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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 i

• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  There's a huge distinction that needs to be made between AR and VR. AR in public is a menace, for the same reason everyone not wearing one hated google glass.
• CerealFounder 5y ago
  Dont worry. Unless they acquire it, they aint building it.
• gscott 5y ago
  Welcome to Ready Player One
  • AlexandrB 5y ago
    Except it's run by Nolan Sorrento from day one.
    • tibbydudeza 5y ago
      So true.
• trentnix 5y ago
  > If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. I don't want them to own it. I'm 100% sure.
• xg15 5y ago
  I think immersive virtual worlds are an absolutely fascinateing topic - even though I don't see how our current ecosystem of centralized services and locked-down devices on the one hand and artificial scarcity by blockchain anarchists on the other hand can lead to anything desirable here. But with the current discussion, I'm surprised we haven't heard more from other players in the field except facebook. What about the makers of VRChat or Second Life? Metaverse-style virtual realities are their bread and butter - and now for the first time, we have a discussion about this subject that includes the larger public. Shouldn't they be all over this? And yet, the only ones talking about the "Metaverse" seems to be Facebook - pardon, Meta. So I wonder, if this whole Metaverse discussion an actual discussion at all or is it just Facebook kicking up dust?
• BummerCloud 5y ago
  In the recent Stratechery interview with Zuckerberg, Mark seemed to indicate FB has no intention of _owning_ the metaverse. Rather, they want to build the technology and platforms that will go towards enabling it. His quote below: >We don’t think about this as if different companies are going to build different metaverses. We think about it in terminology like the Mobile Internet. You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet and I don’t think in the future it will make sense to say that we are building our own metaverse either. I think we’re each building different infrastructure and components that go towards hopefully helping to build this out overall and I think that those pieces will need to work together in some ways. https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerberg-about-the-metaverse/ https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...
  • djokkataja 5y ago
    > You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet Of course not; buying up competitors is much more practical (why build what you can buy?). So this is presumably the same strategy Facebook plans for any competing companies that make successful use of whatever open systems underlie "the metaverse".
• oarabbus_ 5y ago
  >Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up Did you bother to watch the Keynote? That's what they said they are doing.
  • gubatron 5y ago
    nobody watched it. He even mentioned blockchain and NFTs and how it sucks to buy digital items and having them locked into a single platform. Zuckerberg most likely is suffering an existential crisis, he's said before he doesn't know if he'll ever top what he achieved with a project like FB. He knows he's not very liked and he's looking for historic legacy. However, the way the metaverse is developed cannot come only from them, there needs to be a consortium of institutions to debate on open apis, it has worked out so far for the web with W3C. I wonder if there are already any efforts for standard open Metaverse protocols.
• echelon 5y ago
  We could rename metaverse. Maybe derive prefixes from chemistry? Meta, ortho, para. Paraverse. Orthoverse. We can't keep using metaverse now.
  • mattowen_uk 5y ago
    My job has now become more difficult: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Identity_Integration_Server#:~:text=The%20CSEntry%20objects%20are%20then%20mapped%20to%20entries%20in%20the%20metaverse%20called%20metaverse%20objects%20or%20MVEntry%20objects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Identity_Integration....
  • Kinrany 5y ago
    Interverse?
  • anttiharju 5y ago
    Subverse? Universe within a universe, a sub universe.
    • dotnet00 5y ago
      You should try googling that one, preferably not at work, it's taken.
      • anttiharju 5y ago
        Oh my. Too bad - I was kind of proud of the name.
  • shaunxcode 5y ago
    I am fond of holoverse. Holonic not holographic.
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      Holaverse
    • 5y ago
• joshenberg 5y ago
  That's what I wonder. Early VR adopters/technologists hate what happened to Oculus and there aren't a lot of newcomers to that market. I don't think cheaper headsets are going to fix that in the near future so I don't know whom they're targeting. Seems risky to lean into something where the experts already think you screwed up.
  • b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Quest 2 is outselling past VR headsets by leaps and bounds according to news reports. The decision to make a standalone headset and build their own app platform was absolutely the right one from a growth standpoint, even if the hardcore VR consumers aren't biting. Early VR adopters are going to buy the next best product and have no loyalty.
