Facebook Renames to Meta
about.facebook.com
about.facebook.com
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.
Meta, ortho, para.
Paraverse. Orthoverse.
We can't keep using metaverse now.
Neverse for short.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Identity_Integration....
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.
That one? That company lacks innovation?
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.
They also complained about discomfort when resetting center on the gyro control. Something else Splatoon 2 nailed gracefully.
And finally, you example (splatoon 2) only needs to compute 2 degrees of freedom in movement (rotation left-right - or yawing, rotation down-up - or pitching, since rolling isn't relevant with a dot target), while VR systems depend on 6 degrees of freedom (yawing, pitching, rolling, elevating, strafing and surging - all of these for at least 3 devices at the same time: your head, left hand and right hand). Unfortunately controls in VR are quite complicated, and accelerometers, gyroscopes (and magnetometers which are also used in VR systems to know the reference to the floor) are simply insufficient (but necessary since the positional sensors can't keep track all time with occasional occlusion, such as having one hand passing over the other or leaving the tracking area), which is why the same sensors on the switch are used in every VR headset and controls in addition with even more sensors and algorithms.
EDIT: the camera system also helps a lot with defining gaming boundaries in the room and being able to quickly see if I accidentally leave it, I already punched my monitor once and that's with a barrier that always get visible when I approach something in my room.
Adding 3 additional axises change nothing. Nintendo didn’t do it because it’s very niche to require that. It costs pennie’s more to get a 6DOF gyro vs a 3DOF. The question is the need. Do you need to rotate the yaw of your hand? Nope.
So my statements stand. The VR folks seem to be on a “we’re more superior than thou” kick with gyro controls.
A gyroscope is used to detect orientation/angular velocity (spinning), the sensor to add the other degrees of freedom is already there in most modern controllers and smartphones (the accelerometer). The issue is still accuracy I'm afraid.
>Do you need to rotate the yaw of your hand? Nope.
I'd certainly enjoy to open doors and make a simple goodbye gesture in VR.
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/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/So...
Occulus seems to realize this but their software side still needs work.
Nintendo is the only major player in the handheld category: of course they're a "leader". The success of the Switch supports my prior point: it's a warmed-over Nvidia Shield that has very mediocre hardware (Tegra X1 - Maxwell arch), but has amazing first-party games on it. BoTW is one of the best games I have played.
A 480p game on the Wii is still a playable game. An art style that leans into the low resolution will also look fine. While it might not have looked as good as a PS3 it's still playable.
A VR headset with imprecise orientation sensors and a slow refresh rate will make you sick. Your visual input won't match what your proprioception says about your body's positioning. Even if you manage not to get sick such a system isn't usable for non-trivial durations. A low end VR system is not worth any amount of money because it's not practically usable.
Yes, cables are also something that lowers immersion.
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.
Yes, you can see the pixels. But it’s easy enough to ignore that if the content is compelling.
The difference is pixels per degree.
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
1) How do I share something physical with friends remotely in VR? Think food and drinks.
2) How do my other senses come into play? What if I want to smell my mothers perfume? Or feel and smell the ocean breeze?
3) Walking
There are still very large blockers we simply don’t have the technology for. This attempt will fail just the same.
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.
Which is cool. If it weren't for the energy use.
Forced monetization of all that, is a bad thing, not a good thing.
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.
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).
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.
Someone could just make you a counterfeit with one bit changed and sell it cheaper or free, so it doesn't solve anything. Maybe something with neural hashes could work, but nothing in today's popular nft systems.
Your loot is worthless without the game. Why would you still want it?
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.
No one is crying out for a metaverse.
The same way things of monetary value interoperate on the internet currently. Anyone right now can create their own ecommerce site right now and start selling things for money just fine.
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.
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.
This only makes sense for like gambling games / other financial stuff that values those items as a substitute for money. What game designer would let some other company add items to your game without your oversight? Why would you bother devoting developing time into mao king sure everything renders correctly and has the correct properties in game. What if the other game gets hacked and now people start bringing OP items into your game. If you are designing a game you typically want to have control over the whole experience.
> This only makes sense for like gambling games / other financial stuff that values those items as a substitute for money.
Here's another scenario outside of gaming - suppose I once bought some content on Apple Music, but now use some other platform. If music streaming services stored ownership information on a public ledger, then those permissions (and possibly playlists) could just be imported into arbitrary platforms. What's better, startups that build a better experience than Apple Music could access that data without Apple's permission.
The core idea is that the end-user owns their data by default (ie, no explicit export); not the 3rd party platform.
It's reasonable to doubt that Apple would want to allow this, of course - they do seem to like their walled gardens. But it does give another concrete example.
I'm going to reiterate my main point - a public ledger that no particular party can control is the only mechanism that I see for avoiding vender lock-in as we (for better or worse) lean ever more heavily into online and virtual systems.
EDIT: Tried to reword to make my point more clear
I can just upload my *.loot file, and get it anywhere.
The only "good" thing this does is enforce a way to ensure users pay. Eg. Blizzard can't ensure i bought that new skin for my avatar if i'm just uploading a file, but by transferring an NFT or whatever they can. I would rather not use new-age DRM in my metaverse.
The video in the initial tweet is up to 2.1 million views: https://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.
(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.)
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.
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.
There are some niche products with stable worlds, but those are a minority of a minority.
