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The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. At the time, I was really unsure about my intuition -- I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivot

• amjnsx 4y ago
  What made you decide crypto was bullshit all along? It has had quite a few booms as well as busts, and various scams and frauds for good measure. As far as I know the last bust wasn’t much different to the ones that came before it.
• mettamage 4y ago
  To be fair, when Facebook was created there was no data either. Data can be useful but I have yet to hear a story where data played a pivotal role in creating a successful startup
  • minsc_and_boo 4y ago
    Hot or Not was a popular site, and Facebook was created to be that but exclusively for college students. It was called Facemash.
  • baremetal 4y ago
    There was indeed data when facebook started. It was called myspace.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      And friendster.
  • decafninja 4y ago
    But when Facebook was created, they were a scrappy little startup with nothing to lose. The Facebook of 2023 is not a scrappy little startup with nothing to lose.
    • threeseed 4y ago
      But remember Zuckerberg will always be rich and is not able to be fired. So he can sure act like he has nothing to lose.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • johngalt_ 4y ago
        Well most of his money is in Facebook stocks so he has plenty to lose.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          And he'll still have more money than he knows what to do with assuming just about any level of sensible diversification.
          • gowld 4y ago
            or if he never disversifies at all, and FB loses 99% of its value, he'll still have more money than he can spend in a lifetime.
• tlogan 4y ago
  Mark Zuckerberg believed VR would be the key to the company's future expansion. Unfortunately, he was wrong. However, it is important for leaders to take risks and lead their companies in new directions. So he has my respect. Simultaneously, it is worth noting that major technology companies did not develop working generative AI. Examples include Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and even Google's search algorithms, they all fall short of user expectations. And they had years and years and billions of $$. The parallel between virtual reality and artificial intelligence is intriguing. If some company can successfully develop a VR system which does not suck, it could revolutionize the industry in much the same way as a openAI. But that company will not be any of these big ones…
  • machiaweliczny 4y ago
    This isn’t true. Google developed most significant advancements in AI. It’s just that MS beats them hard on vision and execution right now.
• hnfong 4y ago
  > It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be I agree it's clear on day one that these models will be useful. What's less clear is how useful they are -- a year ago most experts would have told you that an architecture that "predicts the next word" won't be powerful enough to make a model that could lead to AGI-alike abilities (and many people here still argue the same today), but here we are now. > Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early That's just a lack of vision. GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. He had plenty of time to commit to AI development instead of Metaverse.
• 0xDEF 4y ago
  High-income Westerners do not like to engage in activities that make them appear like mindless consumer zombies. In Denmark the highest income households have small cheap TVs they can hide away while low income households have big 4K TVs as the main attraction in their living room. The reason is that the former don't want to appear like passive mindless consumer zombies who watch TV. It is a very superficial opinion but wearing a VR headset is literally the most 1984 consumer zombie thing you could possibly do.
  • 4ggr0 4y ago
    Why does it matter if I'm gaming while looking at a screen which is half a metre away, or while looking at a screen which is in front of my face and allows me to move around, in fact making me less like a zombie because I don't have to be stationary. It's been a couple of months since I've done anything in VR, but I don't understand why you're being so overly dramatical about it, comparing it to 1984 and consumerist zombies.
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Rich Scandinavians are difficult to understand. If you're rich you gotta look poor because poor people try to look rich and you don't wanna be associated with poor people.
      • 4ggr0 4y ago
        I think this can be said about lots of nouveau riche/old rich/poor people. But maybe Scandinavia is different :)
• throwawaycircus 4y ago
  I mined bitcoin in 2011 which didn't go well and then made first transaction in 2017 which took 2days to be processed as a result i ruled it as stupidest digital currency. Even though I feel technical right all these years i regret for not buying as many as i could have even back in 2017/18. Centeral banks turned everything like a Ponzi scheme. How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving.
  • piva00 4y ago
    > Centeral banks turned everything like a Ponzi scheme. How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving. Central banks are just playing a larger game, they aren't causing it, the game is: ever increasing growth capitalism. Borrowing and spending creates "growth", saving doesn't. While we exist in this system we can try to pinpoint the blame at different actors but they aren't the cause of it, they are just playing along. The incentives for growth don't align with what's best for society, they align with making people indebted so companies can grow their revenues.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    > How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving. Oney is worthless. Unless you like pieces of paper representing defunct national heroes you should not hold money but assets, stock, estate, things that have intrinsic value.
• alerter 4y ago
  Completely agree. I'm frustrated that Oculus and VR tech in general has been lumped in, via the "metaverse", with a bunch of less useful and less interesting crypto/NFT stuff. All I wanted was some cool niche flight and mech sims, maybe some interesting AR projects beyond what Niantic could offer. Instead, we got a bunch of ugly tech demos, outright scams, and virtual meeting rooms that nobody uses. Being able to buy drugs online was cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the billions of dollars invested and vast amounts of carbon emitted.
  • JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
    Yeah, Facebook's Metaverse pivot made VR pretty toxic right at the point where they were getting a significant level of adoption amongst the public. They needed to focus on making a few more games with the mass appeal of Beat Saber and making entry level machines a bit cheaper again so there was enough users to make the social aspect actually have some value.
• Veedrac 4y ago
  I'm not a crypto advocate, but I don't understand on what basis people think crypto has been empirically disproven, at least separate from any disproof that wasn't ~equally true at its peak. It's not like Bitcoin has failed; it's down 2x from its recent spike, but it's up almost 10x from its Jan 2019 dip. Ethereum is more wounded but still expensive. Look on a log plot as is apt for these things, and it's hard to argue ruin here, especially given they've dipped before. I wouldn't be too shocked if crypto did peter out or flatline over the coming years, just it doesn't seem a priori obvious, given my broad criticisms of it have not stopped its success to date.