    • CoolGuySteve 5y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if the next gen Switch has a VR headset accessory and blows the entire market away the same way the iPod and NES did to their predecessors. The required parts to make a 60Hz 1080p headset are entering the $100 cell phone market and that segment of components are more or less what Nintendo traditionally uses in its handhelds. Nintendo also has a long history of "blue ocean" products that tweak existing technologies to make them more mainstream.
      • ChildOfChaos 5y ago
        Very unlikely we will see it from Nintendo, Nintendo have lacked innovation for ages, they just sell cutesy games to kids. They cornered the 'disney' market, don't expect them to do anything great from a tech perspective
        • CoolGuySteve 5y ago
          You're talking about the company that over the past 15 years introduced consoles with motion controls, touch screens, autostereoscopic 3D, proximity-based data sharing, wireless HDMI streaming, and seamless docking support? That one? That company lacks innovation?
• swalsh 5y ago
  There needs to be many metaverses, and NFT's should be able to be shared between them. It's dangerous to think about the prospect of a major company like Facebook (Or a DAO for that matter) locking up the entire universe.
  • jimkleiber 5y ago
    Agreed, I'm pro multimetaverse. I'm also pro democratic-representation metaverse.
  • vineyardmike 5y ago
    Why NFT? Why can't we just "import jpeg" instead of "link NFT"?
    • swalsh 5y ago
      NFT's let you own digital assets. That means people can make a real living building them.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • RC_ITR 5y ago
        Because no one has ever made a living designing graphics before NFTs?
      • uuddlrlr 5y ago
        NFTs let you own autographs of digital assets. Which is cool. If it weren't for the energy use.
      • stale2002 5y ago
        People don't have to pay for VR avatars when playing VRChat. Forced monetization of all that, is a bad thing, not a good thing.
      • vorpalhex 5y ago
• bduerst 5y ago
  I thought the market has repeatedly shown there isn't much demand for persistent virtual worlds?
  • ARandomerDude 5y ago
    Don't question it, just drink your Kool-Aid.
  • Kye 5y ago
    VRChat seems to have landed on something close to the right balance of whatever it takes to make it happen. It's apparently easy enough for someone to make a whole meme world for an event in the news in time for it to be relevant: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/11/9/21557029/four-seasons-total-landscaping-furries-vrchat-trump https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/11/9/21557029/four-season... The video in the initial tweet is up to 2.1 million views: https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560?lang=en https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560?... VRChat or someone building on their proof of concept is likely to make it happen. It won't be Facebook with its VR Slack.
    • echelon 5y ago
      Facebook will try to buy VRChat.
      • astlouis44 5y ago
        1000% this, it's only a matter of time.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • bsanr 5y ago
      If only. Arguably, part of their secret sauce is their restrictiveness of new users. You have to spend quite a bit of time in-game to gain the ability to even be seen by a lot of other users, and more still to be able to upload avatars and worlds. I'd planned on opening an art gallery space on the platform this summer, only to find that I didn't have enough friends to reach the "trust" level necessary to upload worlds. It's probably a good thing for the quality of the community itself, but anathema to growth or casual use. (And as for me, I'm stuck trying to figure out how to hack up a WebXR experience with, ah, limited programming skills. Until then, it should be at https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_559152a2-44d3-442c-88f2-9a4907de922e https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_559152a2-44d3-44... , but it's inaccessible without adding me as a friend and accepting an invitation to an instance I spin up. So, practically useless. And support is no help in terms of what, exactly, I'd need to do to raise my trust level.)
• jfmc 5y ago
  A Facebook-controlled metaverse, rising gas prices... it is only a matter of time that humans ends up being used as batteries.
  • glogla 5y ago
    Fun fact, in Matrix (if that's what you're referring to) people were originally enslaved by the machines to provide compute capacity of their brains. The battery part came later, when someone (studio executives?) jumped in, and said that's too smart and people wouldn't get it so it was changed to batteries.
    • dstroot 5y ago
      Meta already has enough compute capacity. They have enslaved humans to mine their wallets.
    • lovecg 5y ago
      That makes way more sense too. Human brains are pretty complex devices, it’s easy to believe the machines didn’t figure out how to make something comparable and opted for human farming instead. On the other hand humans make very crappy batteries, how does that science even work.
