Meta

It's so weird that they changed the company's name without any actual product launch. I mean, yeah, obviously this is all about deflecting criticism, but TFA is right that the "metaverse" idea feels less-than-half-assed. It's like they're announcing, "We're out of ideas, so how about we jump this shark?"

Nobody particularly wanted Second Life, and I see no reason to think Facebook has cracked it. It feels like a sophomore effort (not the effort of sophomores, but a mediocre follow-up to a big debut).

Facebook has a valid use, for the fairly prosaic chitchat of friends and family, as well as more general communities (including the community of businesses people use, arts they consume, etc.) It developed some downsides that weren't necessarily obvious, though one really should have seen at least some of it coming since spamming and scamming long predate it. Network effects made it ubiquitous, and they weren't prepared to be the world's dominant anything.

"Meta" doesn't fix any of that, and feels like they're declaring that they don't care about their existing use case because it's no longer growing explosively. It feels desperate.

Which, of course, we all knew. I'm just ruminating on what's going to happen to the things that Facebook does that are distinct from whatever other mindless entertainment they're afraid of losing market share to. We all go back to email lists?