No one cares about your redesign
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My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Of course, nice UI is nice but people would rather achieve a task for a cost and UI is just icing. Even worse is when you change the UI/UX, people get really annoyed at that! "Where is that button I always used to click to do X?" "Oh, you don't do it that way anymore! You need to relearn what you have spent the last 5 years assigning to muscle memory but hey, the site looks cooler right?"
I mean what else would you expect if you employ 500 designers? They have to do something.
With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine. Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore. It might not use SSL so the browser will show ugly warnings or might even stop working completely. Security fixes need to be applied or the website gets hacked. The underlying webserver / platform gets outdated and the provider stops supporting it eventually - or just makes it more expensive. I could go on.
Do you need 500 developers for that? Well, that depends on the size. Maybe, maybe not. But your post gives this vibe of "build it and be done with it" and with software that just doesn't work, even if the business is not growing at all.
My favorite is when we build a decent application and then marketing brings the UX to it's gnees with 27 tracking cookies.
I'd go so far as to say it's a crises in our industry. But the cost is very hidden.
And then of course, expectations evolve. It's less churn and simply life and humanity.
What? I usually see the opposite: it's the super-hip updates that break all the interoperability and standards compliance the site had. My usability add-ons more reliably work on old sites than on the hot new framework that doesn't consistently indicate clickable links or allow you to open views in a new tab.
>Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore.
The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone? Those end up being worse e.g. the fixed floating headers/footers that take 60% of the screen in landscape mode when the desktop version was actually usable. (With portrait not being much better.)
Not saying anything against that, nor that my example happens often. It should just illustrate a concrete and easy to undertsand example, not necessarily what happens most often.
> The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone?
There were and still are websites like "optimized for IE 800x600". Those might have worked for the majority of their visitors when they were created and maybe that was good enough at the time, even though we both agree that technically it was never great. But it does not work for the majority anymore today and hence might now be considered to need improvements.
Again, maybe not what happens to the majority of websites, but everyone understands the example as a case of "was good enough before, stopped being so because the world moved on".
IMO people's emotional response to UI is a lot like emotional response to cash as a compensation mechanism. If it's markedly insufficient they're unhappy, but there's a pretty modest cutoff point past which there are rapidly diminishing returns. And it if keeps changing in inconsequential ways they get nervous.
No I don't care about your new icons.
Users aren't supposed to care about the UI, at all. They're supposed to use it. Feelings about a user interface usually come to the surface when it's confusing, or makes their tasks more difficult to complete.
If you're users never think twice about the design, you've succeeded!
I've seen even stupider reasons too, where a team is sad that some functionality isn't getting used much, so they push for a redesign to shove users into it.
There are valid reasons to redesign an app but I would say that the majority of them are not done for the benefit of the users.
New Reddit is awful
> – Here you go! Here’s the first four comments.
> – …
> – You’re welcome.
The solution? Dozens of incremental changes to get from the old UI to the new one. Need to move a button across the site? Move it 10px at a time over a few weeks/month. Anything faster would just make the iceberg melt faster.
For a company to grow, it needs to attract new users. And tastes change, often surprisingly quickly. What was hot for new users in the early 2000s looks incredibly dated now - just check out old.reddit.com or search for [google in 1998] for examples. As someone entering my 40s who was in college or just out of it at the time, those UIs fill me with nostalgia. But someone who's in college now would be like "What is this shit?"
As a side note, this is why HNers are generally terrible at predicting new product trends now, and tend to poo-poo a lot of things that are gaining remarkable traction. Most of us are in our 30s and 40s by now, a time when our habits are basically set and we have neither the time, energy, or social networks to tap into the cultural zeitgeist. To really get a sense of what captures peoples' energy, you need to be one of the people whose energy is captured (or at least watch them closely), which requires the lack of cynicism and judgment that comes with experience.
