13 ms·

Meta

242 points by simonebrunozzi 5y ago

drumhead 5y ago
It looks like a pretzel or the bag end of male genitalia.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jnsie 5y ago
  It looks like a morose Visual Studio icon
  - Steltek 5y ago
    Cisco WebEx, really https://www.google.com/search?q=webex+logo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=webex+logo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=meta+logo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=meta+logo&tbm=isch
- yuuu 5y ago
  Wouldn't one side sag lower than the other?
lsjvjn 5y ago
>The fact that Facebook is uniquely held responsible for the societal problems engendered by the Internet does, I suspect, stem from the fact that Zuckerberg is an obvious target. How many people concerned about anti-vax rhetoric, for example, can even name the person in charge of YouTube, a far more potent vector? This article makes a very cogent point: Zuckerberg has too much baggage with the general public and Meta would be much better off if he stepped out of the light.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  Zuckerberg controls a majority of voting shares in Meta, right?
- bluepizza 5y ago
  Sorry but YouTube is not a far more potent vector. Facebook and Zuckerberg were fairly blamed because they actively developed features that amplified misinformation, and refused to take any action to curb their damage.
  - lsjvjn 5y ago
    We've seen many articles over the last few years about the YouTube recommendation rabbit hole radicalizing young people online. Facebook is not blameless, but they've become a scapegoat for issues plaguing an entire industry.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    YouTube’s algorithms also amplify misinformation, and demonetization isn’t exactly a fix for that
    - lupire 5y ago
      Are demonentized videos allowed in Recommendations/Watch Next?
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    "Facebook is a potent vector for misinformation" doesn't disprove the contention that YouTube is a more potent vector. We're aware of Facebook's issues around this largely because Facebook became the de facto representative for Everything Wrong With Big Tech -- and while there's a solid case to be made that it's their own damn fault they're in that position, it's kept documented problems with other platforms out of the spotlight. YouTube's recommendation algorithm is notorious for leading you to ever-more extremist ("high engagement!") takes on a variety of topics. And in some high-profile cases -- for instance, Alex Jones back in 2018, coronavirus vaccine disinformation just this year -- YouTube was well behind other social media platforms in executing bans. There is an arguable case to be made that compared to YouTube, Facebook is a relative model of responsibility. (And, yes, there's a larger question about how companies like YouTube and Facebook should be approaching moderation at all, who gets to decide what is and isn't misinformation, who watches the watchmen, etc. But if we presume there's a rationale for moderation at all, then YouTube should be getting way more scrutiny than it generally receives.)
- jfernandez 5y ago
  Agreed, Meta's "good parts" would have a better chance to succeed if it weren't entangled so much with Mark and Facebook at large. Listening to the interview made me feel that Mark/Facebook have good intent with this work (and are clearly doubling down ala rename) but the metaverse feels like something that's being pushed through vs a natural extension of human connection. They are making sure they have a big say on how it unfolds by shifting the focus on the company towards. Good and bad. I was "defending" the metaverse to a friend outside of the tech bubble last night and I talked a lot about how much I learned about socialization/human connection when I used to play Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft. That those relationships which started somewhat "metaverse"-first meant as much as my "real" connections did... and that's what I feel the essence of Meta/metaverse is really trying to bring to everyone.
- lupire 5y ago
  I have no idea if FB or YT is more potent, but Ben didn't offer any evidence so this looks like shilling for Zuckerberg. Facebook's potency is in the reshares, and in the "headline only" feed format where lies in headlines are persuasive even when the linked content is not. YT algorithm shows one person more bad content, but doesn't spam their friends. And in a video the viewer has time to think if the claims make sense.
  - jensensbutton 5y ago
    What if they're resharing Youtube videos?
- apozem 5y ago
  The author of this piece pointed out on his podcast that Zuckerberg, despite his baggage, is a founder and thus the only person who can sell such a huge change to employees and investors. If building a metaverse is a good idea, and that is a large if, then it will have been good for him to stay.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Founder loyalty is much larger among employees than it is among investors (in general, don't know about FB).
    - orhmeh09 5y ago
      OK. How do you know this?
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        Investors routinely replace founder management with management more couched in an institutional investor background.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > The fact that Facebook is uniquely held responsible for the societal problems engendered by the Internet does, I suspect, stem from the fact that Zuckerberg is an obvious target Interestingly, the most vocal opponents of Facebook are... traditional medias. The same medias that are competing (and losing!) against Facebook for add revenue. Keep in mind that before Facebook, for a story to get any traction it had to be approved by the "editorial board" of a legacy news outlet. What do you think happened if the owner of the TV station or newspaper didn't want a story to hit the front page?
  - majewsky 5y ago
    That's why it's important to have several TV stations and newspapers with different management in the same area. The actual enemy is corporate consolidation, both online and offline.
fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
Honestly, I am dismayed by the negative reactions. Even if facebook fails at this, they will produce huge technical innovation. This is an expensive space, you need a big player willing to spend 10-20 billion on it. You need the technical resources and data. The end result will be a ton of open source and new know how in AR/VR. What a blessing!
- losvedir 5y ago
  I'm with you on this. I was an original backer of the Oculus on Kickstarter, and it's just mindblowing to see how far it's come to the Quest 2. And while the original Oculus shows you what promise there is from a hacker in the garage, the Quest 2 shows you what can be done when significant capital is invested in development. I bought a Quest for my little brother across the country, and hanging out in VR is pretty cool. I can definitely believe there's something here. I don't know if Meta will actually end up being the platform in the future, but I certainly think there will be a platform, it will be good in a lot of ways, and because of this frankly audacious move by Meta we'll be getting there sooner.
- che_shirecat 5y ago
  There's always going to be a segment of people who are scared of strides towards the future. And for good reason, unknowns are scary for a reason.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    There's a difference between not wanting to venture into the unknown at all, and not wanting to venture into the unknown led by a shady billionaire whose previous work involves rampant misinformation campaigns.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
valleyjo 5y ago
Sorry but I just don’t like this name. The rebrand seems appropriate given the expanded ambition. What was wrong with horizon?
- ngokevin 5y ago
  Because it starts with M and has 4 letters.
  - tigerlily 5y ago
    And it's an anagram of meat.
  - narrator 5y ago
    I read that META means "Make Everything Trump Again."
furgooswft13 5y ago
MAKE EVERYTHING TRUMP AGAIN
seph-reed 5y ago
Nice article. It's amazing how much bike-shedding there is here around the name and logo, and how little capacity most have for what these changes actually mean. Meta is going full in on the metaverse... so that's going to be hitting some critical mass fairly soon (less than a decade). And that's nuts. We should take this time to enjoy living before that moment. Who knows what changes it will bring, but surely enough that there will be no going back.
- _jal 5y ago
  Meh. I've ignored them for the last 20 years. I expect to ignore whatever their services metastasize into for the next 20, too.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  I think as technology goes more... meta, the more valuable reality will become. I can't help but thing of Duncan Trussell's quote: "Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be." The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses".
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    > The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses". Given my experience in Alt Space thus far, I think there's a really good chance you're right.
    - ihumanable 5y ago
      I don't claim to know what exactly the metaverse will look like, but I remember the first time I put on an Oculus Quest. The first experience you have is being dropped into your "home" and mine defaulted to a big mountain side house, warm wood, fireplace, massive window looking out into a beautiful valley. It was virtual but convincing enough and I still sometimes enjoy just taking in the virtual view before or after playing a VR game. I remember thinking it a bit odd, the actual world around me could be awful, but in here it was just good enough to trick my brain. Throw $10B at that experience and I'm curious to see what happens. Maybe a scarcity-free utopia where everyone can "live" in whatever beautiful environment they want to, maybe a dystopia where you get home and enter your unadorned concrete cube and plug in to your real home, needing just enough physical space to use the VR. If they can ever get it fully jacked into your brain, I could see people just plugging in and never coming out.
rdw 5y ago
