Ask HN: How do you feel about Meta's name? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you feel about Meta's name?

When I first heard the name, I thought, "Great for Facebook/Meta, bad for everyone/everything else."

My thinking is that I do not want one of the most powerful companies in the world owning and/or controlling the metaverse, either in actuality or 'just' ideologically/brand-wise.

I'm guessing folks don't care much because of one of the following reasons:

  - nothing we/they can do about it
  - there are still other, if less attractive, words for the metaverse (multiverse, etc.)
  - props to Zuck for doing the rename - it was a brilliant maneuver, there's nothing more to say about it.
  - the metaverse is not a thing yet, so nothing to worry about yet.
  - it's not ideal, but now facebook/meta will own the metaverse, good and bad, whether they want to or not
  - something else?

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To me, it was more of a publicity stunt to avoid government regulation around the world. Zuckerberg can say it's a "metaverse" company now, not social media. It just so happens that he's also enamored with VR/AR.

For a while I refused to use the new name because I thought it was a lame attempt to change the subject on their problems.

In the last few weeks I call it Meta all the time because with a stock chart like

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/chart?p=META

calling it "Meta" is the greatest humiliation I can inflict on them. It steams me that META is a big part of the S&P 500 index so I can't help holding it in my index funds. I wonder if we can get a shareholder lawsuit to stop Zuckerberg from setting the controls to the heart of the sun.

I am waiting for another tech behemoth to call itself Verse!

But seriously: it’s a name that will make Metaverse as a term impossible to use as the default name for whatever AR/VR world we are collectively creating. Googalaxy or Applearth, or whatever… Meta compromised the term Metaverse by claiming it.

Also, there will be no Metaverse. Gaming in VR will become better, some interesting use cases for AR will emerge (e.g. virtual office). If Zuckerberg will announce tomorrow that they pivot to 3D displays, the whole Metaverse delusion will promptly fade away.

I previously didn't think the term metaverse was going to be widely used to refer to the collective of VR/AR/Internet. Now that it's the name of a company, I'm certain that it won't be. It reminds me of the word cyberspace, which has fallen out of use almost entirely.

My guess is that by the time VR and AR are widely adopted, it will just be called "the internet."

"meta" is a prefix to many words, e.g. metaphysics, meta-modelling, meta-data, meta-programming, etc.

So for me is "meta" is like an unfinished word/sentence. No context, no meaning.

Sucks because I can't complement someones cleverness anymore, saying "That's so meta!". Also can't use the word "meta-data" without sounding creepy.

Just call them Facebook. It’s your brain, you control what you call them.

Cringe

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