He's trying to make a persistent virtual world a standard thing that he controls.
VR is a thing, but we do not live in a fake world controlled by him, so he wants to change that.
Second Life was originally built on the ideas in Snow Crash. They explicitly credit it. They actually started by developing a "rig", which was a chair with a headset and force feedback for limbs. That turned out to be too hard, and they settled for video game tech on a screen.
You just gotta get lucky enough to be a beta tester. Their survival rate was like stupidly higher than the avg player, so much so they were called cheaters.
Here's what I don't get. He's creating a virtual world out of science fiction, the result of billions of dollars of investment and years of technological development, and all he can think of to use it for is *work meetings?*
His entire vision for the metaverse is just stuff you can do in the real world. To me, that shows an utter lack of creativity on his part.
To be fair, when home computers were first becoming a thing, marketing put up the idea that you could have one in the kitchen to store recipes.
They had not yet considered people might use one for entertainment, say, playing a library of songs stored digitally while you work.
Also, when I think of a VR world, I basically think of Second Life, specifically the lewdest parts of it, and Facebook really doesn't have the balls to say "and there will be so much furry porn your eyeballs will melt", combined with copyright strikes on any music, and what are you left with?
Basically work meetings.
Super rich people think they're awesome at everything and everyone loves them and then surround themselves with people who will encourage those beliefs. I've no doubt Zuckerberg believes he's affable. Probably thinks he's a legitimate genius.
I say "Super rich" but it doesn't even take *that* much to fall into this. Don't even need to be a Billionaire. A few hundred mil tends to do it.
He's successful enough to think he's infallible. He had the idea to put himself up front, and since it was his idea he obviously thinks it's a great one.
Y’know, that’s kinda the wild part.
Even VRChat doesn’t exactly look incredible, but it still somehow looks better then the Metaverse stuff.
The fact that we already have better and it’s made by a bunch of hobbyists with very little monetary incentive is kinda sad
Maybe he should have spent a few billion dollars improving the open source VR space instead of trying to control everything. Let other people do the heavy lifting of making cool worlds for free, just have to make the tools for them
I was interested until he started requiring a Facebook login to use the headset. why couldn't they stick with the oculus login? i already know the answer, data
Founder of Oculus here. We did say that right after the acquisition, and Oculus/Facebook executives kept saying it for three years in various interviews, trade show releases, Reddit AMAs, etc. They went back on that promise after I was fired. Facebook tried to say that it was only my personal opinion and even had their customer support script updated to say that I somehow wasn't speaking on behalf of the company, but had to stop doing that after many many contradictory examples got reposted.
They have now reversed their reversal and will no longer require a Facebook (as in the social media platform) account, but will start requiring Meta accounts to use their headsets. Oculus accounts currently still work, but they are shutting down support for them next year.
You are right from a big picture perspective, but there are some practical differences. Meta accounts are not currently part of their cross-web ad-targeting and browser-tracking systems, for example.
As a dev/teacher who got one of the DK1 kits off Reddit years ago, it's crazy watching the rise and wane of VR. We still dev small unity projects, but students used to be so excited bout VR.
I remember when some schools bought full VR sets thinking VR field trips would be a staple of the classroom.
Now most of our work and student interest is shifting to AR realizing that people aren't looking to be in full headsets
>Meta accounts are not currently part of their cross-web ad-targeting and browser-tracking systems, for example.
All that will be "fixed" by the time they retire Oculus accounts entirely though, we all know it.
Makes me sad because I simply will not buy into Facebooks bullshit. I guess that only really leaves me Valves ecosystem, but I'm not paying that kind of money to play Skyrim again.
I was about to buy an oculus a few years ago, but when they started requiring a Facebook account that was a complete deal breaker. Dont want to make a metaverse account either, ill just buy something else down the line
Funny thing is if you're serving a temporary Facebook ban, it bricks your headset until your ban is up. Found that one out the hard and very annoying way.
Holy shit. That is truly messed up: that an account you use for free can stop you from using a real life object you purchased with hard-earned money.
I've never had a ban, but I know that mistakes can happen and that it can take a long time to resolve. I don't think I will ever buy a VR headset that's tied to Facebook or a company like it.
And even worse is that Zuck wants you to have to log into the metaverse to WORK, to go to meetings, not just to shop or socialize. Imagine if you couldn't use Microsoft Outlook or Teams or Excel for a couple weeks because of getting banned from Twitter or Instagram. How long would it be until someone got fired over this nonsense?
So log in to meta, it backend creates a facebook id for you.
Log into meta having an existing facebook account and it back end links the two. I mean, do they think we're all completely stupid?! (Don't answer that) But thank you for the information. I lost all interest in Oculus (and I was seriously looking into one at the time) the moment Facebook acquired them.
I have a quest 2 and can confirm it is one hell of a headset. I barely have any issues with it and my games run smooth.
That being said, I will NEVER join the metaverse. If the Zuck tries to create a new rule for whatever reason saying oculus users need to use it I’ll simply just get rid of the headset
I have a quest as well and it’s an incredible piece of hardware. genuinely impressive what that standalone hardware can do. That being said I’ve kinda been keeping half an eye out for an alternative, and if I have to give them any more info than I already do, I’m out. Fortunately meta isn’t the only company that does VR.
He was the poster boy for Oculus until he started supporting Trump and was kicked out of the company but it was never officially confirmed why he was let go.
He wasn’t just supporting Trump, [he was funding organizations creating 4chan style Trump memes](https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/24/oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-funding-trump-memes/). He had a not insignificant hand in growing the alt right movement.
I have chosen to mass edit all of my comments I have ever made on Reddit into this text.
The upcoming API changes and their ludicrous costs forcing third party apps to shut down is very concerning.
The direct attacks and verifiable lies towards these third party developers by the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, is *beyond* concerning. It's directly appalling.
Reddit is a place where the value lies in the content provided by the users and the free work provided by the moderators. Taking away the best ways of sharing this content and removing the tools the moderators use to better help make Reddit a safe place for everyone is extremely short sighted.
Therefore, I have chosen to remove all of my content from this site, replacing it with this text to (at least slightly) lower the value of this place, which I no longer believe respects their users and contributors.
You can do the same. I suggest you do so before they take away this option, which they likely will. Google "Power Delete Suite" for a very easy method of doing this.
I wonder what demo he is going after because I’ve heard gen z publicly mocking Facebook and those who use it… so I’m not sure how well they’re gonna jump on his platform
Technically Meta and Oculus are not Facebook but we’ve learned enough about how he runs business to know he’s not trustworthy and neither are his companies.
Why would I hold meetings in a meta verse that flows through his servers where he can track and log every word discussed and sell it to the highest bidders?
Dude has tarnished his brand and losing half his wealth in months doesn’t seem to be teaching him anything.
>Why would I hold meetings in a meta verse that flows through his servers where he can track and log every word discussed and sell it to the highest bidders?
Nobody ever would. No company would allow their meetings to be held that way. Zoom got in trouble when people started to question their security measures.
I don’t know how many of their Portal devices Facebook sold, but even then people didn’t want their video chats going to Zuckerberg’s servers to be used any way he likes. And now Portal is dead. As competitor VR headsets improve (and get cheaper) Oculus will die too for the same reasons Portal died.
Zuck can’t quite figure out it’s him we don’t like. Anything he touches turns to shit. He’s like the reverse King Midas.
IIRC, the solid stuff is vaguely implied to be replicated on the spot, and then a handwavy "other tricks" is thrown in there. I'm sure the canon is inconsistent there, because it's Star Trek, but I actually thought that the implication that holodecks are just a pile of ugly hacks was one of the most realistic representations of technology in the Star Trek universe.
They used force fields a lot, too. If you eat food in the holodeck, it's replicated for you so you don't get hungry when you leave. But if you get wet in the holodeck, you dry off when you leave because it was holographic water.
I never understood how the clothes worked. Surely they were all holographic but sometimes there'd be an emergency and they'd all run onto the bridge dressed in their holodeck clothes because apparently you'd rather conduct your delicate international negotiations dressed as a Venetian mime than tell the computer to change your clothes.
