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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

Facebook/Metas recent decisions strike me as completely mad. I don’t understand what the Metaverse should be, and I don’t get the impression anyone else does. Not even Meta, for that matter. Their buffalo ad is downright bizarre and their demos nothing. Renaming the company figures, but this whole Metamates business is beyond parody.

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?

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Losing your marbles might look a lot like what happens when you're desperately looking for something to reverse a decline.

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.

> Losing your marbles might look a lot like what happens when you're desperately looking for something to reverse a decline.

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 think for a lot of the golden geese we're entering a period where entropy is going to force a change to how they're valued, simply because infinite growth is impossible. At some point (and I think we're there or close) you run out of people who both want and don't have a Facebook account, or a Netflix subscription, or whatever else it is you're shilling. Similarly there was a dip in Amazon's share prices after their latest earnings call after 2021 income only increased by two billion dollars.

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.

Growth expectations are a seemingly inevitable side effect of the stock exchange: imagine there was a perfectly highly profitable and perfectly stable (in both directions) company. To people sure of that stability, a "correct" share price would be defined as a function of central bank interest rate. Buy when below, sell when higher. But if that perfect stability existed in reality, people would not know. Even if the average expectation was spot on perfect stability, it would be a bell curve distribution with some being more optimistic and others less. Share transactions only go one direction, pessimists selling to optimists. You end up with an all-optimist ownership after pessimists and realists are bought out.

There is a corrective mechanism to this dynamic and it's called the takeover bid. As soon as the "optimists" fail in their growth goals (and they will fail at some point, pretty much by definition), their valuation drops and the pessimists who had better foresight can take back control.

But before that happens, any amount of "grow or die trying" can take place: as long as inertia keeps the lights on, team "reinvent ourselves!" enthusiastically digs an ever deeper hole. Occasionally those do strike gold I think, but I can't really think of an example right now.

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.

Tbf, I think what he wants to do is basically the Amazon/AWS and Google/Waymo pivot where they basically use their massive piles of cash and engineering talent pipeline to try to capture the Next Big Market. And with a PE ratio based on growth that they'll struggle to achieve that roll of the dice might even be the best (or least worst) option.

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.

> Losing your marbles might look a lot like what happens when you're desperately looking for something to reverse a decline.

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.

Then how do you explain their recent behaviour?

> despite being said dead for 5+ years now

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.

Instagram users are, or will be, parallel TikTok users. If you are up tight about adding users this is a panic situation. In real terms it's not a concern to anyone but Facebook and TikTok. Users just shrug and use what interests or benefits them. Facebooks business model is quicksand because if they leverage users to enter another market welcome to antitrust. They could do payments and a million other things but social it is because that's what created the beast. They dominated a market that has no costs for users to walk away from. Customer value proposition is/was thin.

Yup.

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.

FB's initial success relied on a lot of variables coming together, and Zuck is smart enough to know that.

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.

Metaverse isn't a product or even suite of products. It's just a nebulous vibe that's trying to front-run and capture mindshare in the event that something, probably created by someone else and acquired, can navigate it and find a hit.

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.

It’s really crazy. Like there’s no way this thing takes off, it looks like a nightmare. VR is suuuper far off from mainstream adoption if it happens at all.

This comment reminded me of the time when I was in school, and I thought I'd learn HTML to build the school's first website.

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.

I think I've read about some CEO recently who must have been about 13 when VRML had it's 15 months of fame.

To give some era orientation to the less geriatric: that was right before they started attaching aluminium heatsinks to graphics chips.

It reminds me on those crypto scams that just try to generate hype by acting as if you are the next big thing. And I say acting because ultimately you don't care about realizing an actual working product, but about getting capital from people who buy into the hype.

Metaverse = More immersive 'Second Life'/'Roblox'/'Minecraft' but with more expensive hardware requirements?

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.

Well, I'm not sure he had his marbles at the start, as he's always had that whole "unfeeling megalomaniac" vibe going.

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.

Metaverse is the whole reason they bought VR in the first place.

The futuristic view is an realtime online community that mimmicks reality enough people actually enjoy spending time in it.

I don't think so.

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.

>Maybe he thought they could branch into gaming, but somehow that dream died.

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.

> IMO, Facebook and Twitter were the two biggest reasons MMOs lost popularity.

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").

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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.

This is why they bought it. Go back and check the interviews after the aquisition years ago. Whether you think that's realistic or not, Zuck doesn't care about things like gaming.

Selling ads on social media is slowly dying. Either you bet really big on some new magical tech or you'll have a hard time justifying your valuation in a couple of years. At this stage, the vaguer the better.

> Selling ads on social media is slowly dying

I’d love that to be true. Do you have any data?

Ads have driven out all other content on social media.

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.

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