The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 103 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: The Cambridge Analytica scandal was basically a hoax
“And of course the irony of Cambridge Analytica was it was, in the end, it was basically a hoax. There was nothing there.”
Evans: Twitter is a failure compared to Meta's multi-billion user apps
“It's an amazing success. Like, no, it fucking isn't. It's got two hundred fifty million users. Each has, like, Meta's got three or even four products that have each got three billion users. It's a failure.”
Evans: Developers will have little reason to build for Meta Quest
“I feel very sorry for Meta because they spent, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars on their product that, you know, no one's really, only a couple of million people are really using and doesn't have traction. And after this, why on earth would y…”
Evans: Requiring Google and Meta to pay news publishers for links is ludicrous
“Completely ludicrous idea that Google and Facebook should somehow pay newspaper companies to link to that.”
Evans: The idea that Big Tech buys up all startups is nonsense
“And they're actually a very small percentage of all the acquisition, all the startups in the field, or indeed all of the exits, because, you know, I think it was something like 60 or 70 of those 400 were more than fifty million dollars, which is the point that…”
Evans: Nest and Within probably would have failed without Big Tech buyouts
“The practical effect would probably be that Nest would have gone out of business. Within would probably have gone out of business.”
Benedict Evans: Search and social networks are natural monopolies like water utilities
“There are clearly structural reasons why it's very hard to create a new search engine or to create a new social network. There are very strong network effects, which I, the last, one of the last pieces I wrote, I described as basically a natural monopoly. And …”
Evans: Lack of network effects makes ChatGPT's early lead fragile
“Given that there's no network effects, or don't, or not yet any network effects in LLMs, that feels very fragile. Like, you know, if you remember, you know, I cannot, you know, remember, like, everyone used Yahoo, and then everyone switched to Google, because …”
Evans: Newspapers' core crisis is losing their former distribution monopolies
“The problem, newspapers problem is not that Google and Facebook have a monopoly. The newspaper's problem is that the newspapers used to have a monopoly and they don't anymore.”
Benedict Evans: Spatial computing turns the metaverse into a mere app icon
“With a feature phone, internet was one icon on your telephone. Whereas on a smartphone, the telephone is one icon on your computer. So kind of whole thing gets kind of pulled inside out. And that's sort of the AR VR thesis here that Apple has is no metaverse i…”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent up to $20,000 per active Quest user
“Yes, I was doing some back of the envelope math earlier, and like, if Meta, you know, like, depending on quite how much they've spent, quite many active users, Meta would spend somewhere between 10 and 20,000 dollars for each active user that they have on this…”
Benedict Evans: Meta's massive VR spend builds nonexistent hardware supply chains
“It's like, that's kind of why they're spending all this money, because they realize now actually there isn't all the stuff you need to get VR working actually isn't sort of already there waiting to be plugged together the way smartphones kind of work.
and s…”
Evans: Founders wanting autonomy shouldn't take $20 billion acquisitions
“Yeah, you're going to reach a point where, like, if you didn't want to be part of Adobe, then you shouldn't have taken the fucking twenty billion dollars. Which was always the problem with WhatsApp. Like, and yes, there were all sorts of things about broken pr…”
Evans: Streaming platform scale is driven by content budget, not network effects
“The challenge is like, there's no network effect there. It's a budget effect. It's not like Facebook where everyone, it's not that, it's not like Facebook where everyone has to use WhatsApp because everyone's on WhatsApp.”
Evans: Instagram is probably Meta's most valuable asset
“And yet you look back five and 10 years later, Instagram is probably the single most valuable part of Facebook. It's probably more valuable than the blue app or certainly more valuable than WhatsApp.”
Evans: Facebook cannot centrally build the metaverse
“And now you hear people at Facebook saying, well, we're going to build the metaverse. It's like sitting down in 1994 and saying, well, now we're going to build the web. You know, it's like news corporate, it's like news corporation in 1994 saying, oh, well, wh…”
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Evans: Saying Facebook won social is like saying Condé Nast won magazines
“The idea that like, well, Facebook is one has won social is about as dumb as saying that like Condé Nast is one has won magazines. In like, Vogue is one, there's no more magazines. Yeah, like, no, there'll be other things that aren't Vogue, and that's sort of …”
Evans: For Facebook's VR to succeed, it must transcend gaming
“And so for Facebook, paradoxically, VR needs to not be about games.”
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
Google and Facebook Will Face Regulation Like Banks and Telcos
“You are going to get regulated like a telco or a bank. You know, if you work at Google or you work at Facebook, you are going to have the same kind of scrutiny that a telco or a bank have. And it doesn't really matter if you think you shouldn't. That's just wh…”
Evans: Spinning off Instagram or YouTube will not make competing easier
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube.…”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram due to graph mechanics
“I would actually argue that Instagram is about people you choose to follow, and mostly people you know, whereas TikTok is about people you don't know. It's a completely different graph, and it's a recommendation-based graph, not a people you've met-based graph…”
Evans: Antitrust fines lack deterrent value due to decade-long enforcement lags
“The enforcement is so disconnected from the original decision that, like, nobody who's actually Nobody who's making those decisions understands that in 10 years' time they'll be defined as a monopoly. I mean, they're arguing about it now. You know, there's peo…”
Evans: Breaking up Instagram or YouTube would not reduce harmful content
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition proble…”
Evans: Every platform allowing file sharing hosts child sexual abuse material
“Any internet platform that allows people to share files of any kind has a child porn problem. Every single one.”
