Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse | Hacker News Reader

Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

johncoogan.com

53 pointsMKTSPCLST128 comments

As I was watching their 'keynote' I couldn't help but wonder about the many companies that took a similar approach and then died. Spending a ton of money on something doesn't make it automatically successful. [1]

In fact, history has shown the opposite to be true.

Take Facebook itself for example, it succeeded, not because it poured Billions into building its social network. Mark built something small, for a small market. Reached a monopoly quickly, then expanded to the next market. One after the other.

Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision.

Even if you look at established companies like Apple, and how they launched their first iPhone.

I've worked with tons of startups, helping them with UI/UX design. So usually in their early stages and get to see how they go from prototype to success or failure. [2]

Can 100% confirm that YC's advice of building something small for a small audience and then slowly grow that is the best advice to increase your chances of success.

Facebook should know this.

So I understand it's my observation vs Billions of dollars and a lot of very smart people who're working on it.

But History says this won't work.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/22/magic-leap-announces-layof...

[2] https://fairpixels.pro

How about Tesla?

Tesla followed the same model, no? Roadster -> Model S/Y/X -> Model 3

Same: https://www.tesla.com/nl_NL/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-...

Is this not, essentially, the innovator's dilemma? Facebook has to increase profits at a large scale now, and doubtlessly suffers from middle-management power jockeying, and so is unable to repeat the small market growth process that made them what they are today.

They could cut costs and just try to be good at being a better Facebook. I know that is heresy in the stock world.

I think they effectively cannot. There would be a shareholder's revolt.

How do they revolt? Facebook shareholders cannot remove the Zuck and he doesn't need their money. They have zero power.

Which doesn't matter as Zuckerberg controls too many voting shares. Investors spent money while not receiving voting power ...

And those of us with Privacy concerns don't see this as a bad thing. However, it could be of concern if it is successful, and probably for more than just privacy. If anyone reminisces about the internet of 10-15 years ago, imagine if you will one absolutely dominated by Meta's virtual garden.

I agree with you for the most part, but what the companies you gave examples of lacked is a Zuck. None of them had someone who could execute as effectively as he could.

https://stratechery.com/2021/meta/

> Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision.

Google set out to catalog the entire internet on day one. If that's not a grand vision that they spent billions on, what is?

AirBNB set out to disrupt the entire vacation rental market.

Stripe set out to disrupt the entire POS payment market.

Apple is the only one who fits your narrative: they set out to make a hobby PC then Jobs wanted to ... oh right, disrupt the entire PC market with Mac, but that came 7 years later so OK.

He also said “build something small for a small audience” and that applies to the start of all the companies you mentioned. Even Google. Back then, the internet was small, and enthousiasts a small group (relative to the global population).

Might be good to take a closer look at history.

#GOOGLE

Google started as a research project called BackRub. It only turned into Google and a mission after it started taking too much bandwidth on Stanford's servers

Source: https://inshorts.com/en/news/google-began-as-a-research-proj...

#AIRBNB

Airbnb began just so that the founders could make some extra money to pay rent. Not to disrupt an industry.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-airbnb-was-founded-a-vis...

#STRIPE

Stripe was just a small project so the founders could simplify getting paid for their other side projects.

Source: https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-...

# GOOGLE

"calling it a "web crawler" designed to roam the web. "

I'm right.

# STRIPE "At the time Patrick was working on several side projects and they debated why it was so difficult to accept payments on the web. They sought to solve the problem and see if it was possible to make it simple - really simple. "

I'm right.

# AIRBNB

I'm wrong.

The first two set out to do something huge.

The OP probably means once a company is already established and has their core product peaked at max profit, they struggle to innovate further and build new products. Working at FAANG; I can see the desperation my org has in trying to build the next generation to remain relevant.

> Not sure what you are smoking, but can I have some?

Why would you feel this is necessary?

(edit: I see you edited it away, but I still feel like it’s worth calling out.)

Stop making words up that the author did not say

That's because you are comparing Facebook to startups when you should be comparing Facebook to AT&T. AT&T spent billions on Bell Labs and gave us the transistor among other things like modern day switching networks. AT&T was a government sanctioned monopoly, and for that privileged they spent billions on research.

Keep in mind that billions were already spent on the technology behind the metaverse in research institutions and government labs. Think internet, computers, AI tech, VR tech, all had billions of investment from the public sector already.

What you are seeing with the metaverse is a privatization of the technology that already had substantial public investment.

And even your startups are just piggy backing off billions spent in research. Google itself was started by a government grant for example.

In other words when you look at spend at starups, you are just looking at the tip of an iceberg. Where under the water there was billions spent already by the public.

Facebook's current market position is almost entirely based on being there at the start. Mark knows this and is terrified of missing out on the start of another big thing.

