The metaverse is bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#601

Post by cromka » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

civilized wrote: post #401

cromka wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we, "the old folks", just don't get it, limited by having passed our "exploratory" phase and well into "exploitation" phase (something I read here in HN the other day). And they may have a point: after all, "the old folks" 30 years ago were saying the same thing about the Internet, well into 2000s.

Oh come on. Usenet in the 1980s was full of people in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Sure, some people didn't "get" the internet, but millions of demographically similar people were getting value out of it. That isn't happening, and won't happen, with this metaverse BS. And if it does, attentive people of all ages will see it coming many years in advance.

> Oh come on. Usenet in the 1980s was full of people in their 30s, 40s, and beyond

That's anecdotal evidence. Just because there were user that age, doesn't change that their population, in general, was skeptical.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#602

Post by betwixthewires » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

reddog wrote: post #597

simonh wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"A Picture says more than a thousand words." If I give you a thousand word essay, good luck crating an image that conveys the same information. I mean you could photograph the essay, but then we're back to text again.

What if the essay topic was "Tell me what a tiger looks like".

Your point ironically works directly against you here. Your point is basically "describe an image without using images", it demonstrates how constrained the utility of images is, basically only useful for their own sake.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#603

Post by drummer » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

>For the next decade we'll all be asking ourselves if the whole world's gone mad at least once a week.

Been doing that every hour since march 2020.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#604

Post by amelius » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

dandotway wrote: post #71

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…

Perhaps because we don't have the right filters or avatars yet.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#605

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #521

ARandomerDude wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#606

Post by contextfree » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #526

didibus wrote: post #119

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 network…

Yes, as I read the article I thought about interoperability between applications as a related problem. There has been lots of effort put into this over the decades with things like OLE and in some sense, object-oriented programming in general. They've achieved some success but it feels like they've always fallen far short of the level of reuse and interoperability envisioned, and for basically the same reasons alluded to in the article - even if you can solve the easier technical problem of defining protocols, there remain the harder technical and design problems of mapping semantics and user interfaces between application environments, and the social problem of divergent interests and priorities between the developers of those environments.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#607

Post by blunte » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

As Roger Waters so succinctly wrote (and sang): … this species has used itself to death.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#608

Post by kibwen » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

mdale wrote: post #572

Watch a kid play rec room in VR and then explain how that pandemic home schooling would have made so much more sense if it worked the same way as the game building classes in Rec room work. Observe the huge jump in fidelity of VRchat or rec room vs second life or Roblox. Listen to how a kid describes the rec room versions of "squid games" without ever seeing the show on Netflix. Metaverse is coming. Agree it driven b…

> Metaverse is coming.

No, VR is coming. The metaverse, as reiterated by the author and self-evidently obvious to anyone who has thought about it, has been here since the 90s, and is the internet. What Facebook is trying to do here is to impose a propietary interoperability gatekeeper layer on top of certain aspects of a VR-enabled internet. But the things they're offering are things that nobody is asking for. They will eventually quietly walk their ambitions back and content themselves with selling good VR headsets with some minimally-attractive Facebook integration.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#609

Post by betwixthewires » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #43

the good news is that the metaverse and the tech industry's very expensive obsession with trying to make it a reality will be a schadenfreude generator the likes of which we've never seen before The tech landscape is littered with failed attempts, but we have here two very technically successful companies, Epic and Facebook, both trying to re-imagine the internet as something different. I'm not sure I'd write them of…

> I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet.

If you look at the really disruptive innovations in technology, the vast majority of them were not made by incumbents. The iPhone is the shining example against me here, but the examples for me are Netflix, Facebook, bitcoin, heck, the internet itself. Incumbents expend efforts entrenching their positions, protecting their products they're already invested in, preventing disruption. It's baked onto the game fundamentally. And to be a little cynical, I'd argue that an incumbent claiming to be a disruptor is not being honest with you more than likely.

It is a wise thing to bet against incumbents promising to disrupt their own industry because more often than not you'd be right.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#610

Post by qorrect » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

peterthehacker wrote: post #565

cromka wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we, "the old folks", just don't get it, limited by having passed our "exploratory" phase and well into "exploitation" phase (something I read here in HN the other day). And they may have a point: after all, "the old folks" 30 years ago were saying the same thing about the Internet, well into 2000s.

> we, “the old folks,” just don’t get it Zuckerberg is 37 years old, so he’d probably be lumped into “the old folks” category. Why would he get it and not us? I’m, a decade younger than Mark, so idk if I’m young enough by your standards to get it, but my sister and her friends are in college and think this is all a joke. None of them are interested in putting on VR goggles, let alone joining the “metaverse.” None of…

> Facebook’s growing problems

I'm out of the loop, what problems are they having ?