Ask HN: The Anti Metaverse | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The Anti Metaverse

11 pointsasim10 comments

The anti metaverse. What is it? As the world moves to an entirely virtual experience where we basically simulate the real world on screens, it makes me wonder, what if you don't want that? What if actually we just wanted a much simpler way to experience technology once more.

The true anti metaverse is obviously the real world, but technology has added a lot of value to our lives, I think like a lot of people here, we probably miss the old school experience of the internet that was purely text based and it makes me wonder, could you bring it back? Could the anti metaverse be a purely text based experience?

Technology has evolved to a point that we interact with a ton of point and click GUI stuff, but the speed of text is pretty amazing, it's why so many of us still live in terminals, it's why programming is still largely text based. Beyond the hacker dreams of recreating a simpler internet, it just feels like something so much more useful.

Google's Project Starline is much closer to a technology that actually enhances our lives, as opposed to trying to twist it into something else. Technology when done right is intuitive and mimics our natural environment, in which we are evolved to thrive.

https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/

As for having text-based interfaces, they are completely natural, we have been conversing for at least a 100,000 years. Erika Hall has a great video about text-based design. Safe to say that it's not going away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KohjI5XGhFg

Ah yes, I remember seeing Starline and thinking, yup I can understand why google built that and how incredible it's going to be when that makes it into our homes and offices.

Edit: Btw this talk is super fascinating

Starline is very much under the radar but I think is a much closer, and realistic "technology of the future". From the sounds of people who've tested it it's like looking in a mirror with the person in the mirror on the other side of the world.

Thanks for the video, Erika is really speaking my language.

I agree about the power of language. Talking is generally much more powerful than pointing at words among a list.

But think of a typical Linux system. The system's functionality is implemented in lots of different languages. Some of it is in binaries, some of it in scripts. Various conventions, semantics, terminology and object systems across the system. Different CLI tools even have different ways of passing arguments. No need to go on.

If someone is not interested in this stuff or does not have to learn it for work, the only benefit it could offer them is to make them think of what could have been, and even this is too optimistic. It would probably just make them not want to touch this stuff ever again.

With today's technology we could do so much more but who would sit down and design such a system and why? It cannot be the work of a single entity. It seems impossible in the current situation, since everyone is happy. Probably trillions of dollars are circulated each year, developers are paid nicely, companies make money and the users like their laptops and their phones.

You might be interested in Project Gemini [0]. Their FAQ says Gemini is like "the web, stripped right back to its essence".

0: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

It looks like Gemini focuses on text files? I guess what I'm interested in is consuming services via text. Mostly imagine if everything was an API and then we had a single interface for that which was purely text based e.g /google search hackernews

How would that be different from a shell?

Firstly, gemini is focused on text files, as in the consumption of text files. Services offer logic and computation on top of data, so actual useful things like calendar, events, sms, email, chat. I don't think that's what gemini is doing. Whether that's through a shell or a chat client or web interface is really the question which comes down to the user. Ultimately the terminal is very much limited to developers, web and mobile apps are more accessible for end consumers so I'm more tempted to say web is the ultimate platform to build for while still providing a very simple text based experience that looks similar to chat but specifically for command & control.

I'm not talking about Gemini, but about your proposal: “Mostly imagine if everything was an API and then we had a single interface for that which was purely text based e.g /google search hackernews”. Isn't this text-based interface which interacts with services just a shell?

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