If you haven't seen it yet, you might appreciate this slide deck about how organizations are like slime mold.

Slide 57 main image "0.60=0.95^10", text "And thanks to that non-linearity, even a small decline in individual likelihood [of success] leads to a much lower overall decline in the likelihood of success."

https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

I disagree that slime-ball force is inescapable.

I think our industry has a huge "boulder" - we often work on useless software that is far too removed from real world applications, which causes us to lose our passion.

When you have 50 engineers maintaining a boring piece of crap software which can be maintained by 5 engineers, you will start noticing the productivity going down. Engineers who used to be very productive will slow down to meet the low expectations.

Brainstorming a way to avoid this problem:

- working on things we're passionate about with real-world impact

- having a bunch of small organizations with small number of employees (maybe Mark should break down facebook into 50 smaller companies)

- stop creating redundant jobs; if things are not going well, adding 100 people to a project isn't going to fix the delayed project

> 50 engineers maintaining a boring piece of crap software which can be maintained by 5 engineers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

"If thats the Bradley, then what's this? [...] How did they get to that from this?"

General: "This all well and good Col. Smith. But with this gorilla in production I don't supposed there's going to be anything left in the budget for my scouts. . . . This is a speedy vehicle, why can't it be both? . . . We'll just stick a turret on top with lots of opticals. . . . We aught to get the biggest bang we can up there [in the turret]."

Other general: "Add on some firepower!"

> I disagree that slime-ball force is inescapable.

Please do go through the deck. At about 152 the author talks about a way through organizational headwinds. Also, the thesis is that an organization's ability to mutate and respond in a balance between collective and cellular methods is similar to a slime mold in a positive way (slide 149).

There's a ton of money and there's a ton of money. Facebook has a ton of money to spend. Whether they succeed or fail is anybody's guess but this kind of investment can't help but move the needle on AR/VR tech.

Not necessarily so if it’s all closed sourced proprietary tech. For example I don’t think Newton had accelerated pda tech probably the opposite

Even closed source proprietary tech moves the industry forward. Engineers switch companies. Patents are filed. Competitors reverse engineer products. The knowledge diffusion is slower than with open source but it does happen eventually.

Well, it depends. Let's say this was 1990 and IBM instead of Facebook deciding that the internet is clearly the future and invest billions into it. Could have been the right move. They're betting on AR and VR as a medium, and I wouldn't bet against that long term. The question is if they can actually make something useful. Even if you know something will be successful it's still hard to find a way to capitalize on that. Your timing could also be years off. It was hard to foresee a search engine being the most valuable internet company.

There are counterexamples, sometimes the road to success is to bite the bullet and spend heavily. IBM spent five billion dollars to develop the IBM System/360 line, back when a billion was serious money. Neither Airbus nor Boeing would be where they are today without investing big sums up front. Making AAA games these days basically requires it, Google Stadia is floundering because Google shied away from putting enough money into their game studio to be competitive.

Is that not pretty much the story of Oculus so far? There are 2 million oculus quest 2 devices out there now and they're getting to the point where they have a monopoly in VR

Didn't Oculus "succeed" already before FB bought it and invested huge amounts of extra money?

They have only sold millions of devices since being part of FB. They were still really niche in 2014.

Gross.

If anything, the more I have become ensconced in the internet the more I have begun to appreciate the physical world. My mental health must be wired to require actual trees, sunshine, birds, walks in the neighborhood....

Like a library, I want my internet to be there when I want it, but I don't want to live in it.

Absolutely. The whole thing of "living in the internet" sounds absurd when you apply it to any other technologies. Imagine:

"I want to live in the telephone."

"I want to live in the electric."

"I want to live in my car..." oh, wait...

To be fair, isn't "the internet" (meaning its current but also future state) qualitatively different from those other technologies? "The telephone" and "the electric" are important foundations of the internet, for example.

It's somewhat of a dystopian Ready Player One scenario but maybe eventually inevitable. The metaverse is a pretty direct extrapolation of economic growth in the sense of always doing more with less. Extrapolating the "with less" part leads to people's lives becoming virtual at some point, at least for those who can't afford much of the real world anymore because its good parts are overcrowded.

Unless we leave this planet and find an equally good one, the amount of quality real world out there seems limited. As the amount of "wealthy" people on earth continues to increase, the amount of real world wealth we share might not keep up. Especially if you think nature is part of that wealth, and especially if you take into account erosion due to things like climate change. A virtual world may become the only place for growth to continue.

> My mental health must be wired to require actual trees, sunshine, birds, walks in the neighborhood

It's not just your mental health, this is a well-researched fact of human/animal nature.

What if the next great revolution in mobile/internet/etc. technology is for it to become less important in our lives? For it to recede into the background while we prioritize human relationships, the outdoors, being present?

