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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

I guess the business model of social media companies is coming to fore.

FB has a captive audience, that is aging with facebook and will continue using it.

It is clear why FB purchases IG / WA. They are paying money to capture audiences with money earned from FB.

Going ahead, the cycle will repeat. Once the teens in IG grow into adults, FB will use money from that to buy / make another platform.

In this context, the metaverse makes sense. It is a virtual world, where new SM platforms are churned, with all future populations being part of one or more platforms. FB wants to be the owner of all the platforms.

From a business point of view, it makes more sense, in that, FB can now target ads across platforms, meaning, they target the same number of individuals, but with ads being channeled through different platforms, the ad density comes down, and the feeling of "the feed is all ads" might reduce.

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Except there are 2 major differences:

1. Even if FB isn't forced to divest their recent acquisitions, the regulatory environment will make it much more difficult to do the equivalent of buying Instagram in the future.

2. Any good ideas on how I can short "The Metaverse"? I still think the Metaverse is bullshit and will continue to be bullshit for the near future. The very first time I got on Facebook I was pretty enthralled - I was connecting with friends that I hadn't seen in years, and I really liked reconnecting. I have heard basically nobody say they are looking forward to the Metaverse, besides aging tech giants trying to push it.

I'm sorda looking forward to the Metaverse. Or rather, I'm pleased that FB is baiting the rest of the tech giants into an arms race on VR hardware and software development.

I'm a huge fan of VR gaming. The state of the art is incredible right now, but it'll get so much better the more money is shoveled in.

I'm skeptical about Metaverse and collaborative VR in general:

* much higher barrier to entry (requires specialized hardware)

* much more difficult to produce content (3D worlds to build from the ground up vs text and images of the real world)

* less cool than most video games (YMMV, there might be good VR games, but toons with amputated legs flying around are not cool, and that's what we saw in the Facebook demo)

* several safety and social acceptance issues (basically, you don't see the real world when you're using a VR headset)

* VR is not fun to spectate (checkout twitch, there is not much VR content)

* VR has been around for many years already, and it stays... a niche game accessory.

Add to that space requirements and lots of people find them nauseating to use.

I agree with you, but I find it important to note that it seems like the people who are most into VR gaming also hate the broader concept of the Metaverse.

That is, VR gamers just want to play games, including collaborative games. They don't want to sign in to Facebook to do it, they don't want to "live" in the metaverse, they don't want some shyster hocking their NFTs in VR while they're just trying to play a game.

This whole Metaverse BS just completely feels like Second Life 2.0 (Third Life??)

The thing doesn’t even exist. It’s all just smoke and mirrors at this point. Not even that—where is the tech demo?

It came out a couple months ago.

https://www.oculus.com/horizon-worlds/

Or perhaps your daughter will start using it in here early 20's when life gets busier and people dont have the same interaction expectations?

I dont know the answer but as a non-FB user I do see limitations when people organise events or group chats on messenger. If my wife wasn't connected to most of my friends I'd probably miss out on a bunch of relevant things. So for youth not on FB, I guess time will bring them back into the fold.

33 years old here. Deleted my FB acct in 2012. I stay in contact with everyone I care to be in contact with still over text/Signal/Slack/email. I cannot say I have regretted not having a FB account once in the last ten years.

I'm the same age and deleted my FB account around the same time. Got rid of Instagram a few years ago. I used to think I had a LOT of friends because they would 'like' all of my photos and I was in my 20s so I'd see lots of these social-media-friends out at parties. Once I dropped out of the night life and got rid of social media, I made a big effort to text a large portion of my friend group, but gradually I realized that I was the one putting in most of the effort and the social media interaction was shallow. Now I have a core group of friends in a group chat, and occasionally meet up with people IRL for coffee/lunch/whatever. Social media amplified my perception of social life in my 20s, but for the most part it wasn't nearly as important/real/deep as I once believed it was.

I had a similar experience. I quit in 2009 when I was 24 and let's just say that was a great way of finding out who my real friends were.

You know how some people still think we can live in a world where covid is eradicated? I still think we can live in a world where major social media companies are eradicated. Or at least can't churn out new dangerous variants to re-infect the immunologically naive 14 year olds who think it's a brand new generational trend every year.

I've watched this marketing turnover at least three times now in the music industry, and I really think the killer antibody is exposure to history. The operative question for a 14 year old hearing a super "original" band isn't what does this say to you... because they know what it says to them but they don't know how easily they're being manipulated by the distillation of time-worn, shop-worn, lazy songwriting. The question is: Hey, do you realize who they're ripping off? You'll be a lot cooler if you know.

That's the pill every human needs when they encounter a new and addictive social media platform.

> Once the teens in IG grow into adults

That already happened btw, teens are on TikTok not IG

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