Sheryl Sandberg stepping down as Facebook COO
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Now they’re scrambling to ship an iPhone alternative to get out from under Apple policy, but it really seems like they’re on constant defense now and have a very tough lift to actually get something truly mass market. I would be shocked if Apple, Microsoft or Google were irrelevant in 2030, but it is really possible (if not yet necessarily probable) that Facebook/Meta might actually just not exist in the same kind of way anymore then.
When they first announced the rebrand I actually thought it could be genius and that there’s no way they could have been doing it without a really well considered, heavily backstopped plan… but epic strategic miscalculation seems to be going around a lot this year.
Facebook is an American company, if it fails in that market, it will most likely eventually fail globally as well. Orkut being super popular in India and Brazil didn't save it.
As another anecdote, Facebook has died out amongst my peer group, it used to be heavily used for event planning amongst friends but now it's been abandoned despite no good replacements in the wings because nobody is on Facebook to see your events. Instead we are back to using text messages and emails.
I wonder what insights we can extrapolate to billions of people from our sample size of 2.
Are you using FB and IG and have tried friends most people you know and actively check if people are around those platforms or how else would you know? I find it hard to believe much of any one who is active on the internet does not know any one who does not use FB or IG. There are a lot more people on IG than most people realize because of it being harder to find people. For a community I run, no one knew half of the other members on IG until I listed everyone out to members.
You can't extrapolate your opinion to the behaviours of a billion plus people.
With that being said, anecdotally, in younger (American) circles, facebook.com isn't used much as a social media/content sharing platform. However, other facebook (meta) products like messenger, and instagram are still used a ton, not to mention facebook.com "subproducts" like marketplace, or using facebook pages to act as a landing page for a business. Just because younger people don't use facebook.com doesn't mean they have little relevance within that subgroup.
This isn't even including the huge influence of whatsapp, granted it still(?) doesn't generate any revenue. Facebook developer products like react or pytorch also have a very strong foothold among young developers.
Wasn't one of the points of their recent rebrand to Meta to better define "Facebook" as a singular product, and not the company and its other products?
I see this a lot in other threads pertaining to Meta/FB but its all semantics at the end of the day. And even if they are referring to "Facebook" the singular product being irrelevant, its not really informative since at the end of the day Facebook is a B2B company that sells data and serves targeted ads. It doesn't matter if they get that information to you through oculus, facebook.com, instagram, or whatsapp, and as of now, their "core" products (fb.com, instagram, whatsapp, messenger, oculus) still cover a huge market of people they can glean data from.
It’s true that the 20somethinga don’t use it much, but they’re all on Instagram.
I'm in my 20s and It's a reliable way for managing events, group chats and marketplace
Also the ads I get are generally shockingly relevant to me. I buy stuff from Facebook ads sometimes.
1) Meta has a lot of active users across all of their properties (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp). Even the core Facebook product generates a lot of activity, which can be seen from their financials.
2) The great majority of Facebook users are under 50 (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribu... )
HN commenters (and their friends) don't overlap with Facebook's userbase as much as the general population. It doesn't make sense to try to extrapolate from individual anecdotes when vast quantities of research and data are available on the topic. It's reminiscent of people who refuse to acknowledge climate change because it's not hot where they live. Ignore your bubble, focus on the plentiful data available.
At this point, Facebook has simply waited entirely too long, and the likelihood of any pivot working for a company of their size is basically nonexistent.
b) Facebook isn't really pivoting to metaverse any more than Apple is pivoting to services. It's an additional revenue stream alongside their existing ones which are still very healthy and lucrative.
This strategy has run it's course. Regulators are keen to weaken FB and will obstruct further acquisitions. Acquisition targets know they can beat FB in the long run and will no longer agree to be purchased.
You could also say that "they won" and there's no where to go but down now.
Nothing can grow forever and things that try are known, in the biological domain, as cancers or infestations. There's quite a few corporations that "won" their market, so they're primed for a decline-- if you can still even call it that after enough people made more money than god and retired.
Because exactly as you said: Facebook "won" the social network game several years ago: Everybody was in there. From there the only thing it could do to try to milk more profits was to bring it down.
Instead, we've got IRC or Usenet that, years and years after their "peak", they are still going well and good. Gone are the "ethernal septembers" and most of spam. And the protocol and networks (that matter for the people using it) are still in there.
They haven’t monetized Messenger or WhatsApp much either. Maybe they can’t or it won’t ever be enough. Less than billions in profit won’t help much. Which does make them having won and are now going down seem more correct.
They "sort-of" did. The Open Compute Project (https://www.opencompute.org/) is an effort in which Facebook played a major role. The motivation, for them, is to break free of the shackles put on them by computing and networking equipment vendors (like Cisco). Facebook is big enough that they could design their own stuff, and try to make it a commodity which, as a side-effect, allows others to get involved and benefit from as well. It's hard to say how well this has worked but it was "an initiative".
The first pivot was into Photos. A mini pivot, but an important one as being a glorified contact list and blog was on the way out.
Then they saw another competitor rising, so they bought it to ride its lifecycle. Instagram.
Then into Messaging, with messenger and WhatsApp. Most people I know use one or both of these and not Facebook.
There have been other smaller pivots to stay relevant overall, even if any one piece of the business is dying, and I think that’s good business practice.
Whether the meta verse turns out to be the next wave or not is essentially their current bet.
Today, nothing is chronological, profiles are (somewhat) public facing, people just posts links, photos has basically moved to instagram, messaging has moved to whatsapp, and events hasn't changed a bit. Plus there's a ton of other new features that dilute the tool.
That's hardly "epic".
And the NASDAQ composite is down 13% in the same time frame.
why write something in bad faith?
You said "past few months" and so I quickly pulled up a 3 month history which is a dropdown option in the UI I was looking at. I replied with what I saw.
Their real mistake was not pushing to own the entire vertical stack, building unassailable moats like Google and Apple. Oculus is that bet, and other companies like Valve are pursuing similar strategies.
They’re past as much as selling is past.
Now, is their ads business strong enough to survive in more privacy aware world? That’s a different story.
I don't understand how people can make this statement and not immediately realize their is something deeply, deeply wrong about this situation.
Ads derive their value from the product being sold, the fact that ads themselves have become the economic underpinning of the entire internet, rather than actual things being sold, should tell you there is a problem.
People will not pay a penny for the vast majority of the internet, whether they be social networks or just plain websites. They won't donate either or do "micro transactions", not at the scale in which ads currently deliver revenue.
So for the vast majority of the internet, no ads = no money. And it ends right there, hobbyist bloggers aside.
I have a similar question to "what customer will still load ads". And the answer is probably anyone still using Google Chrome after they upgrade the manifest version to v4 and finally kill adblocking.
Ads are here to stay. At best they may do less tracking in the future, but they remain.
Another unpopular thought...in a fully online, digitized society, how are companies supposed to advertise their existence or their products if there's no ads?
Not my problem, many would say. Well, it is your problem. Because you probably work at a company and they sell things.
Ads artificially increase the price of a product or service, because the cost of advertising is embedded in the price of what's sold; you're paying more money to be manipulated to buy something.
There are other externalized costs that aren't calculated, e.g. what's the cost to society on top of the "$10"/day?
What if ads also make us sicker, make poorer decisions, wasteful decisions - perhaps as simple as buying lower quality products because they have a higher profit margin and so it's the product you're exposed to, and then because we're sicker we spend more money on health?
There's not much conversation about all of this. I think the natural mechanisms of how information propagated via word of mouth before communications became what they are, how we are able to bypass those natural mechanisms, has some very negative impacts on society, e.g. buying products/services from people that didn't earn or deserve the attention, instead able to buy and manipulate you with cheap-shallow ads; what would the world look like today if this wasn't the case, what would your buying patterns be, what type of person would be amassing profits from the different buying patterns that would exist if there weren't ads, and what would the cascading consequences of that be?
and no competitors outperform them, or advertising paradigm shift occurs?
