[HN Gopher] Facebook Renames to Meta ___________________________________________________________________ Facebook Renames to Meta Author : MikusR Score : 776 points Date : 2021-10-28 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (about.facebook.com) (TXT) w3m dump (about.facebook.com) | d--b wrote: | In all seriousness, this looks like an Hooli ad from the Silicon | Valley TV show. I can really picture Mark Zuckerberg as a real | life Gavin Belson surrounded by minions telling him all day long | how great this Meta thing is. | [deleted] | wayfarer1291 wrote: | The whole presentation felt a lot like visions of the internet | from companies like Microsoft (and others) in the mid-90s.. top- | down, centralized. | corysama wrote: | Related: "Facebook's metaverse spending will top $10 billion this | year" | | https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-metaverse-10-bil... | omot wrote: | I'm suddenly teleported back to 2006 when people didn't take | Facebook seriously at all. | [deleted] | timwis wrote: | Wait is this like Google inc rebranding as Alphabet and owning | Google as its main product, or is the social media platform being | renamed to Meta along with the company? | blsapologist42 wrote: | Like Alphabet | jgalt212 wrote: | I just want to repurpose all of Yakov Smirnoff's jokes about | Russia for the metaverse. | donretag wrote: | How long until I get a "Come join Meta!" recruiting email? | [deleted] | speedgoose wrote: | Congratulations for your rebranding! Now, can you respect us? | anter wrote: | Meta for Metastasis | codred wrote: | Perfect! | dbish wrote: | MANGA sounds more fun then FAANG so that's nice | [deleted] | jedberg wrote: | If we didn't change G to A I don't think we'll change F to M | either. | vettedvat wrote: | "He still has PTSD from his tour in NAAAM" | lapetitejort wrote: | Well that's just your opinion MAAAN. | efrecon wrote: | We just need Microsoft and Netflix to rebrand AAAAA | parenthesis wrote: | Microsoft could change their name to Azure, and Facebook | -- or Meta -- could be ejected. | tobr wrote: | > Microsoft | | Folks, here's a good example of why you should read the | article, or at least the title, or at least the thread | you're replying to before you comment. | gnabgib wrote: | Microsoft should be in there, but the M in this case is | from Facebook->Meta... so you need Facebook to rebrand | again for AAAAA. | bytematic wrote: | I like MANAA | aylmao wrote: | MAAAN | mherdeg wrote: | There's a new ticker symbol for this one: FB->MVRS. | | (There's already an ETF called "META"; 6% of its holdings are | FB.) | | I'm kind of curious about what will happen as either: | | (1) confused investors buy into META instead of MVRS over the | next few months | | (2) confused investors can no longer find FB and instead buy | FBK (FB Financial) or another one of the top Robinhood search | results (FBHS, FBNC, FBC). | reayn wrote: | At least the acronym that includes microsoft isn't offensive | anymore, just a nice MAGMAN. | alanlammiman wrote: | I've often found the need to refer to Facebook, Apple, Google | but excluding Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft (ie in the context | specifically of consumer internet, mobile, social but not | ecommerce, b2b or streaming), but have shied away from FAG. | GAF ('gaffe') would be great, but not sure anyone would | understand it. | mandeepj wrote: | Is n't MAGNA better? | kroltan wrote: | Not if you read Japanese comics, or if you speak Portuguese. | playpause wrote: | It's a good thing if it clashes with existing words? | kroltan wrote: | Magna is also a clash, so I'm not sure what's the benefit | there. | | At least manga and mangoes are funny, magna seems just | posh and insufferable (which if you ask the right people, | is an accurate description of those companies) | aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: | If you replace F with M, you must replace G with A as well. | ModernMech wrote: | MANAA | CookiesOnMyDesk wrote: | I'm gonna miss FAGMAN. | vineyardmike wrote: | You're the only one. | crocodiletears wrote: | Yeah, I liked that one. | tasogare wrote: | In France it's GAFAM that is most used, which makes sense since | Microsoft is way more influential on the tech scene than | Netflix, which is just a content provider. | dekhn wrote: | it's really FAAMG in the US too, the people who coined the | phrase were confused. | kixiQu wrote: | opinions here seem to vary based on where on the west coast | the speaker lives | p4bl0 wrote: | GAFAM should now be replaced by MAGMA. It better represents | the evil that will burn you alive. | philwelch wrote: | I think FAANG is more often used as a career benchmark, i.e. | working at Netflix looks good on your resume and pays well. | Apocryphon wrote: | It's just because FANG (don't think Apple was originally | part of it) was a list of fast-growing stocks, coined by | none another than Mad Moneyman Jim Cramer | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG | | Quite honestly that term in both stock and big tech senses | is outdated. It should really include a few post-unicorn | giants like Uber nowadays. | tvararu wrote: | I've seen FAANGMULASS a couple of times. | bostik wrote: | If you ignore Netflix, you can get a pretty close approximation | what this is all about. | endisneigh wrote: | well G is not A, so it would be MAAAN. | | used in a sentence: | | MAAAN, why can't I get some money. | mortenjorck wrote: | Stick it to the MAAAN! | ksec wrote: | MAGMA | | Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon | | ( Netflix doesn't belong to Big Tech ) | hoelle wrote: | MAAMA | | (Google is now Alphabet) | e12e wrote: | Google should probably be Alphabet, though? | Microsoft Apple Meta Amazon Alphabet | systemvoltage wrote: | Netflix got shoved into this for no reason. It does not fit as | "Big Tech". | babelfish wrote: | Why not? | broof wrote: | Well I don't think the acronym for Facebook Amazon Apple | Google would've been palatable | mbg721 wrote: | Next thing, you'll be telling me my Lettuce, Guacamole, | Bacon, and Tomato sandwich is in poor taste. | bink wrote: | That would be quite the GAAF. | Apocryphon wrote: | The reason was because of stocks: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG | hajile wrote: | Netflix is currently 12-13% of all internet traffic down from | around 15% or so. | | Dialing in a little, they peaked out at something like 40% of | all US internet traffic 4-5 years ago. | rsj_hn wrote: | Personally, the only thing I ever watch on Netflix now is | the new Israeli TV stuff -- Fauda, Mossad 101, etc. I think | this is one consequence of them shifting to being a | "channel" with their own content (which I mostly don't care | for). | | Almost all my streaming is with Amazon Prime, which has a | much bigger selection of content suited to my tastes. | timbit42 wrote: | Without Netflix we've got MAGA. Can't say I like it. | odiroot wrote: | Can we finally remove Netflix which doesn't fit in here? We can | always replace it with Microsoft. | cblconfederate wrote: | I hope they have no exclusive rights to the name. So many | metaverse things already exist it would be a shame to see them | being sued by FB | | As for the rest, he's advertising a new Second Life / High | Fidelity as if he invented it himself. Shameful not to mention | that all this has been done before, the main difference being the | VR glasses. And i m glad that this is going to fail because | virtual worlds are the 100% opposite of facebook (pseudonymous, | not real life, NOT real friends, create instead of consume etc) | powerset wrote: | Glad to hear they're at least claiming their contribution to the | metaverse will be built on open standards and protocols, I hope | they follow through on that. Pretty sure nobody would want a | walled meta-garden. | rexreed wrote: | Can someone PLEASE tell me why the metaverse will succeed when | things like Second Life and oh so many other immersive realities | have failed. Is it because of the VR? Honestly why is this a | thing? | jazzyjackson wrote: | Fax Machine conundrum I suppose, only useful once everyone else | is on it. | | I don't see it taking off tho, if Facebook.com can't get a 2D | text interface to load faster than multiple seconds what hope | is there for an immersive world working on anything but the | best fiber connections? | AJRF wrote: | I was watching the video and got to a bit where Mark said "So we | are going to see what some metaverse experiences will be like" | and then a pop up came over the video and said "Log In" and I | clicked cancel because I didn't want to and the page reloaded | itself and lost my place in the video. | stelcodes wrote: | Yep, same. Speaks volumes! | rl3 wrote: | October 28th, 2021 4:44PM EDT | | Following a new keynote from augmented reality company _Meta_ on | Thursday, scientists continue to investigate how Epic Games ' | _MetaHuman_ technology has become categorically superior to real- | life actors in terms of expressed humanistic qualities, seemingly | overnight. | | Responding to questions surrounding the unfortunate name clash, | Epic Games CEO _Tim Sweeney_ denied this would cement his | position as a present day _Eldon Tyrell_ : "We never said that. ' | _More human than human_ ' isn't our motto and never was; today it | just happens to be true. The technology is still in its early | stages, and it clearly isn't there yet." | | When asked for further clarification, Sweeney elaborated with | candor: "It's eerie, you know? From the outset, we knew their | strategy was to bring the one-dimensional qualities of stock | photo models to life, we just didn't think they'd succeed this | early." | | "It's really made us question our product strategy as a whole." | said Sweeney. "We're trying to make fake humans realistic, and | they're trying to make real humans fake. What's their end game? | It's kind of a mind fuck, honestly." | | When reached for comment Meta CEO _Mark Zuckerberg_ declined to | be interviewed for this article, electing instead to maintain an | unblinking gaze as his arms continued to awkwardly gesture with | sterile insincerity. | astlouis44 wrote: | They want to own the SEO around the "metaverse", so renaming | their company to half the world means they dominate all search | around it. Genius move, Mark. | imilk wrote: | If that was the goal, there are many many ways that a company | with the resources of Facebook could dominate rankings for a | term without renaming their entire company a subset of that | term. | IceWreck wrote: | Looks like Zuckyboi is a big fan of Ready Player One. | citizenkeen wrote: | I am not looking forward to all the people who get C&Ds for using | the words 'meta' or 'metaverse'. | rvz wrote: | It is been finally admitted. | | Facebook Inc. aka Meta Inc. is going to kill Apple and put an end | to the iPhone. | | Going to watch this. | | To Downvoters: Here's a reminder of how wrong the HN bubble was | back then: [0] [1] | | This is the same place that reacted to Facebook acquiring | Instagram and WhatsApp to being the dumbest decisions Mark | Zuckerberg made and now it became a $1T company with billions in | profit and billions in monthly active users. | | If users cared about privacy, why are they still on WhatsApp and | Instagram and failed to move elsewhere? Exactly because the | money, creators, social inertia and followers are still there. | | We'll come back in 10 years and we'll see if you still like Apple | and Google's walled gardens and 30% taxes. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840&p=2 | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266796 | not2b wrote: | And how are they going to do that? Do they think people will | discard their phones, replace them with next-gen Google Glass, | live in the "metaverse" and let Zuck listen in on every | interaction? Surely this will kill Apple dead. | jimkleiber wrote: | Exactly, all hail King Zuckerberg? | | Snark aside, if something like this virtual world were to be | created, I would want more democratic representation, not | where one person can rule for life. | wut42 wrote: | wat. | rvz wrote: | yes. | | and you are going to watch them do it on 'the metaverse'. | nanomonkey wrote: | Damn, I love the term "meta", and generally enjoy meta concepts | (metamodernism, metacognition, metaverse, metamorphosis, etc.). | This taints the term terribly. | bellyfullofbac wrote: | It's also so fucking unoriginal... "hmm we need a parent | company that owns all the other companies, what should we call | it?" | | I'm not sure how the structure is, if Facebook, Instagram, | WhatsApp and Oculus are separate companies owned by the holding | company also named "Facebook". | | Obviously the websites/apps will keep their names, just a | design will change, e.g. if you load Instagram, the splash | screen says currently "Instagram, from Facebook", and it'll be | "... from Meta" soon enough. | seanalltogether wrote: | So is this like Google -> Alphabet where it's mostly a behind- | the-scenes type thing? | rvz wrote: | yes. | | On top of that it seems that the interoperable metaverse is | where the future is heading. Not an Apple or Google walled | garden of apps and is reinforced by Oculus being integrated in | the 'glasses' and a new ecosystem will be created from that. | | They seem to be on to something. | danShumway wrote: | The core idea of having a universal layer on top of reality that | is owned by _any_ company, at all, is utterly repulsive to me. I | 'm not sure I have the words to describe it. | | The type of world Facebook is describing is always -- 100% of the | time -- a dystopia if it is a privatized, corporate-controlled | AR/VR layer where ordinary people need permission and contracts | to interact with each-other. Anything any single company or | coordinated group of FAANG companies make will be awful when | scaled up to the level Mark is talking about. There's no promise | they can make to me, there's no strategy they can pursue to ease | my worries. Purely by virtue of a single company (or a group of | FAANG companies) being in charge of it, it's already garbage. | | Having said that, of all of the companies to try and assert | control over a "metaverse", Facebook is probably amongst the | least suited and most dangerous companies to do so. If they can't | even run the Oculus platform competently, how can they possibly | claim they're competent enough to run a giant industry-wide | platform on top of Oculus? | | ---- | | > The metaverse will be a collective project that goes beyond a | single company. It will be created by people all over the world, | and open to everyone. | | And this stuff is just complete nonsense. No platform that | Facebook has ever been involved with has ever even remotely come | close to being "collective" or "open" to everyone worldwide, and | it's just wildly insulting to pretend that anything about that is | going to change now. | | Facebook can't even launch _this announcement article_ without | making a bunch of XHR requests and falling over if Javascript isn | 't enabled. So sure, let's all close our eyes and pretend that | they're magically capable of building an accessible, open VR | platform that respects user privacy/agency. What has Facebook | _ever_ done in its entire history as a company that would make us | believe that they are in any way trustworthy or qualified enough | to try and build a consumer platform /medium of this scale? | awestroke wrote: | Reading about this company just drains my energy and enthusiasm | right away. Can't put my finger on why. | Havoc wrote: | > Can't put my finger on why. | | Cause they're evil like a certain other company but managed to | skip straight over the "Don't be evil" phase. | achr2 wrote: | You know in the Matrix how human's are the batteries? Well | "Meta" is powered in a similar way, except it is your basic | humanity (emotions, attention, engagement, self perception) | that they drain to keep the lights on. | jazzyjackson wrote: | oh my god monsters inc was an allegory for social media, | profit via harvesting fear, laughter, empathy and anger | chowland wrote: | no one cares | hprotagonist wrote: | _The screens are blank at first, but finally the same image snaps | into existence on all four of them at once. It is an image | consisting of words; it says | | IF THIS WERE A VIRUS YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW | | FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT | | THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE; HOW'S YOUR SECURITY? | | CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES FOR A FREE INITIAL | CONSULTATION._ | htrp wrote: | "The concept [Meta] originates from Snow Crash, a dystopian novel | from the 1990s in which people flee the crumbling real world to | be fully immersed in a virtual one" | | Facebook is creating a virtual world to allow us to escape the | deteriorating state of this one. | timbit42 wrote: | Sounds like the matrix. | neom wrote: | I keep a pretty sharp eye on the apple job postings to see what | type of people they're hiring. I think they've been working on | something similar since about 2014. Around then I noticed they | posted for, then hire a lot of optical engineers, (I'd look to | find the hire on linkedin a while after the posting was gone) but | people with odd skills for apple, contact lenses mostly, lasers, | and then a bunch of people who had done PhDs around putting | gas/liquid between plastic that can react with projected light. | RegW wrote: | Good god. Has Facebook now got such a bad rep it has to change | its name? | | For me it will always be the fat man standing behind a lamp post. | kerng wrote: | Is it just me, or is that logo a little unappealing and | distorted? | hmate9 wrote: | Metadata would have been a better name | rektide wrote: | I want to present another way of looking at this, & identifying | it as a brilliant move. This is just one lens, not representative | of what I really believe, but I think it's an important lens to | pick up & assess by. | | Facebook makes a ton of cash, and wants to be a place where | sharp, bright, talented engineers want to come work. But the | family of apps are all semi-done products; they're late | industrial creations, heavily refined, and there's just not a lot | of open possibility space to do good things with them. | | Meta is a break. It's a way to create new grounds, explore new | ideas. Whether the ideas are good or bad almost doesn't matter, | compared to re-creating a company with some real will, drive, & | possibility in front of it. Unchaining yourself from the town- | planner stage of maturity that you've been whiling away at for | almost a decade & creating permissions to try interesting things, | to make new space where you're not always stepping on legacy | concerns: I almost can't imagine not doing this. | | And Meta has a fairly catchy, nebulous set of ideas behind it. | It's difficult to imagine how Facebook/Meta can really make | anywhere near as much impact, make a clear win here. But I'm at a | loss to think of other bits of terrain that are both not-yet- | settled/won, and simultaneously as compelling & interesting to a | potential employee-base. If I ran a hugely successful company | that had more-or-less established itself & wasn't in existential | peril & falling position, I'd be asking myself the same question: | what would be fun for us to do? What would keep my us well | engaged & might possibly yield some epic shit? Meta is a not bad | answer. | r-r-r wrote: | Nicely translates to "(shes's) dead" in Hebrew... | sushsjsuauahab wrote: | I believe the original Facebook name in Chinese (Mandarin) | sounded something like "have to die" as well haha | yunusabd wrote: | You're right, "Fei Si Bu Ke" in Chinese, "Fei Si Bu Ke ", | which literally means "have to die". | azth wrote: | Similar in Arabic (maita). | ativzzz wrote: | While their mission of connecting people sounds nice on paper, | they have shown over and over that they place profit first, which | is not necessarily wrong for a corporation, but this incentives | engagement over connection. | | We've seen that as Facebook grew bigger and the engagement | algorithms took over, that the worst of humanity is brought out. | Despite there being genuine connection and overall improvement to | people's lives happening on FB; if not people wouldn't be using | it, but extremism, addiction and hate have become staples of the | platform at large. | | Frankly, I don't trust FB to fix these issues so I am immediately | pessimistic about Meta, but the reality very well may be that us | humans enjoy extremism content, don't mind digital addictions, | and feed off hate and FB just brings out the raw truth in us. | | Overall, I think FB needs a different business model other than | advertising off engagement if they want to turn the page and | appeal to the better parts of people. | aristofun wrote: | This is the beginning of the end. Read this comment in 10 years | please. | ngneer wrote: | Grim. Much nicer to go outside and enjoy creation. Facebook and | Meta are no doubt austere in comparison. To quote Vonnegut, it is | you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. | 3pt14159 wrote: | Fun story, I once tried to convince a new friend of mine that his | startup that I'd landed a small consulting gig with should focus | on how it could make the world better, not just go after profits, | because I could clearly see that what they had was just so useful | and adaptable and that pharmaceutical companies would easily want | to scoop them up. | | Back then they were in the midst of rebranding, but they | ultimately changed their domain to meta.com and were acquired by | the Chan Zuck initiative. I was happy. It seemed like one of the | most pro-social uses of their software. | | It's kinda funny to see Facebook rebrand to what was a fledgling | startup out of Toronto. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_(academic_company) | nyt-maps wrote: | My god, if you get it, you get it. | | They are going all in on metaverse / have decided that the future | of oculus is the primary long term bet, not facebook itself. | | And they have the money to make it so. | | This is incredibly scary, and probably a good investment. | AlexandrB wrote: | Honestly, I think this is less scary than having Facebook | acting as a "public square". A meta-verse has a higher bar of | entry than a website - including specialized hardware - and | it's less likely that governments and businesses will | distribute information exclusively in some meta-verse vs. it | just being another channel for content distribution. | nyt-maps wrote: | Websites once required "specialized hardware". And if you've | got today's top end VR rigs, it's sorta obvious that the | world is going to go this way - it's too good, and | productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle for the | mind". Plus it'll get way cheaper in the future. Note that | I'm not talking about entertainment usecases, which are also | good - I'm saying metaverse is clearly the future of work, | with massive ramifications if Meta is able to invest enough | to make it appealing to regular people. And I think Facebook | has way more than enough resources to make this a reality. | | Right now, work in the metaverse still looks like 8+ emulated | screens floating in a sphere around you. And this is probably | not the long term best way to work. The real question is what | are the new primitives, is there a new underlying platform, | can everyone get equal access to that platform, and who owns | that platform. | | Just like Apple is making intel chips obsolete with the M1 on | Mac, Meta probably is aiming to make laptops obsolete/niche | in the long run. | tsimionescu wrote: | > And if you've got today's top end VR rigs, it's sorta | obvious that the world is going to go this way - it's too | good, and productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle | for the mind". | | How exactly? VR is just a display technology, with no new | input methods that are even remotely usable for anything | like games. How am I going to be better at programming by | wearing a VR headset and typing on my keyboard than looking | at a screen while typing on my keyboard? | | How am I going to be more productive when forecasting | prices in Excel on a VR headset than on a screen? When | drawing the layout of an integrated circuit? When | summarizing news or books? | | Sure, it will be easier to visualize a few 3D models, and | remote meetings will feel much more natural in VR, but the | vast majority of work essentially boils down to either | manual work, text manipulation, or fundamentally 2D models. | | Unless and until someone comes up with a revolutionary | input method with the precision of a mouse and the | flexibility of a keyboard (like they did with the touch | screen for phones), I don't believe in any claims of a | revolution through AR/VR. Only incremental improvements in | specialized fields. | AlexandrB wrote: | I don't know if I agree. Most of my job is typing text into | various boxes - web-apps, text-editors, terminals. | Fundamentally, long-term productivity in this task is about | ergonomics. Wearing something on my head for 8+ hours is | like anti-ergonomics, and the benefits are dubious. I | _could_ have a bunch of virtual displays in a meta-space, | or I _could_ just area bunch of real monitors. And the | latter solution is generally simpler. | | But even if using a VR rig to simulate a bunch of displays | would be more efficient, that's not a "metaverse". It's | just a VR display. To me a metaverse implies virtual | interaction with other people - otherwise what's the point? | I find I'm more effective when I have uninterrupted quiet | time to work so why would I want to work in a meta-verse | where I can be interrupted at any time in a more invasive | way than Slack or email can manage? It's like an open- | office from hell. Saying it's the future of work is | extremely premature. | | Edit: | | On the topic of this: | | > it's too good, and productivity is enhanced on the level | of "bicycle for the mind" | | _If_ that 's true, Facebook will never crack it. | Facebook's products are the opposite of "a bicycle for the | mind" - they push experiences and content on you instead of | putting you in control. I have serious doubts they could | develop something that requires giving the user power over | their own experience - the condescending attitude of "we | know what's best for you" is too ingrained. | Ancapistani wrote: | > Wearing something on my head for 8+ hours is like anti- | ergonomics, and the benefits are dubious. | | Playing Devil's Advocate here, but I'm _already_ wearing | something on my head for ~16 hours per day - my | eyeglasses. | | The issue here is only that the current generation of | devices aren't yet suitable for long-term use. | swalsh wrote: | I can't tell you how many times i've had political | conversations in VR while playing a game. It's not super | common, but it happens. | | I kind of fear a day when i'm just having a casual | conversation with someone, and suddenly their voice becomes | garbled becauese an AI detected they were telling me some | "misinformation". | Closi wrote: | I think their internal definition of metaverse is probably less | literal than