Facebook is shutting down Bulletin, its newsletter subscription service, and it will wind down by the end of 2023. This is terrible news for idiots who keep falling for false promises of Facebook, Google, and every large platform that lures than with traffic and large audiences.
But I am not surprised by Facebook, and it’s about turn. They do it so often that it is almost comical that people still believe them. Media folks, in particular, are so thirsty for getting an audience, which is why platforms continue to play them for suckers. I have been highly suspicious not just of the big platforms but also of the upstarts.
Remember Medium? Man, did they yank the media ecosystems’ chain or what? I still can’t embrace Substack, despite really liking the team and what they bring to the table. It is one of the reasons I continue to have my own blog and host my own newsletter —it isn’t cheap, but hell, I don’t have to deal with change in “corporate strategy.”
Talking about corporate strategy, the list of Facebook’s copycat failures is growing longer. At this rate, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have lost his one true core competency — copying other people’s ideas. I mean, they did copy Snap as a concept and its ad system, but since then, it has been one miss after a miss. Rough timing, considering Zuckerberg is trying to be an innovator having in the past invented nothing.
No wonder even Tim Cook likes to dunk on his Metaverse.
“I always think it’s important that people understand what something is. And I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.”
Tim Cook, told Dutch publication Bright (via Google Translate).
October 6, 2022. San Francisco