Also keep in mind Apple has been doing a LOT of prep work for AR. We just don’t notice it but each iPhone comes with a full advanced AR sensor suite, capable of super imposing objects into our field of view. The only missing piece is the physical strapping of the iphone to one’s head, but if you did that the iPhone is capable of delivering Hololens-like promised experiences.
Before that, people had a wall and you could go there and read what they wrote and poke them ... remember poking?
They do seem rather good at buying good product companies or copying ideas, which could serve them well in the metaverse-space (ugh...), once it's established.
PyTorch is based on Caffe which was created by Yangqing Jia at UC Berkeley.
You can argue (and I'd agree) Facebook has talent for cherry-picking the best parts of innovative projects. But cherry-picking in and of itself doesn't constitute innovation.
The key one, the vestibular system, is overridable non-invasively:
Galvanic vestibular stimulation https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_vestibular_stimulati...
Vision and sound covered too, though vision can get better with more res and variable focus. Sound can get better with 3d scanning for custom HRTF's matched to the user's ear shape and body (sound reflecting off shoulders etc.).
If you apply galvanic vestibular stimulation to try to "correct" at least the vestibular sense, you will lose your balance and fall over, because you can't fool physics. Even if you're prevented from falling by a harness it won't feel right. The disagreement between your vestibular and proprioception senses will be uncomfortable.
I still don't understand what's the difference between MMOs and Metaverse. Like it's on mobile? That's all? Peak WoW _was_ a social network something Zuck is dreaming about (and that's while you also have to pay a monthly sub). I've read around and some people say that the difference people can _create content_ in Metaverse but... sandbox MMOs are also a thing for a long time (or just look at Minecraft/Roblox/Fortnite). Or the whole point just to attach your persona to your real name + Meta can monetize everything? But that still just sounds like some F2P korean MMO or a japanese gacha game.
Maybe there is more to that but to me at least 1, the Metaverse sounds more like a "vision" than an actual product (yet VR Chat already exist too if the main selling point is AR/VR) 2, if it's an actual product then it's an MMO reimagined for non-gaming "normal" people
Now, I am not sure if they will get there, but they are investing heavily in the tech required (AR screen tech, SLAM, 3d body reconstruction etc), and even partial success could be enormous. Having spent a lot of time in VRChat, seeing people and interacting with them up close has something very powerful, even if if is just the beginning of the technology. I am very excited to see where it goes in any case.
I really don't think so. But maybe future generations have different ideas. I think VR can make a lot of difference in training (e.g. medical training) but it's not consumer stuff.
I’ve found that VRChat makes for a more pleasant, natural, deeper experience than phone calls or video chat. For me, it really replicates the experience of hanging out with people in real life.
Part of it is that it has the thing where you stand next to the people you are talking to and you can move around and talk to someone else when the conversation ebbs and flows. You can go to smaller spaces where you know everyone, or bigger places with friends of friends.
This mitigates the problem with video or phone calls where you have to sort of mutually agree with the other party that you want to talk and when you are done talking. Instead, you can more naturally flow between different conversations. You can go to a crowd and meet new people, you can go on adventure with your close friend, or go hang out at your regular haunt.
There are a lot of problems with the service, though. One of the big ones is that the onboarding experience is shitty for new players. If you don’t already have friends who play, you’ll just end up with 14 year olds screaming obscenities at you in a public world.
Feeling truly present with someone isn't possible in 2d
Or in VR for that matter...
I was on a casual call with ~10 people recently and the way only one person could speak at a time was so unfortunate. Really killed the experience compared to chatting in person.
There is clearly something different in in-person interactions that makes me do this, and if Meta or someone else can replicate part of that experience I believe that could be very valuable. Think even of the environmental implications - so much energy is spend moving people around, imagine if AR platforms could reduce the number of trips by even a small percentage!
Zoom mediates almost all meetings at my company. We went full-remote in 2020, and are now heavily international.
Screen sharing is heavily used, but nobody uses cameras except for presentations.
Even aside from our work norms, I have a strong preference for voice-only realtime comms. Video just doesn't add value to me.
What, wrong decade?
They aren't in the same room, just same screen, but I'm not sure that really has value for me anyway?
On that note, I wonder if a pair of wide angle cameras could be used to create a reasonably convincing three-dimensional live stream via FaceTime. With VR glasses, participants in the call would be able to see each others surroundings in 3D space.
This sounds more immersive, and less goofy than the metaverse. It also seems like a feature that Apple could reasonably deliver with their rumoured glasses.
In terms of tangible results, Meta may as well have pivoted to autonomous vehicles. The only way this pivot makes sense would be if they had actually delivered a headset people wanted.
The best choice they made was to sell a balanced Oculus (high-res and decent battery with low-power compute) as a loss leader rather than continue down the tethered high-powered Rift path.
AR screens, SLAM, 3d reconstruction has well over a dozen well-funded companies gunning for the same result. Several companies are going to lose hard, similar to Magic Leap's recapitalization.
You actually have to try VR to better understand. Google Cardboard doesn’t count
Rec Room and VR chat are good places to start
It also raises the question of what Facebook's metaverse could do that VRChat and Rec Room haven't. VRChat is the more successful of the two and has achieved the level of success of "video game more popular than you might realise", which for the small dev team is enough for a profitable business.
How do you make it profitable at meta scale? NFTs, loot boxes and cosmetic microtransactions seem to be the prospects raised by people promoting such ideas. But then how is VRChat + microtransactions - your local modder's blatant copyright infringement more appealing than VRChat?
Lack of mundane grinding for exp, rep and mats?
Auto/afk [anything] is a staple in lot of mobile MMOs. Like auto-battle, auto-questing etc. Yeah I don't know why would you even "play" at that point but then again those games are insanely popular. Kinda like "gamifying a game" if that make sense.
"Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. And they've apparently never played an MMO. They're like, 'Oh, you'll have this customizable avatar.' And it's like, well... go into La Noscea in Final Fantasy 14 and tell me that this isn't a solved problem from a decade ago, not some fabulous thing that you're, you know, inventing."
These MMO's are the real absolute ceiling of whatever Meta is trying to do, but that's insufficiently gigantic to justify a pivot of Meta.
So they are pitching it as something that will extend past niche audiences (in absolute numbers they are huge but niche in terms of FB scale).
The incoherency of why non-gamers would be interested in this is revealed in their advertising. For example, a fitness buff talking about how swinging around a foam stick with a headset strapped to her face is the best workout of her life.
This is what AR and games are all about. Not necessarily what Meta wants to build.
Even using your fingers, going from keyboard and mouse (on desktop) to touch (on mobile) was a major change.
It's unclear to me that you need realistic 3D imagery versus new kinds of input devices. Maybe smart knobs will become popular?
As for your friends, they can sit wherever the fuck they please. They're holograms, or on a more crude version just simulations from an AR/VR set.
Probably, at least until we perfect the matrix or 360 degree treadmill tech.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010617162321/http://www.inside...
You're basically describing Wii Sports, which was a great novelty at the time. For maybe a year or so.
Metaverse demos have felt super underwhelming compared to e.g. playing Grand Theft Auto 5 for a few hours
I think it's ads.
I don't believe that VR will ever become mainstream btw, but AR has huge applicability starting from business but also for people involved in all kinds of sports, especially anything to do with bikes / skis / motorcycles etc...
I strongly suspect Facebook will not be the winner of either use case.
Apple / Disney are much better positioned to capture the "virtual amusement park / mall" space than Meta.
Google / Microsoft are better positioned for the work / leisure time use case.
Conclusion: Meta is screwed.
It’s just easier to get gullible investors to invest in your metaverse VR idea due to Gartner hype cycle rules, which are currently at Peak of Inflated Expectations.
> “the metaverse” can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that continue to exist even when you're not playing—as well as augmented reality that combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds.
The field is in its "90's internet phase" right now. The tech is still immature, but is rapidly growing in capability and ambition.
Just like most people in the 90's had no idea how "internet" would be used, I think our ability to conceive of VR/AR/XR/metaverse is similarly myopic.
I would give it a 10-15 year timeline before it fully eats the world. But now is the time to build.
