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Facebook Renames to Meta

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Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#951

Post by Mindwipe »

giantrobot wrote: post #945
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 Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory? One of the great…

> Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse?

Because as Second Life demonstrated we don't seem to have many good ideas for incentivising creation otherwise.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#953

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #716
wolverine876 wrote: post #573

Earlier 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 I don't think we should take that at face value; Zuckerberg of course has strong motivations to appear completely committed, including a desire to motivate employees, partners, etc., and a desire to distract from FB's current bad news (which might explain the timing…

> The iPhone went on sale months after Jobs' announcement (IIRC). yes, but thats a different CEO who was about presenting themselves as perfect. Zuckerberg for his legion of faults has never done this. He is far more comfortable saying what he wants to deliver _first_ > don't think we should take that at face value We don't need to, they've handily split out the amount of money they are pouring into this in the publi…

> It was fucking stupid to try and link them so closely in the first place. Instagram was a cool brand. Instagram by facebook is deffo not.

Yeah, that was not a smart business decision. I think the goal was to make it look like FB was cool by associating it with the other brands, but all it did was make the other brands worse.

That's the kind of craziness you can get from a founder that controls everything I suppose.

Bear in mind that Mark Zuckerberg has only ever worked at Facebook, which must be pretty weird.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#954

Post by streamofdigits »

tsimionescu wrote: post #443
api wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are also leftist visions of a future world where we actually address the core problems plaguing our world and give workers democratic control over their own work, instead of leaving that up to wage slave owners who view all of us as human resources.

There is a meta vision (pun) that is bigger than a "leftist vision", in the sense enlightenment and humanism is a very deep well that originates much more than the debate about particular economic system designs, capital formation, ownership and employment contracts etc.

It feels as if abusive societies are the norm (and we have seen that in breathtakingly dark glory with the ascent of surveillance capitalism) but the historical pattern seems to be pointing to the gradual discovery of tools (institutions, behaviors) that eliminate these local minima. Alas it may not be happening fast enough to prevent drifting into a bottomless pit.

The main current issue with the "metaverse", imho, is not who will control it, but is it actually a breakthrough communications technology that is worthwhile developing to its "full" potential? Its "wow" factor feels really gimmicky. I am thinking that if it feels like a gimmick maybe it is a gimmick. But I do acknowledge that a combination of preliminary implementations and not have discovered yet the use cases what would really make it worthwhile may change the picture at a future point.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#955

Post by deltron3030 »

jephdo wrote: post #698
micromacrofoot wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web Thanks I needed the laugh.

Fwiw that is the stated intention: > I think the most important piece here is that the virtual goods and digital economy that’s going to get built out, that that can be interoperable. It’s not just about you build an app or an experience that can work across our headset or someone else’s, I think it’s really important that basically if you have your avatar and your digital clothes and your digital tools and the exper…

> MZ: I think it’s really important that basically if you have your avatar and your digital clothes and your digital tools and the experiences around that — I think being able to take that to other experiences that other people build, whether it’s on a platform that we’re building or not, is going to be really foundational and will unlock a lot of value if that’s a thing that we can do.

A digital identity registry/provider? Did they finally recognize that gamers or people in virtual worlds want to escape their RL identity?

Or is it just another hopeless try to enforce their digital "singular identity" authoritarianism?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#956

Post by rvense »

uuddlrlr wrote: post #344
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…

>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

It is a strange phenomenon, in that it is so nonsensical, yet so ingrained and self-perpetuating in a way. I can actually agree that it qualifies as a "duty", because it's something the people who make up the corporation honestly feel morally bound to. The idea seems to have become sort of a load-bearing neurosis in the Modern Yuppie. If and when we, by some act of cultural psychiatry, remove it entirely, that's a lot of personalities that are going to just crumble, and I don't know if there are enough hiking trails in California for the finance dude(tte)s in sillycon valley set to all find themselves again...

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#957

Post by slightwinder »

debaserab2 wrote: post #609
bmhin wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the market has repeatedly shown there isn't much demand for persistent virtual worlds I don't know if you have a more narrow view of this idea or specifically mean VR/AR, but that just sounds like what massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft are. I think Roblox is even a broader use case, though I am fairly unfamiliar with that. MMOs have been very viable fro…

> MMOs have been very viable from both a business Really? Everything that's not named World of Warcraft seems to die out, usually in less than a year. It's a genre that's been a notorious recipe for failure for most companies not named Blizzard.

World of Warcraft is RPG. Not all MMO are MMORPGs. And there are now many MMORPGs which are similar size or even bigger than WoW is now, for years already. Though, it's true that outside asia no RPG seems to be as big as WoW was at it's peak.

But MMO in general today are massive, far bigger than WoW ever was. Though, there is also far more diversity regarding world-sizes. From smaller worlds for some dozen to hundred users, to bigger world with thousands and ten thousands, to the big massive virtual continents that WoWs era defined, we have them all now.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#958

Post by neilparikh »

spookthesunset wrote: post #786
odiroot wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we finally remove Netflix which doesn't fit in here? We can always replace it with Microsoft.

Yeah, I dunno how netflix is in that acronym and not Microsoft. If you are gonna put in "netflix" might as well include salesforce, dropbox or github.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#959

Post by Aeolun »

lnanek2 wrote: post #729
micromacrofoot wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you sure you aren't living in a techie bubble? Oculus consistently tops the best selling headsets list at amazon cnet, PCMag, etc.. The only non-developers I know with headsets all have Oculus or more rarely PSVR. Maybe they aren't cutting edge, but everyday people can't afford cutting edge anyway. They burned a lot of developer cred. by going back on the promise not to require Facebook login with Oculus, but the…

Plus they think the fact it works with a facebook account is a feature, not a bug.
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