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Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

If what they're doing now is any indication, I don't think they'll succeed with it anyway. They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30.

Their existing prototypes are outrageously embarrassing. I'm the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, awkward, and embarrassingly goofy. At least The Office has some endearing quality (sorry for the weird comparison).

I'm not sure if it's Mark Zuckerberg's influence or what... but everything about Facebook lacks some sort of jour de vive. Like, their idea of "making work fun" is stuff like... an astoundingly cringe-worth video about healthcare open-enrollment? This kind of thing dumbfounds me https://vimeo.com/639318528... and I don't even consider myself a cynical person.

All of this feels only a few degrees removed from Jonestown.

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Are you sure you aren't living in a techie bubble? Oculus consistently tops the best selling headsets list at amazon cnet, PCMag, etc.. The only non-developers I know with headsets all have Oculus or more rarely PSVR. Maybe they aren't cutting edge, but everyday people can't afford cutting edge anyway.

They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the public at large has no knowledge of that. All the public knows is that it's decent hardware for a super low price compared to the competitors, it doesn't require a PC, and it's what most of their friends with a headset are using.

Can't really call having the most popular headset not succeeding, even if it is probably subsidized with their massive ads money making machine.

I think he's talking about the weird VR meeting software with cartoon avatars, not the hardware itself.

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.

I got my open source WebXR app running pretty well on the Quest browser. I honestly think that WebXR is going to be the metaverse especially with seamlessly walking between worlds.

https://vox.run if you want to check it out. Supports any WebXR browser and the dev tools are built in.

Plus they think the fact it works with a facebook account is a feature, not a bug.

> They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30

I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true.

< 30 is the _largest_ proportion of facebook users

https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-u...

Even putting Facebook aside Oculus is dominating the VR space due to cheap hardware, which I would bet is a ton of < 30 people.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/265018/proportion-of-dir...

My point here is consumers don't _actually_ care about company morals, despite the prevailing narrative.

This isn't a statement about morals. I agree that no one cares about those.

It's a statement that no one thinks "oh cool facebook" about literally anything they say or do. Their greatest successes in terms of social capital over the last decade have involved buying other companies.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems while everyone uses Facebook to some extent... no one likes it.

Nobody likes anything. People hate Google, Reddit, etc but they still use it because it provides utility.

I like Google and Reddit, a lot. I think a lot of people do. My biggest beef with Google is just that their search engine seems to get worse with every new release, with more pages and pages of ads and a clusterf of rando content until I get to actual search results. But I still really like their service.

Similarly, I like Reddit a lot. There are a ton of shitty subreddits but so what, I just don't go there.

On the other hand, I hate Facebook. I wish I could find an easy way to stay connected to my existing friend network without the amount of vitriol I feel toward how my feed is organized.

I like Google, especially for the work they're doing in the Dev space (eg Tensorflow), and I love Apple. People do like companies, to certain extents.

FB has done a lot for dev space as well. PyTorch, React, etc. But still gets so much hate

> Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems while everyone uses Facebook to some extent... no one likes it.

Hey now, not everybody is on FB.

>> They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30

> 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.

I feel exactly the same way about Memojis, yet people use them and apparently don’t find them as cringy as I do.

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