That might sound crazy but the alternative is actually making us crazy.

I like that.

My younger self would love that stuff though, so he can escape reality and distract myself. Most video games and social platforms give us a kind of low-effort stimulation that nudges us into a toxic lifestyle.

I think a lot of mistakes will happen for many people until we learn to build and use these kind of things responsibly/sustainably.

Well, this guy helped found Soylent, a product for people who want to avoid eating actual food, so maybe he has similar ideas about trees, birds, and walks in the neighborhood.

The older I get, the more I realize this. The simple things in life are what bring me happiness.

Technology works best when it gets out of your way so you can do the thing you require. Smart phones are the best example of this as they are small enough to fit in a pocket out of the way when not needed, and smart enough to deliver the data you need almost instantly. A TV is (usually) out of the way mounted on a wall, and you interact with it using a small handheld device. It is instant-on/off, requires no setup to use every day.

Smart glasses, VR headsets, etc are the exact opposite. No one likes putting a VR headset on, keeping the kit charged and dealing with all the cables. If a VR headset where a pair of glasses without cables then maybe...but we don't have the technology for that yet. Perhaps that's where Zuck will be putting all of his billions.

Once you're inside the "metaverse" and want to shop for new shoes (real) are you going to have to fly/walk to a virtual shop? With my smartphone I can do that in under 10 seconds.

I've seen this take a lot in communities like HN recently, and often alongside remarks about "realizing what's valuable as I grow older." Is this a genuine recognition of a bridge too far for technological mass adoption, or just the typical resistance to new technologies people often exhibit as they get older?

I assume many of us grew up with parents skeptical about the utility of the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, or whatever the latest technology was during our own childhood. Did those older folks really know what was better just because of their amount of experience? My perception is colored from remembering my own parents' grave concern about "kids being glued to screens all the time" but the instant knee-jerk skepticism to the metaverse from many seems to rhyme to me, like how folks couldn't wrap their heads around how Roblox was worth anything at IPO. It seems like every generation thinks the 'healthy' amount of computer is whatever they grew up with - a dedicated room at the office, a dedicated device in the house, a personal device with limited access, etc.

Because Facebook is now a social network used mostly by people from 40 to 70. They aren't trendy anymore, and most of the Facebook-related press headlines in the past 5 years have been about privacy or advertisement scandals. They are in desperate need for some good PR if they want to restore their brand name.

Except everyone young still uses Instagram

For now.

They've been bleeding young people to Tiktok fairly heavily; it's in all their internal reports.

More Gen Z use TikTok than Instagram, and it's shifting even more that way.

You could replace Facebook with 'Windows' in your statement and it would be why everyone was sure MS was dead.

Microsoft is not betting billions with hololens on it's core windows desktop userbase.

Maybe Facebook needs to find a company like Skype to buy for $8.5B

They did so with Instagram and Whatsapp and those are arguably their most successful product today.

I'm not sure what good acquisitions by FB has to do with this conversation. The point was MS wasted billions of dollars.

A decade ago, but they spent it on something that overlaps with their userbase, which was the point about hololens and comparing to FB.

So what you're saying is that 2041 is The Year of Mastodon Social Network?

People with money in other words, they seem to be missing point on monetising it then, maybe one day AI will be able to simply say it’s stupid and something completely different should be done.

This. and also, they’ve run out of countries to grow users from.

All the 3rd world countries now have internet and smartphones, there is no billions of unconnected people remaining who Facebook can give free internet access to.

The only way for them is downwards unless they radically change things. The metaverse is kinda a hail mary

You say that it like it's a bad thing. It's relatively easy to become the latest fad among the teenagers. It's hard to become a sticky product loved by all the people who have disposable incomes. The people with disposable incomes are the 40 to 70 year olds.

Facebook being a social network mostly used by 40 to 70 somethings is a big credit to them, not a negative.

thats not how FB makes money. They make money from ads and the younger demographic is where the most ad spend is done today. Not saying they can't make money, but it just not what most advertisers want.

> There will be no cap on concurrent users. This is one of the hardest problems to solve from a technical point of view, but it’s critical. The biggest online games still restrict each session to around 100 players. Even though millions might be playing at a given time worldwide, a single server will be capped. Massive concurrency will make metaverse experiences feel very different from the present-day internet.

Oh cool, looking forward to them waving a magic wand so that they can handle the O(n^2) interaction of n clients interacting in close proximity. World of WarCraft retail can't even handle a 40v40 fight in Alterac Valley smoothly. EVE Online handles massive space battles by delaying events and having things stop occuring in realtime. What are Blizzard and all other MMO developers missing?

I played Planetside quite a bit when it came out in 2003. It supported FPS battles with hundreds of people participating. If this kind of scale was the most important thing for shooters then the subsequent trend would have been to increase that scale, but that's not what happened.