Edit: To be clear, IMO most disruptive technologies are not driven by established mega-corporations.
iPhone?
Facebook Mobile?
(And earlier, Bell/IBM/Oracle)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/when-zuckerberg-said-faceboo...
Facebook Mobile is... I'd have to think hard about what it actually is, so I'm not sure that qualifies as disruptive.
Now the iPhone was disruptive. But although you'd fairly classify Apple today as an "established mega-corporation", it's a lot harder to do so when the iPhone came out. To the extent that Apple can use its market share to wield a powerful bludgeon against those who dare cross it--which is what I associate the phrase with--that market share doesn't exist until the phenomenal success of the iPhone. It certainly couldn't do that on the basis of its OS or computers (indeed, you can argue that it still can't do that today). The iPod, or more accurately iTunes, may have given it that power against the music industry, but that's the closest to any sort of tyrannical power it might have held at the time.
The key feature of Gmail was scale, which allowed it to offer much better spam detection, which allowed it to capture more market share, etc.
Facebook mobile is the idea that you have something (Facebook) that was popular somewhere (PCs), that for strategic reasons (TAM / global penetration, location-targeted advertising) pivoted to a completely different medium, and invested non-trivial company resources in making that happen.
The iPod/iTunes were pretty damn big. And specifically, big in demographics that were ideal iPhone customers. Apple in 2007 was very different than Apple in 1997.
iPhone was a breakout product from a decidedly no-longer mega corp who practically died in the 1990s. I guess they had already made a resurgence with the iPod, but I think iPod leading to iPhone is similar enough that it's the same jump.
A mobile app from a company is a breakthrough product in your eyes?
i own two vr headsets but don't really use them for more than casual gaming with friends. haven't really seen the killer use case yet
google glass style AR still has the most "futurey" appeal to me
Now, my Oculus headset sits gathering dust in a cupboard. Nobody I know wants it because it's so boring using it for more than half an hour.
I don't get it, but maybe I don't have to.
As a total counter example, I'm in my 30s, live with my girlfriend (in her 30s) and we play with our Valve Index together several times per week. We also have friends over for house parties where we play VR together (as well as Nintendo Switch.)
Now, imagine this is still "v0" of VR, that I am playing it on a weekly basis etc with my non-gamer girlfriend, I can easily imagine this being massive in 10 years.
If that's the real intent, it seems kind of sad.
VR is in that phase for multiple decades already.
This has been said to be the case (though for the first several waves with a different analogy, for obvious reasons) for every wave of the VR hype cycle since at least the mid-80s.
But it keeps not sticking, and I don't see any convincing reason to believe that the people pushing, or buying into, the hype understand why it keeps not sticking, much less have done anything in the most recent wave to overcome those problems.
Second Life was launched in 2003
It was probably less than 5 years before Wifi was ubiquitous.
VRChat has completely user-made avatars. To support this, they have a robust content moderation system with a fair amount of user control, and bounded performance requirements. Horizon has very limited Mii-like avatars, but with even less customization. This means they don't have to moderate avatars or worry about performance, and also crushes the boundless possibilities of self-expression into a sea of identical corporate art style drones.
VRChat also has user-made worlds. So does Horizons. The difference is that Horizons worlds can only be made out of primitives (cube, sphere, triangle, etc.) This makes it easy to enforce performance requirements and also makes the entire metaverse look like a poorly developed PS2 game. It also runs worse than a well-optimized environment mesh, but apparently Facebook doesn't trust their users to figure that out. Second Life actually shipped with this system originally (in 2003) and later abandoned the system because of these and other problems, but learning from the past is apparently not in vogue at Facebook.
VRChat has a fairly granular safety system, with configurable boundaries, default permissions, friend settings, etc. Horizons has a half-hearted attempt at this but leans mostly on the ominous promise that Facebook is recording everything you say and do, and if someone reports you an unreachable Facebook admin will review your past actions for content violations. This works about as well as you'd expect.
These and other problems are, IMO, all bad decisions, but they're also low effort decisions and that I do not understand. I actually like VR and want Facebook to succeed here (hopefully incentivizing competition), and the department formerly known as Oculus is doing a great job with the requisite hardware. So why, why, given that the entire company has been bet on this, is the flagship Metaverse software of the world's largest social media company lagging behind a random startup making their metaverse in Unity with practically no money?
This seems to be a really common recurring theme in the tech industry and particularly the games industry, and I wish I understood why
Just look at Minecraft, Valheim, any of the recent Pokemon games... A single person or a skeleton crew can somehow always seem to outproduce gigantic companies full of engineers and artists on the same level as the ones from the skeleton crew.
And the VRChat devs actually play their own game, I find it highly unlikely that you could even remotely say the same about Horizon's devs.
e.g., if you're in a business meeting, it automatically runs with your Mii-like avatar, otherwise if you're roaming a desertscape to relax on the couch after dinner, you can be a pink lemur in a cape and cowboy hat. Might as well prep for both contexts now rather than putting off either potential customer.
I never used Second Life, but from that video the metaverse does feel a lot like ActiveWorlds circa 2007.
I don't know why you'd want to do so for most TV. I like to idly code at 1/4 speed during average shows. Like if the cousins want to watch Moana for the 34th time, I'm not gonna dedicate my full attention the whole time, but I do want to hang out with everyone else in the family.
On the other hand, I've never wanted to pick up a phone while my VR headset is on my head. It's engrossing! But the downside of VR is that it's so isolating. There's no way for me to be half in a head-mounted display. No one can casually look over my shoulder, nor can I causally peek up from my screen when someone says something interesting.
I guess it's a little bit of a different story if it's just the centerpiece of family time, though..
Everyone I know has at least one TV. You can buy a 58" TV at Walmart for $298. That's less expensive than an Xbox or PS console.
I don't think this is even broadly true. We just locked everyone in their houses for the pandemic and people hated it. They want to get out and do stuff and see the world. Not sit on a couch with a screen strapped to their face.
Which is basically just another kind of sitting with a screen strapped to your face. Except less fun.
Work, for most people, is maybe a little too hellish.
Feel like this is not consensus on a tech forum.
But I also want a time machine. And honestly, that seems almost as likely as the metaverse ever being a "thing". The technology simply doesn't exist and we are so far off that pivoting to it now seems...either wildly optimistic or HBO Silicon Valley level out of touch.
Just offer VR porn applications, and a lot of people will urge to get a VR headset and a decent computer to support it. For a lot of kinds of media, porn was the killer application.
"No thanks, his headset is always sticky"
But the Metaverse is alive and well, at least if you can detach yourself of that superficial XR vision many people are touting online.
Just look at people buing skins for games and using filters and faceapps for their social media photos and videos.
I know many friends that are very active on social media, and they don't look like themselves anymore.
Sure, this isn't interactive XR content, but it's a whole virtual world that has detatched itself from reality years ago.
Oh, and invest into whatsapp.
We should not confuse the technology with the use case. Once you are the standard-bearer on technology, any future use case is something you can easily piggyback and dominate.
E.g. early versions of iPhone did not support NFC payments, while some competitor models did. Nevertheless, Apple Pay is fairly dominant.
I ran stats on an event I wrote software for, Apple Pay was 70%+ of all 1-click checkouts, Google Pay was under 30%. I was a little shocked at the difference though after spending more time trying to develop for Google Pay I can't help but wonder if that factors in. That and them renaming it every other week and removing features, it's a dumpster fire here in the US from what I can see. I've only ever seen my friends use Samsung Pay on their Androids.
That wore off less than a month later. Even in a house it takes up too much space to use. Using it too much still gives me a headache. Plus being teleported to another world, while amazing at first, does feel isolating after too much use. I have put orders of magnitude more time into playing switch on my couch than my Oculus (which collects dust in my basement) and I got my switch a few months ago.
The most damning thing though is how little interest there is in VR by the broader gaming community. I never hear anyone on major gaming sites or youtube channels mention VR other than brief, occasional mentions when talking PC performance.
Outside of the tech community nobody I know at all cares about VR in the slightest. The Oculus is a huge step forward, but after having been so excited about it, I'm even more convinced that it will never really take off.