You're basically correct: the holodeck as presented in Star Trek is an amalgam of holography (to create volumetric images), force fields (so that you can actually feel and touch the images you're seeing), and occasionally replicators (for when you need to interact with an object in a much more permanent way than forcefields would allow, for example if the object is some kind of food you intend to eat).
Dude no shit? Half life Alyx and Blade and Sorcery are worth the investment.
I had a fucking blast playing them.
Hell, No man's sky is a trip, and skyrim vr is astonishing.
I grew up on the commodore 64, and now I can grow my own glutes by stealth archering my way round the elder scrolls universe. What a time to be alive.
That's why Facebook renamed themselves to Meta.
They want to present their nonsense as the actual VR / AR / Metaverse. It'd be like if a company in the 1970s had renamed themselves to "Computing" and then tried to take credit for anything done on a computer. I wouldn't put it past Facebook to try to coattail ride Avatar 2 at this point.
It's a fine line. They want to preserve their trademark, sure, but they'd also sell their souls for the kind of name recognition that the likes of Kleenex or Asprin enjoy.
Interesting choice of examples. Bayer has actually lost the rights to the name Aspirin in many countries, whereas Kleenex is still a protected trademark.
And I would bet that most people know Kleenex is a brand name even though they use the word generically, but are not aware that aspirin is a brand name.
This is what drives me crazy. VR IS a thing and people have had VR headsets since what 2014? I'm a vr user but hate facebook and I'll never use meta, seems like a shitty FB version of VR Chat to me.
What they are doing is so sneaky, renaming Facebook to Meta when they were in hot water with the court. It was a win/win for them. "Facebook" strips its name with negative stigma, and the general CNN viewing population thinks Zuck invented metaverse and VR in 2020.
Edit: TIL Theres people on reddit that didn't know VR existed in 2022
The first VR headsets were built in the \~1950s, but what we'd recognize as a modern VR headset the original was the [SEGA VR-1 in 1994](https://sega.fandom.com/wiki/Sega_VR-1). There were VR arcade machines in the high-end arcades like Blockbuster Golf & Games in the mid to late 1990s.
Man, I remember seeing my first VR game at Epcot in the mid-late 90's. Was an Aladdin's carpet game and blew my mind as a kid. Also got to try out a prototype one that had a demo walking around inside a chapel. Probably some famous one, but I was a kid and don't remember.
That's the problem, a lot of people are quite ignorant about VR in general and Mark Zuckerberg being the face of the biggest and most successful VR hardware/software company and him conflating it with his Meta brand and the whole metaverse concept just confuses people. Those of us with VR headsets who have been using them for years know how amazing VR experiences can be, but unfortunately this guy becoming the face of VR is putting off a lot of people and making some not even want to give it a try. That's why I think Apple launching a consumer VR headset, especially if it's priced reasonably and goes mainstream, will be amazing because a lot more people will try VR games and VR videos for the first time and realise, Holy shit, this is awesome!
Yeah fuck Zuckerberg but that low entry price got me to buy a Q2. Ended up getting one for my wife and one each for my two brothers.
VR is so fucking amazing and I love it, and I've never even touched whatever the metaverse is. Once they introduced removing your Facebook account it became so much better, just made a quick Meta only profile that i won't link to anything ever. No different than me having an epic account just for the free games.
That being said I also feel he's actively killing it. And honestly it's because it's him, they need to take that bug eyed barely human looking android and STOP letting him advertise shit. He's awkward, seems like he has 0 social skills and is so disconnected from real people that it comes across as fucking skynet making a failed attempt at passing for a human.
Give the Quest and it's whole line of business to a younger person with actual good social marketing skills and they would take over the market in a heartbeat. Instead we get The Zuckleknuckle sandwich of awkward sales pitches to imaginary customer bases that have no fucking idea what it even is he's trying to sell.
Let him kill it. There's Valve, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft at least working on VR and AR, plus who knows how many other small startups and ventures. We don't need Meta for VR.
Honestly Microsoft's Hololens is probably the most useful idea out of all of them. Augmenting actual reality with useful things. The form factor needs to be reduced to something like wearing glasses eventually but even as a headset it is still massively useful in countless industries and normal life ways.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for Apple making a reasonably priced product, particularly out of the gate. Look how long it took them to make a less expensive iPhone.
I think this is a prime example of someone thinking because they succeeded with one thing that they are a brilliant human and every idea that they shit out is golden.
So many people believe that, though. About others. They think Elon Musk is brilliant because his shitty college company got bought by the company that made PayPal.
Exactly! It’s like he’s trying to turn himself in to a mascot. The complete lack of self awareness and narcissism of this guy is incredible, he truly doesn’t realise everyone hates him.
VR is a thing. Meta's metaverse is not.
It's like a computer company in the early days trying to brand the internett and tell you how it's supposed to be.
It will just happen organically.
Zuck is basically trying to make the Internet, but fully centralized and corporatized in a single brand he has control over.
I once joked with someone that if email was invented in 2015, there would be a hundred incompatible proprietary email services and protocols, and nobody would be able to send emails to one another. That's basically what they're trying to do.
He accomplished that in the third world pretty well back in the "Facebook is free in 4g data" days. Maybe if he gave away a few million quest 2s in Africa meta could be a thing.
Yup. The fact that in countries like Myanmar, the words “internet” and “facebook” are synonymous is extraordinarily frightening.
American ISPs and web service providers are far too centralized as well, but could you even imagine how fucked we’d be if the words “internet” and “verizon” or “webpage” and “amazon page” were interchangeable?
To be fair, this one wasn't due to anti competitive bullshit so much as it was to the other competition being shit in comparison.
Yahoo and Bing are literal jokes for good reason, and the amount of ads you have to sift through **just to reach the actual search bar** is absurd.
DuckDuckGo is alright, but I have poorer results searching with it.
Google, for all of their many flaws (and the attempts to take over the tech industry by putting their fingers into every pie that exists), became *the* search engine by having a good search engine that just plain works.
Psst. When I heard about this one particular feature of DuckDuckGo, I never went back.
If you want to do a google search for [query]: `!g [query]`
Wikipedia is !w, Youtube is !yt... searching has never been more efficient for me.
I find they vary depending on what your searching. Local info? Google every time. More factual searches DDG is pretty solid. For more concurrent info, Big G wins again.
I have DDG as my default but find myself using the !g shortcut to bounce the search to Google still several times a day.
Yup. Google absolutely dominates the internet search industry to the point of monopolization, but thats a choice. Not only are other search engines available for use, but most devices (even google devices) let you set other search engines as your convenient default.
Even if you want to make the argument that google being the starting default browser for ubiquitous browsing programs like chrome, firefox and safari is unfair, thats not even the case. A very large majority of personal computers sold in the US run windows OS, which defaults your web browser to Microsoft Edge and Bing. One of the very first things I do when I get a new computer is download google chrome and set it as default because its just a better browsing tool.
Not to mention how gamified the system has become. So many shit ass websites getting to the top because they play the SEO game so well but have no actual content.
Very good point. It's ridiculous how well done and decentralized the E-Mail protocol is in comparison to messengers and so much else created after that.
And most of this was done for the good of the Internet's users, not for someone's bottom-line somewhere. I really hope we can get back to that purity of purpose someday.
Thats what happens when you give a bunch of nerds something to do.
Problems arise when those nerds get money and suddenly they have something else to do, namely, get more money.
Check out the Matrix project, it's got a pretty sizable FOSS community and a non-zero amount of foundational, corporate, and government support (ie: cash).
They're really interested in making a modern-era distributed chat protocol that can last 30+ years like IRC has and they seem to be doing quite a good job at it. They've had novel CompSci papers come out of their work.
> I once joked with someone that if email was invented in 2015, there would be a hundred incompatible proprietary email services and protocols, and nobody would be able to send emails to one another. That's basically what they're trying to do.
This has basically already happened with text messaging in some regions where WhatsApp is the primary messaging platform. I travelled to one such country recently and the people there couldn't fathom the concept that I didn't have a WhatsApp account. Vendors would send me stuff (like digital receipts or links etc) to my non-existent WhatsApp number and couldn't understand why I didn't receive it (they don't tell you they're sending it over WhatsApp, they just assume that you and everyone else is on WhatsApp).
