Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

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Zuckerberg has proven extremely effective at predicting future trends. Look at Instagram and Whatsapp, perfectly timed investments.

Zuck has taken long term bets on the metaverse starting with Occulus and now seemingly betting the whole company on it. He could very well be wrong but there are a lot of very smart people at Facebook and on their board I have to think they did some very intensive validation before doing so.

It could all go up in flames but I think they are going to take a very real run at it backed by billions and billions of dollars.

Don't get me wrong I very much dislike Facebook and the oxygen it provides to extreme and uninformed groups but to think that Zuckerberg is an idiot taking a stab in the dark with the fortunes of a publicly traded FAANG company is not a serious take.

"In Facebooks case, they should really try their hand at making a 2D world that doesn't lead people to want to die before they try to expand on the whole reality thing." No arguments from me, there is a ton of moderation that needs to be added to Facebook.

I think Zuck has a fantastic understanding of systems and where they're headed...and a negative understanding of human motivation and emotion (outside of their quantified metrics). That's why he's smart enough to understand that FB as a platform has a limited lifespan and to get WA and Insta under his belt when they threatened him, and to know that he needs to come up with something else if he wants to continue to accrue wealth and influence. But at the same time, I think his Achilles' Heel is people acting like the irrational apes we are: If you push someone to hate you enough, they will absolutely cut off their nose to spite you, and this works at the cultural level as well. FB as a brand is culturally 'out' now.

Or, as a kid who played Civ online at the same time he did, I'd describe him as somebody who could win every game of Civ through bug exploits and memorizing the mechanics, but is such a dick about it nobody wants to play with him again and that confuses him.

"If you build it, they will come." Only if they don't hate you, and Zuck isn't doing well in the court of public opinion.

So Zuckerberg was like playing the ATL Falcons with Michael Vick and their 4-6 formation on Madden online? Cool thought.

The difference is Instagram and WhatsApp were products that had real product value before Zuck acquired them.

Zuck has to build a v1 product from scratch with the Metaverse. When's the last time FB has truly built a revolutionary v1 product? It's not really in their DNA anymore. I'm not saying they can't do it, but I wouldn't point to IG and WhatsApp as examples of why Zuck can pull it off.

Facebook Chat is basically a messaging business on its own. Given that Google has tried and failed to get into this space COUNTLESS times over the years, I'd call that a pretty solid new product offering from them.

Facebook has also innovated significantly in adtech afaik

Portal is pretty nifty to chat with families over WhatsApp.

I always say that if you're interested in the Metaverse, I have many acres of land in Second Life for sale, and as many Linden Dollars as you'd like.

This whole Metaverse thing reminds me of when IBM purchased 12 islands and opened a virtual office in Second Life. Of course, as was tradition at the time, someone inevitably showed up with a flying gentlemen's sausage. Eventually IBM decided the whole thing was too costly and abandoned the project.

The lesson here is that when IBM gets involved, that's probably the top.

There's a difference in Second Life and the whole "metaverse" just as there is a difference between the time and tech then and now.

Not every tech is going to be successful at every time. The same solution can fail once and succeed some other time when there's a change in the market and/or the underlying technology.

There's a much larger number of human beings on the internet now. And they are not just on the internet, but they actively use it for a large amount of time. That's the chance in market right now and what will drive the adoption of metaverse soon.

The thing that we should focus on right now is whether we want a metaverse owned by Facebook or something that is defined by open protocols.

Oh wow. Someone already did this! How have I not heard about this yet?

> Look at Instagram and Whatsapp, perfectly timed investments.

What do you mean perfectly timed? If you mean that those platforms shot up in usage/revenue/whatever-metric after their purchase, couldn't that be heavily influenced by the purchase? Neither of those were some small little platform with a groundbreaking new feature before that. Everyone I knew (in highschool at the time) had gotten sick of their parents all joining Facebook and making it uncool, so they moved to Instagram before the purchase.

All that Zuck did was notice the platform all the kids are migrating to and bought it to keep those users. It isn't exactly "predicting future trends." They tried to do it again when everyone's parents joined Instagram so the kids moved to Snapchat, but thankfully that deal didn't go through

"All that Zuck did was notice the platform all the kids are migrating to and bought it to keep those users. It isn't exactly "predicting future trends." They tried to do it again when everyone's parents joined Instagram so the kids moved to Snapchat, but thankfully that deal didn't go through"

I would argue this is exactly what predicting future trends is. See which way the tide is going and make the necessary investments to ride it.

...which everybody does. There is nothing special about that particular smart person's ability to predict the future. Appeals to authority based on selectively chosen past performance... let's see how this ages 10 years from now.

> I would argue this is exactly what predicting future trends is.

It's recognizing current and predicting extremely short-term future trends that lots of other people recognized but didn't have the funds to do exploit in the same way.

Metaverse would be something very different.

I think there's a pretty big difference between buying a rapidly-growing platform and... whatever the hell was shown off in that vaporware announcement video

Buying companies that already have millions of users is different from trying to build a new thing yourself. Many. Of their internally built services and products have failed. Remember the android launcher?

Very much so, but while that is true, one shouldn't overlook the base fact that they did build Facebook themselves which was a very new thing and is now one of the largest tech companies in the world. I'm sure there will be hundreds of small bets and failures with the metaverse concept but I do think that eventually its going to happen.

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