So from the point of view of an end user like me, they took something great and ruined everything. I can't imagine that a 25 year old likes the new design better, but then again I can't put myself into the shoes of a 25 year old, so maybe they love jank, autoplaying videos, and constant pop-ups begging them to log in or use the app.
I'm sure from the point of view of Reddit however, the new design is awesome in all ways they measure. Probably revenue, "engagement" (ugggghhhh I hate that word), time on site (thanks to infinite scrolling), whatever it is they find important and prioritize. I can tell you they don't prioritize "usable by a 45 year old with disposable income".
I had assumed this general tend was to work well on mobile, yet Reddit couldn't do more to make it unbearable to use the website on mobile instead of their app. Constant popups to harass you into using the mobile app
My main gripe with narrow columns of content is that they rarely resize properly to smaller desktop sizes (I prefer side-by-side-by-side windows on my large 32" screen, so much that I am considering switching to new 42" oled screens showing up this year — if they were 8k and I had a gpu to drive it, I'd be ecstatic ;)).
I'll chalk this up to "Kids these days." I'm of similar vintage to you, maybe a few years younger. I don't really like this trend either, and use old.reddit.com when I can.
But you and I don't matter. Our consumption habits are already set, and realistically a start-up (particularly a mass media one) that we don't already patronize isn't going to get them. Businesses battle over the margins, the customers who don't already have buying habits, and fight aggressively to get them.
I believe we undervalue how much UI will get people in the door and overvalue how much it will keep them there. When a user is seeking novelty, design is a huge component of that. When they are seeking familiarity, any change is an anti-feature.
You pick a new restaurant based on the originality of its menu. You keep going because you fall in love with a couple of items on it. You stop going when they change things up and discard your favorite dish.
Exactly! I'm still salty about "new reddit."
We care about your redesign because we don't want to have to get used to a whole new less functional UX.
New Reddit’s design was a great improvement if it weren't for the fact that its developers were and still are absolutely clueless. That paired with a user-hostile management made Reddit even worse.
But the redesign itself was not the issue, it was the implementation.
The difference with HN is that HN is not mainly for media. However HN isn’t great either. The button to collapse threads in on top of the thread in a 16x16-pixel touch target. Good luck finding it when you’re 12 comments down.
For being a text comment-only website, the HN experience is pretty poor. The only good thing HN has got going on technically is that it’s super fast. Heck it still doesn’t offer dark mode when it would literally be 7 additional lines of CSS.
Unfortunately that UX isn't the best because most sites linked to are slow, annoying or broken in some way. Imgur fixed that though.
This sounds like the exceedingly stupid javascript override popup view a primary click on links gives. It's meant to make it easy to return to the list and keep scrolling forever.
Try opening the links in new tabs, or hitting "refresh" after clicking. That'll give you the full page view.
That's designed in. It's not an implementation problem.
You can say what you want about them, but they managed to push out a conversion optimized interface for new users while still keeping their core group/addicts at bay, which is not easy.
1. Limiting me to three clients at once. (Work computer, personal computer (Linux), personal computer (Windows), phone—oops!
2. Bombarding me with "your storage is almost full!" notifications either by email or when I visited dropbox.com to, e.g., get a share link for someone. Usually I had over a gigabyte of storage left. The webapp was at times unusable due to the volume of notifications.
3. Prohibiting me from keeping offline copies of entire directories on my phone.
Now I'm spending $20/month on a VPS running Nextcloud and am much happier.
Myself, I resolved the 3-client limit (which they hit me with when switching to a new phone — trying to use backups stored in Dropbox) by a swift migration to OneDrive (where I have 40 GB of free space due to various offers and grandfathering, that’s plenty enough for me). The Linux situation isn’t ideal (there’s a reasonable CLI-only not-real-time client), but otherwise, it’s great. And if I did decide to pay, there’s a neat and cheap 100 GB plan for 2€/month, or a 69€/year plan with 1 TB and desktop Microsoft Office — a bargain compared to Dropbox’s 2-TB-and-not-much-else for €120/year plan. The only thing Dropbox has these days is name recognition and intertia, everyone else’s offerings are cheaper and have more features.
