Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

My question with the metaverse concept is always, "Why? What's the point?"

I can think of two parties that have their own answers:

1) A certain group of people who like computers and grew up reading sci-fi think it would be cool; some even tell themselves it's very important, but for vague reasons that they can't really articulate

2) Centers of capital are interested in it as yet another platform for consumption, attention-capturing, and rent-seeking

I think Zuckerberg is both. But I'm not convinced that society at large has any real motivation to buy into something like this, unless the sheer novelty ends up being powerful enough to rope people in.

Note that a world without a "metaverse" still has a place for VR/AR. Having a complete, interconnected virtual world is not a prerequisite for all the utilities and entertainment that that hardware technology can be used for. And to me it just feels like an incredibly unnecessary layer on top, which serves no real purpose to anyone outside of those first two groups.

The only thing that counts when you create a B2C product is how much time each user will spend time on your product per day.

There is no goal to achieve for the user. Zuck is a very smart guy and knows that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, Youtube ... are activities for people. And those activities will keep being popular only a handful of years. If you don't want the Meta Inc, company's revenue to collapse you have to innovate and be part of the next hot thing.

Nobody knows what is going to be the next hot thing, Zuck just want it to be the metaverse. So the metaverse doesn't need to have a point, it just needs to be successful

The value to Mark Zuckerberg is obvious, the question is what’s the value to users? Why is it fun? Why is it interesting?

> There is no goal to achieve for the user

I mean... there won't be users at all if there's nothing in it for the user.

I agree. At this point Zucks metaverse sounds just like another XBox Home Screen, in VR. A place were you want to spend as little time as possible, on your way to use the real apps.

Books told stories for ages, but movies enhanced the experience and created a new breed of people who pre movies over books. Similarly we use phones for all our purposes, xr will enhance it

The difference is that your phone is a utility, not a piece of art. So XR would have to be more practical than the current interface, which, maybe advanced AR will be. But even then, that's just an AR GUI, not a "metaverse".

And then on the non-utilitarian side, XR entertainment/storytelling is already a thing. You don't need a metaverse for that.

Maybe like Ready Player One, people will use Meta if the outside / real word sucks enough. Here you can be anything you want to be…

Only if what you want to be is two floating eyes and two floating hands in a videogame.

You wrote the exact same thing I wanted to write. I still haven't got a satisfactory answer to that question though.

I have a similar take on how VR lets you show ads much beyond a rectangular screen, so plausibly commands higher ad revenue if monetised. FB needs to grow the pie bigger: the user growth is flatlining.

Facebook's ad product is shit. They exist because they're a monopoly. Their ad product is shit because they don't understand their clients (advertisers) at all and would rather sink R-n-D into keeping the monopoly thing going instead of figuring out market fit for their product. (In that regard Facebook is exactly like Google.)

t. Worked more than 16 years in ad tech.

Out of curiosity, what don’t they understand about advertisers?

It's an evolution of how you can communicate: pictures/written form -> 2D movies -> 3D movies -> AR/VR.

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