<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>__MatrixMan__</author><text>The only people I&amp;#x27;ve met who care at all about the metaverse are terrified of it (giving an advertiser live access to metrics like pupil dilation is creepy), or appreciate the opportunities that it creates to make fun of Zuckerberg. Are there people out there who intend to use it?&lt;p&gt;I remember when Facebook was invite-only. It was cool. Everybody wanted in. This... I think this is grounds to bet against Mark.</text><parent_chain><item><author>mccorrinall</author><text>Mark doesn’t give a shit about share price, otherwise there would be buybacks right now. Meta  still has a donkey which shits gold: even facebook still had 4% DAU growth yoy, while people make fun about fb using users to tiktok.&lt;p&gt;No, Mark wants a war chest and will increase investments for his meta verse.&lt;p&gt;But I would never bet against Mark.</text></item><item><author>brentm</author><text>That isn&amp;#x27;t really something a publicly traded company can do without putting even more pressure on it&amp;#x27;s share price. Mark&amp;#x27;s also still very young, if he wanted to ride off into the sunset he could have done that a long time ago. I give him a lot of credit for staying in the drivers seat given the political pressure they&amp;#x27;ve been under since 2016 and now this period. It would have been a lot easier for him to just checkout and hang out on a mega yacht all day.</text></item><item><author>Cwizard</author><text>After almost 20 years of doing business isn’t it about time that Facebook starts to position itself as a value company rather than a growth company?&lt;p&gt;Realistically they had one big growth avenue and that was acquisitions but the regulatory (or rather political) environment doesn’t allow for it.&lt;p&gt;I get that it is hard to let go of that growth mindset after 20 years of crazy growth but at some point the journey ends and you have to reorient the business (imo). I am not saying stop investing but scale it down a notch, set realistic budgets, pay a dividend or buyback stock. Maybe if they had shifted their mindset away from growth at all cost earlier they wouldn’t have gotten such a bad rep.&lt;p&gt;I feel the same about Google. I wonder how much money their non-ad, non-cloud stuff made of its life time and if it has been profitable.&lt;p&gt;In the end the goal of a company (whether you agree with it our not) is not to get as big as possible but to generate as much cash for its shareholders as possible. And I think Facebook over extended with going all in on Meta.&lt;p&gt;But perhaps I am looking at this with too much hindsight.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Meta Earning Results Q3 2022 [pdf]</title><url>https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_news/Meta-Reports-Third-Quarter-2022-Results-2022.pdf</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>reducesuffering</author><text>&amp;gt; Mark doesn’t give a shit about share price, otherwise there would be buybacks right now.&lt;p&gt;You didn&amp;#x27;t read TFA, the earnings report explicitly saying the significant amount of buybacks they did.</text><parent_chain><item><author>mccorrinall</author><text>Mark doesn’t give a shit about share price, otherwise there would be buybacks right now. Meta  still has a donkey which shits gold: even facebook still had 4% DAU growth yoy, while people make fun about fb using users to tiktok.&lt;p&gt;No, Mark wants a war chest and will increase investments for his meta verse.&lt;p&gt;But I would never bet against Mark.</text></item><item><author>brentm</author><text>That isn&amp;#x27;t really something a publicly traded company can do without putting even more pressure on it&amp;#x27;s share price. Mark&amp;#x27;s also still very young, if he wanted to ride off into the sunset he could have done that a long time ago. I give him a lot of credit for staying in the drivers seat given the political pressure they&amp;#x27;ve been under since 2016 and now this period. It would have been a lot easier for him to just checkout and hang out on a mega yacht all day.</text></item><item><author>Cwizard</author><text>After almost 20 years of doing business isn’t it about time that Facebook starts to position itself as a value company rather than a growth company?&lt;p&gt;Realistically they had one big growth avenue and that was acquisitions but the regulatory (or rather political) environment doesn’t allow for it.&lt;p&gt;I get that it is hard to let go of that growth mindset after 20 years of crazy growth but at some point the journey ends and you have to reorient the business (imo). I am not saying stop investing but scale it down a notch, set realistic budgets, pay a dividend or buyback stock. Maybe if they had shifted their mindset away from growth at all cost earlier they wouldn’t have gotten such a bad rep.&lt;p&gt;I feel the same about Google. I wonder how much money their non-ad, non-cloud stuff made of its life time and if it has been profitable.&lt;p&gt;In the end the goal of a company (whether you agree with it our not) is not to get as big as possible but to generate as much cash for its shareholders as possible. And I think Facebook over extended with going all in on Meta.&lt;p&gt;But perhaps I am looking at this with too much hindsight.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Meta Earning Results Q3 2022 [pdf]</title><url>https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_news/Meta-Reports-Third-Quarter-2022-Results-2022.pdf</url></story>