Facebook's metaverse spending will top $10B this year | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's metaverse spending will top $10B this year

protocol.com

15 pointscorysama22 comments

I remember using Facebook as a good way to organise meetups between friends in the realverse.

I switched to communicating close friends on Whatsapp when I noticed that photos and experiences seemed to be shared to prove more that you were having a good time, than actually having a good time. (I felt myself also doing this at times, and didn't like it).

If anything, I think we need far less of our convivial social lives being mediated through corporations, not more.

I use the word "convivial" after Ivan Illich, [1] who would view Facebook as part of a distopia.

> Zuckerberg said in the Q3 2021 earnings call Monday: "If you're in the metaverse every day, then you'll need digital clothes, digital tools, and different experiences. Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people and hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce this decade."

This to me sounds like someone who has become detached from reality.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich

So, more consumerism, fueled by artificial digital scarcity. Gross.

"You will own only meta-things and be happy."

"(We will take a 30% cut of every every meta-thing transaction.)"

To me it sounds more like the next logical step to the MMO game "Second Life".

Just today I got an offer related with NFTs. A guy I know, basically makes pictures, a batch of them where everyone has something unique.

He sold his first batch. Now he's working on the second one. A few thousand pictures, hundreds of dollars each.

And here I am, with a crappy salary writing code.

You could say that about any successful artist

Yeah, but this guy is not an artist. He has an unrelated job and does this as a hobby.

If only we spent more time having fun as opposed to pretending to.

My biggest gripe recently is the fact that Zuck and Co take bites out of my food and drink long before I can. Heck, when I am on vacation, they enjoy the view before I can. What gives? If I could only count the number of times where a hungry me waiting on my food was told to wait because "we need pictures of this awesome food".

When did folks start living for the likes as opposed to just liking their living?

No hurt intended here, but Zuck & co can shove their metaverse somewhere the sun don't shine for all I care.

Sounds like you need to be asking questions to yourself and whoever you are on vacation with rather than blaming a third party.

For real, this feels like blaming my microwave for only cooking popcorn.

it does?

Thanks for the therapeutic insight stranger.

I guess enabling a bad thing is not a crime and never has been. First they sugared up our drinks and food, now they are sugaring-up our day-to-day.

Maybe I am just cranky.

Time to start the #IEatFirst campaign - Pictures of partially eaten food only!

Recent suggestion for a New Yorker caption: "Honey, are you okay? You are barely taking pictures of your food."

This is the kind of long-term investment needed to push metaverse forward. I think it basically requires a founder-CEO to accomplish, as public markets apply way too much short term focus to any other executive.

Seems like FB or TWTR or NTFLX or TSLA are the only big players able to accomplish risks like this at this point...

FB is spending 50 billion on stock buybacks. Thats the biggest sign they have no clue what to do with the cash they have. From such people's imagination the metaverse is produced.

They could build a Bart extension from union city to East Palo Alto. There’s already a track.

My theory is the whole metaverse charade is just a nice story for investors in hopes to figure things out later when this inevitably doesn’t pan out. Kind of like g+

I don’t even know wtf this means. Is the zucc building his own digital asset infrastructure? Is he funding third party NFT projects?

We’ve had skins and avatars since the dawn of the internet. What exactly requires $10b in spending?

I’m imagining that black mirror episode where peasants ride bikes to earn points to spend on accessories for their little avatars.

Oculus will surely be a closed ecosystem. Just build a god damn database and web api so oculus games can integrate these silly pixels.

Go watch the movie "Ready player one". The book has been given to all facebook employees. They want something like that.

There's no way anyone wants to use metaverse that's controlled by FB.

Want and will are two very different things. Done right many people will live in it.

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