[lapcat]

> It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is captured, then enshittification, then death.

Mark Zuckerberg an hour ago: "Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point." https://www.threads.net/t/CuW5-eWL34x

[wavemode]

lol it's so explicit

at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle

[mym1990]

The ironic thing is that he lists monetization last, but simply by uttering that sentiment he tells us that they are really thinking about monetization first, aka the end goal of the product.

[cableshaft]

Even if he didn't say it, it's implicit in who they are. Do you really think a massive social media corporation is going to launch another social media platform, just for funsies?

[praisewhitey]

They opened it up for brands days ahead of the general public. Of course they're thinking of monetization first.

[hobo_in_library]

I mean, did you think he was pouring money into this out of the goodness of his heart?

[mym1990]

No, no, just pointing out the blatant contradiction in the statement. Although I do wish an app intended for a billion people had a component of goodness to it!

[akhosravian]

I don't think he's ever suggested Facebook is anything but a for profit enterprise, but I think it is an extremely cynical take that "build a product a billion people would use before thinking about monetization" actually means "think about monetization first".

[username135]

The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.

I think your altruism is misplaced because they most certainly are thinking of $$$ first and foremost.

[tarsinge]

> The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.

No it’s only a theory that emerged in the 70’s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine).

[yummypaint]

Framing things this way suggests that the reason the metaverse is failing so hard is because facebook insists on jumping straight to enshitification without spending time on the stages users actually enjoy.

[Night_Thastus]

I think you've actually got it a bit backwards.

Meta did not spend enough time thinking about monetization in the long term, realized they were in a really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to come up with a new platform they could monetize.

They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think about monetization early.

[rchaud]

It will always be a fascinating piece of historical trivia that Zuckerberg was represented as an iconoclastic hacker in The Social Network, when he had already turned into a turgid adtech executive by the time the movie came out.

[flangola7]

It is so foreign to me, to choose greed as your personal identity. These individuals will gleefully stride onto a stage with a microphone and boast about ideas and actions that 1/100th of would fill my mind with such incalculable guilt and embarrassment that I would never sleep or show my face in public again.

[Given_47]

Love this. And it’s very disheartening how society fetishizes how much personal wealth one accrues, so much so that it’s natural for the youth to grow up idolizing that and not once step back and consider the larger effect it has on the community.

An interesting thought is how many people are inadvertently bad, simply as a byproduct of what I touched on above

[vitaflo]

I remember when the worst thing you could be called was a “sellout”. Now it’s a virtue.

[starbugs]

"We will figure out the business model later"

Meaning: Once we have hooked enough users, we'll make them the product.

Free lip piercing...

[at-fates-hands]

Corollary:

"We have a business model, its built on bullshit and blue skies."

Quote from my wise father about being careful when being recruited by a startup that sounds too good to be true.

[starbugs]

“We have been featured at TechCrunch. There’s basically no risk anymore.”

Your father could have saved me…