5 ms·

Ask HN: What was something that generated as much as hype as “Web 3” but failed?

5 points by daolf 4y ago

micahdeath 4y ago
VR and now meta - Conceptually it's nice, but not there yet - the tech is expensive, limited usefulness of apps - games do better, but still limited - and then there is the user interface with the human mind (disorienting/vertigo/motion sickness/etc) ---- for me, it's best just to turn the lights out and work with a monitor.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  VR is strange because it's already culturally successful. I would point to the ideas from the circa-1980 books https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22617.Seduction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22617.Seduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation and then how there was a craze for it in the early 1990s (like this failed TV show) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5 then there was The Matrix and by the time Sword Art Online: Ready Player One came out people were taking it for granted. From a hardware perspective modern VR headsets are "good enough", the success or failure on VR depends on (1) software that is compelling and (2) will VR use ever "move the needle" compared to reading, tweeting, watching TV, conventional video games, ...
  - micahdeath 4y ago
    An additional thing for success: Single people; as a married person with young children, I could never use it to its fullest.
  - trinovantes 4y ago
    VR may ultimately never take off if it can't solve the motion sickness issue that many people experience. The human body is a pretty big limitation
soapdog 4y ago
Google glass and wearables.
Panino 4y ago
VRML - Virtual Reality Modeling Language. I remember a lot of talk. It was going to be big on the 1990s web but then nothing really happened. Quoting Wikipedia: "VRML has never seen much serious widespread use.[18] One reason for this may have been the lack of available bandwidth.[19] At the time of VRML's popularity, a majority of users, both business and personal, were using slow dial-up Internet access." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
- vmoore 4y ago
  Still funny how we re-invent VRML every 10 years. It used to be ThreeJS[0] now it's all the Metaverse shenanigans. [0] https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/
raphlinus 4y ago
5th generation computing[1]. This was an initiative by the Japanese computer industry to create a new class of highly parallel computers specialized for AI, in the early 80s, and primarily programmed in Prolog-like languages. There were people who genuinely believed that the success of this project would leapfrog Japan over the Western computing industry, in other words FOMO. Perhaps ironically, there are some aspects of this project (parallelism and AI) that are now massively important. It's just that they were ahead of their time on those aspects, and Prolog is now largely a historical bywater. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  In the US we had big federal funding for parallel supercomputers in the 1980s and early 1990s, these were oriented towards FORTRAN programs to simulate nuclear weapons as opposed to the Japanese 5th generation systems that were doing things closer to commercial data processing. That research in the US was defunded in a hurry after they realized they were training foreigners how do to this stuff https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL30143.pdf https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL30143.pdf If you look at Hadoop and other developments in commercial parallel computing I'd say many of them (all the ones that don't involve some special interconnect between the processors) are more closely related to what the 5th gen project had converged on at the end... At that point they had given up on Prolog (as we know it, they did settle on a subset called KL0), Dataflow processors and other things and settled for plain ordinary message passing and "shared nothing".
dekhn 4y ago
Push technology
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webrevu/1997/04_18/developers/04_18_97_2.html https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webrevu/1997/04_... https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/ https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/
rvz 4y ago
Clubhouse.
kipchak 4y ago
Maybe Visual Basic?
- micahdeath 4y ago
  I still use this today.
epc 4y ago
Initial Coin Offerings.
ipaddr 4y ago
Cold Fusion, 3d printing, AI, personal computers. Most failed to breakthrough into a mass market product until a generation later. The microwave was invent in 1950 but became a mass product a generation later for example. The web3 is a generation too early.
larrykubin 4y ago
Michael Arrington argues Silverlight is the future of the web https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18531 Segway, Google+, Google Glass, Theranos

5 points by daolf 4y ago

VR and now meta - Conceptually it's nice, but not there yet - the tech is expensive, limited usefulness of apps - games do better, but still limited - and then there is the user interface with the human mind (disorienting/vertigo/motion sickness/etc) ---- for me, it's best just to turn the lights out and work with a monitor.

PaulHoule 4y ago
VR is strange because it's already culturally successful. I would point to the ideas from the circa-1980 books https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22617.Seduction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22617.Seduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation and then how there was a craze for it in the early 1990s (like this failed TV show) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5 then there was The Matrix and by the time Sword Art Online: Ready Player One came out people were taking it for granted. From a hardware perspective modern VR headsets are "good enough", the success or failure on VR depends on (1) software that is compelling and (2) will VR use ever "move the needle" compared to reading, tweeting, watching TV, conventional video games, ...
- micahdeath 4y ago
  An additional thing for success: Single people; as a married person with young children, I could never use it to its fullest.
- trinovantes 4y ago
  VR may ultimately never take off if it can't solve the motion sickness issue that many people experience. The human body is a pretty big limitation

soapdog 4y ago

Google glass and wearables.

Panino 4y ago

VRML - Virtual Reality Modeling Language. I remember a lot of talk. It was going to be big on the 1990s web but then nothing really happened. Quoting Wikipedia: "VRML has never seen much serious widespread use.[18] One reason for this may have been the lack of available bandwidth.[19] At the time of VRML's popularity, a majority of users, both business and personal, were using slow dial-up Internet access." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

vmoore 4y ago
Still funny how we re-invent VRML every 10 years. It used to be ThreeJS[0] now it's all the Metaverse shenanigans. [0] https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/

raphlinus 4y ago

5th generation computing[1]. This was an initiative by the Japanese computer industry to create a new class of highly parallel computers specialized for AI, in the early 80s, and primarily programmed in Prolog-like languages. There were people who genuinely believed that the success of this project would leapfrog Japan over the Western computing industry, in other words FOMO. Perhaps ironically, there are some aspects of this project (parallelism and AI) that are now massively important. It's just that they were ahead of their time on those aspects, and Prolog is now largely a historical bywater. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

PaulHoule 4y ago
In the US we had big federal funding for parallel supercomputers in the 1980s and early 1990s, these were oriented towards FORTRAN programs to simulate nuclear weapons as opposed to the Japanese 5th generation systems that were doing things closer to commercial data processing. That research in the US was defunded in a hurry after they realized they were training foreigners how do to this stuff https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL30143.pdf https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL30143.pdf If you look at Hadoop and other developments in commercial parallel computing I'd say many of them (all the ones that don't involve some special interconnect between the processors) are more closely related to what the 5th gen project had converged on at the end... At that point they had given up on Prolog (as we know it, they did settle on a subset called KL0), Dataflow processors and other things and settled for plain ordinary message passing and "shared nothing".

dekhn 4y ago

Push technology

PaulHoule 4y ago
https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webrevu/1997/04_18/developers/04_18_97_2.html https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webrevu/1997/04_... https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/ https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/

rvz 4y ago

Clubhouse.

kipchak 4y ago

Maybe Visual Basic?

micahdeath 4y ago
I still use this today.

epc 4y ago

Initial Coin Offerings.

ipaddr 4y ago

Cold Fusion, 3d printing, AI, personal computers. Most failed to breakthrough into a mass market product until a generation later. The microwave was invent in 1950 but became a mass product a generation later for example. The web3 is a generation too early.

larrykubin 4y ago

Michael Arrington argues Silverlight is the future of the web https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18531 Segway, Google+, Google Glass, Theranos