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.
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.
MMOs aren't eating the world like in 2005, but they're a solidly-established genre that looks here to stay.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-o...
[1] https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass...
[2] https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/05/meet-the-man-who-red...
[3] https://tech4gamers.com/amazon-mmo-new-world-registered-a-pe...
But MMO in general today are massive, far bigger than WoW ever was. Though, there is also far more diversity regarding world-sizes. From smaller worlds for some dozen to hundred users, to bigger world with thousands and ten thousands, to the big massive virtual continents that WoWs era defined, we have them all now.
Then we have the endless amounts of wargames[1], shoots[2] and old browser-games[3]. Or the newer genre of battle royale, where we have hundreds of players per session in some game. Though, there is not much richful interaction between the players outside the game, it's all just simple chat or even none at all. Though, I heard Fortnite has gained some persistent world-aspects outside the game-sessions?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_...
> but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?
I think their point is more that they will offer the graphical virtual space for the players to wait and meet between the games and work, while others will create the games and apps which people than can enter from this space. My understanding is, they offer technology and the connecting point, not the content. The same way they already do it today with plain old 2D crud-interfaces.
You’re going to see more games like Genshin Impact and the phantasy star online update. Open world multiplayer games without the massively part.
Roblox largely is the modern source mod scene but monetized.
I did enjoy wandering around the TARDIS though.
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...
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.
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.
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.
One step closer to real life Shadowrun.
It really seems like they're tipping their hand here.
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.”
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)
Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free.
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/
> 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.
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.
Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel the secondary market - from which creators see little to no gain. Surprise, Pablo Picasso (nor his estate) doesn't see a dime from the speculation on his art at high-society art auctions - the verifiability of art (i.e., NFTs) benefits overwhelmingly speculators, not creators.
I watched the FB keynote today and some parts were just dystopian. Instead of street art being on a wall for everyone to look at, the VR "street art" expired after mere seconds, requiring you to "tip" the creator to simply keep looking at it? Can we not financialize every moment of existence? FB's vision for the metaverse feels a lot like being nickeled and dimed every 3 seconds for all eternity, where every interaction is commercialized. It's hard to imagine any kind of real shared human experience emerging from this. It feels like FB looked at the state of the real world - where commercial interests are grafted onto the human experience, and decided to just skip the human experience part and go straight to the commercialization part.
Digital scarcity is just such a depressing failure of imagination - artists can produce copies of their art at literally zero marginal cost! Instead of producing art for one customer at a time, they can now produce art that can be sold en masse - so everyone can have access to the art they admire. Why does a pair of virtual metaverse sneakers need to be one-of-a-kind? Why can't we instead sell copies of the sneakers to everyone who wants it, and the price would be low because the marginal cost of production is zero? Why can't we revel in the widespread abundance - provided to both the community and the creator - rather than wallow in the artificially-induced scarcity?
More importantly, do we actually want to try and cement a system of perpetual ownership or revenue in an abundant digital world? Doesn't this go directly against our goal of encouraging creators to keep creating?
I think that one of the downside of current content models based on IP and access rights are that many companies (from Disney to Nintendo) have discovered that they can augment their revenue streams basically in perpetuity by locking down decades-old pieces of content, preventing other people from building on that content or sharing it, and then endlessly reselling and recycling it. Because they have the ability to restrict even normal people from building on their work in even non-commercial settings, they have no real competition or incentive to keep iterating on their work or to be responsible stewards of their IP. This is not the outcome that we wanted from IP law, and I feel very hesitant to try and cement it into a technology.
> from transfer of ownership
I think an important concept to get about the Internet is that content ownership isn't scarce. We have moved into a world where I can give something to you without losing it myself. There is no "transfer" of ownership at all, in the digital world there is duplication of ownership. This is a giant shift from how the real world usually works; and with our laws/businesses, we have made a deliberate choice online to ignore that paradigm shift and instead try our absolute hardest to make sure that "ownership" continues to be an exclusive right that can be transferred.
It's understandable why we've gone down this route, but it is nevertheless a complete denial of what an interconnected digital medium is and what it's capable of. I hope that as we move forward and continue to iterate on the Internet that we gradually get closer to embracing the Internet's strengths rather than hobbling them.
Ignoring all of the other criticisms of NFTs for a second, the underlying goal of NFTs as a technology is to undo the existence of digital files. It's to undo the invention of copyable data and to step backwards out of the Internet back into an older world where when you handed someone a CD you no longer had the CD. I think that even if all of the other problems with NFTs were fixed, that's still just not a goal that's worth pursuing.
I don't think it'd be controversial to say that the world would've been poorer for it - and George Lucas too. If the goal is financial success for artists, mass distribution always beats selective exclusion, and if the goal is broad cultural impact the case for mass distribution is even clearer.
Humans want to enforce certain forms of scarcity. Trying to be utopian about it just ends up creating unintended externalities.
You're correct to criticize advertising, but I also want to push back a little bit on the "utopia" of paywalls as a funding method for the web.
There's a difference between paying for content creation and paying for content itself. Content creators and their time are actually scarce resources, even online. Content itself is not a scarce resource; once something is created it becomes abundant. So both IP laws/paywalls and advertising are attempts to monetize and artificially restrict/control some other abundant and/or uncommoditized resource instead of engaging with the actual scarce resource/activity that we care about incentivizing.
