this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
251 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
85856 readers
4568 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- 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, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's weird that high tech CEOs didn't learn the most valuable lesson from the Metaverse: people are not stupid. If they don't like something, selling it to them harder is not going to make them like it more. It's simply not solving their life's problems.
AI behaves much the same way. It's not that it's useless, it's that faced with the actual cost, its usefulness shrinks to almost nothing. People dislike AI because they know better, not because they are too stupid to see.
Uh. Looks around at the state of the world
I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don't need it to succeed. They don't really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they're pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that "appreciates their ability to be a visionary".
These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.
Nah. Meta needs something to grow.
Right now, they are sitting on social media platforms that can't see meaningful growth and a messaging platform near the same. Nothing that Meta has tried to create after either defends their existing revenue streams from dying or creates a new revenue stream.
Without significant change, Meta is a decade away from being another AOL.
It’s a problem they inflicted upon themselves. They made everything about growth and once they actually go damn near everyone in their platform, growth was impossible. So the only thing to do is shrink.
And they cannot survive that.
That's definitely true, but the question is do the execs really care? I think that for a lot of these people, the only thing that matters is whether they can keep pulling those sweet sweet cash-outs. Just look at the absurd bonuses musk was promised from tesla recently. If he really cared about the success of the company, he wouldn't take those, he would take a fair paycheque and allow the company to reinvest the rest of the money. Instead, he requires massive bonuses to keep working. We're talking about the kind of money that could fund the entire educational sector in a small country for many years. He's taking that out as a personal bonus, to the detriment of the company.
That kind of thing makes me believe that he doesn't really care about the long-term success of the company. What he really cares about is squeezing out cash from the company for as long as possible. If the company fails, he has enough money to buy up something else that he can squeeze cash out of. The modus operandi is basically
Yeah, you make people depend on your product, lobby for a monopoly, and keep your captive audience just enough above starvation to not revolt. Like the healthcare system. Or gas companies. Or semiconductor companies. Or housing owners.
This article was written by ai and used an ai image.
This article was written by award-winning verifiably-human journalist James Ball.
The image is credited to Benny Douet, a human professional illustrator with a legit body of work which stylistically matches said image.
By all means call out slop when it appears, but this isn't it.