This is truly an optimistic take. Mark's "maybe no one else would bother building this if I don't" ethos is inspiring. But, man, that can justify absolutely anything. It seems like an expensive hobby, like Rod Stewart's model trains. Impressive, amazing, had to be built by that one person or it never would have been made....but, it's gratifying to only that one person, too.
gz5 5y ago
I see it as closer to the Amazon pivot from selling physical goods to selling digital goods (using digital as an umbrella encompassing AWS, Kindle, Prime (which essentially digitizes fulfillment and delivery), etc.). FB sold users to advertisers. Very Web 2.0. Well the potential decentralization of Web3 potentially destroys that business model and the Meta strategy seems like it reflects this potential change in the way Amazon saw the world going to digital?
- r00fus 5y ago
  Very not so. Amazon was merely making available externally to others the very production line that they used to make their own site (at a very healthy profit). What in world is Mark offering here? He's investing $10B into... what? AWS/Cloud was a reasonable business pitch (which seemed crazy but essentially: outsource your IT ops to AWS and we can help you scale like crazy very quickly). What's Mark's pitch here? VR is nowhere near prime-time - just read around even on HN. It's got major issues and still lacks a killer app. It's a vanity project that only a fantastically rich, out of touch person can indulge in. That or FB is toxic.
- rory 5y ago
  The Amazon comparison is apt, but I think Apple shifting revenue from hardware to services is a better one. Apple was able to catch the paradigm shift of us starting to use our phones for everything, and make loads of money by offering services to a captive audience and sharecropping opportunities to app developers. Facebook tried to become a platform during the last paradigm shift and failed. Selling users to advertisers has been lucrative but clearly isn't as sticky as the platform model (which is why they have to keep buying up their competitors). So they're trying to push another shift to VR and be the platform for that.
  - gz5 5y ago
    Apple is nice comparison. Apple leveraged the power of its brand in that transition (and created a flywheel of sorts to strengthen its brand), whereas the current FB brand wouldn't likely extend as well. So helps show one reason why FB likely saw the need to change naming and start building a new brand (whereas Apple (and Amazon) went the other way).
r00fus 5y ago
FTA: > “Meta”, on the other hand, is explicit: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook is now a metaverse company I'm not sure anyone (other than some geeks) really understands what the "metaverse" is... or cares. The name/symbolism/demo were uninspiring and vague at best. Not to mention Mark isn't the best salesman for this. It seems so egotistical of him to assume HE needed to be the front-man for this effort other than to say "all of this... it's about me".
- thebean11 5y ago
  The demo is for geeks and investors, so I’m not sure it matters.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Facebook is pummeling advertising platforms with ads that link to the demo.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    So pray tell, what do investors see in it? As a geek I see a hobby horse.
    - threeseed 5y ago
      What does Apple see in it ? They are investing heavily in AR/VR and they have a proven track record in new product categories e.g. smartphone, tablet, headphones, watch. Once the technologies improve such that the glasses/headsets are light and small enough then it's going to be something you can bring and use everywhere. And then the popularity will increase which in turn will attract developers. Repeat this cycle a few times and you have another $100+ billion App Store business on your hands.
      - r00fus 5y ago
        Apple and Oculus/FB have very little overlap. Apple is pushing AR, and Oculus is VR. I don't think it makes sense to conflate those two distinct use cases as the tech is different and user experience is vastly different as well.
munk-a 5y ago
> Zuckerberg made a similar mistake last year, forcing Oculus users to login with their Facebook account, which not only upset Oculus users but also handcuffed products like Horizon Workrooms, Facebook’s VR solution for business meetings. IMO this point is just a single example of the pattern we've seen. Everything done at Facebook is to drive that network data even if it harms the individual component. That's why Meta is so different from Alphabet. Alphabet is legitimately a collection of pretty independent companies - some of them synergize but never unnecessarily[1]. I purchased a VR headset last year and I ended up getting an Index after being mightily tempted by the Oculus - it's my first headset and I wasn't sure how much I'd like VR so I was really hesitant to drop a grand on it but... the likely future where all my activity is forcefully broadcast to all my family and friends on Facebook is a price I'm not willing to pay. Facebook's non-Facebook products suffer from the fact that they so habitually pipe data right back to Facebook. 1. Oh - I'll add a caveat here about google accounts and Youtube. Google did try to merge the two at one point, but they got a huge amount of negative PR and ended up stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools.
- Terretta 5y ago
  > stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools PdM: "Oh, users don't want one account? OK, let them make aliases they think are different, and log in that way. They won't realize it's all still one account, even when we show them their picture and list all these ~~aliases~~, er, "different accounts" they can log in as ..." Users: "Yay, different accounts!" Analytics: "Yay, one account!" Advertisers: "Hey, thanks for tying even more of their identities together for me."
  - munk-a 5y ago
    For content producers it has a very real effect - that behind the scenes linking doesn't threaten to expose your real identity to creepy people on the internet. It does expose it to YouTube people, but I think that's reasonable given that there's money involved. It also (so long as you aren't receiving a check) doesn't actually require any connection to your real name anymore.
- 5y ago
mrkramer 5y ago
Article doesn't mention but Zuck wanted to acquire Unity because he thought Unity will be future VR/AR engine/platform and Facebook wants to own it and not be at the mercy of Apple and Google. I don't know why he didn't pursue it if he is so sure in Metaverse VR/AR thing.
- acomjean 5y ago
  It’s unreal. Fortnite seems to have the virtual event model working pretty well. Movies and concerts with friends and random annoying people jumping around.. but it does work,
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Mark my words, Meta is going to acquire Epic Games so they can own of the major content creation engines for the metaverse. Not to mention all that sweet, sweet game developer data and owning one of the most popular social multiplayer games out there today.
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    Epic's valuation is around $30bn and Facebook has the cash to do it but arrogant Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney would never sell to big bad Facebook. Maybe he gives in and sells to Facebook because they have common enemies(Apple and Google). FTC is another problem but they would probably allow this acquisition no matter how big it is because Facebook is not in the business of making video games or game engines. Besides owning Fortnite and major content creation engines for the metaverse like you said another good synergy is boosting Facebook's Twitch and YouTube Gaming competitor Facebook Gaming with Epic's expertise.
munro 5y ago
This makes me think of Comcast rebranding to Xfinity (USA); though I didn't really grasp what the intended reach of the rebranding to Meta will be from the last post [1]. It seems like it's for the umbrella entity, no product renames. But it still seems like a play to distance their image from Facebook, only to be referenced in court. And if it's anything like the Comcast rebrand, it's like, everyone still knows who you are--and yes we're still stuck using your products--it's just pretentious, annoying, and you're just creating another bad name for yourself lmao. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029317
- munk-a 5y ago
  Remember that the Facebook renaming was for a very good purpose. It became clear as the company aged and grew that the initial name choice was quite poor, unfortunately in a lot of areas around the globe that name has a very negative association that wasn't obvious to Mark when he chose the name. The problem is that the word Facebook just happens to have a historical association with companies that don't respect your privacy - thankfully changing the name to Meta will let this company stand on its own merit. It's so Meta. (Also, /s)
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >it's like, everyone still knows who you are "Yes, we know who you are."[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOrbrjBQf7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOrbrjBQf7Y
nemothekid 5y ago
Personally, I'm less bullish on FB/Meta now. Half of me believes if someone can turn it around it would be Zuck, and the other half believes that FB's culture has optimized the wrong the thing for the past 5 years. Consider this, and call me out if I'm wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB/YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and more reactionary content as it was the only way to optimize time on site. The only way FB could grow was by pushing content that got people riled up. Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that? I started using TikTok as a joke and it's by far my most use social app now, and none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps; and clearly they are growing fast. There was another way but the local-maxima prevented FB from seeing it and as a result they have lost major brand cachet. I don't know what is different about TikTok but the way I see it is Meta's problem will be avoiding their user base dying off and the USG will likely prevent any future acquisitions. Their standalone apps (M, Rooms, Riff, Gaming, Dating, Collab) haven't been major successes (although given the size of Facebook some of these have 10s of millions of users); and I'm not confident a VR platform will have major penetration outside of "Ready Player One" fanboys. That said, FB is a trillion dollar company and betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.