people in the media seem to picture - I think they | are actually betting on the future of however people | communicate, whatever that ends up looking like, be that | WhatsApp, social media, VR or something else entirely. | meheleventyone wrote: | Even their presentation showed that with a solid mix of | different ways of communicating and I'm pretty sure that | wasn't just accidental. On one level its nice to see a much | more expansive definition of metaverse (which IMO already | exists) but on another terrifying that FB wants to be part of | basically every human interaction. | deelowe wrote: | I hope they have serious plans for changing how VR works today. | VR quickly loses it's appeal after a few hours. The isolation | it brings with it is a huge issue. AR holds more promise in | terms of mass appeal but I'm not sure we have that one quite | figured out yet technically and from a UX perspective. | drcode wrote: | Yeah, I'm a VR nerd but I now find that wearing a VR helment | for too long creates a kind of existential loneliness that | will be hard to solve with better technology. | swalsh wrote: | It really depends on the game. I was playing H3VR, and | definatley experienced that dreadful isolation feeling as I | was out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fake | unliving things. But in multiplayer games like Onward Its | provided the opposite feeling for me. My wife and kids left | for a week, and I work from home... after a few days, it | felt like hanging out with friends. | jimkleiber wrote: | I know very little about VR so maybe this will be very off. | | My guess is they want to address that isolation aspect by | making it feel better to interact with others, bringing more | people together in the VR space. | | But this is me interpreting your "the isolation it brings | with it" as people just exploring VR by themselves. | | Did you mean something else? | deelowe wrote: | I mean the isolation of basically wearing a helmet for | hours. It's exhausting to have your vision and hearing | constrained to the digital world in this way for long | periods of time. To me, VR is like a roller coaster. It's | super fun but only in small doses. | jazzyjackson wrote: | Is this bet on VR making the goggles a hardware requirement? So | this new world will only be available to those who can afford | gaming hardware and a high speed internet connection? | silisili wrote: | Not a chance. I've been wrong about a lot of things tech, | probably even most things, but this isn't something I think | most people want. | | Metaverses have always been niche. Most people don't like | things attached to their head. Remember 3D TVs? | | But, perhaps you and they are right. For the first time in my | life, I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no | part in it.' Please don't take this as like, suicidal or | anything, more maybe going off grid or moving to another | country. | acchow wrote: | A common argument for why humanity has never encountered | extra-terrestrial life is that any hyper advanced | civilization likely moved into a virtual world. Do you | believe this is unlikely and humanity is not headed in this | direction? | silisili wrote: | I don't believe humanity or any civilization could survive. | It's pure hedonism, really. How does reproduction even | occur? And if everyone in the first world is plugged in, | what keeps a third world nation from just taking | everything? Or killing off the power grid? It would take a | massive scale of agreement to even allow that to work. | | Outside of that, I am a big believer in, well I don't know | the name for it. But you must experience sadness to feel | happy. And bad times to realize good times. Anyone in a | virtual world would likely never choose scenarios that | cause such things. So there'd be no real true joy in this | virtual life. Life is fleeting. | | From a health standpoint, I don't believe a human body | could exist long in a pure virtual world(thinking of | something like, The Matrix). Still people tend to get | disease, blood clots, stroke, and more. And bones and | muscle too weak to even walk when the grid goes down. Am I | thinking about the scenario wrong? | | Sorry I don't have all(or any) of the answers to that | question, mostly just rambling, but the thought makes me | really sad. | endisneigh wrote: | I've never heard of this argument. Can you point to any | reputable scientist making this argument? | JohnFen wrote: | I'd never heard that, but off the top of my head, it seems | exceedingly unlikely. | newby wrote: | > I honestly feel like 'if this is the future, I want no part | in it.' | | I feel like that about ever larger part of the whole tech | world. I am torn - I can still muster a lot of techno- | optimism when I think for example about possible benefits of | advanced AIs for humanity. But than I imagine the world where | the most advanced AIs are controlled by corporations like | Google and Facebook... I have a bad feeling about this. | | I am trying to find some reasonable middle ground between | becoming a luddite and just continuing like I do not see all | those unforeseen negative impacts produced by the genie that | was once called the IT revolution. | gitfan86 wrote: | You are right. Pride comes before a fall, and Zuck thinks he | is better than Cook, Musk, Bezos, by building the multiverse | he will restore his place as the greatest technologist of our | time | camdat wrote: | Do you not get sick of this being repeated constantly? | | Every year someone repeats that Facebooks doom is imminent, | and every year their revenue and user base gets larger and | larger | | When does this opinion just become pase? | cranesnakecode wrote: | They aren't going after the people who have realized over- | technicalized life is bad for humans. They're going after the | kids who grow up in it and will take until their 30s to | realize they've had depersonalization disorders their entire | lives. | Havoc wrote: | >this isn't something I think most people want. | | I think it is. Not the current crap hardware, but bit further | advanced it definitely has a place. | | The gamers are basically on board already, streamers would | benefit too and porn has a big chunk in VR already. | | Sharp headset that can render text clearly would be huge. | KennyBlanken wrote: | We can call them whatever we want to. Fuck them for trying to | take over both "meta" and "metaverse." This is them trying to | become _the_ VR world just by having _the right name_. | | I don't know anyone that calls "xfinity" anything but | "comcast." I'm pretty sure "xfinity" was them trying to get | away from their nickname "comcrap." | | Imagine if the world collectively said "no" and kept right on | calling them Facebook? | | They're going to run around slapping anyone who uses "meta" or | "metaverse" with C&D letters figuring nobody will have the | money to fight them in court. | | I'd chip in to the legal fund for whoever says "see you in | court" to Facebook. I bet a lot of people would. Maybe someone | like the EFF should set up a "meta defense" warchest. | I-M-S wrote: | That kinda happened to Alphabet - everybody still calls them | Google | bigdict wrote: | Or maybe they have nothing else in the portfolio to bet on? | darthvoldemort wrote: | Maybe I'm too old, but I don't know a single person with | Oculus, not even among my younger coworkers. | | I don't discount that it could be the next big thing, because | wtf do I know, but it feels very niche to me, and certainly not | something that can get the engagement like a phone can. And in | terms of money, Facebook itself is a printing press, I wonder | what the business model is for this? Selling games or | experiences? Billboards in an AR world? | y4mi wrote: | I got one. My honest opinion is that it's potential is | immense, but I wouldn't suggest anyone to get one atm. | | Professional headsets will likely become more widespread over | the coming years and I fully expect that most desk jobs will | replace their displays with a headset... But that's still at | least 10 yrs off, likely longer. A prerequisite would be that | it's not as stuffy/heavy to wear, but that's already | happening at a surprising rate. | | It also makes remote contacts (i.e. remote work, family calls | etc) very different, as oculus just added face tracking to | their newest headsets... So your avatars face mirrors your | real face. | | The presence you feel in these contexts is hard to explain | and has to be experienced imo. | JohnFen wrote: | That's my experience, too. I know a lot of people who are | very into tech, across the entire age range. I don't know a | single person who owns one of these. But I think they're | mostly used by the hardcore gamer crowd, and I only know a | couple of those (and neither have a VR headset). | cronix wrote: | > I wonder what the business model is for this | | Addicting people to living in a fake world where anything is | seemingly possible, and then exploiting it. Basically the | same M.O. as their other products, but on a "next level." | rad_gruchalski wrote: | > Addicting people to living in a fake world where anything | is seemingly possible, and then exploiting it. | | The sentence I was looking for. | MikusR wrote: | The only person with Oculus is Mark Zuckerber as he owns | Facebook that owns Oculus. Maybe you mean Quest or Rift? I | personally don't know anybody who owns an iPad. | ssully wrote: | I don't think this downplays Oculus, but they also announced | today that they are going to start scaling back Facebook | integration with Oculus and start allowing other login methods | besides Facebook. | | Unfortunately outside of Tweets, this is the best story I found | on it at the moment: https://www.ign.com/articles/oculus- | facebook-requirement-end... | RC_ITR wrote: | Keep in mind he used very specific working "personal facebook | account" and just announced a new company name 'Meta.' | | To me that points to a 'log in with Meta' option. | distrill wrote: | which is probably an improvement if they're kept totally | separate from facebook | txsoftwaredev wrote: | I'd imagine it's not that hard to tie a "Meta" user back | to a "Facebook" user. Seems like it's all just for PR. | 0x4d464d48 wrote: | Sounds like a Yudkowskyists wet dream to me. | | Anyone know if people there are heavily influenced by his work? | Kinrany wrote: | > Sounds like a Yudkowskyists wet dream to me. | | How so? Searching for "metaverse" on LW yields 9 results, | most of them are irrelevant. | 0x4d464d48 wrote: | I'm thinking more about how this seems like a template for | people to integrate their personal lives into an actual | simulation and give a justification for a 'friendly AI' to | determine what's best for us. | | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k3823vuarnmL5Pqin/quantum- | no... | | https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/coherent-extrapolated- | volition | rhcom2 wrote: | My kneejerk reaction is this will probably waste a lot of their | money without much traction. But I'm also happy about Facebook | wasting a bunch of their money... | whywhywhywhy wrote: | All depends if they can deliver on AR before anyone else. | | Gotta remember outside of Oculus, their entire product | portfolio exists on top of the platforms of their | competitors. This is their play to own the entire thing from | the foundation up and the resources they'll be willing to use | to accomplish that will be huge and really their only | competition is Apple because Google gave up. | Ancapistani wrote: | > All depends if they can deliver on AR before anyone else. | | Nope. It matters only if the gain wide adoption before | anyone else. If they do, they become the de facto owner of | that space. | | They definitely have the resources to do that. | aerovistae wrote: | For real. This is the least "incredibly scary" thing I can | think of. | iaml wrote: | My kneejerk reaction is that some projects with "meta" in the | name might get into legal troubles out of the blue. | ra7 wrote: | Don't like Facebook one bit, but Zuck is almost always spot on | with his bets. So yes, incredibly scary as it has a high | likelihood of succeeding. | mrkramer wrote: | >Don't like Facebook one bit, but Zuck is almost always spot | on with his bets. So yes, incredibly scary as it has a high | likelihood of succeeding. | | Instagram was growing like crazy, even faster than Facebook | in its early days so acquisition was no-brainer. Instagram | used Facebook's social graph so acquisition made even more | sense. | | On the other hand WhatsApp had hundreds millions users at the | time of acquisition and Larry Page was very close to | acquiring it before Zuck but Facebook offered more money | that's why it turned out to be one of the biggest | acquisitions in the history of Internet($19bn). WhatsApp's | huge userbase and rapid growth could've endangered Facebook | Messenger that Zuck was about to separate from main Facebook | app and make it standalone instant messaging Facebook app. | | So both Instagram and WhatsApp were no-brainer and made | perfect sense and Facebook had cash pile to do it so they did | it. | whitepaint wrote: | What?! | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266618 | | Unless you're an extremely successful businessman yourself, | calling those acquisitions no-brainers is just completely | dishonest. | mrkramer wrote: | In 1.5 years Instagram had 50 million monthly active | users[0]. Yea it was no-brainer considering other mobile | photo apps existed and Facebook and Twitter were also | doing photos. | | [0] https://techcrunch.com/wp- | content/uploads/2017/04/instagram-... | jimkleiber wrote: | Yea, watching some of the demo made me think of how deeply | involved people got with The Sims. A platform where people | could actually be their own Sim? | | Maybe Second Life and those didn't take off as much because | the technology wasn't yet there. | | That being said, I still don't want Zuckerberg to be the king | of it, but there are plenty of possibilities with high- | definition VR/AR tech. | adpirz wrote: | This discounts a lot of failures and products without real | success: | | - Facebook Apps | | - Facebook Home | | - Facebook Workplace | | - Facebook Portal | | - Facebook Essentials | | What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed | them. | | I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't | think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I | don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't | have a track record of building anything worthwhile outside | of their core offering (ie, the Facebook product). | mohanmcgeek wrote: | Also "Facebook platform" which Chamath ran to the ground. | matt123456789 wrote: | So what you're saying is, now would be a good time to be a | promising social AR/VR startup? | mig39 wrote: | Anyone remember the Facebook Phone? | tinktank wrote: | Meh. Many better companies have tried and failed. Good luck to | them but all I have for them is a _shrug_ | danso wrote: | I was curious what meta.com looked like before FB took control of | the domain. Recent snapshots aren't loading for me, but post-2015 | it looks like it was taken over by an AI company -- the page | titles include "Meta -- Science Discovered" [0] and "Meta -- AI | for Science". | | Prior to that, since around 2012 it was an unused Wordpress site | [1] that redirected to meta.compgu.com (which is now "tekman.cc", | a consulting firm or something. | | And its earliest owner (at least as captured by wayback) was a | California events company "Meta Productions: Producers of Meet, | Mix and Match. Promoting awareness through metamorphosis" [2] | | edit: out of curiosity, I just noticed that one of the most | famous domains that refused to sell out [3] -- steam.com -- is | now apparently for sale? | | [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160110141037/http://meta.com/ | | [1] | https://web.archive.org/web/20150228180854/http://meta.compg... | | [2] | https://web.archive.org/web/20081002050002/http://www.meta.c... | | https://web.archive.org/web/20100425061122/http://meta.com/ | | [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20161023041828/http://steam.com/ | modeless wrote: | There was an actual AR glasses company named Meta before this. | They failed a few years ago. I guess Facebook must have bought | the trademark from them. But they never owned meta.com I guess. | Their current site is https://www.metavision.com/ | renewiltord wrote: | Many of my friends from Meta (the AR guys) went to Oculus. | Zuck acquired Meta.com (the AI guys) like half a decade ago. | schleck8 wrote: | It's impressive how the logo on meta.com is not an SVG but a | low resolution PNG | minimaxir wrote: | Before now, https://meta.com redirected to | https://www.meta.org/ which is owned by the Chan Zuckerberg | Initiative; now, there's a banner saying it will be sunset next | March. | Nekorosu wrote: | I somehow feel culturally appropriated. | Ansil849 wrote: | In London, in the area around the London Eye, there is a tourist | trap that offers a very poor 'haunted house' type of attraction, | usually something having to do with zombies. As each iteration of | this tourist trap gains a reputation for being total rubbish and | gains one star reviews online, every few months the attraction | rebrands to another name. | antiterra wrote: | This doesn't sound quite right, what's one of the names? | | The London Dungeon is near the Eye and has been around since | the 70s, albeit in different forms and location. They moved | closer to the Eye due to rail station construction in 2013, I | believe? Down the street from the old London Dungeons location | is the London Bridge Experience, which generally gets better | reviews and doesn't appear to be owned by Merlin Entertainment. | I'd avoid both, but neither appear to match your description. | Ansil849 wrote: | No, I don't mean any of the flagship attractions like the | Dungeon. The one I'm thinking of is small one on the strip by | the Aquarium. | CodeGlitch wrote: | Takeaways in the UK also do this after the Foods Standards | Agency shuts them down. | edgriebel wrote: | Same thing happens with Chinese restaurants in the states. | New name, new sign out front, but oddly enough same fixtures, | same items on the menu, and same folks behind the counter. | gitfan86 wrote: | At least at that place everyone is in on the scam. Facebook | execs have to smile and say good idea to Mark, when all they | want to do is tell him that is stupid | thebean11 wrote: | Sounds like a pretty naive take, given how successful the | company has been under Mark.. | chestertn wrote: | It is so dumb it might work. | jazzyjackson wrote: | boooo | tomalpha wrote: | Is this a change of company name or is the Facebook | product/app/site also changing? | | (As an aside the GDPR popup still asks me about "Facebook" | cookies) | Snetry wrote: | I'm not exactly fond of Facebook but I think this could go in the | right direction of improving their image | davidw wrote: | If they really wanted to do something useful for the world, they | could eliminate comments on local media outlet stories. The | people there, as Obi-Wan Kenobi put it, are a "hive of scum and | villainy". | jstx1 wrote: | Since the linked page didn't really tell me anything, I had to go | their twitter for a summary: | | > Announcing @Meta -- the Facebook company's new name. Meta is | helping to build the metaverse, a place where we'll play and | connect in 3D. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection. | | > The names of the apps that we build--Facebook, Instagram, | Messenger and WhatsApp--will remain the same. | sjg007 wrote: | The Chan-zuckerberg foundation has a scientific paper search | engine called Meta as well. | BrokrnAlgorithm wrote: | I actually agree with the vision, like its clear that media | convergence will all kinda lead us into a common tech space, be | it AR / VR / 3D whatever. | | But I don't think it needs to be called metaverse. We should have | another name for it. Not to give "Meta" as a company the same | honor as google received for "googling". | verdverm wrote: | "merged reality" as the digital world merges onto IRL? | fullshark wrote: | Not sure I agree with the vision but i applaud any company | investing millions (billions?) in trying to shake up the | internet in 2021. | pseudobry wrote: | Looks like the future of the Internet as imagined by Vernor | Vinge's book "Rainbows End" (set in 2025, written in 2006) just | got a lot closer. | gotostatement wrote: | the picture for "responsible innovation" is so funny... they're | like "we're approved by this disapproving black woman!" | spoonjim wrote: | Should have called it "Verse." | mabub24 wrote: | So, cut through the brand/marketing-speak and this is just like | Alphabet, right? | Mockapapella wrote: | I would just like to throw my hat into the ring and say that I'm | super excited for the metaverse and can't wait to experience it | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | What an odd move; how on earth do they expect to defend that | trademark? | djbusby wrote: | Lawyers, guns and money. | samat wrote: | FAANG - MANGA | DethNinja wrote: | Any of the FAANG workers here please tell me why all the large | companies are trying to create metaverse? | | I've been playing MUDs, MMOs since their very beginnings and | literally metaverse doesn't interest me. So who is their target | audience that they can spend billions on this metaverse? | | And how metaverse will be different than Second Life? | | Give us some insider knowledge please. | basisword wrote: | >> I've been playing MUDs, MMOs since their very beginnings | | You're old :) I don't fully get it either. I don't understand | why kids want to watch concerts in Fortnite and spend loads of | money on in game items that only impact aesthetics but it seems | clear there's lots of opportunity there. The interest in NFT's, | crypto etc among younger people is massive too. Lots of | opportunity. What isn't clear is exactly what "the metaverse" | will look like. There are a lot of buzzwords being thrown | around in big tech companies rather than concrete long term | ideas but I think it'll figure itself out with time and | different ideas take shape and come together. | cranesnakecode wrote: | The metaverse isn't for us who've already spend 30+ years in tech | and realize what tech-obsession steals from you. | | It's for the kids who grow up addicted to it and don't realize | until their 30s that they've had depresonalization disorders | their entire lives. | | This will succeed with them. | theabsurdman wrote: | "That awkward moment when Zuck takes your company's name: | meta.inc" | https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1453790072701001728?s=... | thesquib wrote: | Na fa la na ma na ma ba pa to wo ha... | knowsuchagency wrote: | A name to signify what facebook has METAstasized into | lunch wrote: | Welp, tried atleast 7 times to watch this without a Facebook | account. Made it about 2 minutes each time before being | redirected to a login page. | vehemenz wrote: | Great. Now when I discuss metaphysics and metaethics, I have to | subconsciously suppress the visage of history's most mediocre | gazillionaire. | nerdwaller wrote: | I picture Facebook owning the metaverse close to the alternative | outcome to Ready Player One, if IOI ended up owning the Oasis. | | If you've not read it, it's an enjoyable read. Definitely skip | the movie, however. | czottmann wrote: | Still a terrible, terrible organisation that's detrimental to | societies and humankind as such. | coolspot wrote: | Twitter is 100 times more toxic than FB, but somehow everyone | is focused on FB. | | I guess someone powerful is annoyed. | Oddskar wrote: | Maybe you missed the part where FB undermined the US | election? | InitialLastName wrote: | FB is 10 times larger than Twitter, and is diversified across | a fairly large number of different platforms. | missedthecue wrote: | I agree. Twitter is a machine devised to draw people into | clapbacks, cheapshots, fights, spats, and arguments. It's | completely toxic. | | But journalists love Twitter. Every other account is a | journalist or media personality. So all the "social media | bad" articles implicate Facebook. | liaukovv wrote: | My mom isnt on twatter | buitreVirtual wrote: | Whataboutism is not a good defense for FB. All social media | companies profiting from hate and addiction are evil. | floren wrote: | Journalists live their lives on Twitter. | fullshark wrote: | And consistently reveal their biases, one of the greatest | social platforms for that reason as you can see the sausage | get made in real time. | goatlover wrote: | Is it FB or social media and big tech in general? I'm confused | by the laser focus on FB all of a sudden. | coolso wrote: | > I'm confused by the laser focus on FB all of a sudden. | | You have to look at in the context of the 2016 election. Once | it was discovered that the winning team utilized Facebook in | a way the losing team had no concept of (or more likely they | simply didn't use said concept as effectively), Facebook has | been singled out and targeted by most media outlets for being | evil and in need of strict government regulations, to protect | the children and democracy and society, among other things. | | Yes, FB had negative press prior. But this was the clear | turning point in press coverage and governmental oversight | and it was like a light switch. | | I can't say I'm disappointed in the slightest about that, or | that they're wrong. I despise Facebook. But I do find the | reasoning behind this all a very disturbing extension of the | "cancel culture" we're in today. The establishment doesn't | like not having a monopoly on the spread of information, and | it is fighting back. | elwell wrote: | But replace every instance of "Facebook" with "the | Internet" in your message. Why not cancel the Internet as a | whole? | czottmann wrote: | Your reasons are valid but way too U.S.