  • mmmmmbop 4y ago
    There was a time around 2020 I believe, where everyone and their mother was talking about crypto and the blockchain, and how it's going to be this big technological revolution. All kinds of private and public initiatives decided to include "the blockchain" in their projects, NFTs became huge, and there was talk of putting real estate, healthcare, and logistics "onto the blockchain". It's been three years since then, and still no real-world use case has emerged. I don't dispute that there are completely valid use cases for cryptocurrencies, mainly around avoiding governmental financial restrictions and safeguards, and there are still loads of people using cryptocurrencies for speculation and/or as a "store of value". But the whole ecosystem of distributed apps, smart contracts, DAOs, and so on, still mainly revolves around itself, without wider societal impact.
  • 4ggr0 4y ago
    Maybe I'm in a minority with this argument - but just because something has a big market cap or a positive trend line, it doesn't automatically make it valid. (Bernie Madoff, Archegos, ...) Bitcoin has proven itself to be a useful financial speculation object.
    • Veedrac 4y ago
      Hence “empirically disproven, at least separate from any disproof that wasn't ~equally true at its peak” and not “discredited by argument from principles”.
• koonsolo 4y ago
  I never understood why Facebook didn't just wait it out for VR and bought a company once it seemed successful. Seems so much cheaper and less risky.
  • machiaweliczny 4y ago
    My understanding is that he pushes hard in hardware department to pivot into company like Apple because without owning hardware and OS he knows that FB days are numbered. Especially when privacy will take some steam in US
    • machiaweliczny 4y ago
      The other strategy might be going WeChat but that’s still more risky and there is Twitter that will probably compete with that.
    • koonsolo 4y ago
      No idea why you are getting downvoted. This indeed would explain why they want to do it themselves. No other startup can manage that scope.
      • tltimeline2 4y ago
        Instead of trying to create some FB vertical, a better strategy would've been to let the growing VR community of those years keep stewing, while sticking to the hardware and core software side to keep the tech moving forward. We had amazing things happening for a time, and the oculus purchase has basically made VR cringe and killed pc vr at the same time.
    • ulfw 4y ago
      That is exactly it. It's not the first time Zuckerberg went into that direction and failed. He tried the same with the mobile market (and was ridiculously late in the game with a not-much-differentiating offering, not unlike Amazon). I guess he didn't want to make that mistake again and tried to be early in VR, which seemed the 'next big thing' for him for some reason. https://www.lifewire.com/whatever-happened-to-the-facebook-phone-5081980 https://www.lifewire.com/whatever-happened-to-the-facebook-p... He dabbled in crypto thing when that was all the hype. Didn't end any better. https://www.ft.com/content/a88fb591-72d5-4b6b-bb5d-223adfb893f3 https://www.ft.com/content/a88fb591-72d5-4b6b-bb5d-223adfb89...
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  > I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI. And he would have been too late.
• basisword 4y ago
  >> As it stands, my intuition (and everybody else's) turned out to be right. It’s been 18 months since they “pivoted”. Come back in 5-10 years to see who was right. Assuming the metaverse is a failure at this point is simply arrogant.
  • twelve40 4y ago
    yeah, and then you'll say hindsight is 20/20 and who could have predicted the failure?
    • rohit89 4y ago
      Most likely people who predict failure will say of course Mark managed to make it work because he could afford to throw billions on top of billions after it. The metaverse is a 10 year bet that involves progress across multiple axes. No-one here can predict the state of progress in ten years.
• weberer 4y ago
  >I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along. This is what Ron Paul and others have been saying about fiat currency for decades.
• nivenkos 4y ago
  It seems crazy to me that Amazon laid off a lot of the Alexa and robotics teams. You'd think if anything they'd want to invest in that more now that LLMs could be used in combination to produce a much more natural home assistant experience. That said, whilst I think VR doesn't have a huge amount of potential (the equipment is expensive and awkward), I think there is still a lot of space for making it easier to meet and communicate with people virtually. There's still a huge amount of friction where nowadays almost every service has limited public messaging and comments, etc., and online communities are fractured across dozens of Discord or Matrix servers. I think one of the main parts of Tiktok's success has been that it makes it easy to speak to new people either via public comments or video replies, etc.
  • dmarchand90 4y ago
    The problem with vr is it is extremely good for cyberpunk raves but very so so at everything else
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I think there is value in creating an alternative financial system. It doesn’t have to replace your currency or be the only financial system you align yourself with, but I do believe that given the tools we currently have, locking yourself solely into a financial system you have so little visibility and control in is a little foolhardy.
• packetlost 4y ago
  > It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be I think it's clear they will (and are) be useful, but how useful is very much an open question
• yufeng66 4y ago
  Initially, I didn't see much value in the metaverse due to the high barrier to entry for end users and the limited network effect. However, I am bullish now. With the advancement of technologies like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion, there is potential for more interesting NPCs in the metaverse. Additionally, Virtual Reality (VR) could serve as a superior user interface for these technologies compared to text-based interfaces like chatGPT. This could enable the metaverse to scale without solely relying on the network effect, as engaging NPCs and VR experiences can provide value to users even in the early stages of development, and continue to evolve and expand as technology progresses.
  • andsoitis 4y ago
    Your thesis is: a) people didn't join metaverse because there's nobody else there b) generative AI like GPT and Stable Diffusion enable the creation of real-looking and real-sounding bots for a VR world c) metaverse is now interesting again because you're not there alone I don't know that a sparsely populated metaverse is THE reason to be skeptical about Meta's metaverse.
