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Comment by kkjjkgjjgg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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