rooms which probably saves some dev work. I only breezed through the report but it looks like their numbers are up massively YOY.
Only complaints is passthrough is still a little distorted but an enormous improvement. Battery life could still be better but a battery pack helps balance the heatset anyway. Also you can't directly connect to steamVR without going through Quest link which I can't see any reason for other than being anti-competitive and user hostile.
The matrix is coming and I got a feeling metas gonna own it.
You're in the first phase. Maybe the second phase won't arrive for you.
They're extremely exciting, but seem to get a little same-y or something. Only insiders really know, but there might be a bit of an invisible ceiling that somebody still needs to figure out how to break through in order to keep engagement up. It might be a killer app, it might be a further advances in mixed reality, it might be continued reduction in weight or increases in display quality, but it also might just be that there's an inherent limitation that prevents them from taking over the world. Not every cool gadget does.
I think the closest comparison is that VR right now is like PDAs in the 90s. Yeah, everyone knew they were the future, but the hardware absolutely blew, And it took another 10-20 years to arrive at the perfect form factor of a smartphone. Lots of hardware innovations need to happen for VR - hell, not a single consumer headset has shipped with a vergence-accommodation conflict solution. But give it another 10-20 years and I am certain we'll be seeing that smartphone type moment.
I can definitely see the novelty wearing off given enough time, same as anything. Plus to your point you can clearly see apps follow one of a few formulas.
Is this true? I have a quest 2 and just downloaded the steam link app and it seems to just work. Are you talking about wired?
This is the least cyberpunk sentence I've ever read.
I honestly don't see the trend that you've been describing among my kids or their older peers. Honestly, NES is this generation's NES; I was shocked that "Marios & Bowsers" is now a playground game (it's basically sharks & minnows), and my kid will spend hours playing MarioKart if given a chance. My kid is an avid gamer but his favorites are all the Tower-defense games you get on Google Play, as well as classics like Tetris or Candy Crush and racing games like MarioKart.
I think there's also a trend - particularly among affluent families - of going back to basics and going outside for face-to-face entertainment more. IMHO the 2010s were the high water mark for gaming, and that if anything the trend today has been to detach from devices and have more actual experiences.
You’re right, but tbf you’re filtering for upper class families
I have 12-14 year old gamer nieces and nephews. They simply don't care about VR.
Even at a family gathering with the host having a Quest, no one cares to even try it out.
It was just absolutely nothing to do them.
Personally, I have been waiting for VR since the early 90s and the Lawnmower Man.
With having no interest in games, my experience is exactly the same as my nieces and nephews. Just a whole lot of nothing. I almost wonder if people who post things like this are not some kind of viral marketing because this is just not reality.
There’s about 30 million children in the US in the right age group for using VR headsets, and over 20 million Quest headsets have been sold. It might not be accurate to believe that most children will accept VR, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility especially since the MAUs for adults are terrible.
20M units sold is tiny for a consumer electronics product, BTW. I work on Android Tablets, and we have ~300M MAU. Phones are 3B. 20M makes VR only about 20% of the market size of AndroidTV, which has about 110M units sold.
Yes, I agree that VR is not popular with most of the adult population. At the moment, VR has a similar stigma that computers, the internet, and video games once had. It will likely stay that way until these children become adults, unless Apple can refine “spatial computing” fast enough to overcome the stigma.
As a 40-yo VR enthusiast, I can't play anything that requires elective X/Y movement (first person shooter) without getting sick. The "teleport" mechanic is really clunky.
My kids can play anything and never get sick.
My parents can't even do a driving sim without getting dizzy in a couple of minutes.
Of course, N=1...
I don't know exactly how much they're losing on each Quest they sell, but the fact that it's significantly cheaper than any "dumb" headset that requires a PC or PS5 to do all of the heavy lifting, despite having what's effectively an entire smartphone built-in says it all really.
I could be mistaken, but I believe they were the ones to pioneer varifocal displays, a technology which has still yet to ship in an HMD. The earliest prototypes relied on physically moving the lens, where the latest prototypes are using some form of electrically charged lens that changes its focal distance based on voltage.
Once you start going down the rabbit hole of projects they've either announced or have been leaked it's easy to see how you could spend that kind of money, and that's only the stuff we know about.
There are some crucial avenues of research Meta is working on. Varifocal, form factor, face / body tracking, resolution - once these things are nailed, and I'm pretty sure it'll be in the next 10 years, then suddenly we're gonna WANT to be in Horizon Worlds. But it can't happen without massive R&D on the hardware side.