- aaroninsf 5y ago
  Knives may be snapped mid air by the appropriate adversary. The tide is correctly turning against the manifest abuses of this organization, regardless of what it asks to be called; with any luck it will be systematically dismantled and defanged. The pathology and amorality inherent in its DNA goes back to Zuckerberg; the fish has rotted from the head from the start. That pathology leads to market valuation is not a surprise but it's also not conducive to survival.
- unstatusthequo 5y ago
  My opinion is a name change is just that. You can also put a Ferrari body kit for a Pinto, but it’s still a pinto. Name change is just them trying to dodge their own brand’s untrustworthiness.
- 5y ago
rStar 5y ago
it will be interesting to see what facebook turns into if/when they get a new ceo who is business success focused, like tim cook and satya nadella, who are just corporate mercenaries trying to run the most efficient business possible, which is not what the founders of those businesses did. then there’s the question of, will zuckerburg ever even get fb now meta to that point or will he insist on maintaining control and using the company to fund his pet projects to the detriment of the bottom line? zuck spends his time, pie in the sky, while cook and nads eat sleep and breath spreadsheets! riveting!
- pdpi 5y ago
  Nadella joined Microsoft in '92. Cook joined Apple in '98. I'm not sure I'd describe either of them as "mercenary". Tim Cook told an investor to "get off the stock" over criticisms that investing in things that don't contribute to the bottom line (such as sustainability initiatives). "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI" is not something you expect a bean counter to say in a shareholder meeting.
  - rStar 5y ago
    i would. it’s who they are as people, not which jobs they had when.
  - rStar 5y ago
    tim cook was obviously lying in that instance, as is shown by the amount of heavy metals he personally has coaxed out of the ground in pursuit of plausible deniability, oh no i meant, planned obsolescence and the apple app store tax.
- klelatti 5y ago
  Aside from the personal things about Cook and Nadella you’re saying that you want a product guy / founder in charge. The thing is that Meta is a huge company with a massive impact and the man in charge is spending his time on his dream and not fixing issues that affect billions.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
It's really hard to use much of what Zuck says for reasonable analysis. Examples: > I care about this existing, not just virtual and augmented reality existing, but it getting built out in a way that really advances the state of human connection... > I think we’ll have hopefully an opportunity to shape the development of the next platform in order to make it more amenable to these ways that I think people will naturally want to interact. I mean, how can you read stuff like this and not laugh?
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  It’s hard for me to read because my eyes keep rolling so far back in my head. Didn’t he say the same things about Facebook?
- randoglando 5y ago
  Maybe for some things (like playing board games or hanging out a la Fortnite) it would be a great idea.
Steltek 5y ago
Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on? The Metaverse isn't an unfamiliar or abstract thing, it's well represented in movies and TV, and it's a pretty dramatic territory to claim: full sensory immersion in an infinite, interactive world. No one has gotten even a fraction of those things "right" and a social media company is gonna bet the farm on it because they bought a company that made VR goggles?
- randycupertino 5y ago
  > Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on? Theranos, when they pivoted from a medication-delivering patch to a blood testing analytics company. Neither of which they ever actually had the tech for!
- mrkramer 5y ago
  I think VR/AR Metaverse will happen but it is decades away.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Most major tech companies seem to be betting that non-shit AR glasses aren't far off, and are prepping to be ready for that day 1. Big VR bets makes less sense to me. AR is the next smartphone. VR is the next... TV or workstation monitor, and even then, only for some use cases. Just seems like a much smaller opportunity.
    - shock-value 5y ago
      Are you implying that their interest suggests that non-shit AR glasses will actually happen in the relatively short term? Big tech companies were and ostensibly are interested in self-driving too, and that seems to be taking much longer than they expected.
      - handrous 5y ago
otterley 5y ago
Overall this new focus suggests to me that Facebook (Meta) sees limited potential future growth of their social media properties as such, and needs to look to new markets to sustain future growth. However, it is very rare for companies -- especially large, established ones -- to succeed in pivoting themselves to deal with new market realities and ways of doing business. The entrenched interests and culture inside these organizations tend to resist significant change. There's an irony that the bigger the company, the less power a CEO actually has. Time will tell if they succeed.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Except Microsoft, who did it a few times in the past.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    But not always successfully. It helps to have a big warchest so you can try more than once or keep a money-losing business running while you figure it out (XBox, Bing).
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      XBox and Bing are profitable, ironically. Bing is a 7B business[0] Phone/ARM tablets were not. [0] https://news.scott.services/microsoft-bing-usage-and-revenue-stats-new-data/ https://news.scott.services/microsoft-bing-usage-and-revenue...
lvl100 5y ago
I don’t get the hype around metaverse. It’s between Zuck and Jensen. Sure those two guys can push a lot of eyes and start something but the products simply do not exist. It’s as if they’re living in this fantasy world to create…Habbo Hotel for 2025.
- judge2020 5y ago
  The metaverse they have a vision for won't exist, but social VR is on the rise, even if it won't take over everyday life. VRChat consistently has 25k players these days and that's not including the amount of people playing it on Quest devices.
  - Duralias 5y ago
    The official VRChat Discord bot reports the true player numbers and while it isn't very high now "27997", on weekends I have seen it reach near 50k. There are as many people playing it on Quest as there are on Steam, which is wild considering just how many more Quest owners without a gaming PC there must be.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Ninjinka 5y ago
Wow, so much negativity! I'm surprised to find that I am one of the few who was super inspired and excited by the keynote. Granted, I'm a VR/crypto fanboy, but it all just seemed like a move in the right direction.
hackbinary 5y ago
We used to call "reactionary" content sensationalism, and that type of content has always been predicated on fallacious arguments, but especially appeals to emotion. Facebook's algorithms seems very good at dectecting and pushing content that makes users have an emotional response. They now have developed a feature where is someone or a page posts a comment to a page or group that I am not subscribed to, Facebook will push that content on to my feed. It is just about the most annoying thing ever. I am profoundly not interested in people who I follow on what they post on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Why is Facebook pushing Ted Cruz on to my feed if I am not subscribed to him? I want to see my friends posts, but not their responses to Ted. Facebook sucks ass now, and I am going to convert over to mastidon or something.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  It’s sucked for a long time. I quit over 5 years ago. I can only imagine how bad it is now. Algorithmic content is great when it shows us things we want to see, but by it’s very nature it can be exploited to show us that which we most despise in an attempt to increase engagement. I’m willing to go so far as to say the Algos in question are actually just optimized for engagement, not necessarily nefarious, but because we’re human, most people have an innate desire to make the world better in whatever way they can. Many believe discourse can help, but that’s obviously turned out to be flawed in the context of online conversation, where others can distance themself behind an online facade. As long as we are optimizing for engagement, I feel all social media is doomed to the same fate.
dmix 5y ago
Regardless of how this turns out, $10 Billion per year is a lot for an early/R&D level product (unless you consider the Horizons stuff closer to the endgame). Sometimes major upfront investments can create situations where its own size and expectations cannibalize their own potential.
- sithlord 5y ago
  Think Nucleus!
pron 5y ago
What surprised me was how pathetic the move looks (as does the logo, that looks like the brainchild of an actual child; infinity symbol? srsly?). Not only has Facebook proven unable or unwilling to make even less immersive wide-scale online interaction pleasant and beneficial that they claim it's time to be looking for the next challenge (oh, and did they forget about their digital currency?), but they don't even have the technology to start. If this had come at the same time they unveiled some impressive skunkworks project, or even after they emerged from their "trial by fire" as the article calls it, it might have been a different story, but as it is, it appears like a weak act of desperation. Is Facebook feeling that threatened?
etxm 5y ago
A metaverse is the last thing on earth this planet needs.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
