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Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

The concensus is so bearish on the metaverse, it almost makes me bullish.

I'm pretty confident that the metaverse will happen. That doesn't mean that we'll all be using "Horizon Worlds" or whatever, but rather that VR and AR will become popular by 2035. The general public is insufficiently imaginative and is over-bearish because of the negative connotations of the Meta brand, but they ignore simultaneous work by Apple and Microsoft, and the fact that the rate of progress by Meta alone has been significant. I don't have any faith in the ability of the general public (not HN readers) to resist the "fun" of the metaverse once the headsets are affordable and comfortable. We should also expect that a person's first foray into it may be through work (rather than games), as things with the form factor of a Quest Pro begin to compete with high-end workstations and are mandated by employers, mirroring the adoption of the PC.

Having tried modern VR devices and experiences, I agree. As a technologist, you can feel that there is "something" there, but it's not quite there yet.

Ah, the feeling I had about cryptos some 10 years ago. They're still not quite there, but the feeling is long gone.

Found Mark’s HN account!

People also generally agree that smoking is bad for your health, that doesn't mean that smoking is actually good... Being a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian usually doesn't work out, you have to make the right bets.

There is a difference between consensus around something new and consensus around something that's been studied for a hundred years.

They can definitely both be wrong, but one is a lot more likely to change in the near future.

This is faulty second-order thinking: you shouldn't jump from a bridge just because someone tells you to, but everybody jumping from the bridge should be a strong indicator of what to do.

> everybody jumping from the bridge should be a strong indicator of what to do.

Not jump from the bridge?

Funny to see you (even temporarily) modded down. When we were kids, the constant refrain was "if all you friends jumped off a cliff [bridge], would you". Now if you don't jump off too you're usually a "denier" or conspiracy theorist

My answer was always the same: "Yes, I have smart friends so if they're jumping off the bridge there's probably a train coming".

Oddly enough the adults in my life never seemed to appreciate the logic.

No, that's still the refrain. You shouldn't do things because your dumb friends do them. The context here is completely different: if you were in a public space and everybody in front of your suddenly turned around and starting running your way, clearly afraid, you probably would too.

I probably would. Splitting hairs though, if I was watching a stock plummet and had no idea what was driving it, I think that would be analogous to your running situation and I'd try and dump it asap. If I saw a stock declining in reaction to news that I didn't think was so bad, I might hold or buy more, and if I was really certain, I might double down even as I was ridiculed for my choice - a la Steven Bury (sp?) in The Big Short

That's perfectly sound reasoning! But it's not the reasoning the OP offered: in their case it was sufficient to be bullish because everyone else is bearish, without regard for any actual interpretation of the news.

Ok, agreed!

Michael Burry?

Either way: the point is that everybody jumping from the bridge is a very strong predictor of something bad (which you'll want to avoid too). Everybody not jumping from the bridge is just business as usual.

On the stock market, yes.

What again, makes me unease just like the OP. It can't be that obvious that the Metaverse is stupid, can it? People believe in much worse things. Why do we have a consensus?

Actually, fading the crowd has a pretty good track record. Go look at the comment history from any major new product category.

> fading the crowd has a pretty good track record. Go look at the comment history from any major new product category

This is called survivorship bias

It's also called "contrarian investing"; it does in fact have a decent track record.

What's your point?

That we remember the people who dissed the iPhone or Dropbox, but not those who correctly panned countless failures. In Sagan's words, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Exactly that, thank you. Myself, I'm far too optimistic, and I held out hope for companies (like Theranos) long after HN has gone super skeptical on them.

Fair points, there are a lot of intelligent minds here. Personally, I'm thinking about the viability of metaverse concepts beyond the walls of Meta, while the bearish concensus I've seen in media and comments seems to focus only on them. Maybe that is an unfortunate side effect of the branding exercise. I appreciate your opinions.

This is a similar reasoning to claiming that college is not useful because people such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or the Zucc did not need it to do well. It's a form of cargo culting.

Yup, that's why contrarians should have been all in on Stadia, Quibi and Juicero.

Okay, but this isn't the HN crowd, it's the market. HN's opinion (at least in this thread) simply aligns with it.

Yeah good point, edited for market. We'll see in next few years I guess.

My point is everyone is quick to judge a new technology idea before they even try it or give it a chance.

The problem here is it isn't an entirely unknown market. People have tried to make VR work since the 90s, and everyone has failed. What is the last product Facebook made in house that wasn't bolted onto their existing offerings that has made a dent in anything? They tried to make their own phone OS and failed miserably. They had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp.

There is more than one player in this space, maybe Meta won't succeed, but maybe another will. To your point, I think the biggest challenge is still in the hardware. It has improved since the 90s but is still too bulky and cumbersome, similar to the mobile phone hardware companies tried to make before the iPhone.

Why is Meta Horizons full of kids then?

I'll just point out: Club Penguin was also full of kids (including me), but it certainly wasn't worth a trillion dollars.

("Full of" is also unclear. Are they doing better than Roblox or Minecraft? I understand those to be extremely popular with kids.)

Just an observation: roblox' market cap is now > 10% of Meta's.

Indeed we will!

I don't have a particularly strong opinion on VR stuff (I don't think I've ever put a VR headset on). I think I'll have a stronger opinion when they become more common, if they become more common. That's the part that's a little hard to see right now, but maybe I just don't get it.

It's notoriously hard to get excited about VR without having tried it. It doesn't seem like it should make that much of a difference, but the "immersive" nature of VR really does make a lot of things a lot more engaging, and with AR there are a lot of real world use cases outside gaming/entertainment/fitness

> everybody jumping from the bridge should be a strong indicator of what to do.

Technologically speaking, though, everybody jumped on the 3d TV bandwagon. Where is it today?

You're in a bubble. I've never seen a 3D TV IRL and I live in one of the more affluent countries.

When I bought 2 different TVs 10 years ago, both were 3d TV, not because I wanted it, but because there was essentially no other choice. All makers were on board. I never used the feature, not even to try it. Call that a bubble if you want. I know what I was on the market for and what the market had to offer.

You were referring to manufacturers, and 3np thought you were referring to consumers (which is what I initially understood also).

Everything is darkest just before it goes pitch black.

The metaverse is already here. Roblox has 24 million daily active users. The question really is: can Meta get in on some of that action?

IMO the real problem is that FB/Meta lacks game development expertise and creating attractive/fun VR universes seems like it's fundamentally a game development problem.

Creating a successful game is not easy, it takes a certain skill set, and the vision that Zuckerberg has demonstrated (virtual offices, museums and meetings) seems completely boring.

I think there might also be a branding problem because a lot of the stuff that people might actually want to do in VR (guns, violence, sex, tentacles, unsavory avatars) can't really happen under the FB/Meta umbrella because they need to remain family and business-friendly, but that stuff obviously has huge revenue potential, so others will beat them to it.

I'm also wondering if VR will continue to remain niche all the way until we have direct brain interfaces where things actually look and feel real.

And I think that's why Meta is getting nailed - it didn't cost $15B to build Roblox, and what does Meta have to show for how they deployed capital?

My sense of this is that it requires more imagination than Meta leadership is capable of.

I bought 1000 shares over the last 2 days for exactly this reason.

I've got a fantastic bridge in Brooklyn for sale...

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