As such, both advertising and IP-enforced pay-for-access models have negative externalities that arise from them being indirect monetization models. With advertising, we deal with negative externalities such as privacy violations and clickbait. With pay-for-access models, we get externalities like DRM, SaaS, endless content recycling, and a general lockdown of culture itself.
With both payment schemes, we are ignoring the actually scarce resource that is actually in real demand by the market: creators and time. But instead of trying to come up with schemes to monetize that and instead of trying to imagine what a market based on creative/useful output would look like, we've instead become obsessed with making other resources artificially scarce or artificially commoditized. We fight against technology and human nature itself instead of thinking about how we can fund the real scarce resources that still remain.
This could be a longer conversation; there are multiple theories about how to pay for creation, and a lot of debate about what models are sustainable there. Too long of a conversation to get into right here. But the really short version of this conversation is that you are very correct to look at advertising as an imprecise, indirect way of measuring value, and you are correct to point out it has a lot of negative externalities. But you're making an assumption that pay-for-access models haven't had their own negative externalities, and I don't think that assumption holds up. I think we've seen a lot of suppression of innovation and general culture because of our current funding model for IP. Of course a theoretical Internet where people paid for content access would have turned out different; but would it have been better? I don't think that's a safe assumption at all.
At its worst the current pay-for-access model sometimes decreases the creation/availability of content because it incentivizes recycling and restriction of existing content, and restricts other creators from building on top of and preserving existing content -- essentially denying a universal human instinct that has been around for almost as long as humans have existed.
There isn't an easy answer about how we should remake a content economy in a world without digital scarcity (ask Open Source devs how hard this is), but recreating digital scarcity and pretending that we're still in the old system probably isn't the right way to move forward. We should try to consider how people can more directly pay for the resources that are actually scarce: not content itself or the bits on your computer, but instead content creation and maintenance and the people who are able to make the things we care about.
The more directly we monetize resources that are actually scarce and the less that we rely on indirect models of monetization, the fewer surprising/negative externalities we'll see in the long run.
That's not necessarily true. In fact I don't think that holds at all. They've bought smartphones and laptops for hundreds and thousands of dollars and pay many tens of dollars every month to access the Internet. People are already paying quite a bit to access content on the Internet.
The problem with paying for most types of content is the content is not worth the amount of money it's practical to charge for it. Charging money on the Internet is expensive and has lower bounds below which no one will even conduct a transaction. That lower bound is about a dollar and so many transaction fees come out of it a seller is not going to end up with a whole dollar and the buyer will end up paying more than a dollar.
A blog post, gif, or YouTube video is not worth a dollar. For most people they're not even worth a whole penny. They're certainly not worth an up front payment sight unseen.
In the early days of the Internet charging for content was even less practical and more expensive than today.
Advertising on the Internet, like advertising in other media, is a way to "charge" users some fractional penny to access some content. In aggregate the content creator can make money based traffic. While AdTech has reached asinine levels of intrusiveness the concept of advertising isn't necessarily bad. It also doesn't exist just because users are cheapskates.
Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory?
One of the great things about digital worlds/goods is they exist in microscopic (nanoscopic now) electrical circuits. They use practically no resources and can be duplicated for next to nothing. They also take up very little physical space to store. They're free from or at least resistant to most natural phenomena that create scarcity.
Because as Second Life demonstrated we don't seem to have many good ideas for incentivising creation otherwise.
Any system implement artificial scarcity would be a DRM system. In order for you to able to "wear" virtual Nikes (because you paid for them) and me not be able to "wear" them (because I didn't) the metaverse could not be open and federated.
In order for me to see your virtual Nikes I'd have to retrieve the mesh and texture files for them. My system would have to be locked down such that I couldn't pull those files out of my local cache.
From your side of the issue, would you (the hypothetical royal you) pay for virtual Nikes if I could tell my client device to ignore remote resources? What good are your virtual Nikes if people can choose not to see them?
Obviously replace Nike with any IP holder even down to the smallest of small time creators. A metaverse with artificial scarcity would be the walliest of walled gardens with a giant moat on the outside. The only way to make that work is to have a completely locked down and closed system.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/facebookrealitylabs/videos/56153569...
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.
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
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
(In general the maximize profit meme does need to die tho)
The second paragraph gives two such cases: AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow and Shlensky v. Wrigley.
> 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.
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...
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/)
This would be an interesting test case. The limits on what he can or cannot do are remarkably ill-defined.
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.
Why that is is where the fundamental disagreement is. One of the proposed reasons is too much regulation, the other is too little. It's (in my opinion) probably both - too much poorly applied, and not enough where it's needed.
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!"
which was added thanks to your parent comment.
$200+ billion. They can't afford it. 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.
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?"
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.
Maybe a vocal minority like us HN-folk, but I don't think that by ourselves we really matter in terms of numbers.
It was like the Matrix scene where Neo was learning, then leaves the simulation and says "I know Kung Fu".
She used computers for social media and looking up recipes, so not very savvy at all. I don't think there's a correlation between interest in VR and technicality. Maybe between _vocal_ interest in VR and technicality.
On the other hand, oculus is state of the art in virtual reality. I don't know if any other hardware or ecosystem as well developed as theirs is.