My assumption is that games optimize for fun, and scale isn't necessarily fun. Soccer (football) permits 11 players per side on the field at any one time. Why not make it 25? Why not make it 100?! Wouldn't that be more fun? Presumably not.

limiting the range / scope of your affects is probably the best answer here. keep a small ‘n’

FPS players only affect a single ballistic trajectory (a bullet) at a time.

Characters also need to be rendered, but that’s O(N).

Finally, VR will be able to faithfully simulate being unable to get into a nightclub because it's full.

> FPS players only affect a single ballistic trajectory (a bullet) at a time.

If only!

I really don't understand the hype outside of FB, including people in the industry claiming its 'genius' for them to take over the name for better SEO

Has a big corporation ever succeeded in telling us what the next big hyped up product will be? Maybe outside of iPhone

We never got articles like this 2 years before TikTok became popular, or any other social media app. Things just organically become popular or unpopular. This whole telling us what we will be excited about in 3 years seems unrealistic, childish, and dumb

To me, the metaverse just sounds like the next Google Wave

... or the next MySpace.

To be a MySpace, you need to successfully dominate a market segment for a while. Facebook is more like the next Myspace. The VR thing looks more like the next Sinclair C5.

It's hard to tell, but I hope <strike>Facebook</strike>Meta has jumped the shark, and in 10 years time they'll be like AOL. Still there, but just for extremely old people.

The elephant in the corner of the room for the Metaverse seems to be that relatively few problem domains actually benefit from a 3D spatial UI. Our retinas are 2D; our brains think in 2.5D at best: and unless we're chasing each other around a virtual landscape in an MMORPG or we're manipulating 3D geometry, it's not clear that 3D does anything but get in the way.

You could even argue that the Metaverse effectively exists already today, in the form of multi-user domain-specific collaborative apps such as Figma, Etherpad, Google Docs etc - if only there was a way to liberate the data from the presentation layer. One could then do a fancy multiplayer 3D window manager in VR to blend it all together, but this feels like eyecandy rather than a fundamental improvement.

That said, there's no question (in my mind) that we need a common real-time data layer to share the data securely between the different apps and experiences who build on it, and it'd be cute if the spatial stuff did exist in the same coordinate space somehow for ease of interoperability. If nothing else, 3D spatial file managers would be fun (bring back FSN!). If anyone is interested in such a thing, we're actively looking for folks to help build out genuinely open metaverse stuff on Matrix (https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1453869116847239175).

The whole Meta thing is just a 1-2 year distraction to keep the stock price up while Facebook figures out its real existential problems. Maybe it sells some more VR units great, but it keeps Facebook at the forefront of "hard technical innovation" "new age social media" and has other tech giants rushing to "keep up".

Solid distraction, 7/10.

This.

This feels to me like Elon Musk maintaining his 'genius' profile by doing a brain implant presentation 'thing' that'll go nowhere but keeps people talking and believing.

The American way of flashy presentations over substance does tend to catch up however, so we will see.

In the scheme of things, Facebook's enemy is facebook itself. They are by far the biggest platform with real identities and all the tools needed to make it a pleasant and compelling experience. They just don't know how to make it go 'moar money' every quarter and thus far, they've steadily ruined their own product to appease the stock market.

At some point, you just have to say 'we're not growing anymore, this product is great, everyone who wanted to use it is already using it and we're done trying to squeeze our customers'. Now whether or not the ego of the folks running these sorts of places can handle it is another matter.

Facebook thinks about social networks in two dimensions:

1. Audience size (eg <50, <500, 1M+); and

2. Format (eg text, images, video, VR, AR).

You can go through the exercise of placing every social network on this grid and there are gaps. Implied in this is a progression in formats and we've certainly had that from text to images to video.

In this framework, the acquisition of Oculus makes more sense.

I personally question the premise that formats will evolve from into VR. VR seems to be viewed as a mere stepping stone to AR. I agree that AR seems more likely an outcome. I just don't see VR going mainstream in a way that FB seems to be betting on.

Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker. Opinions are my own.

Yeah one thing that’s puzzling to me about FB’s bet is that Oculus should be a litmus test for the consumer interest in this stuff and afaict it hasn’t really took off. If Oculus isn’t particularly realizing huge growth, why would the Metaverse?

The technology isn't quite there yet. I don't think it's fair to use it as a litmus test for the greater metaverse and the advantages it creates.

Totally agree. Maybe they see numbers we don't, and maybe the limited availability of the physical platform indicates higher demand. I'm a big fan of the Oculus hardware and software. Just not the link to Facebook accounts that is soon to be required for older accounts. But my friends? Even the gamers couldn't care less about VR. You need a large space for it. Most of the games are pretty niche. You can't play anything close to cutting edge games. It's not really useable for work purposes, due mostly to not having a great keyboard interface and lack of third party investment in work-oriented applications.

