For those that want to read about the fault of human psyche:
https://technophilosoph.com/en/2024/06/09/why-we-trust-ai-despite-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/
The popular author Michael Crichton named this effect after his physicist friend Murray Gell-Mann, who had noticed how newspaper readers, for example, after studying an erroneous article on a subject in which they themselves are very knowledgeable, just shake their heads and find the reporting on it distorted, erroneous and lacking in understanding. However, if they then turn the page and read an article on another topic in which they themselves have little knowledge, they trust the information in this article almost without reservation.
Becoming a billionaire really does seem to get to people’s heads, the younger the billionaire the worse.
Zuck is being completely reckless, burning through hundreds of billions of dollars hopping on every futuristic idea, and doesn’t listen to anyone’s fair criticism anymore.
He probably even thinks he is some great visionary and everyone else is holding him back, and that’s why they work for him, not the opposite.
In a sane socioeconomic system we wouldn’t people get this rich and powerful for their own good, especially young people.
Yeah, this unfortunately
Billionaires should not exist
In a sane socioeconomic system there would still be a chance for him to lose it all
In a sane system, he wouldn’t have so much to lose.
But he’s sitting on a functional monopoly bolted onto a surveillance state with infinite money. So he can keep fucking up forever.
But it is better he spends the money than hoarding it.
Why so? Hoarding money, as well as burning them, is practically equivalent to returning them to the treasury. Spending them wastes labour.
Spending them wastes labour.
Uh, this sounds as shallow as driponomics arguments.
You mean, just like his pivot to VR?
Exactly. Zuck stole the original idea to Facebook. Then bought a ton of companies after that for innovation. He has no good ideas of his own, when he does think of stuff, they are wild big company pivots that fail.
Zuck has never had an original idea in his head, ever. His initial claim to fame, prior to FB, at least on college campus’ was making a “hot or not” clone utilizing photos from various Harvard facebooks. Every idea since then has been someone elses or he’s tried to take the Apple approach of “let someone else do it first, then we improve on it” except he has never been able to nail down the second part. The only reason FB became successful was the initial exclusivity and it filled the gap of a post 20-something myspace/ICQ/AOL IM world.
At the time the idea was super innovative and it was fun to see your classmate’s photos.
Was it really that innovative? It was just myspace for college students
It was innovative because it helped you meet up with your real-life college friends. MySpace and Friendster had you adding people manually.
Or his pivot to threads?
I have to admit, I did wonder what his vr would look like and then he showed off something that looked like an early alpha release of a cheap second life clone in a giant global presentation, hilariously funny.
I hope that the whole facebook downfall and the inevitable enshitification of other facebook servies like instagram und whatsapp only accelerates the adoption of better alternatives, we’ll see if people are actually willing to leave whatsapp if its gotten bad enough
When you say better alternatives I suspect you do not mean a better town square?
I actually don’t mind this concept of a „town square“, but I think that it doesn’t work with so many people all just shouting into the void. The best form of social media seems to be this Reddit/lemmy forum style with categoriesed conversations in sub spaces
I agree. Micro-blogging was always bad, even in the early Twitter days. The people that used it back then and yearn for an equivalent now are the most opinionated, self-absorbed wankers online.
I hope so too, but I’m not holding my breath. People keep showing that critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with. In short, not happening! 🤣
critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with
Critical thinking is a mechanism for digesting large amounts of information over time, in order to make informed policy decisions.
If you don’t have useful information, you don’t have spare time, and you don’t have any actual input into policy, it lacks value.
I see folks consistently trying to make this an individualist problem. “I figured it out because I think critical! You didn’t because you’re a dumb-dumb!”
But more often than not, it’s two people talking past each other, working off different bodies of data (of debatable quality) that they’ve incompletely digested. And then all they know how to do with their conclusions is yell “You’re an idiot!” at people who disagree.
How do you reach large numbers of people to form a consensus? How do you collaborate with them towards a tangible benefit?
Curiously enough, Facebook used to provide a mechanism for this purpose. And the fact that it doesn’t anymore - that it is largely a trap for weak, confused, vulnerable people to scream at one another while they get scammed - speaks more to the profit engine of the service than the core competency of any of its members
amazing how many missteps you can make as a ceo these days without consequences…
It’s what happens when you own a controlling share of the company. You can freely run it into the ground.
Tells you a lot about success and merit. He has absolutely no fucking clue what’s going to be successful and what won’t. He was just super lucky with Facebook.
The reason he’s a billionaire is because the system is totally fucked up. He’s a bug, not a feature.
The current Economic structure is designed so that the thing that makes the most Money is having Money and tilted so that the more the Money the bigger the effect.
This is why, for example, many if not most countries have higher taxes on income from work than on income from dividends.
It’s not by chance that Social Mobility has collapsed to pretty much non-existence in most of the World, especially the US (were the saying “You can be anything” actually used to be true, but not anymore, not even close) - the Economy is so extremelly rigged for Money to make Money that the dumbest, laziest, most inept rich kid will keep on getting richer their whole lives no matter how much they fuck up.
