6 ms·

I read this three times and I'm still not sure what your point is.

cromka 5y ago
That we, "the old folks", just don't get it, limited by having passed our "exploratory" phase and well into "exploitation" phase (something I read here in HN the other day). And they may have a point: after all, "the old folks" 30 years ago were saying the same thing about the Internet, well into 2000s.
- civilized 5y ago
  Oh come on. Usenet in the 1980s was full of people in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Sure, some people didn't "get" the internet, but millions of demographically similar people were getting value out of it. That isn't happening, and won't happen, with this metaverse BS. And if it does, attentive people of all ages will see it coming many years in advance.
  - machiaweliczny 5y ago
    I've read a lot of game reviews on VR and was surprised about demographics. Lots of older (40+) people there. Anyone has more reliable stats? I personally feel that hardware need to be next-gen as I am nauseus but would be happy to have discord alternative to play in VR. Imagine drawing board, fake cinema, sharing games, arranging common space minecraft-like. I think this will work. You login after work and do creative shit with buddies. This is how it works for me now but we have discord and own game that we work on. Happy to upgrade XP when new hardware comes.
    - redisman 5y ago
      That demographic makes sense. If you’re 40 you grew up with the birth of video games, you read the sci-fi and the early hype and failure of multiple VR products along get decades and you have a bunch of disposable income
  - parasubvert 5y ago
    Eh, I think Facebook is really onto something, particularly if you see Oculus as the main tip of the spear. They’re playing a very long game. My high school and college friends and I are spread across the continent. The pandemic and a mix of Discord and Tabletop simulator brought us back together to do regular board gaming. This is effectively a VR environment without the headset. My 12 year old hangs out on VRchat or Minecraft , simultaneously watching YouTube or Twitch streams at the same time with his friends when he is home. Today this is a mix of FaceTime , Discord etc, but all-in-one will be used if it’s better. My younger daughter likes to explore VR worlds, and interact with them. We are seeing what’s coming years in advance, but many aren’t looking. Facebook is going to eat this space up completely at their current rate of success, if Apple , Microsoft or Valve don’t step up.
    - civilized 5y ago
      > The pandemic and a mix of Discord and Tabletop simulator brought us back together to do regular board gaming. This is effectively a VR environment without the headset. This is the central problem for VR. The internet offers many experiences that are essentially "VR without the headset", from the Tabletop simulator you mentioned to World of Warcraft. What does the headset really add? You're still looking at a screen, except now you've got a damn thing on your head and are blind to the actual world around you. That virtual world better be really incredible to make up for it.
      - parasubvert 5y ago
        The quest 2 is surprisingly good at swapping between reality mode (via cameras) and VR mode, when needed. Augmented reality will make this sort of switching more important. ultimately, people choose VR for the immersion. It’s why problem build home theatres or still go to the theatre, or visit amusement parks, etc., when they’d rather stay home. The headsets are getting far more convenient and comfortable. Still early.
  - cromka 5y ago
    > Oh come on. Usenet in the 1980s was full of people in their 30s, 40s, and beyond That's anecdotal evidence. Just because there were user that age, doesn't change that their population, in general, was skeptical.
  - che_shirecat 5y ago
    Saving this so I can come back and laugh in 10 years
- peterthehacker 5y ago