Did you own a Quest or Quest 2? Quest 2 is noticeably better.
> That wore off less than a month later.
A major use case for me is cardio exercise. Imo the Quest 2 is better than a Peleton for the variety of workouts. Many games are low key fitness apps. This is what keeps me coming back. I’ve lost 20 lbs so far with the Quest 2
> Using it too much still gives me a headache.
This might be related to Quest 2’s inflexible IPD adjustment. It probably isn’t an issue on higher end XR headsets like the upcoming Apple headset as well as PSVR2
> Plus being teleported to another world, while amazing at first, does feel isolating after too much use.
The trick is to only play multiplayer apps or games.
> The most damning thing though is how little interest there is in VR by the broader gaming community.
There are two major reasons for this:
1. Meta is still a toxic brand. Slightly less toxic than FB, but it still prevents a lot of early adopters from even trying it
2. Other alternatives are drastically more expensive AND complicated. While Quest 2 starts at $299, other VR systems start at $499 - $999, and they need a VR capable PC starting at $1599.
If Facebook wasn't behind it I would probably own a Quest 2 (even though I'll buy Apple's VR headset at release) but as-is I won't touch that with a 10' pole.
I have also been really enjoying my switch recently while my Oculus collects dust.
That is the true reality of it all.
All the next gen VR headsets are building in color passthrough so that they effectively operate as AR devices - but better ones in some ways because they can actually replace reality fully when they want to, not be constrained to just tweaking it.
What some companies call AR today isn't, it's just a HUD. Those will all fail.
In the near term the opposite of real AR: "passthru-VR", for lack of better term with cameras taking in real world and merging it with a digital VR world, have a chance of becoming popular.
the AR thing sounds cool, but are people really going to pick the Meta one over the Apple or Google one?
Cheap entertainment for the masses.
Does it make money? Obviously.
And funny enough they have so much money and what do they do actually with it?
Nothing someone can actually name besides: the feed, messenger, occulus and stuff they bought up like insta and Whatsapp.
Congratulations to Facebook and basically no real innovation in the last 10 years.
Besides optimizing the addictiones of garbage which got easily trumped by TikTok.
Face, meet book. Boom.
The new generation won't associate FB/Meta with Facebook, they will associate it with Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and any future acquisitions. I'm sure facebook.com will still be kicking around, maybe just the popular features like Marketplace and Pages sans the traditional news feed and updates.
IMO this is the only way I see this company surviving. And the reason I haven't mentioned the Metaverse is because I personally think that it will be a giant ass flop right out of the gate.
I don't like Facebook as a product. But I like that Meta is trying to make something work that isn't possible today, but may be possible in the future. It may not work out for them and their vision may never happen. But when someone makes fun of "strapping a phone to your face" I hear "get a horse". It doesn't take brains or vision to see the limitations of present technology.
Not because there shouldn't be legitimate concerns about VR, but because it's pointing to Facebook execution fail as the only thing that matters to the success of the metaverse, and it's expecting that the timeline should have been further along by now.
Facebook has always built mediocre products. Its strength is in acquiring or copying good ones, and then jacking the internal engineering on them up to 11.
Apple is seen as putting out good products, but they put out the Newton, ROKR, and even internally designed the iPad before they released the iPhone. There is time to build a good product, and chances are, Facebook won't be the one to build it.
And yet - first year iPhone sales and first year Quest 2 sales are somewhat on par. There's reason for optimism, or at least not heavy pessimism, yet.
It's effectively impossible to buy sufficient content to meet AAA platform expectations these days. Because you're competing against incredibly competent, experienced, and well-stocked legacy alternatives.
Consequently, either (a) "upgrading" an existing deep pool of legacy content (Google search, iPhone/web) or (b) turning every user into a content producer (Facebook, TikTok) have very good chances of success.
And finally, to call out a fundamental blind spot: if Facebook doesn't lose, they win.
Everyone pretends Facebook needs to win the VR market. They don't. They just need to keep enough of an eye on it that they aren't blindsided by a competitor, and then scale up their engineering once a seed appears successful. Their size, revenue, and ubiquity will win by default.
If FB has 100 engineers working on VR for 20 years with nothing to show for it, but that allows them to ramp up when something magic finally happens (right hardware breakthrough, etc), then that's FB money well spent.
Consider, for example, the repeated attempts at making 3D televisions a thing. It keeps popping up every couple of years, then people figure out that they don't really need it, and it fades away again. This kind of VR technology could very well be the same. Even 3D gaming remains a niche despite some serious attempts by major players to turn it into something more than a gimmick.
It'll be the _Next_ Facebook that does.
What about the metaverse ? :) Isn't it something not defensing and mass market ?
I feel like you are reproaching Meta to not do exactly what they do. They are having a massive innovative bet on how people will spend their time in the future.
It's fun to see people demanding more moderation and berating excessive moderation in FB, regularly, on this very forum.
One topic about "disinformation" get highly voted up and that "moderation is the only way to go".
Then another thread about Facebook moderation and suddenly the same people say "It's so terrible that Facebook is moderating so heavily".
https://twitter.com/BasicAppleGuy/status/1531737446534131713
Google is king of web, iffy on software, and decent on hardware (when they commit).
Apple is king of hardware/software and sucks on web (it's really embarrassing at this point, I want to pull my hair out when I use almost any of their web-based tools, consumer or developer focused)
FB is decent on social for now but they haven't innovated in forever, they just buy up things like IG/WhatsApp/Oculus , I'm not convinced they are capable of producing anything interesting internally.
Maybe my comment will age badly but I'm not at all worried about FB "owning" the metaverse or anything like that, they have a terrible track record.
The nice thing about Instagram and Twitter, as far as Washington lobbyists are concerned, is that it's influencer driven and there's very little room for bottom up discussion between "normal" people. The original Facebook was a tool where dissent could grow in a bottom up fashion, with friends posting and realizing, "holy smokes! I was thinking that too!". This doesn't happen any more now that everyone knows that big brother is watching.
Don't forget the AI moderation-on-post. Just recently, a popular 'influencer' posted a scam. I left a comment saying such, along with a comment that the influencer should be ashamed of himself, and immediately, an AI filter told me that my comment may go against the Community Standards, and that repeated attempts to comment would lead to account deactivation. There is no appeal button.
To those building these technologies, beyond false positives and coverage error, it takes one law or PR incident for you to re-train this model against dissent. And to those building technologies like Apple's CSAM scanning, it takes one DB replacement to make it flag photos of the Hong Kong protests or Tank Man.
Maybe that has changed, but at that time they made the other big companies look like they were way behind.
If you think the name change means they're focusing on the metaverse, that's just convenient. The fact is, Facebook is a toxic brand and Meta is just a silly looking brand. Post name change, they can do acquisitions and brand them as X by Meta without associating to the toxic brand. (Plus, maybe they can get the Mennen ad team to add 'by Meta' to the end of all their ads with audio)
Neat to think they believe it does.
The way I see it, Facebook is dead. It lost its place in society by forcibly combining free online expression with personal identity and responsibility. What remains is a culturally normative repository of groupthink with fewer and fewer participants deriving novel value, and that is reflected in the userbase trends.
What meta represents philosophically is a return to semi-anonymized and immediate human-to-human interaction, without the pretense of permanence or the necessity to project only socially righteous behavior. It is a natural, and by nature ephemeral medium. It is the only hope for meta long-term, and beating apple out of the gate is an encouraging sign to me.
why are optionally anonymous forums like HN not sufficient for this? why do we need virtual avatars, content markets, gamification?
if people want these things there are always video games
Like all creepy futurism projects, there seems to be an unlimited amount of money and associated ESG and "The Current Thing" street credibility behind these projects that see them funded and cheerled in the press to absurd levels even as the public is absolutely luke warm about it all at best.
[1]https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/37980/20220601/virtual...
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
VR and the Metaverse require a much bigger commitment by comparison. You can't casually use them. Heck, you can't really even eat or drink while a VR headset is strapped to your face.