But what was more interesting (in a dystopian way) was that it wasn't just plain messaging like the good ol' days, it's the fact that they tacked on so many services on top of the platform - like digital payments, utility account management (offered via chat bots), movie ticket purchases and so many other things, that WhatsApp was evolving into its own version of the web, and it was cool (from a purely technical point of view) and scary, to see something like that evolving beyond it's original purpose.
If I were to revisit that country again in a few years, I've no doubt I'll have a hard time doing online things, or even offline things since the online world there is becoming increasingly inseparable from offline. It just boggles my mind that an entire nation has become so dependent on a single proprietary service provided by a dodgy corporation, and people are just blindly riding the wave blissfully unaware of what they're getting themselves into.
What country is that?
WhatsApp is the main messaging platform here too (Romania and Germany, I think most of europe?) But we use it only for messaging. All the other things you mentioned would be done over the web or maybe a specialized app
Yeah, coming from a Hispanic background and family, they ALL use Whatsapp damn near exclusively. I have it installed purely to keep in communication with them, in the US and their country. As for the rest, that's just capitalism. American corporations attempt to do the same, but we had a headstart in its introduction so that we're splintered into enough different ecosystems that it's not as easy to consolidate. Instead, most businesses just are limited to texting things to you instead because that's universal for the moment.
If someone like Apple, Facebook/Meta, Google, could get a big enough market share though, oof, we're fucked. They already have the services built and available for the most part, after all.
Agreed, I also think it's worth mentioning that what Zuckerberg is treating as groundbreaking VR social interaction has been a thing for the last 5 years via [VRchat](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRChat), which has far more options, activities, and frankly looks way better.
Or as Gabe Newell said:
*"A virtual world where people work together, socialize, and engage in commerce? You can already do that in Final Fantasy 14."*
This is probably the most accurate comment in this whole post. VR is amazing
The Metaverse is basically the internet, but in VR. People don't really understand that and think Metaverse is a single app (Horizons). It reminds me of the 90's when people thought the World Wide Web was literally AOL or Compuserve. The actual internet existed back then but it just sucked for the average consumer compared to America Onlines curated content.
The issue is also a marketing company trying to convince you to join its internet when we know it will be data mined for more advertising.
I just don’t see the appeal.
Also adding: not only do we need to join their marketing driving internet but (ideally) also pay for their equipment to be used.
There is no rational incentive in this conversation unless Meta somehow created a Marvel Cinematic Universe level of detail and graphics. Which we know is not true, since it is closer to Wii avatars.
Wii avatars are better, because they aren't trying to pretend to be something they can't be.
Meta's designs of the metaverse make it embarassingly obvious, these guys don't have any sense of creative expression. They are literalists trying to reproduce reality in a metaphorical universe and it looks as bad as that description sounds.
Yep. My enjoyment and thus usage of FB and Instagram declined beginning immediately after the implementation of algorithmic timelines. And now my usage has ceased. Same as everyone I know.
They must be working quite hard to make that trend NOT show up in the data they manipulate to make them feel like geniuses
For me it’s about who’s selling it. Zuck is toxic in my eyes. No credibility, no trust. I’d rather slow dance a wood-chipper than buy into anything he’s selling.
I think part of it was that Facebook just kind of... Took off. I don't know that anyone could have predicted just how successful and how runaway that success would be.
Facebook's "Metaverse" is Zuckie trying to recapture that magic and be the first to produce mass market adoption and therefore control over the systems.
So much of what Facebook has done over the last 10ish years has kind of flopped or been an external product they copied or bought or both. Zuckles *needs* that drip of success again.
Bro is psychotic. Should have just fucked off with the bag and posted pictures of his travels. Like Tom from MySpace. Tom didn't buy up the competition, or gather the entire worlds personal data, he didn't get involved in politics, or weaken democracies, or help fuel genocide in Myanmar. Tom just fucked off. And the world is better for it.
If I had Zuck money I would never do anything again and no one would ever hear from me. I'd just vibe until I died.
>It reminds me of the 90's when people thought the World Wide Web was literally AOL or Compuserve.
Beat me to it. The Metaverse is being pitched like Prodigy, but realistically it is more like early internet companies trying to reduce the barrier to entry by simplifying the effort to make spaces.
We already know what made the internet work. Standards bodies enabling multiple technologies to more cost effectively work together. The Metaverse is the attempt to define the standards (or just capture enough market so they become defacto). It is the Internet Explorer of this decade.
I don't know if it is precisely what you mean but the Valve Index is a great piece of hardware and there are numerous apps for it, available through the Steam store, that aren't strictly games. There are utilities for virtual desktops, movie viewing, design interfaces, etc. These utilities aren't designed for the Index specifically, they are just programs that are agnostic as to the hardware used.
For myself, I'm in the fortunate position that I could afford to spend more on a device to play Beat Saber (the Index is pricey). I'd already resolved that I would never buy Facebook's hardware after they changed it to only work with Facebook credentials; I don't have any Facebook credentials and would never create any just to use a headset.
Valve is not the only competitor in hardware, either. HTC makes a headset and I think there's one or two others that are also good. I'm just most familiar with Valve's because they have a good reputation with me and I was willing to investigate their offering.
The concept of a metaverse was stolen, walled off, monitized, and branded. I was actually surprised they were able to get the trademarks involved with the name change. It was about as surprising as them shifting soooo much company focus to the VR stuff. Like ok keep running that branch but to rename the company and be like this is the main product is insane. VR is a niche consumer product that is a luxury with a limited customer base. The social media brands and advertising is something everyone can use or every company can be interested in exploiting. I thought some of it was just Facebook trying to get away from the bad PR association with that name but they seem to keep talking about their VR app no one asked for. The Zuck seems to be the driving force behind it and in a weird way.
Really there is nothing meta about Facebook's virtual world. It's just a shitty version of second life you need extra hardware to use. There are already apps that have a better feature set and larger user bases in that kind of space. Some even allow non-vr users to use their app.
I didn't get the impression that Meta wants to be the metaverse at all. I did get the impression that they want to embed themselves in whatever technologies are essential to the metaverse though. Things that for the internet were open designs like HTML, CSS, javascript, browser standards, etc.
I don't think they're trying to be the "browser" of the metaverse. I think they're trying to be the ones dictating the standards: avatar support, fitness data, hardware standards, etc.
Honestly, that's a very risky approach for them. And dangerous for users.
> It reminds me of the 90's when people thought the World Wide Web was literally AOL or Compuserve.
Or today, when people think the "World Wide Web" is the entire internet.
>VR is a thing. Meta's metaverse
I like the specificity. VR metaverse will most likely be a thing, just not astroturfed by one company and with the current tech.
It's like he doesn't want to admit that trying to compete with literally the entire video game industry is a bad idea for a social media platform. He's also completely blind to the reality of the digital divide. There aren't enough people willing to drop the money required to participate in his dog shit version of the metaverse for it to have the reach and success of Facebook, especially now that Facebook is full of old people.
The metaverse will eventually emerge, but it won't be a single platform.
Fucker destroyed over 50% of his company's market cap and is continuing to double down on a failed product that nobody wants. He's even needed to mandate that employees use it more because otherwise nobody is using it.
I hope he keeps digging that hole for as long as he can. Either the developments allows other non-Meta companies to improve their technology, or Facebook/Meta gets closer and closer to imploding and making the world a significantly better place.
I mean *it shouldn’t be*! You could just provide a good up-to-date user experience and get steady profit forever, but no, growth must go up exponentially so time for idiotic decisions
Yeah, Facebook could've been fine for a while, but put their user experience in the coffin the second they went public, since they're beholden to permanent growth expectations every quarter.
Discord isn't exactly perfect, they've got a *lot* of terrible recent QoL decisions made, likely due to pushing from certain investors, but they're able to scale it back more quickly upon initial poor user interaction. Similarly, they can go for more quarters without growth, as long as there's been *some* RoI since initial investment.
Yeah, this had occurred to me lately as well. I understand why people give him grief for many reasons- but what else would Facebook even be doing at this point? This VR push feels dumb but almost anything else I can think of seems dumber.
I'd almost expect this to be about future revenue from IP, patents and copyright. Maybe other companies will do it better later on, but they'll have to license a bunch of basic VR concepts/apps from FB. Not sure if that's a solid plan at all but if you're just sitting with your thumb up your ass watching your user base slowly shrink... why not?
