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Meta Myths

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Re: Meta Myths

#131

Post by nicolashahn »

deckard1 wrote: post #104
alerter wrote: post #37

I always wondered if it was a mistake for Facebook to try to rapidly casualise VR after acquiring Oculus. If they spent even a small fraction of their metaverse billions developing high-end, niche products (flight/mech sims etc.) then they could cultivate a loyal base of affluent users. It probably wouldn't be profitable by itself, but it would grow their user base and act as a nice showcase of what VR is capable of.…

yeah, it's a bit weird that Marques Brownlee recently gave a better presentation on Meta/Metaverse than what Zuckerberg cooked up. But I think that's the intent. Because when you lay out Meta's strategy so naked, like Marques did, then you realize that no one is going to buy into it. You need early adopters and those are the ones that are going to sniff out that you're actually building a dystopian privacy-invading S…

I don't think the "metaverse" needs to succeed as much as the hardware does. A set of AR glasses that aren't bulky or sci-fi enables a huge amount of brand new functionality, on maybe even more than smartphones did. In that case, if Meta has the best option on the market, it doesn't need to write the killer app, someone else can do it, just like the App Store enabled iPhone developers to do.

I'm less optimistic on the VR takeover, but I can imagine a future where VR headsets would be preferable to using laptops for daily use, and the same thing applies there.

Re: Meta Myths

#132

Post by nicolashahn »

throwthere wrote: post #130
pchristensen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, "Apollo" here is the Apollo space program that invented and manufactured space flight and moon landing and return, over 13 years, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Through all the Meta-verse skepticism, I kept thinking that the payoff could be worth it if they capture the next big platform. But this put the scale of the investment in context, and now I doubt that even the wildest success will payoff fo…

The $250 billion spend is "projected" over 10 years by the commentator. Would META spend $25 billion/year indefinitely without earning a profit? I don't know but other scenarios seem plausible too.

As long as Zuck is in charge, yes.

Re: Meta Myths

#133

Post by ChrisClark »

Kye wrote: post #123
hintymad wrote: post #44

The All-In Podcast had a chart ( https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126 ) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter !

What has Tesla changed? All it did was show a market for non-garbage electric cars. Other more established companies are running laps around it now. How much of that $25B went to the ever-retreating promises of self-driving?

> Other more established companies are running laps around it now.

Huge citation needed. You can't just lie and will it to be true. :D

Re: Meta Myths

#134

Post by vhold »

alerter wrote: post #37

I always wondered if it was a mistake for Facebook to try to rapidly casualise VR after acquiring Oculus. If they spent even a small fraction of their metaverse billions developing high-end, niche products (flight/mech sims etc.) then they could cultivate a loyal base of affluent users. It probably wouldn't be profitable by itself, but it would grow their user base and act as a nice showcase of what VR is capable of.…

I wonder how much it would have cost to simply recreate Google Earth VR, which is still one of the most compelling VR applications, period. It was released 6 years ago.

Re: Meta Myths

#135

Post by stephc_int13 »

jpeter wrote: post #126
stephc_int13 wrote: post #36

I am pretty sure that Kodak or Nokia had pretty healthy results when the wind turned for them. Those kinds of ships are so big that it is very easy for managers, investors and employees to convince themselves that everything is _fine_. The biggest problem, for Meta, in my opinion, is not the brand, not the business model and not the competition. The problem is much worse because it is internal and probably too late t…

What is wrong with their engineering culture? They gave us React and PyTorch. Pretty good track record

You could also say that they gave us Zstd and LZ4, but this is simply not true, they hired someone who made it.

There are plenty of brilliant coders, engineers and scientists at Meta, no question about it.

Re: Meta Myths

#136

Post by wwweston »

dont__panic wrote: post #69

Myth 1: Users Are Deserting Facebook ..The problem with this narrative is that Meta is still adding users: the company is up to 2.93 billion Daily Active Users (DAUs), an increase of 50 million, and 3.71 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs), an increase of 60 million.. I've been wondering about this for a while now: who are these people who are still using Facebook every day? All of my family has reduced facebook usag…

> who are these people who are still using Facebook every day?

I'm using it pretty frequently, often daily. It may not be the place where everyone is posting their frequent updates, but I still have hundreds of acquaintances who post periodic updates (or read mine), a few circles who use FB events to manage announcements/invites, and FB serves as well as it ever has as a Rolodex.

I get that people get cranky about their feeds and/or concern about psychological or social effects of social media, but FB isn't at all unique here. Any social media you aren't the customer of is going to make its money either directing/selling your attention (which means messing with the feed) or data about your attention, and so naturally most do and there's not really an alternative, there's just a perception of what's fashionable among a given circle.

Re: Meta Myths

#137

Post by jpeter »

It would be a smart move for meta to quickly build a twitter clone. The twitter self destruct countdown is ticking

Re: Meta Myths

#138

Post by drewda »

mFixman wrote: post #102

Disclaimer: I'm a former Meta employee and I still hold a bit of love and nostalgia for the company. The article is right to point out that Meta has by far the largest and most sophisticated ad targeting and tracking system in the market. The problem is that even if you don't count Apple's ATT the window of places where they can use it is getting smaller: Facebook the app is a shell of its former self, WhatsApp is un…

> ads work when people want to spend money on products

That's a good "30,000 foot view" summary of how consumer advertising businesses work.

Re: Meta Myths

#140

Post by JeremyReimer »

traverseda wrote: post #125
JeremyReimer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion and disconnect comes from the fact that the Metaverse, by definition, cannot ever exist. Zuckerberg is chasing a fantasy. I wrote in more detail about it here [1], but the basic gist is: 1. A real "Metaverse" that isn't just another video game would require every tech company to agree on a single standard for a MMO world, and 2. There are zero financial reasons why any other company would agree to a) wa…

Doesn't that same logic apply to the web and html? Are you saying that an open standard like the web couldn't arise in the current political/economic climate?

I think it would be very unlikely for the web and html to arise in the current political climate, yes. It only came to be in the first place because of a massive amount of government investment that was an artifact of the space race in the late 1960s and early 70s. For a time, all the major tech companies were trying to build their own walled garden alternatives to the Internet (Microsoft with MSN, Apple with eWorld, AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc.) and they only failed because the Internet grew faster than any one of them could.
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