I could see how they would be convenient for a few applications, but they don't have the range of uses a phone has. In particular, any kind of content creation seems like it would be nearly impossible. Though this same line was said about phones in the past.
I don't think there's deliberate neglect here. Fashion shifts and facebook is no longer as fashionable. It is very very hard to stay at the forefront of fashion unless you're product is one that reinvents itself on an annual basis (see the fashion industry)
The meta pivot seems to be more of a desperate anticipation then a strategic opportunity. Facebook conveniently announced meta just before the earnings call.
Not since Google+ have I seen so much hybris when it comes to one of the big SV companies, but at least back then Google didn't bet the entire company on Google+ succeeding or not the same way as Facebook (ok, Meta) seems to be doing right now with the metaverse (yes, I know about the "all small arrows behind one big arrow" or something like that speech that came from Page but it turned out not even the Google higher-ups believed in their prep-talks).
[1] https://media.wired.com/photos/61bd32b4b540f6bc340c4449/mast...
[2] https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/02/15/screenshot-11-1_...
Zuck is taking a gamble. Good for him. It’s extremely rare for a big co to have the balls and for leadership to have the autonomy to do this these days. He has both.
He may fail. But at least he took a big hairy audacious risky shot at first to market and a chance at being what Steve Jobs is to smart phones.
I wouldn’t count him out just yet. What he’s doing with Oculus as a loss leader is interesting, and the tech is hitting an interesting inflection point as it becomes wireless, low latency and cheap for the first time.
Hate on FB and confirm your biases all you want, but watch this space.
Being wrongly infatuated with a concept as Meta seems with metaverse is not a gamble IMHO.
It seem more like a stupid decision done by someone that became successful by being in the right place at the right time. And now they want to prove that it wasn't an accident and that they have it takes to repeat hence become infatuated with an absurd idea that we want to be inside the FB world.
This is massively underselling what led to Facebook's success. As someone who started using Facebook-alternatives in 2001, there were a ton of competing social networks at the time. Many very superficially similar to Facebook, and many with a multi-year headstart. FB drove them all to extinction and became the social network via a combination of great product management, and engineering execution. And this was all led by a teenager in his second year of college. The vast majority of people in his shoes would not have achieved the outcome that he did.
Is it though? He'll be a billionaire the rest of his life. His grandchildren will be billionaires. What's the risk? Other then his employees jobs. The dozens of vendors that serve Facebook and their employees. The local businesses that depend on Facebook.
Why is greed so often mistaken for nobility?
I would be shocked if VR/metaverse does not massively grow within the next 10 years. I think the headsets alone will continue to get massively better which will convert most of humanity, just like how much better iPhones got since the first one. In fact, I would bet anything on the foregoing, as I have near total confidence in that aspect.
It’s much harder to figure out which companies will profit off of that, so it’s certainly possible Meta will miss. But they have a leader with a vision, and are pouring more money into this than any other major player. Will that be enough? Who knows. But I think it’s a mistake to count them out so early in the process, when they are the ones putting R&D into this.
In my mind, it’s like starting an auto company right when cars arrive and people are still skeptical of them, and being the company to pour the most money into developing them. That’s who you want to bet against?
Taxes and moderation are considerations, sure, and may backfire partly, but I think the users will go where the tech is. Just like people buy iPhones not withstanding the cost, moderation, App Store tax, etc, because the iPhone is what users want. If Meta makes an excellent headset and software platform, people will use it. Most people don’t care about the things HN cares about (like App Store fees).
Unless you jailbreak it or turn on scary developer mode all those apply on Android too. Hell, iPhones are cheaper than some Android flagships now.
I'm not saying Android doesn't offer that freedom to some. I'm saying most people don't (and shouldn't) use it.
I’m not so sure about VR. It’s a huge power hog. Either the battery life would be limited or you’d need to carry around a backpack to keep it running or it would stay at your desk with more wires in your head than a William Gibson protagonist.
I could see some limited use cases for VR, like training and education. But as a replacement of the world in the way smartphones have been? I just don’t get how that will be physically/technologically possible.
But if there’s evidence to the contrary believe me I would love to change my mind.
But I do think VR has the potential to be "huge" like cellphones, in the way that nearly every kid in the world has a headset, and spends hours of time in there each day. I think it can eat up a ton of time currently spent on movies, TV, video games, socializing in places like Minecraft or Roblox, concerts, sports games, etc. The average person spends way too much time watching TV for example, but if every kid in the world wants to spend 2 hours per day in VR instead of watching TV, that will be an enormous TAM notwithstanding that people won't want to literally live in VR with all day battery life. Although there will always be outliers, and I think there will be many people that will easily choose to spend 8 hours + per day in VR.
And even currently, the Quest 2 provides hours of battery life without wires, which will only continue to improve.
How old are you by the way? Today phones last nearly all day, but people used to carry around multiple phones for their batteries and swap them out. IF they are at home, they could do the same with VR until the battery life improves.
How will it get better? The only way it can meaningfully get better is if it disappeared.
The problem with the current state of VR is not the software, the app store or moderation, it is the form factor and the ergonomics.
Very few people want to strap on a giant heated helmet to their face and experience the eye strain associated with watching a very bright light from a point blank distance through lenses that need to be adjusted perfectly every time. It is just too much of a hassle.
A neuralink-type chip, if at all feasible, is a much more promising approach.
I'm not a big VR person, but better display, better battery life, better audio, lighter kit, et cetera, seem like easy linear progressions.
Making the headsets much much lighter, less hot, wireless, better optics, higher res, higher refresh rates, etc., will improve the experience massively.
Look into what is already public: companies are exploring eye tracking, varifocal lenses (so your eyes are not always looking at the same focal plane), etc.
You can even compare the Index versus the Quest 2 to see what a difference a better screen can make.
People already deal with eye strain by staring at a bright screen from a fixed distance for most of their life.
Neural link, sure, eventually. For now, if you don’t think ten years of progress won’t lead to hundreds of millions of devices sold, well, wait and see.
I'm just not seeing where the insight comes from that this is something people will want on a huge scale. Even if you solve the current problems of the headsets being painful to wear over long periods. I just don't think people want their attention to be hijacked.
I’ve tried 3D TV and VR headsets: I always thought that 3D TVs were a gimmick whereas VR is MINDBLOWING
* Marketplace was a huge success in terms of subsuming Craigslist. The quality of posts and the volume of postings makes me rarely even check Craigslist anymore.
* Small forums for various hobbies are almost entirely driven by Facebook groups now, instead of in the past where you’d find some custom bulletin board where the last post on most subforums was 3 years ago. It’s better than Reddit for certain things. Groups for communities (ie: your neighborhood or small town) are thriving, too.
* Messenger is the sole mechanism I have to keep in touch with friends from school that are now back overseas.
I think their general success is assured, even if the metaverse isn’t ready yet. They can afford to lose some money on a big bet.
On the other hand, I think that they missed the boat with the metaverse not being a big thing during covid lockdowns, because the cultural rebound of covid yields zero appetite for virtual existence. People want to make up for lost time.
For me, Marketplace buyers have flaked out more than Craigslist ones. Forums are less useful/dynamic than anonymous Reddit. And I don't even touch Messenger vs. numerous other chat apps.
I like Instagram and WhatsApp, but Meta's "core" business is non of my interests.
On Marketplace?! This blows my mind that you think this. It's a chaotic nightmare. Sellers post everything as free and then separately negotiate a price. Buyers repeatedly ask you if something's still available. Both of these mean something's very wrong with how people understand to use the system.
someone has said "your price is fair, my agent will be over to pick it up with a cashier's check" for every single thing I've sold on craigslist. I don't think filtering out scumbags like this is a terribly hard problem.
When I sell something on Craigslist, it's cash-only and they have to meet me at a public place and pick up the item in person. And I verify the bills are not counterfeit before I hand over the item.
This is what it's come to. Probably because the police can't be bothered with minor fraud nowadays, and the criminals know it.
Basically, the bank will cash it, and days later, discover it's fake and demand that YOU give them the money back. There's a time delay which the scumbags are exploiting.
Cops put "financial crimes" way down their priority list.
