That’s the reason the product exists for. They have to increase the value for their shareholders.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
493 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
59190 readers
3487 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
As a consumer why would you care about a corporations finances? That is their problem to figure out. As a consumer you are trying to find value for you personally. Does this solve a problem in my life? Am I better off with this thing than without it? Is the cost worth it, be it monetary or privacy?
Maybe not for you.
Okay. Let’s take a step back and try to see what is the problem statement and the market opportunity here.
Opportunity: Twitter has gone down. People are looking for alternatives. At one hand, you have Mastadon but it is not easy to use. On the other, you have Threads - seamless to use as long as you already had Instagram.
Need: Was there one? Not really. The opportunity above created the need.
Moat: Instagram is very YOU presence oriented. Let’s agree that it was not supposed to be a communication platform. Then influencers came in, influencer marketing became a thing, live video chats came in. All of this requires YOU to put your face forward on a camera.
Now comes Thread - no need to do anything. Put down a thread. Start a conversation. That’s all. If you want, there is an easy cross share to Instagram. Influencers are going to milk it. Ads impressions combined over both the apps will increase thus
Result: Increasing the revenue for Meta and as a result, benefiting the shareholders.
It is not about I caring about it. It’s about how they ensure that you develop just a habit of checking - that is all. You sticking does everything for them, and not it does not even have to add that much of a value.
Cost? Privacy matters to you then yes. The problem now a days is that FOMO gets the best of people.
Sorry for the long message. Thanks in case you stayed with me until the end. 😅
I'm not seeing the connection between someone deciding to use Threads or not and caring if it makes more money than Twitter. The financial success of it isn't a consideration in whether or not someone would use it. It's user count and perceived longevity might, but those are only tangentially related to its financial situation.
So we’re not all here because of a corporations decisions on how to make money?
But this is not for the user to worry about in the first place. Why do you think that would the case? It’s a free to use platform for everyone.
More than the user count, you would looking at user retention. More retention would automatically mean more impressions for everything that already is on Instagram - this is the corporation POV.
Isn't that what this thread is talking about and suggesting? We have this news article on the BBC asking whether or not Threads can make more money than Twitter as if the consumer cares about the answer to that question.
Your average Joe may not. But if you look at the basics - this was launched to make money, so of course, there would be discussions around the revenue it generates.
I mean, you would pay like a Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music a subscription amount to use it, but you still won’t care how much money they make. But the market does that’s all. 😅
This is a story about how two companies aim to make revenue from its users. It’s precisely about many of those issues.
It’s an important question. The reason that many of us are is down to the way one corporation decided to monetise.
Also, the BBC has already done stories about the Threads UX
One reason we care about this is because we can choose to or to not purchase small fractions of these public companies and become partial owners. This information is useful in making investment decisions.
Increasing “value” for shareholders in spite of user experience should be a reason to be sent to the guillotine.
In al seriousness now, being profitable is ok, but these companies try to be ever more profitable while not giving a flying fuck about the impact they have.
How do you define impact here?
The user below failed to mention Meta is indirectly responsible for an actual Genocide through their purposeful lack of oversight and endless desire for engagement at no matter the cost.
Increasing the echo chambers of conspiracy theorists, extremist and with that influencing things like elections seems quite the impact to me. All these mega corporations could’ve tried to limit these things, but probably that would’ve looked bad on their balance sheets.
Add to this the insane amount of data harvesting they do on their users and in general just making every damn platform worse from year to year while only looking for ever more profits.
Your comment reminds me that this headline is speaking to boomers. Where I, with direct experience using these shitty platforms, don’t give a shit if either live or die
It's what Threads exists to do. They just said that they don't really want politics or news on Threads, they just want it to be a place for pure consumerism.
capitalism is the fundamental problem
Can this multi-billionaire be more of a multi-billionaire than this multi-billionaire?
And who can hide it while flaunting it the best?
Agreed, fuck capitalism
It should not be about making as much money as possible, it should be about building a great product. Sure, you have to pay the bills, but sadly the way capatalism influences business makes that it can't exist and do fine, no it has to be amazing and be constantly growing.
What is the point? Like, an app such as Twitter imo should operate more like a public good, as a library does. Side effect would also be that billionaires will be too bored to care at all, so that's great.
The point of constant growth is to prevent being taken down by the free market. Because at some point someone with more financial muscle will try to release something to replace you.
So, besides messing with the free market, which would be totally authoritarian and monopolistic, I can't think of a solution.
The problem with Reddit isn't its intention to grow, it's that they did it in a totally shitty way. For example, they could have worked with the community to improve the app before taking down 3ed party apps, they could have created accessibility/mod tools, and they could have added reasonable pricing for their API.
It's not that growth is bad, is that these companies just don't care how their userbase feels. But that is not inherent of growth.
From the evidence I’ve seen, I made more money than Twitter. Just today. At my crappy job
I disagree, unprofitable sites becoming popular then being destroyed by aggressive monetization ultimately resulting in their failure and the loss of loads of useful information isn't something to strive for.
These sites need to not hemorrhage money, they shouldn't be milk cows either. The problem is unnecessary overhead, for example reddit having 1,400 employees.
We're not arguing against profitability. However, making growth and profit central to social platforms is the culprit.
Tech companies keep getting funding by selling pipe dreams to clueless investors and then strip mining it out of everything people liked from it.
There needs to be a better, sustainable and scalable growth model for social platforms. The difficulty is that a not a lot of people will pay for it, and to be fair it wouldn't be good to restrict it to only those that do.
Tatar- is correct. "growth" is the problem inherent in publicly traded corporations. Growth sounds good. Living things grow!
But growth in this case means expansion,literally unlimited (in theory) which is how you take something quite viable (coffee, food, net service) and turn it into a monster that needs to endlessly grow, cut corners, cut salaroes, etc.
Growth has little to do with profit. Public corps are sold (shares) and to maintain/increase value of those shares, get monetarily bigger.
The whole "IPO" thing is a model based on this expectation of future growth.
Not profit salaries and goods, like a corner store. THAT could be sustainable.
Fuck capitalism.
Threads won't be a social network. It will be social advertising.
Who gives a fuck?
I expect Threads to fail, because honestly Zuckerberg isn't a very smart guy.
I expect it to fail because it's utter dogshit. Since the feed is algorithmic, you see a bunch of crap you aren't following rather than the people you are following. Who wants that?
I have no idea about the specifics. But what you describe, is kind of the thing I'd expect.
He would take a concept and make it worse, because he thinks he is smart.
Maybe it's to get people to scroll more, so they see more adverts. IDK. Facebook has a lot of behavioral data to use in such a design. But Zuckerberg might be arrogant enough to disregard it.
I don’t like zuck, I still think it’s shortsighted to not call him smart.
Yes, it will and zuck will feel fulfilled and stop thinking about more money.
May be not.
Nah. Something tells me, Threads exists solely to deliver some lame ass corporate-friendly "fullfillment" of that shitty Elon/Mark cage match.
That headline is depressing.
One week. I'm curious to see what people will tell of the platform after just one week.
Meta it's a company and a big one, they need to make money in order to keep working, that's how business works
view more: next ›