  > we, “the old folks,” just don’t get it Zuckerberg is 37 years old, so he’d probably be lumped into “the old folks” category. Why would he get it and not us? I’m, a decade younger than Mark, so idk if I’m young enough by your standards to get it, but my sister and her friends are in college and think this is all a joke. None of them are interested in putting on VR goggles, let alone joining the “metaverse.” None of them had heard of it until Facebook’s name change. The Metaverse is a top-down Wall Street sponsored hype cycle. It’s not a matter of “old folks” not getting it. It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems.
  - qorrect 5y ago
    > Facebook’s growing problems I'm out of the loop, what problems are they having ?
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      They ran out of humans to sign up to Facebook.
  - cromka 5y ago
    > It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems. Those problems, at their recent peak, are that – recent. Yet I know, for a fact, they have been working on the new concept for very long now. I spoke to a FB insider about a year ago already and he, in very diluted way, described what we know as metaverse now.
  - parasubvert 5y ago
    If you’re looking at the consumer gaming and social media space, then you’d get it. People underestimate Zuckerberg’s ability to see socio-technical far in the future at their peril. He was ridiculed for making a MySpace competitor, for getting rid of Facebook Apps, for the look & feel changes, the ridiculous prices paid for Instagram and WhatsApp… and he was right each time (for growing his business and his customer base). Where he has been wrong is in putting Facebook at the centre of his empire, when it’s increasingly a legacy platform for family members, old people and maladjusted conservatives. Metaverse corrects this by making Facebook just one of several properties.
unknownOrigin 5y ago
Astroturfing Meta
pennaMan 5y ago
The point is that this technology forum is in the sad state of being consistently dismissive of novel technology.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  I don't think that's an age thing as much as a knee-jerk cynicism thing that's been here since at least 2011. Don't read HN if you want to be excited about something new, read HN if you want it to be torn apart with constant negativity.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Yup HN is legacy at this point. A bunch of old people yelling at clouds. It’s the new Slashdot. So it goes.
  - qorrect 5y ago
    I'm going to go ahead and ask you to get off my lawn.
  - jgilias 5y ago
    I've seen all kinds of demographics and localities on HN. What would be the new HN then?
  - Oddskar 5y ago
    Such hogwash. Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth (that has a long graveyard of unsuccessful services behind them) we're now "legacy" and "old people yelling at clouds"? Disregarding Meta entirely, I would say it's completely normal for people on HN to be sceptical of new things. Most new things don't work out. Most new things are either vaporware or snake oil. It's hard to tell the good from the bad sometimes.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      > Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth No, the reason is because many new technologies are dismissed here not due to technical infeasibility, but because posters cannot understand the point or value proposition. When this is happening in response to technologies that many people are using and investing in as early adopters, which provides proof of some kind of value at a minimum, is generally speaking a sign of being out of touch to write it off entirely as doomed to fail, vaporware, etc, because you simply do not understand what people are investing their time and capital in. For example this comes up continually with VR and AR and crypto, extremely rapidly growing technologies with tons of capital flooding into them. It's one thing to say we can't do something, it's another thing to see entire industries forming around you and tons of capital being allocated and saying it will all fail simply because you don't see the point.
Valakas_ 5y ago
If you look at future predictions they almost always make the same mistake: they're based on the technology available at the time they were made.