    • velp 4y ago
      Also, this reads more like an argument for the usefulness of GPT-4 over the Metaverse
  • discodave 4y ago
    [flagged]
• sharkweek 4y ago
  > I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up Maybe like 10 years ago when PG was more active on here he was participating in a thread (honestly forgot about what) where I ended up asking him “If Mark Zuckerberg applied to YC with objectively the worst idea you’ve ever heard, would you invest?” And he said, “of course!” I think at the time VR started making headlines, I thought was a pretty cool concept. I loved that Valve and Oculus (private at the time) were both going after it. When FB bought Oculus I didn’t see an obvious connection, but like you’re saying I just assumed Zuckerberg knew exactly what he was doing. Over time I’ve come to appreciate WHY they made the investment. If they had been right, they were going to be very right (and frankly in kind of a terrifyingly dystopian way imo). I also wonder if FB could go back in time would they completely scrap VR investment? What (at the time) would have been their big bet instead?
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    >I also wonder if FB could go back in time would they completely scrap VR investment? What (at the time) would have been their big bet instead? I think this is the relevant question. So many people fall into the Trap stop thinking in terms of binary outcomes, especially with hindsight information. This isn't how business investment works at all. The same people that are quick to judge investment failures can rarely produce an alternative idea with multi-billion dollar upside.
• maxk42 4y ago
  If the Metaverse was succh a great idea Secondlife would be much more successful.
• daitangio 4y ago
  My same sentiment. Also NFT are not working like expected. And eBook have not destroyed (yet) the old-paper-made books...
• delecti 4y ago
  I don't think the metaverse is such a bad idea, I just think we're not there yet, and also that Meta isn't a trusted or cool enough company to pull it off. VR now is like a 1995 laptop, and it needs to be an iPhone for the metaverse to happen. And probably more than that, it'll need to be AR before it could happen. It needs to be Google Glass, but what that can be 10 years from now, and made by a company people like enough to generate FOMO.
  • Fauntleroy 4y ago
    Personally I think it's going to come from the gaming space, as they already know how to create virtual spaces people want to be in. Either a really good MMO (World of Warcraft had people glued to CRTS) or something like Fortnite, where we already have celebrities doing "live concerts".
    • dumpsterlid 4y ago
      This was why I knew the metaverse was going to be a failure, it was clear as day there were business executives acting with so much self confidence about what the future of virtual experiences will be..... while ignoring the entire medium of designing virtual experiences and all of the collective wisdom learned from successes and failures. It is like a successful painter annoucing a new revolutionary form of art that involves sounds arranged in time to create artistic experiences instead of paint on a canvas.
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  > I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up. I think he's just desperate to have what Apple has; A hardware platform on which to hang other services and applications.
• kevin_nisbet 4y ago
  I think the tricky part with innovation, is almost everything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost everyone. And as the tech or company progresses, more people look at it and think it's a good idea. If it were really obviously a good idea, there's no innovation, there would already be others doing it. And this is in contrast to what YC likes to call tarpit ideas, because there are lots of ideas that look good but everyone who tries to tackle them fails for whatever reason. So we can say metaverse was a bad bet for Facebook, but that's sort of looking in hindsight at the struggles that tech has and the unknown market. And it appears to be a big bet and lost. But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority seeing the progress and now seeing the excitement. But go back a couple of years, and more of us would be naysayers, talking about how bad the tech is, or various failure modes.
  • cirgue 4y ago
    > almost everything innovative looks like a bad idea to almost everyone I disagree really strongly with this. Innovative things look like impractical long shots that have obvious upsides but that violate conventional wisdom around what is possible. The smartphone is a great example of this: it was obviously innovative, and the idea was obviously great before it actually became reality, but the practical limitations of hardware made it impossible until one day it wasn’t. Same for generative language models. The real innovation for both of these things is that some element constraining a good idea changes and someone notices and can act on it decisively. Some version of the Metaverse has always been possible in one form or another, but no one acts on it because it doesn’t benefit the users it depends on for success. The fundamental limiting factor is participation incentive, and technology doesn’t change that.
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > that's sort of looking in hindsight at the struggles that tech has and the unknown market There is innovating, trend following and what I’ll term trend completion. Innovation creates new categories. Crypto was innovative. It looks like a losing bet, but nobody can doubt it was daring. Trend completion doesn’t create new categories, but it delivers on a promise. The iPhone is in this category. A product delivered against the incompleteness preceding it. (And synthesising categories.) Absent that tangibility or specificity you have trend following. Facebook didn’t create the VR/AR category. It hasn’t delivered a product. It hasn’t even described a uniquely compelling vision. It jumped into a fad because others were doing it and then flailed around helplessly while executives penned PowerPoints.
• jeffwask 4y ago
  I'm not sure if Metaverse was a bad idea so much as selling out everything else to go full steam on Metaverse was a bad idea. It felt like they sold out their core user base and destroyed their existing platforms to get there. They were simultaneously tanking their image and reputation with users while asking them to commit and invest in a new platform.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    I agree, but I also think the marketing around the ideas wasn't good either. You need public mindshare to build an ecosystem like this, and a lot of the potential audience never understood the point of it. To this day, I have no idea what problem the Metaverse is supposed to solve.
• AeiumNE 4y ago
  What is sort of ironic is that they were already leading in that area too, they have one of the best labs in the world for that kind of research. But they didn't really do much public messaging around it.
• BWStearns 4y ago
  > Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI. It's also important to remember that Facebook was staring down the barrel of a bunch of investigations regarding election misinformation and basically tailoring their products to be addictive to teenagers while they internally realized it was harmful. The rebrand was much more about rebranding than meaningfully changing the direction of the company. I think he just figured with ZIRP he could do the direction change as well at 0 risk.