That and there's been effectively 0 progress on these points in the past few years. There's still potential, but I'm less optimistic about VR generally and Oculus in particular.

Doesn't internet+oAuth+ecosystem essentially cover the metaverse concept already or am I missing the big picture?

> The metaverse will be persistent

That's already the case. Your email, facebook posts, photos, game history, chats, etc are already persistent. MMOs are not at all "the closest thing" to this existing.

> The metaverse will be live

The internet is both live (e.g. twitch) and async (e.g. email) depending on what you're consuming. What is new here?

> Experiences will span both digital and physical worlds

This seems kind of how a lot of things already work, though I can see that VR can push this forward in some respects.

> There will be no cap on concurrent users

Except when there are technical or product reasons right? Pretty much as things are now.

> The metaverse will have a fully functioning economy

I guess this could be improved. General purpose digital trading marketplaces aren't big or general purpose; but that might also be good - centralized markets could take too much profit from the ecosystem.

> The metaverse will have unprecedented interoperability

This is a pretty generic statement, even with the example of fortnite skins being usable in minecraft. oAuth already allows for sharing access to data between different providers. It's a question of the product developers from both sides wanting to create the available interop. Maybe there will be easy to use libraries that handle more specialized cases in the future but what is _new_ here to require a new name?

I still have no idea what the Metaverse is and the "is it already here" section doesn't really explain what is missing. It's just vague concepts thrown into a soup trying to sound cool and I can't find any substance in what is being said. Can someone clarify this Metaverse concept?

I already live in the Google metaverse and fear everyday that an algorithm decides to ban me for no reason.

More seriously even after reading the article I don't understand what is the metaverse and why I would want it.

Isn't this all about extension of gaming and social network albeit polished with VR lipstick. People jumped on SecondLife as soon as it was launched and articles were written how it would change the life as we live. 20 years later the good web old browser is critical to how commerce runs efficiently. > Microsoft is already helping companies build “digital twins” that represent physical infrastructure in virtual spaces. The article jumps from Pokemon go to Digital Twins. Digital twins have been around for a while (SCADA) and serve specific industrial purpose.

How can Metaverse - help me if I need a ride to the airport ? - help me meet my doctor online ( we are both supposed to dress up in Roblox outfits and go into Metaverse ?

you get the point.

Isn't this simply Second Life writ somewhat larger?

Everything I've seen looks like PG-13 Second Life.

Which sort of removes all the reasons that anybody ever used Second Life...

Assuming they deliver (very questionable), it’s like asking that aren’t smartphones simply a telegraph machines?

The fact a broad idea has been tried before without success doesn't mean it can't be successful.

There were smartphones before the iPhone - like the Nokia Communicator, Compaq iPaq and Palm Treo. They were a niche product - not the market-defining success the iPhone was.

Actually, Second Life was, in its time, quite successful. I honestly don't see the form factor, or VR, making a comeback though. If I was going to back anything (which I am not) it would be AR.

Blackberry was incredibly successful. I don't know why people always leave it out of the conversation.

I've seen it described as "Second Life for boomer aunts".

Well, I suppose I'm a "boomer uncle", but I can't see myself going for it. Particularly if it supports that git with his stupid haircut.

But with more AOL type Big Brothering to forestall the Penis Problem.

I don't get it, in the sense that, I don't get why I'd ever want to put on a VR helmet and go into the metaverse.

I've had plenty of electronic 3D experiences since Wolfenstein 3D. The technology to approximate a "metaverse" has been around for quite a few decades. There was even a "VR" version of HTML that flopped. (VRML, I think?). Second life was a great approximation of the metaverse, but it never really became a killer app.

Even when I've tried immersive VR, it's just not practical in a typical home. It requires a lot of open space with no clutter, and careful calibration. I smacked my arm into a physical wall because a sensor was miscalibrated by a few inches. A large, uncluttered open space for VR is a luxury that only people with large, empty homes have.

I don't think computers need to emulate the physical world in order to provide good communications or online experiences, nor do I think we need good VR for an online experience.

Reminder that "VR" and "the metaverse" are not the same concept. VR tech and experiences will come regardless of whether or not there exists some sort of unified metaverse-like experience. It is possible to be bullish on VR while being bearish on whatever proprietary gatekeeper layer Facebook tries to invent.

I am so turned off by the metaverse hype. The idea clearly aims at dominating our lives in order to squeeze money out of us. I despise that kind of dependency. It's just an awful idea. On the flipside, Facebook should burn some billions on this idea and finally fail at the complexity of realizing it.

The idea transcends walled gardens though. If it was a good idea, pluralistic and open variations on same would be possible.