I have to say I’m a bit worried he’s banking on receiving unlimited access to an insane level of surveillance data to use in the the $50B digital prison he’s building in Louisiana
Jeff Landry’s Intelligence Chief is Spying on New Orleans with Project NOLA
Louisiana’s use of NDAs in AI data center push raises questions over transparency
Bad uses and implementations of AI is being reversed and also being reclaimed by people-owned open source alternatives which is good
However, robotics needs way more done to be put back into peoples hands, and also to have more people-owned alternatives to become industry standards (same should be done for people-owned ai to be industry standards)
Lots to do but we got this and decent amount of people are doing for both AI and Robotics to make it for us and not for those who wish to shit on us all
Has he picked a single winner since he stole the idea for facebook?
Probably only when he bought out Instagram and Whatsapp, that’s all I can think of
Those were already popular before he bought them, and then he made them worse.
…but no less popular
I feel like Oculus improved under them, but yeah - an exception proves the rule.
I don’t know if “improved” is as accurate as “accelerated” in that case. Oculus was already doing cool stuff they just needed the resources to really get going, and now Meta is all up in it so the service kinda blows.
Yeah, please tell me that he didn’t take oculus & vr and drove it into the ground. Where is a nice cheap vr set (not locked in with some turd)?
He bought 100 lottery tickets through acquisition (probably more) and 2 of them hit.
What’s the second one 😅
And Oculus
He’s working hard on destroying that one, don’t worry. The quest experience has only gotten worse with every update.
Rip
Two other things I don’t use.
Unfortunately for humanity, it seems that the pervert glasses are quite popular
I thought he actually stole the source code, not just the idea.
How on earth can you steal the working thing but not the idea? I mean if it was your idea.
I’m suggesting that he didn’t run back to his dorm room and recreate what he saw someone else do all quick like and rather stole their completed or nearly completed code.
Oh yeah I misread that a bit. 👍🏼
Marky Zuckerberg may run Meta into the ground however the fucker will still be rich.
Which does piss me off, BUT the world would be better if we took Meta, Reddit, Twitter, and all the other social media giants and gave them the Ole Yeller treatment
Yeah, Same here honestly
His is such a bad company but so poorly run by its dictator. He can’t be ousted as he holds majority shares. It’d be funny as hell if it wasn’t facilitating the progression of the end of our world. Dumping billions that could be used to feed and support people in need. Instead we got the metaverse and datacenters on every corner.
Right? Imagine if all of the money spent “building out” the metaverse had been invested in improving infrastructure in real life…
His is such a bad company but so poorly run by its dictator.
Publishing their LLM wasn’t such a bad idea. If China hadn’t caught up, everybody would be praising Meta right now.
Yeah I don’t think that deserves much praise, personally for a company destroying regulation, lobbying to elect a despot, profiting off of sex trafficking, effectively spreading disinformation and misinformation about a wide variety of scientific fields, etc.
This video on how much of the debt these companies hold is hidden from their balance sheets is chilling. According to this, Meta “officially” owes $151B, but in reality has debt obligations closer to $572B.
That’s over 40% of Meta’s entire market capitalization, and they’re rapidly adding to that debt. Meta’s existing properties are losing users, and there’s just no fucking way they’ll be able to pay back this debt in the long term, because they have zero hope of deriving income from all this data center investment. At some point, BlackRock and the other private equity firms Meta owes money to are going to come looking for blood
I guess they’re waiting for Peter Thiel to save them, again, when he turns the data centers into data lakes for palantir and we go full surveillance state. I do believe there is some end game these tech billionaires believe is on the horizon that we aren’t really privy to, it’s just a matter of them making it come to fruition before reality crashes down on their heads. Bankrupting them faster through boycotts is a good way the average person can help speed up reality and slow down their progress.
Ugh. I’m so sorry and angry every time I think on this…
…Full surveillance state. I do believe there is some end game these tech…on the horizon…matter of them making it come to fruition before reality crashes down on their heads…
We should bankrupt them faster because it’s what they deserve, and the progress needs to be slowed at all costs.
But the reasons why all this is unfolding? Very clear to see, and you even referenced them without really pausing to consider.
Fascism isn’t stupider this time around (in so far as being beyond the already astronomical stupidity required to believe it’s a solution to fucking anything).
It’s desperate. They didn’t pivot away from their little spaceship dreams and into AI because it’s more profitable. They don’t care to come ahead in an economically sound world.
I’m sorry. Time has ran out on the climate and our biosphere, as far as them retaining the properties that allowed us the ‘Modern World’.
There is no longer an avenue that averts widespread desolation, and they’ve known it all along because they don’t actually all ignore scientific consensus, they just pay for the masses to ignore it.
It’s going to be a gnarly and awful time, but humans aren’t wired to just give up and die.
Hence the total surveillance state. Hence the mass casual cruelty with mass deaths. Hence the persecution of anyone who might oppose or see through it.
The world as we know it will be reduced to ashes, in our lifetimes, and we’ll have to scramble to do whatever our species will do just to barely persist in some form, as that is just what we do.