This is an investor's view and the subtext seems to be "We're making a lot of money out of this, and I expect we'll make a lot more." The problem is that it's only an investor's view. It's quite dismissive of Facebook's very real political problems, and doesn't acknowledge that for many people - especially, but not exclusively younger users - Facebook is a terminal combination of boring, evil, and cringe. But more than that, Facebook isn't in a unique position to own the metaverse. The rest of MANGA will be converging on similar space. If there's any possibility at all of open hardware - or at least of an open standard - it's likely the real competition will come from an unexpected direction. Social and AR/VR are fundamentally different spaces and Zuckerberg's idea of what's supposed to happen in those spaces is fundamentally weird and very possibly ridiculous. Between the absence of consumer-friendly hardware - nothing is going to happen until the tech fits into very wearable low-effort glasses - and Facebook's eccentric history, I would expect Meta to fail and the metaverse to happen elsewhere, leaving FB to carry on as a kind of AOL for an ever-decreasing userbase until it's sold off for far too much money to some other large corporation which should know better.
- sharkjacobs 5y ago
  > MANGA This was a funny bit when i saw it on twitter yesterday, but if we're actually going to update our top 5 tech companies acronym let's do it comprehensively. Google has been Alphabet for a while, so MANGA should be MANAA. And I haven't understood why Netflix is in there for a while now, I think we should swap it for Microsoft. What do we think about MAMAA?
  - mupuff1234 5y ago
    Alphabet's stock ticker is GOOG so I think 'G' still works.
    - tempodox 5y ago
      So, MAGMA?
      - 5y ago
hsnewman 5y ago
This is a very bad sign for facebook. They are betting on everyone walking around with 3D goggles talking in Zoom like meetings. I personally would rather go outside and see reality than virtually doing it. Only time will tell, but I'm betting on reality.
- tinyhouse 5y ago
  I think it's a bit naive to think it's either that or nothing. As long as they can develop new high quality VR experiences with high adoption, they would succeed. I don't think they even know what they will end up with in 5-10 years. It's a big and expensive experiment with non insignificant chance of success in my opinion.
  - hsnewman 5y ago
    They have changed their company name and the focus. It's a very big gamble. I for one won't be investing in vaporware.
- mhink 5y ago
  I'm not a fan of Facebook/Meta, but I'm also not sure about this take. Rewind the clock 30-40 years, and I feel like it'd be easy to say something like "This is a bad sign for IBM. They are betting on everyone sitting around staring at a monitor sending electronic messages instead of talking." That's not to say that they'll actually deliver on this idea, but we've definitely seen the transformative power of tech on society. Whether that's a good thing or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
klelatti 5y ago
A company like Facebook (ok Meta) focuses on what the person in charge is interested in. Can’t be helped - it will just pervade the whole company. Zuck is interested in this Metaverse vision and not in fixing the issues with his existing properties. Announcing this now is two fingers to those affected by these problems. If he gets massive regulatory intervention now he’s brought it on himself and deserves it.
0000011111 5y ago
Meta put simply is a digital version of human culture and society. There is good and evil. I am not sure they can keep the evil from spreading. How can they contains it without blocking large amounts of users. I see the platform as a dark forest where there is no path toward profit unless they allow evil content to be spread widely and therefore allow more adds to be seen by more people.
polytronic 5y ago
Meta is copying our work and our logo. I was the chief developer of MySoci.Net, featuring my own 3d graphics engine NthDimension (https://github.com/StylianosPolychroniadis/NthDimension https://github.com/StylianosPolychroniadis/NthDimension) for its first version before moving on to Unity. You can check out MySoci.net at https://www.microsoft.com/el-gr/p/mysoci/9pbwts6pnb9r https://www.microsoft.com/el-gr/p/mysoci/9pbwts6pnb9r
- tubby12345 5y ago
  I am 100-.9^100 percent sure you are just using this as an opportunity to shill for your thing but the Meta logo is just an undulating circle, while yours is a Mobius strip (meta is only the Mobius in profile)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ryandrake 5y ago
As much as I am not a FB fan, I give Zucc credit for dedicating an entire keynote to his vision of the future. What are all the other tech companies' visions for the future? Who knows! They never talk about the future. Apple almost never talks about anything more than a month away. Their vision of the future? Looks like it's probably: a brand new phone, similar to and released precisely one year after the previous one... forever and ever. What's Amazon's vision of the future? Continue N% YoY growth for online shopping and cloud...forever. Google's? Ads on moar surfaces...forever? Zucc said this is our future vision for end users, here's what and why. Whether or not you like the idea or company, at least he stuck his neck out and articulated it.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  We all know what their vision for the future is and it's pretty banal. More money.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- donclark 5y ago
  Agreed, but just like with Tesla (Elon Musk) is it more for marketing purposes? I get the actual intent with Tesla (Elon Musk). Not so with Zucc. Is Zucc playing a game that he is not showing us?
- dangoor 5y ago
  > Apple almost never talks about anything more than a month away. Their vision of the future? Looks like it's probably: a brand new phone, similar to and released precisely one year after the previous one... forever and ever. This is just because Apple never talks about future things, but they certainly have a picture internally. Plenty of reporting supports the existence of AI/VR glasses of some sort and a car of some sort being designed within Apple.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > What are all the other tech companies' visions for the future? I can't say that I care at all about what trillion dollar companies' visions of the future are.
gfodor 5y ago
You can change the name, you can change the products, you can change the vision, hell, you can even change the CEO. But until you change the business model, it's just shuffling deck chairs on a ship we're now, sadly, almost all passengers on.
alexashka 5y ago
Am I the only one thinking Zuckerberg, like Bill Gates, was good at creating a monopoly, but had no taste or ability to do anything else? This move reminds me of Elon Musk's brain implant garbage that is sure to fail. It's like these people can't just do a good job of providing a simple thing people want/need, they want to believe they can do something big. They can't, and they won't, but they will waste billions of dollars making other fools believe it. I wonder when the music finally stops and these tech billionaires are revealed to be the lottery ticket ego-maniac hacks that they are. I wonder.
- slownews45 5y ago
  One big difference - a lot of these billionaires are willing to try out ideas and ignore folks who say they won't work. If you try out a few ideas, some will pan out. And brain implants are certainly coming. Parkinsons and other diseases are already being treated with them.
kerng 5y ago
This blog post seems to get some fundamentals wrong. Alphabet is just a holding (that's also why the name is rather boring), Google didnt wanna damage it's on brand by rebranding everything. There is no need, its positive and people like it. Facebook tries to distract from its negative press to give the company an entire Facelift. Many people are already updating that they work at Meta and not Facebook anymore on LinkedIn - quite interesting to observe. Most Googlers or people working at one of the Alphabet companies would proudly state they work at Google to this day.
yyyk 5y ago
Well, Facebook sure sent a strong signal of being committed to an AR/VR vision. We can't say they don't have a corporate direction. Would it work? I suspect that it's too early for the tech. Haven't seen much yet in the way of compelling apps - and first mover advantage isn't what it used to be.
papito 5y ago
Mark Zuckerberg does not care about money. That's what I gathered from reading Chaos Monkeys and An Ugly Truth. He never had that problem. A privileged sociopath who has never known life outside of Westchester, Harvard, and his Silicon Valley compound. He talks about "connecting people" but that's probably because he himself is deathly insecure about it. He has never been one of our species and that gnaws at him. Do girls like him? Do we like him? His favorite historical figure is Caesar, he looks like Caesar with his haircut, which is also called "the Caesar". This man drifts away in meetings when they talk about boring money stuff, but he DOES care a buttload about the number of users and those users not leaving. It's power, it's influence - it's what he craves. But. The man who pivoted on his idea of rating chicks - by stealing a better idea - may have run out his lucky streak, which started by winning the birth lottery in Upstate New York. He may have been at the right place at the right time, of prime age, and of means enough to have access to computers and the Internet (a very common thread, see: Bill Gates), but now that The Facebook brand has literally become toxic (RIP), he has to come up with an actual world-changing idea, and that, as he will find out, is hard. And it doesn't help that not only is it hard to hire people at Facebook now, I will bet you the farm that those working there are walking it in for the nice paycheck. Why do you think the TikTok algorithm makes Reels look like a high school project? Those people don't have their heart in it, and why would they? The company repeatedly, shamelessly lies to them.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Metastasis: The spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body. In metastasis, cancer cells break away from the original (primary) tumor, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form a new tumor in other organs or tissues of the body.
Aeolun 5y ago
> I don’t know that if we weren’t investing so much in this, that would happen or that it would happen as quickly, or that it would happen in the same way This, at least, I can completely agree with. I’m happy that someone is expending so much effort to make what I want a reality. It’s just a bit unfortunate that it is Facebook.