I feel like we’re all hoping that there will be a VR version of the early web, free and open, and mostly just neat things to connect with or about. I worry there is increasingly no chance of that.
The internet network and it's forbears was funded largely by the US DoD (not the army specifically I don't think?) (and as a huge portion of academic computer science continues to be, btw), but most of the people involved in creating the internet and the things built on top of it, technologically and socially, including those allocating significant material resources to it's development, were not in fact military personnel (let alone in the army specifically?).
What I meant is that the people involved in building it were focused on things other than making money. (This may be hard to believe, that any human endeavor can take place except motivated by extreme profits, but it's the case). They were also not, by and large on the whole, especially motivated by military advantage, although some may have been, including some of the funders. But it was not in fact, largely, built as a national-security-focused or military/militarized network (sure, subsets of it were, there was a MILNET; it was a part of ARPANET and later separated from it, which shows that it was not the whole); nor was it built originally as a giant surveillance system for the purposes of commerce and profit (or law enforcement).
About 0.6-1 trillion dollars, give or take.
20-50 times what they earn per user.
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...
0. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamer.com/amp/oculus-will...,
$300 * 3 billion people, so $900 Billion give or take which coincidentally is right around the market cap of the entire company.
3 billion fb users x 100 per unit = 300 billion
A letter to everyone would cost 3 billion
That feeling when you don't have a single original idea, and unironically view Black Mirror episodes as a blueprint.
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.
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 ...)
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).
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_suite#Compar...
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!
I would suggest looking at libertarian left instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism, in particular.
It feels as if abusive societies are the norm (and we have seen that in breathtakingly dark glory with the ascent of surveillance capitalism) but the historical pattern seems to be pointing to the gradual discovery of tools (institutions, behaviors) that eliminate these local minima. Alas it may not be happening fast enough to prevent drifting into a bottomless pit.
The main current issue with the "metaverse", imho, is not who will control it, but is it actually a breakthrough communications technology that is worthwhile developing to its "full" potential? Its "wow" factor feels really gimmicky. I am thinking that if it feels like a gimmick maybe it is a gimmick. But I do acknowledge that a combination of preliminary implementations and not have discovered yet the use cases what would really make it worthwhile may change the picture at a future point.
You say this with a maybe as though it isn't already a certainty.
Nothing can stop it from happening. There will always be brainpower available, willing, and capable of contributing to computer aided fantasy and isolation. Not that it has to necessarily be a bad thing, mind.
OTOH plenty of things could make it impossible to succeed with a starship.
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.
Thanks I needed the laugh.
> 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...
if they don’t have a marketplace that wraps what “other people build” I’ll eat my hat
A digital identity registry/provider? Did they finally recognize that gamers or people in virtual worlds want to escape their RL identity?
Or is it just another hopeless try to enforce their digital "singular identity" authoritarianism?
If I was FB I would have announced at least a protocol or some technical foundation, even if it's purely preview.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey now, not everybody is on FB.
> I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true.
I'm not sure that you can equate demographics and usage statistics to feelings about credibility. For example, I use a certain world-eating online retailer/marketplace a few times per year, but never for anything where I think there is a reasonably high chance that I would be purchasing counterfeit goods, because of my concerns about credibility.
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.
The Oculus is great, but the way it's actually used today (games/social VR chat mostly) is still pretty niche.
Facebook is really pushing this new metaverse use case that blends VR with work/meetings/etc. I personally think it's a non-starter, they seem to be trying extremely hard to manufacture a trend, rather than capitalizing on an existing one.
But I've been completely wrong about Facebook twice before, so what do I know.
https://vox.run if you want to check it out. Supports any WebXR browser and the dev tools are built in.
Wouldn't that be fitting because the word comes from a bad sci-fi pulp story?
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.
> 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.
Contrast with WhatsApp where they control the entire stack from client to network to server. They can push a single set of updates and everyone has the new hotness.
Stage one is that the old email servers become an end for all of their users. From there services can start shifting to having clients where users control the keys.
>Every client would need to support whatever E2E encryption scheme chosen.
If someone couldn't use gmail with an email client the author of that client would have a big incentive to add support for it else risk their users switching to a client that does.
No, going back to your original premise the only thing 'interesting' for me about Facebook is how dismally awful the company is and how nakedly sociopathic Zuckerberg is.
"…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?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/faceboo...
The BuzzFeed journalist shared a video on her Twitter that illustrates use of metaverse by Facebook HR
https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos
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
"If you can't change the product, change the packaging."
I don't want them to own it. I'm 100% sure.
No one should own it, the only non-dystopian metaverse would be open hardware and software and decentralized/p2p connectivity.
I am absolutely certain that nobody should own it.
But with the current discussion, I'm surprised we haven't heard more from other players in the field except facebook. What about the makers of VRChat or Second Life? Metaverse-style virtual realities are their bread and butter - and now for the first time, we have a discussion about this subject that includes the larger public. Shouldn't they be all over this?
And yet, the only ones talking about the "Metaverse" seems to be Facebook - pardon, Meta. So I wonder, if this whole Metaverse discussion an actual discussion at all or is it just Facebook kicking up dust?
>We don’t think about this as if different companies are going to build different metaverses. We think about it in terminology like the Mobile Internet. You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet and I don’t think in the future it will make sense to say that we are building our own metaverse either. I think we’re each building different infrastructure and components that go towards hopefully helping to build this out overall and I think that those pieces will need to work together in some ways.
https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...