I doubt it will break walled gardens. Why should Meta/Facebook create the only Metaverse and why should they care about interoperability (probably not feasible anyway)? My fear is bigger walled gardens (metaverses) and services / devices that you cannot use anymore without being connected to them. Fans of decentralized things should worry.

I'm happy that FB is spending their money on this. It's an endless money pit that most likely will fizz out than prove revolutionary.

People won't pop in and out their Oculus to use the metaverse. A lot of people won't even be able to use it (motion sickness, etc). Contrast this with every other mobile. It's not a media that significantly adds an advantage to communication (see how 3D cinema died again)

The challenges the article pose are also interesting. Unlimited users? "Always on/fully stateful/etc" again, seems like a giant money pit and a Sisyphean task. For what? Second Life 2.0 with VR googles?

Compared to that, Elon's proposal of solving world hunger with 6Bi dollars seems outright doable.

And it seems Mark is more worried in "proving something" and has turned the hubris knob to 11

> For the past few months, everyone in tech has been talking about the metaverse non-stop.

Um.

It was at this point in the article I became very skeptical of the author's thought process.

Okay, maybe it's just Twitter, Stratechery, and Matthew Ball, but in my little filter bubble... it felt like everyone was talking about the Metaverse non-stop.

New hobby: find a blog's definition of metaverse and find an existing application that fulfills it

In this case, I claim Discord does the job for most of the bullets except interoperability.

Discord is live and persistent. Many Discord servers are digital copies of meatspace orgs (e.g. schools, clubs, friend circles, interests, etc). I don't think paid Discord servers have a user cap (not sure). There are servers for buying / selling / trading, if that counts for functioning economy. Tons of user generated content, especially in the form of bots. Interoperability is the only lacking bullet, although it's not particularly clear what this even means (is the invention of a metaverse supposed to make Fortnite and Minecraft skins interoperable, when those games are outside the metaverse?)

Billionaires are wasting money on crap like Metaverse, which is slowly bringing down the society.

Would be great if they started investing in real world endeavors, such as fixing supply chain issues and improving manufacturing automation, so people in 3rd world countries will stop losing limbs while they're making us plastic crap we don't need.

We have behemoths paying bored (and mostly redundant) engineers to work on ads and meta-verses.

If they gave us engineers fun & real world problems to work on, our productivity would be significantly higher, and we would waste less time on things like HN.

I bet a team of 5 engineers working on a passion project would be 100x more productive than 500 engineers working on Meta.

But for now - we will continue collecting our paychecks to do dumb stuff while we're watching the world burn.

For if you were God and in the sense that you knew everything and you were completely transparent to yourself through and through. You would be bored. Because, if looking at it from another way, we push technology to its furthest possible development, and we had instead of a dial telephone on one’s desk a more complex system of buttons. And one touch beep, would give you anything you wanted. Aladdin’s lamp. You would eventually have to introduce a button labeled surprise.

https://alanwatts.org/1-2-3-mythology-of-hinduism-pt-1/

Check out this system for (open) declarative multiplayer VR https://github.com/networked-aframe/networked-aframe

Nice to see this as the first comment. Not working in VR currently. But as one of the creators of A-Frame and formerly was in YC doing a VR + Metaverse attempt, AMA.

Yes but notice how there is no follow-on and no one else mentions WebVR or WebXR. This community is consistently disappointing in its technical judgement. Other places online are often even worse. But its surprising considering the background of most people on here.

People are sheep. When they see A-Frame or WebXR being touted by their friends, they will acknowledge it and try to build off of it. But more likely is they will let Facebook use their dominant position and takeover. Then they will claim there was never any alternative they could have built off of.

Facebook probably can’t find sellers in the acquisition market due to its negative reputation. They have to spend that money in something internal and this is the best they can do since Zuck is living in some fantasy world.

I don't think Facebook's version of a metaverse will succeed simply because only a fool would strap an eye-ball-tracking ad delivery system to their face that is owned and controlled by Zuckerberg and his addictive algorithms. Kinda reminds me of an "Alien" egg detecting a warm body nearby...

Plus Zuck's polyanna vision of his metaverse just sounds like an attempt to pivot away from all the troubles he and his platform have caused. Like car salesman trying to keep you in your seat with promises of new and better.

To be up front, I do have a FB account (for name squatting) but never login or use it (starve the beast). Better things to do with my time and attention.

I did try a friend's Occulus awhile back and it was cool to geo-travel to 360 environments, play light sabers, etc. I can see some potential for certain applications. But after an hour of immersion it left me feeling weird, disoriented. Probably due to my proprioception being severely messed with.

The metaverse has potential idea but only if it's Halliday's vision and not coporately co-opted by the likes Sorrento. Or put in real-world terms, if it's Tim Berners-Lee's vision and not Zuckerberg's.