-centric for me. I | look at FB (the global company) in a global context and am | shocked and disgusted at their "profits yes, responsibility | no thanks" approach in, say, most non-English speaking | countries around the World. | distrill wrote: | I don't think it's particularly sudden, although I am also | confused by the laser focus. | goatlover wrote: | Before a few weeks ago, it was all social media and big | tech that was getting a bad rap for ruining society, but | now it's almost exclusively FB. | goatlover wrote: | I forgot to add ruining the "fabric" of society, as the | media and politicians love to say about whatever X is | doing that. I have no idea what the "fabric" of society | is supposed to be. But I'm pretty sure it was already | "ruined" by tv, rock & roll and video games. | jeromegv wrote: | FB being the biggest and the one most likely to shape our | society, they deserve the spotlight. | viro wrote: | Or congress could do its job and not expect a private | company to regulate "truth". | czottmann wrote: | If you think the laser focus happened "all of a sudden" I | believe you haven't been paying enough attention. ;) I think | outside of the U.S. there has been more concern about FB's | awful track record for years by now. | | But to answer your quest: For me it's their wish to be the | biggest dog on Earth, aiming to be "everyone's internet" | (especially in poorer, non-western nations) while at the same | time wilfully ignoring the responsibilities that come with | it. | | Most other players are also bad, I guess, but so far not many | of them are able to do that. much. damage. to society while | putting profits first no matter the cost, while trying to | game the system no matter the cost, while scorching the Earth | to stave off perceived competition, while assuming they're | above the law. | | I'm certain that if Twitter, Telegram, Baidu, VK et al are | having their own skeletons in the closet but they're not in | the spotlight as much (yet). | | (Edited for grammar.) | viro wrote: | Its people that are the problem, they are just using Facebook | as a scapegoat. No matter what they do, they(FB) will get | attacked by 50% of the country ... Remove GOP voices | spreading crazy shit .. They are suddenly suppressing | political voices(censorship). Leave the content up and | suddenly Facebook is responsible for domestic terrorist | attacks. Honestly Facebook has literally been begging | congress to regulate them. The problem isn't Facebook its | that congress refuses to do it job and now Americans expect a | private company to regulate speech for nearly every country | FB operates in. | goatlover wrote: | I agree. The modern internet is just a reflection of how | people want to use the internet, with all the good and bad | that comes with that. I guess it's too bad the utopian | dreams of the 90s didn't pan out, but what did people | really expect once society moved online? | salt-thrower wrote: | I disagree to a certain extent. The business model of | adtech + social media creates an especially toxic product | that brings out the worst in people, and puts vitriolic | content in front of more eyeballs because that's what | drives engagement. | | If FB's business model were significantly different and | didn't depend on maximizing eyeballs-on-screens time, and | didn't depend on selling the ability to manipulate people's | emotions at scale, the product might be less toxic. | | In summary, I think it's a cop-out to just say "humans | bad." Yes, but the systems we create and participate in can | and do influence human behavior in different ways. Facebook | wouldn't be quite so toxic if there wasn't money to be made | from the toxicity. | txsoftwaredev wrote: | While we are at it can we remove Antifa and BLM from | facebook? | czottmann wrote: | As a European, I look at FB in a global context, i.e. less | U.S.-centric, and am shocked and disgusted for their | "profits yes, responsibility no thanks" approach in, say, | non-English speaking countries around the World. | viro wrote: | Why isn't that the governments in those countries | responsibility? Why should Facebook even be allowed to | enforce Western culture(values) onto non-western | countries. | kgeist wrote: | Here in Russia our local social networks are more popular | than FB but I'd say they're way more toxic than FB. Some | years ago it was very easy to find child porn with a few | clicks. At least there's some conversation in the US | going on the harmful effects of social networks; here no | one cares. People in countries where FB is the only | option simply don't have anything to compare it to; they | can't know it's a pretty decent social network, compared | to some. | scaswqdqw wrote: | Hahaha! Opened the about page and Zuckerberg's face is right on | the top :D This doesn't look like a good rebranding! Young people | don't want Zuckerberg's social networks. They need something new. | encryptluks2 wrote: | Good luck ever having them remove the data you share. | tdonia wrote: | visiting a friend at a facebook office a few years ago, we walked | by a small room near the bar cordoned off with caution tape. "oh, | they're replacing the TV again, people keep using the oculus and | smashing it by accident, has happened a few times" -- i can't | help but picture that small, broken room today. #meta | kingkawn wrote: | This transition has been hyped up since I was in college in the | early 2000s at least, where I remember attending presentations on | Internet 2.0 and other such buzzwords. Mass market does not want | to wear the goggles or do some elaborate version of Second Life. | If anything people want less screen-time rather than an even more | isolating intrusive version of it. | Traster wrote: | I really hope this transparent dodge to avoid regulators doesn't | work out. The first time Zuck says "Oh, don't subpoena me, | subpoena this human shield" Congress needs to turn around and say | no. | specialp wrote: | The choice of "Meta" is very interesting. Chan-Zuckerberg started | a project called "Meta" to increase the dissemination of science. | This was a project going on for a while now [1] | | What does this mean for that? | | https://sociable.co/science/aaron-swartz-chan-zuckerberg-met... | avsbst wrote: | They started the process of shuttering it ~6 months ago. My | partner worked there for ~3 years. Despite meeting all their | metrics for user growth and activity it was a decision that | came out of the blue. Guess we know why though? Can't have it | conflicting with the brand. | | I remember that two weeks before the decision came down, and | she and her team got blindsided, she told me how a bioeng | researcher emailed her telling her that without their tool they | never would've found the connections and research needed to | solve the problem they were working on. Not sure why they | didn't just rebrand the tool and team, but it's probably just a | blip to the facebook execs. | pazimzadeh wrote: | Looks like it's still up? https://www.meta.org/ | avsbst wrote: | 11:45ish they will put a banner up saying it's going to be | shutdown end of May next year | | Unfortunately archive.org is capturing the SVG logo from | the site not the actual site so I can't prove the current | state of the website but you can look at the last valid | capture from 10/22: https://web.archive.org/web/20211022094 | 334/https://www.meta.... | avsbst wrote: | Right on cue: "Meta.org will sunset March 31, 2022: Meta | will be supported through March 31, 2022. In the lead up, | we will work with you in transitioning to alternative | open services. Read more." | mrkramer wrote: | Welcome to Metaverse where we have virtual sex! Enjoy your stay. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGMa1Q-45ow | kitd wrote: | Meta or Facebook makes no difference. Nothing is going to change | with this company until they are forced to publish their | algorithms. | astlouis44 wrote: | Sorry Zuckerberg, but the metaverse will NOT be a walled garden, | tied to a social media company. Is the the internet, and more | specifically, THE WEB itself as an immersive, distributed spatial | ecosystem of worlds. | | The metaverse needs to be interoperable above all else, and this | is unachievable with the equivalent of native, vendor locked apps | controlled by an entity. The web already does this, as every site | is governed by standards like HTML and HTTP which are consistent | everywhere, on every device. | | WebGPU, WebXR, WebAssembly, and WebTransport are the key | foundational technologies to this future online space. Our | startup Wonder is assembling tools to empower developers and non- | technical creators alike to build and deploy immersive websites | using native game engines like Unreal Engine, that allow for | immersive virtual storefronts, hangout spaces for chatting with | friends and family, collaboration with coworkers, or jump into a | game or interactive experience like a concert. | | Why the web, you might ask? Because no owns it. There's no 30% | cut to give Apple or Facebook for accessing it. | | If you're interested in learning more or registering your intent | ahead of our general availability launch, you can join our | Discord here: | | https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8 | tracyhenry wrote: | > WebGPU, WebXR, WebAssembly, and WebTransport are the key | foundational technologies to this future online space. | | This sounds like a narrow view focusing on software. Hardware | is apparently the bottleneck here. A 3D game on a website is at | best semi-immersive. You need headsets/AR glasses to get full | immersion. | micromacrofoot wrote: | > the metaverse will NOT be a walled garden, tied to a social | media company | | > If you're interested in learning more or registering your | intent ahead of our general availability launch, you can join | our Discord here | | This is award-worthy satire | [deleted] | throw10920 wrote: | > the metaverse will NOT be a walled garden, tied to a social | media company | | > links to a Discord server | renewiltord wrote: | This is fucking awesome. I am super bullish on the metaverse. | Besides, you don't bet against the Zuck. | losvedir wrote: | I suspect we will be awash in critical comments shortly, so let | me just say I'm kind of excited about this. | | Don't forget that the internet was originally a military project. | I'm excited to see a huge corporation going all in on VR and AR. | It has the potential to be really interesting technology, and the | research in displays, sensors, and other hardware and software | won't go to waste. | | If "Meta" is the new ARPANET, I wonder what the new CERN and web | will be. | mempko wrote: | Google is the AT&T of the internet. Meta is the AT&T of the | metaverse. In modern times, there is no CERN. Just AT&T. | neither_color wrote: | Im excited for this too, Meta seems to be his passion project | that he wants to be remembered for, and if he sticks to his | word of opening up Oculus for easier development and letting | you sign in without FB this will really take off. The comments | here remind me of slashdot comments saying the iPod sucked | because it had less storage than a zen nano and was overpriced, | or the iphone would flop because business users needed a | keyboard. | IceWreck wrote: | > If "Meta" is the new ARPANET, I wonder what the new CERN and | web will be. | | Lets not get ahead of ourselves. This so called "Metaverse" | will be another proprietary project that may or may not gain | traction unless they open it up for federation. And facebook is | all about walled gardens so they won't. | | And if they do, how do we know that 10 years later they wont | shutter up their instance, cut off the federated parts to | monopolize their own (presumably biggest) instance. | vineyardmike wrote: | > And facebook is all about walled gardens so they won't. | | They had tons of Open APIs and stuff until people abused it | and the CEO had to go to congress, so idk if the blame is | solely on the company. | mechanical_bear wrote: | Except ARPANET and CERN conducted their research for a larger | audience, much of it making its way to the public. FB/Meta | research is largely proprietary. | grae_QED wrote: | The whole "Metaverse" thing reads like E. M. Forster's, _The | Machine Stops_. | | Now we'll never need to leave our houses. All thanks to Facebo... | Uh, Meta. | daviding wrote: | If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook | to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. | | Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open | it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad | revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than | they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could | see this flubbing out hard otherwise. | | I'm personally keen on the AR/VR space (surrounded by headsets | here), but the early adopters are so polarized about | Facebook/Oculus's involvement. I don't know if a rebrand (is this | really that?) would be enough for the tech crowd to forget and | move on. | gscott wrote: | Welcome to Ready Player One | AlexandrB wrote: | Except it's run by Nolan Sorrento from day one. | tibbydudeza wrote: | So true. | CerealFounder wrote: | Dont worry. Unless they acquire it, they aint building it. | api wrote: | Virtual reality was always dystopian. It's what happens when we | don't have a frontier and turn inward to computer aided fantasy | and isolation. | | One of the best dystopian explanations for the Fermi paradox is | that intelligences eventually figure out how to immerse | themselves in high fidelity fantasy worlds and basically sit | around and masturbate until some black swan event like a planet | killer astroid or a gamma ray burst destroys them. Maybe it's | easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is | to build a starship. | | There seem to be three possible futures on offer today: | | (1) A Brave New World with AR, VR, social media dopamine loops, | ARGs and conspiracy LARPs, cheap drugs, and sex robots where | the meaning of life is to withdraw into a fantasy world and | masturbate until you die. This offers the comfort of rewards | without challenges. | | (2) Reactionary movements against modernity itself, proposing | that we instead re-embrace feudalism or some kind of | totalitarianism where the state or some Ubermensch gives us | purpose. This includes authoritarian fundamentalist religious | movements, the alt-right, neoreaction, etc. This offers the | comfort of the "devil we know" and futures that resemble our | past. | | (3) SpaceX Starship and the next frontier, a future where we | embrace difficult adventures in the real world with high risk | but high payoff. This offers the least comfort but a lot of | growth and experience. | | Choose wisely. | tsimionescu wrote: | There are also leftist visions of a future world where we | actually address the core problems plaguing our world and | give workers democratic control over their own work, instead | of leaving that up to wage slave owners who view all of us as | human resources. | api wrote: | I didn't include that because I don't see a workable, | viable proposal. My intention was to list futures that I | can see actually happening. | | I'm not against what you describe nor do I think it's | mutually exclusive with option (3), but so far IMHO | leftists have offered no solution to some of the inherent | problems of this vision. | | The biggest one is how to make democracy work. | | How do you do good work under a democratic model? The | Soviet bureaucratic model isn't truly democratic and as | every engineer knows nothing good ever comes from a | committee. How can democratic governance produce efficient, | polished, practical, cost effective outputs? | | How do you avoid perverse incentives, runaway complexity, | endless bikeshedding, or stagnation due to "vetocracy" like | what exists with California housing? How do you prevent the | seemingly natural formation of an oligarchy? | | So far I don't think democracy has ever existed except at | tribal scale (below Dunbar's Number). All former and | current attempts are oligarchies with a degree of | democratic veto power or a democratic facade. | | I think this problem is closely isomorphic or maybe even | identical to the open problem of efficient and secure fully | decentralized computing and global consensus in distributed | systems without hidden centralization or brute force | approaches like Bitcoin proof of work. (... and Bitcoin PoW | is in reality an oligarchy if you look at the largest pools | ...) | tsimionescu wrote: | > as every engineer knows nothing good ever comes from a | committee. | | That's a common adage, yet some of our most used | technologies are created or maintained by committees - | the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though | it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, | Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects. | | Regarding your point about democracy vs oligarchy, this | is to some extent a spectrum. There are few truly | democratic (one man one vote) organizations, that is | quite true. But I still have much more of a say on how my | city is run than my company. | | And there are some examples of huge co-ops with a great | degree of success. The biggest is the Mondragon | corporation in Spain. They're by no means an example of a | perfect democracy, but again - workers clearly have much | more of a say there than in most similarly sized corps. | | Also, some of the countries on Earth with the biggest | quality of life happen to be some of the most | democratically run as well - Switzerland perhaps being | the most striking example. | | The sheer amount of effort put by those in power in | making sure those below them don't get any ounce of power | also shows that they see the potential risk to their | status if some of these things happen - thinking here | specifically of the huge union busting industry, and of | efforts to discredit any leftist candidate that makes it | onto the world stage (like the disgusting accusations of | anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn, or the insinuations | of being anti-black against Bernie Sanders). | Karrot_Kream wrote: | > That's a common adage, yet some of our most used | technologies are created or maintained by committees - | the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though | it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, | Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects. | | I think "created or maintained by committees" here is not | precise enough. In most of these cases, especially in the | case of net technologies, ECMAScript, and C++, a | committee came into place only after independent vendors | began to blaze the trail on their own. The committee's | job here was to take existing implementations and distill | them into a standard. This is important because | individual entities often have almost no incentive to | cooperate otherwise. | | However, there are examples of initiatives created top- | down by committee that ended up becoming too complicated | to achieve actual usage. The OSI Model vs the TCP/IP | model [1] is a good example of this failure. | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suit | e#Compar... | tsimionescu wrote: | It's definitely true that committees can produce terrible | results, like the OSI stack. But the committees that I | listed didn't just distill implementations into a | standard, they also design new features for those | projects and actively steer experimentation done by | vendors (especially true for the C++ committee). | int_19h wrote: | Soviet democracy was never a good faith attempt. I mean, | Bolsheviks have forcibly disbanded an elected Constituent | Assembly after it deliberated for 13 whole hours (during | which it became clear that they don't have majority | support there). But it doesn't mean that the fundamental | principles of council democracy as they _advertised_ it | don 't work. | | I would suggest looking at libertarian left instead. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism, in particular. | joshmarlow wrote: | > So far I don't think democracy has ever existed except | at tribal scale (below Dunbar's Number). All former and | current attempts are oligarchies with a degree of | democratic veto power or a democratic facade. | | I've not read the book, but according to this interview | [0] something closer to half of all pre-modern societies | had something resembling democracies (the rest being the | autocrats we tend to expect from history). | | Some were a bit different - for instance, in many cases | elected representatives would have a fixed mandate on | issues that they had the authority to make decisions on. | Anything broader meant going back to the constituents to | ask for an extension of power. | | I'm hopeful that human society has already solved some of | the problems of democracy - modern society has just | glossed over those solutions with not-invented-here | syndrome. | | I'm also hopeful that technologies built top of | cryptocurrencies (like smart contracts and DAOs) will | enable new ways for humans to coordinate. | | Mechanisms like quadratic voting and funding appear | genuinely new to me - and particularly promising! | | [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGkhWUureVg | mdoms wrote: | > Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at | least give it a chance. | | I have yet to see a single federated system that has | demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe | that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's | usual playbook, which is proven. | rektide wrote: | The world wide web used to have a host of proprietary servers | for it, but those for the most part got eaten by Apache | (which latter renamed to Apache Http Server). And then a host | of new open-source http servers and libraries. | | Sometimes what's good for markets & the world doesn't _have_ | to be owned & commercial. Sometimes the availability of | resources such as info-resources like httpd can beget | enormous commercial success while themselves not having much | commercial success. | | A Tim O'Reilly saying comes to mind: create more value than | you capture. In some cases, without setting free the core | idea & letting people run wild, you'll never stand a chance | of capturing any value what-so-ever. | Krasnol wrote: | > If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want | Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. | | Wouldn't that be fitting because the word comes from a bad sci- | fi pulp story? | dropnerd wrote: | every hn top thread about fb says "we don't want fb to do this" | or "fb is evil" | | whether you agree or disagree, the more interesting question is | the details behind what Meta could build | | the answer is not federation. federation doesn't scale. | rdrey wrote: | Could you flesh out the "federation doesn't scale" argument a | bit? | dropnerd wrote: | https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ | | > So while it's nice that I'm able to host my own email, | that's also the reason why my email isn't end-to-end | encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, | WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to | over a billion users with a single software update. So long | as federation means stasis while centralization means | movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble | existing in a software climate that demands movement as it | does today. | hdjjhhvvhga wrote: | > I'm personally keen on the AR/VR space (surrounded by | headsets here), but the early adopters are so polarized about | Facebook/Oculus's involvement. | | There is no polarization at all. I don't know a single person | who is happy about being forced to use FB in order to be able | to use the equipment they have bought. | ssully wrote: | Our version of a persistent virtual space was never going to be | like fiction. There will be 3 or more competing metaverses, | none of which have any interoperability. | m4rtink wrote: | That can actually end up more healthy overall & lead to some | competition. | | Having just one metaverse everyone uses seamed like the worst | thing in Ready Player One - because then one entity can | control it and for their rules and morals on all | participants. | | Much harder to do that with multiple competing incompatible | metaverses. | ryandrake wrote: | Or hundreds of incompatible little ones. If VR really takes | off "We need to add chat to our app" will become "We need to | add our own metaverse to our app." | [deleted] | mensetmanusman wrote: | Someone will own it, every option involves human owners... | Tepix wrote: | Facebook is investing 10 billion dollars into the metaverse | this year alone and will increase this amount in the future. | | They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the | web and still end up with one of the most popular hubs. | | If people who value their privacy can setup their own hubs, i'm | pretty much OK with Facebook speeding up the advancement of | AR/VR technology for the next several years using their | advertisement dollars. | micromacrofoot wrote: | >They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like | the web | | Thanks I needed the laugh. | jephdo wrote: | Fwiw that is the stated intention: | | > I think the most important piece here is that the virtual | goods and digital economy that's going to get built out, | that that can be interoperable. It's not just about you | build an app or an experience that can work across our | headset or someone else's, I think it's really important | that basically if you have your avatar and your digital | clothes and your digital tools and the experiences around | that -- I think being able to take that to other | experiences that other people build, whether it's on a | platform that we're building or not, is going to be really | foundational and will unlock a lot of value if that's a | thing that we can do. | | https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark- | zuckerbe... | int_19h wrote: | Talk is cheap. When did Facebook ever care about interop? | micromacrofoot wrote: | they talk about everything like this, it's vague pr speak | that sounds open, but it never is... remember when they | were trying to tell developing countries that "free | basics" was the internet? | | if they don't have a marketplace that wraps what "other | people build" I'll eat my hat | carbonguy wrote: | > If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want | Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. | | I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be | owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter. | | > Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should | open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad | revenue) so it has a chance to grow? | | I mean, that would be nice for users, but: | | a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally* able to give up | ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, | basically | | b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal | to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta | user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one | of them an Oculus headset for free? | | And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is | basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this | particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their | power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed). | | * in the sense of "this is the fundamental basis and goal of | the company," not in a U.S.