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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s a lot of hate because Facebook is an immensely hate-able company that needs its next cash cow and it sure hopes this is it.

Look at the history of it’s core product to see where VR will go if it takes off:

Facebook was the cool place for college students to connect with friends. No ID requirements to sign up and no ads for years. Your feed was just your friends post. Things were great. Now there’s ads in your feed and you need to definitively prove your identity. Not to mention the history of scandals and privacy violations.

They’ll do whatever it takes to get those first 100 million users. Once they get them though all bets are off. Privacy will only get worse, they’ll give up on the initial power users because who cares about a couple million hard core gamers?

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They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth.

Only nobody cared because that was the time prior to the latest privacy awakening, and apparently we still have a hard time putting it in the right context. If the best thing you can say about a company is that it was not big and nobody cared about their (what are now considered) atrocities back when, then you should probably reconsider your evaluation.

GP is kind of downplaying the real horror of Facebook which is that they (allegedly) enabled genocide.

And not many seem to care or remember. Was so far away, to another group of people, won't happen here, what does it matter

Except that to some extent, similar things are happening here -- Putin was, from what I've read, using FB to do psyops, to prepare his 2014 takeover of parts of Ukraine: making up and spreading stories about Russians getting abducted etc, ... Which helped him with the 2014 annexations, and leading up to his invasion and war today. More people dead than in Myanmar.

A bit surprising that the current US gov doesn't seem to look at FB as a psyops threat against itself?

> They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth.

How in the world did you come to that conclusion? Any Meta app you have on your smartphone is doing what they can to collect heuristics in order to identify you and serve you Ads. How is that any different? It's just not as obvious.

> Only nobody cared because that was the time prior to the latest privacy awakening [...]

You make it sound like it's a fad or the user simply didn't care in the 2000s. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If a private company would park a van in front of your door to observe you 24/7 in order to sell mundane details about your daily life to advertisers you'd be up in arms. Yet in the digital space it's no big deal.

> > They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth. > How in the world did you come to that conclusion? Any Meta app you have on your smartphone is doing what they can to collect heuristics in order to identify you and serve you Ads. How is that any different? It's just not as obvious.

In the early days of Facebook there was a negative article about them in Harvard's student newspaper. Mark Zuckerberg looked for through the logs for login attempts from student journalists at the paper and used the passwords they entered to try to gain access to their email accounts.[0] I'd say that is significantly worse from a privacy perspective than using cookies to show you more relevant ads.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook

So when Zuckerberg's social world was Harvard he violated the privacy of the school. Now his social world is different and he'd have less reasons to perform those same crimes. Way more power and reason to perform an entirely different set of crimes though!

> You make it sound like it's a fad

Privacy is not a set concept.

If you had told my parents in their youth, that their kids would have a high likelihood of happily divulging big chunks of their private life to the world at large, as a matter of routine, they would quite literally not even have understood the concept, no matter in how much detail you would have explained all the steps leading up to that. Why would anyone want any of that?

I am building a small business in the medical field right now. People are real sensitive about their data – right until the point where they happily waive all privacy rights to push you to use WhatsApp for all sensitive communication, because, OF COURSE they'd want to use WhatsApp, what else, it's real convenient after all.

Isn't everyone doing that though? With Apple stepping into the Ads business, it is almost clear that they will eventually wipe out any third party competition, especially facebook from their platform. Facebook has realised that it desperately needs a hardware channel to survive in the cut-throat competitive field the tech industry has become, and VR is that channel.

Yep, our current system sucks. I happen to think Facebook is much, much, worse than Apple but who knows in 5 or 10 years.

Apple is building its own VR headset and making money off VR hardware seems like a stretch.

That doesn't seem a huge stretch to me. Apple has always tried to be on the leading edge in novel human-computer interaction hardware: the mouse, the touch screen, the pocket computer, the wrist computer...

The wrist computer is useless though

Their current version/vision perhaps is yes. But they're still the market leaders (Although Apples problem with innovation procrastination when market leaders is frustrating).

I guess we have to wait for competition here before we see things move faster(particularly better human interfacing etc). All in all they shoot to the expectations of their users. (And the competition simply plays catch up)

Im waiting for the "total recall" (the new one) style hand/pane/internal projections but that might skip watches and go straight to a neuralink thing.

The wrist computer doesn't make sense to me. Why is every manufacturer so focused on having the same capabilities of a smartphone on a smartwatch? Shouldn't a smartwatch be a complement of the smartphone? Like, take out the cellular, microphone, maybe even WiFi and speaker (just give it a tiny one for beeping), give it a very energy efficient SoC with very limited GPU capabilities, an OLED (or AMOLED) display that is always on with white/gray on black time driven by a low power circuit, and the rest is just sensors and battery. All processing is done in the phone and they're connected via Bluetooth LE, the watch just collects health and movement data, and the battery lasts at least a week.

Why would anyone reply to a text from a watch, when their paired phone is in their pockets? Or listening to music from a watch with a 200mAh battery? Are we stupid?

And I'm not implying the screen only shows time, but it just shows the data in real time and let's you configure things, apps are limited and most things are white on black, again, battery is #1. My wristwatch lasts over a year and shows the time without having to flick or touch it.

You get texts/emails on watch so you can glance at your watch and read it without pulling out your phone.

You don’t listen through your watch but use it as a more convenient interface to change a song/playlist.

