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Comment by disruptiveink | Hacker News Reader

Metaverse's biggest adoption issue is simply going to be its association with Meta/Facebook and, to add insult to injury, with Zuckerberg itself. Both the general public and the media have a severe dislike of both Facebook as an institution and Zuckerberg as a person.

Honestly bewildering to see Meta push Zuckerberg as the main PR person for the metaverse, do they honestly not know Zuck is extremely uncharismatic and universally hated these days? Or is it simply a "can't say no to the boss" situation?

They should have just used Instagram/Whatsapp's branding, get celebrities/influencers for PR, ensure Zuck is never seen anywhere close to a VR headset and it could have been a success. Like this, it's doomed to be another Google Glass, even if it might be cool in theory/practice, no one wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole. By associating it with Zuck, they ensured it'll get pooed on for easy Twitter dunks regardless of how good/bad it actually is.

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Judging from media and friends who currently work there, it seems like few employees actually believe in the Metaverse vision, and that it is largely being pushed onto them by Zuck, who seems to think he has little responsibility to justify his decisions to his staff. In fact, a lot of Zuck’s rhetoric lately, from explicitly blaming lazy employees to canceling accepted internship offers, seems to be washing himself of all responsibility for Meta’s issues while demanding the kind of unquestioning loyalty that intelligent, capable folks are typically unwilling to give.

A crisis shows a leader’s true colors, and Zuck has shown himself to be a visionless bully. It won’t happen, but the best thing for that company would be for him to step down as CEO in favor of someone more capable.

I disagree. Zuck has a vision and he's made it pretty plain. He is pivoting his company away from traditional social media and attempting to transform it into a social VR company. He seems intent on making this happen even if he has to kill the facebook arm of the company in order to do so. The thing he says over and over is that he started facebook as a way to connect people and I think he sees the inherent limitations built into that system. You will never truly connect with someone through text and pictures on a webpage, even audio and video can't do it. He seems to believe, whether correct or not, that we can truly connect with each other in VR. I think he might be right about that. It won't ever have perfect fidelity with the real world but it is far more accessible than buying a plane ticket to the point that it stands a chance of doing for social interaction what the web did for access to information. I think he's all in on it, I don't know if he'll succeed but he sure as hell is going to try.

people can hardly connect with each other in real life anymore

"Traditional Social Media" = the triad of Email, Message Boards, and Chat.

This has been true since the days of timesharing and BBS culture in the 70's / 80's and people will always have a natural affinity for that. If Meta abdicates that space, other things would fill its place. But I don't think we can go back to the era of thriving subcultures, the charm of novel connection, that we had in the 90's, so much has changed since then.

Suck is not on a mission to connect people. He is just a dude who got tremendously rich by fucking over people with the first social Media platform.

If aliens have the same evolution, Facebook would have just be called something else.

This his idiotic plan to pivot fb into the future because after WhatsApp and Instagram suddenly TikTok came.

And if you believe in a future with VR and in the one platform paradigm than this investment is worth a lot but it's in my opinion a very big gamble while suck believe in it's being a smaller gamble.

/shrug imagine suck actually believing in something worthwhile he actually could have used this by making a real working social media platform or start doing something for people like planting trees...

This might be overstating how closely the general public follows insider tech news.

Most people are just sharing random photos from their family and buying things on marketplace.

Facebook’s huge mistake was bringing in ‘news’ to drive engagement on top of family pictures during elections.

If they learn from this mistake, most people will slowly forget. It might be like how there are still people mad at MS for what they did in the 90s, but most people don’t care and are just using office stuff.

Facebook has been heavily present in mainstream news, being blamed for every ill of the world, and people have started to pick up on it.

It shouldn't be surprising that anything Meta does might get negative bias from traditional media. Meta/FB has fueled the decline of traditional news media. Factual accurate reporting doesn't keep people "engaged" and scrolling through their ads but misinformation and internet "experts" arguing about things they aren't qualified to even think about makes money.