Of course not; buying up competitors is much more practical (why build what you can buy?). So this is presumably the same strategy Facebook plans for any competing companies that make successful use of whatever open systems underlie "the metaverse".
Did you bother to watch the Keynote? That's what they said they are doing.
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.
"You've got mail!" LOL
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, that was not a smart business decision. I think the goal was to make it look like FB was cool by associating it with the other brands, but all it did was make the other brands worse.
That's the kind of craziness you can get from a founder that controls everything I suppose.
Bear in mind that Mark Zuckerberg has only ever worked at Facebook, which must be pretty weird.
The obvious distinction being Jobs, with his "one more thing," announced an actual product.
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.
It feels like only regulators can take on them, but that too is unlikely to happen, except some feeble attempts in Europe
Europe unfortunately is too weak unless they convince the U.S.
One more thing for your viewing pleasure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxBnaMGP2aY
~ A fellow Columbo fan who used to watch it with his Grandma (she so had the hots for him)
Here is list: https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/one-more-thing-3793072/
how does FB changing their name affect their chances at regulation?
They can even list Instagram on the market selling maybe a 5% equity.
Aww, kids are so cute when they're having a temper tantrum
> "One More Thing" is the announcement of a company rebrand to avoid government regulation.
"One more thing" was a famous Jobs quote for major announcements, and the iPhone had possibly the most famous tech announcement ever, let alone of Jobs'. There was also a famous line where he says "these aren't 3 products, this is one device," which also has the word "one" in it.
Could you elaborate on that please?
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.
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."
We'll continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs
Also, their "support" for sideloading, while better than nothing, requires a valid phone number or credit card number to sideload anything.
That said there are privacy controls. You interact with other Oculus users through a customizable username. And your Oculus activity can be set to be shown to "Only me" (or Oculus friends, or FB friends, or public).
But FB themselves are obviously still collecting all the data they can.
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.
Especially since the original Quest didn't require a Facebook account. It required a Quest account, but it didn't have to be explicitly linked to Facebook. (It's also one reason why I still use my original Quest and haven't gotten the updated model).
I mean... Quest had this ability before. And Facebook took it away. And now they want us to clap for them when they say they're kind of bringing it back, at some point in the future, in some kind of limited capacity for work accounts?
Call me skeptical.
I'm not really aware of any platform (including Quest) where I would say that Facebook is doing a good job of supporting consumer choice, and I've read plenty of leaked internal communications from the company that suggests they're internally pretty hostile to the idea (Mark included).
Maybe they've turned over a new leaf, but if Mark wants us to all give him the benefit of the doubt that a metaverse is going to be different, he could start by showing this commitment with... any of their current products, really.
There's a lot of talk here about how Facebook is going to be moving into the bold new world of user agency and privacy and choice, and not much acknowledgement that Facebook is responsible for making these platforms what they are today. I don't like Mark's subtle insinuation that Facebook is doing something new or bold by getting rid of restrictions on Oculus that he created. Especially when he hasn't actually fixed the problem, he's just vaguely assured people that the problem might get fixed a year from now, maybe.
He wants credit for swinging in a new direction, and he hasn't actually swung in that direction. Well, prove it, Mark. Prove it with your existing products before you start bragging about how good your next product will be.
Assuming not good or bad intent but meta intent would mean they're working on a meta account, so while you stop into a 'verse it's not your social, it can be whatever, but they'll link all your accounts in the meta umbrella.
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/
Imagine acquiring a company via your non-profit purely to grab the name and domain names for your for-profit.
Announcement: https://cziscience.medium.com/meta-transition-5f66b1fae475
These trademarks covered: “promoting the goods and services of others via computer and communication networks using targeted and non-targeted methods; operating on-line marketplaces for sellers of goods and/or services … providing advertising space via the global computer network … creating on-line virtual communities … hosting electronic facilities for others for organizing and conducting meetings, events and interactive discussions via communication networks”
So pretty likely to conflict with Facebook.
However, they transferred all of these to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in May: https://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/assignment-tm-7299..., and as you mentioned, are now shutting down. It’s not a great look. I would feel pretty bad if I had devoted years of my life to building meta.org to now see how it was used
...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.
What a joke. Is there a more bluntly obvious PR than inverting everything you're being criticized for?
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?
I'm pretty sure this literally just means "it'll have apps"
So it's "created by people all over the world, and open to everyone" in the same way iOS is. Sounds like a great replacement for reality
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.
Anyone know if people there are heavily influenced by his work?
How so? Searching for "metaverse" on LW yields 9 results, most of them are irrelevant.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k3823vuarnmL5Pqin/quantum-no...
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/coherent-extrapolated-volition
The main point being that it has the potential to grow to a point where the life of a user becomes inseparable from a 'Metaverse'. Whether you call this 'virtual' or a 'simulation' seems moot.
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.
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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/instagram-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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 pasé?
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.
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.
Why not? I watch sad and scary movies all the time to experience those emotions.
You can also have virtual struggle and striving to achieve virtual items that are to many people just as rewarding as real world items.
How does your mother die in VR? How does your best friend die in a car crash? How do you learn your Grandpa doesn't recognize you anymore? Or to learn you have a terminal illness? How do you get so nervous to meet a person your face feels like it's on fire, work up nerve, get rejected, and go home wanting to die? Those are real feelings entertainment cannot reproduce.
