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Comment by nwsm | Hacker News Reader

> 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)

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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

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.

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.

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