• csomar 4y ago
  > But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along. In case it's a surprise to you; crypto, after one of the worst bear markets, has now around $1.2 Trillion market cap. So sure maybe it's bullshit but so is facebook and tiktok. They still make money selling BS ads and toxic content. Crypto will be an upgrade comparing to their present business model (Zuck tried to get on crypto but was discouraged by regulators).
  • mmmmmbop 4y ago
    Right, and FTX was valued at $32 billion at some point.
  • CRConrad 3y ago
    > In case it's a surprise to you; crypto, after one of the worst bear markets, has now around $1.2 Trillion market cap. “Market cap”?!? So WTF is it; some stock you want people to buy? Shitstocks usually brag about their “market cap”. Currencies don't.
• wslh 4y ago
  Not a Mark fan but the Meta Quest Pro and Oculus are great and innovative devices. The obvious flaw in Meta business execution is that there is no content there! If you bet on the Metaverse you should build it and not wait developers to come. Or incentivize developers to use your platform. From the business perspective I think they failed in playing the Japanese console game old strategy (Nintendo and Sony): work obsessively to have great and high quality content and synchronize this with the console launch. Not saying that Nintendo and Sony are not nightmares for producers but they are very obsessive about details.
• eschneider 4y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the metaverse isn't a bad idea, but the implementations just aren't there yet. Or at least, folks aren't coming up with applications that are both compelling and supportable with affordable hardware. Google Glass had similar problems. Eventually someone's going to nail both these things, we just haven't seen it yet.
  • dannyr 4y ago
    Timing is also not great IMO. We're just getting out of the pandemic and people are excited to be outdoors. I wouldn't want to spend time in the Metaverse after all the lockdowns and travel restriction during the pandemic.
  • davidw 4y ago
    This is fair - it's at least real engineering and might find some uses. It's probably just not a zillion dollar business from day one.
  • kibwen 4y ago
    The notion of "metaverses" is a fine idea, and we've had great implementations of these for years, decades even. Meanwhile, Facebook's notion of "The Metaverse" is downright dystopian, and I'm happy that it's proving to be a demoralizing money pit.
    • rvnx 4y ago
      The worst part is that it feels that most Metaverse things are a poor copy-paste of a French project "Le Deuxième Monde" https://twitter.com/bompard/status/1526968731825491969 https://twitter.com/bompard/status/1526968731825491969 It wouldn't be an issue if it wouldn't look like we were still in 1997 (and Meta's Metaverse isn't the greatest piece of software either).
  • _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
    I can see the tech being super interesting for video games. But the angle of going to work, going to a mall etc. in the metaverse is just super unappealing. The nice thing about working remotely is that I don't have to go to an office and the nice thing about shopping online is that I don't have to go to a mall. So, why would I want to emulate the these things on a platform where something better already exists?
• otikik 4y ago
  > bullshit fractal Oh my. Such a good way to put it. Thank you.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  "Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-ibm-watson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
• dustedcodes 4y ago
  To me and everyone around me the Metaverse was immediately clear to be a massive flop. First of all, before the Metaverse neither me or any of my tech friends did even know that anyone was still investing into VR. When we heard about Facebook pivoting to the Metaverse we all were like "what? why would you invest into a technology which has been widely rejected already?". It's like Facebook investing in 3D TVs, which had a short blip in the market but then died off, because fundamentally nobody cared about 3D TVs. I don't know anyone who is even remotely excited about VR let alone the Metaverse. This became even more obvious when shortly after Facebook's pivot nobody, I mean like absolutely nobody was searching or reading up on VR news. It's a topic that people just don't care. They don't want VR in their life. People want more REALITY in their life, not less. Especially after COVID. On the other hand, AI has sparked everyone's imagination. Only a few weeks ago I showed my wife ChatGPT and we used it for some work she had to do in her field (medicine) and she was completely amazed by it. She's got her own account with OpenAI now and uses it for a variety of things already. My wife is the most non tech person ever. This to me is a strong indication that AI has not even scratched on the surface of its potential.
  • JKCalhoun 4y ago
    > They don't want VR in their life. People want more REALITY in their life, not less. For myself, I 100% agree. Tired: Metaverse; Wired: Protoverse.
  • charlieflowers 4y ago
    > People want more REALITY in their life, not less. Agree with most of what you said. But my take is, people would LOVE virtual reality if it were done well enough. We just don't seem to have the technical capability to pull it off well enough yet. Uncanny valley and all that.
    • jeremyjh 4y ago
      Yes exactly. ChatGPT is exciting because it actually works, not because it’s the first AI chat program. If Microsoft had pivoted to it even 5 years ago they’d be a laughingstock like Meta.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  It is Nov 14 2018. Facebook share price is $139. The WSJ publishes reports that Facebook morale is tanking. The top HN comment reads that Zuckerberg doesn't understand Facebook. A year later, Facebook ends 50% higher. Another year later, Facebook is 30% again higher. And it happens for another year. In the end, what gets Facebook is Apple AAT but it still ends up 60% higher than when that comment was posted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058
  • mmmmmbop 4y ago
    Really appreciate the perspective, thanks!
  • minsc_and_boo 4y ago
    Facebook is only up 30% since 2018. Comparitively, NASDAQ and SP500 are up 69% and 55%, respectively. Even GOOG is up 100%. Facebook is performing worse than the natural growth of the markets, so maybe moral is important?
