Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

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You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head:

Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008)

It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0].

Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then.

[0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 [1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html [2] https://community-place.neocities.org/

Geocities and Xoom were all the metaverse we needed back in our day.

You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.

Amen to GeoCities. They had a concept of addresses within neighborhoods. My friends and I all made our own pages, experimenting with web tech.

And remember webrings and Internet Link Exchange?

I'd also say that MySpace and Tumblr carried that vision forward.

It's ironic that Facebook won, with its bland conformity, and now they think they're going to bring us the metaverse.

SL was great and a lot of fun. It just had a rather clunky user interface, and probably other issues (nobody said it was easy). Nevertheless there was an explosion of creativity for a while.

Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches.

That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, for example, both disappeared. Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.

VRML appeared at a time when people were still using dial-up modems. Things change - eventually technology may be good enough for people to adopt VR on a larger scale.

> Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.

Yet the social network as a concept that moved from one monopoly to another is a fad that is dieing. It certainly seems likely companies that have gotten their start from VR will succeed in collecting a lot of money and possibly diversifying successfully, but will VR end up being more useful than a FB style social site?

The basic problem with VR for me is that second life showed some potential that isn't going to happen because it is socially positive and a lot of negatives that make me want to kill VR as a medium before I have to deal with FB owning real estate in it.

FB has basically created the bifurcation that will limit the future of all new mediums. Half your friends will never use anything they participate in making the concept of social X a disaster for any X.

I'm not rooting for Facebook, I just take issue with the takes of people claiming the concept of metaversum is bullshit, many of whom have clearly never even played any of the modern games like Fortnite or Roblox, or tried a Quest.

Nobody would be happier than me if a decentralized alternative to social networks like Facebook could be established.

I am not really seeing it as a given, though - the big companies usually offer more convenience and the masses fall for it. And for content creators it makes more sense to go to where the masses are. I have looked into the Fediverse but it seems there is hardly anything there.

I don't know if VR will replace classic web sites like Facebook. An issue in SL, for me at least, was that it was too difficult to create a good looking avatar. In Facebook you don't have to bother with web design. Not sure how to translate that to VR - everybody having a standard living hexagon for representation probably won't work.

When Facebook went public, everyone thought it was doomed, because they made no money. It took the addition of the personalized newsfeed, aka the part of Facebook that is the least social, for it to become a billionaire firm. Nobody posts on my wall anymore.

But now there is Roblox, isn't it kind of a metaverse too? And it's a huge success.

how come nobody is mentioning the inevitable cancer that kills every metaverse given enough time: griefers.

Yet social media has enabled, and arguably thrived on, griefing and trolling at an industrial scale.

What's worrying is...what if FB manages to create a metaverse that thrives on the same toxicity that FB itself does. And through the Oculus makes the tech cheap and portable enough to get a critical mass of people involved in it.

While I’m not seeing much around this topic in this particular forum, it is being discussed in many places.

The general consensus seems to be (and at this point I wholeheartedly agree) FB attempting to build a meta world is hysterical considering their seeming complete inability (with some unwillingness sprinkled in) to address trolls/astroturfing /misinformation on their flagship site was a significant driver of many people ceasing to use the site.

If they screw up something like a vanilla social network, they have no shot at running an entire second life derivative. At least one where anyone other than NFT sneakerhead type marketing victims will willingly spend their valuable free time.

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