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Meta acquires Moltbook

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Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#321

Post by disqard »

tavavex wrote: post #224
Terr_ wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it like a casino acquiring a former-joke product, which made hologram/animatronic illusions of people "winning big" at a table or slot-machine. Now whenever they detect a current customer might cut their losses and go home--OMG, look, that person over there just hit the jackpot! In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly h…

But they could implement it without buying Moltbook. Easily. They have the money and the engineers to make it happen a hundred times over. Something like it already might be on Facebook. To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.

Your comment made me think of something: this might be Meta buying it to kill it off.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#322

Post by Duralias »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #315
brendanyounger wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.

> a metaverse that no one wanted That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them. What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the de…

The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest. A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays. https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...

But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#323

Post by Duralias »

georgefrowny wrote: post #317
StableAlkyne wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a metaverse that no one wanted That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them. What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the de…

Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg. I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the au…

Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.

Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#325

Post by globular-toast »

jacknews wrote: post #36

I'm beginning to think that the problem of 'late capitalism' is quite related to the ability of companies to acquire other companies. Thereby eating their competition, either by stifling upcoming competitors or to gain degrees of monopoly power by joining with peers. What would the world look like if you you simply could not do that?

Governments did used to go some way to stopping companies acquiring other companies and would even split monopolies up. But they all just kinda stopped doing that in more recent years.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#326

Post by rhubarbtree »

game_the0ry wrote: post #95

I can't take mark zuckerberg seriously anymore. He's made so many missteps recently: meta-verse, meta-glasses, llama, hiring wang, meta reality labs, etc. He should probably hire a proper "number 2" (not someone political like sandberg) -- someone who "gets" the internet, like how he did when he was a harvard geek making a hot-or-not clone in his dorm room. I'm not sure acqui-hiring the moltbook founders is the move.…

He’s still making money out of adverts on Web 2.0 platforms. A lot of money. Clearly Zuck is a brilliant businessman. That does not mean he is a brilliant technologist. He doesn’t have to be, so long as he can keep making money.

Eventually there may be a big misstep, perhaps, something big enough to bring down the company. But he’s never come close to date. He’s so good at making money from ads that he can afford to keep burning cash on fruitless projects, hiring people that don’t deliver, building infrastructure he might not need. That’s a testament to his performance as a money maker.

Meta is an advertising machine. Not something I’d want to be associated with, but you cannot deny that he has built an incredible ad machine, probably the greatest ad machine ever built - whereas Google had to deliver sophisticated and costly tech to maintain their machine (maps, google search, gmail) meta’s only technical breakthrough has been to hyperscale a php website.

Re: Meta acquires Moltbook

#327

Post by gamblor956 »

3rodents wrote: post #24

I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this: > "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." So the impetus for the acquisition was either the ve…

In my day we used to call registries "databases."

The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents.

This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.

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