I think the only risk there would be identity theft leading to payment with stolen money, but they're almost certain to get caught so it's fine.
If that's a concern: If you make sure the transfer comes from a business checking account, they only have 24 hours to report the fraud before the business is on the hook for the stolen money and not you(I think). I'm not sure if personal vs. business are externally-distinguishable in an automated way, however.
For every seller doing things the old way, there’s a handful of people doing things the cordial and respectful way, putting an effort into it. It’s getting better. You do have to learn how to read the page, but I don’t see how they could fix that.
For example one could easily have two-three chat apps and use each with different people. I still use Craigslist, I think it works better and has better organization of categories.
The main Facebook app, now that is a unique product - yet frankly, from my perspective it feels completely marginalized, the content there is in worse shape than ever. I find the news feed absurdly bad, GAG videos and ads.
It seems like FB goosed conflict on the platform until everyone decided they’d had enough and left or stopped posting. There is nothing in the newsfeed from my contacts at this point, the feed is either entirely ads or bottom barrel MLM scams. Instagram is going the same direction with everyone growing exhausted from competition for likes. TikTok seems successful in part because the primary purpose isn't to engage with your friends.
So where does that leave social networking amongst your peers? SMS seems to be making a comeback.
Aside from the occasional scam ad, I mostly get animal videos from facebook.
Animals could be a similar “no fill” response reflecting that your network doesn't have much going on.
Do you engage with political content on facebook or other platforms where facebook has tracking agreements? they're maximizing engagement. facebook knows I'm way more likely to click on a "we rescued a dog" video than political stuff, so doesn't show me political stuff. Their data points don't just come from the facebook website.
I tried clicking on a few profiles I hadn't seen in a while and a lot of them had nice posts too. I saw everything from them for about a month then it disappeared again.
I am very worried about what will become of all the very private stuff in their database as they begin to decay.
Right now I assume it would take very sophisticated effort to steal all that messenger data, but what about if/when Facebook is a zombie company with a skeleton crew or an unloved subsidiary of a conglomerate?
They did the same with Instagram. Click Instagram logo and select "Following" to get a chronological timeline. Possibly also only in Europe.
So Facebook just made his posts my... uh entire newsfeed. Like my newsfeed would just be 5-10 posts from this guy, some political bullshit and then another 5-10 posts from the same guy.
Even if that were the stuff I was engaging with, surely it is obvious that I don't want it in that quantity.
I'd love to hear from Facebook newsfeed product managers as it really seems like no humans actually contributed to decisions.
Whether or not the metaverse is anything but marking would require me to look at a balance sheet, but facebook seems to be moving through the business life-cycle at a much more rapid pace than i expected it to. They are wringing the value out of the product for revenue growth at the expense of long term adoption. Always a mixed bag but I'm sure an MBA could explain it better.
Suffices to say. I have no idea whether or not their products have are long-run competitive, because I'm very much not the target demo.
i wonder if FB as result of all its A/B testing and engagement maximization has built a "faster horse".
> one could easily have two-three chat apps and use each with different people
I guess theoretically, but in reality, no. People are going to use one app. Apple realized this with iMessage and it's become one of their biggest advantages in the U.S. market. Texting an iPhone user as an android user is legitimately a bad experience, because apple knows that their users aren't going to download a new chat app so they can go ahead and make the experience dogshit for the out group users.
But it doesn't have the most people. I have long lost that sense that FB is where everyone is. That feels so 2016
> Apple realized this with iMessage
In general iMessage is not a good example because it a product that leverages the unique position of Apple owning the hardware. No other company can play the same game. Apple don't want you to use iMessage on other systems, they deliberately make the experience worse for Android. But who else can afford that?
You definitely can seamlessly use Whatsapp, Viber, FB Messenger, Telegram and Signal all at the same time on all your devices.
I think you misunderstand my point about iMessage. Apple users have a very good reason to use different chat apps. Most people probably text non iPhones every once in a while. Yet every iPhone user I know refuses to download other chat apps. It’s not like there’s a big barrier to getting WhatsApp, they just don’t want multiple chat apps. People who are already using WhatsApp feel the same way, and there’s much less reason for them to switch, since the product doesn’t purposefully knee cap users.
People who care about something, like, here? I think FB was a transitory medium for people who were not on the internet to discover what's out there. Most of them are going to end up in topical communities because the central market is too crazy
What are the issues? I never use text except for spams at this point, all discussions I have with friends are on whatsapp/messenger.
Because all their friends use iMessage too. Switching isn't trivial when you have to convince your whole network tos witch with you.
True, but they are harder to maintain because of the spam. Facebook has more data on genuine users than a bank and it’s easy for them to block low quality or fraud posts. That’s the true value of Facebook - they know more about of your life than you do.
Not so sure that they do.
If they knew so much about me why is it that I dislike most that they show me?
Perhaps - and that is now the most worrisome thought - that crap is the "best" they can show and everything else is much worse.
Now that does not bode well for FB's future. Or Meta's, whatever, even their brand feels a lot dumber now.
Disliking what they show you doesn’t mean they know less about you than a bank. It just means they’re not yet perfect in utilizing said information.
If you engage with it, they'll keep showing it to you. Their goal is not to make you happy, it's to keep you engaged so there is an audience for their ads.
In fact, this is why the outrage engine everywhere on social media. People who are upset are going to need an outlet to blow off that steam.
Facebook was my go to place to find events around me. Now they've dumbed down the page and removed the ability to search by date and location, and made it useless.
The same can and will happen to their other properties.
Marketplace sucks compared to other alternatives out there (Craigslist has never been big in the European countries I've lived in so can't comment on that in particular).
Groups are a horrible alternative to forums. An algorithm decides which posts are "hot" and posts die over time. Forums can provide highly informative long-running threads (which FB groups and Reddit cannot). Sure, manually moderating a forum is hard work but the end result is so much better.
Messenger? There are so many better (and encrypted) alternatives to communication.
The only thing FB has going for it is that almost everyone is there. It's super easy to hook up with someone you just met the other day just by searching for them on FB, sending a friend requests and then you can be chatting within minutes. You don't even necessarily need to know their name, you can go through list of friends of a common friend and look for them by face. All other solutions practically involves having to remember asking someone for their phone number. This is also why marketplace/groups are "successful", due to the sheer number of people already on the platform.
As products they all pretty much suck.
In my experience, the FB ecosystem, other than Instagram and WhatsApp, is totally irrelevant to the younger generation.
If FB didn't own Instagram and WhatsApp I think it'd be dying in the next few years. These acquisitions are IMO what's keeping it relevant.
We don't really care about Metaverse or anything of the same nature. I think that is just an American thing.
While that the line I normally use, I will give them some benefits of doubt, it is the Silicon Valley / US Tech / US Mainstream media thing.
They are still taking money and being used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the most recent example being with Marcos in the Philippines.
Foreign Correspondent covered this well:
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/foreign-correspondent/series/2...
I quit FB for good about 5 years ago. At that point it was all trash.
> Marketplace was a huge success
Whoa they have a marketplace?! Since when?
> Small forums for various hobbies
For my hobbies there are still bulletin boards! Of course, Reddit's very useful as well.
It's likely that there's good conversations I'm missing out on because I'm not on FB, but I'm not aware of what I'm missing out. Don't really care.
> Messenger is the sole mechanism I have to keep in touch
WhatsApp (owned by FB) is ubiquitous. Nobody uses Messenger, even if both parties are on it.
Where I'm at (I'm not in USA), FB was all the rage about 12 years ago. But now none of my friends — people who I actually know — use it. However, I think a lot of people use Instagram (again, under FB), which I've never tried.
Find me a forum with 10k members and hundreds of active users that’s dedicated almost entirely to the North American use of the BMW M57. Because that’s the sort of thing Facebook has.
You might think that you’re getting along fine without these forums but I promise you, if you’re not on the site you’re missing conversations.
Well, I'm not from North America. I'm from India.
