Meta: We need 5x more GPUs to combat TikTok, stat Facebook parent Meta has reportedly said it needs to increase its fleet of datacenter GPUs fivefold to help it compete against short-form video app and perennial security concern TikTok. The oft-controversial tech giant needs these hardware accelerators in its servers by the end of the year to power its so-called discovery …
Yes, because Moore forbid that Facebook users might switch away from their Facebook portal for a few minutes.
What we need is an attention tax. Web operators to pay $x per person per hour that the user spends continuously connected to their services. (With some TBD thresholds for total number of users, % of users continuously connected for more than x time, etc.) Make them, literally, pay for hijacking people's brains this way.
Would OS manufactures pay it? Because, if so, we'd have reinvented the Windows tax.
But that would then have to apply to every website with a comments section, not just social media. And given the vast majority of people get their news from social media these days (sad, but true), they would probably try to wriggle out of paying it by claiming people were reading news and not bullshit posts.
OK, I mentioned a threshold for total number of users. That would mean small sites don't have to take too much trouble collecting all this data.
On reflection, I would also add an exemption for any site whose users are required to pay more than $10 per month to use it. That would take care of educational and quality entertainment sites. It would also fix a floor on the charges of streaming services, which would suppress predatory competition in that market.
As to sites that still qualify, they can claim what they like about what the user is doing, but the tax collector doesn't care. All he needs to know is, how long per day did each individual user spend on servers controlled by this business. They collect this data anyway, you can bet they share it with advertisers, so they can jolly well share it with the taxman too.
Dear Wall St. We're down 50% because nobody likes or cares about Facebook anymore, most of our customers are boomers sharing recipes or wondering why their grandchildren's pages haven't updated since they were 11.
So we're cutting staff to reduce costs - like any good traditional dinosaur industry.
But we're really a dynamic growth company that should be priced like a cool 2man startup.
See, you can tell we're still relevant cos we renamed ourselves to a meaningless short word
... has an inverse relationship to what the world needs.
My conspiracy voice is saying that Meta's needs, however, will be quietly supported by various federal US entities in their attempt to wrest some attention back from "China's" TikTok in their on-going game of my surveillance is better than your surveillance.
"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers"
Fuck meta, Fuck tiktok. Capitalisation intentional.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
