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It's interesting how Facebook's target audience is nearing retirement age, but Meta is going full steam ahead with futuristic VR headset technology. It seems li
by jdlyga 4y ago
It's interesting how Facebook's target audience is nearing retirement age, but Meta is going full steam ahead with futuristic VR headset technology. It seems like a real clash of ideas, but I could see this working out well to connect people especially older people who are retired, similar to the Black Mirror episode San Junipero (a surprisingly optimistic and happy episode).
The problem is Meta's headsets have a very core-gamer focused audience left over from the Oculus days, though they've started to pivot away from this in recent years. It's nowhere near ready for a mainstream audience to use for social connections. The headsets are too bulky, the interface is too complicated, and the apps require too much setup, character creation, and are just too involved. Nothing right now passes the grandma test.
- pavlov 4y agoMeta has a huge global teenage user base with Instagram and WhatsApp. TikTok complements them rather than replacing. All three are growing. I don’t know how they’re going to translate that reach to VR profits either, but focusing on Facebook-using retirees misses the big picture of Meta’s growth.
- gtirloni 4y agoI don't see teenagers using Instagram much or at all where I live.
- pavlov 4y agoThere’s something about social media that makes people confidently extrapolate their local observations to global scale. Meta’s apps have 3.7 billion active monthly users. That’s half the population of the world! It’s impossible to guess their behavioral trends based only on what you and I see around us. Even Facebook is growing despite nearly a decade of HN users declaring it’s only used by retirees and will soon die out.
- gtirloni 4y agoNot saying it's not growing or very big already. Just that the next wave of users don't seem to be coming from teenagers.
- nativespecies 4y agoMeta's DAU for teens/young adults has been in decline for a decade. It's only going to get worse: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-highlights-the-decline-of-facebook-and-ig-as-tiktok-becomes-the/631694/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-highlights-...
- ulfw 4y agoYou're very wrong. It's hard to generalize these things but if anything (roughly speaking) teens are on tiktok as are 20+ yr olds, 30-40 are on instagram and 40+ are nowadays on Facebook.