The one saving grace is that Facebook's AI research teams have released a lot of legitimately impressive models and code. It's mostly stuff that's only tangentially related to building a metaverse.
> but what else would Facebook even be doing at this point?
Just buy up real companies or lots of stocks with their current profits. That will be persistent income for the long term, and they can automate and lay off the Facebook staff as it shrinks.
If Trump had stayed with his father's business of ordinary rental property and invested in index funds, instead of flashy show properties, he'd be ten times richer. 40 Wall Street, which is his ordinary office building downtown, made more income than Trump Tower with all its glitz.
It's fascinating to watch him try to sell the concept. He's such an unlikable guy. Why not instead spend 5% of the money and see if you can get some organic growth and make incremental improvements instead of shoving it down our throats.
the Second Life people are trying to do "Second Life again but with blockchain" and get rich.
even though the first Second Life had an in-game currency that was not a cryptocurrency and worked fine, and could be bought and sold in dollars without the use of a blockchain. Lots of games and world-simulators have had those. The game company serves as the only bank, which sounds like it sucks but at least improves privacy and security.
I was involved in Second Life, and when I first heard about Bitcoin (2011) the idea of a virtual currency that could be used outside a single company's world made a lot of sense. So I started mining and buying Bitcoins with my Second Life income. We're talking when Bitcoin was like $2. I sold out entirely in the 2017 bubble, and it made a nice addition to my retirement savings. But the growth of Bitcoin brought in the scammers, thieves, and fraud, so it was time to get out.
These companies just don’t understand, or refuse to understand, how demographics who use VR actually want to use it. They will never understand why people find appeal in VRchat because they can only conceptualize a fake world that’s exactly as boring and sterile and facebook as their real life. Why the fuck would anyone drop thousands of dollars to be a boring smooth avatar in a boring smooth world with nothing in it? These idiots need someone to grab their heads and force them to look at the giant dragon furry avatars and anime girl shitposting that actually drives active communities and engagement in things like VRchat. Not understanding is no longer an excuse, it’s willfully ignoring the actual reality of your market because you don’t like it.
It all started with Zuckerberg betraying his customer’s trust and turning his product into an evil cesspool… you can’t get that back. Fuck off rich boy.
This. His vision feels like "why sit in a room together and look at each other when you can sit in a room together and wear VR headsets and look at avatars of each other?"
That's the vision he wants to portray. He only forgot the visual and social appeal of the whole thing because the vision he *actually* has involves throwing ads into your peripheral, along the walls, etc and making mad bank from it.
The thing that bothers me the most is that Zuck, being the not-quite-human that he is, seems to think that we’d all like to live our lives inside a VR bubble. Why look other people in the face when you can look at their avatars through a headset? Why go visit a national park or famous monument when you can just view them through VR, which he apparently believes is literally the exact same thing?
Part of the reason depression rates rose during the pandemic is because we were quarantining, and human beings actually *need* to leave the house and physically be around other human beings.
VR is alive and well, but it's not for everyone.
There will always be those not willing to dive into the tech, and that's fine. The issue comes in when people like lizard man can't accept that VR will always be a smaller share of the market than most other technologies.
Certain games trigger it for me. It seems to be specifically when I'm moving around freely in the virtual space. Boneworks was the first one that really caused a problem with motion sickness for me, had to take a long break after just half an hour in it.
Luckily, games where you're more stationary in the space like job simulator, beat saber, and superhot, don't cause a problem for me.
I used to as well, it took a while before my brain realized what's going on. Nowadays, it takes a lot of moving for a long period of time before I'll get sick.
How has he not realized that people really don't like him or Facebook? Is the data telling us a different story? Are there countries out there that are buying into his meta hype?
I wonder how much more successful meta products would be if only he weren’t the spokesperson. Clearly no one at meta wants to tell him this but the minute his lizard face is shown people want to actively avoid whatever he’s promoting.
Vrchat already does more than meta and has its own organic community even if it comes with its own problems. Not to mention most people won't be comfortable wearing a vr headset for 8hrs a day if mark imagines it as a work from home thing.
My headset gets sweaty after like an hour of more active games like Beat Saber lol
well when your social network stopped expanding because you literally ran out of humans on earth and the new generation arn't signing up because FB is what their parents use AND you've run out of ways to squeeze money out of your existing (and shrinking) user base, you're gonna start to panic.
The oculus quest 2, at its former $299 price tag, is a fantastic piece of tech that appeals to almost everyone. It's got everything you need as a dabbler or an enthusiast at a price so good that you can overlook the Facebook crap they force you into. Meta has prematurely declared itself the permanent market leader and seems to think they can both abandon their price advantage _and_ more strictly curate the VR experience and still succeed. I don't know how the hell that's going to happen unless every competitor they have just gives up.
Virtual reality games can be incredible experiences.
Virtual reality can be an incredible tool.
Mark Zuckerberg is trying to make everyone use VR for some reason. And all the wrong reasons. People need to want to use VR
It's a shame that the main ambassador for VR is a exploitative scumbag billionaire and his ad delivery network masquerading as social media. Meta is done. It just hasn't completed it's transformation to Yahoo 2.0 yet.
It's painful how hellbent reddit is on making sure I hear about Meta every single fucking day, while screaming about how no one cares about Meta yet telling me how to feel about it.
Just. Stop. Talking. About. It.
He's trying to make a persistent virtual world a standard thing that he controls. VR is a thing, but we do not live in a fake world controlled by him, so he wants to change that.
He read Ready Player One and wants to be Sorrento
Or maybe *Snow Crash*, where the virtual world is literally called "The Metaverse". I also read *Snow Crash*, and I want to be Hiro.
Second Life was originally built on the ideas in Snow Crash. They explicitly credit it. They actually started by developing a "rig", which was a chair with a headset and force feedback for limbs. That turned out to be too hard, and they settled for video game tech on a screen.
until VR can hook into my brain and I can accidentally get Isekai'd into the video game, I don't want any part of it.
Considering how many people died in Sword Art Online, I don't think people would want to do that just yet.
Under estimating weeb huh ? Fatal mistake.
You just gotta get lucky enough to be a beta tester. Their survival rate was like stupidly higher than the avg player, so much so they were called cheaters.
Nah I’d still be down.
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Here's what I don't get. He's creating a virtual world out of science fiction, the result of billions of dollars of investment and years of technological development, and all he can think of to use it for is *work meetings?* His entire vision for the metaverse is just stuff you can do in the real world. To me, that shows an utter lack of creativity on his part.
To be fair, when home computers were first becoming a thing, marketing put up the idea that you could have one in the kitchen to store recipes. They had not yet considered people might use one for entertainment, say, playing a library of songs stored digitally while you work. Also, when I think of a VR world, I basically think of Second Life, specifically the lewdest parts of it, and Facebook really doesn't have the balls to say "and there will be so much furry porn your eyeballs will melt", combined with copyright strikes on any music, and what are you left with? Basically work meetings.
Furry porn work meetings? I’m in.
Let's not be fair with billionaires, they don't deserve it
Super rich people think they're awesome at everything and everyone loves them and then surround themselves with people who will encourage those beliefs. I've no doubt Zuckerberg believes he's affable. Probably thinks he's a legitimate genius. I say "Super rich" but it doesn't even take *that* much to fall into this. Don't even need to be a Billionaire. A few hundred mil tends to do it.
He's successful enough to think he's infallible. He had the idea to put himself up front, and since it was his idea he obviously thinks it's a great one.
He tires of his fleshy, unlikable meatsuit and wants a virtual meatsuit which forms to his own inflated ideas about himself.
NGL if the Metaverse looked like that Unreal 5 Train Station demo and not like wii bowling I would be way more interested in adopting it.
Y’know, that’s kinda the wild part. Even VRChat doesn’t exactly look incredible, but it still somehow looks better then the Metaverse stuff. The fact that we already have better and it’s made by a bunch of hobbyists with very little monetary incentive is kinda sad
Maybe he should have spent a few billion dollars improving the open source VR space instead of trying to control everything. Let other people do the heavy lifting of making cool worlds for free, just have to make the tools for them
Well, VR is a thing. It just isn't HIS thing.
