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Comment by HL33tibCe7 | Hacker News Reader

Completely off-topic digression: I still think the name change to “Meta” is a big mistake. Subjectively, for some reason I just really dislike the name. More objectively, the branding is very muddled, e.g: serving an “Engineering at Meta” blog post on fb.com.

Often with these things it’s just about time; it feels wrong because you’re just not used to the change yet. Maybe that will happen, but it’s been months now. Usually with these changes I change my mind quicker than that.

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> the name change to "Meta" is a big mistake

I think it's too soon to tell. Facebook has really negative brand recognition (from my POV), and who knows, maybe "metaverse" style online interaction is the future. (For the record I'm anti-web3 and indifferent on metaverse communities)

I will always say VR, I will never say "metaverse".

Their branding move was bold, yet unconvincing.

Meta's metaverse is centered on VR, but generally, metaverse and VR are orthogonal

Vr is a subset of the ‘metaverse’. The metaverse isn’t really something new. It’s just a rebranding of the portion of our lives that are contained within the digital realm. On top of that there are obviously ideas for how to adapt and grow that space, which is all to be seen

“It’s just a rebranding of the portion of our lives that are contained within the digital realm.”

none of my life is “contained” within shitbook

Lol that’s fine. Metaverse isn’t specific to shitbook. You’re on the metaverse via hn. At the end of the day, I think it’s dumb. I’m just iron manning the justification of the rebrand

No, you and I and parent commenter are on the world wide web on HN.

I see no 3d Second Life models interacting.

The Metaverse, at least in theory, is the connection of all aspects of your digital existence into a seamless whole. It wouldn't be limited to Facebook, it would give you a digital identity you can freely carry between websites, VR environments and devices.

In reality of course none of that exists and Meta has so far not shown how they plan to accomplish that. Worse yet, Facebook is directly responsible for making things not seamless on the Internet and in VR. So I don't have much hope (or fear) of them actually being successful in building that. But their vision is a lot broader than just Facebook in VR.

Based

Meta still redirects meta.com to https://about.facebook.com/meta

I don't think it's too soon.

It's too soon to tell if it's a mistake*

It isn't too soon to see that they don't believe in this rebranding themselves. Ergo it was a mistake.

The name Meta dilutes the brand significantly. I bet if you ask people what Meta is, most people outside tech can't tell. But if you ask what Facebook is, 100% of them can. They took a really good brand name and trashed it to the point they needed to rebrand.

I thought that was the point, though. The brand Facebook is well known, but had developed negative associations. So they wanted to start fresh.

Two sides of the same coin.

But they are still keeping the name Facebook for that specific consumer product.

Can we please keep this type of rants and off-topic criticisms out of technical threads? Lately even reading technical threads has become difficult because of thread-hijacking off-topic rants.

I feel like, given the negative connotations of "Facebook", that's by design.

a muddled brand is better than the currently maligned harbinger of misery disinformation and insurrection that Facebook has been mired in. Recruiters at Meta probably appreciate the distance.

How many candidates wouldn't know that Meta == Facebook, at least within the tech spheres?

The point of the rebrand is not to hide the association, but to make people think Meta > Facebook.

I suspect it does help because a lot of hiring goes on for Quest, Instagram, Portal, WhatsApp, Workplace — you can talk to candidates about those specific products rather than make them think of grandpa posting right-wing memes on the blue app.

Yea this is exactly it. I would never want to work for Facebook but I might want to work for Oculus. Even though I know Meta is just Facebook in new clothing it might (for some) psychologically distance it enough.

That being said with all of the data Facebook has from Facebook itself I would imagine Suckerberg must know that for the long term success of his different businesses they do have to distance the smaller ones a bit more than they are now - personally I am hoping we see a major fall in Facebooks value and influence and things like Oculus are spun-off to be as autonomous as possible.

Yeah, this techie is not convinced that this whole Meta nonsense is meaningful. It's extremely disingenuous if recruiters actually expect people to not realize they are exactly who they are, a high paying corporation that has major negative externalities associated due to bad behavior.

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