But I do know a forum here with 100k+ car enthusiasts:
https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/
In case you were wondering, 6 cylinder diesel BMWs are infact very popular in India. All powered by the N57 engine. Couldn't find too much with the older M57, but to be fair BMW sales really picked up in India only after the F10 5-series was launched at around 2010, and I'm not sure if they ever had the M57 engine.
Among car enthusiasts in India, the 530d is perhaps the most coveted sedans. (535d and 540d were never sold here. North America gets plenty of cool cars which aren't sold here).
Here are a couple of great reviews of the 525d and 530d with that engine on the aforementioned forum:
(530d) https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/1074...
(525d) https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/8261...
Other owner reviews that I could find:
(530d; I personally felt this was especially well written) https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/long-term-ownership-reviews/1...
(530d) https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/test-drives-initial-ownership...
(X3 30d) https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/long-term-ownership-reviews/1...
(X3 30d) https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/test-drives-initial-ownership...
(X3 30d) https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/test-drives-initial-ownership...
Probably the most useful part of NABDOG is that I can think of a question while I’m out in my garage, snap a picture and make a post, and have a handful of answers before I shut my hood. The real-time aspect of Facebook groups is underrated.
The other group that comes to mind is dedicated to disc golf in my city. People will post, “hey, I’m going solo to X course at 4:30, anyones welcome” and people will connect that way and become friends. I don’t think there’s a real replacement for these.
Go deeper into the threads and you'll discover the secrets.
Since I neither drive a BMW nor live in USA to take advantage of the 3 independent mechanics between MI, CO, and GA, I suppose I'm not missing out on that :)
(Why'd you specially mention MI, CO, and GA?)
However, from your words I gather that NABDOG has plenty of useful information.
Hence, it's all the more important for them to have an independent website instead of living inside FB. Apart from being much more useful to a wider audience, at the very least, you'll still have the content when FB sinks ;)
> disc golf in my city
TIL that a sport called "disc golf" exists. Thanks. Like I mentioned in ancestor post, we both live in different universes.
Drive safe.
EDIT: Correction, anyone below the age of 60.
> The metaverse is a real idea yes - but strapping a phone to your face and walking through your coffee table isn’t it.
And the idea of people watching video on a tiny smartphone was initially thought to be absurd.
> When they first announced the rebrand I actually thought it could be genius
Did you really?
> but epic strategic miscalculation seems to be going around a lot this year.
Right. Like facebook's miscalculation in buying instagram, whatsapp, etc.
I've never used facebook. Think the world's better without facebook and most social media and large tech companies like apple, microsoft, google, etc. But man, you people have been so wrong for so long and it's hard to take the facebook haters seriously anymore. Just like the tesla haters a few years ago.
That said, kudos on the strides VR has made in the past decade!
It’s pretty clear Facebook will go the way of MySpace.
I believe FB management saw the writing on the wall, multiple world governments were no longer going to allow them to sway elections/perception + kids never want to use what the 30/40 year olds use, it was a matter of time before FB became uncool.
Staring at this reality, instead of going down with the ship, the logical decision was to take their still enormous resources and pivot to the next big thing. Meta isnt it, and they probably know it, but its their best idea.
Im old enough where Ive seen HUGE things everyone on the Internet was using, die quickly; IRC(as the main internet chat), ICQ, MS Messenger, AOL, Napster, MySpace, Yahoo, Geocities.
Its FBs turn, IMO.
So, what more magic can we add to the internet? Bulky headsets you can only use home, 3D avatars with no more mood cues than a forum smiley ? Micropayment for vanity objects not worth more than my karma count on reddit ?
Facebook lost it when they started this nonsense.
Honestly I was offended as I would say their rebrand is cultural appropriation.
They didn't invent the "metaverse" it's a by now decades old idea you find in many, maybe even most science fiction novels. Neither is using the term meta in this context.
In some way they basically try to forceful appropriate this to redefine it as a Facebook thing.
But this might also be why they might fail!
Because the term metaverse is already used in such a generic way by so many parties that it only stands for a vague "interconnected vr world" thingy, i.e. you could argue that even by now any trade mark protection law suite is already a lost cause (at least in the EU).
Similar have fun protecting Meta as a trademark for anything which is meta (like metadata, like most things in VR...).
I mean sure Apple is called Apple, but that only works because they have nothing to do with Apples...
Anyway putting that aspect aside there is another three problems with there vision:
- added values - convenience - accessibility
For success the added value must outclass any inconvenience especially such cause through problems of accessibility.
But for multiple of their use cases this is not the case, like e.g. the VR meeting rooms are much less convenient then voice/video calls and add hardly any value. Worse their are less accessible and might legally not be usable by any company hold to accessibility standards.
Another example would be e.g. 3d web, which died because for most use cases it added hardly any value over 2d text based web.
Similar things like slack became successful due to it being simple text based, if it would have been based around a vr room it would have flopped even if everyone has the right hardware to run it performant.
Pretty much the main important point I think Facebook would need to succeed in is to convince most people working in front of a computer that they want to work with a VR headset instead, but who wants to ware a VR headset 8 hours a day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/mark-zuckerberg-...
"The pair continued their twice-weekly meetings, but Mr. Zuckerberg took over more of the areas once under her purview. He made the final call on issues surrounding Mr. Trump’s spread of hate speech and dangerous misinformation, decisions Ms. Sandberg often lobbied against or told allies she felt uncomfortable with. Mr. Zuckerberg oversaw efforts in Washington to fend off regulations and had forged a friendly relationship with Mr. Trump."
If this is an accurate reflection of her experience, I don't expect it's a side of Mark Zuckerberg most of us imagine exists.
> When you saw only one set of footprints,
> It was then that I carried you.
https://www.onlythebible.com/Poems/Footprints-in-the-Sand-Po...
that's when I bailed because you wouldn't shut up about your keto diet.
But this is probably my most upvoted HN comment ever, which mostly just makes me ashamed.
That's because CEOs aren't public figures such as actors or musicians. They should not be that and they should not be politicians. The fact that people know Mark Zuckerberg name or his face at all is in itself an anomaly.
CEOs are the ones who get to sign off the quality of life that their company provides. That's about it.
I don't know the name of Shell CEO but I know they are the person who get to sign off the quality of life which comes when I take a trip to Mexico or fill the tank of my Navigator and they also get the blame for externalities in lieu of me, which is nice...otherwise the green tree hugger loons such as extinction rebellion would attack my car.
I fundamentally and vehemently disagree with his goals and the effect Facebook has on the world, but (outside of the early years) I haven't heard anything toxic about him as an executive.
That experience is clearly taking its toll on Randi Zuckerberg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0diaVLPrQ
I imagine you could couchsurf to the various vacation properties off-season when they would otherwise be empty, which would be nice.
For context - https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/14/22933904/razzlekhan-heath...
I've not read anything (else?) Mrs Sandberg has (or hasn't) written, but this turn of phrase has a "professional" feel & taste. It's contrived. It's not something you would say about someone truly dear to you, your best friend, your parents, etc.
Maybe your dog.
I noticed that the news always seems to go out of its way to find inhuman-looking badly-tinted photos of him making strange expressions. Lately he's become something of a scapegoat IMO, probably because an introverted billionaire with some creepy tendencies/background makes such an easy target.
Whatever you think of the Clintons, the photos by the articles on the Fox News website or the New York post didn't show a human being.
It'd be an art gallery of photographic stills, to destroy someone's humanity.
A 1/100 second exposure, frozen in time, can make someone resemble something they're not.
The reaction from most was to call him lame or approval hungry, but my thought was, “That is SO cool and badass and I have misunderstood this man completely.”
Hearing Zuck pontificate about freedom of speech made me kick a puppy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOHSysMmH0
I've updated by opinion (judgement) of Zuckerberg.
Previously, I believe he's a moral cripple, quite skilled at discombobulation. Like giving long-winded non-answers to critical question to thwart deeper inquiry.
Now I think he's primarily a philosophical cripple, incapable of deep introspection. From this interview, Zuck was unable (or unwilling) to rise to Lex's challenge to steelman the arguments made in The Social Dilemma. That's just sad.
