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Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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