• amalcon 4y ago
  The thing about the metaverse (and related tech) is that its success or failure rested entirely on the rate of improvement of the hardware. If the headset could present, say, an office that I could work from for 8 hours -- this would represent a massive disruption to the commercial real estate market. If I could sit down for a real conversation with my mother (who lives a 2 hour drive away) without it feeling like Zoom with motion sickness, that's a social game changer. The problem is that the tech cannot actually do things even close to this caliber yet. The fidelity has not reached the uncanny valley yet, much less gotten over it. Zuckerberg clearly thought he could make this possible with Meta's resources, but that just didn't happen.
• beambot 4y ago
  > But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along. Just looked it up. Between BTC, ETH & top stablecoins, crypto has $900B+ market cap and $60B+ in 24-hour volume. I'm not saying your conclusions are wrong (though I disagree), just that you're calling the game "over" at the end of the first quarter based on one hype-cycle. I remember people doing something similar in the dotcom bust: "WWW is dead."
  • EduardoBautista 4y ago
    There have been multiple hype cycles for crypto. In over a decade, I have yet to see something priced in cryptocurrency. Pricing something in dollars and then converting that amount in cryptocurrency for the next 15 minutes is still a dependence on government backed currency.
    • beambot 4y ago
      Contrary to some peoples' understanding, replacing fiat currency for everyday purposes isn't the only viable application of crypto. As one example: There are already banks that use XRP as the international settlement medium. You'll also see a lot of conversation right now about central bank digital currencies (CBDC) that could plausibly utilize crypto in some fashion.
      • CRConrad 3y ago
        > replacing fiat currency for everyday purposes isn't the only viable application of crypto. Stop it with the fake juxtaposition. Crypto is just as “fiat” as any other currency, including gold.
  • CRConrad 3y ago
    > crypto has $900B+ market cap So more of a speculative investment asset than a currency, then? Currencies aren't usually said to have a “market cap”. Investment assets – i.e, shit stocks – do.
• gspencley 4y ago
  Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. It's not about whether or not there is value there to be provided. VR and cyrpto provide value too, it's just that the markets for that tech are way more "niche" than companies were hoping for. And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software. The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now? Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for. Right now what I am observing is a phenomenon that is way too common in our industry. Companies are rushing to go to market with some AI "thing." 99.9999% of those "things" will end up being more versions of the Metaverse and crypto. Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people. It's all so novel and abstract and people are seeing dollar signs with very little understanding of how they are going to put it to use. Where it finds its uses, I predict will be limited to the same applications that we're already using ML for. Chat bots, entertainment, generating document outlines etc. Just because we made a big breakthrough with the technology doesn't mean that we've actually created a solution to real world problems that real world people are having here and now in the real world. No one, other than maybe Open AI, is going to get rich on "generative AI." If they get rich and change the industry, it will be finding a use for it that many people want.
  • warning26 4y ago
    > The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now? Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
• Animats 4y ago
  > The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. The Metaverse is coming along just fine. Roblox, Fortnite, VRchat, and Second Life all work. None are ad-supported. It's not compatible with Facebook's business model. There's no real role for "brands" in the metaverse. Or even ads. All the successful systems charge the user, although many have a free to play tier. As a branch of gaming, the metaverse works reasonably well, and is getting better. Gaming itself is huge, has passed Hollywood, and is going on from there. See the current issue of The Economist.
  • factualinacc1 4y ago
    You know Fortnite has a huge ad business right? Like in the hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter. Roblox also has a branded games business. It does not mediate ads but it also has advertising of other games on its platform. They are definitely working on automatic ad mediation.
• Night_Thastus 4y ago
  People seem to misunderstand why the metaverse was pushed so hard. Meta isn't stupid and was doing it for a good reason. It all comes back to how Meta makes its money - data collection. Facebook is in a really tricky position right now. They don't control the hardware or OS that it runs on, or the app stores. That means that at any time, Apple or Google can screw them over and deny Facebook from collecting data. However, what if they had their own hardware (Oculus) running their own OS? Then, they could collect as much data as they wanted without any interference from Google or Apple. That means significantly more profit! There's no way in hell they're going to break into the mobile phone market, so VR was their best option. That's why they pushed VR so hard. They need it to work because otherwise they have no control over their main source of income, and the squeeze on them is getting tighter ever day.
  • yardstick 4y ago
    Yeah it’s about control. They should have launched their own phones, hardware and OS, which waaay more people would use than VR.
  • importantbrian 4y ago
    > There's no way in hell they're going to break into the mobile phone market, so VR was their best option. They even tried to break into the mobile phone market at one point back in 2013. Then apple made it's privacy changes and now Google has said they will do something similar on their platform. I think you're right that Facebook got desperate to find a platform they can control.
    • sizzle 4y ago
      Remember when they tried giving free internet away in India, they are diabolically sleazy, trying to exploit the next billions of humans coming online in exchange for harvesting their data and monetizing it to the highest bidders.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    I agree 100% that was the strategic motivation. It still doesn't change the fact that it was a dumb decision. Facebook would have been much better off simply accepting that they couldn't control the hardware or OS or app stores and continue to do the best they could within those constraints. Instead they just threw away a ton of money that could have gone to shareholders and employees instead.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  You can ignore the grandiose claims of crypto savants and still accept how its unrivaled cloud development platform is going to continue to attract developers, accept that the entertainment sector is valuable, accept that the collectibles sector is valuable and we just never had transparency into the size of that while reducing friction for some aspects of the collectibles market, that financial services is valuable solely because there are some frictions to solve from people already there, that gambling is valuable, that flash loans are not paralleled by any other platform except the central banks overnight market, and so on. Outside of crypto its still hard to get free live transaction data for your trading algorithm. None of this needs ideology about the consensus layer or fandom about how transactions are settled with claims of “hard money” thats going to take over the world, but that sentiment does harden it and is intrinsically intertwined. But you can ignore it and still recognize the parts that are valuable, even if there is no value to you.
