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Facebook Renames to Meta

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Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#791

Post by philistine »

wodenokoto wrote: post #632
wpietri wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pay young kids to install a VPN on their phone and look at what they're installing and you too can buy as well as Mr. Zuckerberg!

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#792

Post by freewilly1040 »

tubby12345 wrote: post #592
wpietri wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were great acquisitions because Facebook failed to compete in those markets. Facebook continues to fail to compete in the youth market. I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen. 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://twitt…

>I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen. I mean this is classic moving of goals posts - the only measure of acumen the CEO of a publically traded company is that little number called the share price. whether he buoys that number by brain-genius innovations or by brain-genius acquisitions, he's still demonstrating brain-genius business acumen (the proo…

Even granting him that WhatsApp and Instagram were indeed savvy purchases, I think it is fair to say that purchasing nascent competitors is no longer a tool available to Facebook. Both because antitrust scrutiny and because those competitors likely don’t fear Facebook’s copycat routine like they once did.

New product launches have indeed gone poorly. This certainly looks terrible to my eyes. Time will tell but skepticism is warranted.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#793

Post by sounds »

polote wrote: post #378
brap wrote: post #125

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.

> 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…

The internal leadership at Facebook are all yes-men, from personal experience.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#794

Post by bredren »

baby wrote: post #392
bredren wrote: post #321

Couple quick things: Zuck's speaking has improved an incredible amount. So, props there. Zuck's said a few variations of "building blocks are there" or "it is coming together" but also, "Even though it is still a long way off..." This projection / demo video of the metaverse seems like a distraction to me. If FB doesn't have this to deliver, it is a lot like the old microsoft product concept videos. [1] What is the i…

I mean, you gotta make people excited about the future, and I think they were successful in doing that here. They want to be an innovative company, as opposed to just a social network company, that's the pitch.

Then I would have not spent so much time showing off silly games that don’t exist / are not even planned, like the hydro foil thing.

They could have talked about how they do innovative tech research across the spectrum.

For example, they can reasonably take credit for react as a major open source contribution. Why not describe plans for doing the same in helping people build for the metaverse.

It felt way too surface level to me.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#795

Post by Karrot_Kream »

danShumway wrote: post #737
tlrobinson wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising company to be building "the metaverse". I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse. It's one use-case I can kind of see benefiting from blockchain protocols: enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse, by recording transfers of avatars and assets between…

> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one? Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advanta…

On the flip side, a lot of people posit that it's exactly this mentality that caused the creation of the advertising profit model in the first place. Net users were unwilling to pay for content because content is trivially copyable, and the early net was idealistic so "Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors". Advertising was a way to sidestep this problem altogether and turn users into the product rather than the product itself, since nobody was actually willing to pay for the product.

Humans want to enforce certain forms of scarcity. Trying to be utopian about it just ends up creating unintended externalities.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#796

Post by JetSpiegel »

T-A wrote: post #730
koonsolo wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Facebook and Zuch can't be that stupid. But for me, I can't see this working. There is no VR game that really killed it. I also don't see which generation would actually be into this. So it's not a "idiots!", but more of a "what am I missing here?". Will be interesting to see this play out

> I also don't see which generation would actually be into this. Roblox has more than 200 million daily active users; 67% of them are under 16 [1]. Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling? [1] https://backlinko.com/roblox-users

> Where will they go when hormones hit and blocky avatars no longer seem all that compelling?

To college, where actual humans will be available for porking at all hours. If this Meta thing is a success, there might not be a following generation.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#797

Post by da39a3ee »

What are the plans for preventing people from simulating sexual encounters with virtual likenesses of real people?

It seems that in order to prevent that, we need some sort of security technology preventing me from being able to create computer programs / VR plugins that can simulate that visual experience. If so, does that mean that we're going to need some sort of fingerprinting technology that can determine whether a VR humanoid is a likeness of a real human?

Or is the plan "ban sexual content in VR worlds"?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#798

Post by anyonecancode »

I assume this is short for "metastatic"?

--

Ok, acknowledged throwaway line. To try and save this and at least make this at least slightly more substantial -- I'm skeptical of VR becoming seriously mainstream, in the near term or perhaps ever. I'd say I hope FB goes all in and ends up burning up all their money, except I could see it being a profitable niche, giving them money to continue negatively impacting the mainstream non-metaverse online world.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#800

Post by mbreese »

wpietri wrote: post #511
brap wrote: post #125

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.

There's a concept I find really useful: Acquired Situational Narcissism. If somebody spends enough time in an environment where everything is about them, they can easily come to believe everything is about them. Another thing I think is at play is people confusing luck with genius. Zuckerberg is clearly smart, but Facebook was also a right-time, right-place thing. As FaceMash and Facebook showed, he understood his au…

> I mean, I too read and like Snow Crash

That's my take on it too. I don't really feel the metaverse in Snow Crash was something that I'd like to replicate. I mean, it's a cool idea, but that world is not one that I'd intentionally try to make.

Whether or not we are on our way that direction is another question entirely...

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