It looks like a pretzel or the bag end of male genitalia.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jnsie 5y ago
It looks like a morose Visual Studio icon
- Steltek 5y ago
  Cisco WebEx, really https://www.google.com/search?q=webex+logo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=webex+logo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=meta+logo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=meta+logo&tbm=isch
yuuu 5y ago
Wouldn't one side sag lower than the other?

>The fact that Facebook is uniquely held responsible for the societal problems engendered by the Internet does, I suspect, stem from the fact that Zuckerberg is an obvious target. How many people concerned about anti-vax rhetoric, for example, can even name the person in charge of YouTube, a far more potent vector? This article makes a very cogent point: Zuckerberg has too much baggage with the general public and Meta would be much better off if he stepped out of the light.

kevinmchugh 5y ago
Zuckerberg controls a majority of voting shares in Meta, right?
bluepizza 5y ago
Sorry but YouTube is not a far more potent vector. Facebook and Zuckerberg were fairly blamed because they actively developed features that amplified misinformation, and refused to take any action to curb their damage.
- lsjvjn 5y ago
  We've seen many articles over the last few years about the YouTube recommendation rabbit hole radicalizing young people online. Facebook is not blameless, but they've become a scapegoat for issues plaguing an entire industry.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  YouTube’s algorithms also amplify misinformation, and demonetization isn’t exactly a fix for that
  - lupire 5y ago
    Are demonentized videos allowed in Recommendations/Watch Next?
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  "Facebook is a potent vector for misinformation" doesn't disprove the contention that YouTube is a more potent vector. We're aware of Facebook's issues around this largely because Facebook became the de facto representative for Everything Wrong With Big Tech -- and while there's a solid case to be made that it's their own damn fault they're in that position, it's kept documented problems with other platforms out of the spotlight. YouTube's recommendation algorithm is notorious for leading you to ever-more extremist ("high engagement!") takes on a variety of topics. And in some high-profile cases -- for instance, Alex Jones back in 2018, coronavirus vaccine disinformation just this year -- YouTube was well behind other social media platforms in executing bans. There is an arguable case to be made that compared to YouTube, Facebook is a relative model of responsibility. (And, yes, there's a larger question about how companies like YouTube and Facebook should be approaching moderation at all, who gets to decide what is and isn't misinformation, who watches the watchmen, etc. But if we presume there's a rationale for moderation at all, then YouTube should be getting way more scrutiny than it generally receives.)
jfernandez 5y ago
Agreed, Meta's "good parts" would have a better chance to succeed if it weren't entangled so much with Mark and Facebook at large. Listening to the interview made me feel that Mark/Facebook have good intent with this work (and are clearly doubling down ala rename) but the metaverse feels like something that's being pushed through vs a natural extension of human connection. They are making sure they have a big say on how it unfolds by shifting the focus on the company towards. Good and bad. I was "defending" the metaverse to a friend outside of the tech bubble last night and I talked a lot about how much I learned about socialization/human connection when I used to play Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft. That those relationships which started somewhat "metaverse"-first meant as much as my "real" connections did... and that's what I feel the essence of Meta/metaverse is really trying to bring to everyone.
lupire 5y ago
I have no idea if FB or YT is more potent, but Ben didn't offer any evidence so this looks like shilling for Zuckerberg. Facebook's potency is in the reshares, and in the "headline only" feed format where lies in headlines are persuasive even when the linked content is not. YT algorithm shows one person more bad content, but doesn't spam their friends. And in a video the viewer has time to think if the claims make sense.
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  What if they're resharing Youtube videos?
apozem 5y ago
The author of this piece pointed out on his podcast that Zuckerberg, despite his baggage, is a founder and thus the only person who can sell such a huge change to employees and investors. If building a metaverse is a good idea, and that is a large if, then it will have been good for him to stay.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Founder loyalty is much larger among employees than it is among investors (in general, don't know about FB).
  - orhmeh09 5y ago
    OK. How do you know this?
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Investors routinely replace founder management with management more couched in an institutional investor background.
908B64B197 5y ago
> The fact that Facebook is uniquely held responsible for the societal problems engendered by the Internet does, I suspect, stem from the fact that Zuckerberg is an obvious target Interestingly, the most vocal opponents of Facebook are... traditional medias. The same medias that are competing (and losing!) against Facebook for add revenue. Keep in mind that before Facebook, for a story to get any traction it had to be approved by the "editorial board" of a legacy news outlet. What do you think happened if the owner of the TV station or newspaper didn't want a story to hit the front page?
- majewsky 5y ago
  That's why it's important to have several TV stations and newspapers with different management in the same area. The actual enemy is corporate consolidation, both online and offline.

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

Honestly, I am dismayed by the negative reactions. Even if facebook fails at this, they will produce huge technical innovation. This is an expensive space, you need a big player willing to spend 10-20 billion on it. You need the technical resources and data. The end result will be a ton of open source and new know how in AR/VR. What a blessing!

losvedir 5y ago
I'm with you on this. I was an original backer of the Oculus on Kickstarter, and it's just mindblowing to see how far it's come to the Quest 2. And while the original Oculus shows you what promise there is from a hacker in the garage, the Quest 2 shows you what can be done when significant capital is invested in development. I bought a Quest for my little brother across the country, and hanging out in VR is pretty cool. I can definitely believe there's something here. I don't know if Meta will actually end up being the platform in the future, but I certainly think there will be a platform, it will be good in a lot of ways, and because of this frankly audacious move by Meta we'll be getting there sooner.
che_shirecat 5y ago
There's always going to be a segment of people who are scared of strides towards the future. And for good reason, unknowns are scary for a reason.
- majewsky 5y ago
  There's a difference between not wanting to venture into the unknown at all, and not wanting to venture into the unknown led by a shady billionaire whose previous work involves rampant misinformation campaigns.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

valleyjo 5y ago

Sorry but I just don’t like this name. The rebrand seems appropriate given the expanded ambition. What was wrong with horizon?

ngokevin 5y ago
Because it starts with M and has 4 letters.
- tigerlily 5y ago
  And it's an anagram of meat.
- narrator 5y ago
  I read that META means "Make Everything Trump Again."

furgooswft13 5y ago

MAKE EVERYTHING TRUMP AGAIN

seph-reed 5y ago

Nice article. It's amazing how much bike-shedding there is here around the name and logo, and how little capacity most have for what these changes actually mean. Meta is going full in on the metaverse... so that's going to be hitting some critical mass fairly soon (less than a decade). And that's nuts. We should take this time to enjoy living before that moment. Who knows what changes it will bring, but surely enough that there will be no going back.

_jal 5y ago
Meh. I've ignored them for the last 20 years. I expect to ignore whatever their services metastasize into for the next 20, too.
mathgladiator 5y ago
I think as technology goes more... meta, the more valuable reality will become. I can't help but thing of Duncan Trussell's quote: "Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be." The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses".
- seph-reed 5y ago
  > The way I see this playing out is that the metaverse is going to be for poor people while reality is enjoyed by those with resources for "all five senses". Given my experience in Alt Space thus far, I think there's a really good chance you're right.
  - ihumanable 5y ago
    I don't claim to know what exactly the metaverse will look like, but I remember the first time I put on an Oculus Quest. The first experience you have is being dropped into your "home" and mine defaulted to a big mountain side house, warm wood, fireplace, massive window looking out into a beautiful valley. It was virtual but convincing enough and I still sometimes enjoy just taking in the virtual view before or after playing a VR game. I remember thinking it a bit odd, the actual world around me could be awful, but in here it was just good enough to trick my brain. Throw $10B at that experience and I'm curious to see what happens. Maybe a scarcity-free utopia where everyone can "live" in whatever beautiful environment they want to, maybe a dystopia where you get home and enter your unadorned concrete cube and plug in to your real home, needing just enough physical space to use the VR. If they can ever get it fully jacked into your brain, I could see people just plugging in and never coming out.

rdw 5y ago

This is truly an optimistic take. Mark's "maybe no one else would bother building this if I don't" ethos is inspiring. But, man, that can justify absolutely anything. It seems like an expensive hobby, like Rod Stewart's model trains. Impressive, amazing, had to be built by that one person or it never would have been made....but, it's gratifying to only that one person, too.

