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Facebook Renames to Meta

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Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#841

Post by tekknik »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #567
arduinomancer wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30 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 c…

This isn't a statement about morals. I agree that no one cares about those. It's a statement that no one thinks "oh cool facebook" about literally anything they say or do. Their greatest successes in terms of social capital over the last decade have involved buying other companies. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems while everyone uses Facebook to some extent... no one likes it.

> Maybe I'm in a bubble, but it seems while everyone uses Facebook to some extent... no one likes it.

Hey now, not everybody is on FB.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#842

Post by musicale »

musicale wrote: post #799

dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29033358 but I'll add my dup comment for good measure: META: Make Everything Terrible Again

Wrong thread, and I can't seem to edit parent post for some reason; however I will add...

It's a synthesis of the core features of social media:

Misinformation, Enragement, Tracking & Advertisements

or perhaps a more truthful mission statement for tech companies:

Make Everyone Technologically Addicted

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#843

Post by yuuu »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #281

I know most of us aren't looking forward to a future with Facebook in control, but ask yourself: How many times has Zuckerberg been wrong about tech trends? I can't think of a single time. He's gotten every major investment correct. This metaverse idea will either be the first major Facebook misstep, or it's a future we should embrace sooner than later. You stand to win big if you're an early adopter on any given pla…

I think you're 100% right. I'll be laughing at all of the criticism in this thread ten years from now.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#844

Post by possibleworlds »

potatolicious wrote: post #765
danShumway wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Absolutely - this is what frustrates me most about the discourse around the metaverse - the insistence that a virtual world of limitless possibility be unnecessarily bound by the worst aspects of the real world. Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel t…

You’ve just clarified a thought I hadn’t fully formed about NFTs (since I try my hardest not to think about them)… they could define a model whereby creators receive an ongoing cut from transfer of ownership. And this could be applicable in the broader sense you are talking about in your last paragraph, eg many copies (mp3 sales) or licensing (streaming services). Time could become an NFT, giving all the contributors to a film or workers at a company a share of profit. I mean that would be truly revolutionary.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#846

Post by tekknik »

spideymans wrote: post #412
eli wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oculus sold 2 of every 3 VR headsets last quarter. If there's a lesson here, it's that you can't extrapolate mass market appeal from what early adopters think.

VR and AR is still in its early adoption phase. It's too early to make any predictions about which VR/AR platforms or products will ultimately have mass market appeal. As an analogy, none of the biggest smartphone manufactures in 2004 really ended up mattering in the long run.

This is the second attempt at VR. It had one attempt, died and now here we go again. Answer a few simple but important questions.

1) How do I share something physical with friends remotely in VR? Think food and drinks.

2) How do my other senses come into play? What if I want to smell my mothers perfume? Or feel and smell the ocean breeze?

3) Walking

There are still very large blockers we simply don’t have the technology for. This attempt will fail just the same.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#847

Post by TimJRobinson »

silisili wrote: post #428
acchow wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common argument for why humanity has never encountered extra-terrestrial life is that any hyper advanced civilization likely moved into a virtual world. Do you believe this is unlikely and humanity is not headed in this direction?

I don't believe humanity or any civilization could survive. It's pure hedonism, really. How does reproduction even occur? And if everyone in the first world is plugged in, what keeps a third world nation from just taking everything? Or killing off the power grid? It would take a massive scale of agreement to even allow that to work. Outside of that, I am a big believer in, well I don't know the name for it. But you m…

> Anyone in a virtual world would likely never choose scenarios that cause such things. So there'd be no real true joy in this virtual life. Life is fleeting.

Why not? I watch sad and scary movies all the time to experience those emotions.

You can also have virtual struggle and striving to achieve virtual items that are to many people just as rewarding as real world items.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#848

Post by unphased »

api wrote: post #350
daviding wrote: post #36

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…

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 bu…

> Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.

You say this with a maybe as though it isn't already a certainty.

