Isn't this simply Second Life writ somewhat larger?
Assuming they deliver (very questionable), it’s like asking that aren’t smartphones simply a telegraph machines?
Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
61–70 of 133 posts
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#62I'm happy that FB is spending their money on this. It's an endless money pit that most likely will fizz out than prove revolutionary.
People won't pop in and out their Oculus to use the metaverse. A lot of people won't even be able to use it (motion sickness, etc). Contrast this with every other mobile. It's not a media that significantly adds an advantage to communication (see how 3D cinema died again)
The challenges the article pose are also interesting. Unlimited users? "Always on/fully stateful/etc" again, seems like a giant money pit and a Sisyphean task. For what? Second Life 2.0 with VR googles?
Compared to that, Elon's proposal of solving world hunger with 6Bi dollars seems outright doable.
And it seems Mark is more worried in "proving something" and has turned the hubris knob to 11
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#63As I was watching their 'keynote' I couldn't help but wonder about the many companies that took a similar approach and then died. Spending a ton of money on something doesn't make it automatically successful. [1] In fact, history has shown the opposite to be true. Take Facebook itself for example, it succeeded, not because it poured Billions into building its social network. Mark built something small, for a small ma…
> Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision. Google set out to catalog the entire internet on day one. If that's not a grand vision that they spent billions on, what is? AirBNB set out to disrupt the entire vacation rental market. Stripe set out to disrupt the entire POS payment market. Apple is the only one who fits your narrative: they set out to ma…
He also said “build something small for a small audience” and that applies to the start of all the companies you mentioned. Even Google. Back then, the internet was small, and enthousiasts a small group (relative to the global population).
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#64Billionaires are wasting money on crap like Metaverse, which is slowly bringing down the society.
Would be great if they started investing in real world endeavors, such as fixing supply chain issues and improving manufacturing automation, so people in 3rd world countries will stop losing limbs while they're making us plastic crap we don't need.
We have behemoths paying bored (and mostly redundant) engineers to work on ads and meta-verses.
If they gave us engineers fun & real world problems to work on, our productivity would be significantly higher, and we would waste less time on things like HN.
I bet a team of 5 engineers working on a passion project would be 100x more productive than 500 engineers working on Meta.
But for now - we will continue collecting our paychecks to do dumb stuff while we're watching the world burn.
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#65New hobby: find a blog's definition of metaverse and find an existing application that fulfills it
In this case, I claim Discord does the job for most of the bullets except interoperability.
Discord is live and persistent. Many Discord servers are digital copies of meatspace orgs (e.g. schools, clubs, friend circles, interests, etc). I don't think paid Discord servers have a user cap (not sure). There are servers for buying / selling / trading, if that counts for functioning economy. Tons of user generated content, especially in the form of bots. Interoperability is the only lacking bullet, although it's not particularly clear what this even means (is the invention of a metaverse supposed to make Fortnite and Minecraft skins interoperable, when those games are outside the metaverse?)
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#66As I was watching their 'keynote' I couldn't help but wonder about the many companies that took a similar approach and then died. Spending a ton of money on something doesn't make it automatically successful. [1] In fact, history has shown the opposite to be true. Take Facebook itself for example, it succeeded, not because it poured Billions into building its social network. Mark built something small, for a small ma…
> Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision. Google set out to catalog the entire internet on day one. If that's not a grand vision that they spent billions on, what is? AirBNB set out to disrupt the entire vacation rental market. Stripe set out to disrupt the entire POS payment market. Apple is the only one who fits your narrative: they set out to ma…
Might be good to take a closer look at history.#GOOGLE
Google started as a research project called BackRub. It only turned into Google and a mission after it started taking too much bandwidth on Stanford's servers
Source: https://inshorts.com/en/news/google-began-as-a-research-proj...
#AIRBNB
Airbnb began just so that the founders could make some extra money to pay rent. Not to disrupt an industry.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-airbnb-was-founded-a-vis...
#STRIPE
Stripe was just a small project so the founders could simplify getting paid for their other side projects.
Source: https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-...
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#67I don't get it, in the sense that, I don't get why I'd ever want to put on a VR helmet and go into the metaverse.
I've had plenty of electronic 3D experiences since Wolfenstein 3D. The technology to approximate a "metaverse" has been around for quite a few decades. There was even a "VR" version of HTML that flopped. (VRML, I think?). Second life was a great approximation of the metaverse, but it never really became a killer app.
Even when I've tried immersive VR, it's just not practical in a typical home. It requires a lot of open space with no clutter, and careful calibration. I smacked my arm into a physical wall because a sensor was miscalibrated by a few inches. A large, uncluttered open space for VR is a luxury that only people with large, empty homes have.
I don't think computers need to emulate the physical world in order to provide good communications or online experiences, nor do I think we need good VR for an online experience.
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#68As I was watching their 'keynote' I couldn't help but wonder about the many companies that took a similar approach and then died. Spending a ton of money on something doesn't make it automatically successful. [1] In fact, history has shown the opposite to be true. Take Facebook itself for example, it succeeded, not because it poured Billions into building its social network. Mark built something small, for a small ma…
There are counterexamples, sometimes the road to success is to bite the bullet and spend heavily. IBM spent five billion dollars to develop the IBM System/360 line, back when a billion was serious money. Neither Airbus nor Boeing would be where they are today without investing big sums up front. Making AAA games these days basically requires it, Google Stadia is floundering because Google shied away from putting enough money into their game studio to be competitive.
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#69Facebook thinks about social networks in two dimensions: 1. Audience size (eg 2. Format (eg text, images, video, VR, AR). You can go through the exercise of placing every social network on this grid and there are gaps. Implied in this is a progression in formats and we've certainly had that from text to images to video. In this framework, the acquisition of Oculus makes more sense. I personally question the premise t…
Yeah one thing that’s puzzling to me about FB’s bet is that Oculus should be a litmus test for the consumer interest in this stuff and afaict it hasn’t really took off. If Oculus isn’t particularly realizing huge growth, why would the Metaverse?
The technology isn't quite there yet. I don't think it's fair to use it as a litmus test for the greater metaverse and the advantages it creates.
Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could replace Facebook with 'Windows' in your statement and it would be why everyone was sure MS was dead.
Microsoft is not betting billions with hololens on it's core windows desktop userbase.
Maybe Facebook needs to find a company like Skype to buy for $8.5B