Yahoo was once the most popular website on the planet, the only place that everyone on the internet touched at least once in an online session. After a humiliating slide, Yahoo is another site that has some fans in certain parts of Asia and offers some niche products.
Did Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook on a similar path?
That’s the big question investors should start asking as Meta Platforms Inc.
PURPOSE,
The chief executive is struggling to change his strategy amid clear signs of concern. after the first decrease in the number of users three months agoFacebook On Wednesday, it reported its first quarterly revenue declineand Zuckerberg’s response is to imitate a competitor and send the company into dangerous waters that almost kill the platform and take US democracy with it.
Zuckerberg is trying to emulate rising Chinese rival TikTok by changing the company’s core apps to rely more on artificial intelligence to manage the content its users see — a major shift to give the algorithm more power over what people see on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg told analysts on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that Meta apps will rely more on its discovery engine for content instead of the people or things you follow. This means that users will (and already do) see content from complete strangers in their feeds and videos, just like TikTok.
“Right now, about 15% of the content on a person’s Facebook feed and slightly more of the content on their Instagram feed is recommended by our AI from people, groups or accounts you don’t follow,” Zuckerberg said. “And we expect those numbers to more than double by the end of next year.”
Facebook has been lucky to survive a number of scandals in recent years since then allowing election disinformation to run rampant tone sale of personal user data tone helps spread incitement to violence This led to an attack on the US Capitol. However, apparently nothing has been learned because the company, or at least its algorithm, will now decide which stranger’s content you see.
Facebook and the world have already learned that bad actors will learn how to game this algorithm, which will pit strangers against strangers on a far scarier scale than exists today, leading to a predominance of inflammatory posts or videos and divisive content. If we’re lucky, the result will be that the users Facebook still has will decide it’s time to go elsewhere online, just as Yahoo’s fans once did.
While the algorithm has overwhelmed Facebook and Instagram — the content moderation aspect of both social media sites is already largely handled by artificial intelligence — Zuckerberg responded to a question on the call, showing just how incapable Facebook’s technology is of succeeding. According to his goals – Zuckerberg will spend human capital on the dream of a “metaverse”. Zuckerberg’s grand vision is to create a digital universe populated by those who want to escape the real world of grass, flowers, air, sky, animals, and people by donning a rugged headset so you can hang out with your friends in a digital nightclub or boardroom. or wherever you want.
Virtual reality has only proven to be popular among a small segment of the population and is still a very difficult thing to gain mainstream consumer acceptance. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang already found out. Instead, all the parents and grandparents on Facebook that the old Zuckerberg no longer cares about will be controlled by bots, while his minions will focus on a new world: An unsettling, potentially dystopian future.
Facebook and Instagram have grown tremendously because they appealed to the masses, not just advanced users or the technical experts who developed these products. If Meta loses those users, its apps will continue their current downward spiral — digital ad decline, recession or not — in the same way that even complex sites and services like Yahoo’s inability to go mobile won’t be able to adapt as easily. As Facebook is doing now, it tried to copy younger rivals.
Zuckerberg is the king of Meta, with complete control over the founder, so he says it’s the law of the land — power Yang and the parade of CEOs who took over Yahoo when he wasn’t running it never had. No one is going to dissuade Zuckerberg from making this bet on an algorithmic future, so investors must decide if they want to take the chance that there’s nothing ahead of him but a downward spiral toward the same fate Silicon Valley has seen so far. A once popular portal on the Internet.