gz5 5y ago

I see it as closer to the Amazon pivot from selling physical goods to selling digital goods (using digital as an umbrella encompassing AWS, Kindle, Prime (which essentially digitizes fulfillment and delivery), etc.). FB sold users to advertisers. Very Web 2.0. Well the potential decentralization of Web3 potentially destroys that business model and the Meta strategy seems like it reflects this potential change in the way Amazon saw the world going to digital?

r00fus 5y ago
Very not so. Amazon was merely making available externally to others the very production line that they used to make their own site (at a very healthy profit). What in world is Mark offering here? He's investing $10B into... what? AWS/Cloud was a reasonable business pitch (which seemed crazy but essentially: outsource your IT ops to AWS and we can help you scale like crazy very quickly). What's Mark's pitch here? VR is nowhere near prime-time - just read around even on HN. It's got major issues and still lacks a killer app. It's a vanity project that only a fantastically rich, out of touch person can indulge in. That or FB is toxic.
rory 5y ago
The Amazon comparison is apt, but I think Apple shifting revenue from hardware to services is a better one. Apple was able to catch the paradigm shift of us starting to use our phones for everything, and make loads of money by offering services to a captive audience and sharecropping opportunities to app developers. Facebook tried to become a platform during the last paradigm shift and failed. Selling users to advertisers has been lucrative but clearly isn't as sticky as the platform model (which is why they have to keep buying up their competitors). So they're trying to push another shift to VR and be the platform for that.
- gz5 5y ago
  Apple is nice comparison. Apple leveraged the power of its brand in that transition (and created a flywheel of sorts to strengthen its brand), whereas the current FB brand wouldn't likely extend as well. So helps show one reason why FB likely saw the need to change naming and start building a new brand (whereas Apple (and Amazon) went the other way).

r00fus 5y ago

FTA: > “Meta”, on the other hand, is explicit: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook is now a metaverse company I'm not sure anyone (other than some geeks) really understands what the "metaverse" is... or cares. The name/symbolism/demo were uninspiring and vague at best. Not to mention Mark isn't the best salesman for this. It seems so egotistical of him to assume HE needed to be the front-man for this effort other than to say "all of this... it's about me".

thebean11 5y ago
The demo is for geeks and investors, so I’m not sure it matters.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Facebook is pummeling advertising platforms with ads that link to the demo.
- r00fus 5y ago
  So pray tell, what do investors see in it? As a geek I see a hobby horse.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    What does Apple see in it ? They are investing heavily in AR/VR and they have a proven track record in new product categories e.g. smartphone, tablet, headphones, watch. Once the technologies improve such that the glasses/headsets are light and small enough then it's going to be something you can bring and use everywhere. And then the popularity will increase which in turn will attract developers. Repeat this cycle a few times and you have another $100+ billion App Store business on your hands.
    - r00fus 5y ago
      Apple and Oculus/FB have very little overlap. Apple is pushing AR, and Oculus is VR. I don't think it makes sense to conflate those two distinct use cases as the tech is different and user experience is vastly different as well.

munk-a 5y ago

> Zuckerberg made a similar mistake last year, forcing Oculus users to login with their Facebook account, which not only upset Oculus users but also handcuffed products like Horizon Workrooms, Facebook’s VR solution for business meetings. IMO this point is just a single example of the pattern we've seen. Everything done at Facebook is to drive that network data even if it harms the individual component. That's why Meta is so different from Alphabet. Alphabet is legitimately a collection of pretty independent companies - some of them synergize but never unnecessarily[1]. I purchased a VR headset last year and I ended up getting an Index after being mightily tempted by the Oculus - it's my first headset and I wasn't sure how much I'd like VR so I was really hesitant to drop a grand on it but... the likely future where all my activity is forcefully broadcast to all my family and friends on Facebook is a price I'm not willing to pay. Facebook's non-Facebook products suffer from the fact that they so habitually pipe data right back to Facebook. 1. Oh - I'll add a caveat here about google accounts and Youtube. Google did try to merge the two at one point, but they got a huge amount of negative PR and ended up stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools.

Terretta 5y ago
> stepping it back significantly with aliases and multi-account management tools PdM: "Oh, users don't want one account? OK, let them make aliases they think are different, and log in that way. They won't realize it's all still one account, even when we show them their picture and list all these ~~aliases~~, er, "different accounts" they can log in as ..." Users: "Yay, different accounts!" Analytics: "Yay, one account!" Advertisers: "Hey, thanks for tying even more of their identities together for me."
- munk-a 5y ago
  For content producers it has a very real effect - that behind the scenes linking doesn't threaten to expose your real identity to creepy people on the internet. It does expose it to YouTube people, but I think that's reasonable given that there's money involved. It also (so long as you aren't receiving a check) doesn't actually require any connection to your real name anymore.
5y ago

mrkramer 5y ago

Article doesn't mention but Zuck wanted to acquire Unity because he thought Unity will be future VR/AR engine/platform and Facebook wants to own it and not be at the mercy of Apple and Google. I don't know why he didn't pursue it if he is so sure in Metaverse VR/AR thing.

acomjean 5y ago
It’s unreal. Fortnite seems to have the virtual event model working pretty well. Movies and concerts with friends and random annoying people jumping around.. but it does work,
astlouis44 5y ago
Mark my words, Meta is going to acquire Epic Games so they can own of the major content creation engines for the metaverse. Not to mention all that sweet, sweet game developer data and owning one of the most popular social multiplayer games out there today.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  Epic's valuation is around $30bn and Facebook has the cash to do it but arrogant Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney would never sell to big bad Facebook. Maybe he gives in and sells to Facebook because they have common enemies(Apple and Google). FTC is another problem but they would probably allow this acquisition no matter how big it is because Facebook is not in the business of making video games or game engines. Besides owning Fortnite and major content creation engines for the metaverse like you said another good synergy is boosting Facebook's Twitch and YouTube Gaming competitor Facebook Gaming with Epic's expertise.

munro 5y ago

This makes me think of Comcast rebranding to Xfinity (USA); though I didn't really grasp what the intended reach of the rebranding to Meta will be from the last post [1]. It seems like it's for the umbrella entity, no product renames. But it still seems like a play to distance their image from Facebook, only to be referenced in court. And if it's anything like the Comcast rebrand, it's like, everyone still knows who you are--and yes we're still stuck using your products--it's just pretentious, annoying, and you're just creating another bad name for yourself lmao. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029317

munk-a 5y ago
Remember that the Facebook renaming was for a very good purpose. It became clear as the company aged and grew that the initial name choice was quite poor, unfortunately in a lot of areas around the globe that name has a very negative association that wasn't obvious to Mark when he chose the name. The problem is that the word Facebook just happens to have a historical association with companies that don't respect your privacy - thankfully changing the name to Meta will let this company stand on its own merit. It's so Meta. (Also, /s)
nobody9999 5y ago
>it's like, everyone still knows who you are "Yes, we know who you are."[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOrbrjBQf7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOrbrjBQf7Y

nemothekid 5y ago

Personally, I'm less bullish on FB/Meta now. Half of me believes if someone can turn it around it would be Zuck, and the other half believes that FB's culture has optimized the wrong the thing for the past 5 years. Consider this, and call me out if I'm wrong, for the past 5 years we were led to believe by FB/YouTube that algorithmically generated could only have negative consequences as it moved people to more and more reactionary content as it was the only way to optimize time on site. The only way FB could grow was by pushing content that got people riled up. Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that? I started using TikTok as a joke and it's by far my most use social app now, and none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps; and clearly they are growing fast. There was another way but the local-maxima prevented FB from seeing it and as a result they have lost major brand cachet. I don't know what is different about TikTok but the way I see it is Meta's problem will be avoiding their user base dying off and the USG will likely prevent any future acquisitions. Their standalone apps (M, Rooms, Riff, Gaming, Dating, Collab) haven't been major successes (although given the size of Facebook some of these have 10s of millions of users); and I'm not confident a VR platform will have major penetration outside of "Ready Player One" fanboys. That said, FB is a trillion dollar company and betting against a company with such a huge war chest is like trying to catch a falling knife.