You're probably right that Zuck does not completely lack empathy. I now think it's more that he's just oblivious. Painfully, willfully, happily oblivious.
This is closer to Kara Swisher's position, which I hadn't really given much weight. (She knows all these unicorn neurodivergent wunderkind personally.) Like when talking about freedom of speech, Zuck blathers Just So platitudes, completely divorced from humanity's entire history wrestling with these kinds of problems. No nuance. No acknowlegement of paradox. No calculus for balancing mutually exclusive outcomes.
This interview does reinforce my view that having someones like Zuck, Dorsey, and others in full control over medias central to our culture and discourse is like giving flamethrowers to a bunch of young boys going thru their firebug stage.
At least Zuck's not (apparently) purposefully malicious, trying to burn down the whole world, like Murdoch. If intentions matter more than outcomes.
> she was the best thing to happen to FB and Mark Zuckerberg.
Or -hear me out- the person most influential in current SV business is not the best thing to happen to a (very young, impressionable) founder trying to grow his business. Pre-Sheryl ads were businesses having fb pages and advertising when your friend bought a product (very social-based). Post-Sheryl ads tracked you everywhere and learned about you.
But FB and Marks reputation have never been worse. He probably would be rich-enough either way.
Yeah, my impression has been that she has provided cover for FB and Mark Zuckerberg.
Sandberg has been exceptionally quiet in the last few months, and given that the succession underneath her has been horribly bungled, I suspect she's chosen this time to bugger off.
I'm not sure what this means, but I hope Sandberg's style of disingenuous personal "brand" disappears with her. Just say what you mean and give us time back.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sandberg-facebook-kotick-activi...
Ironically, I believe you could take that Jobs quote, swap Apple for Microsoft, and you’d be talking about the mobile industry. I doubt I’m even the first person to observe that. You really do become the villain if you gain enough market dominance.
Maybe it’s not just one company. But the industry. Or maybe it’s her ;)
DoubleClick launched in 1996 and merged with Google in 2007.
Google bought Urchin and Adaptive Path / Measure Map in 2005.
The ad and tracking industry was not due to one person's influence.
He obviously isn’t a COO, but then Facebook has an existential legislative risk. So maybe that’s the indication, they need to be co-run by a policy leader, and opps is a solved problem.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/16/nick-cleg...
> “[Mark] added that the new role would put Clegg “at the level” of himself and Sheryl Sandberg”
If you wanna play by a different set of rules - gotta change the entire landscape. No one is going to do that.
Yes, it is the system, does not mean I will call that an outstanding job because we focus on one metric: profit/making money. It's pretty stupid to reduce existence to these terms because of an economical system.
"To the victims of genocides organised on my platform, to the little girls who self-harmed looking at photos on our platform, to the businesses we destroyed through our arbitrary and capricious policy changes, my job is done here, it's been an honor"
>More recently, there was a fresh irritation: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal contacted Meta about two incidents from several years ago in which Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve an article about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, and a 2014 temporary restraining order against him.
>The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the people said. The couple has been engaged since 2020.
>As of May, that review was continuing, the people said.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611219
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-sheryl-sandberg-quit-facebo...
After heading the company that created enormous psychological and sociological issues in the world and was/is involved in shady, anti privacy, illegal, anti-competition dealings she just gets to retire and focus on her "philanthropic" work. She's the modern equivalent of a robber baron.
They'll either own the entire next generation of the Internet, or faceplant so hard they end up being a marginal Craigslist replacement.
Given that the Meta rebrand was received as if they'd just offered to turn everyone's lives into a permanent Zoom call, I'm in the faceplant camp for now.
What's there now is a joke, and Sheryl cashed big paychecks while looking the other way.
"An investigative report from The Wall Street Journal in November 2021 identified that despite his earlier claim, Kotick had been well aware of the past allegations mentioned in the California lawsuit but did nothing to change corporate policy, and had protected an employee who sexually harassed from being fired. Further, the report asserted that Kotick himself had threatened to kill an assistant on their voice mail.1 Activision Blizzard's board issued a statement that supported Kotick's efforts to lead the company,2 while employees, shareholders, and other voices from the industry urged Kotick to resign or to be replaced in light of these allegations.3,4,5"
1 https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot...
2 https://www.wired.com/story/activision-blizzard-employees-do...
3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/11/17/bobby-...
4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/11/18/activi...
5 https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/18/22789679/activision-bliz...
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Fair_...
Nothing will change significantly until the TADAs are declared the new killer app.
your welcome for the free analysis.. obvious really.
She may be more clean than they are, but they convinced their voters that they're ethical people -- or at least ethical enough. And all of them (except Trump) started with a clean slate in their first election, before running for president.
Sandberg is starting from a bad spot. She has all the liabilities of Clinton without the decades of campaigning to give her a base of support.
Do people here think this is a shakeup at the company or that she legitimately wanted to do something else?
Pre-Trump era she was more the public face of Facebook than even Zuck. Then when the Cambridge Analytica scandal basically did a 180 on the entire reputation of the company she effectively disappeared from the public eye.
Neoliberalism is the most popular ideology by far in the world. Something that is tightly roped into more and more money and greed being important. Look at how Howard Schultz, Bezos, Musk, and all the other rich people in those companies are reacting to unions. It’s as if them losing 10% of their insane wealth is the end of the world.
Hopefully people can think more like you. The world would be a better place.
pretty clear that she did not want to be the face of a controversial company given that she often leveraged her role to talk about being a woman exec in tech eg “Lean In” and that all but disappeared when the perception of the company completely changed.
Real selves, ha! More like jealousy (and other negative emotions) evoking versions of selves.
Is Facebook the next Yahoo?
Strange.
I personally am skeptical that VR will ever be anything other than a niche and there are lots of reasons for this. Most notably after 10-15 years it's still yet to find that "killer app".
My interpretation of this situation is that Facebook is directionless but this began years ago.
This was most evident when Facebook decided to try and moderate objective truth online in response to the misinformation that really went mainstream in the 2016 election and since only ballooned further. It's a noble-sounding goal but a thankless one that you will never succeed in. People will disagree on what it's true. Additionally, Facebook's DNA is to optimize for interactions and nothing generates interactions better than misinformation, hate and preaching to the choir.
The next misstep was to merge the online messaging platforms, probably to challenge the supremacy of iMessage. Nobody was happy about this. People don't actually want interoperability between FB Messenger, WhatsApp and IG Messaging.
Beyond this IG lost its streamlined production direction in service of propping up other products.
The Metaverse is just the latest iteration of an idea wildly hoping to find a product market fit. Many of us have read Snow Crash and VR is a common theme in sci-fi but I think it's just not going mainstream for a long time if ever.
So we can only read the tea leaves here about why Sandberg left. Chris Cox famously left (and later came back) and used words that seemed to indicate he wasn't energized about the company's direction (when that direction was fighting misinformation).
Sandberg obviously has generational wealth at this point so doesn't need to work. Is this departure a judgement on the direction of the Metaverse? It's really hard to say. But Sandberg is widely respected so this isn't a good outcome. It's even more interesting that she won't be replaced. I do wonder what the organizational impacts of this are.
She’s being replaced by Javier Olivan, who has been at FB forever and is the head of their Growth org.
Facebook and Instagram often do this when they don't like your IP (a problem with CG-NAT, VPN, etc).
Meta stock went down a few points immediately after the announcement.
COO leaving isn't something that can be ignored. She'll still be leaving tomorrow.
When have you ever seen FB act in such a quick, noiseless and effective way?
its a 130k people, and Sandberg is the head of the chattiest part of it. Not only that there is Boz who appears to want to not only subsume the CTO position but also COO (see dinner comments)
TL;DR:
FB is far to big and uncoordinated to manage something like this.
EDIT: Apparently this was not actually prepared months in advance.
> I’m told that Sheryl Sandberg notified Mark Zuckerberg that she would step down over the weekend
They told you why, to bury the news, which they all have an incentive to do. If it wasn't the trial verdict (which is dominating the news), they could have waited until something else to displace it. News outlets have finite space and time and the public has a finite attention span, not too hard to take advantage of that.