I guess Zuckerberg is convinced that VR is the next breakthrough that has the potential to displace Facebook. I wonder if this is a good way to deal with that threat, though? Even with this level of investment, if there's a VR breakthrough based on fundamentally novel ideas, it will probably come from somewhere else, and Facebook will be bogged down by their existing entrenched players attached to ideas that went nowhere. It might be smarter to keep investment minimal, or only invest in hardware, until you identify the conceptual breakthrough and can follow it up quickly.

Assuming Zuckerberg is smarter enough to think of this, maybe he believes that the breakthrough in VR won't be a conceptual one, but will be the result of a massive investment of effort towards presenting existing data for VR consumption. This is essentially what the posted article suggests. Or maybe he thinks he can force his existing VR workforce down the right path when it appears, and that's less naive of an idea than it appears to me.

  > The metaverse will have unprecedented interoperability. 
  > This means being able to bring a Fortnite skin into Minecraft and vice versa

For the life of me, I can't understand why this is important. Nobody cares about this. I don't want to move skins around. Besides, if there's a digital marketplace, people will create their own duplicates of any 3D asset.

Just look at VRChat.

Zero value.

  > The metaverse will have a fully functioning economy.

"You wouldn't download a car."

I can see pay to play, commissioned 3D asset work, etc., but ultimately most things digital can be replicated and copied cheaply.

  > There will be no cap on concurrent users.

Even so, kids will still be telling each other to join their customized private Minecraft servers.

A system without rules and moderation allows communities to grow in their own ways.

The best metaverse platform will have a downloadable, moddable client and server that lets people spin up their own instances.

It also isn't actually happening! I have yet to see anybody give a technical explanation of how the "metaverse" enables this.

You can read between the lines here, and then the value proposition becomes much more clear for Facebook. For this to work, they'd basically need to provide a common engine for everything using the Metaverse. Rather than Second Life, people should be thinking Roblox as the closest existing technical implementation.

So, what's the value proposition in killing all existing 3D engines and completely replacing them? Obviously high if you can pull it off.

But this "metaverse" thing is really easy to write whitepapers and even fiction about it when you don't have to actually implement it, but gets a lot trickier in the implementation. For instance, right now, 3D engines are undergoing some pretty major changes in every release. This is not generally the time someone can swoop in and stabilize everyone on a particular engine for long periods of time, because while the "metaverse" is being written on this gen, Unreal Engine is advancing to the next level, and stuff written on that engine is going to be easier to write and look a lot better than the "meta" engine. There's actually some deep and fundamental reasons Roblox looks and plays the way it does.

There's other issues too; the "metaverse" envisions all this cross-platform avatar stuff, but are you going to play Call of Duty and its gritty "realistic" gameplay with 24 cartoony dufuses? No. Is Disney going to just happily license all of its characters to go into Call of Duty and get shot and bloodied? No. Are you going to be able to take your trademarked character everywhere with you? Exactly as well as you can stream whatever content you want from any content streamer today.

Building the technical platform is already a multi-billion dollar problem. There's a good chance it won't work well when it's done, but even if they overcome that, then they've got abundant legal barriers to overcome, in an environment where other companies are going to have every incentive to sue for their chunks of flesh.

I can also virtually guarantee that we're going to see very targeted demos, where the demos that Facebook puts out works well, because they were written in conjunction with the engine team, so the engine has exactly the features necessary to make the demo work, and nothing else. When EA goes to port Call of Duty into the metaverse, it's going to be a nightmare bug fest that looks like garbage compared to the real release.

When you think about the tech necessary to accomplish their goals, and then consider the social and industry implications of that tech, it's hard to see how to reach their lofty goals. The metaverse simply implies a level of cooperation and voluntary power ceding and a lowest-common-denominator environment that can't hold up the fictional portrayals driving the hype.

(I think ultimately it's a category error I've seen a lot. Fiction can be good at pointing the general direction the future may be, but taking fiction as a technical blueprint never works out well that I can see.)

> You wouldn't download a car.

I would if I could 3D print it at home, but that might end up serving an actual purpose, which runs counter to FB's ethos.

> This means being able to bring a Fortnite skin into Minecraft and vice versa

This is nothing. Fortnite and Minecraft are not built the same, so what this means is that someone built a Fortnite skin, and a Minecraft skin, and told Meta about both. It's not "interoperable" if it's just someone doing all the work twice.

Besides, why would Epic and Microsoft both roll over for Facebook here? There's an intrinsic benefit to rival corps flatly ignoring Meta and waiting for it to go away.

Not to you or anyone in this room perhaps, but to a child who their entire life revolves around fortnite and minecraft it... May provide some value.

My personal belief is that reality will probably represent your assessment.