aaroninsf 5y ago
Knives may be snapped mid air by the appropriate adversary. The tide is correctly turning against the manifest abuses of this organization, regardless of what it asks to be called; with any luck it will be systematically dismantled and defanged. The pathology and amorality inherent in its DNA goes back to Zuckerberg; the fish has rotted from the head from the start. That pathology leads to market valuation is not a surprise but it's also not conducive to survival.
unstatusthequo 5y ago
My opinion is a name change is just that. You can also put a Ferrari body kit for a Pinto, but it’s still a pinto. Name change is just them trying to dodge their own brand’s untrustworthiness.
5y ago

rStar 5y ago

it will be interesting to see what facebook turns into if/when they get a new ceo who is business success focused, like tim cook and satya nadella, who are just corporate mercenaries trying to run the most efficient business possible, which is not what the founders of those businesses did. then there’s the question of, will zuckerburg ever even get fb now meta to that point or will he insist on maintaining control and using the company to fund his pet projects to the detriment of the bottom line? zuck spends his time, pie in the sky, while cook and nads eat sleep and breath spreadsheets! riveting!

pdpi 5y ago
Nadella joined Microsoft in '92. Cook joined Apple in '98. I'm not sure I'd describe either of them as "mercenary". Tim Cook told an investor to "get off the stock" over criticisms that investing in things that don't contribute to the bottom line (such as sustainability initiatives). "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI" is not something you expect a bean counter to say in a shareholder meeting.
- rStar 5y ago
  i would. it’s who they are as people, not which jobs they had when.
- rStar 5y ago
  tim cook was obviously lying in that instance, as is shown by the amount of heavy metals he personally has coaxed out of the ground in pursuit of plausible deniability, oh no i meant, planned obsolescence and the apple app store tax.
klelatti 5y ago
Aside from the personal things about Cook and Nadella you’re saying that you want a product guy / founder in charge. The thing is that Meta is a huge company with a massive impact and the man in charge is spending his time on his dream and not fixing issues that affect billions.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

It's really hard to use much of what Zuck says for reasonable analysis. Examples: > I care about this existing, not just virtual and augmented reality existing, but it getting built out in a way that really advances the state of human connection... > I think we’ll have hopefully an opportunity to shape the development of the next platform in order to make it more amenable to these ways that I think people will naturally want to interact. I mean, how can you read stuff like this and not laugh?

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
It’s hard for me to read because my eyes keep rolling so far back in my head. Didn’t he say the same things about Facebook?
randoglando 5y ago
Maybe for some things (like playing board games or hanging out a la Fortnite) it would be a great idea.

Steltek 5y ago

Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on? The Metaverse isn't an unfamiliar or abstract thing, it's well represented in movies and TV, and it's a pretty dramatic territory to claim: full sensory immersion in an infinite, interactive world. No one has gotten even a fraction of those things "right" and a social media company is gonna bet the farm on it because they bought a company that made VR goggles?

randycupertino 5y ago
> Has a huge company ever rebranded themselves like this to a dream that they're so far away from delivering on? Theranos, when they pivoted from a medication-delivering patch to a blood testing analytics company. Neither of which they ever actually had the tech for!
mrkramer 5y ago
I think VR/AR Metaverse will happen but it is decades away.
- handrous 5y ago
  Most major tech companies seem to be betting that non-shit AR glasses aren't far off, and are prepping to be ready for that day 1. Big VR bets makes less sense to me. AR is the next smartphone. VR is the next... TV or workstation monitor, and even then, only for some use cases. Just seems like a much smaller opportunity.
  - shock-value 5y ago
    Are you implying that their interest suggests that non-shit AR glasses will actually happen in the relatively short term? Big tech companies were and ostensibly are interested in self-driving too, and that seems to be taking much longer than they expected.
    - handrous 5y ago

otterley 5y ago

Overall this new focus suggests to me that Facebook (Meta) sees limited potential future growth of their social media properties as such, and needs to look to new markets to sustain future growth. However, it is very rare for companies -- especially large, established ones -- to succeed in pivoting themselves to deal with new market realities and ways of doing business. The entrenched interests and culture inside these organizations tend to resist significant change. There's an irony that the bigger the company, the less power a CEO actually has. Time will tell if they succeed.

908B64B197 5y ago
Except Microsoft, who did it a few times in the past.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  But not always successfully. It helps to have a big warchest so you can try more than once or keep a money-losing business running while you figure it out (XBox, Bing).
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    XBox and Bing are profitable, ironically. Bing is a 7B business[0] Phone/ARM tablets were not. [0] https://news.scott.services/microsoft-bing-usage-and-revenue-stats-new-data/ https://news.scott.services/microsoft-bing-usage-and-revenue...

lvl100 5y ago

I don’t get the hype around metaverse. It’s between Zuck and Jensen. Sure those two guys can push a lot of eyes and start something but the products simply do not exist. It’s as if they’re living in this fantasy world to create…Habbo Hotel for 2025.

judge2020 5y ago
The metaverse they have a vision for won't exist, but social VR is on the rise, even if it won't take over everyday life. VRChat consistently has 25k players these days and that's not including the amount of people playing it on Quest devices.
- Duralias 5y ago
  The official VRChat Discord bot reports the true player numbers and while it isn't very high now "27997", on weekends I have seen it reach near 50k. There are as many people playing it on Quest as there are on Steam, which is wild considering just how many more Quest owners without a gaming PC there must be.
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Ninjinka 5y ago

Wow, so much negativity! I'm surprised to find that I am one of the few who was super inspired and excited by the keynote. Granted, I'm a VR/crypto fanboy, but it all just seemed like a move in the right direction.

hackbinary 5y ago

We used to call "reactionary" content sensationalism, and that type of content has always been predicated on fallacious arguments, but especially appeals to emotion. Facebook's algorithms seems very good at dectecting and pushing content that makes users have an emotional response. They now have developed a feature where is someone or a page posts a comment to a page or group that I am not subscribed to, Facebook will push that content on to my feed. It is just about the most annoying thing ever. I am profoundly not interested in people who I follow on what they post on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Why is Facebook pushing Ted Cruz on to my feed if I am not subscribed to him? I want to see my friends posts, but not their responses to Ted. Facebook sucks ass now, and I am going to convert over to mastidon or something.

yurishimo 5y ago
It’s sucked for a long time. I quit over 5 years ago. I can only imagine how bad it is now. Algorithmic content is great when it shows us things we want to see, but by it’s very nature it can be exploited to show us that which we most despise in an attempt to increase engagement. I’m willing to go so far as to say the Algos in question are actually just optimized for engagement, not necessarily nefarious, but because we’re human, most people have an innate desire to make the world better in whatever way they can. Many believe discourse can help, but that’s obviously turned out to be flawed in the context of online conversation, where others can distance themself behind an online facade. As long as we are optimizing for engagement, I feel all social media is doomed to the same fate.

dmix 5y ago

Regardless of how this turns out, $10 Billion per year is a lot for an early/R&D level product (unless you consider the Horizons stuff closer to the endgame). Sometimes major upfront investments can create situations where its own size and expectations cannibalize their own potential.

sithlord 5y ago
Think Nucleus!

pron 5y ago

What surprised me was how pathetic the move looks (as does the logo, that looks like the brainchild of an actual child; infinity symbol? srsly?). Not only has Facebook proven unable or unwilling to make even less immersive wide-scale online interaction pleasant and beneficial that they claim it's time to be looking for the next challenge (oh, and did they forget about their digital currency?), but they don't even have the technology to start. If this had come at the same time they unveiled some impressive skunkworks project, or even after they emerged from their "trial by fire" as the article calls it, it might have been a different story, but as it is, it appears like a weak act of desperation. Is Facebook feeling that threatened?

etxm 5y ago

A metaverse is the last thing on earth this planet needs.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

This is an investor's view and the subtext seems to be "We're making a lot of money out of this, and I expect we'll make a lot more." The problem is that it's only an investor's view. It's quite dismissive of Facebook's very real political problems, and doesn't acknowledge that for many people - especially, but not exclusively younger users - Facebook is a terminal combination of boring, evil, and cringe. But more than that, Facebook isn't in a unique position to own the metaverse. The rest of MANGA will be converging on similar space. If there's any possibility at all of open hardware - or at least of an open standard - it's likely the real competition will come from an unexpected direction. Social and AR/VR are fundamentally different spaces and Zuckerberg's idea of what's supposed to happen in those spaces is fundamentally weird and very possibly ridiculous. Between the absence of consumer-friendly hardware - nothing is going to happen until the tech fits into very wearable low-effort glasses - and Facebook's eccentric history, I would expect Meta to fail and the metaverse to happen elsewhere, leaving FB to carry on as a kind of AOL for an ever-decreasing userbase until it's sold off for far too much money to some other large corporation which should know better.