For now I won't stop using the service, but it disgusts me every time I see it.
1.) Wearable VR becomes affordable, unobtrusive, and ubiquitous
2.) You can monetize real life
Meta has first mover advantage through Oculus, as well as a lot of resources. It comes down to whether or not the technology matures enough for mass adoption.
My guess is that they're betting on eventually becoming a main player in the smartglasses field, either on the hardware or software side. If Apple Glasses or something similar launches and becomes popular, they may succeed.
Ironically (IME) Facebook is mostly ignoring the one thing it's almost good at and which distinguishes it from TikTok - running the space that used to be filled by mailing lists and discussion groups.
The social element is more than a little half hearted now. And Second Life 2.0 isn't going to improve anyone's day any more than Second Life 1.0 did - smart glasses or no.
I doubt this. There's no recent precedence for splitting apart a company of their size.
> The social element is more than a little half hearted now.
It doesn't matter. Meta is an advertising company. Augmented reality, if it takes up, opens up an unprecedented amount of advertising space for Meta or another company to target.
Imagine you're thirteen years old and have a choice between Apple's AR take on eye wear, or vanilla eye glasses.
I would be surprised if governments are any quicker on the regulatory uptake here than they were with social media advertising.
You are correct that if all the choices of a younger generation shepherd them to equally predatory places then they can't win. But again, don't underestimate the older people and their (sometimes) better perspective on things. They can show the kids that there are in fact other universes to explore.
The craziness that many corporations want to impose on us is passively resisted by many even now -- as in, they just avoid it.
This is something that the "growth hackers" miss in their so-called analysis: the passive resistance element. Many folks won't actively argue with you whether your super cool VR idea is good or not. They'll just shake their heads and leave.
The Oculus is painful to wear for more than half an hour. I can only play when everybody has left the house or is asleep, lest I bump into them. I forget to charge it. The games are mostly mediocre. It’s difficult to show people what to do, even to put it on, especially if they wear glasses. Sharing is uncomfortably intimate.
I’ve found Oculus to be a novelty. It’s fun for the first 20 minutes, and after that, it gathers dust in a drawer.
VR headsets likely aren't the answer. Unobtrusive smartglasses may very well be the answer.
Like I wrote in my previous post, Meta is a smart move if AR becomes ubiquitous. This will likely happen if and when smartglasses or something similar become a viable replacement for eye glasses.
If Apple Glasses takes off (who knows), Meta may look like a very prescient decision in a couple of years.
When I can just slip on a pair of VR/AR glasses and throw away my monitor is the moment I believe VR/AR has "made it".
They also have to last a good amount of time between charges (wired AR glasses are likely going to be a no-go outside of the office).
It's likely going to be a while before AR becomes viable as more than just a novelty. My guess is that Meta is banking on there being an intermediate commercial stage, where enough corporate customers come on board for visualization & remote work use that they're able to maintain engineering momentum.
It's also possible that a consumer oriented product is farther along the development pipe than expected. Apple is likely the only company at this point that could force mass-adoption with a first generation product. If they release something in, say, 2023 and it becomes widely adopted, Meta would be positioned better than most competing companies to capitalize off of it.
...have you met Microsoft Teams? Compared to that abomination Zoom is a work of art.
If we look on Steam, less than 5% of users have a VR headset. And Steam users are outliers already.
There are probably more CRT monitors in use than VR headsets.
I think of that photo of the dude from 1980 with all the electronics equipment - microphone, camcorder, disc player, mobile TV, boombox, etc. - things that are all replaced by a smartphone everyone carries in their pocket. I think it'll be the same with my home office: desk, chair, monitors, monitor stand, microphone, webcam, computer - all will be replaced by a VR headset. The only thing it doesn't replace are input devices like keyboard & mouse, and pointing devices might get replaced by eye tracking. A common prediction is that the majority of knowledge workers will be in VR full time by the end of the decade, which honestly seems reasonable to me.