-founding-document sense | alasdair_ wrote: | >b) How much would it cost to just send every one of them an | Oculus headset for free? | | $300 * 3 billion people, so $900 Billion give or take which | coincidentally is right around the market cap of the entire | company. | swyx wrote: | retail price != manufacturing price, so say just 2-300 bil | Tenoke wrote: | >How much would it cost to just send every one of them an | Oculus headset for free? | | 20-50 times what they earn per user. | carbonguy wrote: | I doubt it's THAT high a multiple - in 2020 they earned | just over $32 per user [1] and an Oculus Quest 2 retails | for $299; one assumes the manufacturing cost is lower, | meaning the multiple is likely 9x or less. | | Of course, the essence of your point is true: Facebook | doesn't make as much per year per user on average as a | headset costs. | | [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks- | average... | Tenoke wrote: | This is revenue and not profit and I've seen a lot of | articles claiming that they are almost definitely selling | headsets at a cost already[0]. Point stands either way | for giving them free and selling at a cost is just a | lesser version of that at any rate. | | 0. | https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/oculus- | will..., | uuddlrlr wrote: | >I don't think Facebook is constitutionally able to give up | ad revenue gains | | This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die. | | Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is | dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have | to they do it because they can. | | Edit: clarify | throwawaycuriou wrote: | I also blinked at that. But then took it to mean | constitutionally in a pure sense - whether they can keep a | strength of belief enough to follow through. Unrelated to | 'The Constitution' from a US citizen's point of view. | Although now I'm pondering just how misplaced and powerful | our reverence of that cobbled together document is. | carbonguy wrote: | You are correct, that is the sense that I meant it. I'll | edit my comment to clarify. | uuddlrlr wrote: | Thanks for clarifying! The constitution is pretty far | from fiduciary duty legally, so I apologize for not | interpreting it more charitably. | | (In general the maximize profit meme does need to die | tho) | MandieD wrote: | It's basically a peace treaty. There are things about it | that I think are incredibly counterproductive to | democracy (and they were _designed_ to be so!), but I | shudder at the thought of rolling the dice on scrapping | or heavily re-writing it. | wyre wrote: | They have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder | profits. See Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. | dragonwriter wrote: | No they don't, except maybe in Michigan ( _Dodge v. Ford_ | is a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from 1919, applying | Michigan state law; as your own article states: "In the | 1950s and 1960s, states rejected Dodge repeatedly", so | assuming that _Dodge v. Ford_ represents anything other | than a quirk of Michigan law [and potentially an outdated | one even there] is...unfounded on the evidence you have | provided.) | mattkrause wrote: | _Dodge v. Ford_ was basically a perfect storm of saying | just the wrong amount. | | To summarize the case, Ford was sitting on a huge amount | of cash. Some shareholders, in particular the Dodge | brothers, wanted it paid out as dividends. Ford said no, | and specifically: | | "My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the | benefits of this industrial system to the greatest | possible number, to help them build up their lives and | their homes" | | Had he said less, or even nothing, that would have been | fine. Management is entitled to make whatever _business- | related_ decisions they see fit (the "business | judgement" rule). If the Dodges disagree with those | decisions, they can sell their shares and reinvest the | money elsewhere. | | Had Ford said more "...and we think doing so will grow | the market for our cars", "help us retain our skilled and | motivated workforce" or something else vaguely related to | success of Ford Motor Company, that also would have been | fine. | | Unfortunately, what Ford said fell into a gap where it | was clear that what he was doing was _not_ a business | decision; he was using the shareholders ' money for his | own personal ends, charitable though they may be. | _Shlensky v. Wrigley_ is an interesting comparison. The | Cubs refused to have night baseball games due to | some...idiosyncratic beliefs about the "true nature" of | the sport. This reduced their potential profits, but was | nevertheless okay because chasing after the "purists" OR | going for mass-market appeal are both reasonable business | decisions. | | (This is not my argument; it's made in this article: | https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1384/) | likpok wrote: | Later caselaw (note that that case was from 1919) gives | directors widespread latitude to decide what "benefiting | the corporation" means. | | The second paragraph gives two such cases: AP Smith | Manufacturing Co v. Barlow and Shlensky v. Wrigley. | cma wrote: | This actually just makes it worse if (plausible) Zuck is | a sadist. | mannerheim wrote: | They have a legal obligation to maximise shareholder | value, but what that entails courts will generally leave | up to the discretion of the company's executives. In | fact, the very first paragraph says precisely that: | | > At the same time, the case affirmed the business | judgment rule | | What is the business judgement rule? | | > The business judgment rule is a case law-derived | doctrine in corporations law that courts defer to the | business judgment of corporate executives. | | In other words, if the CEO of a company says that he did | something because e.g. he believed it was better for the | long-term health of the company, the court will generally | take his word for it, barring evidence of deliberate | malfeasance. | | What one cannot do is as Ford did, which was to | deliberately try and hurt other shareholders. | wyre wrote: | Thanks! I understand it now. | Frondo wrote: | The very article you cited disagrees! You said they have | "an obligation to maximize shareholder profits" while the | linked article says they have to "operate in the | interests of the shareholders." Those are two very | different things! | | Hunt around for just a few minutes on the google search, | "do corporations have a legal obligation to maximize | share value," and you'll see that what you said is the | myth that gets repeated -- this one link probably | summarizes the argument against the myth in the most | neutral way: | | https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u- | s-co... | anonporridge wrote: | The problem is that the "maximize profit" meme is VERY fit | in the evolutionary world of memes. | | Those organizations and people that adopt the meme become | more powerful and choke out all those entities that don't. | | You can't just choose not to pursue profits at any cost if | there are ANY competing entities out there that choose to | do so. | mattkrause wrote: | Indeed! It's not even really true: I did some digging in | this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674 | | The relevant legal standard is "Don't abuse the company for | your own ends", not "you must do everything to get as much | money as quickly as possible, consequences be damned!" | AlexandrB wrote: | It's especially dubious in Facebook's case because Mark | Zuckerberg controls the majority of voting shares. If he | wanted to run the company straight into the ground I doubt | anyone could stop him. | threatofrain wrote: | I don't think you can sell shares to the public and then | deliberately screw over your shareholders. If Zuckerberg | acted terribly then he may be exposed to liability. | munk-a wrote: | That's a question of malicious intent - if he intended to | directly cause damage to specific shareholders than yea - | they'd have a case. General idiocy isn't going to fall | into that category though - shareholders all voluntarily | bought their shares. | FormerBandmate wrote: | Mark Zuckerberg could not make his salary $800 billion, | or donate the entire company to charity. That's what that | means, nothing about business decisions | alasdair_ wrote: | >Mark Zuckerberg could not make his salary $800 billion | | This would be an interesting test case. The limits on | what he can or cannot do are remarkably ill-defined. | nradov wrote: | Mark Zuckerberg couldn't donate Facebook the corporation | to charity, but he absolutely could donate all of his | personal Facebook shares to charity. If he did that then | the charity would have a controlling stake. | dnautics wrote: | The "fiduciary duty meme" is exactly what GP did _not_ mean | as per their disclaimer. Constitutionally in this sense | means "as a result of it's constitutive makeup", i.e., | it's culture, hierarchy, incentive structures, employees, | managers etc. | sundarurfriend wrote: | > The "fiduciary duty meme" is exactly what GP did not | mean as per their disclaimer | | which was added thanks to your parent comment. | Impossible wrote: | For b) assuming each Quest costs Meta around $400, and they | are sending to 1B users, $400B, so about half their market | cap and 10x yearly revenue :). | wlesieutre wrote: | They sell the Quest for $200, do you really think they're | losing another $200 on each unit? | adventured wrote: | > How much would it cost to just send every one of them an | Oculus headset for free? | | $200+ billion. They can't afford it. They couldn't get the | manufacturing for it, either. | carbonguy wrote: | > They couldn't get the manufacturing for it, either. | | A very good point. I think the financing would be less of | an issue, honestly; $200 billion a lot of cash up front, | but spread out over five or ten years it's well within | their FCF if they wanted to allocate it that way. | | EDIT: As another comment pointed out, FB might also be able | to convince advertisers to subsidize some (or all) of the | costs of "free" headsets for the masses, if they wanted to | try this scheme. | jrochkind1 wrote: | At this point I'm confident I don't want there to be "a | metaverse" at all, because under our current social and | cultural systems, I am confident it will be very very bad no | matter who owns it. | bsenftner wrote: | This is the sad reality. Our society is simply not | structured to protect the end-users of any such service in | any meaningful way. Our political and ethical leaders are | simply too embedded with selfish interests. The Metaverse | will be a fleece the customer engine, with the rate and | manner it is developing. | FormerBandmate wrote: | The internet exists under our current systems and, although | there are parts of it that suck, it's dope | jrochkind1 wrote: | So I might have a less optimistic analysis of the | plus/minus of the internet, but more importantly, I think | it was _created_ under very different circumstances, in | it 's birth-years, by actors with different interests, | values, and goals -- than the "metaverse" will be. The | metaverse will be much worse. | baby wrote: | You mean it was created by the army? | elil17 wrote: | As to point B, they don't even need to send one to all users | - just the ones they think will be cash cows for advertisers. | Everyone with a income and behavior pattern that makes them a | super valuable ad demographic (say, 5% or even 1% of users) | gets one for free while the rest of us pay our way on. | carbonguy wrote: | This is an extremely interesting idea - I wonder if they'll | start some kind of "invitation beta" for this fraction of | users you describe. | thrwyoilarticle wrote: | My outsider understanding of advertising is that the most | valuable marks are the richest. So the PR might kill that. | ben_w wrote: | > How much would it cost to just send every one of them an | Oculus headset for free? | | About 0.6-1 trillion dollars, give or take. | cbtacy wrote: | > How much would it cost to just send every one of them an | Oculus headset for free? | | That's the wrong question. | | The right question is "how many FB users would accept a free | headset that advertisers paid for in exchange for access to | your data and exclusive rights to place ads in front of you?" | mandevil wrote: | Counterpoint: the HTC First (aka the Facebook Phone) was | >$1 USD less than a month after it debuted, and still was a | gigantic flop. Facebook Portal has sold ~1 million units. | Oculus has sold ~8 million units or so (all numbers based | on quick googling, might be wrong). So people reject | Facebook hardware all the time, and they don't actually | have that much in the way of hits in the HW space. | FormerBandmate wrote: | It was $1 on a two-year contract. It was also a bad | phone. That really doesn't say much | Apocryphon wrote: | It says that they're lacking in the hardware department. | kroltan wrote: | No, that question is wrong, because that answer rounds up | to 100%. | | Maybe a vocal minority like us HN-folk, but I don't think | that by ourselves we really matter in terms of numbers. | cbtacy wrote: | Exactly. You could assume that it's likely that something | like 2.75B (out of the est 2.89B) FB users would happily | wear (free) physical spyware in this scenario. | srveale wrote: | We can answer this by looking at how many facebook users | are okay (implicitly) with using facebook in exchange for | access to their data and exclusive rights to place ads | right in front of them. The answer is 100% | FormerBandmate wrote: | I would highly doubt 100% of Facebook users would want to | use virtual reality. Out of those who would tho, it would | be pretty high, I doubt many Facebook users would buy HP | Reverbs after that. Not worth the absurd cost tho | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | There's a world of difference between sharing | cat/dinner/vacation photos with friends and family and | living in some kind of fantasy animated cartoon world. | | The social dynamics are completely different. Second Life | showed that very clearly. | | The three biggest things in Second Life were fantasy | consumerism, fantasy entrepreneurship, and fantasy sex. | | Unless FB is getting into those markets it's going to | find the metaverse a tough sell. | | Not least because the whole point of fantasy is that _it | 's not really you._ So that immediately conflicts with | FB's only-real-identities dogma. | jeffwask wrote: | > If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want | Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. | | One step closer to real life Shadowrun. | neuronexmachina wrote: | Or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which coined the term | "metaverse." | JohnFen wrote: | I genuinely wonder why Facebook thinks that using that term | is a smart thing, considering that Snow Crash is a pretty | heavily dystopian novel where everything is owned and run | by corrupt, powerful, and abusive corporations. | | It really seems like they're tipping their hand here. | int_19h wrote: | Snow Crash is literally the first thing that came to my | mind when I saw FB talking about "metaverse". | | And not only it is a dystopia, but the Big Bad in the | story is literally the guy who owns the physical | metaverse infrastructure: | | > "I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, | toadying pseudojournalist who "interviews" him. He's | sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than | normal. "All television going out to consumers throughout | the world goes through me. Most of the information | transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through | my networks. The Metaverse -- the entire Street -- exists | by virtue of a network that I own and control. | | He's also pretty open about his methods: | | > "Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No | such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can | never get that last one-tenth of one percent." ... | "Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up | with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they | busted up Ma Bell?" "Just barely." The reporter is a | woman in her twenties. "You know what it was, right?" | "Voice communications monopoly." "Right. They were in the | same business as me. The information business. Moving | phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, | one at a time. Government busted them up--at the same | time when I was starting cable TV franchises in thirty | states. Haw! Can you believe that? It's like if they | figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the | Model T and the airplane were being introduced." | thesquib wrote: | And had a virus that transmitted to humans via the | metaverse. Very apt for Facebook to choose this actually | micromacrofoot wrote: | If what they're doing now is any indication, I don't think | they'll succeed with it anyway. They've got almost zero | credibility with anyone under 30. | | Their existing prototypes are _outrageously_ embarrassing. I 'm | the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office | because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make | it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, | awkward, and embarrassingly goofy. At least The Office has some | endearing quality (sorry for the weird comparison). | | I'm not sure if it's Mark Zuckerberg's influence or what... but | everything about Facebook lacks some sort of jour de vive. | Like, their idea of "making work fun" is stuff like... an | astoundingly cringe-worth video about healthcare open- | enrollment? This kind of thing dumbfounds me | https://vimeo.com/639318528... and I don't even consider myself | a cynical person. | | All of this feels only a few degrees removed from Jonestown. | lnanek2 wrote: | Are you sure you aren't living in a techie bubble? Oculus | consistently tops the best selling headsets list at amazon | cnet, PCMag, etc.. The only non-developers I know with | headsets all have Oculus or more rarely PSVR. Maybe they | aren't cutting edge, but everyday people can't afford cutting | edge anyway. | | They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the | promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the | public at large has no knowledge of that. All the public | knows is that it's decent hardware for a super low price | compared to the competitors, it doesn't require a PC, and | it's what most of their friends with a headset are using. | | Can't really call having the most popular headset not | succeeding, even if it is probably subsidized with their | massive ads money making machine. | arduinomancer wrote: | > They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30 | | I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true. | | < 30 is the _largest_ proportion of facebook users | | https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook- | global-u... | | Even putting Facebook aside Oculus is dominating the VR space | due to cheap hardware, which I would bet is a ton of < 30 | people. | | https://www.statista.com/statistics/265018/proportion-of- | dir... | | My point here is consumers don't _actually_ care about | company morals, despite the prevailing narrative. | micromacrofoot wrote: | This isn't a statement about morals. I agree that no one | cares about those. | | It's a statement that no one thinks "oh cool facebook" | about literally anything they say or do. Their greatest | successes in terms of social capital over the last decade | have involved buying other companies. | | Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems while everyone _uses_ | Facebook to some extent... no one _likes_ it. | edgyquant wrote: | Nobody likes anything. People hate Google, Reddit, etc | but they still use it because it provides utility. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | I like Google and Reddit, a lot. I think a lot of people | do. My biggest beef with Google is just that their search | engine seems to get worse with every new release, with | more pages and pages of ads and a clusterf of rando | content until I get to actual search results. But I still | really like their service. | | Similarly, I like Reddit a lot. There are a ton of shitty | subreddits but so what, I just don't go there. | | On the other hand, I hate Facebook. I wish I could find | an easy way to stay connected to my existing friend | network without the amount of vitriol I feel toward how | my feed is organized. | echelon wrote: | We could rename metaverse. Maybe derive prefixes from | chemistry? | | Meta, ortho, para. | | Paraverse. Orthoverse. | | We can't keep using metaverse now. | tomp wrote: | Internetverse | | Neverse for short. | anttiharju wrote: | Subverse? Universe within a universe, a sub universe. | dotnet00 wrote: | You should try googling that one, preferably not at work, | it's taken. | shaunxcode wrote: | I am fond of holoverse. Holonic not holographic. | Apocryphon wrote: | Holaverse | jl6 wrote: | Time for your holonic irrigation. | Kinrany wrote: | Interverse? | joshenberg wrote: | That's what I wonder. Early VR adopters/technologists hate what | happened to Oculus and there aren't a lot of newcomers to that | market. I don't think cheaper headsets are going to fix that in | the near future so I don't know whom they're targeting. Seems | risky to lean into something where the experts already think | you screwed up. | b9a2cab5 wrote: | Quest 2 is outselling past VR headsets by leaps and bounds | according to news reports. The decision to make a standalone | headset and build their own app platform was absolutely the | right one from a growth standpoint, even if the hardcore VR | consumers aren't biting. Early VR adopters are going to buy | the next best product and have no loyalty. | thow-01187 wrote: | > The decision to make a standalone headset and build their | own app platform was absolutely the right one | | Not sure whether the appeal of Quest 2 is in the | standalone-ness and the app platform - or whether it's | about being around half the price of comparable headsets | before it, perhaps even being sold at a loss | CoolGuySteve wrote: | I wouldn't be surprised if the next gen Switch has a VR | headset accessory and blows the entire market away the same | way the iPod and NES did to their predecessors. | | The required parts to make a 60Hz 1080p headset are | entering the $100 cell phone market and that segment of | components are more or less what Nintendo traditionally | uses in its handhelds. | | Nintendo also has a long history of "blue ocean" products | that tweak existing technologies to make them more | mainstream. | ChildOfChaos wrote: | Very unlikely we will see it from Nintendo, Nintendo have | lacked innovation for ages, they just sell cutesy games | to kids. They cornered the 'disney' market, don't expect | them to do anything great from a tech perspective | elliekelly wrote: | I would imagine the Switch gyro controller must be pretty | close to the tech needed to make VR games? | ddragon wrote: | In my experience with a rift s, even though the oculus | touch also has gyroscopes and accelerometers, they only | help for a few seconds at most when the controllers leave | the camera. Those sensors are just not accurate enough (I | know little about the details of the sensors, but | accelerometers are tracking the second derivative of the | position, so any small error will accumulate fast when | you want the latter), and you don't want to have your | hand all over the place when you're trying to interact | with things in VR, which is why, at least for now, you | need to measure position directly for it to work, such as | the camera/LED devices that are most popular with VR | headsets and controllers (and even stuff like the PS Move | controller). | meheleventyone wrote: | https://www.nintendo.com/products/detail/labo-vr-kit/ | | In a similar vein to phone based VR that we've had since | Google Cardboard. Modern headsets fuse gyro, | accelerometer and camera feature tracking together to | stably track the position of the headset and | hands/controllers. | CoolGuySteve wrote: | You're talking about the company that over the past 15 | years introduced consoles with motion controls, touch | screens, autostereoscopic 3D, proximity-based data | sharing, wireless HDMI streaming, and seamless docking | support? | | That one? That company lacks innovation? | desiarnezjr wrote: | Their biggest achievement is that they made all those | things so cheap and accessible. It really reinforces that | newer, innovative or edgier tech (ie: Kinect) isn't | always the right approach. | Tepix wrote: | 60Hz 1080p isn't good enough for VR. Bulky hardware that | can be built for $100 isn't good enough for mass | adoption. There's a reason why Meta is investing so | heavily. | CoolGuySteve wrote: | People have been arguing that Nintendo hardware doesn't | deliver high enough fidelity ever since the Wii but that | hasn't stopped most of their products from being | incredibly successful. | | The idea that it's refresh rate or resolution that's | keeping VR from becoming mainstream seems ridiculous when | even a relatively friendly platform like PSVR ships with | this bundle of cables: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikip | edia/commons/thumb/3/3d/So... | | Occulus seems to realize this but their software side | still needs work. | sangnoir wrote: | Nintendo offsets lackluster hardware with exceptional | games. The end result is Nintendo rarely becomes the | outright leader in any hardware segment. I agree they are | successful, but I can't recall when they last "blew away | the market" | specialp wrote: | 5 out of the top 10 consoles sold of all time are | Nintendo. They are the outright leader and always have | been in handhelds and the Switch has been the best | selling console for the past 2 years | int_19h wrote: | It's not an either-or. It definitely needs to be wireless | to truly take off, but resolution and refresh rate | requirements are also required to provide an enjoyable | experience. | ben_w wrote: | 60Hz: I agree with you | | 1080p: I disagree, that can either be good or bad | depending on the content. E.g. original iPhone was only | 320x480, but Apple made it feel _good_. | advrs wrote: | Have you tried VR at 1080p? I understand your point (one | number does not adequately represent "quality of | experience") but for VR, 1080p is simply not enough due | to the distance to the display (pixels are very visible). | int_19h wrote: | FWIW, I own HP Reverb G2 (2160x2160 per eye - the highest | I could find when I got it), and it's still not quite | enough. 4K per eye might be what it takes. | eli wrote: | Oculus sold 2 of every 3 VR headsets last quarter. If there's | a lesson here, it's that you can't extrapolate mass market | appeal from what early adopters think. | spideymans wrote: | VR and AR is still in its early adoption phase. It's too | early to make any predictions about which VR/AR platforms | or products will ultimately have mass market appeal. As an | analogy, none of the biggest smartphone manufactures in | 2004 really ended up mattering in the long run. | txsoftwaredev wrote: | I wonder how many are still actively being used. I bought | the Oculus quest early on. Spent a bunch on different | games, hooked it up and played PC VR games. Used it nearly | daily for a few months but have since given it away. Partly | due to the current limitations of VR tech (it's heavy, | screen resolution is still very low, need a large space to | really play it) as well as now having to use a Facebook | account. | Karawebnetwork wrote: | I would argue that early adopters/technologists of VR are | comparable to PC gamers and Quest adopters are comparable to | console gamers. | | Both have a purpose, both are subsets of the same | demographic... but both vote very differently with their | wallets. | | Personally, I don't mind FB taking over the casual market. | There are still alternatives and the technology will advance | faster with such a big company behind it. | | That being said, I won't be touching the Metaverse unless I | can't avoid it. | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/faceboo... | | The BuzzFeed journalist shared a video on her Twitter | | https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos | | In the video, Facebook HR staff hide behind "the metaverse". | | https://player.vimeo.com/video/639318528 (Ctrl+U, Ctrl+F mp4) | | https://archive.org/download/facebook_open_enrollment_2022/F... | | What the journalists are not discussing is whether and how "the | metaverse" will be used to surveil people and support | advertising. No discussion of whether/how it embodies "privacy | by design". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | There's a huge distinction that needs to be made between AR and | VR. AR in public is a menace, for the same reason everyone not | wearing one hated google glass. | randomsearch wrote: | Facebook can't even beat TikTok. They'r not going to win at | building an alternate reality. | swalsh wrote: | There needs to be many metaverses, and NFT's should be able to | be shared between them. It's dangerous to think about the | prospect of a major company like Facebook (Or a DAO for that | matter) locking up the entire universe. | jimkleiber wrote: | Agreed, I'm pro multimetaverse. I'm also pro democratic- | representation metaverse. | vineyardmike wrote: | Why NFT? Why can't we just "import jpeg" instead of "link | NFT"? | joshmarlow wrote: | The neat thing about using NFTs is that you can represent | the ownership on a public blockchain and that gives you | some nice possibilities: | | 1) storing virtual property rights on a public ledger means | that it can be shared among different 'metaverses', which | provides friction against vendor lock-in; it limits | specific vendors (like Facebook) to only providing UIs to | underlying property | | 2) a single vendor going out of business doesn't impact | your virtual property; Blizzard could shutdown WOW and you | would loose all of your loot, but if it's on a public | ledger then your loot survives | | I think something like this is the only really plausible | approach to building an open and interoperable metaverse | (it's also the most compelling application of NFTs IMHO). | cma wrote: | Changing one bit on a texture or shifting a vertex by one | bit changes the hash. NFT is useless for implementing IP | without some other legal enforcement. | joshmarlow wrote: | > NFT is useless for implementing IP without some other | legal enforcement. | | From a real-world legal perspective, you're totally | right. | | But as a means of acquiring an object in one virtual | environment and maintaining access to it in others, it | seems like a pretty good mechanism. | charcircuit wrote: | >Blizzard could shutdown WOW and you would loose all of | your loot, but if it's on a public ledger then your loot | survives | | Your loot is worthless without the game. Why would you | still want it? | mindcandy wrote: | There's a whole lot of BS in NFTs at the moment. But, | there is one thing they are good for: Everyone is crying | out for a decentralized, interoperable metaverse that is | not walled-off and owned by corporations. OK. So, how | does anything of monetary value interoperate in that | scenario? | | So, you can make your metaverse service, I can make mine, | and we can both interoperate by supporting each other's | APIs. But, some of our services cost us significant money | to provide and have market value to our users. We can | make with work out for everyone by recognizing ownership | of certain NFTs as decentralized verification that a | given user has rights to things of value in our services. | | We don't have a lot of examples of this so far because | corporations are incentivized to wall you off from their | competition and the public has not the means to securely | control and verify value outside of the blessings of the | corporations. But, now we can do it without them. | joshmarlow wrote: | mindcandy's comment sums it up well, but I'll just add | that the loot is worthless without the game _now_ - that | 's the point of vendor lockin. | | But if items and their properties are stored in a public- | by-default way, then _other_ games can incorporate those | items in it (without Blizzard 's permission). So if you | get some loot in one game, it can become available in | others. | | The neat idea is that application data from different | sources become _composable by default_. | | Frankly, I'm not much of a gamer - but an open ledger is | the only basis that I can see to avoid vendor lock-in for | the increasingly nuanced virtual environments that we are | building. | fl0wenol wrote: | All of this assumes that other games will "play by the | rules", in the sense that they won't let you use an item | that you don't own. If I can see the resource (and in all | current models, the content of the signed media/document | an NFT authorizes is public) then I can use myself if my | client is so configured. Most games give value to loot by | forced scarcity, NFTs don't implicitly enable this at | all. | joshmarlow wrote: | I think that's right locally - you can of course make | your local software ignore the ownership of nfts. But if | the crypto/ledger doesn't line up, then other better | behaved clients can (and arguably have an incentive to) | just ignore what your client says. That could mean (in a | gaming context) that the rest of the network just ignores | your progress in the game (ie, new loot acquisitions). | | It's the same thing with Bitcoin node software - any node | could broadcast a transaction that contains more BTC than | the address actually has. But the crypto/ledger won't add | up, so the network just wouldn't accept it. | | In fact, flooding the networks with forgeries would | devalue the network (and the operator's investment in the | project). | | Games built on a public ledger benefit from playing by | the rules - doing otherwise would devalue their | investment in building on the ledger. | [deleted] | swalsh wrote: | NFT's let you own digital assets. That means people can | make a real living building them. | stale2002 wrote: | People don't have to pay for VR avatars when playing | VRChat. | | Forced monetization of all that, is a bad thing, not a | good thing. | [deleted] | RC_ITR wrote: | Because no one has ever made a living designing graphics | before NFTs? | vorpalhex wrote: | NFTs let you own a link to a digital asset... which isn't | very useful for an infinitely reproducible asset. With a | central entity (eg Meta) there's no need for distributed | ownership. | uuddlrlr wrote: | NFTs let you own autographs of digital assets. | | Which is cool. If it weren't for the energy use. | lambdadmitry wrote: | Which is exactly the argument big studios used to argue | for DRM. NFT is (quite literally) DRM, rebranded and | ostensibly accessible to the masses, but with all the | caveats amplified accordingly and with a huge energy cost | attached. | micromacrofoot wrote: | Unlike now, where no one makes a living building anything | digitally. | | Sorry if your post was sarcasm, NFTs have hit some kind | of milestone where I can't tell the difference between | the jokes and sincere posts. | bduerst wrote: | I thought the market has repeatedly shown there isn't much | demand for persistent virtual worlds? | Tiktaalik wrote: | What you mean to tell me folks didn't love Playstation Home? | ARandomerDude wrote: | Don't question it, just drink your Kool-Aid. | Kye wrote: | VRChat seems to have landed on something close to the right | balance of whatever it takes to make it happen. It's | apparently easy enough for someone to make a whole meme world | for an event in the news in time for it to be relevant: | https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/11/9/21557029/four- | season... | | The video in the initial tweet is up to 2.1 million views: ht | tps://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560?... | | VRChat or someone building on their proof of concept is | likely to make it happen. It won't be Facebook with its VR | Slack. | echelon wrote: | Facebook will try to buy VRChat. | astlouis44 wrote: | 1000% this, it's only a matter of time. | bsanr wrote: | If only. Arguably, part of their secret sauce is their | restrictiveness of new users. You have to spend quite a bit | of time in-game to gain the ability to even be seen by a | lot of other users, and more still to be able to upload | avatars and worlds. I'd planned on opening an art gallery | space on the platform this summer, only to find that I | didn't have enough friends to reach the "trust" level | necessary to upload worlds. It's probably a good thing for | the quality of the community itself, but anathema to growth | or casual use. | | (And as for me, I'm stuck trying to figure out how to hack | up a WebXR experience with, ah, limited programming skills. | Until then, it should be at https://vrchat.com/home/launch? | worldId=wrld_559152a2-44d3-44... , but it's inaccessible | without adding me as a friend and accepting an invitation | to an instance I spin up. So, practically useless. And | support is no help in terms of what, exactly, I'd need to | do to raise my trust level.) | stonecraftwolf wrote: | Paying for a VRChat+ subscription comes with an increased | trust level, so possibly that. | Kye wrote: | I didn't know they launched a premium thing. I wondered | how they planned to pay for it. | ajmurmann wrote: | "I've come to the insight that there really aren't any bad | ideas at all. Only ideas at the wrong time.[not quite | verbatim]" - Marc Andreesen | bmhin wrote: | > the market has repeatedly shown there isn't much demand for | persistent virtual worlds | | I don't know if you have a more narrow view of this idea or | specifically mean VR/AR, but that just sounds like what | massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as Ultima | Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft are. I think Roblox | is even a broader use case, though I am fairly unfamiliar | with that. | | MMOs have been very viable from both a business and user | stand point and have been a fairly big thing for going on a | quarter century or so at this point. Whether these branch | into more of the Second Life non-game social space or into | being largely AR/VR driven is pretty up in the air, but it's | not some sci-fi concept really. | tsimionescu wrote: | MMOs live or die based on constant new content and even new | mechanics, not persistent worlds. | | There are some niche products with stable worlds, but those | are a minority of a minority. | debaserab2 wrote: | > MMOs have been very viable from both a business | | Really? Everything that's not named World of Warcraft seems | to die out, usually in less than a year. It's a genre | that's been a notorious recipe for failure for most | companies not named Blizzard. | tazjin wrote: | I don't know what the situation is now that Blizzard is | no longer really Blizzard, but back in the early years of | WoW this was - in large part - because almost every other | MMO that launched just plain _sucked_. | | Blizzard was to the gaming industry what people often | believe Apple is to the hardware industry. They were the | only ones that invested in polished UI, coherent UX, etc. | and it was so incredibly noticeable. | | I'm sure a lot of this was pressure to get something out | quickly to make a "WoW killer", which is what gaming | media branded basically every MMO that launched after | WoW. | bduerst wrote: | MMORPGs are not really persistent worlds though. | | They're an environment crafted to scratch a dopamine itch | by providing instant gratification for work, with a social | layer attached on top. I write this as someone who used to | play MUDs back before MMORPGs even became a thing. | | Unless Facebook is planning on releasing their own WoW | branded as the metaverse, I don't see how they're the same. | angelzen wrote: | Who do you want to own it? | tlrobinson wrote: | > I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. | | I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising | company to be building "the metaverse". | | I hope all the other players in this space band together and | form an open, federated metaverse. | | It's one use-case I can kind of see benefiting from blockchain | protocols: enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse, | by recording transfers of avatars and assets between the | "metaworlds" making up the metaverse ("digital identity | scarcity" is still an unsolved problem though, I think) | charcircuit wrote: | >enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse | | Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free. | jrochkind1 wrote: | What are the motivations of the other players? | | > enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse | | Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the | "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this | space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data | are instead motivated by selling users things they don't | need. | danShumway wrote: | > enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse | | I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide | common lack of imagination. We start building digital | realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more | crappy like the regular one? | | Nobody really _likes_ scarcity other than speculators and | collectors. We shouldn 't be trying to invent more of it, we | shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital | abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate | the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital | systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the | complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every | time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, | that's a step in the right direction. | | It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, | that so many people in the tech industry are | incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't | artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic | existing systems. | | We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and | then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we | just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend | speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether | somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or | share it online. | cpeterso wrote: | > I hope all the other players in this space band together | and form an open, federated metaverse. | | Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely | each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is | experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with | Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/ | [deleted] | mrweasel wrote: | While I'm not interested in VR at all, and only feel like | should be used in limited areas, I agree on the issue of | Facebook owning "the metaverse". Many of the early adopters are | already of Facebook and/or dislike the company, meaning that | there are few people to help push the products. | stephenhuey wrote: | 75 minutes into his keynote, he said: | | "...but connecting people was always much bigger...it was | always clear that the dream was to feel present with the people | we care about...here we are in 2021, and our devices are still | designed around apps, not people. The experiences we're allowed | to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever, and | high taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the | way that we are meant to use technology. The Metaverse gives us | an opportunity to change that, if we build it well. But it's | going to take all of us...Together, we can create a more open | platform." | | When he says this, I hear between the lines that the platform | will be open to all contributors as long as the "open platform" | belongs to Meta. How does he not realize that by seeking to | dominate and own this "open platform" instead of working | outside of his company to build a truly open platform with | others is actually open? | | Does he not read enough sci fi or literature in general to know | that by having so much power and not seeking to let go a bit | more, he opens himself up to the same risks and temptations | faced by myriad dystopian villains? | rl3 wrote: | > _It 's like a bad sci-fi pulp story._ | | That feeling when you don't have a single original idea, and | unironically view Black Mirror episodes as a blueprint. | hackernudes wrote: | I think there is at least a chance that they handle Meta | differently - at 1:28:24 in the keynote[1] Zuck says "...that | means that, over time, you won't need to use Facebook to use | our other services". | | [1] | https://www.facebook.com/facebookrealitylabs/videos/56153569... | RC_ITR wrote: | Yeah, he means you'll need a "Meta" account. | jfmc wrote: | A Facebook-controlled metaverse, rising gas prices... it is | only a matter of time that humans ends up being used as | batteries. | cultofmetatron wrote: | ready player one's whole premise was that is was too | expensive to travel and everyone volunteers to live out their | lives in a vr metaverse... | glogla wrote: | Fun fact, in Matrix (if that's what you're referring to) | people were originally enslaved by the machines to provide | compute capacity of their brains. The battery part came | later, when someone (studio executives?) jumped in, and said | that's too smart and people wouldn't get it so it was changed | to batteries. | lovecg wrote: | That makes way more sense too. Human brains are pretty | complex devices, it's easy to believe the machines didn't | figure out how to make something comparable and opted for | human farming instead. On the other hand humans make very | crappy batteries, how does that science even work. | anotherman554 wrote: | I figure the machines must be draining some sort of | psychic energy from humans. While there's no such thing | as psychic energy as far as we know, that's because all | knowledge of it has been left out of the matrix. | sundarurfriend wrote: | MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. | But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them | liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to | the living - | | NEO _(politely)_ : Excuse me, please. | | MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo? | | NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a | certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is | the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly | imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting | thermal energy into electricity _decreases_ as you run | the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort | of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to | burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now | you're telling me that their food is _the bodies of the | dead, fed to the living?_ Haven 't you ever heard of the | laws of thermodynamics? | | MORPHEUS: Where did _you_ hear about the laws of | thermodynamics, Neo? | | NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high | school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics! | | MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo? | | (Pause.) | | NEO: ...in the Matrix. | | MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies. | | (Pause.) | | NEO _(in a small voice)_ : Could I please have a real | physics textbook? | | MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe | doesn't run on math. | | - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/64/Harry-Potter- | and-the... | VyperCard wrote: | Oh. An interesting philosophical approach | dstroot wrote: | Meta already has enough compute capacity. They have | enslaved humans to mine their wallets. | gdilla wrote: | It's their metaverse. A walled garden metaverse. So maybe that | isn't really a metaverse, but what they want you to think about | a metaverse. | dmix wrote: | Zuckerberg repeatedly tried to say it will be an open | standard with interop like HTTP links. Zero indication what | that means. | | If I was FB I would have announced at least a protocol or | some technical foundation, even if it's purely preview. | 16bytes wrote: | I don't understand what exactly this rename/rebrand entails. | | Is it restructuring FB like Google became Alphabet? So, under the | "Meta" umbrella, you have all of the individual FB assets, and | www.facebook.com just becomes one of those assets? | | Some outlets are reporting that, yes, it's something like this: | | https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1049813246/facebook-new-name-... | | This landing page, however, does a terrible job of explaining | this. There's this "news" page: | | https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-me... | | But even that is similarly lacking in details. Looking at this | page you'd think Oculus is now Meta for how much they emphasize | VR/AR and literally nothing about FB and the other apps. | | What weird, mixed messaging. | fairity wrote: | I get that it's popular to shit on Facebook and its CEO, but a | lot of you seem to be dismissing the metaverse vision out of | hand. | | It seems obvious to me that humans will eventually spend a | significant amount of time in VR. The question is not if but | when. | | As tech advances, eventually, VR environments will feel close to | identical to IRL environments. And, when that happens, there is | no reason to bear the commute costs of travelling to IRL | environments. | smuemd wrote: | Not to happy with this. The name of my daughter (8yo) is Meta. | :-/ | sergiotapia wrote: | Logo looks like a ballsack. | | https://i.imgur.com/iucCEuc.png | sillysaurusx wrote: | I know most of us aren't looking forward to a future with | Facebook in control, but ask yourself: How many times has | Zuckerberg been wrong about tech trends? | | I can't think of a single time. He's gotten every major | investment correct. | | This metaverse idea will either be the first major Facebook | misstep, or it's a future we should embrace sooner than later. | You stand to win big if you're an early adopter on any given | platform, and perhaps it's time to start thinking about this as a | new iOS. | | That said, I hope I'm mistaken. | [deleted] | imwm wrote: | meta.com - used to be a Chan-Zuckerberg initiative to discover | scientific papers. Now it's Facebook's corporate home. Hmm. | arduinomancer wrote: | On one hand I'm not a big fan of Facebook | | But it is pretty amazing to have so much money and focus being | thrown behind VR/AR | | There are a ton of problems that need to be solved in that space: | graphics/geometry algorithms, image processing, hardware, | interface/IO, neural stuff | paulgb wrote: | I worry that the Facebook association is actually _holding | back_ VR. I know a few people who have expressed interest in an | Oculus headset, but for the Facebook association. But the | amount of capital Facebook is throwing after it surely makes | other vendors hesitant to compete. | Klonoar wrote: | This is more or less how I feel about it - I refuse to touch | anything VR-related that is associated with Facebook as an | entity. | reaperducer wrote: | _There are a ton of problems that need to be solved in that | space: graphics /geometry algorithms, image processing, | hardware, interface/IO,_ | | ...advertising, spying, tracking, tabulating, monetizing, | engaging, profiting, controlling... | zalequin wrote: | Fuck Uckerberg and anything that is related to thus human waste | parenthesis wrote: | It makes a lot more sense for Facebook to change the name of the | parent company -- given the actual and potential proportion of | their revenues from Instagram and WhatsApp -- than it did for | Google to change to Alphabet given that Alphabet is still mostly | Google in terms of making money. | | However, the timing makes it look like a ploy to distract from | current controversies (although I don't think it is a ploy), and | the name Meta is going to look really stupid if their whole | Metaverse thing doesn't work out. | shoto_io wrote: | Let's have a "Meta" discussion about this rebrand. | fossuser wrote: | You can watch the connect talk here: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKPNJ8sOU_M&t=867s | | It'll be interesting to watch this space and it's cool that | someone is working on building this out - I hope they leverage | some of the staying power of the web by leaning on protocols for | a true platform, but that'll be hard to do. | | There's a ton of interesting potential if lightweight AR hardware | works out. I think it'll be pretty interesting. | mikl wrote: | Thanks to Facebook, the word meta will soon sound like a curse. | Words like "metadata" will start sounding very sinister. | | Anything else you can do to ruin our day, Meta? | xyst wrote: | Basically name squatting off the popular use of "meta" to | describe a self referential event/action. | | Also FB lately has become synonymous with causing significant | harm to democracy across multiple continents. A corporate name | change is a cheap way to deceive people in the future. When they | (future generations) try to lookup the history of "Meta", they | won't immediately see the crap that FB produced in the dark ages. | | It's the equivalent of a restaurant or business changing their | DBA because of shitty online reviews. Or car dealerships | advertising "new management" | jimkleiber wrote: | > Basically name squatting off the popular use of "meta" to | describe a self referential event/action. | | Ironically, this cannibalizing of the word "meta" makes me feel | even more strongly in favor of breaking up the company. | uptown wrote: | Sure complicates the questions around what metadata they keep | about a person. | karaterobot wrote: | This is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of not | using Meta. In retrospect, a lot of people wish they'd done this | with Facebook, but of course it's too late now. Don't make any | mistakes you know you'll regret. | butterfi wrote: | Hilariously, when you follow the above link, the site doesn't | honor the back button. Figures. | heydenberk wrote: | Some of the largest companies in the world are named after | fruits, misspelled big numbers and rainforests, but even with | that set of comparands, this seems a bit silly. | mrgleeco wrote: | Wonder if gTLD is a thing here. If they already not on it, seems | like a good (quarter million) squat. | busymom0 wrote: | I tried to watch the keynote video 3 times and after a few | seconds, it would show me a login popup. I haven't had a FB | account for over 7 years. Why can't they just let me watch what | they are without an account? | jimkleiber wrote: | I wonder how this will help their case against antitrust. At | first blush, it seems to me that this might hurt them more than | help them. Announcing one's desire to move to a higher level, to | transcend, gives me the impression they want to be even more of a | monopoly, not less. | | Or maybe it has the sense of "we don't care about your national | laws, we will do as we please"--a bold challenge to nation-state | regulation. | desktopninja wrote: | Job recruiters to prospect: Lets take a look at your meta data | busymom0 wrote: | Weird that meta.com doesn't redirect to fb. | | It redirects to meta DOT org which is: | | > Meta, a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative project, is a biomedical | research discovery tool that analyzes & connects millions of | scientific outputs to give you a comprehensive view into science. | You can easily explore research and follow developments by | searching for specific terms or creating customizable feeds of | papers and preprints. | | EDIT: Fixed automatically now. | forgotpwd16 wrote: | Clean your DNS cache. It now redirects to | https://about.facebook.com/meta. | busymom0 wrote: | Yep, just tried now and it fixed itself. | aorth wrote: | I can't even watch the keynote without logging in. I don't have a | Facebook account... ummmmm. | mempko wrote: | Meta and the metaverse looks like a huge attack on Apple. In a | metaverse world, iPhones don't make any sense. Those that own the | platform will make all the money. Apple owned a very lucrative | App platform that would go away if FB is successful. I'm | wondering how Apple will respond. | filmgirlcw wrote: | I want off this ride. | zitterbewegung wrote: | This sounds like googles strategy to dominate social networking | with Wave... | otterley wrote: | On keyboards without a Meta chord key, Emacs and Readline users | can hit Escape first instead. Sounds like a good plan to me. ;-) | _bramses wrote: | MAANG just doesn't roll off the tongue as well | silentsea90 wrote: | I dislike FB, but I think it is very cool that Zuck has the guts | to radically change the company's identity around a vision that | may be arbitrarily far (see: Oculus/Magic Leap's promise vs | progress). Most big companies are petrified to make changes that | kill the dying golden goose. | bellyfullofbac wrote: | I'm not sure how the structure is, if Facebook, Instagram, | WhatsApp and Oculus are separate companies owned by the holding | company also named "Facebook". | | I'm pretty sure the websites/apps will keep their names, just a | design will change, e.g. if you load Instagram, the splash | screen says currently "Instagram, from Facebook", and it'll be | "... from Meta" soon enough. | gillytech wrote: | Hopefully this does irreversible damage to Facebook and they | have to sell off chunks of their monopoly to survive. | Grakel wrote: | God, look at the comments. "I can't wait to (describes VR | gaming.)" The misunderstanding of technology across the | population is so profound it's dumbfounding. | sushsjsuauahab wrote: | While I wish them all the best, this name in my opinion only is a | bit cringe. | | Carmack and Abrash have been dreaming about the "metaverse" for | 30 years now, but I would rather view computers as tools instead | of viewing them as things that control our perception of | existence. | alvis wrote: | Meta? Does it matter? | tyronehed wrote: | Classic ploy: squat on an existing word with the implication that | anytime someone describes something as "meta", Facebook can act | like they were saying "Meta". | cnst wrote: | Not April 1 yet? | MengerSponge wrote: | Meta is as anodyne as Altria. | heavyset_go wrote: | I just saw some ads about Meta. They are beyond cringey. Facebook | and Zuckerberg are out of touch. | ppjim wrote: | Someone predicted 10 years ago in HN that this would happen. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561810 | pronlover723 wrote: | Facebook is the worst place to have a metaverse. The metaverse to | me is where you get your freak on. Just look at VRChat or Second | Life, it's full of people in highly sexualized outfits doing | sexual things. I don't want Facebook (or any company) associating | my sexual persona with a real name account. | [deleted] | [deleted] | [deleted] | wolverine876 wrote: | Meta-comment: Corporate press releases are poor OPs; it is only | the facts and spin they want to present, rather than good | journalism which covers more facts, other analysis, multiple | points of view. | | It's similar to the reason that Wikipedia doesn't allow primary | sources (last I knew), only secondary ones. The primary source | has a strong bias and can say anything. | scaswqdqw wrote: | So, regular people have troubles trademarking very complex names | and they give Zuckerberg trademarks for any commonly used word. | What a great equality of treatment! | [deleted] | mycentstoo wrote: | Metabook? Instameta? WhatsMeta? | Communitivity wrote: | Every FAANG (or MAAAN) company has invested into the Metaverse. | Let's all remember they didn't invent it though, so I hope they | don't gain complete control. | | I'm all for it if it advances VR technology and they don't have | full control. If the Oculus situation is any indication, Meta | will be making a play for VR ad dominance, as will Google. | NotChina wrote: | So Zucks email will be data@meta.com? | jhallenworld wrote: | The new logo almost looks like the Space:1999 Meta | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFf5uavxYGQ | twalla wrote: | It's almost like Zuck saw all the ads in Ready Player One and | read about all negative shit in Snow Crash and went "yes, I'd | like that" | 7373737373 wrote: | If it's gonna be an ad-based business model, we might end up | here, HYPER-REALITY: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs | freediver wrote: | Does anyone actually enjoy the VR/AR experiences in a profound | way? | toomuchtodo wrote: | Dystopian Ready Player One. | smilespray wrote: | "Oh my God, it's full of ads!" | jamestimmins wrote: | Fairly certain that's just Ready Player One | [deleted] | [deleted] | kaladin-jasnah wrote: | It's not. In the story (the book), the company that runs the | metaverse (Gregarious Systems) is portrayed as a "benevolent" | company that somewhat respects its users and acts in the best | interest of people (you may be thinking of the intentions of | IOI and Nolan Sorrento, the adverserial company that sound | like our Facebook). | | Uh, there's also an unfounded claim in the story that the | metaverse software (the OASIS) is open-source, but the author | only mentions it once and this claim isn't exactly supported | by the rest of the story (at least to me). | pinewurst wrote: | While Gregarious is somewhat benevolent, the described | world of RP1 in general is highly dystopian. | goatlover wrote: | One could argue that the benevolent company was giving | people an excuse to ignore the problems in the real world. | Didn't the main character gain the option to delete | Gregarious Systems if he deemed it was best for the world? | jliptzin wrote: | Why can't they just say we want to change the company name to | distance ourselves from the increasingly toxic brand that is | Facebook. Yet another dishonest, cringe, and nauseating | announcement from Facebook. | [deleted] | Belphemur wrote: | Lots of PR Bullsh*t here: | | > Connection is evolving and so are we. > The metaverse is the | next evolution of social connection. Our company's vision is to | help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to | reflect our commitment to this future. | | In other words, nothing will change, just the name. | malloreon wrote: | I wonder if facebook employees really think they paper over the | harm they do each day by renaming their company. | | if you call it something else does it still hurt people? | hacknews20 wrote: | Read my comment about this before: the only (best) way to fix | this company is to go private and have as part of that a new | executive team. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23453963 | cedricgle wrote: | I guess no more project will dare to use _meta_ in their name. | They will fear either a copyright lawsuit or a fall in SEO. | lxe wrote: | Just like that one time Netflix split into Qwikster... good times | blunte wrote: | How long until they begin to sue any other company with "meta" in | its name (even pre-existing ones)? It will happen. | dmix wrote: | The longer FB video made me wish I was on Youtube. They don't | even do sharing basic content well yet. | legohead wrote: | Everyone keeps saying metaverse, but meta makes me think of | metadata, which is about the worst name they could have chosen. | | "Are you worried about FB storing all your data? Okay, lets | rename to a word that is about scooping up all relevant data." | schleck8 wrote: | The entire Wikipedia article is already updated haha | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta,_Inc. | danijelb wrote: | This is as dumb as it would be to name your internet company Net | in the early 90s. | | Metaverse is supposed to be a generic term for an interoperable | virtual 3D world. And now the term is linked to a specific | company. I guess if there will ever be a metaverse, it won't be | called that. | Waterluvian wrote: | So is this a Google -> Alphabet thing? | | Or is "Facebook" being rebranded everywhere? | oedmarap wrote: | I imagine when the branding is complete we'll get the following | gem: <meta property="og:title" content="Meta"> | <meta property="og:site_name" content="Meta"> <meta | property="og:url" content="https://meta.com"> | | Joking aside, in my view the branding (and branding ability) of | the name change to Meta is impressive given their long term | vision. | | However, I do get the feeling that Meta will aim to eventually | become a household proprietary name and thereby water-down what | can be considered one of the broadest, most abstract terms we're | all familiar with. | 29athrowaway wrote: | Do humanity a favor and do not buy Oculus headsets. | | Force them to remove Facebook login from headsets, and force them | to open their VR platform to people using any headset. | | If you don't, you may find yourself requiring an Oculus headset | to work, do errands, etc. Just like Internet Explorer became the | unavoidable plague of the 90s. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | interesting the instagram page for facebook is gone, changed to | https://www.instagram.com/wearemeta/ | m3kw9 wrote: | There is still a huge massive gap in what peoples think a | metaverse is like(think Ready Player One, or any move with VR | involved) vs what it is in reality. | | Facebook will still be Facebook for quite a while. | mwilliaams wrote: | I see they already bought the meta.com domain. I wonder who owned | it before and how much it cost Facebook to acquire. | [deleted] | olingern wrote: | This looks like an attempt to obfuscate the negative sentiments | that we've come to associate with the conglomerate Facebook. I | think there will be some short term success, but Meta and | Facebook will become synonymous as Alphabet and Google are. | | I'm also reminded that our mass media will play a major role in | how public sentiment plays out. Like him or not, you have to | admit the great lengths our media has covered Dave Chappelle over | the past few weeks. You'd think things like this Facebook rebrand | or the stalled infrastructure bill would have more meaningful | coverage. Outrage, like sex, sells. I wonder if this rebrand will | breach the outrage threshold? | annadane wrote: | Who wants to bet Zuckerberg is the ONLY one within the company | that wants this and other employees are rolling their eyes? | TillE wrote: | I don't understand what Facebook is even doing in terms of a | metaverse. Like they have the VR goggles, but what are they | actually doing with it? | | Coincidentally, MMO developer Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star | Wars Galaxies) has recently been detailing in a series of | articles what his new company is doing in terms of building a | metaverse, and it's pretty exciting in gaming terms. | | https://www.playableworlds.com/news/riffs-by-raph:-online-wo... | shostack wrote: | If you haven't had the chance, I'd suggest watching the FB | Connect keyboard. It couldn't really be more explicitly spelled | out in terms of the long term vision and the road to get there. | isoskeles wrote: | Maybe they'll try to make it so you can spend time with AI, VR | avatars of your dead loved ones (like in Caprica, the prequel | to the remake of Battlestar Galactica). | Kinrany wrote: | It doesn't sound any more open than then Facebookverse, so | it'll just get bought out eventually. | fullshark wrote: | This was their previous attempt: https://youtu.be/PVf3m7e7OKU | | Which I guess became Facebook Horizon | https://socialmediahq.com/whatever-happened-to-the-hype-surr... | MBCook wrote: | They're getting investor money. So far that seems to be it. | grantc wrote: | Even if they're at 0% done in terms of what happens after you | connect to a digital world via immersive conduits, $10B a year | can put a dent in that burndown. | btbuildem wrote: | If a metaverse is hosted by FB, it'll come with all the drama, | nonsense and toxicity we see on there today. The product (ie, | today's users of FB) is what stinks to high heavens. | txsoftwaredev wrote: | Don't blame the users. Blame the choices that Facebook has | made. They WANT the toxicity, it keeps people's eyes on their | phone. | threeseed wrote: | > If a metaverse is hosted by FB, it'll come with all the | drama, nonsense and toxicity we see on there today | | It is ridiculous to imply that it's somehow unique or exclusive | to Facebook. | | It exists on all of the social media platforms, across the web | and in the real world. It is more a byproduct of anonymous | interaction than something Facebook is specifically doing. | elmomle wrote: | It isn't the users, it's the platform and underlying philosophy | of the business. They are factory-farming humans' attention; | it's no wonder the result is dystopian. | md8z wrote: | I see this sentiment posted often on HN but I've seen no | social media that didn't eventually become toxic or that | didn't feed on human attention, this website included. What | good is a platform if nobody pays attention to it? And if | people are paying attention to it, how do you plan to prevent | them from fighting, competing with each other over every | little thing, and spreading misinformation? | afavour wrote: | I've seen it said (somewhere, sorry) that humans simply | aren't designed to interact on these mass social scales. | And (without evidence, I admit) that feels kind of right to | me. The ideal social network is a small one. But the | incentives of advertising and/or just growth in general | mean that it would difficult to compete in the market | against the likes of Facebook. | neom wrote: | Google tells me researches at York University research | indicates that humans can remember "10,000 faces over the | course of a lifetime. The average person can recall | around 5000" - and that's on lifetime scale - so it's not | surprising that systems that are pushing past that would | be uncomfortable/anxiety inducing. Brains are not wired | to deal with huge numbers of humans (although I'm sure | evolution will eventually have a thing or two to say | about that). | ben_w wrote: | > I've seen it said (somewhere, sorry) that humans simply | aren't designed to interact on these mass social scales. | | This is something I've said, though I doubt I'm the only | one. One particular problem is the availability heuristic | goes very wildly off-course when there's an internet | bandwagon. | threeseed wrote: | This is completely backwards. | | The large scale social interaction is courtesy of the | internet not from Facebook. | | For example websites like Reddit, HN, Twitter, TikTok etc | are the ones that facilite interaction with large, broad | groups of people whereas the majority of Facebook users | are just interacting with their small social circle. | ben_w wrote: | Hm, not sure. | | _I'm_ as you say, but my FB friends list have the | following friend counts: 432, 139, hidden, 176, 1213, | 103, hidden, 510, 179, 277, 217, 262, 233, it's a cat, | 320, 296, 317, hidden, 985, 398, hidden, hidden, 489, | 995, hidden, hidden, 434, 167, hidden, 1080, 1297, | hidden. | | And several of those friends are in FB groups which have | leaked onto my feed as a result of my friends interacting | with those groups. | threeseed wrote: | Those numbers are completely normal for the list of | friends and acquittances you've met over your lifetime. | And of that list you would only be interacting with a | fraction on a regular basis. | | But that's completely different from say Reddit where you | would be exposed to hundreds of thousands of different | people over the lifetime of using the site. | afavour wrote: | The post I was replying to didn't mention Facebook once. | Just social networks, which Reddit and the like would | fall under. So you're drawing a line that doesn't exist | in the original context. | | > the majority of Facebook users are just interacting | with their small social circle | | That describes me and my Facebook experience is | comparatively pleasant. But I don't know how typical it | actually is, most of the angst on there seems to come | from people sharing meme page posts, being members of | groups that spread misinformation... certainly that | describes how a number of my relatives experience | Facebook. I don't think the social circle is that small | for many users. | tshaddox wrote: | I've always presumed that the vast majority of Facebook | engagement now is not with personal content created by | Facebook friends, but with the mass media content from | large Facebook communities. Most of what I see when I | look at my feed are posts from groups or "pages" which I | have never heard of. Most of those posts aren't even | there because one of my Facebook friends directly shared | or interacted with the post. | cmorgan31 wrote: | You provide enough value without over reaching to gobble up | the planet's engaged time. You know massive ad engines | which make the social media concept profit driven will not | stop existing as a driver for the metaverse. We would need | to pay to play in this space or accept a terrible freemium | model which is likely to cause unintended consequences. The | worst outcome would be a combination of both. | ljm wrote: | HN has its own brand of toxicity and cynicism for sure, but | the existence of HN doesn't depend on that. It doesn't need | you to be angry to survive, it doesn't need to know about | you as a person. If you like the content that surfaces on | HN and you get on well in the community then you're good. | HN doesn't give a shit if create an account to comment on | one or two interesting posts and then _never return_. | | HN can live without you. | | FB, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. etc. cannot | survive without trying to actively engage you. They are | working tirelessly to find ways to rope you back in. | | They cannot live without you. | tshaddox wrote: | It's true that HN probably could continue to exist with | much less overall usage and engagement than it currently | has, but that's because it presumably costs very little | to run (including development and moderation) and (even | more importantly) isn't a core product for a public | company attempting to constantly grow at all costs. | burkaman wrote: | > I've seen no social media that didn't eventually become | toxic or that didn't feed on human attention | | What about email? | hdjjhhvvhga wrote: | HN (and other discussion sites like lwn.net) are way | different in this regard. Also, it's not a social medium | but a forum. Before social media we had many fora. The | success of each of them depended on their specialization | and moderation. The more specialized the forum was, the | easier it was to keep order because there were fewer | trolls. Also the users knew they should not feed the | trolls. We hat heated discussions, dramas, long-time users | leaving the fora. But practically speaking everything was | transparent. Nobody manipulated your "news feed" like they | do with FB (an Instagram) to maximize revenue. Nobody | suggested to me I should join some fringe groups, | repeatedly. Nobody showed to me the stupidities some of my | friends wrote on some groups (some of them not even knowing | all their friends see it). | md8z wrote: | Is it? The HN front page absolutely does have some level | of algorithmic manipulation going on. There was just a | thread on this: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032 | hdjjhhvvhga wrote: | Oh of course HN has a ton of problems and problematic | solutions (greying out people outside of group think - | shouldn't it be the opposite?) but it's _way_ better than | FB. Paradoxically, I don 't remember when I used HN main | page, I'm using alternative interfaces displaying | censored posts etc. - one of the many things you can't do | with FB. | threeseed wrote: | Of course HN is better than Facebook. It's moderated, | limited in discussion topics and the user base skews | heavily towards higher educated, older professional | types. | | It's like being at a professional work event and truly | shocked that everyone is well behaved. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | It's basically The Matrix but without the cool martial arts | moves. | | I suppose the ultimate goal is compulsory participation, for | more or less overt values of "compulsory." | Mikho wrote: | Meta worse. | Cyberthal wrote: | You have a tremendously valuable brand. | | You change it to a nerdy adjective. | ebanana wrote: | meta feta betta? i guess if google can be alphabet, facebook can | be meta. i was always under the assumption from everything i have | read about business and branding that from a marketing standpoint | renaming your brand once established is a fairly bad idea but i | guess that has changed? | at_a_remove wrote: | Hrm, so FAANG becomes MAANG. Add in Microsoft and Uber, MANGA MU. | "Yeah, I have been shopping my resume around to the other MANGA | MUs." | frakt0x90 wrote: | This person called it a week ago which I just think is impressive | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28931821 | pelasaco wrote: | That's so woke, weird and awkward. Zuckerberg, trying to be | natural, the interviewer, the parties.. I hope that isn't our | future | dmix wrote: | Even the robot character was awkward. | pelasaco wrote: | almost as awkward as Zuckerberg nodding in the interview and | saying how much fun he had playing some games. | racl101 wrote: | Drop the 'ta'. | | It's cleaner. | buitreVirtual wrote: | The timing of this announcement is strange. Maybe this was | already planned for late October, or maybe this is an attempt to | take control of the narrative after all the horrible publicity. | dvaun wrote: | I was building plans for a site called th.emeta.net on the domain | emeta.net, which I own. With this announcement I may have to | rethink that now...crud | Graffur wrote: | I do think VR will be part of our futures but I won't use | Facebook as part of it. | | When I was watching the keynote - about 10 mins in - I got | redirected to login to Facebook. That is not cool. | renewiltord wrote: | Wait what. They bought Meta VR like a couple of years ago. Some | of my friends were there. | macawfish wrote: | they want to mediate all interaction, so they can tax and steer | relationships | jrgd wrote: | Ridiculous Pointless Sad | wayeq wrote: | Facebook finally caved to their rapidly aging demographic's | clamoring for a VR metaverse | hardwaregeek wrote: | I want to read the William Gibson book that inspired this reality | Imnimo wrote: | I don't think this strategy really worked for Ron Artest, but | maybe it'll work for Facebook. | duderific wrote: | He will be rebranding as "Facebook World Peace" | alanlammiman wrote: | Gosh, you'd think that after CAMBRIdge AnalyticA, and to a lesser | degree liBRA, CAMBRIA isn't the best name for the new headset... | eatonphil wrote: | Renaming but the domain stays the same? Clicking the logo on the | top just takes you to about.facebook.com. | | Ah, going to meta.com does take you to about.facebook.com. | | They just aren't not-redirecting you yet. | _alexander_ wrote: | Facebook lates to the party - meta.ua | mrkramer wrote: | Metaverse in a sense of VR, AR? Just like Google wasn't the first | search engine or Iphone the first smartphone someone else will | dominate VR and AR someone else will make that big innovation and | killer apps not Facebook. Facebook is big and old. Big Blue just | like IBM. | yumraj wrote: | I hope the pi-hole block list maintainers block the new domains | soon. | bredren wrote: | Couple quick things: Zuck's speaking has improved an incredible | amount. So, props there. | | Zuck's said a few variations of "building blocks are there" or | "it is coming together" but also, "Even though it is still a long | way off..." | | This projection / demo video of the metaverse seems like a | distraction to me. If FB doesn't have this to deliver, it is a | lot like the old microsoft product concept videos. [1] | | What is the intent? To see Zuck as a visionary? Does his speaking | deeply on this subject attempt to position him / Meta as an | authority? | | Unless Facebook / Meta is setting expectations way lower than | where they're about to deliver, I don't see how this will be | viewed as anything other than a temporary salve to fill the | vacuum sucking oxygen out of Facebook. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tFdreZB94 | baby wrote: | I mean, you gotta make people excited about the future, and I | think they were successful in doing that here. They want to be | an innovative company, as opposed to just a social network | company, that's the pitch. | ashton314 wrote: | Dang it. How am I supposed to tell people that when I talk about | "meta-programming" I'm talking about Lisp and macros and cools | stuff like that, and not that I'm programming for some shady-as- | sin company? | solarkraft wrote: | I for one am excited for the Metaverse and all the Second Life | jokes we will make about it. | breakpointalpha wrote: | Anyone else find it hilariously dark that this page says: | | "The metaverse will be social" and when you click "Watch the | Keynote" it takes you to a login screen for Facebook? | haar wrote: | Click to watch the keynote... "You must log in to continue." | znull wrote: | All I can think of is Comcast -> Xfinity and how well that's | gone... | wayeq wrote: | So they finally caved to their rapidly aging demographic's call | for a VR enabled metaverse. | fillipvt wrote: | Would Meta be able to build a federated Metaverse? If they are, | things are different. | eganist wrote: | quasi-serious: | | This spells the end of the expression "that's so meta" or any | related quip about self-referential humor. | alex_young wrote: | If they are actually rebranding wouldn't that be reflected on | Facebook? I don't see it. | gregschlom wrote: | This HN comment from last week nailed it: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28931821 | bxparks wrote: | Heh, I got uMatrix cranked up so high, all I get is the menu bar | with "FACEBOOK", 3 screenfuls of complete blank, then "A future | made by all of us". I feel strangely good about not seeing | anything. | ElonMuskrat wrote: | Their new logo looks like a sagging pair of tits. | anonu wrote: | I was trying to understand when the metaverse concept started | coming into more "popular" discussion. | | Here's an interesting thread from June 10: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27723460 | gamedna wrote: | I wonder how much they paid for meta.com | blhack wrote: | I'm excited about it, and I thjnk it just means reality got a lot | larger. | | I don't think Facebook will be able to control the metaverse as a | closed platform, even if they wanted to. | modeless wrote: | Other interesting things said during the keynote: "and frankly, | as we've heard your feedback more broadly, we're working on | making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than | your personal Facebook account. We're starting to test support | for work accounts soon, and we're working on making a broader | shift here within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a | lot of people. Not everyone wants their social media profile | linked to all these other experiences and I get that, especially | as the metaverse expands." | | Also: | | "As big of a company as we are, we've also learned what it is | like to build for other platforms. And living under their rules | has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. Most of all, | I've come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are | stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things, | and holding back the entire internet economy. [...] We'll | continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs so consumers | and developers have choice rather than forcing them to use the | Quest store to find apps or reach customers." | Tepix wrote: | Sounds nice, doesn't it? However i believe they very recently | starting requiring a validated dev account (i.e. with phone | number) for devs to continue to sideload to their Oculus Quest, | right? | wolverine876 wrote: | > we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an | account other than your personal Facebook account | | How much work does that take? | | > I've come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees | are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new | things | | A shot at competitors' app stores. | jazzyjackson wrote: | Does facebook still have a real-name policy? interacting with | people in the metaverse with my real name is the last thing I | want (we all saw ready player one, no? does zuck understand the | importance of anonymity?) | warning26 wrote: | I assume this just means that they'll require a "Meta" account | instead of a Facebook account, and it will come with all the | same problems as creating a Facebook account. | | Also, their "support" for sideloading, while better than | nothing, requires a valid phone number or credit card number to | sideload anything. | JohnFen wrote: | This. Whether it's linked with your other social media or not | isn't the issue. And whether it's a "Facebook" account, | "Meta" account, an "Oculus" account, or whatever, it's all | still an account with Facebook and can be expected to have | all of the baggage that comes with an account with Facebook. | twinge wrote: | We'll continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs | | I see this as a tacit approval of the thriving network of | pirate games, something like the Adobe Photoshop model of | proliferating and becoming the de facto platform. | zzixp wrote: | This is actually pretty big for me. I got a Rift a while back | but it's been in a drawer ever since I needed to connect my FB | account. | tobiasSoftware wrote: | You actually don't need to connect it to FB for now as it's | only the new systems such as Quest 2 that are forced to link | it to FB. However, they have threatened to change that in a | year or so even for the Quest 1 and Rift. | gillytech wrote: | This is highly frightening. | | Run. | | Don't let your kids get sucked into this. If they are already, | rescue them. If your parents have been captured by Zuck and his | minions, get them out. Go outside and look at a tree. Reality is | fine as it is. | jacktheturtle wrote: | FAANG sounds better than MAANG though | easton wrote: | It wasn't changed for Alphabet either. The future is MAAAN. | gsich wrote: | Netflix has no place in this acronym. | adamqureshi wrote: | I wonder who they paid to come with that one. Now they'll further | push into making humans slave to the machine. More ads, More AI. | More human mining. More content pollution. It's just a big ass ad | factory. Its very easy to control sentiment using content bots / | farms and convince people to drink the koolaid under the false | pretense of bringing them together when in reality all they want | todo is serve you more ads and sell your views to the marketing | companies who target you everywhere. 2-cent. | rdxm wrote: | LOL....what a bunch of ass-hats. Like this is going to white-wash | over the fact they are a cancer on the species and the culture... | joshruby16 wrote: | facebookrebrand.com is available. ;-) | | shleiby @ gmail | cranesnakecode wrote: | This is going to be the Futurama metaverse where you have to | fight ads everywhere to go. | rcpt wrote: | Can't wait to talk to all you guys in VR | swayvil wrote: | When your reputation gets really bad, change your name. I guess | that works well enough to make it worth doing. | | I recall several scummy companies doing that over the recent | decades. | georgewsinger wrote: | Not part of the metaverse: https://simulavr.com | riffic wrote: | this is the Alphabet thing all over again. | | doesn't change anything. | Dowwie wrote: | Often, Hacker News sentiment winds up terribly wrong. With that | in consideration, Metaverse will probably be huge and is worth | considering. | | Is it going to be a walled garden? To what extent will it be | open? | aserdf wrote: | i wonder, if one declines to participate in the "metaverse", will | their shadow profile be randomly inserted, and | vandalized/ridiculed by other versians? | | sidenote - if i am understanding correctly, its conceptually | similar to modus operandi from back in the 90s? just in VR? | Program_Install wrote: | This is just some dystopian sounding shit, innit? Meta(verse, | data, etc.), humans have just sold themselves out. | NelsonMinar wrote: | See also: Philip Morris rebranding itself Altria. | bingohbangoh wrote: | Wow, did they pick the last four letter word that wasn't a | startup name? | Agathos wrote: | Whatever happened to Transmeta, anyway? | mikestew wrote: | So will they be keeping the same domain names, or am I going to | have to redo my Pi-Hole setup? I guess I'll add a wildcard entry | for "meta.com" just to get ahead of things. | [deleted] | petersonh wrote: | LOL trying to watch the keynote but keep getting asked to login | to Facebook and then since I don't have an account, I get the | boot. I think that about sums it up. | arduinomancer wrote: | The presentation talks a lot about the metaverse being built on | open standards and protocols but it still seems extremely vague | | Have they actually detailed this anywhere? | | For example a most basic question: what 3D engine is this going | to run on? | | Is that engine open source? | | What are the formats for assets/models/materials? | | What blockchain is hosting the NFT assets? | babyshake wrote: | If Meta really does a good job of separating the open standards | from their close products then this could actually be an | exciting development, as unfashionable as it may be right now | to be excited about anything Facebook is doing. | charcircuit wrote: | >what 3D engine is this going to run on? | | >Is that engine open source? | | That would be up to the implementers similar to how there are | different browser engines. | stcredzero wrote: | Well, shucks! Years ago, I had an unpublished iOS app named | _Meta_! Oh well! | iblaine wrote: | Reminds me of MySpace renaming itself to My_____. | philk10 wrote: | oh, you wanted the metadata and not the Meta data says Zuck on | his next congressional grilling | minimaxir wrote: | The rebrand was introduced as a "One More Thing" during the event | keynote. | | A 2007 "One More Thing" was the announcement of the iPhone and | the future of mobile computing. Now a 2021 "One More Thing" is | the announcement of a company rebrand to avoid government | regulation. | danso wrote: | For better or worse, it does seem Zuckerberg is as invested in | making the "metaverse" the new future of Facebook as Jobs was | with Apple and the iPhone | wolverine876 wrote: | > For better or worse, it does seem Zuckerberg is as invested | in making the "metaverse" the new future of Facebook as Jobs | was with Apple and the iPhone | | I don't think we should take that at face value; Zuckerberg | of course has strong motivations to appear completely | committed, including a desire to motivate employees, | partners, etc., and a desire to distract from FB's current | bad news (which might explain the timing - why now?). If we | take it at face value, we are part of the messaging. | | For one thing, FB's metaverse is an over-the-horizon | technology and product, very much vapor at this point and one | that may never happen. The iPhone went on sale months after | Jobs' announcement (IIRC). | | More interesting is that FB possibly has lost so much | confidence in its brand that it's de-emphasizing it, which | seems like an overreaction to me. | KaiserPro wrote: | > The iPhone went on sale months after Jobs' announcement | (IIRC). | | yes, but thats a different CEO who was about presenting | themselves as perfect. Zuckerberg for his legion of faults | has never done this. He is far more comfortable saying what | he wants to deliver _first_ | | > don't think we should take that at face value | | We don't need to, they've handily split out the amount of | money they are pouring into this in the public accounts. | | > More interesting is that FB possibly has lost so much | confidence in its brand that it's de-emphasizing it, which | seems like an overreaction to me. | | It was fucking stupid to try and link them so closely in | the first place. Instagram was a cool brand. Instagram by | facebook is deffo not. | tomjen3 wrote: | I look forward to that, since maybe I will then know what the | hell the metaverse is supposed to be. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | > _Zuckerberg is as invested in making the "metaverse" the | new future of Facebook as Jobs was with Apple and the iPhone_ | | The obvious distinction being Jobs, with his "one more | thing," announced an actual product. | schmorptron wrote: | In this case, worse. Definitely worse. | troyvit wrote: | Meta-worse | JKCalhoun wrote: | Seems like "metaverse" means walled internet. | | _" You've got mail!"_ LOL | creshal wrote: | The iPhone turned out to be the most walled garden | smartphone as well (even compared to _older_ designs that | relied on Java ME), and it didn 't exactly hurt them. | | The more relevant question is, can Facebook in 2022 excite | people as much as Apple did when riding on the height of | the iPod/iTunes craze in 2007? | sverhagen wrote: | LOL? You mean AOL? | zenmaster10665 wrote: | You are misunderstanding or wilfully ignoring the details. | They talk about interoperability as a key part of how this | will become reality, and the fact that no single company | can realise this vision... | 5faulker wrote: | Still a faceless corporation though. | akudha wrote: | Having watched the downfall of MySpace, Orkut etc, I thought | (hoped) same thing might happen to FaceBook. But now it feels | like they are going to be around, for a long, long time. I | don't know if anyone is even trying to take on them, Google | seems to have given up on their social products. FB might not | be fashionable anymore, people might even curse them, but | they'll continue to use them at some level :( And they have | enough money to keep buying other companies and stay at least | somewhat relevant | | It feels like only regulators can take on them, but that too | is unlikely to happen, except some feeble attempts in Europe | johannes1234321 wrote: | Well, Facebook in some demographics is above ity peak. The | company however was able to acquire Instagram and keep | Snapshot in a niche. Will be interesting how much TikTok | will takeover in attention time. But for now they have a | money printing machine and a good foundation. | | Europe unfortunately is too weak unless they convince the | U.S. | dudeman13 wrote: | I mean, I associate the book of faces with Lizard Zuckerberg. | | It might as well act like a faceless corporation, but it is | far from "faceless"... I think. Consider f.e. Tesla's face, | or Amazon's face. | nerbert wrote: | Colombo invented the "one more thing". Give credit where credit | is due ;) | agumonkey wrote: | Colombo was also more valuable that this announcement it | seems. | lostcolony wrote: | Columbo was solving crimes. FB is committing them. | BitwiseFool wrote: | "Good artists copy, great artists steal" | | -Steve Jobs (who stole this from Pablo Picasso, and there is | a debate about whether or not Picaso even came up with the | quote originally) | jareklupinski wrote: | - Colombo | mrzool wrote: | This brought back memories, thank you :') | edgriebel wrote: | > rebrand to avoid government regulation | | Aww, kids are so cute when they're having a temper tantrum | nabla9 wrote: | I think you remember wrong. iPhone was not one more thing | announcement. In 2007 One more thing was Safari for Windows. | | Here is list: https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/one-more- | thing-3793072/ | jb1991 wrote: | > announcement of a company rebrand to avoid government | regulation | | how does FB changing their name affect their chances at | regulation? | mohanmcgeek wrote: | Just guessing: now Meta is a holding company of various | social media "companies" so it'll be a bit harder to make a | case that one company has a monopoly on the internet social | media advertising. | | They can even list Instagram on the market selling maybe a 5% | equity. | aflag wrote: | I think the holding already existed. But it was called | Facebook and now it's called meta | KaiserPro wrote: | very much this. Facebook is made up of lots and lots of | subsidiaries | [deleted] | regularjack wrote: | It wasn't enough for them to ruin the world, they had to ruin the | word meta too. | 4oo4 wrote: | I'm going to keep calling them Facebook out of spite, since this | doesn't distract me in the slightest for how toxic the company | continues to be. | | Instead of Metaverse, I'm going to call it Virtual Hell(tm). | simonh wrote: | Presumably Sharkleap was taken. | | Suck always struck me as slightly disconnected from real life, | but this is him floating off into fantasy land, and not just | metaphorically. If you think the Metaverse is the next big thing, | I've got an NFT of some valuable real estate in Second Life I'd | like to sell you. | liminal wrote: | Facebook is working on brain-computer interfaces... because we | completely trust them to have that level of access to our minds. | quartz wrote: | https://meta.com is live as well. | | ...I can't tell if it's intentional that the page loads initially | with the "facebook" brand in the uppper left and then quickly | overwrites it with meta. | yellow_lead wrote: | The keynote video redirecting to a Facebook login screen is | hilarious. | ZephyrBlu wrote: | Why? The keynote video is on Facebook, that's why it would be | redirecting you to a login screen. | quartz wrote: | I guess at least partially because part of the rebrand was | supposed to be that you won't need a facebook account | anymore to do meta things so gating the video is a little | off-brand now. | dstick wrote: | Someone got to add "Advanced JS" to their resume! | dang wrote: | Please don't do this here. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | distrill wrote: | It's definitely intentional | babyshake wrote: | It is strange that it doesn't use any type of animated | transition so it does look like a typical FOUC issue even | though it probably isn't. | Jensson wrote: | It is good design, now it looks like a mistake so people | react and talk about it rather than just ignore it. | lwansbrough wrote: | It's definitely _not_ intentional. If it was intentional it | would be animated, and there 's no indication in the HTML | that it's anything more than a FOUC. | blsapologist42 wrote: | If it was intentional shouldn't it have some kind of fade | animation? | specialp wrote: | Meta has been live for a while as a Chan-Zuckerberg foundation | project in open publishing. It is crazy they hijacked it for | the corporation! | ButterWashed wrote: | I'd say it's intentional, it highlights the transitional | journey from one brand to another. | nazgulnarsil wrote: | It disabled my fucking back button. What a perfect | encapsulation of what they are about. | lewisj489 wrote: | You sure this isn't from FireFox Facebook container? | Oddskar wrote: | There can be no going backwards. Only forward! | Unai wrote: | >Our Actions: Promoting Safety and Expression, Protecting | Privacy and Security, Preparing for Elections, Responding to | COVID-19 | | What a joke. Is there a more bluntly obvious PR than inverting | everything you're being criticized for? | [deleted] | jcomis wrote: | the old comcast maneuver. if everyone hates you, change your | name! | racl101 wrote: | Ron Artest literally changed his name to 'Meta World Peace' | cause his popularity sunk to an all time low after the Pistons | and Pacers brawl. | Cadwhisker wrote: | Finally, someone found a way to get everybody off "Facebook". | jay_kyburz wrote: | The thing I don't understand about the Metaverse is, if it was | going to be any good, we would have it now with mouse, keyboard, | and a nice big 4k monitor. _What you do_ in the metaverse doesn't | really have anything to do with goggles you strap on your face. | The goggles are just supposed to improve the immersion. | | If Facebook wants to make this work they need to get into the | business of making multiplayer games for everyday people. They | need a huge catalog of virtual experiences with as much variety | and content as Netflix's catalog. | | I have no doubt that for $15 a month a huge amount of people | would switch over from watching TV in the evening to hanging out | in virtual worlds doing interesting stuff. | | Then once everybody is playing these games on their playstation, | xbox, or pc, they can upsell them on a VR rig. | Uhhrrr wrote: | Maybe they can just buy Roblox. | djbusby wrote: | Holy crap! I drunkenly guessed that lame-ass name. Somebody just | got $1 richer! | nescioquid wrote: | In case you're still drunk, what will the new acronym be? | | MAANG? MAGNA? AANGM? | notacoward wrote: | If Google hadn't become Alphabet, we could have had MANGA. | babyshake wrote: | Remove Netflix and we've got MAGA. | [deleted] | djbusby wrote: | I'm hoping for some other rebrand and it can become MEGAMAN | haaserd wrote: | Does this remind anyone else of that time that Comcast renamed | themselves Xfiniti to distract from their terrible customer | service, rather than fixing their horrible customer service? | hwers wrote: | All this talk _about_ the future is getting kinda boring at this | point. I feel like it 's been a good 7 years of talking about | what will come in the near future and other than that near | stagnation on most other fronts. (Autonomous cars, VR, etc.) I'll | care when it's here I guess. | blhack wrote: | Some of you guys seriously need to get out of your bubble. | Facebook is an extremely popular service. Many, many people use | it every single day, and love it. | | This is not a rebrand to avoid regulations, or make people like | it again or whatever. Facebook has been signaling this as the | direction they wanted to go for quite a long time now. | popey wrote: | I certainly get "use it every day", for sure. Clubs, | celebrities, enthusiast groups. | | "love it" though? | | Feels to me that it's a necessary evil, like car insurance. | wheretogonext wrote: | The keynote feels like I'm watching an episode of black mirror. | 29athrowaway wrote: | In the metaverse, Facebook's crypto will become the legal tender. | They may get away with rolling out Libra/Diem over there. | | A VR world controlled by Facebook, with Diem as currency, that | can only be accessed by Oculus... what can go wrong? | | My kids will never use that crap I assure you. | haolez wrote: | The common word "metaverse" is now under attack and will be | relentlessly copyrighted and protected :) maybe this was the | strategy all along! | Dumblydorr wrote: | Can anyone here convince me AR/VR isn't a fad? If FB is headed | towards a metaverse where our insane uncles can embed themselves | further in a false reality, how is it that the rest of us sane | individuals want to join their conspiratorial matrix? | | Even taking out the crazy uncles, VR makes me insanely nauseous. | What's more, it's very expensive to get solid VR that doesn't, | nevermind it still looks terrible even if you have a high powered | rig. | | I could see solid VR occurring in the distant future, but it has | so many ethical and technological downsides currently. I view it | mainly as a fad to inflate stock prices, a fun toy for tech | enthusiasts, but not a serious game changer. | molsongolden wrote: | More fluid collaborative remote work environments. | | I haven't kept up with or tried any of the AR/VR products but I | could see huge usage if someone can nail the remote work VR | experience. | | Assume there will be reasonably priced hardware with good | performance when thinking about the space. This bit is | inevitable if the demand exists. | jazzyjackson wrote: | It's an accessibility lawsuit waiting to happen, as a large | portion of the general population gets motion sickness | wearing goggles. | | AI audio descriptors may come in handy, but really I'm more | concerned with excluding people based on cost of hardware and | access to high speed internet. | | (I'm designing a metaverse platform which supports multiple | interaction modes so as not to exclude people, AMA) | psyc wrote: | VR the implementation is prone to false starts. I still don't | know whether this current wave will stick. | | But VR the concept is universal and inevitable. The idea of | feeding artificial input to the biological senses, in order to | place our consciousness elsewhere, is a genie that can't be put | back in the bottle. No way does humanity leave that option on | the table once it's technologically feasible. | marknutter wrote: | Why would anyone want to be totally immersed in a realistic | virtual world? It boggles the mind. | MikusR wrote: | Quest 2 is 300$ and completely standalone | zemo wrote: | > Can anyone here convince me [position] | | generally no, because this framing starts the conversation from | a standpoint that you have a position, and it's the other | person's responsibility to change your position, instead of | your own responsibility. | | > What's more, it's very expensive to get solid VR that | doesn't, nevermind it still looks terrible even if you have a | high powered rig. | | have you used a Quest | oehpr wrote: | Some VR looks pretty good, I think The Walking Dead: Saints and | Sinners looks great! | | But of course, good proper unjank VR seemingly requires a 5x | GPU power increase. You need 90+ FPS, two screens, high rez, | and responsive. It's a pretty hard ask, so games need to take a | big step down in quality in the name of performance. Even | worse, a persons situational awareness and scale take a big | leap up when compared to a flat screen, you notice flaws way | easier. | | Personally I was pretty lucky, VR doesn't seem to make me sick. | And I use it frequently for lunch break exercise, I get to play | games and get some physical activity in, which is a big win for | a desk jockey. On that reason alone I don't think VR is going | away. That's amazingly valuable. | jschulenklopper wrote: | "Meta" is a four-letter word. | | Or less ambiguous, "meta" is a word of four letters. | brap wrote: | The video they put out is _extremely_ cringe. The whole | "metaverse" thing is cringe. | | It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes- | men who never challenge him and only tell him what he likes to | hear. He is truly detached from us normal people and our human | experience. | throwoutway wrote: | Or that he just watched/read "Ready Player One" and was like | "yes. that. now" | TameAntelope wrote: | That "cringe" your feeling _could_ be how people felt about the | Internet in the 80s. Just keep that in mind. | brap wrote: | Maybe. But the internet grew organically, over decades. It | was not shoved down our throats by a corporation telling us | "this is cool, this is what everyone wants now, and this is | the future". I'm sure VR/AR will be big too, but it's going | to take a while, many technological breakthroughs, and it's | not going to look like _that_. | xtat wrote: | So much this. | filoleg wrote: | To be fair, that's the exact same sentiment I remember reading | about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp | acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the | dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and | without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions | before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc. | | Look at today, and I think most people would agree that | acquiring whatsapp and instagram back then was a great business | decision on his end. | | And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense to | begin with than those acquisitions did. | wpietri wrote: | They were great acquisitions because Facebook failed to | compete in those markets. Facebook continues to fail to | compete in the youth market. I don't think failing to | innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign | of particular acumen. | | And they're still failing to innovate. Facebook now will be | "retooling" toward "serving young adults the north star, | rather than optimizing for older people." | https://twitter.com/sarafischer/status/1452744573084708869 | | In practice what this means is that they have the same | problem they did before, but antitrust scrutiny means they | can't buy their way out of it this time. | tubby12345 wrote: | >I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way | out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen. | | I mean this is classic moving of goals posts - the only | measure of acumen the CEO of a publically traded company is | that little number called the share price. whether he buoys | that number by brain-genius innovations or by brain-genius | acquisitions, he's still demonstrating brain-genius | business acumen (the proof of this seemingly tautological | claim is that there are plenty of other companies that have | failed to acquire their way out of irrelevance). | wpietri wrote: | Not at all. | | I consider this in particular deeply incorrect: "only | measure of acumen the CEO of a publicly traded company is | that little number called the share price". And I'm | hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason Facebook is | in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's focus on | dominance and profit without regard to little | externalities like genocide. So you may have different | goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved | anything. | | If I'm trying to understand somebody's acumen, I want to | see what they can do on their own. As someone else | pointed out, Zuckerberg didn't even really have the one | idea that he successfully exploited. He's rich, sure, | but, "He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty | far from my criteria for genius. | tubby12345 