• soulofmischief 4y ago
  This is a silly comment. Crypto has tons of amazing use cases which existed before the community got hijacked by grifters. The hilarious thing is how much these use cases will fold back into AI.... how else do you expect an autonomous agent to manage its finances? Or for a global autonomous economy to emerge? You should do yourself a service and read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Learn about Ethereum. Learn about the drama and history surrounding the space; who the good guys and bad guys are. It's a really complex subject and I understand if you don't want to set aside the time to fully learn about it, but you do yourself a disservice by sharing an ignorant perspective of the space. At least have the courtesy in such case to recognize that your opinions are not fully informed.
  • mmmmmbop 4y ago
    > Crypto has tons of amazing use cases Really? Which ones?
• fghsqwads 4y ago
  The only reason Zuckerberg wanted to pivot to the Metaverse was because he wanted to be president of the US but couldn't. The idea was spread briefly, and he found out that the general public hated him and he had no chance to win political office. He decided to make his own universe where he could be the virtual president / tyrannical dictator.
• naravara 4y ago
  > Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It's no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI. I think fundamentally Facebook is not a product company and is consequently bad at actually making products. Apple has been moving very cautiously on the AR/VR front in contrast. Granted, Apple moves cautiously on everything, but they do seem more intentional about what to leave up to users to figure out on their own vs the Facebook approach of assuming you can just solve the interesting engineering problems and have the cool technology and people will just figure out how to use it. Smart watches and smartphones existed for a while before the Apple Watch and the iPhone, but what really kicked off the market for them was just a design that put it out there for people to explore with it so Apple could then iterate and figure out what the real niche was. But that will never happen if your initial test cases are just tech nerds. Tech nerds love the technology qua technology too much to figure out why things are interesting outside that.
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  I think the reality is that the useful part of meta-verse, the meta part, runs contradictory to the interests of a company like meta. Because it involves: 1) De-proprietorizing user data 2) Handing identity from identity providers (like meta) to open systems 3) Allowing foreign content into the walled garden So Meta built the least useful but snazziest part of the meta-verse, the verse part. And they built it in the face of a bunch of other already extant "verses", like Roblox which offer a more intersting landscape for interaction.
  • isk517 4y ago
    They made Second Life but without the ability to ruin a CNN press conference with flying human genitalia, which basically means they made a worse version of Second Life.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  > I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI. I don't think so -- generative AI doesn't really provide strategic advantages to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp the way it seems to hold promise for search (Google/Bing) and productivity software and certain jobs. Same way crypto isn't strategic to Meta either. You don't have to pivot your company. If you're still raking in cash, it can be much smarter to just continue that, rather than make a giant bet that might ultimately sink everything.
• martindbp 4y ago
  > The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. Sure, but VR isn't, they're different things. For VR they've sold somewhere around 15-20 million headsets, and many people use it quite a bit. I have no doubt VR is/will be big, but the path to finding what's compelling in VR will be strange. Personlly I rediscovered a love for table tennis and play every single day now, I'd probably pay $2-3k for a Quest 2 if I had no choice. That said I think trying to build the "Metaverse" in a top-down way will be very difficult, and Meta will probably not be the ones pulling it off since they don't have much good will, people actively avoid their social platforms if they can. But to me, what we need is not a Metaverse, but a good OS/platform with integrated social/identity, where friends can easily join each other's games, voice is enabled by default and provided as part of platform, not individual apps etc. Meta has been working on making this easier, but with my friends group the friction is still too high. And it's super annoying when third party apps (like Rec Room) needs their own login, friends/social features etc making it cumbersome to find your friends in there.
  • ninth_ant 4y ago
    Do you have data to back up the statement “many people use it quite a bit” (where it refers to VR)?
    • martindbp 4y ago
      ElevenVR has, according to themselves, 1 million players (https://elevenvr.com/en/ https://elevenvr.com/en/), how many active I don't know. That's just one niche. Other popular games/experiences are various shooters (Onward, Pavlov etc), rhythm games, fitness games, social experiences like Rec Room and VR Chat, movie/tv viewing apps, golf. Fitness has to be the most surprising one which few people would have predicted. For me, a few of my friends bought one together so we can hang out and play games, as we live far away with families these days. Remote meetings is obviously a huge potential one, but we probably need one or two hardware iterations to make that a compelling alternative to video. So it's safe to say VR has found some compelling use-cases, the question is if it's enough to sustain growth. More use cases will open up as the hardware gets better, so I think so.
  • 4y ago
• hackingforfun 4y ago
  > It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal. I consider myself to be a pretty reasonable person and I think the value in something like Bitcoin is as a backup or alternative to the traditional system. Similar to how someone would invest in gold. Except Bitcoin is much easier to transfer, requires much less space to store, etc., vs gold. I think 95% of crypto is bullshit though, and there are a lot of scams. If you look at recent bank collapses, high inflation, etc., I think a reasonable person might question how long modern monetary theory can go on like this. I'm not a gloom and doom person. I still hold fiat, haven't given up on banks, still invest in US treasuries, stocks, etc. But I think holding some in crypto and gold, etc., also makes sense.
  • pavel_lishin 4y ago
    I think this only holds if enough other people believe in gold or crypto as a backup system. If I had some extra zucchini and potatoes, and you were running very low on food, it would take quite a bit to convince me that a piece of shiny metal or numbers in a distributed ledger would be worth the calories I'm surrendering. Right now, dollars would be worth it, because nearly everyone believes in their utility, despite being a very similar faith-based currency.