Or - hear me out - you could market the shit out of it until it's no longer goofy. Take Bluetooth headsets as an example - they used to be tacky and the users would appear obnoxious by default, until Apple made them white and expensive, and marketed them as aspirational products.
I'm also looking forward to UI innovations moving beyond the desktop screen paradigm. Like each window floating in 3D space, stuff like that.
I'd like to read on that a bit, I haven't seen it talked about much.
This is way too early though.
They have first mover advantage but haven’t hit the target yet. So in practice they’re only a barely ahead of all the competitors coming from all sides.
I’d compare them to Microsoft during the Windows CE PDA area. They’re the major player in the field but it was so clunky that we were all waiting for the breakthrough. Perhaps MS could have renamed itself to “DigitalMobile” or something like that and put all its weight behind that wave, but I kinda don’t believe they would have pulled it off either way.
By the same token I think Meta’s vision is right, but I assume they are rushing ahead full steam because they clearly see it as an extremely tough race for them.
It very likely is.
> I’d compare them to Microsoft during the Windows CE PDA area.
I completely agree. Smartphones turned out to be as much of a hardware issue (capacitive touch screens) as a software issue. AR won't go mainstream until someone releases something revolutionary, which will likely be an AR smart glasses device that looks like a pair of normal eye glasses. This could be Meta. My money is on Apple.
> By the same token I think Meta’s vision is right, but I assume they are rushing ahead full steam because they clearly see it as an extremely tough race for them.
I think it comes down to whether Meta's suite of applications (Facebook, WhatsApp, & Instragram) are still popular once consumer AR becomes viable.
So many of the most popular apps on the Quest 2 are just swarming with kids. I think this is intentional.
I would agree, except that I don’t believe something that completely takes over your total range of vision can ever be “unobtrusive”.
it's bullshit
Zuckerberg knows Facebook is turning into an hollow husk of its former self and the metaverse is his last ditch attempt to keep things together.
There were a number of things that led to Telegram's (relative) success. One of them is the owner itself - Whatsapp has suffered in reputation with the sell-out to Facebook, especially when they announced to combine the data stores of both companies. From then on, it was widely seen as "yet another thing of Facebook where they want all your data" despite Whatsapp actually offering better encryption than Telegram. Telegram in contrast is seen as "independent" from any major political power - Durov's fight with the Russian government is well known, as is its opposition to Western demands.
Another issue was cross-device compatibility. Whatsapp used to be completely immovable between Android and iOS, and its web UI for a long time was tethered to the phone, meaning it would drain your battery. That has only changed recently, but (IMO) too late.
And the final thing were the mass-fanout capabilities. Telegram groups allowed quick dissemination and discussion of information, for open groups even without requiring a Telegram account. Whatsapp had neither. Then add to that the resistance of Telegram towards any kind of moderation, especially from Western governments... and suddenly a bunch of conspiracy theorists, vaccine deniers and outright Nazis had the perfect platform. No moderation from the platform side, no content requirements other than "please don't spread CSAM", and effective management tools for group admins to yeet off counterspeech attempts. These days, you have QAnon groups numbering six-digit subscribers [1], and the same for German copycats [2].
Telegram's success is mostly based on outright ignorance and defiance of the rules everyone else (including Facebook) plays by.
[1]: https://www.logically.ai/articles/new-telegram-research-show...
[2]: https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/kontraste/querdenken-...
It’s almost refreshing in a way. There is certainly unsavoury content being shared around but it doesn’t affect the average telegram user in any way because they don’t see it if they don’t subscribe to it.
How is that any different to WhatsApp? WhatsApp is used by neo-nazi groups[0], used to organise literal genocide[1] and is the main source of covid/vaccine conspiracy nonsense around the world (except for the U.S.)