Evans: Facebook generates trivial revenue from news content
“All my friends at Facebook would basically say, we wish we didn't have news at all. We don't make any money from it. We actually don't make any money from news, although the amount of money is trivial. It's a huge amount of pain and aggravation”
Evans: Online harms stem from total connectivity, not algorithms or ads
“A couple of years ago, there was this whole thing in India of lynch mobs forming based on wild rumors that were spreading on WhatsApp, which was super interesting because WhatsApp is not, doesn't have an algorithm and doesn't have advertising. And so like thos…”
Evans: Content moderation is unscalable without architectural constraints
“The creation of bad stuff is fundamentally infinitely scalable, because it's people. It's four billion people saying, retweeting stuff that fits their prejudices. And the content moderation or the virus scanning is fundamentally unscalable, because you're one …”
Evans: Heavy platform regulation protects incumbents like Facebook from startups
“Part of the point of regulation is that it's expensive and it helps incumbents.
You know, if you, Facebook has whatever it is, 30, 40,000 human moderators. If you create a law that says if you have a social network, a human being has to look at every post, wel…”
Facebook cleared out Oculus founders for wanting to build gaming consoles
“This is why they cleared out all the team, because they bought a company staffed by people who wanted to make a games, a high-end games console, and they know they don't want that.”
Evans: Anthropic Leads AI Frontier, OpenAI and Gemini Trail by 5%
“Because right now we've got, you know, Anthropics ahead at the moment. We have OpenAI and Gemini five percent behind, like not far behind. Grok just, SpaceX Grok Nazi model just came out with like a model that's in like the top At the top of some of the benchm…”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
Evans: Meta AI in Instagram search failed due to mismatched user intent
“Meta tried to put their app as like a blue circle, put the, but the AI thing is a blue circle inside all their apps and it just didn't work. No one knew what it was. And it was like, they're floating in the search window, but that's not why you use search and …”
Brown: TikTok Gives Americans a Taste of Foreign Tech Dominance
“Saying that, like, basically Americans are experiencing what the rest of Europe has experienced over the last 10 years of, yeah, your citizens are loving a piece, a social media app that wasn't designed by Americans for Americans with Americans in mind.
yeah,…”
Evans: Temu and Shein Accounted for $4 Billion of Meta's Revenue
“10% of revenue, five percent of revenue growth. And so that's about four billion dollars, and so apparently half of that was Temu, and well, presumably quite a lot of the rest was Shein.”
Evans: Social platforms previously blocked COVID lab leak and mask efficacy posts
“I mean, the kind of the case study here is when social networks decided to block anybody Suggesting that masks weren't very useful during COVID or block anybody suggesting that maybe COVID had leaked from a Chinese biology research lab. And I think now, I don'…”
Evans: AI prompt moderation will repeat social media governance battles
“You re-run all of the arguments we had around content moderation and social media of what should people be allowed to say. You either say more or less anything, which is Elon Musk's idea, or you end up with a long list of criteria, which is where Facebook has …”
Devins: Meta has the right price; Apple has the right device
“And what I wrote last summer was that Meta basically has the right price and is working towards the right device. And Apple has almost the right device and is working back towards the right price.”
Devins: Vision Pro Ecosystem Integration Outclasses What Meta Can Offer
“There's some bugs here and there, but my god, this thing is polished and integrated into the ecosystem in so many ways that MetaSand doesn't have, can't because it doesn't have all of that.”
Evans: Creator reach declines due to user competition, not algorithm malice
“The other half of it is the reason that you're downranked in the newsfeed is because people don't care, A, people don't care about you that much, B, they followed 50 of your competitors, and B, they have a hundred friends. And there's no solution to that.”
News on social platforms creates aggravation without driving revenue or usage
“Speaking from a business perspective, news is a lot more trouble than it's worth. It's not actually particularly good for business because it's a huge amount of aggravation and toxicity and anger and problem. And it doesn't actually drive a lot of, it certainl…”
App Store privacy labels are a self-inflicted wound for Apple
“And so it's weird because the weird thing about this is this is actually hurting Apple. Clearly it's the problem with Meta and Twitter and anybody else with an app on the store, but it's also hurting Apple because Apple is telling people that there's no privac…”
Evans: Meta is not designing Threads for Twitter power users
“And the same thing here, Meta is not building for people who've got 35 alphabetized lists. Meta is not building for people who use RayX to do searches on Twitter. Meta is not building for people who follow 20,000 people and use TweetDeck. It's not building for…”
Benedict Evans: Apple's laptop-grade silicon gives Vision Pro an architectural advantage
“Apple is using a high-end laptop SAC in this thing because they have their own, which has massively better performance per watt than anything from Intel. Guess what Meta has to use? They have to use a smartphone chip from Volcom.”
Benedict Evans: Meta Quest has only single-digit millions of regular users
“So Meta sold maybe twenty million. That you have survey data that says that maybe 10 or 20% of people are actually using them regularly, which is not a great number. So there's like single digit numbers of millions of people using this thing.”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent at least $35 billion on Reality Labs
“Meta has spent, I think, at least thirty five billion dollars on this stuff. Because they spent like over thirty billion dollars on operating losses for the Reality Labs group, offset a bit by revenue from selling hardware and games. And they bought Oculus, an…”
Evans: Publisher link tax demands against Google and Facebook are flawed
“And this is, in many ways, just a kind of, it's one of those arguments that just sort of disintegrates as soon as you poke at it, in any way at all, because they don't argue with, they don't, they think they're the only people that should get paid, not anyone …”