Comment by rmahan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmahan | Hacker News Reader

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> The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 often looks like the absolute

How incredibly reductive, evident by the “basically” and “just” minimizations of innovative apps. When twitch was launched in 2011 was it “basically” a streaming platform? Was WhatsApp, with its launch date in 2009 “just” another chat app? Are the content sharing, file sharing, whiteboarding, breakout rooms, panels, background effects, automated transcription of Teams and zoom not a significant improvement over the days of Skype?

Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!

Plus, there's the consideration of adding value with a quality experience itself being innovative. Dropbox is "just" a VCS. Slack is "just" IRC. Yet, no one had effectively executed the idea of providing those as a managed service with a focus on UX. That seems obviously non-innovative now, and to some people it even looked like it wasn't solving a problem when it was new[1], but in practice they solved real problems that people actually had with such solutions in a way that wasn't previously available, i.e. "innovative".

That said, Meta's take on the metaverse concept falls short in many ways compared to what VRChat's been doing for years.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Honestly - I don't know what people see different about table-top RPGs, they're essentially just rehashed Homeric epics with an uninspired interactive element. /s

The saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." is extremely relevant here - nearly all science and innovation is iterative (and this is a good thing as it allows us to progress without relying on occasionally having a universe-brained Leonardo DaVinci simply pull innovation out of thin-air). Dramatic and sudden breakthroughs aren't the norm, the norm is slow improvement and refining, building something that's a little bit better than what you used last year and sharing it with your coworkers and that form of innovation should get a lot more praise than it usually does.

The telephone is basically just talking

> Sure, it’s easy to look back 10 years and say X is just Y, cause it’s been around for 10 years!

Exactly. If the author published this in 2008 he would be saying "the iPhone is just a rehash of Blackberry but with a touch screen." If he published it in 2004 he would say, "the Blackberry is just a rehash of Palm but with a tiny keyboard." I don't know what came before Palm but you get the picture: innovation is clearly a cumulative process.

Besides, the value of unifying recent (or even ancient) technologies in a new way should not be overlooked.

This is why the Olympics have different classes of medals for achievement...

These days though, we reward far too many bronze medal winners with the most profit and investment.

Praising and being content with small victories is not the way to achieve gold... Praising large victories, and noting when they aren't happening enough is the way to inspire more gold medal winners AND the way to generate a lot more silver and bronze medal winners.

To be as to the point as I can about it, you can take a stock 94' PT cruiser (which was very adventurous undertaking during it's initial release year mind you) and put a spoiler, very cool paint job, and even neon lights on it in 2022, but it's not going to win any drag races without a major overhaul.

The small innovations and bolt-ons just aren't cutting it.

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