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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

They also renamed the entire corporation from "Facebook" to "Meta" to prove how serious they were about it.

While simultaneously renaming the VR headsets to also use Meta branding instead of Oculus, even though Oculus was a great brand and the most recognizable name in the VR industry. What made it worse is that by that point they'd produced lots of headsets with Oculus branding, including an Oculus button on one of the controllers. So, they had to change that button to also have a different logo and name, and have the software presumably recognize which revision you had to draw the correct controller model in the VR view. It's insane how far they went in pursuit of what they saw as the next NFTs.

IIRC the reason they abandoned Oculus brand was that Palmer Luckey sold the company with condition the Oculus headsets would not need a facebook account to use it. Later they renamed the company and headset, and would you look at that — it requires meta account now.

I think the Oculus Quest 2 was the first one to release with a Facebook requirement, but it was still Oculus-branded. It was this headset that they swapped out the branding on when they renamed themselves to Meta. Earlier models still have the Oculus logo on them and the controllers, despite being as locked-down as all the others. The rebrand came much later than the account requirement.

This isn't correct

Funnily enough, it did end up as the next NFTs, just not in the way they hoped

Oculus had pizzaz and nice branding separation from Facebook. Which was a good thing.

Meta does not feel like a different brand from Facebook, given it is its umbrella. As brands they both speak "surveillance", "advertising", "scams", "AI slop", "manipulating your experience", "child harms" and "doom scroll regret".

They should rebrand the headsets back to Oculus, put them in a separate division, remove any dependencies. And never speak of Meta This or Facebook That or Zuckavatraphila again.

Well, NFTs in 2026 are also not so popular

That's not what I meant. I wasn't talking about replicating the popularity (that never materialized), but about getting on the hype train of selling people nothing for something.

C’mon it was worth a shot.

Remember how amazing the original NFTs were?

Thank god Mark Zuckerberg is not self aware in the least bit because we can keep getting hilarious gems like this for probably the rest of his days. The guy probably lives as close to the Truman Show experience as one can realistically get.

Hah, you made me think of the future with regards to this fool. Why do I see a future where amongst all the chaos and destruction of a big climate-induced disaster, the headline "Mark Zuckerberg and his family have reportedly retreated into his doomsday bunker" will appear...

I thought the bunker is only a rumor, but DDGing it, it's "rumor" that's been covered in many news outlets, so, I'm guessing it's real although the news outlets might have some details wrong.

Now, that might just be the decoy bunker. :)

Wild musing:

Did Zuckerberg invent Facebook.com or copy it from another person, during college?

I forget where history landed on that one.

And so I wonder if this corporate decision relates to that inventiveness of lack of.

In initial form, there wasn't anything to invent: it was implementing a digital phone book.

That idea was brought to him by the Winklevoss brothers.

He then built it (allegedly, and having to pay $65m to settle a claim about, while lying to his partners) and scaled the company into what is now Facebook.

:-) this is really a great explanation. Thank you for filling me in ...

Now they have to rebrand the company again to be about some AI hype spy glasses. The Metaverse was a flop.

The corporate metaverse was a huge flop. There are plenty of VR games and communities that are still thriving off the backs of the Corpo metaverse technology.

They have different goals. VR gaming has always been targeting small scale hardcore gamers. Meta was promoting the Metaverse as something the average person would use daily for work and shopping. That never happened and no company has achieved it.

The rename was successful. The failure of Meta brand didn't directly impact the Facebook one.

Don't worry, they'll rename themselves LLaMeBook next, and this time will be different!

Moltbook, they bought this recently

They changed the name of the company to distance themselves from a number of scandals including Cambridge Analytica, COVID vaccine misinformation, and sitting on studies about teen mental health and social media use.[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59083601

Not sure why you're downvoted but I absolutely do think that they changed their name for better branding. I also think they were involved in a number of antitrust lawsuits so renaming their company to Meta says "see, we're the underdog in this new big VR industry, we're not a monopoly".

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