They dream of a techno feudalist dreamscape where each little Dragon has their manageable fiefdom composed of a diminished and controllable populace to continue to carry out their self-aggrandizing whims. They can burn all of the economy now, because they’re trying to trade it for straight power.
Joke’s on them, they’ll die by the masses too, and those that don’t, will die by the masses. It’s not that hard for thousands of angry and with nothing to lose people to go after them.
Their dream of Autonomous Weapon guardians is as laughable as the rest of the stupidity they’ve attempted and failed at throughout the years: It will be as imperfect a solution to what they’re attempting as anything else they’ve ever done.
But we collectively let them have control of the playground while it was fresh and clean, so now we gotta deal with their bullshit king of the hill fantasies and the results of their evil stupidity.
I do believe there is some end game these tech billionaires believe is on the horizon
I think it’s just a variant of the standard republican “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”. They think financial wealth is something they can just create out of thin air using AI (the way that government creates wealth out of thin air by printing money, allegedly), so as long as they acquire the data centers to fuel it, by whatever means necessary, they’ll be all right in the end.
They are all going into debt over datacenters. Google issued new shares… how? why? They all make so much money and still they can’t cashflow this expansion.
What blood will there be to take?
It’s all saturated and nobody really needs anything new anymore. There’s nowhere to go. We should expect to see some of these firms suddenly collapse like Silicon Valley Bank did.
Cynically though… they’ve been peddling nothing for two decades now. Big data, the cloud, SAAS, web 3.0, metaverse, nfts, llms, there’s always a new nothing born.
I think they supports my point. There really is no need for a Web 3.0. Progress for the simple sake of progress is really just marketing a money grab.
Outside of Facebook what has he been responsible for that didn’t blow up in his face? The only other things Meta has that aren’t thus far miserable failures are Instagram and Whatsapp, both of which they bought.
Reminder that he stole Facebook
And Google built a search engine. Everything else they’ve tried to build has failed, other than maybe Gmail which was just a Yahoo Mail / Hotmail clone. Everything else that has been successful has been an acquisition: Maps (Keyhole), YouTube, Android, Google Photos (Picasa), Doubleclick…
We really need robust antitrust. How many of these acquisitions would be thriving companies in their own right, competing with the big tech giants if the tech giants hadn’t been able to absorb them.
Google+ is an example of what happens when companies have to compete instead of acquiring other companies. Google poured billions into it and it flopped completely.
just wanted to add to the list that google bought writely and immediately started making it worse as google docs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalyr
IMO it’s almost worse than if G+ flopped completely. Google+ was actually awesome for the specific world of smalltime pen and paper RPGs. But of course, that one creative community of people designing & publishing cool stuff wasn’t enough to justify its cost, or challenge Facebook for supremacy, so they pulled the plug even though plenty of people were still using it. Just a waste.
If it takes multiple billions of dollars to create a product that is useful for a niche group of pen and paper RPG players, that product is probably not going to succeed.
But, also, if Facebook didn’t have such an unassailable monopoly on social networking, small, focused social networks that targeted a niche group of people might have a chance of surviving.
Oculus perhaps, although also bought
And immediately blew it up after buying it.
What is the state of VR? Still super niche?
always will be. I just don’t afford a couple hundred grand for the “bigger living room” optional accessory
If you have to ask, you probably know the answer :)
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bot.
Maybe I should just create the new Facebook as well
Drop the ‘the’, just call it ‘new facebook’. Thank me later.
Ah, the old American naming convention
Its more or less a quote from the movie.
Hmmmm people like services which are actually better than what Facebook currently offers. Maybe free dating apps, cool games and meet up services could attract new users. Get me a team and some beers and pizza, and I will make new Facebook.
However I will never be able to outcompete META. That is a different story. That is an insane company with the craziest infrastructure.
It’s all about networks. It’s not creating platforms that’s hard, it’s getting people to use them.
It is super hard! However we should not give up just because it is hard or not possible. Anything is possible with right determination
We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.
We shouldn’t give up, but not everything that is possible happens, so just be aware that most ventures fail. But of course keep trying. Like with Lemmy.
A good product and marketing strategy can bootstrap an audience. You likely need to provide something beyond just a phone book. Even outside of Facebook there’s a million of those but getting an audience for a new product is far from impossible, tons of new games do it all the time.
The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that
You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years
Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.
So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america
I think you can start with niches or regional groups, they then start inviting others in.
WhatsApp and Discord basically had to bootstrap themselves and did it through niches and meeting a clear market need but we’re then bought up by Facebook. There were plenty of group chat competitors and voice chat competitors.
Discord is privately owned still but you bring up another key point: the players you’re up against are so powerful, with so much wealth and the most comprehensive legal representation, that even if you manage to have some success they will either buy you or destroy you. Meta has a presence on the fediverse, even
Facebook’s AI auto summarizer that it passes to Google et al, is currently rewriting The National’s reporting of Rod Liddle’s death to say “he dies of alcoholism, suicide or cancer, a short illness followed by a heart attack”.
As usual, it was without their explicit consent.