      • sundarurfriend 5y ago
        MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living - NEO (politely): Excuse me, please. MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo? NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics? MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo? NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics! MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo? (Pause.) NEO: ...in the Matrix. MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies. (Pause.) NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook? MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math. - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/64/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/64/Harry-Potter-and-the...
• mdoms 5y ago
  > Federate it a bit more than they are comfortable with, to at least give it a chance. I have yet to see a single federated system that has demonstrated commercial success. There's no reason to believe that strategy would result in greater success than Facebook's usual playbook, which is proven.
  • rektide 5y ago
    The world wide web used to have a host of proprietary servers for it, but those for the most part got eaten by Apache (which latter renamed to Apache Http Server). And then a host of new open-source http servers and libraries. Sometimes what's good for markets & the world doesn't have to be owned & commercial. Sometimes the availability of resources such as info-resources like httpd can beget enormous commercial success while themselves not having much commercial success. A Tim O'Reilly saying comes to mind: create more value than you capture. In some cases, without setting free the core idea & letting people run wild, you'll never stand a chance of capturing any value what-so-ever.
• ssully 5y ago
  Our version of a persistent virtual space was never going to be like fiction. There will be 3 or more competing metaverses, none of which have any interoperability.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    Or hundreds of incompatible little ones. If VR really takes off "We need to add chat to our app" will become "We need to add our own metaverse to our app."
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • mattowen_uk 5y ago
      I predict that VR will really take off at the same time as 'The Year of the Linux Desktop'.
  • m4rtink 5y ago
    That can actually end up more healthy overall & lead to some competition. Having just one metaverse everyone uses seamed like the worst thing in Ready Player One - because then one entity can control it and for their rules and morals on all participants. Much harder to do that with multiple competing incompatible metaverses.
• jeffwask 5y ago
  > 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. One step closer to real life Shadowrun.
  • neuronexmachina 5y ago
    Or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which coined the term "metaverse."
    • thesquib 5y ago
      And had a virus that transmitted to humans via the metaverse. Very apt for Facebook to choose this actually
    • JohnFen 5y ago
      I genuinely wonder why Facebook thinks that using that term is a smart thing, considering that Snow Crash is a pretty heavily dystopian novel where everything is owned and run by corrupt, powerful, and abusive corporations. It really seems like they're tipping their hand here.
      • int_19h 5y ago
        Snow Crash is literally the first thing that came to my mind when I saw FB talking about "metaverse". And not only it is a dystopia, but the Big Bad in the story is literally the guy who owns the physical metaverse infrastructure: > “I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse — the entire Street — exists by virtue of a network that I own and control. He's also pretty open about his methods: > “Yeah, you know, a monopolist’s work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.” ... “Y’know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted up Ma Bell?” “Just barely.” The reporter is a woman in her twenties. “You know what it was, right?” “Voice communications monopoly.” “Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business. Moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, one at a time. Government busted them up—at the same time when I was starting cable TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It’s like if they figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the airplane were being introduced.”
• randomsearch 5y ago
  Facebook can’t even beat TikTok. They’r not going to win at building an alternate reality.
• angelzen 5y ago
  Who do you want to own it?
• tlrobinson 5y ago
  > 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 the "metaworlds" making up the metaverse ("digital identity scarcity" is still an unsolved problem though, I think)
  • jrochkind1 5y ago
    What are the motivations of the other players? > enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data are instead motivated by selling users things they don't need.
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    >enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free.
  • cpeterso 5y ago
    > I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse. Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/ https://hubs.mozilla.com/
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • danShumway 5y ago
    > 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 advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction. It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems. We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.
• mrweasel 5y ago
  While I’m not interested in VR at all, and only feel like should be used in limited areas, I agree on the issue of Facebook owning “the metaverse”. Many of the early adopters are already of Facebook and/or dislike the company, meaning that there are few people to help push the products.
• hackernudes 5y ago
  I think there is at least a chance that they handle Meta differently - at 1:28:24 in the keynote[1] Zuck says "...that means that, over time, you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services". [1] https://www.facebook.com/facebookrealitylabs/videos/561535698440683/ https://www.facebook.com/facebookrealitylabs/videos/56153569...
  • RC_ITR 5y ago
    Yeah, he means you'll need a "Meta" account.