I think Facebook’s decision to focus on news and other reshare type content was specifically because they were losing market share in the family pictures segment. Millennials were leaving the platform in droves and FB knew its best option to maintain growth was to leverage its enormous vats of data to make its News Feed a political tool.

Anecdotally, very few of my friends share original content on FB anymore. It all goes on Instagram or Twitter.

Facebook's foray into the Metaverse is not some obscure venture that only tech experts are aware of. They run commercials for it during NFL games!

> This might be overstating how closely the general public follows insider tech news.

You don’t need to turn off the general public. You need to turn off early adopters, whose excitement and advocacy you need to cross the chasm to the general public.

> MS for what they did in the 90s

The difference between Meta and MS is that Office was already universally used (or dominant) and essential to business when the public started griping about Gates. Meta makes a VR product no one needs (yet? Ever?) and has essentially no adoption.

I can’t help but recall this Cheyenne Dialysis satire whenever I watch Zuck lead a keynote; https://youtu.be/E4jQe9h5v5E

I support the idea of vr tech but do I want to be nickel and dimed to death in Zuckerberg's mall-tee-verse. Nope. Not a chance. I hope the venture ruins meta taking fb, and zuck down with it.

Believe me, me nor the majority of my peers building metaverse infrastructure were excited by Zuck's pivot to co-opting the metaverse. We also do not align with a large portion of his definition of Metaverse.

This is the big problem. There are a lot of us, working in this industry, that believe in the technology, but aren't trying to make it into a cash-cow, consume-everything, replicate-the-rent-seeking-of-the-real-world-NFT-real-estate ecosystem. We're trying to make tools that improve on the work that people are already doing, seeing good results with our users, and then Zuckerberg comes along sucks all the air out of the room.

I'd be completely fine with a Zuckerberg-less VR market that took 5x longer to reach mass market appeal. I think it's good to build the tech quietly, only extend it into areas where it makes sense with each advancement, and not try to shove My First Multiplayer Unity Project out on everyone like they've done with Horizons.

Doubt this take very much. If the technology is there then the PR won't matter. If the technology is fundamentally unworkable then it's dead in water. It hinges on the technology not the PR.

The biggest problem here is leadership. The technology is "there" and has been for a while. The problem is that that "there" is not where Zuckerberg wants it to be. Zuckerberg wants to carve his own very specific niche of VR and goes completely tunnel vision on everything else. So instead of exploring the weird and wonderful things VR can do, we end up with those generic legless Facebook avatars that nobody likes. His announcement of legs coming to the Metaverse even had to be faked with a mo-cap suit, not actual in-headset tracking, since that's hard. Meanwhile back in the PCVR space we had full body tracking for years and people running around with it VRChat all the time with their complete custom avatars.

Lots of those PR problems wouldn't even happen with better leadership. The requirement for Facebook accounts on Quest2 for example not only caused tons of problems, both practically and in terms of PR, it was also completely unnecessary, as Quest2 didn't have any Facebook specific features worth talking about. And now it's all getting rolled back to how it was before anyway.

So many of the problems that Meta is facing wouldn't even exist when they didn't create them in the first place.

> If the technology is there then the PR won't matter.

Oh my sweet summer child, no. The technology is the table stakes. PR/marketing/branding to win the hearts and minds of the public to drive development to maintain the engagement of the public is key. See Blackberry.

Trying to win the hearts and the minds of the public with Zuck at the helm is an uphill battle to say the least. Have they put out any new product that the public has been excited about since they got to know what a psychopath Zuck is? No. They’ve simply bought Instagram (one of the best acquisitions in history) and WhatsApp (not sure this is driving much $$).

Time for investors to recognize that Zuck was a one hit wonder (albeit, quite the hit) but that he lacks any vision for a future that humanity actually wants to participate in.

You make it seem like Zuck is not the one making the decisions

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