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/germany-suspends-29-cops-over-...
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...
My main concern about the traction for the metaverse is how are they going to pull people in? The good thing about both Facebook and Instagram is that you can use both product on the go. You don't have to set aside time for it. Celebreties and influencers aren't going to move from Instagram, where they can do few posts during the day from where ever they happen to be, to a platform where they need to put on special equipment and allocate hours where they can't do anything else. I question whether or not you're actually able to be an influencer, if you spend hours a day in a virtual world. That's not inspiring or even that interesting.
VR makes sense for gaming, not but social media.
If anything Facebook should fix existing known problems with social media, work on the trust relationship between the company and the users (e.g. by retiring Zuckerberg) and then maybe think about how to integrate a social platform with augmented reality and VR on a big scale.
But as of now Facebook/Meta is not in the position to create a new userbase around some mediocre new app. Either it is so undeniably good that everybody understands it without a second thought, or they need to find a way to move their old userbase over to the new thing slowly.
But having a mediocre thing from an company that most people actively distrust is not enough.
But what "social" thing is there after short form video? Something VR related, so FB is going to try and build it in the hope they can snag the generation after tiktok one assumes.
When it's merely doing fashion, fine, be honest about it. But when it's doing engineering/psychology -- the huge problem is that there's no skin-in-the-game incentives. It can harm people without fear of repercussion, and so it does.
I will take it seriously when someone is fined or thrown in jail for harming people through, e.g. dark patterns. This should happen, soon.
Partially this is just that it's still a major buzzword and so buzzword soup things will just have both because why not? But the (well, a) big problem for blockchain has always been the interface with the real world, so I suppose it's natural for it to be quite enthusiastically paired with the idea of a parallel digital world.
If they can make it cheaper and less awkward it would appeal to a lot of gamers just for this.
As interns and postdocs, we were all lab monkeys, and all got our turn in the helmet. Some people were utterly hopeless, always got sick, couldn't do the tasks. Others took to it like fish in water. I think this disconnect in proprioceptive adaptability leads people who have it to vastly overestimate the general public's ability to remain in a VR space for more than a minute or two.
One of the things the lab's senior scientist was researching was the effect of latency on performance at 3D tasks. For example, moving a ring down a twisted wire without touching[0]. There was a clear effect on both objective performance and subjective reports of comfort as latency decreased, and it hadn't bottomed out at 60 fps / 16 ms latency (one frame). This was true for every test subject, but greatly exaggerated for those with generally poor performance. I doubt even 240 fps / 4 ms would eliminate it. And how are you going to get 4 ms of input latency with modern USB drivers? Not even your keyboard has that anymore.
[0] A virtual version of this: https://metzamusements.com/inventory/college-and-high-school...
Who would want to watch a stamp-size video of horrible quality when we have TVs? This will never catch on.
You have to get started early on these sort of big transitions, otherwise by the time everything to make it successful is in place, you're years too late.
That being said, I don't think this is going to be a winning strategy for Facebook either.
I can imagine a Discord-type of world, basically Second Life without the game mechanics. Could I have my Pikachu follow me around? What about an avatar of my real dog?
This stuff exists already though. So the value add is that I feel more immersed, while simultaneously being more disconnected from the flow of my everyday life? It's already rude to get on your phone when you have company, how much worse is it if you have to don a headset or something to take a call?
Anyways, I'm 30 and it all sounds lame to me. I don't play video games. I didn't even get the Pokemon Go thing when everyone my age got obsessed. Maybe I'm just too literal minded. I guess I'll focus on buying real stuff with the real money I make by making virtual stuff for the metaverse.
For people to really start using this, they need two things: trust and goodwill. People trusted that Facebook would rectify its privacy issues at the start. Remember the promise of a global council for Facebook? That got killed pretty quickly, along with apps you could plug into Facebook and other innovative things for creators. But enough scandals and there is no more trust, so if Facebook launches something truly different then no one feels they can trust it.
