Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Renames to Meta

about.facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 1001 posts

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#631

Post by carbonguy »

Tenoke wrote: post #574
carbonguy wrote: post #304

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? 20-50 times what they earn per user.

I doubt it's THAT high a multiple - in 2020 they earned just over $32 per user [1] and an Oculus Quest 2 retails for $299; one assumes the manufacturing cost is lower, meaning the multiple is likely 9x or less.

Of course, the essence of your point is true: Facebook doesn't make as much per year per user on average as a headset costs.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#632

Post by wodenokoto »

wpietri wrote: post #522
polote wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me believe Zuckerberg is completely surrounded by yes-men I feel like the opposite. Zuck is the only one to believe in the metaverse and as a result people who worked on the communication did it badly without a lot of conviction. He is in a pretty comfortable position, one of the richest people on earth doing 20% of growth every year. And still he wants to make a big risky bet like this one. I'm not really…

What things would those be? As far as I know his successes are a) 1 idea he had as a 19-year-old plus b) some other things that he bought with the money from that.

Well, he sure knows what to buy.

Remember when he bought Instagram for a billion dollars? That amount seemed unreasonable high back then. Looking back though ... I'd wish I could spend money as well as Zuckerberg.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#633

Post by lwansbrough »

distrill wrote: post #23
quartz wrote: post #3

https://meta.com is live as well. ...I can't tell if it's intentional that the page loads initially with the "facebook" brand in the uppper left and then quickly overwrites it with meta.

It's definitely intentional

It's definitely not intentional. If it was intentional it would be animated, and there's no indication in the HTML that it's anything more than a FOUC.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#635

Post by Ancapistani »

AlexandrB wrote: post #508
nyt-maps wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know if I agree. Most of my job is typing text into various boxes - web-apps, text-editors, terminals. Fundamentally, long-term productivity in this task is about ergonomics. Wearing something on my head for 8+ hours is like anti-ergonomics, and the benefits are dubious. I could have a bunch of virtual displays in a meta-space, or I could just area bunch of real monitors. And the latter solution is generally…

> Wearing something on my head for 8+ hours is like anti-ergonomics, and the benefits are dubious.

Playing Devil's Advocate here, but I'm already wearing something on my head for ~16 hours per day - my eyeglasses.

The issue here is only that the current generation of devices aren't yet suitable for long-term use.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#640

Post by mindcandy »

charcircuit wrote: post #588
joshmarlow wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The neat thing about using NFTs is that you can represent the ownership on a public blockchain and that gives you some nice possibilities: 1) storing virtual property rights on a public ledger means that it can be shared among different 'metaverses', which provides friction against vendor lock-in; it limits specific vendors (like Facebook) to only providing UIs to underlying property 2) a single vendor going out of b…

>Blizzard could shutdown WOW and you would loose all of your loot, but if it's on a public ledger then your loot survives Your loot is worthless without the game. Why would you still want it?

There's a whole lot of BS in NFTs at the moment. But, there is one thing they are good for: Everyone is crying out for a decentralized, interoperable metaverse that is not walled-off and owned by corporations. OK. So, how does anything of monetary value interoperate in that scenario?

So, you can make your metaverse service, I can make mine, and we can both interoperate by supporting each other's APIs. But, some of our services cost us significant money to provide and have market value to our users. We can make with work out for everyone by recognizing ownership of certain NFTs as decentralized verification that a given user has rights to things of value in our services.

We don't have a lot of examples of this so far because corporations are incentivized to wall you off from their competition and the public has not the means to securely control and verify value outside of the blessings of the corporations. But, now we can do it without them.

Post reply on HN