Hahaha! More like watch the politicians cower in the face of the populace demanding their FB back. Despite the recent setbacks they still have 2 billion users. That's a LOT of whining.

IraHayes wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 6:24 am

johnny lightning wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 6:06 am Hahaha! More like watch the politicians cower in the face of the populace demanding their FB back. Despite the recent setbacks they still have 2 billion users. That's a LOT of whining.

And, it’s a lot of angry reliable voters!
While the younger generation are moving away they are not as reliable at the ballot box as their mothers, fathers, grannies and grandfathers.

If you aren't paying for it, you're the product.
Maybe mental health will get a little better around the world without it.

The new paradigm?

After share sell-off, can Facebook survive web3 and the metaverse?
AFR (aust financial review)
John Davidson; today

Last week’s $320 billion rout of Facebook shares will just be the beginning of a long decline for the company if it fails to radically overhaul the way it does business to keep up with web3 technologies and the social trends driving them, proponents of the emerging online world order said.

Yet even if the company can pivot towards concepts such as decentralisation and interoperability – web3 features that allow users to maintain ownership and control of their own data, and take that data with them anywhere they want to go – Facebook will still suffer a huge decline in advertising revenues, the proponents say.

Web3, a collection of technologies that includes cryptocurrency, digital wallets, blockchains, NFTs, token-based economics and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), is all about creating value for users and allowing them to take that value with them, said Trent Barnes, a principal at Melbourne-based crypto investment company Zerocap.

Facebook, by contrast, has made its money from extracting value from users in the form of digital advertising, and convincing its shareholders it needs to do the opposite is going to be a tough sell, said Mr Barnes, who has just launched another company, MaxStealth, which he said would make investments in Web3 start-ups.

“When you’re Facebook and you have had an unprecedented run of profit and value creation for shareholders that has been like summiting Mount Everest, and then, all of a sudden, you’re on the decline on the other side and your competitors are building systems that aren’t designed to extract value out of users, how do you compete any more?” he said.

Despite Facebook’s name change to Meta last year – a pivot that shows the company at least recognises the problem it is facing, given that the “metaverse” is just an embodiment of web3 technologies – 98 per cent of the company’s revenues are still from digital advertising, which represents the old, web 2.0 model, Mr Barnes said.

“Their innovation is still geared towards ‘How do we increase revenues?‘. They need to shift that to ‘How do we increase user experience, user community, and the best interest of the users?’,” Mr Barnes said.

“Facebook will need to become interoperable with the metaverse if they want to stay relevant. But it’s going to be very hard for them to make that shift.

“If you can take your memories from Facebook and take them into Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, that will take away advertising revenue from Facebook because their users are no longer unique to Facebook.

“It is going to have to come up with some other revenue model. There’s going to be a big exodus of users over the coming five years unless Facebook is able to do something.”

Scott McKeon, co-founder and head of growth at the Sydney-based mobile-working start-up Espresso, has been contemplating how his company is going to reach customers in the future, and a shift away from social media advertising towards the decentralised, community-based Web3 world might be on the cards, he said.

“If you look at a big web 3.0 project like bitcoin, the community around them is incredible. They’re not just apathetic users,” Mr McKeon said.

“As a small but growing consumer electronics start-up, up against companies that are just so much bigger than us, we’re looking at how we can create a community around our technology and the mobile lifestyle it embodies.

“I’m looking at web 3.0 as a way of enabling community in a way that is more than just a loyalty program.”

One possibility for e-commerce companies such as Espresso was non-fungible tokens (NFTs), that would help companies “identify their most loyal and engaged customers and build a community around them,” he said.

Users could buy an NFT to gain initial membership to the community, but also earn NFTs when they participated in the community by giving feedback or writing reviews.

Such community building could actually take place on the Facebook platform, Mr McKeon said, but Meta would need to loosen its reins and let the communities act more autonomously than it did now.

“We’ve already seen how Facebook went from being a newsfeed to being Facebook Groups. That’s what everything is heading towards – back towards community,” he said.

“If Facebook can adapt, it will be to create environments for people to enable community groups. It has the team and the scale to be able to deliver on that. It’s definitely in their core competency. It’s just a question of whether they will take that path.”

Robby Wade, co-founder of the online chat company ThisApp which is using web3 technologies to take on Meta’s WhatsApp, said that alongside NFTs the next generation of businesses could also use DAOs to help create communities around their products.

DAOs gave customers voting rights in the company, and a sense of shared control over the future of the technology they were buying.

“They’re a little dangerous for early-stage start-ups because you can end up with design by consensus, but once you’ve hit product-market fit, you can slowly decentralise the platform over to the community,” he said.

Such a shift to decentralised, customer-owned companies presented a huge problem for “juggernauts” such as Facebook, Mr Wade said.

In the web3 model, companies wind up creating value for their customers, rather than just extracting value from their users by advertising to them.

“If you think about ThisApp, our platform is essentially valueless if users aren’t using it. Users are all of the value in our platform,” Mr Wade said.

“Web 3.0 lets you partner with your users. Advertising is just becoming a little bit old.”

https://www.afr.com/technology/after-sh ... 204-p59tx9
John Davidson is an award-winning columnist, reviewer, and senior writer based in Sydney and in the Digital Life Laboratories, from where he writes about personal technology. Connect with John on Twitter. Email John at [email protected]

Like... they're not going to screw us with this one
chuckle

Nonsense! Web3 is obviously the coming of internet enlightenment that will benefit all for decades to come. Trust me.

Yah! Throw the whole legal library at them.