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The metaverse is bullshit

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521–530 of 780 posts

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no? A library lends out books/media to people at no cost. How is Netflix, a publicly traded for-profit company, anything like a non-profit, usually government-owned library?

The library costs you money too, in the form of taxes. At least Netflix only charges its actual users. I'm forced to pay for the two public libraries in my town even though I've never been in them.

Your taxes also maintain roads you never drive on. And yet you still benefit because the trucks that supply your grocery store or the plumber coming to fix your sink might use those roads. That’s the point of taxes: we all pay in, and we all reap the rewards.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#522
post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such hogwash. Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth (that has a long graveyard of unsuccessful services behind them) we're now "legacy" and "old people yelling at clouds"? Disregarding Meta entirely, I would say it's completely normal for people on HN to be sceptical of new things. Most new things don't work out. Most new things are either vaporware or snake oil. It's hard to tell the good…

> Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth No, the reason is because many new technologies are dismissed here not due to technical infeasibility, but because posters cannot understand the point or value proposition. When this is happening in response to technologies that many people are using and investing in as early adopters, which provides proof of some kind of value at a minimum, is gener…

Will you recognize that it doesn't actually have to be a point to it, though? As long as you can spellbind investors there doesn't actually need to be something useful that's build at the end of the day. "Crypto" is a good example of this. A lot of the products and services that were build using Blockchain could just have used a normal RDBMS.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no? A library lends out books/media to people at no cost. How is Netflix, a publicly traded for-profit company, anything like a non-profit, usually government-owned library?

The library costs you money too, in the form of taxes. At least Netflix only charges its actual users. I'm forced to pay for the two public libraries in my town even though I've never been in them.

Are you really having issues with paying extra taxes in order to help people afford reading more books and gaining knowledge for themselves?

Capitalism has really fucked us up if this is a common sentiment.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point the OP is making is VR isn’t a domain where you test drive practical family cars. Sure you have racing games but how many people can afford, let alone justify, high ended performance cars for their family? And how many racing games do you see where people are driving boring (relatively speaking) family cars? The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual rea…

>If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place. What? Why? A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution. Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (…

That sounds incoherent. Why are we all drinking OJ/beer? Can we taste it? If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers (that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?) without risking giving up the lie?

Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket, too. It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#525
post #502
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally think they should've acquired TikTok last year when TikTok was looking to be acquired by Microsoft. They probably would've extended their survival for another 10-ish years (lifecycle of a social media) Eh, IMO I don't think that would have worked - I suspect it would have raised too much anti-trust attention and not have been allowed. The bigger picture is that in the UK at least, 'Meta' owns most comm…

> 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends Bring them back to email, because there are still many small email providers in the UK. See https://delta.chat/en/ for email as IM.

or just use Signal. people around me have been flocking to it from WhatsApp, I even got my wife on it.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#526

I think the only BS is the way we.all talk about this stuff, same way the cloud is all hyped up. AR and VR are great tech, when it gets good enough that it's a simple comfortable accessory to wear, and it incurs no strain on your eyes, it'll definitely find many uses. And for sure we'll pursue the tech for better full body tracking, walking in-place, simulated touch, and all that, and if all that one day works simila…

That's the problem, isn't it... we barely have support for this kind of thing in 2D.

If I make a chair in SolidWorks, I can't even drag-and-drop it into a 3D printer, let alone open the document to use it in the Sims or in an email client. When I drag and drop an email into Excel I get a dialog box asking about what the delimiters are, and woe is me if I want to drag and drop an image to share it with another networked device. To get anything to work, one needs to be constantly aware of filetypes, which applications support which files, and the quirks they have when importing/exporting files (text encodings ftw /s).

If we can't figure out metaverse-style interactions on text files, the only way it's going to happen with car files is in one company's interoperatability walled garden.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head: Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Live…

SL was great and a lot of fun. It just had a rather clunky user interface, and probably other issues (nobody said it was easy). Nevertheless there was an explosion of creativity for a while. Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches. That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, f…

When Facebook went public, everyone thought it was doomed, because they made no money. It took the addition of the personalized newsfeed, aka the part of Facebook that is the least social, for it to become a billionaire firm. Nobody posts on my wall anymore.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook also has nothing better to spend the cash on – $60bn cash reserves in 2020 and revs are $120bn/yr growing at 30% y/y, what do you even do with that?

I think there's an obvious answer to that question: don't focus so much on profit and ensure that the net benefit of your product for humanity is greater than it currently is.

Nah that's too obvious. MUST. MAKE. PROFIT. FOR. SHAREHOLDERS. The machine must march on and grow at all costs.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#529
post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth No, the reason is because many new technologies are dismissed here not due to technical infeasibility, but because posters cannot understand the point or value proposition. When this is happening in response to technologies that many people are using and investing in as early adopters, which provides proof of some kind of value at a minimum, is gener…

Will you recognize that it doesn't actually have to be a point to it, though? As long as you can spellbind investors there doesn't actually need to be something useful that's build at the end of the day. "Crypto" is a good example of this. A lot of the products and services that were build using Blockchain could just have used a normal RDBMS.

Sure, no doubt. But the arguments fielded on HN as to why these various technologies are dead ends and will implode once people become rational are weak. They're usually from people who literally have never used the technology (or, used it many years ago.) At best, they have, don't get it (which is fine) but then go on to make the leap that since they didn't get anything out of it, the whole thing is a house of cards. This is a similar error as thinking every new tech that comes along is going to be the next big thing.

The value prop of VR and AR is remote social presence on par with f2f and full sensory override. This is why Facebook is pivoting the entire company around it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think Zuck is a complete idiot. The value prop of crypto is economic freedom. This is why VCs are pivoting their entire portfolios around it and why more than a trillion USD have rushed into it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think the entire alternative Internet-based financial system being developed around crypto is a bunch of hot air. At a minimum, for those technologies, they deserve steelmanning given how far they've run without dying. The hubris it takes to dismiss things as big as these, which as much potential to radically alter society, isn't just unfounded, but foolish, given that being on the wrong side of this trade in the direction of dismissiveness is hugely risky if you are a technologist.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#530

Text is mightier than the Metaverse. Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text. News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors. Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed…

And that’s why text based games dominated the world and no one is playing 3D games?

Twitter is a text based game, in a way.
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