Nothing virtual is real. No movies are real. Not yet, at least.
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.
You might resonate with the manifesto: https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/
I don’t know that we can outright dismiss anything based on 3D TVs not taking off. I’m certainly no fan of Facebook attempting to own this space, but to outright dismiss the whole concept because of the poor sales for 3D TVs seems naïve IMO.
I'm not sure the general public at large will like VR, either. It's disorienting. And if strip mall Lasik wasn't enough to tell, we don't like wearing things on our face. That will -never- change.
I remember going to a real 3d movie as a kid, but I forget where. Some movie studio park, probably. It was only 10 or so minutes of Hitchcock's 'The Birds', but wow was it amazing. Too amazing. I remember feeling real fear to where I'd take the glasses off for a few seconds, people were screaming, many took off their glasses before it was over.
Not sure if this relates to the metaverse, just sharing an anecdote.
If this VR utopia ever will take hold, it will be with neural implants or something like it. Not with glasses, and not with contacts.
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 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?
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."
The sentence I was looking for.
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.
let me repeat what i said earlier: i don't think that the current generation of consumer headsets is ready for prime time, all of the reasons are however solvable. that's why i used the cop-out of "at least 10 years off".
theoretically i can use it indefinitely without getting a headache. It however always feels like a slap in the face if even the smallest hiccup or framedrop happens. Another thing thats hard to stomach is movement done by controller. Its (for me) doable while sitting down, but if i stand up while moving with the controller... lets just say i usually stop within 5 minutes if i'm forced to do that.
the low pixel density on consumer headsets make it hard to consider them for anything but casual gaming usage, even though I think that VR-Headset gaming will always be a pipe-dream. It would be a different story if fantasy-style VR Capsule ever become a thing, letting the player also have touch etc, but the First Person View that current games try use is in my experience just too lacking with a purely visual headset, especially with the poor input quality like we have today.
The potential I see in VR Headsets is really in productivity while sitting in front of a desk using a regular mouse and keyboard. 8k displays would be a minimum for that and once you target that market new designs become viable again, as few people would want to wear such a headset directly on their face. Letting in your surroundings will be less of an issue if it's not aiming for complete isolation/immersion and onboard graphics will likely be less of an issue if the device doesn't have to render a complex video game scene.
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...
To me that points to a 'log in with Meta' option.
<meta property="og:title" content="Meta">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Meta">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://meta.com">
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.
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:
> links to a Discord server
> 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
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.
But then phones came
The metaverse is an idea. Immersion is in the brain. Theater was the first metaverse.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's like being at a professional work event and truly shocked that everyone is well behaved.
What about email?
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.
I suppose the ultimate goal is compulsory participation, for more or less overt values of "compulsory."
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.
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.
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.
Maybe that was the point. People scrolling think it's just a selfie but then you realize his wife is moving in the background!
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 f̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ meta who have to clean this up in the end.
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...
VR is much more likely to either become the new TV or to die an obscure death, like 3D movies.
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?
This is all pretty inaccurate. Glass wasn't even a VR/AR headset. The released Spectacles were just cameras. They're releasing a new Spectacles devkit that's actually an AR headset soon. Snap filters are still very popular and ARKit is also quite popular although it hasn't really hit a killer business case.
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.
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
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.
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?
To college, where actual humans will be available for porking at all hours. If this Meta thing is a success, there might not be a following generation.
And how he communicates with his friends, no video, no calls, but just chat text.
I honestly don't see this generation move to intense communication/experience, when they now prefer the most casual tech.
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.
Xerox (modern computer), AT&T (Unix), Sony (PlayStation), Google (Maps, GMail), Apple (iPhone), Amazon (AWS)
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.
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).
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.
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?
But that's exactly my point. Zuckerberg isn't starting fresh every year. That's the sort of comparison I'd love to see. He's a guy who won very big based on some lucky choices at 19. And he's never started a fresh tournament since.
In contrast, look at Steve Jobs. He's a fine example of "Once you're lucky, twice you're good." And more than twice, really. Started Apple, got pushed to the side Created the Macintosh and the LaserWriter and got booted. Helped get Pixar going. Started NeXT, which was a relative failure, but whose tech set him up nicely for an acquisition. Acquihired back at Apple and turned it into the juggernaut it is today. Say what you want about him, and I'll say plenty negative, but he clearly has skills.
That's the kind of writeup I'm looking for about Zuckerberg. That all I'm getting is bluster and "but he's very rich" is its own kind of answer, I guess.
> We're talking about business acumen
Yes, we are. But your definition is a relatively narrow one where dominance and profit are the only measures of business success. I get why that's a popular definition here. But even here, it's not the only one. If the public markets are all that matter to you, fine, but at least try to recognize their are other criteria.
every morningl m-f, the markets open and FB starts fresh like every other ticker. every evening FB is either up or down. enough down days and zuck would be out. the fact that FB is up and to the right for almost 10 years exactly indicates that zuck wasn't just lucky.
You aren't even trying to understand my point here, and you have reduced yours to absurdity, so I'm done.
New product launches have indeed gone poorly. This certainly looks terrible to my eyes. Time will tell but skepticism is warranted.