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > I'm personally keen on the AR/VR space (surrounded by headsets here), but the early adopters are so polarized about Facebook/Oculus's involvement. There is no polarization at all. I don't know a single person who is happy about being forced to use FB in order to be able to use the equipment they have bought.
• carbonguy 5y ago
  > 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 for users, but: a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally* able to give up ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, basically b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free? And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed). * in the sense of "this is the fundamental basis and goal of the company," not in a U.S.-founding-document sense
  • cbtacy 5y ago
    > 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?"
    • srveale 5y ago
      We can answer this by looking at how many facebook users are okay (implicitly) with using facebook in exchange for access to their data and exclusive rights to place ads right in front of them. The answer is 100%
      • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        There's a world of difference between sharing cat/dinner/vacation photos with friends and family and living in some kind of fantasy animated cartoon world. The social dynamics are completely different. Second Life showed that very clearly. The three biggest things in Second Life were fantasy consumerism, fantasy entrepreneurship, and fantasy sex. Unless FB is getting into those markets it's going to find the metaverse a tough sell. Not least because the whole point of fantasy is that it's not really you. So that immediately conflicts with FB's only-real-identities dogma.
• rl3 5y ago
  >It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story. That feeling when you don't have a single original idea, and unironically view Black Mirror episodes as a blueprint.
• api 5y ago
  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 burst destroys them. Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship. There seem to be three possible futures on offer today: (1) A Brave New World with AR, VR, social media dopamine loops, ARGs and conspiracy LARPs, cheap drugs, and sex robots where the meaning of life is to withdraw into a fantasy world and masturbate until you die. This offers the comfort of rewards without challenges. (2) Reactionary movements against modernity itself, proposing that we instead re-embrace feudalism or some kind of totalitarianism where the state or some Ubermensch gives us purpose. This includes authoritarian fundamentalist religious movements, the alt-right, neoreaction, etc. This offers the comfort of the "devil we know" and futures that resemble our past. (3) SpaceX Starship and the next frontier, a future where we embrace difficult adventures in the real world with high risk but high payoff. This offers the least comfort but a lot of growth and experience. Choose wisely.
  • tsimionescu 5y ago
    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.
    • api 5y ago
      I didn't include that because I don't see a workable, viable proposal. My intention was to list futures that I can see actually happening. I'm not against what you describe nor do I think it's mutually exclusive with option (3), but so far IMHO leftists have offered no solution to some of the inherent problems of this vision. The biggest one is how to make democracy work. How do you do good work under a democratic model? The Soviet bureaucratic model isn't truly democratic and as every engineer knows nothing good ever comes from a committee. How can democratic governance produce efficient, polished, practical, cost effective outputs? How do you avoid perverse incentives, runaway complexity, endless bikeshedding, or stagnation due to "vetocracy" like what exists with California housing? How do you prevent the seemingly natural formation of an oligarchy? So far I don't think democracy has ever existed except at tribal scale (below Dunbar's Number). All former and current attempts are oligarchies with a degree of democratic veto power or a democratic facade. I think this problem is closely isomorphic or maybe even identical to the open problem of efficient and secure fully decentralized computing and global consensus in distributed systems without hidden centralization or brute force approaches like Bitcoin proof of work. (... and Bitcoin PoW is in reality an oligarchy if you look at the largest pools ...)
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Someone will own it, every option involves human owners…
• Tepix 5y ago
  Facebook is investing 10 billion dollars into the metaverse this year alone and will increase this amount in the future. They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web and still end up with one of the most popular hubs. If people who value their privacy can setup their own hubs, i'm pretty much OK with Facebook speeding up the advancement of AR/VR technology for the next several years using their advertisement dollars.
  • micromacrofoot 5y ago
    >They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web Thanks I needed the laugh.
    • gubatron 5y ago
      you need to watch the keynote. Zuckerberg wants to leave behind a better legacy.
    • jephdo 5y ago
      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 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. https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerberg-about-the-metaverse/ https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...
      • int_19h 5y ago
        Talk is cheap. When did Facebook ever care about interop?
      • micromacrofoot 5y ago
• gdilla 5y ago
  It's their metaverse. A walled garden metaverse. So maybe that isn't really a metaverse, but what they want you to think about a metaverse.
  • dmix 5y ago
    Zuckerberg repeatedly tried to say it will be an open standard with interop like HTTP links. Zero indication what that means. If I was FB I would have announced at least a protocol or some technical foundation, even if it's purely preview.
