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Posted by dgellow 9 hours ago

Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app(www.nytimes.com)
80 points | 71 comments
NikxDa 8 hours ago|
I can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money.

But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.

darth_avocado 8 hours ago||
Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.
twostorytower 7 hours ago|||
They tried. Facebook Watch. It's a total disaster.
solid_fuel 7 hours ago||||
> Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure

Facebook has no content production experience though, and when they do dip their toes into that market its via AI slop (like their official AI accounts on instagram). I think this is because they don't value the human element of art at all.

They would be entirely reliant other content providers, which is a rough place to be in when you have to deal with actual studios and not just independent creators. Independent creators are easier for Facebook to exploit since they are usually small operations and dependent on facebook/instagram for market reach.

dgellow 7 hours ago|||
Youtube isn't really known to be highly profitable. I'm also not sure people would go to a Facebook YouTube when the normal YouTube exists
darth_avocado 7 hours ago||
Brother, YouTube is quite literally a money printing machine. I don’t know where you’re getting information from.
dgellow 7 hours ago||
YouTube has a lot of revenue, profit isn't known as far as I'm aware. Alphabet doesn't report YouTube earnings separately, and when they were still sharing that information it was a pretty large amount of losses IIRC. But if you have sources I'm happy to change my mind
ahmadyan 2 hours ago||
They report YT's earnings, iirc it is about 60B (40B ads + 20B subs) annually, with 10% YoY growth. They don't disclose youtube's profits outside of Google Services (which has ~40% margins), so yes youtube is a money printing machine.

And for a long time (pre-AI) youtube was the biggest load on Google's entire infra. The number i recall was ~30% of all Google's cpu utilization was for youtube, and google spent a lot of effort optimizing it.

JsonDemWitOster 6 hours ago|||
Cliché cynic's comment: the end users they are concerned about are the companies they sell ads to. If you're not that, tough luck.
rusk 8 hours ago|||
51% shareholding he’s free to make all the mistakes he wants
orsenthil 7 hours ago|||
> why nobody ever stops for a moment

What, you want to get fired?

idontwantthis 8 hours ago||
Corey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...

autoexec 8 hours ago||
He wants to collect and profit from insider info by joining in on the newest unregulated gambling scheme. I'm sure plenty of cheaters and suckers will be happy to make him more money.
ElProlactin 8 hours ago||
Polymarket: "Trade on anything."

Kalshi: "Trade the Future."

Meta Arena: "They 'trust me.' Dumb f^^ks."

throwa356262 8 hours ago||
Hopefully it's the same geniuses that implemented his metaverse thingy.
tmule 7 hours ago|
Hope so (ex-Meta, and hold a couple of million dollars of their stock, but quite dislike the company).
seydor 7 hours ago||
They even call it "Arena". The place where gladiators kill each other, lions eat christans , criminals are exectuted brutally and animals are hunted. What an apt name chosen by the most moral company of our times.
leosanchez 6 hours ago|
> lions eat christans

Could you explain this bit ?

JsonDemWitOster 6 hours ago||
I don't think he meant you ate Christians, more that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...
gos9 3 hours ago||
This is the obvious next iteration of online based life

Facebook gave life to communities where people draw identity and social belonging from a screen

It only makes sense to continue bearing down into that simulacra

sometimelurker 6 hours ago||
I wonder how/if they'll use AI for this. maybe this would give them access to some very highquality pretrain data (like who made which bet on what at what time), which I can definitely imagine them needing. I've heard they have a lot of spare compute they run experiments on, and if this goes well for them maybe they could make a really good prediction bot
cdrnsf 7 hours ago|
This will fail, he'll throw money at Kalshi and or Polymarket and, if he acquires either, chase some sort of regulatory capture scheme.
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