And goodwill. There is no more of it left. For people to try something new from an existing company, it really takes a reasonable amount of goodwill before they will give it a try. Like the reasons for a lack of trust, there is a lack of goodwill.
So Facebook has momentum. This Meta VR or whatever it is called has none. And it’s unlikely to gather much at this point.
Frankly, as one of the people who distrust Facebook, I hope they die and wither on the vine.
An organisation could spend infinite funds wrongly and still fall, if not a single deciding person in your organisation is willing to not lie to themselves and act on it.
Even with massive amounts of cash, you can only support 72000 employees for so long. With most of these things, if you get enough downward momentum, income dries up, layoffs start, customers get more nervous etc.
I guess we don't have too many stories of very long-lived companies (certainly of Faang size) that have survived the changes in the world unless they have stuck to a strong core product, which hasn't changed so much in 100 years+ like cars, boats etc. What I wonder is if it is possible that a 1 product company like Meta can really survive in the long-term.
https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...
Some of these are pretty funny actually.
People use the shit out of Facebook Marketplace and the localalized buy/sell/swap groups.
MySpace really did crash and burn. There was nothing tying users to the site. Meta on the other hand has multiple properties with enormous captive audiences who mostly aren't going anywhere.
Sure, Meta's on the decline and TikTok is on the rise. But until TikTok opens up a Marketplace competitor or Groups competitor or TikTok produces a messenger that allows you to DM your Grammy a heart emoji on her cheap Android phone, FB and Meta will be mostly fine (and simply declining) for years.
Now I think I agree with him that medium doesn't really matter. The confidence of their user base is everything and once its gone, its like watching a giant fall over for years.
wut
That just seems like self-parody
Thinking about the slogan, interesting how Meta the company comes first, coworkers second, and in last place the individual.
Am I a naysayer? A tech pessimist and a neo-luddite? Am I not clever enough to understand what’s happening? Out of touch perhaps? After all, I rarely use tech outside of work and like an offline life.
Or has Zuck lost his marbles?
I’d love that to be true. Do you have any data?
Part of the reason it is so intolerable to use Facebook and Instagram is because between one in three and one in two pieces of content that they display to you is sponsored.
As I was trying to figure out how to do it, it dawned on me that 2D HTML was old fashioned and that the future was VRML, because of course you'd want everything to be 3D, it's obvious, right?
Luckily I was not smart enough to build the school website in 3D.
To give some era orientation to the less geriatric: that was right before they started attaching aluminium heatsinks to graphics chips.
There's only so many things that can sustain an FB size valuation, and most of those things have an existing 800 pound gorilla sitting on them.
So then you're left with speculative bets that could maybe balloon one day, and you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to believe in the thesis for one of them.
Somehow it feels like Facebook is a Ponzi scheme, except with users not money. Valuation always seems to be based on user growth. It’s amazing to me how quickly the sense of desperation kicks in once user count flatlines.
I get that these companies all started as scrappy startups, but they're now the establishment, and maybe they need to stop chasing infinite share value growth and start talking about paying reasonable dividends to retain value.
Some might say Nadella Microsoft, or the iPod company, but I'd say that the former wasn't quite down enough to qualify, and iPod-age Apple wasn't a growth bet at all: everything they did at the time would have been considered a success if it only stabilized on the level reached by the CRT iMacs.
Problem is they're just so unfocused and goofy about it. To the extent that VR immersive experiences become big (which is likely not as big as Zuck thinks), it's more likely to be dominated by a company with a culture based around immersive worldbuilding and storytelling, not a company culture based around advertiser metadata and surfacing stuff people click on. And rebranding itself as a metaverse whilst all it has to show the average user is a website which has been around in essentially the same format for 15 years underlines that.