• outworlder 4y ago
  > The Metaverse was always such a bad direction I don't think so. I just think the massive spending is a bit premature. Keeping a R&D division inside Meta makes sense. Betting the farm does not. VR has enormous potential but we are still lacking more ergonomic headsets and killer apps. I want to do 3D modelling in VR - except for some simple apps, I can't do that.
• munk-a 4y ago
  Statistically speaking - people who have brilliant innovative ideas that result in successful businesses are exceedingly rare and those ideas often come from experiences outside of the main line of work by combining ideas from disparate disciplines to have a true breakthrough. We as a society really need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that those ideas are likely to cluster on a small set of individuals that continue to crank them out. We've developed such an extreme cult of personality around the rich and it's pretty baffling to see when, if you actually sit down to talk to people - we're all pretty brilliant. Companies that get big and then score repeated out of the park hits do so by attracting and nurturing talent[1] - they don't do so by having one brilliant star that shines eternal. 1. And that is a really good and honestly rare talent in the modern marketplace - it can be hard to let creativity thrive.
• UncleOxidant 4y ago
  You're right, crypto is a religion. > But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along. The faithful have managed to get BTC up over $30K again, though. Saw Tim Bray posit the other day that if the US Gov just dumped all of it's BTC holdings (mostly seized from criminals) they could crash crypto quickly since the liquidity isn't there.
• sircastor 4y ago
  > started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. This is essentially how fiat currency works, isn’t it?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • mmmmmbop 4y ago
    That's a bit simplistic. Fiat currency "works" by being backed by a state, implying that the state will work to protect the fiat currency's value, be that through fiscally responsible governing and/or the use of force to protect its interests. For states which can not guarantee that, the currency tends to rapidly lose its purchase power. When I mentioned the societal nature of crypto, I meant something different. People who hold crypto have a vested interest in the wider adoption of crypto, and they often tend to become vocal proponents of crypto projects. I don't even claim bad intentions – I believe there is some psychological effect at play here that causes people to hold opinions that serve their interests, and becoming a crypto holder means that from that moment on, the spread of crypto is in one's interests. Now, my point was, that perhaps I overlooked this sociopsychological aspect of crypto. If enough people in power are personally invested in crypto, and they use their power to advance crypto adoption because it personally benefits them, then at some point it doesn't matter whether there's any intrinsic value in crypto or not – it becomes a self-reinforcing system.
• chrchang523 4y ago
  An important catch here is that he was eight years too early, not two. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742 .
• adrr 4y ago
  VR will be something eventually. Bandwidth/Storage isn't there and the device technology isn't there. I would love to be able to walk around Pyramids or Petra and have it be life like and not make me sick. Zuck doesn't care about the metaverse, he's chasing the next consumer device since he missed the smart phone. He knows that if he doesn't control the hardware, his business is at risk. Apple has reinforced this.
• TheCondor 4y ago
  Where are self driving cars in your mind? Save for tax cheats (even though the laws are clear) and speculators, crypto just doesn't provide that much value. There are some neat use cases but they are just that. The "metaverse" stuff... I don't think it was a bad bet to buy up Occulus, they still haven't found a great nail for that hammer but pivoting the entire company seems questionable. There is so much toxicity on the internet, why would you want to be "immersed" in it? I'm not anti-generative AI, I don't want to sound that way but Zuck and company have some interesting data on large scale systems with giant amounts of data and information, they certainly have invested in it too. Maybe it's wasn't "luck" so much as they might have some intuitions about the negatives uses of the technology. It's seriously cool stuff but I think we're still collectively in the honey-moon period. I do forecast a world where we will need to exponentially strengthen our BS meters.
• ted_bunny 4y ago
  > bullshit fractal New one to me, love it. Synonymous with ideology, IMO — keep zooming in, the answers are there, we promise! Those who zoom out are lost!
• AJRF 4y ago
  I think in a room with enough sycophants one could be made to believe in the vision of the Metaverse being the answer to Facebooks current problems; - Lack of relevance on the big blue site. - Huge slide in ad revenue. - Expensive acquisition of Oculus with not much revenue to show for it. $2bn is not a bet-the-company amount of money for Facebook, but it is something, and that $2bn spent on Oculus is op cost taken from somewhere else. - Reduction in moats for FB, Web shifted to mobile, FB tried bets on mobile + gaming, but those moats have receded. I imagine Mark wanted something that could increase ad spend, new revenue stream (increase revenue from micro transactions, digital asset ownership) and something to give them some platform strength to shore up their future. If you look around there is no other technology that is offering itself as a platform to own apart from the meta verse. Now, I absolutely do not think this bet will pay off - but I can see how he would think it would.
• fwungy 4y ago
  There are $7.5T worth of foreign exchange transactions per day. If BTC can take 1% of that it's currently worth $1.5M/btc. The rest of the crypto market shadows btc with other blockchains having niche uses. BTC/crypto is a natural alternative to USD settlement. If you believe the USD is sunsetting as the global reserve currency then crypto, especially btc is probably a good long term investment.
