Meta is shutting down Metaverse. They spent 85B dollars on it | Hacker News Reader

Meta is shutting down Metaverse. They spent 85B dollars on it

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39 pointspossiblelion20 comments

I wasn't following the project very closely and so might have missed something - but could someone explain what happened there and where all those billions went?

The idea of an immersive, persistent, multi-user virtual reality is not exactly a new one and we've had several mature implementations over the years - VRChat, Second Life, in some sense most MMOs, etc.

Compared to that, all the impressions of the "Metaverse" that made some larger rounds in the press looked more like the prototype of a WiiFit knockoff. And that for 85B? Did they do some significant research/development in other problem areas that are less visible than the graphics? Or what was going on there?

Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427214

Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47416940

Tech sentiment around 2022 was time was Zuckerberg was a good leader for actually setting a clear direction for his company.

I'm not sure what to conclude from this.

It was? I've always thought he's just someone who will say anything to protect his stock price and... yeah, and that's about it.

Facebook -> Meta -> AIBook -> ??????

Are they? I thought they were moving the access to it to be solely via their app or something like that

didn't they rename the company to Meta because of their investment in Metaverse.... what will the company rename itself to next?

On to the next hype ...

AI generated content and chat bots.

Next a rename to SlopBook ...

They won't rename themselves again. They're um, "beyond" that.

If they wanted to broaden their brand association beyond the legacy product they should have dropped “book” to become Face. A bit of a stranger name than Meta I guess but it’s more historically explainable and doesn’t tie it to any specific new product that could fail.

Face would be an absolutely awful name. Though, interestingly, that's what people in (at least some) Latin American countries (inexplicably) call Facebook.

Why would Face be an awful name? To me it feels similar to “Apple”, which might also sound like a stupid name for a computer company if it wasn’t established already.

I think they actually renamed to avoid anti-trust by attempting to shift the company's identity away from social media monopoly. If you're perceived as pointless and weird (and actually are), it's much better than being perceived as a monopoly which is the target of bipartisan effort to be dismantled.

I think they took a boutique idea that had no legs and leaned into it because it also happened to be complementary to a strategy to escape the anti-trust heat.

They renamed the whole company after this...

Restore Facebook.

Launch Facebook into the Sun.

Make Facebook Again Great!

it was so bad that they couldn't even get anybody to form negative opinions about it

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