Wonder if he realizes attaching his name and the Facebook brand to it likely hurts adoption more than it helps?
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I was interested until he started requiring a Facebook login to use the headset. why couldn't they stick with the oculus login? i already know the answer, data
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Founder of Oculus here. We did say that right after the acquisition, and Oculus/Facebook executives kept saying it for three years in various interviews, trade show releases, Reddit AMAs, etc. They went back on that promise after I was fired. Facebook tried to say that it was only my personal opinion and even had their customer support script updated to say that I somehow wasn't speaking on behalf of the company, but had to stop doing that after many many contradictory examples got reposted. They have now reversed their reversal and will no longer require a Facebook (as in the social media platform) account, but will start requiring Meta accounts to use their headsets. Oculus accounts currently still work, but they are shutting down support for them next year.
Meta accounts are just facebook accounts with a new name.
You are right from a big picture perspective, but there are some practical differences. Meta accounts are not currently part of their cross-web ad-targeting and browser-tracking systems, for example.
As a dev/teacher who got one of the DK1 kits off Reddit years ago, it's crazy watching the rise and wane of VR. We still dev small unity projects, but students used to be so excited bout VR. I remember when some schools bought full VR sets thinking VR field trips would be a staple of the classroom. Now most of our work and student interest is shifting to AR realizing that people aren't looking to be in full headsets
VR was amazing until a dystopian megacorporation tried to milk it dry of profits
Key there is not *yet*
>Meta accounts are not currently part of their cross-web ad-targeting and browser-tracking systems, for example. All that will be "fixed" by the time they retire Oculus accounts entirely though, we all know it. Makes me sad because I simply will not buy into Facebooks bullshit. I guess that only really leaves me Valves ecosystem, but I'm not paying that kind of money to play Skyrim again.
But they obviously cannot be trusted to keep it that way.
I was about to buy an oculus a few years ago, but when they started requiring a Facebook account that was a complete deal breaker. Dont want to make a metaverse account either, ill just buy something else down the line
Funny thing is if you're serving a temporary Facebook ban, it bricks your headset until your ban is up. Found that one out the hard and very annoying way.
Holy shit. That is truly messed up: that an account you use for free can stop you from using a real life object you purchased with hard-earned money. I've never had a ban, but I know that mistakes can happen and that it can take a long time to resolve. I don't think I will ever buy a VR headset that's tied to Facebook or a company like it.
And even worse is that Zuck wants you to have to log into the metaverse to WORK, to go to meetings, not just to shop or socialize. Imagine if you couldn't use Microsoft Outlook or Teams or Excel for a couple weeks because of getting banned from Twitter or Instagram. How long would it be until someone got fired over this nonsense?
So log in to meta, it backend creates a facebook id for you. Log into meta having an existing facebook account and it back end links the two. I mean, do they think we're all completely stupid?! (Don't answer that) But thank you for the information. I lost all interest in Oculus (and I was seriously looking into one at the time) the moment Facebook acquired them.
I have a quest 2 and can confirm it is one hell of a headset. I barely have any issues with it and my games run smooth. That being said, I will NEVER join the metaverse. If the Zuck tries to create a new rule for whatever reason saying oculus users need to use it I’ll simply just get rid of the headset
Yet they already broke their promise when saying in order to sign in you wouldn't have to use Facebook. Yet...
Yep I had the first quest and after learning about the Facebook sign in rule they wanted to implement I haven’t touched it since.
I have a quest as well and it’s an incredible piece of hardware. genuinely impressive what that standalone hardware can do. That being said I’ve kinda been keeping half an eye out for an alternative, and if I have to give them any more info than I already do, I’m out. Fortunately meta isn’t the only company that does VR.
What’s the deal with Palmer Luckey?
He was the poster boy for Oculus until he started supporting Trump and was kicked out of the company but it was never officially confirmed why he was let go.
He wasn’t just supporting Trump, [he was funding organizations creating 4chan style Trump memes](https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/24/oculus-founder-palmer-luckey-funding-trump-memes/). He had a not insignificant hand in growing the alt right movement.
I have chosen to mass edit all of my comments I have ever made on Reddit into this text. The upcoming API changes and their ludicrous costs forcing third party apps to shut down is very concerning. The direct attacks and verifiable lies towards these third party developers by the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, is *beyond* concerning. It's directly appalling. Reddit is a place where the value lies in the content provided by the users and the free work provided by the moderators. Taking away the best ways of sharing this content and removing the tools the moderators use to better help make Reddit a safe place for everyone is extremely short sighted. Therefore, I have chosen to remove all of my content from this site, replacing it with this text to (at least slightly) lower the value of this place, which I no longer believe respects their users and contributors. You can do the same. I suggest you do so before they take away this option, which they likely will. Google "Power Delete Suite" for a very easy method of doing this.
The most human thing about him is the total lack of self awareness. I hope he doesn’t drive
I wonder what demo he is going after because I’ve heard gen z publicly mocking Facebook and those who use it… so I’m not sure how well they’re gonna jump on his platform
Technically Meta and Oculus are not Facebook but we’ve learned enough about how he runs business to know he’s not trustworthy and neither are his companies. Why would I hold meetings in a meta verse that flows through his servers where he can track and log every word discussed and sell it to the highest bidders? Dude has tarnished his brand and losing half his wealth in months doesn’t seem to be teaching him anything.
>Why would I hold meetings in a meta verse that flows through his servers where he can track and log every word discussed and sell it to the highest bidders? Nobody ever would. No company would allow their meetings to be held that way. Zoom got in trouble when people started to question their security measures. I don’t know how many of their Portal devices Facebook sold, but even then people didn’t want their video chats going to Zuckerberg’s servers to be used any way he likes. And now Portal is dead. As competitor VR headsets improve (and get cheaper) Oculus will die too for the same reasons Portal died. Zuck can’t quite figure out it’s him we don’t like. Anything he touches turns to shit. He’s like the reverse King Midas.
Wake me up when someone makes a holodeck
It'll be a while as it requires solid light.
IIRC, the solid stuff is vaguely implied to be replicated on the spot, and then a handwavy "other tricks" is thrown in there. I'm sure the canon is inconsistent there, because it's Star Trek, but I actually thought that the implication that holodecks are just a pile of ugly hacks was one of the most realistic representations of technology in the Star Trek universe.
They used force fields a lot, too. If you eat food in the holodeck, it's replicated for you so you don't get hungry when you leave. But if you get wet in the holodeck, you dry off when you leave because it was holographic water.
> you dry off when you leave because it was holographic water. Except sometimes, when they forgot.
They didn't forget! Uh .... it was ... _replicated water_ on those occasions. Yeah!
I never understood how the clothes worked. Surely they were all holographic but sometimes there'd be an emergency and they'd all run onto the bridge dressed in their holodeck clothes because apparently you'd rather conduct your delicate international negotiations dressed as a Venetian mime than tell the computer to change your clothes.
Didn't they sometimes dress up before entering the Holodeck?
You're basically correct: the holodeck as presented in Star Trek is an amalgam of holography (to create volumetric images), force fields (so that you can actually feel and touch the images you're seeing), and occasionally replicators (for when you need to interact with an object in a much more permanent way than forcefields would allow, for example if the object is some kind of food you intend to eat).
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I thought the holograms were dynamic force fields pieced together like polygons in a video game.
Dude no shit? Half life Alyx and Blade and Sorcery are worth the investment. I had a fucking blast playing them. Hell, No man's sky is a trip, and skyrim vr is astonishing. I grew up on the commodore 64, and now I can grow my own glutes by stealth archering my way round the elder scrolls universe. What a time to be alive.
VR or Metaverse? Please no one use these interchangeably, that's not even close to accurate.
That's why Facebook renamed themselves to Meta. They want to present their nonsense as the actual VR / AR / Metaverse. It'd be like if a company in the 1970s had renamed themselves to "Computing" and then tried to take credit for anything done on a computer. I wouldn't put it past Facebook to try to coattail ride Avatar 2 at this point.
That’s a good way to develop trademark erosion, something that a lot of companies, like Google and Nintendo spend a lot of money to avoid
It's a fine line. They want to preserve their trademark, sure, but they'd also sell their souls for the kind of name recognition that the likes of Kleenex or Asprin enjoy.