Personal note: My sister (now 26 yo) was diagnosed with psychosis about 6 years ago and I attribute it to her extensive use of social media. I can’t prove it but I’m sure that social media either created or triggered her psychosis. Today she’s still on drugs.

I would appreciate companies like fb to work more on the effects of social media on society and people’s psychology rather than creating fake worlds so that people get hooked more on it. But of course corporates only care about profit. Heck, I would still appreciate them if they tried to create a competitor to spacex or blue origin. Of course they are also commercial organizations but least there’s some side effect of space exploration that would benefit humankind in the future. But metaverse looks like just another social media platform packaged differently. I don’t see it helping humanity. And fb at this size should do more to help society rather than trying to plug everyone to matrix.

I really hope he isn’t successful.

Why? Even if you don't take part, it would arguably create advantages for many, especially those in the developing world.

Can you expand on what those "advantages" are exactly? You've mentioned them twice on this thread now. How can an electricity dependent VR toy benefit someone in poor and likely cramped living conditions?

> Facebook wants to build something so fundamental to the metaverse that they can capture that iPhone moment. And if they succeed, the billions they’ve invested will look like pennies.

Precisely and that is going to be the smart glasses. Take this for example: [0] Magic Leap is simply General Magic for the smart glasses and the talent is going to the big tech giants.

Whoever executes the hardware and software ecosystem for the smart glasses wins. Probably it will be a race between Meta, Apple, Google or Microsoft.

Unsurprisingly, the Metaverse is 'Meta's' and several other metaverse-related companies's 'App Store' for their smart glasses.

[0] https://www.protocol.com/who-is-hiring-magic-leap-employees

The only aspect of the Metaverse I'm interested in is how it will affect the landscape of massively concurrent, real-time applications, which hasn't advanced too much in the last decade or so.

Amazon's New World MMORPG is on the verge of crumbling a few weeks after launch, mostly because the game's networking sucks. Facebook's Metaverse is an all round shady concept, but it's pretty possible that it will result in some useful new technologies.

To me, this is just a particularly garish example of what a lot of tech seems like these days: very expensive solution in search of a problem.

I don't know. Sometimes there are really visionaries out there who just are thinking bigger than you or I. Like I certainly didn't think the iPhone would be nearly as successful as it is, or TikTok, or Minecraft. Facebook has a lot of resources, I think they might be able to make this work and be a real world-changer.

It's almost as if they have not heard of Second Life, or multi-player games.

Facebook will, like CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo, etc fade away. They won't necessarily implode, but what was a hot trend will turn into a commodity nobody cares about. Also, their role in the US elections and Jan 6th will haunt them.

Basically this piece reaches the same conclusion as Zuckerberg in 2018. As Zuckerberg said "The Metaverse is ours to lose." If you think VR + computers are going to get to the place where the metaverse becomes preferred internet interface for users for a multitude of use cases, then it's as simple as that.

If they are looking to create a Ready Player One, they are going to need three things in my opinion.

1. Ultra fast specialized chips 2. Cheap hardware 3. Fast universal internet, maybe 6G

This was more interesting than I thought. Nice to see someone with a slightly positive take on the metaverse that has taken the time to break it down thoughtfully.

Have they fixed the nausea problem? I can spend about one minute in VR before I feel sick.

To answer the question posed by the title: Because the company vests all its decision-making power in one person, he has no oversight except from wacky SV VC, he is not someone with much business experience let alone life experience. Thus he can make crazy, immature decisions and no one can interfere. He is surrounded by yes-men and yes-women and other yes-people.

Someone submitted a keynote from John Carmack earlier today. He had a term for the type of developers who will likely work on building "The Metaverse". Astronaut architects or some such. He thinks they are lost in abstractions and fail to understand how things actually work. Don't take my word for it, go watch the video.

Also seems like Carmack is not too keen on the idea of strategically planned obsolescence. A programmer with both common sense and a conscience. Surprising he got mixed up with Facebook.

Because capitalism never settles. It always crave for growth.

Nearly every single modern technology that exists, I have been trying to get away from for years. In fact, most technologies aside from the ones that maintain our houses (which are mostly only necessary because of the bizarre way we build houses) are detrimental to the environment and to our very health. Even health care technologies can be detrimental to us. We do live longer from the advancement of science, but technology itself seems to counteract that in many cases (not all obviously).

I don't want VR. I'm sure there is some reason why I should want VR. But I'm very happy at the moment not knowing what that reason is.

Luckily I have disconnected from social media, and only use things like YouTube to learn how to build a shed. But I dread the idea that some technology I don't even want will find its way into my life just because some company will make it impossible to live without it.

> Nearly every single modern technology that exists, I have been trying to get away from for years

Since you state that online it looks like you're not succeeding :)

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