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  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 embarrassingly goofy. At least The Office has some endearing quality (sorry for the weird comparison). I'm not sure if it's Mark Zuckerberg's influence or what... but everything about Facebook lacks some sort of jour de vive. Like, their idea of "making work fun" is stuff like... an astoundingly cringe-worth video about healthcare open-enrollment? This kind of thing dumbfounds me https://vimeo.com/639318528 https://vimeo.com/639318528... and I don't even consider myself a cynical person. All of this feels only a few degrees removed from Jonestown.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • n1ghtmare_ 5y ago
    I feel exactly the same way about Memojis, yet people use them and apparently don’t find them as cringy as I do.
  • arduinomancer 5y ago
    > They've got almost zero credibility with anyone under 30 I'm not a fan of facebook either but this is simply not true. < 30 is the _largest_ proportion of facebook users https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-user-age-distribution/ 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 < 30 people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265018/proportion-of-directx-versions-on-the-platform-steam/ 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.
    • micromacrofoot 5y ago
      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.
• Krasnol 5y ago
  > 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. Wouldn't that be fitting because the word comes from a bad sci-fi pulp story?
• dropnerd 5y ago
  every hn top thread about fb says "we don't want fb to do this" or "fb is evil" whether you agree or disagree, the more interesting question is the details behind what Meta could build the answer is not federation. federation doesn't scale.
  • rdrey 5y ago
    Could you flesh out the "federation doesn't scale" argument a bit?
    • dropnerd 5y ago
      https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ > So while it’s nice that I’m able to host my own email, that’s also the reason why my email isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update. So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today.
      • charcircuit 5y ago
        If Google required end to end encryption else people's messages go to spam, email administrators would go and update their systems.
        • giantrobot 5y ago
          That's not how E2E encryption works. It's not just e-mail administrators updating their systems. Every client would need to support whatever E2E encryption scheme chosen. That's hundreds of individual client applications (potentially thousands counting various versions) that would need to be updated. Contrast with WhatsApp where they control the entire stack from client to network to server. They can push a single set of updates and everyone has the new hotness.
• stephenhuey 5y ago
  75 minutes into his keynote, he said: "…but connecting people was always much bigger…it was always clear that the dream was to feel present with the people we care about…here we are in 2021, and our devices are still designed around apps, not people. The experiences we’re allowed to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever, and high taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the way that we are meant to use technology. The Metaverse gives us an opportunity to change that, if we build it well. But it’s going to take all of us…Together, we can create a more open platform." When he says this, I hear between the lines that the platform will be open to all contributors as long as the "open platform" belongs to Meta. How does he not realize that by seeking to dominate and own this "open platform" instead of working outside of his company to build a truly open platform with others is actually open? Does he not read enough sci fi or literature in general to know that by having so much power and not seeking to let go a bit more, he opens himself up to the same risks and temptations faced by myriad dystopian villains?
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb485/zuckerberg-facebook-new-name-meta-metaverse-presentation https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb485/zuckerberg-facebook-n... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/facebooks-new-name-is-meta https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/faceboo... The BuzzFeed journalist shared a video on her Twitter that illustrates use of metaverse by Facebook HR https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos https://player.vimeo.com/video/639318528 https://player.vimeo.com/video/639318528 (Ctrl+U, Ctrl+F mp4) https://archive.org/download/facebook_open_enrollment_2022/Facebook%20-%20Open%20Enrollment%202022_FHD_DOWNLOAD.mp4 https://archive.org/download/facebook_open_enrollment_2022/F... What the journalists are not discussing is whether and how "the metaverse" will be used to surveil people and support advertising. No discussion of whether/how it embodies "privacy by design". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design
• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I don't want any company to own it. I want it to be open technology that somehow exists completely independently of companies and governments. If a company must own it, I certainly don't want it to be an advertising company, least of all Facebook.
• rhizome 5y ago
  What do you mean, "not sure?!" "If you can't change the product, change the packaging."
• fabianhjr 5y ago
  > 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. No one should own it, the only non-dystopian metaverse would be open hardware and software and decentralized/p2p connectivity.
• theelous3 5y ago
  > not sure I am absolutely certain that nobody should own it.