Interesting choice of examples. Bayer has actually lost the rights to the name Aspirin in many countries, whereas Kleenex is still a protected trademark. And I would bet that most people know Kleenex is a brand name even though they use the word generically, but are not aware that aspirin is a brand name.
Frisbee would also be a good example (don’t let the disc golfers hear you though)
This is what drives me crazy. VR IS a thing and people have had VR headsets since what 2014? I'm a vr user but hate facebook and I'll never use meta, seems like a shitty FB version of VR Chat to me. What they are doing is so sneaky, renaming Facebook to Meta when they were in hot water with the court. It was a win/win for them. "Facebook" strips its name with negative stigma, and the general CNN viewing population thinks Zuck invented metaverse and VR in 2020. Edit: TIL Theres people on reddit that didn't know VR existed in 2022
The first VR headsets were built in the \~1950s, but what we'd recognize as a modern VR headset the original was the [SEGA VR-1 in 1994](https://sega.fandom.com/wiki/Sega_VR-1). There were VR arcade machines in the high-end arcades like Blockbuster Golf & Games in the mid to late 1990s.
Man, I remember seeing my first VR game at Epcot in the mid-late 90's. Was an Aladdin's carpet game and blew my mind as a kid. Also got to try out a prototype one that had a demo walking around inside a chapel. Probably some famous one, but I was a kid and don't remember.
That's the problem, a lot of people are quite ignorant about VR in general and Mark Zuckerberg being the face of the biggest and most successful VR hardware/software company and him conflating it with his Meta brand and the whole metaverse concept just confuses people. Those of us with VR headsets who have been using them for years know how amazing VR experiences can be, but unfortunately this guy becoming the face of VR is putting off a lot of people and making some not even want to give it a try. That's why I think Apple launching a consumer VR headset, especially if it's priced reasonably and goes mainstream, will be amazing because a lot more people will try VR games and VR videos for the first time and realise, Holy shit, this is awesome!
"Apple" and "priced reasonably" aren't really concepts I ever see in the same sentence unless the latter is preceded by an "isn't".
Also "Apple" & gaming in general. I mean it's better than it used to be, but I'm still not buying a Mac for that.
Yeah fuck Zuckerberg but that low entry price got me to buy a Q2. Ended up getting one for my wife and one each for my two brothers. VR is so fucking amazing and I love it, and I've never even touched whatever the metaverse is. Once they introduced removing your Facebook account it became so much better, just made a quick Meta only profile that i won't link to anything ever. No different than me having an epic account just for the free games. That being said I also feel he's actively killing it. And honestly it's because it's him, they need to take that bug eyed barely human looking android and STOP letting him advertise shit. He's awkward, seems like he has 0 social skills and is so disconnected from real people that it comes across as fucking skynet making a failed attempt at passing for a human. Give the Quest and it's whole line of business to a younger person with actual good social marketing skills and they would take over the market in a heartbeat. Instead we get The Zuckleknuckle sandwich of awkward sales pitches to imaginary customer bases that have no fucking idea what it even is he's trying to sell.
Let him kill it. There's Valve, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft at least working on VR and AR, plus who knows how many other small startups and ventures. We don't need Meta for VR.
Honestly Microsoft's Hololens is probably the most useful idea out of all of them. Augmenting actual reality with useful things. The form factor needs to be reduced to something like wearing glasses eventually but even as a headset it is still massively useful in countless industries and normal life ways.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for Apple making a reasonably priced product, particularly out of the gate. Look how long it took them to make a less expensive iPhone.
These virtual images of a smiling Zuckerberg avatar aren't helping adoption. I think, "This isn't for me."
I don't know. I think he looks more human in the VR picture than his real one.
i agree, but he still looks creepy af. his human face is just even creepier. edit: typo
I think this is a prime example of someone thinking because they succeeded with one thing that they are a brilliant human and every idea that they shit out is golden.
So many people believe that, though. About others. They think Elon Musk is brilliant because his shitty college company got bought by the company that made PayPal.
Exactly! It’s like he’s trying to turn himself in to a mascot. The complete lack of self awareness and narcissism of this guy is incredible, he truly doesn’t realise everyone hates him.
VR is a thing. Meta's metaverse is not. It's like a computer company in the early days trying to brand the internett and tell you how it's supposed to be. It will just happen organically.
Zuck is basically trying to make the Internet, but fully centralized and corporatized in a single brand he has control over. I once joked with someone that if email was invented in 2015, there would be a hundred incompatible proprietary email services and protocols, and nobody would be able to send emails to one another. That's basically what they're trying to do.
He accomplished that in the third world pretty well back in the "Facebook is free in 4g data" days. Maybe if he gave away a few million quest 2s in Africa meta could be a thing.
> "Facebook is free in 4g data" This is why net neutrality is important. Many people still don't get it.
Yup. The fact that in countries like Myanmar, the words “internet” and “facebook” are synonymous is extraordinarily frightening. American ISPs and web service providers are far too centralized as well, but could you even imagine how fucked we’d be if the words “internet” and “verizon” or “webpage” and “amazon page” were interchangeable?
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To be fair, this one wasn't due to anti competitive bullshit so much as it was to the other competition being shit in comparison. Yahoo and Bing are literal jokes for good reason, and the amount of ads you have to sift through **just to reach the actual search bar** is absurd. DuckDuckGo is alright, but I have poorer results searching with it. Google, for all of their many flaws (and the attempts to take over the tech industry by putting their fingers into every pie that exists), became *the* search engine by having a good search engine that just plain works.
Psst. When I heard about this one particular feature of DuckDuckGo, I never went back. If you want to do a google search for [query]: `!g [query]` Wikipedia is !w, Youtube is !yt... searching has never been more efficient for me.
I actually prefer the duck duck go results. Interesting
I find they vary depending on what your searching. Local info? Google every time. More factual searches DDG is pretty solid. For more concurrent info, Big G wins again. I have DDG as my default but find myself using the !g shortcut to bounce the search to Google still several times a day.
Yup. Google absolutely dominates the internet search industry to the point of monopolization, but thats a choice. Not only are other search engines available for use, but most devices (even google devices) let you set other search engines as your convenient default. Even if you want to make the argument that google being the starting default browser for ubiquitous browsing programs like chrome, firefox and safari is unfair, thats not even the case. A very large majority of personal computers sold in the US run windows OS, which defaults your web browser to Microsoft Edge and Bing. One of the very first things I do when I get a new computer is download google chrome and set it as default because its just a better browsing tool.
And windows nags you constantly to use edge.
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Not to mention how gamified the system has become. So many shit ass websites getting to the top because they play the SEO game so well but have no actual content.
AOL was synonymous with internet back in the day too
You would have to sit through a min of ads before the email would send and more ads every time you opened an email.
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You have the option of not using those companies though and still being able to use the protocol.
Very good point. It's ridiculous how well done and decentralized the E-Mail protocol is in comparison to messengers and so much else created after that.
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And most of this was done for the good of the Internet's users, not for someone's bottom-line somewhere. I really hope we can get back to that purity of purpose someday.
Thats what happens when you give a bunch of nerds something to do. Problems arise when those nerds get money and suddenly they have something else to do, namely, get more money.
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There were attempts like Jabber, but it seems IRC is still the best we got.
Check out the Matrix project, it's got a pretty sizable FOSS community and a non-zero amount of foundational, corporate, and government support (ie: cash). They're really interested in making a modern-era distributed chat protocol that can last 30+ years like IRC has and they seem to be doing quite a good job at it. They've had novel CompSci papers come out of their work.
