Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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The metaverse is the ultimate, final instance of the "... but on a computer!" fallacy [1], even moreso than the "virtual worlds" that prompted me to originally write that article. It's reality... but on a computer!

We already have a reality. It's called reality. The entire value proposition of computers is to do things reality couldn't already do. Replicating reality, but poorly, is a complete and utter waste of time.

Or, to put it another way... no, the metaverse isn't happening. Or to put it yet another way, it already happened and the silly science-fiction descended ideas about what it would look like are as silly as the idea that in the future everyone will constantly wear form-fitting jumpsuits.

The metaverse is an actively stupid idea. When the useful bits and pieces are reified over the next couple of decades, I'll still be right, because those things won't be "the metaverse", they'll still be extensions of the real things that are not only happening now, but have already been happening for decades, including yea verily this very site we're communicating on right now, which would not even remotely be improved in any sense whatsoever by being "in the metaverse".

[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2916/ (Rereading that ten years later, it seems education has hardly gotten anywhere. Still BOAC-ville.)

It may finally take off if/when VR is just another feature of portable, broadly popular AR glasses.

Until then, it loses for anything but niche applications, because it's doomed by the popularity of the smartphone. Nobody wants a social network (or whatever) that can't be reached from their smartphone, or that sucks to use on there, which means nobody wants VR as the primary interface to anything, making it rather pointless.

The whole market is spinning its wheels until or unless someone finally manages to get normal people excited about AR glasses, which means some serious hardware advancements. Whatever's the "next big thing" has to be as portable and usable-everywhere as smartphones, or it's doomed. The Web boom among normal folks wasn't because they started sitting at desktop computers way, way more, but because computers got ultra-portable and cellular Internet got cheap enough to actually use. They're not going to clamber to join anything that they can't comfortably and non-dorkily use at a coffee shop or in line at the grocery store or while sitting on the couch watching Netflix or what have you.

Right. Second Life was the metaverse 20 years ago, they even sold real state. It slowly died for a reason.

And for those of us who played around w 2nd life, I’ve yet to see a meta verse demo that was much different than what I remember.

I haven't played around with Second Life and it still looks like Second Life to me too. Except visibly obviously less populated.

Put that one down in the history books as being way ahead of its time. More honest, too.

I always preferred Active Worlds personally.

I remember on my first day teleporting into a random location around some mansion, and an expensive-looking female avatar yelled at me how dare I spawn at a private property. Later I ran through some bars and shops and never visited this swamp again.

I agree, and one can say “but videogames” however that doesn’t seem to be what any of this is reaching for. People play “realistic” videogames, which has an element of reality in creating a 3D world, but it tries to tell a story that one can escape into away from our everyday lives. Instead the point for the Zuckerberg metaverse is in mirroring reality but with even more control given to the corporate machine to feed you ads and convince you to buy more things. Who wants a hyperreality built by advertisers? That sounds like hell.

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