[parkingrift]

I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.

[echelon]

> A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen

A sibling comment even said,

> Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead).

I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even.

Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfing with the execs.

Social is fickle. MySpace and Digg died in an afternoon. All of the centuries of dead and forgotten stored content isn't keeping people there. It's connections. And those can come and go easily. Just look at Snapchat and TikTok.

Meta employee compensation is going to begin decreasing both in terms of salary and stock equity. They won't be able to retain good talent, so initiatives will die. Meta is also in a narrative death spiral, and this will eat away at employee morale.

New startups will see blood in the water. They'll come after the Baby Boomers. They'll come after the photographers. Facebook won't have capital to fight battles from every angle.

They have a massive amount of infrastructure to maintain. This will become a giant thorn if they lose employees. How will they weigh keeping the lights on, finishing ongoing migrations, etc. vs fighting new battles to stay alive?

We now realize how little moat they actually have. Facebook really needed a device. They tried to build a handset and failed. Oculus is too little too late.

edit: Facebook ads will cost a lot less as advertisers demand more favorable rates and see diminishing value, perhaps even abandoning the platform for their ad spend.

[candiddevmike]

Meta technically is mostly B2B, the users are the product. There are probably businesses that have signed ad spend deals with Meta that they can float on. And I'm sure there's ways Meta can/is juicing their ad auction numbers since they control the both ends of it without a lot of transparency.

[voisin]

Aren’t the contracts based on click through rates or impressions? If the users go, I doubt companies signed contracts to pay the same for less visibility.

[tmaly]

If the economy has a down cycle ad spend will drop. This might be what really stings.

[parkingrift]

Neither MySpace nor Digg were anywhere near the scale of Meta. At it’s peak MySpace was one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Meta is today. Facebook may wither and die but they also have Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.

And for what it’s worth there is almost nothing more I’d like to see than Meta vanishing. I hope you’re right.

[evanelias]

In 2006, MySpace was the most visited website in the United States. Wikipedia cites a couple of sources, and I do recall this being widely reported at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace

Granted, the web was a much smaller place then, in terms of both users and revenue. But still, relative to its time, it was huge.

[reustle]

> At it’s peak MySpace was one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Meta is today.

While this may be true, what % of global internet DAUs did each of them house? I'm not sure if this relevant or not, but it seems the internet was just a much smaller place back then.

[parkingrift]

I don't know. Is it really that relevant? It's just fundamentally pretty hard to quickly shed 1.92 billion users. Quick and dirty math there are around 3 billion internet users in the world, excluding China. Meta platforms have 1.92B of those people. The scale and penetration is hard to fathom.

[yucky]

>it seems the internet was just a much smaller place back then.

It sure felt a lot bigger than it does now.

[chaosharmonic]

Yeah, Meta will probably die like AOL, which is fitting since (at least in a rhetorical sense) it's also mostly lived like AOL.

[turnsout]

It will look like the death of Yahoo... It lost relevance very quickly, but was able to survive as an irrelevant zombie company for a long, long time.

[BoxOfRain]

Reminds me of a white dwarf in a sense, long past its peak but it was once something so enormous it continues to radiate a little for many years due to the residual heat of its prime.

[faangiq]

This is the lifecycle of all companies.

[davidandgoliath]

Esp. one with $30B+ a quarter in revenue. What a wildly silly notion.

[fargo]

2.9 billion users

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

[parkingrift]

I don’t know where Statista gets their numbers but Meta reported their active users this week at 1.92B. It was a drop from 1.93B which is partially why their stock tanked.

[davidivadavid]

Those were daily active users. (Not that Statista's MAU numbers are correct, but important distinction).

[djclicking]

https://techstory.in/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-...