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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

> But he fears that most of the companies working on such a project have missed one essential component of lasting success: the fact that people are as much creators as they are consumers. “There isn’t as yet any evidence that people want to have a purely consumptive entertainment experience in social virtual worlds,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any evidence in human history that you can get a billion people to just kind of sit there and veg out, watch stuff. You can’t get to the kind of usage levels that metaverse brands want to get to with a consumer non-participatory experience.”

I think this is the money quote. Meta seemed to be under the impression that people want to invent digital versions of themselves just to consume content and engage with brands.

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Yeah. I spent quite a lot of time in SL - I had an art gallery where I showcased my RL photography and interacted with the visitors when online. My avatar was a sort of steampunk soviet artist manic pixie dream girl, just for the Lulz originally but eventually I really liked it.

I had zero interest in interacting with brands. It was much more fun to go to a public space and sit there coding using the in-world dev tools - making something like a radar that sent alerts when people visited your parcel of a land, or a comedy UAV, and then explaining what you were doing to a journalist or psychology student or vampiress or predator or similar.

[Edit] added details as they came back to me, many years later

I spent just a bit of time. I remember building a jetpack suit and learning just enough of the scripting language the I could make flames come out when I flew around. I worked on it on some kind of free-build island. There was a machine in the background that looked like it took in a constant stream of cows at one end and spat out meat at the other end.

And it was always a toss-up what you'd find in people's little plots of land. Beautiful Japanese garden? Beautiful sex dungeon? Who knows!

It appears that modern internet companies fail to understand that a "brand megaphone" is not a desirable product for anyone, except brands of course. The internet is sick now.

Do any real end users really care about "interacting with brands?" If I stack-ranked all the reasons I enjoy the Internet, "Interacting with brands" won't even make the list. What does that even mean? Do people really go online so they can "interact" with Mountain Dew? What would that even look like?

After I wrote that last sentence I checked and indeed the "Mountain Dew" twitter account has 777.2K followers. W--T--F--? Am I the lone crazy person?

Doritos has 870K followers. McDonalds has 4.7M followers. Are these all bots? What real live human being actually wants a twitter feed from Doritos?

> What real live human being actually wants a twitter feed from Doritos?

Somebody who really likes Doritos and wants to know about new flavors, get discounts, et cetera. I'm sure there are plenty of people who fall into that category. Maybe not 870k, but definitely not zero.

I was about to laugh this away—only to realize that my brother-in-law is one of those people.

That really sounds crazy!

As crazy as beer, wine, and coffee snobs.

They have like lotteries where they e.g. award a free dorito to some new followers etc.

> What real live human being actually wants a twitter feed from Doritos?

The scary answer: people we share the world with. People on the roads with us. People who make decisions that can impact our lives.

Having tested Meta Horizon (which I think is supposed to be current Meta's metaverse? But I could be wrong), It's completely user-generated content, there is very little company-generated content.(there is very little content altogether but that's another joke) So I have a hard time understanding that comment...?

This is true and its so painful reading these armchair comments. Meta is focused on games and UGC but you'd never know if you read the median comment here.

I would then argue that there was (still is?) a massive marketing failure, probably because there was a greater focus on marketing to companies than users.

My perspective is that I was pretty into VRChat at the time and found no compelling reason to even try the early Metaverse.

Meta's virtual world projects always give me the sense that they're aimed at set of personas/demographics that has almost zero overlap with the people actually running or building those projects.

That's why they fail. Virtual worlds - almost like real ones - are super-platforms, not applications. The interactions are too varied and complex to reduce to a set of simple primary use cases or personas.

So, if you're building a virtual world that you yourself wouldn't want to use, you're almost certainly going to fail.

maybe the metaverse isn't for you. just because you don't want to do a thing doesn't mean there aren't others out there that do.

maybe all that blather about "the long tail" in the late 90s was halfway correct. the intarwebs allow relatively small communities of people who are interested in a particular thing to do that particular thing. But a small percentage of a very large number can still be large.

if 99.9% of people don't want the hassle of maintaining an alternative identity online, that's fine. but that still means that 0.1% of people do.

if your critique is "the metaverse is laughable because the majority of people don't participate in it" you may be missing the point. if your critique is "it's entirely possible meta over-estimated interest in the metaverse," then i heartily agree.

i think second-life-like online experiences are useful, but they seem to have been over-hyped (to say the least.)

The problem is that Facebook appealed to basically everyone. You had young and old alike from various social circles all using the platform.

If Metaverse only appeals to a small group of people, it’s a failure. Because it’s supposed to push Facebook forward, and it’s hard for a company to limit its own market. It could be done successfully by spinning the company off, but for whatever reason they just do not want to do that.

And I think fundamentally VR and virtual worlds is just not going to appeal to a mass market of people. There are so many people who are just not interested in spending time in ‘Techno-world’. These people liked Facebook because (a) they talked to their real friends and (b) it was unobtrusive enough to not bother them. A lot of people quit Facebook as soon as they felt it was encroaching their lives too much.

I’m confused about what you’re saying here. GP doesn’t imply no one could possibly enjoy metaverse; when they are talking about “what people want,” I think this should be taken as “what [the vast majority of] people want.” This is in line with your .01% business.

What part of their comment are you arguing with? They didn’t say they were against it.

"Meta seemed to be under the impression that people want to invent digital versions of themselves"

The second part of the sentence that you left out seems to be the significant clause

no - Meta wants to be the front-face of a system of Digital Twins, where only official records are legally valid, and access to those records is monitored, and changing those records involves opaque backrooms. Many Fortune 500 have already committed, and multiple small implementations are being used now.

I’m sorry to be blunt, but what on earth are you talking about?

Could you please provide a heap of more context — this reads like conspiracy nonsense upon first glance.

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