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
Indeed, part of that acquisition was firing the then-current CEO. So as an example, I think it better serves to point out why we should question Zuckerberg's performance.
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.
>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.
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
Isn't hiring the right people an extremely large part of being "business savvy"?
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.
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.
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".
But he has uncontested control because of an unusual dual-class share structure. And isn't the explanation for Facebook's founder-favoring structure basically that Peter Thiel wanted it that way?
My recollection is that founder-favoring share structures go in and out of fashion historically, and that Facebook rose during a period when that was popular. So yes, props to young Mark Zuckerberg for pushing for that when it was achievable.
But even Mark Zuckerberg describes himself as lucky in this regard:
“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/zuckerberg-if-i-didnt-have-c...
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.
IIRC, the idea he stole wasn't "social networking," it was "social networking for elite kids at Harvard."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facebook:
> Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Zuckerberg tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.[21][22]
Building a company with 1000 users is a success. A million is another success. A billion is hundreds of successes.
I'd argue the 1st million users is much harder than the 3rd billion.
- Well, I wouldn't say that... what else did he do other than relativity?
And for what it's worth, Einstein did a lot more than one thing. Off the top of my head, Einstein's annus mirabilis had 4 papers that were all major accomplishments, including the E=mc² equation popularly associated with him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
His work on relativity came later. As did a fair bit of other work, that I'm less familiar with but that I could easily look up and provide sources for.
And that's the kind of list I'm looking for here. People have claimed that he has other successes. I'm asking what they are. I've now given you the kind of list I wanted for Einstein, and I've given it elsewhere in this discussion for Steve Jobs. So will you give me that list for Zuckerberg? Because as far as I know it has one thing on it: Facebook.
Given that nobody has so far, and given all the handwaving like yours, I think you all have answered my question.
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.
If anything, it seems like young people ended up moving to Snapchat as their main social media platform of choice since the purchase. I had a ton of friends who used Instagram frequently but now almost no one posts there, other than occasional stories. The main feed is almost entirely ads now, and I can't remember the last time I had a conversation with someone who said they like Instagram still.
That's not to say it hasn't grown and isn't making them money, but I also don't think Instagram would have had the same trajectory if Facebook didn't buy them. They just integrated it with their existing platform that already had a lot of traffic.
b) having absolutely 0 moral compass
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.
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.
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.
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."
I vouch for the parent commenter’s statement.
What I said was that it's a concept I find useful. Whether a trained professional who was given the necessary access to diagnose him is beside the point. Indeed, any qualified professional who did examine and diagnose him couldn't talk about it like this, so it seems bizarre to me you have mistaken an internet forum comment for some sort of ironclad medical claim.
And I find the concept useful and relevant here because it helps make clear how the rarefied world billionaires live in can over time distort cognition whether or not it crosses the line into an actual disorder.
That's my take on it too. I don't really feel the metaverse in Snow Crash was something that I'd like to replicate. I mean, it's a cool idea, but that world is not one that I'd intentionally try to make.
Whether or not we are on our way that direction is another question entirely...
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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).
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)
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.
used in a sentence:
MAAAN, why can't I get some money.
Dialing in a little, they peaked out at something like 40% of all US internet traffic 4-5 years ago.
Almost all my streaming is with Amazon Prime, which has a much bigger selection of content suited to my tastes.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon
( Netflix doesn't belong to Big Tech )
(Google is now Alphabet)
Microsoft
Apple
Meta
Amazon
AlphabetCoincidentally, 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...
Which I guess became Facebook Horizon https://socialmediahq.com/whatever-happened-to-the-hype-surr...
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.
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.
Besides, there are only a few sites that most people ever visit. The internet is “small” now. Tackle the biggest threat, the rest will fall in line - likely with glee since they already enforce pro-establishment censorship policies as it is. Twitter, for example.
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.)
I guess someone powerful is annoyed.
But journalists love Twitter. Every other account is a journalist or media personality. So all the "social media bad" articles implicate Facebook.
Cause they're evil like a certain other company but managed to skip straight over the "Don't be evil" phase.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very few can handle bad actors at the scale they have to. But no they were clearly not ready. Not sure what tech company really showed success at this sort of scale. Twitter could barely stay above their toxic sludge of content, Youtube is even more full of misinformation, reddit is not free of controversial decisions - hell, even good ol' SMS and phone is a heap of robocalls and spam.
$29bn in annual profit means they can pay a bit more.
They have like 40k people acting as moderators. They have teams of people to triage issues related to election interference. They have teams dedicated to tracking bot rings and foreign astro turfing.
There is still more to do, but they hardly just pay a consultancy to "scrub the digital graffiti and hate speech off their walls."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
...advertising, spying, tracking, tabulating, monetizing, engaging, profiting, controlling...
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.
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?
>Is that engine open source?
That would be up to the implementers similar to how there are different browser engines.
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"
Ironically, this cannibalizing of the word "meta" makes me feel even more strongly in favor of breaking up the company.
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.
What does this mean for that?
https://sociable.co/science/aaron-swartz-chan-zuckerberg-met...
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.
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/20211022094334/https://www.meta....
You can't even watch the keynote without a Facebook account...
> 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.
I can't say I want them to fail because VR is exciting, but I do hope other companies can catch up and do R&D of their own.
MAANG? MAGNA? AANGM?
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).
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.
yes.