Nothing can stop it from happening. There will always be brainpower available, willing, and capable of contributing to computer aided fantasy and isolation. Not that it has to necessarily be a bad thing, mind.

OTOH plenty of things could make it impossible to succeed with a starship.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#849

Post by danShumway »

possibleworlds wrote: post #844
potatolicious wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - this is what frustrates me most about the discourse around the metaverse - the insistence that a virtual world of limitless possibility be unnecessarily bound by the worst aspects of the real world. Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel t…

You’ve just clarified a thought I hadn’t fully formed about NFTs (since I try my hardest not to think about them)… they could define a model whereby creators receive an ongoing cut from transfer of ownership. And this could be applicable in the broader sense you are talking about in your last paragraph, eg many copies (mp3 sales) or licensing (streaming services). Time could become an NFT, giving all the contributors…

At the point where NFTs become a "many copies" model, are they NFTs anymore? It seems like "non-fungible" and "copy" are in contradiction.

More importantly, do we actually want to try and cement a system of perpetual ownership or revenue in an abundant digital world? Doesn't this go directly against our goal of encouraging creators to keep creating?

I think that one of the downside of current content models based on IP and access rights are that many companies (from Disney to Nintendo) have discovered that they can augment their revenue streams basically in perpetuity by locking down decades-old pieces of content, preventing other people from building on that content or sharing it, and then endlessly reselling and recycling it. Because they have the ability to restrict even normal people from building on their work in even non-commercial settings, they have no real competition or incentive to keep iterating on their work or to be responsible stewards of their IP. This is not the outcome that we wanted from IP law, and I feel very hesitant to try and cement it into a technology.

> from transfer of ownership

I think an important concept to get about the Internet is that content ownership isn't scarce. We have moved into a world where I can give something to you without losing it myself. There is no "transfer" of ownership at all, in the digital world there is duplication of ownership. This is a giant shift from how the real world usually works; and with our laws/businesses, we have made a deliberate choice online to ignore that paradigm shift and instead try our absolute hardest to make sure that "ownership" continues to be an exclusive right that can be transferred.

It's understandable why we've gone down this route, but it is nevertheless a complete denial of what an interconnected digital medium is and what it's capable of. I hope that as we move forward and continue to iterate on the Internet that we gradually get closer to embracing the Internet's strengths rather than hobbling them.

Ignoring all of the other criticisms of NFTs for a second, the underlying goal of NFTs as a technology is to undo the existence of digital files. It's to undo the invention of copyable data and to step backwards out of the Internet back into an older world where when you handed someone a CD you no longer had the CD. I think that even if all of the other problems with NFTs were fixed, that's still just not a goal that's worth pursuing.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#850

Post by danShumway »

modeless wrote: post #102

Other 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…

> we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account

I mean... Quest had this ability before. And Facebook took it away. And now they want us to clap for them when they say they're kind of bringing it back, at some point in the future, in some kind of limited capacity for work accounts?

Call me skeptical.

I'm not really aware of any platform (including Quest) where I would say that Facebook is doing a good job of supporting consumer choice, and I've read plenty of leaked internal communications from the company that suggests they're internally pretty hostile to the idea (Mark included).

Maybe they've turned over a new leaf, but if Mark wants us to all give him the benefit of the doubt that a metaverse is going to be different, he could start by showing this commitment with... any of their current products, really.

There's a lot of talk here about how Facebook is going to be moving into the bold new world of user agency and privacy and choice, and not much acknowledgement that Facebook is responsible for making these platforms what they are today. I don't like Mark's subtle insinuation that Facebook is doing something new or bold by getting rid of restrictions on Oculus that he created. Especially when he hasn't actually fixed the problem, he's just vaguely assured people that the problem might get fixed a year from now, maybe.

He wants credit for swinging in a new direction, and he hasn't actually swung in that direction. Well, prove it, Mark. Prove it with your existing products before you start bragging about how good your next product will be.

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