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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I support Zuckerberg 100% and think he's doing the right thing, or at least the right kind of thing, even though I think VR will probably fail. Too many businesses are infected with a kind of parasitic capitalism disease - Warren Buffet is the prime exemplar of this - dominate a niche, build a moat, raise prices, extract value, repeat ad nauseum.

Zuckerberg is doing something different. He amassed a gigantic fortune and built a huge company. Now he's trying to innovate rather than simply sit on his hoard and extract value. He's spending his money on real innovation - actual technology. That's good. Plus, he's doing it in complete defiance of media, investors, business types, etc. That takes courage. Good for Zuckerberg.

What is the point of getting control over such vast capital if not to try and build the future?

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> Now he's trying to innovate

What do you think is the innovation he's trying to do? So far it looks to me like "let's do SecondLife, but with walled gardens, and we'll sell expensive hardware for it". We could argue whether this is useful in some context and whether maybe some specific kind of meetings would actually benefit from VR, but... VRChat exists - if they bought that and did "VRChat for business", they'd be already better off.

But actual innovation? I just don't see it.

Vr chat? You mean the weird vr social game for furries and anime fans?

I think your comment illustrates to me the disconnect. The criticism is hyper focused on that one app. The quest 2 is a fantastic device. And the software for it is actually fantastic. The hardware and software coming out of reality labs is by far the best as a whole.

And while I don’t think monolithic apps like horizon worlds are going to be more than a gimmick for a long time. Logging in for the first time on the quest pro and chatting with strangers was something else. Of all the hyped marketing in the presentations I rolled my eyes at the focus on “presence” and feeling like you are there with someone but it already lives up to that in my opinion. It was pretty damn cool.

Now that I think about it. Maybe he doesn’t have to give a damn about marketing vr well. Apple will come in and do that work for him soon.

> Vr chat? You mean the weird vr social game for furries and anime fans?

It's a platform. If they want to restrict the avatars to boring blobs and the environments to virtual offices, that's what they could do. Similar to how both Skype and Skype for business existed.

Specifically it's a very well built out platform with capabilities to integrate with a lot of types of usage. I share the view of "furries are to VR as porn is to video media". If you have experts in extensive VR usage, you may as well learn from them.

> The criticism is hyper focused on that one app.

What are the other good apps? What is the innovation? I can only refer to what is published and known.

I tried out 1v1 slime-ball yesterday and it was pretty sweet.

While the mouth tracking is interesting, https://www.tiltfive.com/ was there much before Meta with AR table games. (I'm not saying meta's game is bad... just again, not really innovative)

The important bit that you are missing is that Meta and its metaverse can survive only if the world they are building will be:

1. addictive enough that a very large chunk of humanity will visit it daily (ideally many times a day)

2. attractive to advertisers (I am including shopping in that)

In this context having fantastic software or a fantastic device is not a convincing argument. Facebook.com wasn't a fantastic piece of software when it blew up, hardware is mostly irrelevant (in the sense that it should be so good that it's basically unnoticeable to the user). The metaverse is not a coherent idea - it's a product of an obsessive mind with almost unlimited resources (for now at least).

This experiment has failed already. When early games with very primitive graphics were first released on home computers, they attracted a very dedicated following. People _wanted_ to play even primitive games. Same with many popular desktop applications and websites. Looking at something that is receiving overwhelmingly bad reviews from all target audiences and saying that we just need to invest $50B more does not make sense. The idea has to work at a smaller scale and has to experience organic growth for it to be viable and attractive to investors.

I'm too far from it to know exactly how Facebook is spending the money. In my mental model they are spending it on "make VR work" and that's how I'm thinking about it here.

This is why I hedged a little in my original comment and said that this is at least the kind of thing Facebook should be doing. I really hope they aren't spending all, or even most, of their money on the demos we are seeing. I don't necessarily think their specific strategy is right, but trying to do something is right.

Personally, I'd be spending everything on brain-computer interfaces - because that's the only way I can see VR working. What would happen if you gave a team of scientists billions of dollars a year with the mandate to get a brain-computer interface for the highest level animal on which you could ethically and legally do unlimited experiments? Get that down, work your way up to a less intrusive device targeting apes and then humans, and then you could do real, serious VR.

I doubt his target market is HN users. He wants the youngest generation to get VR and grow up using it. Minecraft, Roblox, all the clones ... many billions of dollars. If you own the platform, even more. Then, when they hit adulthood, they are natives in the technology.

But Minecraft is not a VR - that's kinda the point. Minecraft never tried to be a clone of our reality, but in computer and under somebody's control. SecondLife tried that and failed. Minecraft built a completely different reality, with different laws - that's what worked.

> Then, when they hit adulthood, they are natives in the technology.

That is kinda circular argument. What's the use of being native of technology that nobody is actually using for anything interesting? At least in Minecraft you can learn a living on Youtube maybe...

I agree. It takes guts to buck the trends set by your peers and to forge a new path. Especially as a billionaire, the well traversed paths are already laid out and everyone is an echo chamber of the same message. Zuckerberg is taking a huge risk and gamble by pushing forth with what he believes to be the next stage in how users interface with computational devices. I have no idea if it will be a success but I respect the effort. Meta’s business proposition is vast and rather unclear at the moment as the technology remains in its nascent state. There are a lot of naysayers that like to parrot what they’ve heard but few people seem to be trying to figure out what it’s all about. Without considering it too deeply, I see Meta having an opportunity to reduce the physical costs associated with getting a team and equipment together, things that are normally required to create. It’s possible you won’t need to rent a studio to make music, or have all the professionals flown in to storyboard.

I don’t use Facebook, Instagram, etc. Nor do I hold stock in any of these company’s (or Meta). But I think it takes a lot of strength to move in this direction, so kudos to Zuckerberg. I hope something good comes out of it for all.

I support Zuck's plan to go down in a VR-fueled blaze too. Maybe Facebook will die and the VR tech will survive elsewhere.

VR tech is not ready - hardware is too week so peoples (eg. soldiers) getting sick and optics is too pricy.

I agree, and I don't even like Facebook.

Everyone wants another iteration of iPhone and more stupid software. It's all the same. The tech industry is becoming boring and uninspired.

The only tech that gets me as excited as when I was a child is VR/AR. Fun and exciting new hardware. Give me something that I can create and play with.

Supposedly Oculus has a young userbase as well.

What kind of moat did Buffet build? Which prices did he raise? It doesn't seem to remind anything in his career. If anything, "dominating a niche" is Zuckerberg's strategy, not Buffet's - the latter's business interests are rather diverse (Wikipedia says his most lucrative investment proved to be Coca-Cola shares).

the future is outsmarting states like China and Russia and avoiding, not profiting from, social collapse. I think he is just choosing something easy enough to accomplish but which might have a reasonably large addressable market.

really hard problems requiring actual innovation? so-called tech guys can only sell ads and personal data, sorry.

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