wrote: | >And I'm hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason | Facebook is in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's | focus on dominance and profit without regard to little | externalities like genocide. So you may have different | goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved | anything. | | you are moving goalposts you just don't see it. We're | talking about _business_ acumen, not scientific acument | or mathematical acumen or ethics acumen. That FB is in | the "public doghouse" is about as meaningful an | observation as "the post office loses money every year" | or "NASA can't afford to pay its engineers as much as | FAANG" or "the ACLU has never successfully tried a | personal injury case". The only public that matters here | are the public markets and they think zuckerberg is a | genius (this recent blip not withstanding). | | >I want to see what they can do on their own. | | I mean that's your definition and you're welcome to it | but for the rest of the world there is M&A. | | >"He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far | from my criteria for genius. | | to which i leave you with a quote | | >Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final | table of the World Series of Poker every year? What, are | they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas? | prewett wrote: | Not that I _want_ to compliment Zuckerberg, but "buy what | you can't build", "know what you can't build", and | "reasonably estimate the value of a young company" all seem | like business savvy to me. Warren Buffet could be accused | of simply buying his way into a huge conglomerate, but | instead he's celebrated as a wise investor... | rvz wrote: | > I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your | way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen. | | I guess Apple failed to compete and innovate when they | acquired NeXT and Beats. Or Microsoft failed to innovate as | soon as they acquired GitHub and Xamarin. /s | | Very senseless acquisitions that have no long term strategy | or reason behind it to sustain the future of the business | or to compete in the market. /s | noncoml wrote: | > the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on | HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions | happened | | Don't want to downplay it, but having access to all the info | users give to FB is like insider-trading. They know very well | what is trending, what is growing and what is going nowhere. | | The main difference is that Metaverse is something the want | to build from scratch, not something that already exists like | Insta and WhatsApp, so they don't have that insider-trading | info. | mrkramer wrote: | >To be fair, that's the exact same sentiment I remember | reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and | WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one | of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just | desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money | on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, | etc. Look at today, and I think most people would agree that | acquiring whatsapp and instagram back then was a great | business decision on his end. | | >And, in my eyes, the whole Meta thing makes way more sense | to begin with than those acquisitions did. | | That's a fallacy. It doesn't matter if Zuck had 2 consecutive | successful predictions because his 3rd can be unsuccessful. | Each event(situation) is specific and different. | lovecg wrote: | Also reminds me of all the skepticism surrounding the iPhone | launch. I remember those joke ad spoofs making fun of the | actual phone feature. Yet here we are and who uses actual | voice calls anymore? | koonsolo wrote: | I agree that Facebook and Zuch can't be that stupid. | | But for me, I can't see this working. There is no VR game | that really killed it. I also don't see which generation | would actually be into this. | | So it's not a "idiots!", but more of a "what am I missing | here?". | | Will be interesting to see this play out | rblatz wrote: | I've got a group of 6 of us that play Echo Arena on the | Quest 2 about 3 hours every week. Beat saber is also a fun | game, but does get a bit stale for most people after a | couple weeks. | | None of these are VR's Halo, but it seems that VR is | getting out of the tech demo/hobbyist space and into a | broader market appeal. If facebook keeps iterating and | pushing out quality improvements at the current price point | it's just a matter of time. | T-A wrote: | > I also don't see which generation would actually be into | this. | | Roblox has more than 200 million daily active users; 67% of | them are under 16 [1]. Where will they go when hormones hit | and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling? | | [1] https://backlinko.com/roblox-users | brap wrote: | IG and WA were already wildly popular on a global scale when | they were bought, though. People clearly wanted those. Is | anyone on board with this "metaverse" thing outside of SV? To | me this seems less like the IG and WA acquisitions, and more | like the much hyped Facebook Phone and Facebook Home projects | (RIP). | [deleted] | micromacrofoot wrote: | I think it's even worse... does anyone outside of | _Facebook_ and the press take their Metaverse demos | seriously? | | Everyone I know and work with universally thinks they're a | joke. They've spent how much money on this janky uncanny | nonsense? You'd think they'd at least stumble into one | redeeming quality, but it escapes them. | Grakel wrote: | I think a version of the meta verse will arise | eventually, but when have you ever known a major | innovation to come from a tech company that is already | huge in a relatively unrelated area? They just get bogged | down and start eating themselves. | delecti wrote: | I don't think this is that unrelated. There are certainly | plenty of examples of things about this related to a | company's primary focus. There are several Amazon | products that are pretty huge since they started as just | "books" (Echo, Kindle, AWS), Netflix streaming after | DVDs, the entire ecosystem of iOS devices after starting | with Macs. | sangnoir wrote: | > when have you ever known a major innovation to come | from a tech company that is already huge in a relatively | unrelated area? | | Xerox (modern computer), AT&T (Unix), Sony (PlayStation), | Google (Maps, GMail), Apple (iPhone), Amazon (AWS) | vmception wrote: | Zuck and The Book have a lot of dumb, cringeworthy, failed | initiatives that have nothing to do with those surprisingly | high valued acquisitions a decade ago. | spsful wrote: | This is what I don't understand about their plan. Who on earth | is planning to adopt this? We've seen a push from all sides of | the tech industry to open up the AR/VR space, and it never took | off. | | Remember the Snapchat Spectacles? They still sell them but I | don't think they were ever popular. Google glass? Popular, but | discontinued. Apple's ARKit? Definitely much less adoption than | their commercials would have led you to expect. | | It seems like this is an experiment bound to fail, so good luck | to the execs at facebook meta who have to clean this up in the | end. | c0d4h wrote: | I can't speak for VR, but AR definitively has a future. | | You already see practical use of this technology with HUD- | tech (Heads up display) in cars, but beyond that you'll find | great applications for it within medicine/operations, | transportation (directions), marketing (product information, | authenticity verification), and the list goes on and on... | tsimionescu wrote: | Yes, AR has some potential as an industrial or otherwise | specialized technology. It won't be revolutionary or change | the world in any way, but it will probably improve several | kinds of processes, a background tech. | | VR is much more likely to either become the new TV or to | die an obscure death, like 3D movies. | pb060 wrote: | 3D movies will come back and die again. And again, | forever | kazen44 wrote: | VR becoming the new TV is highly unlikely because many | people multitask while watching TV. this is very | difficult to do with VR. | pintxo wrote: | You could multitask in VR, without even anyone noticing? | tsimionescu wrote: | How can you wash dishes while your entire view field is | covered by some movie? | tsimionescu wrote: | I was thinking more of TV in the way it captured | audiences in the 50s, 60s, 70s. You're probably right | though that AR has a bigger chance of capturing something | like the way TV is interacted with today (a background | activity). | brap wrote: | Exactly, this whole things screams "we don't know what people | want". The video looks like a very well made parody. | MikusR wrote: | Both Glass and Spectacles were sold only to the "chosen | ones". | bink wrote: | Remember this AR Demo from Apple way back with the iPhone 8? | | https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16272904/apple-arkit- | demo... | | And what commercial applications of this have we seen in the | last 4 years? | AlexandrB wrote: | Unifi has an AR app for working with their switches[1] that | shows some HUD info for each port. I've never used it on my | switches personally and judging by that video it's more | trouble than it's worth. But it exists. I suppose in a | large data centre this _might_ be useful, but the | technology still seems pretty immature. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dlB-UAhTyw | fl0wenol wrote: | Related tech that got traction is BLE in servers with | corresponding apps, like Dell Quick Sync. Lets you flash | the ID light of a server from your phone, among lots of | other things. | gaogao wrote: | Pokemon Go? | 7373737373 wrote: | I wish he'd just present as his awkward true self, instead of | this prerecorded, fake cringefest, something Musk doesn't shy | away from | EpicEng wrote: | Yeah but his "true self" isn't exactly something 99.99% of | people enjoy. He's a robotic tool. Looks to me like he signed | up for a "how to appear more human 101" course and now | gesticulates with his hands non-stop. | 7373737373 wrote: | Musk isn't a great rhetorician, and many people don't like | his personality either. But some like him nonetheless, they | empathize with him and see beyond that, because they see | some of the drives and desires behind the unusual facade. | I'm sure Zuckerberg signed up for such courses, but I don't | think it's comfortable for him, or his audience either. | Ignorance is bliss, forcing oneself to be hyperaware of | ones own appearance, gestures and statements to please | others seems wrong. Who enjoys such a lie? | ritchiea wrote: | He's certainly determined whatever his true self is, it's not | good for business. | brap wrote: | It's amazing how no one can be frank with him. "Look mark, | the CEO doesn't have to be the presenter. I'm sorry but you | just can't be the face of the company, it's bad for | business. Please, move aside, and get a normal person | haircut". | 7373737373 wrote: | I wouldn't rule out that he could even be _liked_ , if he | didn't obviously pretend to be someone he is not | junon wrote: | I'm one degree away from Mark. I dated someone who was an | early employee at Facebook for a little while - all I can | really say without revealing who they are. I just know | they know Zuck, Cook, and a few others personally. | | They told me that when Facebook's (or maybe it was | Instagram's...) stories came out with video support, Zuck | posted a super bizarre video introducing it, being the | first one and all. And I guess it was just him awkwardly | staring into the camera, not really saying anything. | Almost like someone who thinks it's a photo but it's a | video instead - though he was fully aware it was a video. | His wife was in the background waving and stuff too. | | The person I was seeing I guess texted him and said | something to the effect of "hey this is super awkward, | maybe you should re-post it with you talking about it", | which I guess Zuck did. | | So it's my impression that he's not exactly surrounded by | yes-men, but instead that he's not really in touch with | the social aspect of running one of the largest social | networks on earth and how people really behave. I know a | lot of people say it's autism but as far as I was told | it's not - he's just strange. | | This is hearsay of course, but I'm pretty confident that | I was told the truth given who it was that I talked to | about all this. | 908B64B197 wrote: | > Zuck posted a super bizarre video introducing it, being | the first one and all. And I guess it was just him | awkwardly staring into the camera, not really saying | anything. Almost like someone who thinks it's a photo but | it's a video instead - though he was fully aware it was a | video. His wife was in the background waving and stuff | too. | | Maybe that was the point. People scrolling think it's | just a selfie but then you realize his wife is moving in | the background! | junon wrote: | That's not how it was described - it wasn't anything | clever. | 7373737373 wrote: | I think he is very perceptive when it comes to the logic | and desires behind social interaction, like making | personal attributes such as relationship status in | Facebook explicitly public early on, and this because he | could see and consider these things from the outside. | He's different, but he should be proud of it, because | without being different, he wouldn't have achieved what | he did. The Trump network will show what happens when a | different kind of personality has centralized control | over a social network, in many a sense, it could be much | worse. | ritchiea wrote: | He's lived a different life than nearly anyone else. | Certainly so caught up in his responsibilities to | Facebook that he's been unable to grow and change and | branch out and fail, and be rejected and forced to | reinvent or repurpose himself the way most people do. | It's impossible to imagine what my life would be like or | how my perspective would be different if I was caught in | a bubble of a project I started in my late teens turning | into a near trillion dollar success that only grew and | grew from the moment I started on it. | 7373737373 wrote: | I think him being rejected by most people drove him to do | what he does | FormerBandmate wrote: | I was involved in a startup project the first couple | years of college. We didn't know anything about what we | were doing so it languished in development hell and is | still in it as far as I know, with a new crop of kids. I | can't imagine being stuck in that mindset, there's a lot | of maturing that happens when you have a boss and need to | work with a team and he's always been the head of this | college project that's worth a trillion dollars now. | Doesn't sound healthy at all | smilespray wrote: | Add Peter Thiel to this couple and we have a good game of | "fuck, marry, kill". | polote wrote: | > It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by | yes-men | | I feel like the opposite. Zuck is the only one to believe in | the metaverse and as a result people who worked on the | communication did it badly without a lot of conviction. He is | in a pretty comfortable position, one of the richest people on | earth doing 20% of growth every year. And still he wants to | make a big risky bet like this one. I'm not really in favor of | the metaverse but history has shown us that Zuck is pretty | successful at things he wants to do | wpietri wrote: | What things would those be? As far as I know his successes | are a) 1 idea he had as a 19-year-old plus b) some other | things that he bought with the money from that. | carlosdp wrote: | Say what you will about Mark, no informed person could | claim with a straight face that he's not one of the | savviest business-people in history. | patentatt wrote: | lol, people don't remember all of the stern talking-to's | zuck had to have from his investors in the beginning. The | investors made him go to business classes to learn how to | 'business' and talk to people. The one thing I could give | him was to retain the ownership stake that he did, but | that even could be said to be largely due to sean | parker's influence and his experience with VCs. | wpietri wrote: | Oh? Maybe give me a brief rundown of his business savvy? | I'm especially interested in evidence that can't be | attributed to the people he hired or the vast, vast | wealth at his command. Not to mention a large PR | department working hard to make him look like one of the | savviest businesspeople in history. | yupper32 wrote: | > that can't be attributed to the people he hired | | Isn't hiring the right people an extremely large part of | being "business savvy"? | margalabargala wrote: | Business savvy people hire the right people, but just | because someone turned out to be the right person, | doesn't mean the person who hired them was necessarily | business savvy. | motoxpro wrote: | I mean, if it were that easy to build a trillion dollar | company, everyone would, but it's not, so they don't. | | People complain that he has too much control but then | also, like you, complain that he isn't behind and "real" | decisions. | | He made that "vast vast wealth" by building Facebook. One | had to come before the other. | chriswarbo wrote: | > I mean, if it were that easy to build a trillion dollar | company, everyone would, but it's not, so they don't. | | It's not easy to win the lottery either, but that doesn't | make a lottery winner "one of the savviest business- | people in history". | jumpman_miya wrote: | Comparing the success of FB to winning the lottery is | disingenuous. Cry moar. | wpietri wrote: | I'm not complaining, and I'm not claiming he is or isn't | behind a given decision. I'm just trying to understand | what people see as evidence of his savviness, as I don't | see much besides a pile of money and an adequately- | maintained natural monopoly that now looks to be in a | fair bit of trouble both in the market (thus his recent | announcement of a dramatic retooling) and in the public | eye (e.g., the latest whistleblowers and the | Congressional hearings). | | And it's perfectly possible that he is more responsible | for the bad choices than he is for the good ones. I've | dealt with execs like that. I'd bet many others have as | well. | marnett wrote: | I dislike Zuckerberg as much as another fellow, but he is | one of the few founder/CEOs who managed to not only | maintain control of his company, but maintain complete, | uncontested control over his company. There are so few | businesspeople that can claim that, as it is typical that | either fundraising or corporate politics (or both) | eventually ousts the founding members or dilute their | absolute power. To claim that he somehow accidentally | negotiated and maintained complete control throughout the | entire lifetime of Facebook is disingenuous at the very | least. People do not accidentally maintain power. Any | number of other ambitious people would have loved to | become the power broker at Facebook by taking Mark down, | and preventing that every step of the way is foundational | to the definition of business savvy. | fillipvt wrote: | It's far too rare for a founder to maintain control in | that way while also growing the company to the size of | Facebook is. For example, Basecamp has managed to | maintain control but it's nowhere near their size. | majani wrote: | His ability to hold on to pole position once he gets it | is definitely unprecedented, especially in an industry | that's known for it's volatility. But in terms of | original creativity, he scores extremely low. | mritchie712 wrote: | * 1 idea he stole as a 19-year-old | | I'm not big on people complaining about "idea stealing", | but zuck is in a league of his own with this shit, so worth | pointing out that he didn't have the idea for FB. | FormerBandmate wrote: | Honestly, HarvardConnection would have been just MySpace | but solely for Harvard users. Forums have been around | since what, the 1980s (as BBSs)? | smoldesu wrote: | _grumble grumble_ Good artists copy... _grumble grumble_ | wpietri wrote: | Excellent point, and I totally agree. Thanks for the | correction. | patentatt wrote: | Stole or just copied, the 'idea' of a social network | wasn't novel by the time fb came around. Credit where | it's due, it was executed well in the early stages and | had the unique twist of being college-only at the | beginning. People don't remember that when fb started | gaining traction, friendster was already very much a | thing but was stumbling hard on execution. I remember the | friendster site being just dog slow. Myspace and Hi5 were | also in the mix before or right at the same time as fb. | Really just the PR/marketing angle and the not screwing | up on execution are fb's claim to fame. | aflag wrote: | Orkut was also out there and it was wildly more popular | than Facebook in some parts of the world. | wodenokoto wrote: | Well, he sure knows what to buy. | | Remember when he bought Instagram for a billion dollars? | That amount seemed unreasonable high back then. Looking | back though ... I'd wish I could spend money as well as | Zuckerberg. | ethanyu94 wrote: | How about building one of the largest companies in the | world? Would others be able to do that if they had that | idea as a 19-year-old? Let's not reduce all his | accomplishments to a single idea. Ideas don't matter, | execution matters. | wpietri wrote: | That would still be one success. And I'm pretty sure | other people had something to do with that. So I'd like a | little more evidence, thanks. | roberto wrote: | You really think building one of the biggest companies in | the world, with billions of users, is just one success? | | Building a company with 1000 users is a success. A | million is another success. A billion is hundreds of | successes. | zenmaster10665 wrote: | Lol...you want him to have built more than one of the | most successful businesses in history? It isn't one idea | that got him here.. Everyone's a critic. | ethanyu94 wrote: | If building Facebook isn't enough evidence of success for | you, I don't know what is. Pretty sure most people with | the same idea could not have turned it into what Facebook | is today. Also, Facebook isn't just one idea - it's many | ideas. | wpietri wrote: | It's enough evidence of _one_ success. But "Zuck is | pretty successful at things he wants to do" sounds like | he has more than one success. I'm just asking what those | other things are. | zenmaster10665 wrote: | You are exposing your lack of knowledge on what it means | to run a multinational corporation. It isn't one lucky | choice, it is strategy and execution over the long term. | This is the same for any successful company. | int_19h wrote: | Facebook hasn't been around long enough to talk about its | "long term". | TigeriusKirk wrote: | This is just coming across as completely ridiculous. | tw04 wrote: | a) 1 idea that he stole | | b) having absolutely 0 moral compass | moosey wrote: | Zuckerberg no longer experiences risk except for in the most | abstract of ways. Not in the way that the vast majority of | people think about risk. | | I would also suggest lack of conviction and lack of ability | to complete the job look very similar, and you are likely to | end up with the latter of you are surrounded by yes-men. | paganel wrote: | > Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men | | That's what I think happens, yes. They should have learned | something from the failure of Google+, after all they were | directly involved in that, apparently they haven't. | dmix wrote: | The video also showed Zuckerberg really pixelated green-screen | effect and low-framerate: | | https://i.imgur.com/AGklzd2.png | | Using a low quality virtual background might have been a poor | choice when it's fundamental to the idea. | wpietri wrote: | There's a concept I find really useful: Acquired Situational | Narcissism. If somebody spends enough time in an environment | where everything is about them, they can easily come to believe | everything is about them. | | Another thing I think is at play is people confusing luck with | genius. Zuckerberg is clearly smart, but Facebook was also a | right-time, right-place thing. As FaceMash and Facebook showed, | he understood his audience because he was his audience. But | now, nearly 20 years later, Zuckerberg-the-billionaire has very | little in common with the audience he needs if he is going to | make the metaverse happen. | | I mean, I too read and like Snow Crash, so I get the emotional | appeal. But a middle-aged guy's favorite dystopian novel from | 30 years ago may not be a useful blueprint today. | Permit wrote: | I'm trying to word this kindly, but I think you should | instead look at the concept of "Parasocial Relationships" if | you think it's appropriate to diagnose Mark Zuckerberg with | Acquired Situational Narcissism. | | You do not know him, you have not met him and it does not | make sense to try to diagnose a public figure based on what | you've been presented by either his own press releases or | media coverage of him. You and the person you have replied to | have bought into the idea that no one at Facebook challenges | him despite having not worked at Facebook or personally | witnessing this. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | Dude, we're all just shootin' the shit on a random tech | forum site. Saying "Damn, Zuckerberg must be a total | narcissist to have come up with this shit" is not exactly | like I'm writing "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" in his | medical chart or something. | | It's more an expression that "I think this idea is so bat | shitty that I don't _want_ to know jack about how someone | came up with it, just seems like a narcissistic idea to me. | " | AndyMcConachie wrote: | It would have been so much less cringe if they had just hired | an actor that people liked to deliver the message. No one likes | Mark Zuckerberg, so why is he the talking head. He's a terrible | actor and presenter. They really needed to pay a famous person | to do it. | twofornone wrote: | >He is truly detached from us normal people and our human | experience. | | From watching his mannerisms and facial expressions, I get the | feeling that he is high functioning but very much on the | autistic spectrum, and emulates many subtle movements/behaviors | during communication that come naturally to "normies". That's | why he comes off as a robot deep in the uncanny valley. | | I like to think of it as partly emulating with software some of | the communication hardware that neurotypical people have | innately. Which is why social interactions can be taxing for | those with Asperger's, the extra cycles are draining and | distracting, in addition to the necessary self consciousness | which also costs some amount of compute. | bredren wrote: | This seems like a video for investors, not users. | yurlungur wrote: | Although I do feel the same I think given the world we are in | today, I wouldn't necessarily bet big on its failure. That | would probably make too much sense. | throw7 wrote: | Can't watch without logging into facebook. That's all you need to | know. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-28 23:01 UTC)