That we, "the old folks", just don't get it, limited by having passed our "exploratory" phase and well into "exploitation" phase (something I read here in HN the other day). And they may have a point: after all, "the old folks" 30 years ago were saying the same thing about the Internet, well into 2000s.

civilized 5y ago
Oh come on. Usenet in the 1980s was full of people in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Sure, some people didn't "get" the internet, but millions of demographically similar people were getting value out of it. That isn't happening, and won't happen, with this metaverse BS. And if it does, attentive people of all ages will see it coming many years in advance.
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  I've read a lot of game reviews on VR and was surprised about demographics. Lots of older (40+) people there. Anyone has more reliable stats? I personally feel that hardware need to be next-gen as I am nauseus but would be happy to have discord alternative to play in VR. Imagine drawing board, fake cinema, sharing games, arranging common space minecraft-like. I think this will work. You login after work and do creative shit with buddies. This is how it works for me now but we have discord and own game that we work on. Happy to upgrade XP when new hardware comes.
  - redisman 5y ago
    That demographic makes sense. If you’re 40 you grew up with the birth of video games, you read the sci-fi and the early hype and failure of multiple VR products along get decades and you have a bunch of disposable income
- parasubvert 5y ago
  Eh, I think Facebook is really onto something, particularly if you see Oculus as the main tip of the spear. They’re playing a very long game. My high school and college friends and I are spread across the continent. The pandemic and a mix of Discord and Tabletop simulator brought us back together to do regular board gaming. This is effectively a VR environment without the headset. My 12 year old hangs out on VRchat or Minecraft , simultaneously watching YouTube or Twitch streams at the same time with his friends when he is home. Today this is a mix of FaceTime , Discord etc, but all-in-one will be used if it’s better. My younger daughter likes to explore VR worlds, and interact with them. We are seeing what’s coming years in advance, but many aren’t looking. Facebook is going to eat this space up completely at their current rate of success, if Apple , Microsoft or Valve don’t step up.
  - civilized 5y ago
    > The pandemic and a mix of Discord and Tabletop simulator brought us back together to do regular board gaming. This is effectively a VR environment without the headset. This is the central problem for VR. The internet offers many experiences that are essentially "VR without the headset", from the Tabletop simulator you mentioned to World of Warcraft. What does the headset really add? You're still looking at a screen, except now you've got a damn thing on your head and are blind to the actual world around you. That virtual world better be really incredible to make up for it.
    - parasubvert 5y ago
      The quest 2 is surprisingly good at swapping between reality mode (via cameras) and VR mode, when needed. Augmented reality will make this sort of switching more important. ultimately, people choose VR for the immersion. It’s why problem build home theatres or still go to the theatre, or visit amusement parks, etc., when they’d rather stay home. The headsets are getting far more convenient and comfortable. Still early.
- cromka 5y ago
  > Oh come on. Usenet in the 1980s was full of people in their 30s, 40s, and beyond That's anecdotal evidence. Just because there were user that age, doesn't change that their population, in general, was skeptical.
- che_shirecat 5y ago
  Saving this so I can come back and laugh in 10 years
peterthehacker 5y ago
> we, “the old folks,” just don’t get it Zuckerberg is 37 years old, so he’d probably be lumped into “the old folks” category. Why would he get it and not us? I’m, a decade younger than Mark, so idk if I’m young enough by your standards to get it, but my sister and her friends are in college and think this is all a joke. None of them are interested in putting on VR goggles, let alone joining the “metaverse.” None of them had heard of it until Facebook’s name change. The Metaverse is a top-down Wall Street sponsored hype cycle. It’s not a matter of “old folks” not getting it. It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems.
- qorrect 5y ago
  > Facebook’s growing problems I'm out of the loop, what problems are they having ?
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    They ran out of humans to sign up to Facebook.
- cromka 5y ago
  > It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems. Those problems, at their recent peak, are that – recent. Yet I know, for a fact, they have been working on the new concept for very long now. I spoke to a FB insider about a year ago already and he, in very diluted way, described what we know as metaverse now.
- parasubvert 5y ago
  If you’re looking at the consumer gaming and social media space, then you’d get it. People underestimate Zuckerberg’s ability to see socio-technical far in the future at their peril. He was ridiculed for making a MySpace competitor, for getting rid of Facebook Apps, for the look & feel changes, the ridiculous prices paid for Instagram and WhatsApp… and he was right each time (for growing his business and his customer base). Where he has been wrong is in putting Facebook at the centre of his empire, when it’s increasingly a legacy platform for family members, old people and maladjusted conservatives. Metaverse corrects this by making Facebook just one of several properties.

unknownOrigin 5y ago

Astroturfing Meta

pennaMan 5y ago

The point is that this technology forum is in the sad state of being consistently dismissive of novel technology.

Karunamon 5y ago
I don't think that's an age thing as much as a knee-jerk cynicism thing that's been here since at least 2011. Don't read HN if you want to be excited about something new, read HN if you want it to be torn apart with constant negativity.
gfodor 5y ago
Yup HN is legacy at this point. A bunch of old people yelling at clouds. It’s the new Slashdot. So it goes.
- qorrect 5y ago
  I'm going to go ahead and ask you to get off my lawn.
- jgilias 5y ago
  I've seen all kinds of demographics and localities on HN. What would be the new HN then?
- Oddskar 5y ago
  Such hogwash. Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth (that has a long graveyard of unsuccessful services behind them) we're now "legacy" and "old people yelling at clouds"? Disregarding Meta entirely, I would say it's completely normal for people on HN to be sceptical of new things. Most new things don't work out. Most new things are either vaporware or snake oil. It's hard to tell the good from the bad sometimes.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    > Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth No, the reason is because many new technologies are dismissed here not due to technical infeasibility, but because posters cannot understand the point or value proposition. When this is happening in response to technologies that many people are using and investing in as early adopters, which provides proof of some kind of value at a minimum, is generally speaking a sign of being out of touch to write it off entirely as doomed to fail, vaporware, etc, because you simply do not understand what people are investing their time and capital in. For example this comes up continually with VR and AR and crypto, extremely rapidly growing technologies with tons of capital flooding into them. It's one thing to say we can't do something, it's another thing to see entire industries forming around you and tons of capital being allocated and saying it will all fail simply because you don't see the point.

Valakas_ 5y ago

If you look at future predictions they almost always make the same mistake: they're based on the technology available at the time they were made.