Facebook still has an user count who's market limit approaches the human population, has lost users for the first time just last month and is still the largest social network, despite being said dead for 5+ years now. Facebook-the-company (Meta, I guess) also still has Instagram, which does not look like it's loosing out against TikTok, and WhatsApp+Facebook Messenger, which together have an enormous market share in the messenger market.
I don't think there's really a need for panic, yet.
Maybe those people were right all along. The problem is that their valuation is based on continued growth, that can no longer be assumed based on last quarter.
Yes and: the audience for "metaverse", crypto ("libra" IIRC), etc are developers. For both retention and recruiting. IMHO.
Tangent: I'm reminded of when tabloids paid premium salaries. For pretty much all the same reasons. Having National Inquirer on your CV severely limited future prospects, the work sucked, the world and your peers hated you, etc.
The futuristic view is an realtime online community that mimmicks reality enough people actually enjoy spending time in it.
I think back when Occulus was a thing and Carmack was involved, Zuckerberg thought it was just cool and bought it because it would've been fun. A complete guilty (and kinda expensive) purchase. There was no way from the get-go to make it profitable. Nobody wanted to see ads in their eyeballs. But he did it anyway. Maybe he thought they could branch into gaming, but somehow that dream died. Now 8 years later Carmack is gone and VR hasn't really progressed beyond chat rooms. They're left scrambling for ideas as their valuation is tumbling. They tried rolling their own crypto and that shit failed hard. People already have instagram, and whatsapp is slowly eroding in the west. A dumb little rebranded music app is eating their lunch.
"What can we do?"
"What about facebook, IN VIRTUAL REALITY?"
Because absolutely the last thing anyone wants to do is see their dreary fucking facebook feed in 3d. So here we are, a rename later, somehow thinking that will do anything. The last hurrah is to pretend we somehow operate as a parent company with independent subsidiaries because our brand is so toxic that years of bad press and a myopic pivot of our core product has finally caught up to us.
Personally, I saw some logic. Before social media, many people socialized in online games. They could meet and talk to new people, and navigating the map was a natural way to avoid a deluge of messages. IMO, Facebook and Twitter were the two biggest reasons MMOs lost popularity.
Which, ironically, supports your point:
>"What about facebook, IN VIRTUAL REALITY?"
This won't be popular. People left immersive worlds for Facebook because they preferred a simple message feed they could glance at while doing something else. They often get sucked into Facebook and don't do something else, but I think putting on VR equipment and deciding not to do anything else for a block of time is enough of a barrier to make it unpopular. Even if VR ends up dominating the gaming market, VR social media will be niche.
Interesting, never looked at it this way. You're likely correct.
To add to this as a former MMORPG player, I'd say those games also lost popularity because there was no development there. You got through several super slow grinds -- leveling and gearing up at the very least -- only to land in a quicksand from which there's no escape: end-game dungeon and raid grinding for better and better gear which is done for... you guessed it, so you can do higher level dungeons and raids. You do that and you're waiting for the next tier to be released. Warframe and the Destiny games suffer from that same thing as well.
We the humans don't like annoying and soul-draining routine. We like leisurely routine, and sadly MMORPGs are often not that. Heck, a lot of modern games are not that. They are like jobs.
Thinking back, I cherish most moments in WoW when I socialized with people while doing the raids and dungeons. I never enjoyed the grinds however. I kinda sorta liked them up to a point -- beautiful scenery, nice voice acting, some role play etc. but it quickly loses its appeal and just becomes dreary.
At one point this catches up with enough players for there to be mass exoduses -- although mind you, all these games have a core fanbase that will never leave no matter what; that however is no indication of popularity or success (something I believe people constantly use to shut down discussions like "is the game on a downward spiral?", "lol no it still has X million players").
---
Back to topic at hand, I'd say something like this definitely applies to social networks as well. People's careers get cancelled over a seemingly offensive comment on Twitter, for example. Other people take notice and start self-censoring while others are like "feck this, I am out".
It seems that all social networks and MMORPGs -- or maybe all communities in general? -- eventually succumb to being an echo chamber and are driven by tradition.
