September 07, 2021, was Facebook’s highest share price at $382.18.
Shortly after on Oct 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook would become Meta and introduced the metaverse.
Right now (4/30/23) as I write you this Meta’s share price is currently at $240.32… and I should mention this is after good PR and a positive swing upwards.
Call me crazy, but it seems like the metaverse isn’t paying out too well for the lizard person Zuck.
Where did things go wrong?
It seemed like since early 2004 Facebook practically couldn’t do wrong… even when they did do wrong.
When Mark Zuckerberg introduced the metaverse he basically presented it as Second Life 2.0 powered by his own (now owned by him) Oculus headsets. It was supposed to be the next new dystopian thing.
First, we had Bitcoin, then we had NFTs, and now what’s next?
The Zuck’s metaverse. Second Life 2.0. – it only made sense!
Oh, wait… no, it didn’t. Nobody actually wanted this.
Sure, VR has a place, but no one wanted a poor quality Second Life remake billed as the next new thing.
Facebook now is practically mediocre at everything.
I don’t know many people that actively still use Facebook itself, Instagram now has better competitors, and as a whole?
TikTok has grabbed a huge chunk of the attention spans previously devoted on Facebook powered socials, and directed it back towards themselves.
It seems the company has entirely lost direction and is mainly coasting on the work of their past. You can’t even really say the Metaverse failed, because it never took off.
However, what you can say with strings of failures, lack of growth, and piling on layoffs… Meta isn’t doing too hot right now, and neither is the Zuck.
What do you think?
Is this finally the end of a run?
Will Mark Zuckerberg retire with his family of lizard people(s) like Tom from MySpace and accept the ultimate tech bro throne belongs to someone else? Or will he crack the code on the next big attention sucking VR based social media platform and bring in record profits?
In my humble opinion, only time will tell.
You might enjoy some of our other posts about Meta and the Metaverse.
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Facebook still has close to 3 billion monthly active users, and 2 billion daily active users.
The big problem with Facebook’s metaverse, and Second Life, and all the previous attempts right back to text-based ones, is that people seem to ignore the basic differences between productivity tools (the kind that we use to get stuff done) and computer games.
Put very simply: the job of computer games is to make easy things hard, and the job of productivity tools is to make hard things easy.
Spreadsheets succeeded because they were easier than paper and a calculator. The web succeeded because it was easier than going places and reading books and magazines. Facebook succeeded because it was easier than keeping track of your friends using phone calls, emails and letters. Now think of computer games. Whenever anyone tries to make a computer game easier, it’s called cheating.
In a computer game, the journey is the reward. In a productivity tool, the result is the reward.
I don’t want a productivity tool that makes things harder by working like a video game. I don’t want to have to “travel” from one area to another – I want to get what I want immediately. I don’t want a user interface which pretends to be a building, or a city, or a whole world – I want my data and applications arranged how I like to use them to make my life easy.
Metaverses will keep failing until they get this right.
not funny
you have lost comedy credibility with me
My feeling is that many people have greatly reduced the time they spend on Facebook. Maybe they’re active in just one or two closed groups and use messenger to talk with friends. In the village where I live the Facebook group set up for it has had an extremely negative impact. The toxic behaviour in it has led to people not wanting to step up to do anything in real-life. Increasingly people see Facebook as a negative thing.