531–540 of 1001 posts
Reading about this company just drains my energy and enthusiasm right away. Can't put my finger on why.
You know in the Matrix how human's are the batteries? Well "Meta" is powered in a similar way, except it is your basic humanity (emotions, attention, engagement, self perception) that they drain to keep the lights on.
MANGA sounds more fun then FAANG so that’s nice
The video they put out is extremely cringe. The whole “metaverse” thing is cringe. It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men who never challenge him and only tell him what he likes to hear. He is truly detached from us normal people and our human experience.
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. 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 what they're doing now is any indication, I don't think they'll succeed with it anyway. They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30. Their existing prototypes are outrageously embarrassing. I'm the kind of person that has a hard time watching The Office because I feel second-hand embarrassment, and I can barely make it a minute in to any of their VR demos. They're so uncanny, awkward, and embarrassing…
I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-u...
Even putting Facebook aside Oculus is dominating the VR space due to cheap hardware, which I would bet is a ton of https://www.statista.com/statistics/265018/proportion-of-dir...
My point here is consumers don't _actually_ care about company morals, despite the prevailing narrative.
My god, if you get it, you get it. They are going all in on metaverse / have decided that the future of oculus is the primary long term bet, not facebook itself. And they have the money to make it so. This is incredibly scary, and probably a good investment.
Maybe I'm too old, but I don't know a single person with Oculus, not even among my younger coworkers. I don't discount that it could be the next big thing, because wtf do I know, but it feels very niche to me, and certainly not something that can get the engagement like a phone can. And in terms of money, Facebook itself is a printing press, I wonder what the business model is for this? Selling games or experiences?…
The video they put out is extremely cringe. The whole “metaverse” thing is cringe. It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men who never challenge him and only tell him what he likes to hear. He is truly detached from us normal people and our human experience.
To be fair, that’s the exact same sentiment I remember reading about Zuck on HN around the time Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions happened. People were saying it was one of the dumbest business decisions, that Zuck is just desperate and without any brain trying to spend his FB money on acquisitions before FB inevitably dies of irrelevancy, etc. Look at today, and I think most people would agree that acquiring whats…
And they're still failing to innovate. Facebook now will be "retooling" toward "serving young adults the north star, rather than optimizing for older people." https://twitter.com/sarafischer/status/1452744573084708869
In practice what this means is that they have the same problem they did before, but antitrust scrutiny means they can't buy their way out of it this time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? That's the wrong question. The right question is "how many FB users would accept a free headset that advertisers paid for in exchange for access to your data and exclusive rights to place ads in front of you?"
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-metaverse-10-bil...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I think this is less scary than having Facebook acting as a "public square". A meta-verse has a higher bar of entry than a website - including specialized hardware - and it's less likely that governments and businesses will distribute information exclusively in some meta-verse vs. it just being another channel for content distribution.
Websites once required "specialized hardware". And if you've got today's top end VR rigs, it's sorta obvious that the world is going to go this way - it's too good, and productivity is enhanced on the level of "bicycle for the mind". Plus it'll get way cheaper in the future. Note that I'm not talking about entertainment usecases, which are also good - I'm saying metaverse is clearly the future of work, with massive r…
How exactly? VR is just a display technology, with no new input methods that are even remotely usable for anything like games. How am I going to be better at programming by wearing a VR headset and typing on my keyboard than looking at a screen while typing on my keyboard?
How am I going to be more productive when forecasting prices in Excel on a VR headset than on a screen? When drawing the layout of an integrated circuit? When summarizing news or books?
Sure, it will be easier to visualize a few 3D models, and remote meetings will feel much more natural in VR, but the vast majority of work essentially boils down to either manual work, text manipulation, or fundamentally 2D models.
Unless and until someone comes up with a revolutionary input method with the precision of a mouse and the flexibility of a keyboard (like they did with the touch screen for phones), I don't believe in any claims of a revolution through AR/VR. Only incremental improvements in specialized fields.