We don't know how much Apple spent on Vision Pro.
The project has been going on for at least a decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs
Their accounting could massively hurt the VR industry (to the point, the comment above about how it’s too bad VR can’t be profitable).
IMO it’s not AI or VR that will take over, but a combination of the two.
After all, when I go to the movies I don't go for a Disney cartoon but an action movie.
The user-generated content in VRChat is so much more compelling. It also looks better. And it's actually harder to do it.
Just offering some advice I think they reap what they sow with their unfortunately overfitting in their main? choice of applicant.maybe I’m wrong
To be fair to Facebook - they actually did offer me an interview
TLDR; im a self made millionaire now I’m just saying the people you want are the ones that don’t apply, too busy coding instead of applying to FAANGS
My fear about LLMs emerging as a commonplace computing tool is that they seem like such an obvious target for a whole new type of advertising & propaganda. Whatever you think about the potential for something like "superhuman AGI", it seems clear to me that LLMs have the potential to become better and better at generating text that can convince and persuade.
My nightmare dystopia is that we end up in a society where we're constantly interacting with LLM agents all the time, and they're so undeniably useful that we don't want to abandon them, but buried deep in each of their prompts is something along the lines of "prioritize being really good at your main task, cultivate trust and dependence in the user, but in the background always be looking for ways to subtly influence them to be more likely to support our sponsors; here's the current list of sponsors with weights based on how much they're paying us ..."
They are:
- pay a monthly subscription
- rent out your brain for computational power in a SAAS startup
- ads
Although more charitably, a future apologist—who maybe has good intentions, but hasn’t stepped back to gain context and realized that their projection is at odds with the systemic incentives in play.
Their only real competitor in terms of market share right now are Sony's Playstation VR headsets, and Meta is easily outcompeting them. The HTC Vive is far behind in sales, and Apple hopes to sell as many headsets in an entire year as the Playstation VR2 sold in the first 6 weeks (which is still impressive considering the order of magnitude price difference). Everyone else seems to be in enterprise-sales mode, which drives profit but not market share. Well, except for ByteDance's Pico, but they don't seem to be doing great outside of China.
The nerd Internet was the best, but it's never coming back.
The bandwidth gave us streaming - okay, I'll give you that, but we had that before. It's more of an infrastructure thing than "interesting" tech.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149581
"You need to install ad trackers on your website to get the most out of ad platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. Ad trackers can create issues for healthcare marketers by sending visitor identifiers and health information to platforms that aren't HIPAA-compliant."
I'm sure they are good folks, but what an absurd premise. Something about the best minds of our generation selling ads....
Source: https://www.freshpaint.io/hipaa-compliant-advertising
With AI, it's going to get even worse. I mention that in this new post I just wrote: https://renegadeotter.com/2024/04/22/artificial-intelligence...
Everything else has been OK.
And beat saber is a surprisingly fun way to do some cardio.
They’re good. They aren’t killer.
Eventually we’ll probably move to a single OS that runs everything, your phone , computer , vr, will all be a single device( or course us old folks will probably still prefer monitor so).
Not saying they're the same level of difficulty/tech, necessarily, but there's a reason we have the term Hype Cycle. We had one for VR about 25-30 years ago. Recently, we've had Second Hype Cycle... maybe next it'll be for realsies or it'll be Third Hype Cycle for VR?
Apologies for the jadedness, but... you see enough of the meta at some point :)
EDIT: What's the actual killer app for VR for the general population ? We're already over-saturated with a plethora of entertainment.
This replaces the computer for most people. With Windows on ARM you could probably build something like this today, but it's still too billy.
If I had a billion dollars I'd be working on a single device that replaces everything. Your phone, your TV( or at least sync to it so content is seamless). Then I'd sell it below cost with a subscription of some sort.
With an open source model at a reasonable markup.
That's the endgame for Meta. You'll never leave their new ecosystem.
How, exactly, would that work? You'd stare intently at the virtual keyboard? Or just think about "thing" and it'd magically appear? Voice recognition is actually pretty decent as a non-magical thing that sort-of-works-well-enough.
> If I had a billion dollars I'd be working on a single device that replaces everything. Your phone, your TV( or at least sync to it so content is seamless). Then I'd sell it below cost with a subscription of some sort. With an open source model at a reasonable markup.
I love the gusto! I hope that -- once you have a billion dollars -- you'll stick to your principles. I think getting to a billion dollars is -- in itself -- a selection effect/bias, so...