They seem to be on to something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt they will suffer from the venture. However, I believe that the name change will result in a long-lasting sting to remind them of their failures.
People said the same about the internet itself, then social media, then tinder, then tiktok.
Honestly, people and government just put "haven for pedo's" on everything they don't like.
So, just “people”?
This spells the end of the expression "that's so meta" or any related quip about self-referential humor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many times have they had Mark Zuckerberg come out talk about some future product or idea that never came to fruition?
Remember the faked home automation personal assistant video that Mark did a few years ago and how that was the future?
This is what this company does. They unveil an idea and faked tech demo before they even know if they can execute upon it in a meaningful way and then never talk about it again, because it ends up they can’t do what they promised.
Now I am sure they will do something here since they have the VR tech, but I just don’t believe they are going to create anything more than second life in VR.
"Are you worried about FB storing all your data? Okay, lets rename to a word that is about scooping up all relevant data."
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.
Is it going to be a walled garden? To what extent will it be open?
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.
It seems that in order to prevent that, we need some sort of security technology preventing me from being able to create computer programs / VR plugins that can simulate that visual experience. If so, does that mean that we're going to need some sort of fingerprinting technology that can determine whether a VR humanoid is a likeness of a real human?
Or is the plan "ban sexual content in VR worlds"?
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.
Ah, going to meta.com does take you to about.facebook.com.
They just aren't not-redirecting you yet.
--
Ok, acknowledged throwaway line. To try and save this and at least make this at least slightly more substantial -- I'm skeptical of VR becoming seriously mainstream, in the near term or perhaps ever. I'd say I hope FB goes all in and ends up burning up all their money, except I could see it being a profitable niche, giving them money to continue negatively impacting the mainstream non-metaverse online world.
Now we'll never need to leave our houses. All thanks to Facebo... Uh, Meta.
We knows what this will lead to....
Also, goodbye to all the little fragment of free "me" time people still have(if they still have any left) Without alone time to reflect on self, how can one grow, how can one think about something deeply?
The future is grim, unlike what Mark and his investors said while hoarding even more fortune.
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.
I always thought I would "get" technology. But with a lot of this new metaverse stuff, I truly don't "get it" while I think younger generations will. Some day maybe I'll make a fool of myself by not knowing how to call my son in VR using an NFT identity.
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.
What was interesting was the idea of a Meta account and that splitting out the various Facebook properties because enforcing one set of terms across all of them has become impossible. That's quite the about turn and has a lot of implications.
Unfortunately, it was also an almost detail free announcement, and felt like the company had only come to this conclusion a few days ago.
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.
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.
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".
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.
"love it" though?
Feels to me that it's a necessary evil, like car insurance.
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.
Here's an interesting thread from June 10: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27723460
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.
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-metaverse-10-bil...
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.
Facebook is creating a virtual world to allow us to escape the deteriorating state of this one.
It used to be companyurl/?sk=h_chr, which now just gives a message that something is wrong.
Or is "Facebook" being rebranded everywhere?
Note to self: if you ever write a scifi-novel, trademark the names of all flashy technologies imagined in it so that some Evil Corp does not claim them to brush up their coolness factor.
Instead of Metaverse, I'm going to call it Virtual Hell™.
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?
If you’ve not read it, it’s an enjoyable read. Definitely skip the movie, however.
Facebook will still be Facebook for quite a while.
When I was watching the keynote - about 10 mins in - I got redirected to login to Facebook. That is not cool.
"The metaverse will be social" and when you click "Watch the Keynote" it takes you to a login screen for Facebook?
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.
I recall several scummy companies doing that over the recent decades.
I don’t think Facebook will be able to control the metaverse as a closed platform, even if they wanted to.
Anything else you can do to ruin our day, Meta?
For me it will always be the fat man standing behind a lamp post.
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.
sidenote - if i am understanding correctly, its conceptually similar to modus operandi from back in the 90s? just in VR?
Any hints to a list somewhere?
Very few people today know that Chiquita used to be the infamous United Fruit Company.
but I'll add my dup comment for good measure:
META: Make Everything Terrible Again
It's a synthesis of the core features of social media:
Misinformation, Enragement, Tracking & Advertisements
or perhaps a more truthful mission statement for tech companies:
Make Everyone Technologically Addicted
It's cleaner.
Anyway, I am just being snarky. I get that this idea is much bigger than the Horizon Home demo. I guess I shouldn't be dismissive, since objectively, they also made one of the biggest most impactful companies in the world out of a PHP blog site.
Or less ambiguous, “meta” is a word of four letters.
You change it to a nerdy adjective.
doesn't change anything.
(As an aside the GDPR popup still asks me about “Facebook” cookies)
Are Facebook execs really this tone deaf?
if you call it something else does it still hurt people?
The general public finds the products of Google, Facebook and corporation X as being convenient, not evil.
There are many alternative social networks, search engines, chat apps, operating systems which for some reason don't have so much success. If they don't start being more convenient and more tempting to the public, we are still stuck with the products of "evil" corporations.
The governments of the world won't do anything to change the situation so the situation will only change if alternative products become more desirable by the public.
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.
They could have talked about how they do innovative tech research across the spectrum.
For example, they can reasonably take credit for react as a major open source contribution. Why not describe plans for doing the same in helping people build for the metaverse.
It felt way too surface level to me.
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.
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.
yes.