“Meta” is a four-letter word.
Or less ambiguous, “meta” is a word of four letters.
Facebook Renames to Meta
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#342Can't watch without logging into facebook. That's all you need to know.
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#343If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…
Welcome to Ready Player One
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#344If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…
> If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter. > Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? I mean, that would be nice f…
>I don't think Facebook is constitutionally able to give up ad revenue gains
This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die.
Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can.
Edit: clarify
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#345Other interesting things said during the keynote: "and frankly, as we've heard your feedback more broadly, we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We're starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we're working on making a broader shift here within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a lot of people. Not everyone wants their soc…
Sounds nice, doesn't it?
However i believe they very recently starting requiring a validated dev account (i.e. with phone number) for devs to continue to sideload to their Oculus Quest, right?
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fairly certain that's just Ready Player One
It's not. In the story (the book), the company that runs the metaverse (Gregarious Systems) is portrayed as a "benevolent" company that somewhat respects its users and acts in the best interest of people (you may be thinking of the intentions of IOI and Nolan Sorrento, the adverserial company that sound like our Facebook). Uh, there's also an unfounded claim in the story that the metaverse software (the OASIS) is ope…
While Gregarious is somewhat benevolent, the described world of RP1 in general is highly dystopian.
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#347If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…
> If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter. > Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? I mean, that would be nice f…
For b) assuming each Quest costs Meta around $400, and they are sending to 1B users, $400B, so about half their market cap and 10x yearly revenue :).
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
For better or worse, it does seem Zuckerberg is as invested in making the "metaverse" the new future of Facebook as Jobs was with Apple and the iPhone
Seems like "metaverse" means walled internet. "You've got mail!" LOL
The iPhone turned out to be the most walled garden smartphone as well (even compared to older designs that relied on Java ME), and it didn't exactly hurt them.
The more relevant question is, can Facebook in 2022 excite people as much as Apple did when riding on the height of the iPod/iTunes craze in 2007?
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#349I want to present another way of looking at this, & identifying it as a brilliant move. This is just one lens, not representative of what I really believe, but I think it's an important lens to pick up & assess by.
Facebook makes a ton of cash, and wants to be a place where sharp, bright, talented engineers want to come work. But the family of apps are all semi-done products; they're late industrial creations, heavily refined, and there's just not a lot of open possibility space to do good things with them.
Meta is a break. It's a way to create new grounds, explore new ideas. Whether the ideas are good or bad almost doesn't matter, compared to re-creating a company with some real will, drive, & possibility in front of it. Unchaining yourself from the town-planner stage of maturity that you've been whiling away at for almost a decade & creating permissions to try interesting things, to make new space where you're not always stepping on legacy concerns: I almost can't imagine not doing this.
And Meta has a fairly catchy, nebulous set of ideas behind it. It's difficult to imagine how Facebook/Meta can really make anywhere near as much impact, make a clear win here. But I'm at a loss to think of other bits of terrain that are both not-yet-settled/won, and simultaneously as compelling & interesting to a potential employee-base. If I ran a hugely successful company that had more-or-less established itself & wasn't in existential peril & falling position, I'd be asking myself the same question: what would be fun for us to do? What would keep my us well engaged & might possibly yield some epic shit? Meta is a not bad answer.
Re: Facebook Renames to Meta
#350If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow? Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I could see this flubbing out hard otherwise. I'm personally…
Virtual reality was always dystopian. It's what happens when we don't have a frontier and turn inward to computer aided fantasy and isolation.
One of the best dystopian explanations for the Fermi paradox is that intelligences eventually figure out how to immerse themselves in high fidelity fantasy worlds and basically sit around and masturbate until some black swan event like a planet killer astroid or a gamma ray burst destroys them. Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.
There seem to be three possible futures on offer today:
(1) A Brave New World with AR, VR, social media dopamine loops, ARGs and conspiracy LARPs, cheap drugs, and sex robots where the meaning of life is to withdraw into a fantasy world and masturbate until you die. This offers the comfort of rewards without challenges.
(2) Reactionary movements against modernity itself, proposing that we instead re-embrace feudalism or some kind of totalitarianism where the state or some Ubermensch gives us purpose. This includes authoritarian fundamentalist religious movements, the alt-right, neoreaction, etc. This offers the comfort of the "devil we know" and futures that resemble our past.
(3) SpaceX Starship and the next frontier, a future where we embrace difficult adventures in the real world with high risk but high payoff. This offers the least comfort but a lot of growth and experience.
Choose wisely.