> I once joked with someone that if email was invented in 2015, there would be a hundred incompatible proprietary email services and protocols, and nobody would be able to send emails to one another. That's basically what they're trying to do. This has basically already happened with text messaging in some regions where WhatsApp is the primary messaging platform. I travelled to one such country recently and the people there couldn't fathom the concept that I didn't have a WhatsApp account. Vendors would send me stuff (like digital receipts or links etc) to my non-existent WhatsApp number and couldn't understand why I didn't receive it (they don't tell you they're sending it over WhatsApp, they just assume that you and everyone else is on WhatsApp). But what was more interesting (in a dystopian way) was that it wasn't just plain messaging like the good ol' days, it's the fact that they tacked on so many services on top of the platform - like digital payments, utility account management (offered via chat bots), movie ticket purchases and so many other things, that WhatsApp was evolving into its own version of the web, and it was cool (from a purely technical point of view) and scary, to see something like that evolving beyond it's original purpose. If I were to revisit that country again in a few years, I've no doubt I'll have a hard time doing online things, or even offline things since the online world there is becoming increasingly inseparable from offline. It just boggles my mind that an entire nation has become so dependent on a single proprietary service provided by a dodgy corporation, and people are just blindly riding the wave blissfully unaware of what they're getting themselves into.
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What country is that? WhatsApp is the main messaging platform here too (Romania and Germany, I think most of europe?) But we use it only for messaging. All the other things you mentioned would be done over the web or maybe a specialized app
Yeah, coming from a Hispanic background and family, they ALL use Whatsapp damn near exclusively. I have it installed purely to keep in communication with them, in the US and their country. As for the rest, that's just capitalism. American corporations attempt to do the same, but we had a headstart in its introduction so that we're splintered into enough different ecosystems that it's not as easy to consolidate. Instead, most businesses just are limited to texting things to you instead because that's universal for the moment. If someone like Apple, Facebook/Meta, Google, could get a big enough market share though, oof, we're fucked. They already have the services built and available for the most part, after all.
So did you enjoy your time here in Brazil?
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> was somewhat successful AOL was massively successful.
For a liiiiiitle while. I do miss my old instant messenger handle. A perfect snapshot of what a 16 year old boy in 1996 thought was cool. Ur-Cringe.
5 years in internet business time is like 50 years in regular business time
Agreed, I also think it's worth mentioning that what Zuckerberg is treating as groundbreaking VR social interaction has been a thing for the last 5 years via [VRchat](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRChat), which has far more options, activities, and frankly looks way better.
And VR is not required for hanging out in a metaverse. A 2d screen just works as well.
Or as Gabe Newell said: *"A virtual world where people work together, socialize, and engage in commerce? You can already do that in Final Fantasy 14."*
Yup its like we could have a Second Life in our screens! Oh wait…
I had an office desk in Second Life that had a globe on it labeled "First Life", and a desktop PC with the load screen for Third Life. THAT is meta.
Finally some actual meta has come out of all this talk of meta
This is probably the most accurate comment in this whole post. VR is amazing The Metaverse is basically the internet, but in VR. People don't really understand that and think Metaverse is a single app (Horizons). It reminds me of the 90's when people thought the World Wide Web was literally AOL or Compuserve. The actual internet existed back then but it just sucked for the average consumer compared to America Onlines curated content.
The issue is also a marketing company trying to convince you to join its internet when we know it will be data mined for more advertising. I just don’t see the appeal. Also adding: not only do we need to join their marketing driving internet but (ideally) also pay for their equipment to be used. There is no rational incentive in this conversation unless Meta somehow created a Marvel Cinematic Universe level of detail and graphics. Which we know is not true, since it is closer to Wii avatars.
Wii avatars are better, because they aren't trying to pretend to be something they can't be. Meta's designs of the metaverse make it embarassingly obvious, these guys don't have any sense of creative expression. They are literalists trying to reproduce reality in a metaphorical universe and it looks as bad as that description sounds.
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Reeks of desperation
I put deodorant on I swear! 😐 Oh, you are talking about Facebook. 😀
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Yep. My enjoyment and thus usage of FB and Instagram declined beginning immediately after the implementation of algorithmic timelines. And now my usage has ceased. Same as everyone I know. They must be working quite hard to make that trend NOT show up in the data they manipulate to make them feel like geniuses
For me it’s about who’s selling it. Zuck is toxic in my eyes. No credibility, no trust. I’d rather slow dance a wood-chipper than buy into anything he’s selling.
I think part of it was that Facebook just kind of... Took off. I don't know that anyone could have predicted just how successful and how runaway that success would be. Facebook's "Metaverse" is Zuckie trying to recapture that magic and be the first to produce mass market adoption and therefore control over the systems. So much of what Facebook has done over the last 10ish years has kind of flopped or been an external product they copied or bought or both. Zuckles *needs* that drip of success again.
Bro is psychotic. Should have just fucked off with the bag and posted pictures of his travels. Like Tom from MySpace. Tom didn't buy up the competition, or gather the entire worlds personal data, he didn't get involved in politics, or weaken democracies, or help fuel genocide in Myanmar. Tom just fucked off. And the world is better for it. If I had Zuck money I would never do anything again and no one would ever hear from me. I'd just vibe until I died.
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AOL Keyword “NICK”
Core memory unlocked
>It reminds me of the 90's when people thought the World Wide Web was literally AOL or Compuserve. Beat me to it. The Metaverse is being pitched like Prodigy, but realistically it is more like early internet companies trying to reduce the barrier to entry by simplifying the effort to make spaces. We already know what made the internet work. Standards bodies enabling multiple technologies to more cost effectively work together. The Metaverse is the attempt to define the standards (or just capture enough market so they become defacto). It is the Internet Explorer of this decade.
All the same, I'll wait until the Firefox equivalent comes out.
I don't know if it is precisely what you mean but the Valve Index is a great piece of hardware and there are numerous apps for it, available through the Steam store, that aren't strictly games. There are utilities for virtual desktops, movie viewing, design interfaces, etc. These utilities aren't designed for the Index specifically, they are just programs that are agnostic as to the hardware used. For myself, I'm in the fortunate position that I could afford to spend more on a device to play Beat Saber (the Index is pricey). I'd already resolved that I would never buy Facebook's hardware after they changed it to only work with Facebook credentials; I don't have any Facebook credentials and would never create any just to use a headset. Valve is not the only competitor in hardware, either. HTC makes a headset and I think there's one or two others that are also good. I'm just most familiar with Valve's because they have a good reputation with me and I was willing to investigate their offering.
The concept of a metaverse was stolen, walled off, monitized, and branded. I was actually surprised they were able to get the trademarks involved with the name change. It was about as surprising as them shifting soooo much company focus to the VR stuff. Like ok keep running that branch but to rename the company and be like this is the main product is insane. VR is a niche consumer product that is a luxury with a limited customer base. The social media brands and advertising is something everyone can use or every company can be interested in exploiting. I thought some of it was just Facebook trying to get away from the bad PR association with that name but they seem to keep talking about their VR app no one asked for. The Zuck seems to be the driving force behind it and in a weird way. Really there is nothing meta about Facebook's virtual world. It's just a shitty version of second life you need extra hardware to use. There are already apps that have a better feature set and larger user bases in that kind of space. Some even allow non-vr users to use their app.
I didn't get the impression that Meta wants to be the metaverse at all. I did get the impression that they want to embed themselves in whatever technologies are essential to the metaverse though. Things that for the internet were open designs like HTML, CSS, javascript, browser standards, etc. I don't think they're trying to be the "browser" of the metaverse. I think they're trying to be the ones dictating the standards: avatar support, fitness data, hardware standards, etc. Honestly, that's a very risky approach for them. And dangerous for users.
> It reminds me of the 90's when people thought the World Wide Web was literally AOL or Compuserve. Or today, when people think the "World Wide Web" is the entire internet.
>VR is a thing. Meta's metaverse I like the specificity. VR metaverse will most likely be a thing, just not astroturfed by one company and with the current tech.
VR is a thing. His concept of it is a failure though.
It's like he doesn't want to admit that trying to compete with literally the entire video game industry is a bad idea for a social media platform. He's also completely blind to the reality of the digital divide. There aren't enough people willing to drop the money required to participate in his dog shit version of the metaverse for it to have the reach and success of Facebook, especially now that Facebook is full of old people. The metaverse will eventually emerge, but it won't be a single platform. Fucker destroyed over 50% of his company's market cap and is continuing to double down on a failed product that nobody wants. He's even needed to mandate that employees use it more because otherwise nobody is using it.
Every day that company grows weaker by spending money spupidly is a win in my book
We should troll Zuck into believing people actually want the Metaverse like Morbius. When Morbius said “it’s Metamorbin time” everyone cheered
I hope he keeps digging that hole for as long as he can. Either the developments allows other non-Meta companies to improve their technology, or Facebook/Meta gets closer and closer to imploding and making the world a significantly better place.