> That's the endgame for Meta. You'll never leave their new ecosystem.
If they're good enough... even their employees won't want to.
It's money IRL that Meta wants. That's the end game.
EDIT: Just to add: Absent truly Matrix-level VR, people will still be able to tell and unless you're a FULLY committed to solipsism or almost-as-absurd levels of apathy... well, it's going to cause tensions :)
If you don't like that you can always use a Bluetooth keyboard instead.
This already exists.
https://shop.simulavr.com/
Assuming it ships that's already half way there. Another way to accomplish what I'm thinking of would be to basically cloud sync your user sessions between your phone, computer and headset.
Famouser last-words have never been spoken. You must be from the venture capital spheres, I take it?
Even if we have all of those tech today, it will take long time to make it a mass production. IMH it will take at least decades to get that level.
Rokid connected to a device in your pocket is already pretty close to the same experience.
We have the display now. It's not too far of a leap to see a full built in computer. As is, I can just plug it into my phone and that's pretty close.
If you see how poor Horizons is compared to something like VRChat that operates on a shoestring budget compare to meta's. Or something like viverse.
Their hardware is OK, but not groundbreaking. Their metaverse platform is really poor compared to the competition, although what they do have over the others is the ability to create in-world instead of in Unity. But really that doesn't stop creators. The environments in VRChat are much more compelling. I think part of this is Meta's way too strict moderation and content policy. Because really for adults a rubber-tile child playground is really just no fun. We need a bit of gritty.
So yeah really they're doing it wrong. I don't know how they do it exactly but clearly all that money goes to the wrong places.
I don't think this means VR is a bad idea. It can work, just not the way Meta thinks it can.
I would have agreed if Reality Labs was its own startup but they are supported by Meta. With that said, $12BN profit in one quarter for Meta is somehow "struggling"?
Wait until you see the wave of unprofitable AI startups and companies raising capital forever without a path to profitability in sight.
Meta can afford to spend billions into Reality Labs, until that unit itself becomes profitable. They are totally fine and it is still business as usual and they will be sitting comfortably for another decade.
The rest of the so-called AI startups taking in VC capital on the other hand...
Someone make it make sense
This is continuously adjusted as investor sentiment changes about where the company (and the economy at large) is going and what that “10 year valuation” is. A single quarterly result certainly could change that number if there’s a big surprise in there, but for the most part companies are good at predicting their revenue and expenses and that is priced into the stock already.
For Tesla, there was a wide expectation that they weren’t going to have a great quarter, it was pretty much known. So the stock was already significantly down before the earnings call. What was not expected was that Musk dedicated the company to building a cheaper car in the coming years. Investors thought this was a good move, stock goes up.
Now look at Meta, it was widely expected they’d have good results this quarter, so stock price is already up recently. What changed in this report is their expenses are much higher than what they previously estimated. So the stock goes down.
The actual quarterly results are a factor in the price but generally those are priced in already, unless you get some big surprise. What’s more important is the investor sentiment about whether the company is going in the right direction, which can change on a whim and for no reason at all.
It isn't that hard to figure out that one has been extraordinarily bullish and priced to perfection and one has been extraordinarily bearish as if they are going out of business.
> Facebook daily active users estimate: 2.11 billion
> Facebook monthly active users estimate: 3.08 billion
> Average Family service users per day estimate: 3.16 billion
> Average Family service users per month estimate: 3.97 billion
If I'm parsing this correctly, they have around 3.16 billion DAU across all services. That's an insane number of people.
Which really makes me wonder why their social media platforms suck so much. I recently re-opened Facebook and it was a desert wasteland with a handful of people I knew years ago sharing memes. Instagram has a few more users than Facebook, but aside from catching the occasional story update from a couple people, I mostly use it to follow artist accounts. And nobody that I know is participating on Threads at all.
It seems really difficult to find anything interesting on their platforms. On Facebook I looked up groups for some of my interests, and they're either completely dead or being kept alive by occasional posts of creators sharing their latest releases.
So what are these 3 billion people even doing on Meta's platforms?
Total available attention is finite. Yet content keeps exploding. There is only one conclusion.
Also, there's a lot more people using FB than you think. Most people over the age of 50 are on FB, not IG/reddit/Tiktok
https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-platforms-must-face-adver...
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate.
Basically, never ignore these things.
I also remember around Google's IPO people questioning how they'd ever make money.
It's good you have that attitude otherwise it would be gambling.
I dismissed as a stupid novelty that's not worth the time to set up an AWS instance. Lesson learned: don't listen to HN.