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Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

johncoogan.com

101–110 of 133 posts

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#101

The whole Meta thing is just a 1-2 year distraction to keep the stock price up while Facebook figures out its real existential problems. Maybe it sells some more VR units great, but it keeps Facebook at the forefront of "hard technical innovation" "new age social media" and has other tech giants rushing to "keep up". Solid distraction, 7/10.

This.

This feels to me like Elon Musk maintaining his 'genius' profile by doing a brain implant presentation 'thing' that'll go nowhere but keeps people talking and believing.

The American way of flashy presentations over substance does tend to catch up however, so we will see.

In the scheme of things, Facebook's enemy is facebook itself. They are by far the biggest platform with real identities and all the tools needed to make it a pleasant and compelling experience. They just don't know how to make it go 'moar money' every quarter and thus far, they've steadily ruined their own product to appease the stock market.

At some point, you just have to say 'we're not growing anymore, this product is great, everyone who wanted to use it is already using it and we're done trying to squeeze our customers'. Now whether or not the ego of the folks running these sorts of places can handle it is another matter.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#102
Personal note: My sister (now 26 yo) was diagnosed with psychosis about 6 years ago and I attribute it to her extensive use of social media. I can’t prove it but I’m sure that social media either created or triggered her psychosis. Today she’s still on drugs.

I would appreciate companies like fb to work more on the effects of social media on society and people’s psychology rather than creating fake worlds so that people get hooked more on it. But of course corporates only care about profit. Heck, I would still appreciate them if they tried to create a competitor to spacex or blue origin. Of course they are also commercial organizations but least there’s some side effect of space exploration that would benefit humankind in the future. But metaverse looks like just another social media platform packaged differently. I don’t see it helping humanity. And fb at this size should do more to help society rather than trying to plug everyone to matrix.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#103
post #6

Isn't this simply Second Life writ somewhat larger?

The fact a broad idea has been tried before without success doesn't mean it can't be successful. There were smartphones before the iPhone - like the Nokia Communicator, Compaq iPaq and Palm Treo. They were a niche product - not the market-defining success the iPhone was.

Actually, Second Life was, in its time, quite successful. I honestly don't see the form factor, or VR, making a comeback though. If I was going to back anything (which I am not) it would be AR.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#104
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not pretty much the story of Oculus so far? There are 2 million oculus quest 2 devices out there now and they're getting to the point where they have a monopoly in VR

Didn't Oculus "succeed" already before FB bought it and invested huge amounts of extra money?

They have only sold millions of devices since being part of FB. They were still really niche in 2014.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#105
Doesn't internet+oAuth+ecosystem essentially cover the metaverse concept already or am I missing the big picture?

> The metaverse will be persistent

That's already the case. Your email, facebook posts, photos, game history, chats, etc are already persistent. MMOs are not at all "the closest thing" to this existing.

> The metaverse will be live

The internet is both live (e.g. twitch) and async (e.g. email) depending on what you're consuming. What is new here?

> Experiences will span both digital and physical worlds

This seems kind of how a lot of things already work, though I can see that VR can push this forward in some respects.

> There will be no cap on concurrent users

Except when there are technical or product reasons right? Pretty much as things are now.

> The metaverse will have a fully functioning economy

I guess this could be improved. General purpose digital trading marketplaces aren't big or general purpose; but that might also be good - centralized markets could take too much profit from the ecosystem.

> The metaverse will have unprecedented interoperability

This is a pretty generic statement, even with the example of fortnite skins being usable in minecraft. oAuth already allows for sharing access to data between different providers. It's a question of the product developers from both sides wanting to create the available interop. Maybe there will be easy to use libraries that handle more specialized cases in the future but what is _new_ here to require a new name?

I still have no idea what the Metaverse is and the "is it already here" section doesn't really explain what is missing. It's just vague concepts thrown into a soup trying to sound cool and I can't find any substance in what is being said. Can someone clarify this Metaverse concept?

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#106
post #29

> There will be no cap on concurrent users. This is one of the hardest problems to solve from a technical point of view, but it’s critical. The biggest online games still restrict each session to around 100 players. Even though millions might be playing at a given time worldwide, a single server will be capped. Massive concurrency will make metaverse experiences feel very different from the present-day internet. Oh c…

limiting the range / scope of your affects is probably the best answer here. keep a small ‘n’ FPS players only affect a single ballistic trajectory (a bullet) at a time. Characters also need to be rendered, but that’s O(N).

Finally, VR will be able to faithfully simulate being unable to get into a nightclub because it's full.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#107

Gross. If anything, the more I have become ensconced in the internet the more I have begun to appreciate the physical world. My mental health must be wired to require actual trees, sunshine, birds, walks in the neighborhood.... Like a library, I want my internet to be there when I want it, but I don't want to live in it.

Well, this guy helped found Soylent, a product for people who want to avoid eating actual food, so maybe he has similar ideas about trees, birds, and walks in the neighborhood.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#108
post #16

I really don't understand the hype outside of FB, including people in the industry claiming its 'genius' for them to take over the name for better SEO Has a big corporation ever succeeded in telling us what the next big hyped up product will be? Maybe outside of iPhone We never got articles like this 2 years before TikTok became popular, or any other social media app. Things just organically become popular or unpopul…

... or the next MySpace.

To be a MySpace, you need to successfully dominate a market segment for a while. Facebook is more like the next Myspace. The VR thing looks more like the next Sinclair C5.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#109
post #29

> There will be no cap on concurrent users. This is one of the hardest problems to solve from a technical point of view, but it’s critical. The biggest online games still restrict each session to around 100 players. Even though millions might be playing at a given time worldwide, a single server will be capped. Massive concurrency will make metaverse experiences feel very different from the present-day internet. Oh c…

limiting the range / scope of your affects is probably the best answer here. keep a small ‘n’ FPS players only affect a single ballistic trajectory (a bullet) at a time. Characters also need to be rendered, but that’s O(N).

> FPS players only affect a single ballistic trajectory (a bullet) at a time.

If only!

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#110

I am so turned off by the metaverse hype. The idea clearly aims at dominating our lives in order to squeeze money out of us. I despise that kind of dependency. It's just an awful idea. On the flipside, Facebook should burn some billions on this idea and finally fail at the complexity of realizing it.

The idea transcends walled gardens though. If it was a good idea, pluralistic and open variations on same would be possible.
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