Apparently that's the best that we as a species can offer. Sigh.
It also has the side benefit of glossing over the general sense of toxicity over becoming a 'facebooker' that's been blooming in the industry for a while.
Still, FB has been on the VR/AR kick since pre-Oculus acquisition. Merging that thrust into the now-popular "metaverse" buzz may be an effort to capitalize on marketing/branding as much as anything. And, the timing dove-tails with the clear beginning of decline in their (formerly) namesake business at a time when their "acquire to maintain relevance" strategy may be nearing the end of its utility. So, this may all be a rational response under that set of conditions.
But, this doesn't mean the "metaverse" is any more well-defined or meaningful on its own. And, it doesn't make me any less concerned about the idea of a world living inside Zuck's mind.
He's also smart enough to know that people are smelling weakness, and that's a bad time for him and Meta, because the parts of the tech world Zuck has allied himself with are ruthlessly mercenary and when he + Meta become a liability, all their friends and allies are going to drop them like a rock. The main contribution Zuckerberg brought to the table was an understanding of and an outlet into digital youth culture. Now we're hitting adulthood and Zuck's approaching middle-age, and you can't be the bright young kid forever. He's realizing that he needs something concrete for his power and influence to last, but I wouldn't be shocked if either:
a.) The people with the decent ideas/the ones who could tell Zuck 'no, that's a batshit idea' that he'd listen to have all bailed. They're not going down with the ship.
b.) He's tanked his reputation to work with so much that he can't assemble the teams he'd need in order to make something like the Metaverse actually feasible. There are no Savarins, McCollums, Hugheses, or Moskovitzes around. He has ideas, but he's so obsessed with being on top that he's forgotten that an army of a million soldiers with a commander in chief but no generals or officers is not going to be very effective.
That's my take anyway.
I anticipate that the biggest market for a 'metaverse ecosystem' will be virtual sex. You'll be able to buy NFTs of specific acts, performed by specific people and download them to your, umm, VR/AR accessories. I'm only half-kidding with this stupid mashup.
This is obviously a great achievement but I think it also means he has been living in a bubble all his professional life.
I mean, it's his company so I guess he can have those corporate values if he wants, but it's straying in to radical honesty to say the aims of the company are specifically to further his own interests.
> wut
> That just seems like self-parody
Maybe it's an analogy? The "metamates" relationship to "checkmate" is the same one as the "own-goal" relationship is to "goal".
I think the weird hype words are just because the marketing department is twiddling their thumbs while the engineers are building.
But this is also why I don't play in the stock market because everything I bet on in my mind usually tanks.
Yeah, we are imagining that, and that is exactly the reason we think it will crash and burn, because, come on. What sane person would want that? What sane person would use that? Why would anyone bother? That is both boring and awful at the same time.
I could go on. It's remarkably easy to go on.
Point being, you may feel better by insisting that it's just 'cheap cynicism', but I remain unconvinced. "corporate VR work rooms and VR school classrooms with billboards in the background" seems like a frighteningly real possibility from where I'm sitting; I watch people spend their lives staring down at a rectangle designed to shove ads in their face all day because "it's the best way to keep in touch".
Additionally, Microsoft actually is able to engage with the big corporate clients that want or have a need for data visualization, the US government chief among them. The "VR workroom" or conference call is a neat gimmick - the VR or AR security briefing or military planning session is a massive leap forward in capability, and there's a lot of money there.
Counterexample: PlayStation's lead time over the XBox, and how Microsoft threw a lot of money to catch up.
Founders invariably suffer from some cognitive dissonance around the nature of their "shared goals" (eg: the "mission") when compared to those they employ. I can recall a cofounder insisting on including a section in performance self-review, wherein she expected us all to list how our personal dreams aligned with those of $employer.
We have these little brainwashing assignments too. They're an excellent use of my time and a valuable part of the self-assessment process.