The test use case is while you are driving because you can talk to it and it will type out what you’re saying well. Rather than pulling out your phone and trying to text back.

It also monitors vitals and steps. It is also handy when I forget my phone in the car and I need to text or make a quick call.

I could go on but I’m done typing.

The Newton…

Valve hasn't done that with Steam, and they're the only real competition Facebook has with VR.

Have you not been following the Steam Deck?

I clearly haven't, can you elaborate? I thought the steam deck was near universally lauded for it's open and hackable software, repairable hardware and competitive pricepoint. Is there some privacy news or other scandal I've missed?

Full disclosure, I say this having spent days playing my Steam Deck now.

It's a hardware channel to deliver you an ad platform selling you video games. Steam has better vertical integration (they are selling the games they are advertising), but it's the same idea. I haven't seen Steam OS telemetry reports, but I would expect they're basically the same as every other tech player. The platform _is_ open and hackable, but the OS is immutable and it's still an ad device.

I am absolutely astonished. Up until now I was absolutely sure that Valve was purely a charity. /s

Seriously though. Can we have some nuance in the debate about advertising? Surely the bit we object to is the invasive, privacy and democracy-eroding tracking - not the concept of advertising itself?

I also have a Steam Deck, and I should make it clear the "ads" are the usual Steam Store stuff - entirely voluntary (you don't see ads for games unless you visit the Store page) and non-intrusive.

I think there's a world of difference between showing people ads for games when they visit a store page voluntarily, and showing people ads in their social media feed when what they want is to see their friends' updates.

I find it very weird as well. So a store shouldn't show products it sell? Only allow them to be searched?

I understand being anti-add, but we are talking about store here selling and distributing products. Which makes reasonable attempt to serve relevant suggestions to user. Of new games or games that are somewhat based on what users have already played or followed.

Now if Steam store was showing third-party advertisements I would be on barricades.

And no one actually forces you to use the Steam on Steam Deck it is linux box with root access in place...

That's like going in to a store and calling their product displays ads.

What about the Steam Deck isn't privacy-friendly?

I don't think I've heard a bad thing about it, except maybe for the battery time. What are you referring to?

Valve is privately owned, public companies need to keep growing revenue.

True, and it isn't just hate for the sake of hate. I would like to have a device like that (not for meetings, god forbid, but I'd like to read without having to hold a book in by hands, or to watch a 360° 3D movie, you know), but I'm just not gonna buy it from Facebook. To clarify, I'm not gonna buy it from any company that will require me to sign-up and log-in somewhere to use the device I bought.

"To clarify, I'm not gonna buy it from any company that will require me to sign-up and log-in somewhere to use the device I bought."

Dont both Android and iOS devices do this?

After wanting a metaverse since 1992, if anyone could make me not want one it's Zuck.

Maybe they didn’t require ID, but for the first year(s) they did require a valid college, and then business domain in your email at sign up so it was really anon as you’re making it out to be.

I’m glad you pointed this out, it seems to have been a lost fact. When I got my fb account it was when fb was still adding schools a chunk at a time, mine happened to be one of them. My friends who went to schools not yet “in” or didn’t go to school at all we’re quite jealous. This span of time lasted less than a year but part of the initial draw of fb was the exclusive nature of it.

I never understood the hate for Facebook. Everytime someone points out their reasons, usually it has major flaws in 1) Inconsistency 2) Hypocrisy 3) Ideological bias 4) Bandwagoning.

So if someone wants to hate Facebook, if they have principled position, I respect that. But that's hardly ever the case in my experience online and offline.

I am not a fan of most social media companies, but I love the tech scene, and the progress Meta is making in this field. Should be universally applauded even by the harshest critics of Facebook.

I don’t think “progressing in a field” is worthy of applause if you’re just going to use that progress to hurt people. Technology doesn’t just magically make peoples lives better, sorry but the cats out of the bag on that one.

Not defending Facebook, but that is essentially what capitalism is, and virtually all "successful" companies follow the same path.

I get how someone who doesn't question it or doesn't object to it could be confused by the hate for facebook.

What field? the field of time-wasting technology?

They’re trying to make us more connected to each other… by getting rid of reality :-/

Entertainment is not time wasting and VR is not just for entertainment.

As far as I can remember it all started since Trump got elected. Before then the tone on Facebook was much more positive than it is now

The word "dystopia" (according to Google Trends at least) had a large spike worldwide in November 2016 and has been consistently trending higher than pre-November 2016 ever since. Trump (or probably just general events around then) did something to the Anglosphere net that definitely made it more negative and cynical.

EDIT: same pattern with "dystopian"

Also, Brexit.

Well maybe you never had the need for privacy. Fine with you, not fine by most people. Or you are oblivious how previously quite good tool for integration with remote friends and family got progressively worse to the point where its utter ad-infested and bug-infested piece of crap (to be fair FB was having tons of bugs since beginning, they just didn't improve on that front, I can easily hit 3-5 of them within a minute of casual use - latest firefox with ublock origin).

No company sliding down so much has received much love. Not sure what is there to not understand. Oh yes and owner is clearly an amoral person with strong sociopathic traits hellbent on making humanity worse off long term, not unique but the same applies and compounds.

No amount of self-serving VR progression or some open source libs can anyhow annulate that. Morals is something a lot of people value, and lack of it gets appropriate reactions.

The NYT writing FB hit pieces every week for the last three years, hasn't helped that perception.

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