Comment by vanilla_nut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanilla_nut | Hacker News Reader

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> Still, I can’t help noticing how many of the stories tonight are about being alone — about not getting laid, not talking to the girl, not having someone there when they take off the headset. Seen through the lens of the metaverse, America looks so huge and so lonely.

TL;DR: author moves from the UK to the US. Checks out the metaverse because life is so isolating in most of America. Turns out it's full of sad, horny, lonely Americans, many of them below the age of 18. Author eventually moves back to the UK and does not miss the alienation of the US one bit.

This article was actually pretty hard to get through. Seems like the Metaverse has a vibe somewhere between 4chan, online gaming, and a shopping mall in 2002; it's kind of boring, but a lot of people have so little else to do that they spend time there anyway.

Also apparently most of the people in the Metaverse use the headset for virtual porn, because they're lonely. It sounds like a very sad place.

The entire "they're all young lonely people" is such a bizarre narrative especially when it comes from techies, reminds me of how gamers or even just computer people in general were stereotyped as being reclusive nerds before it became cool to be in tech.

They're young people with enough free time and money to play around with emerging technologies that are still a bit too fiddly and niche. It's kind of a given that such a demographic probably doesn't have to worry much about relationships. Being young, it's also a given that a lot of what they do involves sexual references even if they aren't seeking any sex in real life.

After reading through the article I'm not really seeing the loneliness these other people are supposedly experiencing. It's just typical internet banter, not too unlike what people sharing a discord server might engage in.

While I don't know anyone who frequents Meta's platform, I do know many VRChat regulars (personally I average ~5-6 hours a year in it, while they might be around an hour daily at least) and none of them would say they're lonely, many of them aren't in relationships, but that isn't from a lack of ability, they simply aren't at a point in life where being in a relationship matters to them.

Yeah, I feel like if this author had jumped in some IRC channels back in the late 90's/early 2000's, they would've described the users there as lonely

Enormous nitpick that I apologize preemptively for: Ireland is not in the UK. Northern Ireland is, but the author is from Dublin, Ireland.

Thank you, that's an excellent point. I often forget that Ireland is still in the EU!

Being in the EU has nothing to do with the UK, which Ireland has been independent of since 1921.

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