sharkjacobs 5y ago
> MANGA This was a funny bit when i saw it on twitter yesterday, but if we're actually going to update our top 5 tech companies acronym let's do it comprehensively. Google has been Alphabet for a while, so MANGA should be MANAA. And I haven't understood why Netflix is in there for a while now, I think we should swap it for Microsoft. What do we think about MAMAA?
- mupuff1234 5y ago
  Alphabet's stock ticker is GOOG so I think 'G' still works.
  - tempodox 5y ago
    So, MAGMA?
    - 5y ago

hsnewman 5y ago

This is a very bad sign for facebook. They are betting on everyone walking around with 3D goggles talking in Zoom like meetings. I personally would rather go outside and see reality than virtually doing it. Only time will tell, but I'm betting on reality.

tinyhouse 5y ago
I think it's a bit naive to think it's either that or nothing. As long as they can develop new high quality VR experiences with high adoption, they would succeed. I don't think they even know what they will end up with in 5-10 years. It's a big and expensive experiment with non insignificant chance of success in my opinion.
- hsnewman 5y ago
  They have changed their company name and the focus. It's a very big gamble. I for one won't be investing in vaporware.
mhink 5y ago
I'm not a fan of Facebook/Meta, but I'm also not sure about this take. Rewind the clock 30-40 years, and I feel like it'd be easy to say something like "This is a bad sign for IBM. They are betting on everyone sitting around staring at a monitor sending electronic messages instead of talking." That's not to say that they'll actually deliver on this idea, but we've definitely seen the transformative power of tech on society. Whether that's a good thing or not is left as an exercise to the reader.

klelatti 5y ago

A company like Facebook (ok Meta) focuses on what the person in charge is interested in. Can’t be helped - it will just pervade the whole company. Zuck is interested in this Metaverse vision and not in fixing the issues with his existing properties. Announcing this now is two fingers to those affected by these problems. If he gets massive regulatory intervention now he’s brought it on himself and deserves it.

0000011111 5y ago

Meta put simply is a digital version of human culture and society. There is good and evil. I am not sure they can keep the evil from spreading. How can they contains it without blocking large amounts of users. I see the platform as a dark forest where there is no path toward profit unless they allow evil content to be spread widely and therefore allow more adds to be seen by more people.

polytronic 5y ago

Meta is copying our work and our logo. I was the chief developer of MySoci.Net, featuring my own 3d graphics engine NthDimension (https://github.com/StylianosPolychroniadis/NthDimension https://github.com/StylianosPolychroniadis/NthDimension) for its first version before moving on to Unity. You can check out MySoci.net at https://www.microsoft.com/el-gr/p/mysoci/9pbwts6pnb9r https://www.microsoft.com/el-gr/p/mysoci/9pbwts6pnb9r

tubby12345 5y ago
I am 100-.9^100 percent sure you are just using this as an opportunity to shill for your thing but the Meta logo is just an undulating circle, while yours is a Mobius strip (meta is only the Mobius in profile)
- deleted 5y ago
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ryandrake 5y ago

As much as I am not a FB fan, I give Zucc credit for dedicating an entire keynote to his vision of the future. What are all the other tech companies' visions for the future? Who knows! They never talk about the future. Apple almost never talks about anything more than a month away. Their vision of the future? Looks like it's probably: a brand new phone, similar to and released precisely one year after the previous one... forever and ever. What's Amazon's vision of the future? Continue N% YoY growth for online shopping and cloud...forever. Google's? Ads on moar surfaces...forever? Zucc said this is our future vision for end users, here's what and why. Whether or not you like the idea or company, at least he stuck his neck out and articulated it.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
We all know what their vision for the future is and it's pretty banal. More money.
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donclark 5y ago
Agreed, but just like with Tesla (Elon Musk) is it more for marketing purposes? I get the actual intent with Tesla (Elon Musk). Not so with Zucc. Is Zucc playing a game that he is not showing us?
dangoor 5y ago
> Apple almost never talks about anything more than a month away. Their vision of the future? Looks like it's probably: a brand new phone, similar to and released precisely one year after the previous one... forever and ever. This is just because Apple never talks about future things, but they certainly have a picture internally. Plenty of reporting supports the existence of AI/VR glasses of some sort and a car of some sort being designed within Apple.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> What are all the other tech companies' visions for the future? I can't say that I care at all about what trillion dollar companies' visions of the future are.

gfodor 5y ago

You can change the name, you can change the products, you can change the vision, hell, you can even change the CEO. But until you change the business model, it's just shuffling deck chairs on a ship we're now, sadly, almost all passengers on.

alexashka 5y ago

Am I the only one thinking Zuckerberg, like Bill Gates, was good at creating a monopoly, but had no taste or ability to do anything else? This move reminds me of Elon Musk's brain implant garbage that is sure to fail. It's like these people can't just do a good job of providing a simple thing people want/need, they want to believe they can do something big. They can't, and they won't, but they will waste billions of dollars making other fools believe it. I wonder when the music finally stops and these tech billionaires are revealed to be the lottery ticket ego-maniac hacks that they are. I wonder.

slownews45 5y ago
One big difference - a lot of these billionaires are willing to try out ideas and ignore folks who say they won't work. If you try out a few ideas, some will pan out. And brain implants are certainly coming. Parkinsons and other diseases are already being treated with them.

kerng 5y ago

This blog post seems to get some fundamentals wrong. Alphabet is just a holding (that's also why the name is rather boring), Google didnt wanna damage it's on brand by rebranding everything. There is no need, its positive and people like it. Facebook tries to distract from its negative press to give the company an entire Facelift. Many people are already updating that they work at Meta and not Facebook anymore on LinkedIn - quite interesting to observe. Most Googlers or people working at one of the Alphabet companies would proudly state they work at Google to this day.

yyyk 5y ago

Well, Facebook sure sent a strong signal of being committed to an AR/VR vision. We can't say they don't have a corporate direction. Would it work? I suspect that it's too early for the tech. Haven't seen much yet in the way of compelling apps - and first mover advantage isn't what it used to be.

papito 5y ago

Mark Zuckerberg does not care about money. That's what I gathered from reading Chaos Monkeys and An Ugly Truth. He never had that problem. A privileged sociopath who has never known life outside of Westchester, Harvard, and his Silicon Valley compound. He talks about "connecting people" but that's probably because he himself is deathly insecure about it. He has never been one of our species and that gnaws at him. Do girls like him? Do we like him? His favorite historical figure is Caesar, he looks like Caesar with his haircut, which is also called "the Caesar". This man drifts away in meetings when they talk about boring money stuff, but he DOES care a buttload about the number of users and those users not leaving. It's power, it's influence - it's what he craves. But. The man who pivoted on his idea of rating chicks - by stealing a better idea - may have run out his lucky streak, which started by winning the birth lottery in Upstate New York. He may have been at the right place at the right time, of prime age, and of means enough to have access to computers and the Internet (a very common thread, see: Bill Gates), but now that The Facebook brand has literally become toxic (RIP), he has to come up with an actual world-changing idea, and that, as he will find out, is hard. And it doesn't help that not only is it hard to hire people at Facebook now, I will bet you the farm that those working there are walking it in for the nice paycheck. Why do you think the TikTok algorithm makes Reels look like a high school project? Those people don't have their heart in it, and why would they? The company repeatedly, shamelessly lies to them.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Metastasis: The spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body. In metastasis, cancer cells break away from the original (primary) tumor, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form a new tumor in other organs or tissues of the body.

Aeolun 5y ago

> I don’t know that if we weren’t investing so much in this, that would happen or that it would happen as quickly, or that it would happen in the same way This, at least, I can completely agree with. I’m happy that someone is expending so much effort to make what I want a reality. It’s just a bit unfortunate that it is Facebook.