Zuckerberg on why the social network is becoming ‘a metaverse company’ | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg on why the social network is becoming ‘a metaverse company’

theverge.com

30 pointsAndrewKemendo18 comments

In broad strokes, Zuckerberg says some things I agree with here re: interoperability, but I just can't look past the fact that it's Zuckerberg... I'm not sure there's any single entity I trust less than Facebook to make this vision happen in a way that isn't completely user-hostile.

The term "metaverse" is so ill-defined and buzzwordy. I doubt that anything considered a metaverse would come from such a closed-system approach that Facebook is so fixed on.

Based on the response here - and with my background in Augmented Reality and Computer Vision, as well as ad markets and consumer tech - I'm seeing that people are not actually conceptualizing the concept of metaverse.

The timing on this one is a killer, but the fact that people don't grok the concept, and it's possible massive future, tells me that it's the right time to invest in it.

Can you explain your thought process a bit more (assuming you weren’t being sarcastic)?

Happy to, though for brevity sake I will make some claims that I won't derive here - so forgive me and caveat emptor please.

The concept of the metaverse is one in which the physical world is connected to "virtual" worlds via some abstracted reference.

For example, I can put a RFID sensor on a doorway (lets call these markers) for example, to which you can then scan that RFID with an interrogator and that will link the physical presence of the interrogation device with the physical location of the RFID sensor.

You can take this example much further and for example use a series of cameras/sensors to take video and then reconstruct that in real time to recreate a "real time" virtual copy of whatever is happening in the real world.

Now imagine that you have a camera on you at all times that is outward facing (like the cameras on the Rift that are used to sense location). If you can build a representation of the real world that itself acts like unique markers that are inherited from the world, then the Oculus system can have a temporal representation of your location (assuming you're wearing such a device), gaze, and all of the associated data that can be extracted from the environment.

So take it a step further a few decades and now you are wearing augmented reality glasses which have an always on camera - for sundry technical purposes that are required for it to work that I won't go into here. At scale, I now have a constantly updated version of not only the real world - because you're updating the virtual representation of the real world state - but also how you interact with the real world, what you interact with etc... such that we can rebuilt a massively robust understanding of you and your behaviors (and everyone else's even if they aren't using glasses) to a degree that would be not just unprecedented but also incredibly valuable to advertisers and companies.

That is worth Trillions and FB (and SNAP and others) has been moving steadily on this path to realize this world for at least a decade.

Like the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel?

I feel like Zuckerberg has always seen (and wanted to see) himself as an idea person. He's the guy who invented Facebook! That phrase is practically synonymous at this point with "tech visionary".

But he hasn't had a real, successful idea since Facebook. He bought Oculus, he bought Instagram, he bought WhatsApp. Original experiments like Portal have mostly been flops. The longer Facebook goes along as it is, the richer and more detached he gets, the deeper his delusion grows and the more audacious (and expensive) are his desperate efforts to prove that he's still the visionary he always thought/wished he was.

So now we're entering the "nobody except him even knows what he's talking about anymore" phase, which he probably takes as a sign that he's seeing things others can't, when the reality is that he's living in his own little world that's only getting further and further removed from the real one. Some part of me feels bad for him.

While I think that's true on some level, in general I think this largely downplays Zuckerberg's competence. The company is $1T market cap and still fully controlled and executed by just him, the original founder. No other entity compares to that. It's the most concentrated power across the world we've ever seen. As powerful as president's seem, there's so many checks, balances, and compromises within and across parties to do things, I don't think it compares. And you just don't get there without an incredible amount of smarts and calculating.

If anyone has a small chance of ending up emperor of the fucking universe, as scary as that is, it's this guy.

I'm not saying he isn't smart, I'm saying he isn't creative (but I think he wants to be). As you say, he's got more power than potentially any other single person, and what does he have to show for it other than more power?

>The company is $1T market cap and still fully controlled and executed by just him, the original founder.

That doesn't mean he's been essential for a long time. I think an awful lot of people thought that Steve Jobs was important to Apple when he died in 2011. But look at it now.

> He bought Oculus, he bought Instagram, he bought WhatsApp

Three great purchases. Lots people stopped using Facebook and exclusively use Instagram nowadays.

>He's the guy who invented Facebook!

And probably not even that, he probably took it from other people

Wonder why he hasn't looked into starting his own space program.

I can see why Mark is taking his company in this direction, as Facebook in its current form is getting old and increasingly losing the attention of the younger generations. To keep the surveillance capitalism model alive, Facebook needs to grow many more tentacles and get people to use hardware they control. Apples pesky privacy stance will not matter if most people start using an Oculus device to jump into and interact with his alternate, ad-fueled universe. A VR environment is the perfect place to slip in ads and product placements in new and subtle ways.

so this is how the matrix actually starts guys

Man, if Zuckerberg ran for president in 2016 we would have most certainty avoided Trump. He is truly the Napoleon of our time, charismatic, cunning and always expanding his reign across the world. It's really a shame that the government keeps trying regulate it. Democrats should back off, Zuckerberg could easily replace them with AI Deepfakes and the masses wouldn't care, much less notice the difference.

> Zuckerberg > charismatic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak

I am reminded of the time he tried to demonstrate he was a normal human to other humans by livestreaming a barbecue

Charisma is not this man's forte

He wasn't old enough in 2016

Reply on news.ycombinator.com