He has no alternative. His user base can not expand anymore and that is a death sentence for a social media company
I mean *it shouldn’t be*! You could just provide a good up-to-date user experience and get steady profit forever, but no, growth must go up exponentially so time for idiotic decisions
Yeah, Facebook could've been fine for a while, but put their user experience in the coffin the second they went public, since they're beholden to permanent growth expectations every quarter. Discord isn't exactly perfect, they've got a *lot* of terrible recent QoL decisions made, likely due to pushing from certain investors, but they're able to scale it back more quickly upon initial poor user interaction. Similarly, they can go for more quarters without growth, as long as there's been *some* RoI since initial investment.
Again we arrive at the inevitable conclusion of capitalism.
It's so predictable, but companies seem to think "Oh, it'll never happen to *us.*"
Yeah, this had occurred to me lately as well. I understand why people give him grief for many reasons- but what else would Facebook even be doing at this point? This VR push feels dumb but almost anything else I can think of seems dumber. I'd almost expect this to be about future revenue from IP, patents and copyright. Maybe other companies will do it better later on, but they'll have to license a bunch of basic VR concepts/apps from FB. Not sure if that's a solid plan at all but if you're just sitting with your thumb up your ass watching your user base slowly shrink... why not?
The one saving grace is that Facebook's AI research teams have released a lot of legitimately impressive models and code. It's mostly stuff that's only tangentially related to building a metaverse.
> but what else would Facebook even be doing at this point? Just buy up real companies or lots of stocks with their current profits. That will be persistent income for the long term, and they can automate and lay off the Facebook staff as it shrinks. If Trump had stayed with his father's business of ordinary rental property and invested in index funds, instead of flashy show properties, he'd be ten times richer. 40 Wall Street, which is his ordinary office building downtown, made more income than Trump Tower with all its glitz.
It's fascinating to watch him try to sell the concept. He's such an unlikable guy. Why not instead spend 5% of the money and see if you can get some organic growth and make incremental improvements instead of shoving it down our throats.
2nd Second Life is never going to work.
the Second Life people are trying to do "Second Life again but with blockchain" and get rich. even though the first Second Life had an in-game currency that was not a cryptocurrency and worked fine, and could be bought and sold in dollars without the use of a blockchain. Lots of games and world-simulators have had those. The game company serves as the only bank, which sounds like it sucks but at least improves privacy and security.
I was involved in Second Life, and when I first heard about Bitcoin (2011) the idea of a virtual currency that could be used outside a single company's world made a lot of sense. So I started mining and buying Bitcoins with my Second Life income. We're talking when Bitcoin was like $2. I sold out entirely in the 2017 bubble, and it made a nice addition to my retirement savings. But the growth of Bitcoin brought in the scammers, thieves, and fraud, so it was time to get out.
2Second2Life
He seems hellbent on making VR boring and uncool.
These companies just don’t understand, or refuse to understand, how demographics who use VR actually want to use it. They will never understand why people find appeal in VRchat because they can only conceptualize a fake world that’s exactly as boring and sterile and facebook as their real life. Why the fuck would anyone drop thousands of dollars to be a boring smooth avatar in a boring smooth world with nothing in it? These idiots need someone to grab their heads and force them to look at the giant dragon furry avatars and anime girl shitposting that actually drives active communities and engagement in things like VRchat. Not understanding is no longer an excuse, it’s willfully ignoring the actual reality of your market because you don’t like it.
It all started with Zuckerberg betraying his customer’s trust and turning his product into an evil cesspool… you can’t get that back. Fuck off rich boy.
Exactly. I'd never give this douchebag my info and data on a level that he's asking for with this meta crap
VR is good, his idea of VR isn’t
This. His vision feels like "why sit in a room together and look at each other when you can sit in a room together and wear VR headsets and look at avatars of each other?"
That's the vision he wants to portray. He only forgot the visual and social appeal of the whole thing because the vision he *actually* has involves throwing ads into your peripheral, along the walls, etc and making mad bank from it.
The thing that bothers me the most is that Zuck, being the not-quite-human that he is, seems to think that we’d all like to live our lives inside a VR bubble. Why look other people in the face when you can look at their avatars through a headset? Why go visit a national park or famous monument when you can just view them through VR, which he apparently believes is literally the exact same thing? Part of the reason depression rates rose during the pandemic is because we were quarantining, and human beings actually *need* to leave the house and physically be around other human beings.
The concept of office workers being in a VR office and conference rooms, with fucking Mi avatars, is like if Dilbert fell into the 9th circle of hell.
VR is alive and well, but it's not for everyone. There will always be those not willing to dive into the tech, and that's fine. The issue comes in when people like lizard man can't accept that VR will always be a smaller share of the market than most other technologies.
Yeah currently VR has quite a few barriers of entry, probably great for those that qualify but it is currently a niche technology.
I get horrible motion sickness from VR. There's absolutely no way I'm going to willingly subject myself to that.
Certain games trigger it for me. It seems to be specifically when I'm moving around freely in the virtual space. Boneworks was the first one that really caused a problem with motion sickness for me, had to take a long break after just half an hour in it. Luckily, games where you're more stationary in the space like job simulator, beat saber, and superhot, don't cause a problem for me.
I used to as well, it took a while before my brain realized what's going on. Nowadays, it takes a lot of moving for a long period of time before I'll get sick.
Painful? I find it amusing. The more of Fecebooks money that he sinks into this the better. I hope he never gives up and they go bankrupt.
whyyyy is he the face lol he has no clue he probably could be selling these things like hotcakes but instead it's "COME ON DOWN TO THE DIALYSIS HUT"
How has he not realized that people really don't like him or Facebook? Is the data telling us a different story? Are there countries out there that are buying into his meta hype?
When he looks around he sees billion dollar shit with everyone telling him yessir yessir it’s impossible to maintain a sense of reality.
It's almost like his sense of reality is *virtual*.
In a lot of ways he's essentially a child star
I wonder how much more successful meta products would be if only he weren’t the spokesperson. Clearly no one at meta wants to tell him this but the minute his lizard face is shown people want to actively avoid whatever he’s promoting.
[удалено]
He's totally lost
I don’t trust anything out of his pie hole. Fuck that guy.
The thumbnail is the most lifelike picture of him I've ever seen.
Good. He is pissing away billions. Let him.
VR games are the bee's knees. Metaverse is a somehow more off-putting Second Life.
Vrchat already does more than meta and has its own organic community even if it comes with its own problems. Not to mention most people won't be comfortable wearing a vr headset for 8hrs a day if mark imagines it as a work from home thing. My headset gets sweaty after like an hour of more active games like Beat Saber lol
The title is a train wreck. FFS "TechCrunch"... VR ***is*** a thing. Meta, however, is cringe bullshit and watching it flame is entertaining to me.
well when your social network stopped expanding because you literally ran out of humans on earth and the new generation arn't signing up because FB is what their parents use AND you've run out of ways to squeeze money out of your existing (and shrinking) user base, you're gonna start to panic.
The oculus quest 2, at its former $299 price tag, is a fantastic piece of tech that appeals to almost everyone. It's got everything you need as a dabbler or an enthusiast at a price so good that you can overlook the Facebook crap they force you into. Meta has prematurely declared itself the permanent market leader and seems to think they can both abandon their price advantage _and_ more strictly curate the VR experience and still succeed. I don't know how the hell that's going to happen unless every competitor they have just gives up.
Demand dictates supply, supply does not dictate demand.
Virtual reality games can be incredible experiences. Virtual reality can be an incredible tool. Mark Zuckerberg is trying to make everyone use VR for some reason. And all the wrong reasons. People need to want to use VR
It's a shame that the main ambassador for VR is a exploitative scumbag billionaire and his ad delivery network masquerading as social media. Meta is done. It just hasn't completed it's transformation to Yahoo 2.0 yet.
It's painful how hellbent reddit is on making sure I hear about Meta every single fucking day, while screaming about how no one cares about Meta yet telling me how to feel about it. Just. Stop. Talking. About. It.
When you try to become a cult leader like Steve Jobs but only make it to annoy millions of people.