Yahoo was once the most popular website on the planet, the one place everyone on the Internet seemed to touch at least once per online session. After an ignominious slide, however, Yahoo is just another site that has some fans in certain parts of Asia and offers some niche products.
Has Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook on a similar path?
That’s the big question investors need to start asking as Meta Platforms Inc. META, +6.55% CEO is scrambling to change its strategy amid obvious signs of distress. After its first drop in users three months ago, Facebook reported its first-ever quarterly revenue drop on Wednesday, and Zuckerberg’s response is to mimic a rival and send the company into dangerous waters that have almost they killed the platform and took away American democracy. .
Zuckerberg is changing the company’s core apps to rely much more on artificial intelligence to power the content its users see, seeking to emulate rising Chinese rival TikTok, 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’s apps will rely more on its discovery engine, rather than the people or things you follow, for content. This means users will see (and are already seeing) content from strangers on their channels and videos, just like TikTok.
“Right now, our AI recommends about 15% of the content in a person’s Facebook feed, and slightly more than their Instagram feed, from people, groups or accounts you don’t follow,” he said. said Zuckerberg. “And we expect those numbers to double by the end of next year.”
Facebook has been lucky to survive a series of scandals in recent years, from allowing election misinformation to sink in to selling private user data to helping spread incitement to violence that led to the storming of the United States Capitol. Nothing was apparently learned though, as the company, or at least its algorithm, will now decide what unknown content to watch.
Facebook, and the world, have already learned that bad actors will learn to game this algorithm, resulting in the dominance of incendiary posts or videos, divisive content that will pit strangers against strangers, on an even more terrifying scale than exists today. If we’re lucky, the result will be that the users Facebook still has will decide it’s time to leave for other online destinations, as Yahoo fans once did.
While the algorithm takes on even more of Facebook and Instagram — the content moderation aspect of both social media sites is already mostly handled by AI, Zuckerberg said in response to a question on the call, showing the extent to which Facebook’s technology is incapable of succeeding. on his goals: Zuckerberg will spend his human capital on his “metaverse” dream. 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 humans by wearing a clunky headset so you can hang out with your friends in a digital nightclub or boardroom. or wherever you want
Virtual reality has only proven popular with a small segment of the population, and is still too unpopular for mainstream consumer adoption, something Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has already learned. So instead, all those Facebook parents and grandparents, the old folks Zuckerberg doesn’t care about anymore, will be served by robots, while his minions focus on a new world: the uncomfortable, potentially dystopian future.
Facebook and Instagram have grown so much because they appealed to the masses, not just power users or the techies who develop these products. If Meta loses these users, its apps will continue their current downward spiral (declining digital ads, recession or not), just as Yahoo failed to transition to mobile, with a complex site and services that didn’t they could easily adapt even if it tried to copy younger rivals, as Facebook is doing now.
Zuckerberg is the king of Meta, with full control from the founder, so what he says is the law of the land, power that Yang and the parade of CEOs who took over Yahoo when he wasn’t at all never had. in front No one is going to stop Zuckerberg from betting on an algorithmic future, so investors must decide whether they want to risk nothing ahead but a downward spiral toward the same fate that Silicon Valley has seen since Another popular portal on the web.