• mattlondon 4y ago
  I am not so sure about the generative models thing. Everyone is losing their shit about ChatGTP et al, yet I am sitting here saying yeah neat trick but I cannot trust anything it generates since anything and everything can be 100% made up and totally inaccurate and outright false. It is neat technology, but ultimately it is like a dictionary where you have to double-check that it is telling you the correct spelling every single time you look up a word - totally useless in other words: why bother using the dictionary at all if you then need to go check that the dictionary is right using some other source of truth? Why not just go straight to that and skip the dictionary in the first place since it is so untrustworthy. Every single time I've asked ChatGTP or Bard a "simple" question that I know the answer to, there has always (always!) been something simply outright wrong. It is just not ready to be trusted right now, but I look forward to the day when hallucinations are solved. Until we can be sure that LLMs do not hallucinate, I struggle to see the value to everyday-people for LLMs beyond use cases where accuracy and facts are unimportant. So ignore google-killing search engines, ignore medical diagnosis, ignore programming, ignore legal advice, and instead embrace making up stories or poems about unicorns or whatever where facts, accuracy, and correctness simply don't matter. It will still have a big impact sure, but I don't think it will be as world-changing as people think once the novelty wears off and people realise that LLMs are generally not very reliable when it comes to giving accurate info, and are better suited to "creative" tasks where correctness/accuracy doesn't matter. E.g. with stable diffusion (remember that?) no one expected a perfectly anatomically accurate picture of a dog or whatever - it did a passable picture of a dog eating a burrito or whatever the prompt asked for, but no one confused it with reality or treated it as fact. This is where I feel that we are with LLMs right now - passable, but does not hold up to detailed scrutiny. But obviously yes the metaverse is obviously total bullshit and facebook have totally jumped-the-shark on this. They're currently deep in restructuriung to undo over-hiring during the pandemic - it would not surprise me at all to see them also re-pivot away from the metaverse too (couching it as some sort of "focusing on efficiency" or whatever, i.e. continue working on FB, instagram and whatsapp core features)
• 1970-01-01 4y ago
  All 3 of these technologies retain a very strong, putrid stink when given a rational smell test. Until someone finds a way to permanently wash away this foul odor, I will remain skeptical of them. Metaverse stink: "This could have been an email" in 3-D! Bitcoin has 2 stinks: A)Find a lot of computing energy. Think about building power plants to make coins, and you're starting to get somewhere. B)Price will rapidly drop and spike, maybe thousands of dollars per day. That's a feature!? LLM AI: 60% of the time, it's right every time! This tech includes very nice graphics to back up any of its highly confident and hallucinogenic bullshit. Until this phenomenon is well understood, it stinks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...
• x3sphere 4y ago
  > But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along. You say that, but crypto bubble hasn't really popped. At 30K, BTC is only down around 55% from the highs, that's about in the same league as many tech stock declines this year. A true bubble pop should be like 90%+ down. The masses clearly don't agree that it's bullshit so far.
• stubybubs 4y ago
  > I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up. You know, I never really though these founders were visionary geniuses. For the most part they are well connected/already well off, and did the right thing at the right time. I think the last couple of years have made that even more clear. Facebook really started taking off about the time that a second golden age of tech was starting, fueled largely by near-zero interest rates and a focus on massive IPO exits without any proof of profitability. Nobody had to make any money for years, if at all. Uber hasn't made any money and neither has Spotify. Tesla does make cars, but its real product is arguably its absurdly valued stock that has allowed it a large runway fueled for the most part by the delusions of grandeur of its CEO. During this time larger companies simply acquired everything in sight, hoping that it would pay off. I mean, of all these acquisitions by Meta, which have been worth it? They're not all Instagrams. https://www.techwyse.com/blog/general-category/facebook-acquisitions-infographic/# https://www.techwyse.com/blog/general-category/facebook-acqu... Facebook made it, but not because Zuckerberg made the best PHP site ever. Right place, right time, maybe among the first to realize that any engagement is good engagement, and I doubt it was Zuckerberg himself who had that realization. On top of that, Google, Meta, and advertising companies in general have grown mostly on the theory that the mass amounts of data that they collect and use to sell hyper-focused ads is worth something. Recently it's been revealed that this isn't true, and you get just as good or better results by simply advertising the last thing somebody looked at, or whatever they are currently standing next to IRL. Knowing that you looked at hemorrhoid cream 3 years ago doesn't help you sell anything today. So it's arguably based on lies as well. Now with interest rates up, I think we'll see how that plays out as advertisers finally start pulling back due to economic conditions. Uber turned off 2/3 of its ad spend in 2017 after it found that most of "conversions" were in fact fraud. Curious to see what other companies experience on this front. We'll find out how many of these founders are true geniuses or were just burning cash. I mean shit, give me a billion dollars and I'll give you something that looks like the next big thing no matter what...
• OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  The best theory I've seen is that Zuckerberg was looking for an angle where Facebook could control a platform, rather than simply be a program on somebody else's. Look around, see VR, and think "This space is in its infancy, and doesn't currently have a market-dominant platform" and then bet big. Because at the end of the day, Facebook didn't have much to lose. The social media wars were over, FB and especially Instagram had won. As long as they didn't actively break anything, the information->ads->money pipeline will keep flowing until the entire space gets disrupted by something fundamental shifting under their feet. A VR-2ndLife that actually caught on could honestly be a relatively believable such shift. Ultimately it didn't, but that's still alright news for FB: no big changes means the gravy train is still rolling.
• ynx 4y ago
  A lot of self-proclaimed technologists counterintuitively love to see technology fail, especially when they predicted so ahead of time. That's some frustrating shit, because it rewards the least patient and surface-level analyses which (correctly!) identify deficiencies and lulls in activity, but mislabels them as stagnation or dead-ends or fundamental flaws. It took us 20 years from General Magic to a passable iPhone. VR will take time, and AI is likely more fruitful to prioritize currently (not saying that's a bad idea!) - but we don't yet have enough historical perspective to declare VR - or even (ick) crypto - as bad directions.
• duxup 4y ago
  There was a story about the Metaverse and Carmak and some discussion and disagreement about issues like not being able to host stadium sized experiences (not all the avatars could be in the same room) and other topics like avatar quality in meetings. I couldn’t help but think that I have zero interest in a stadium or any size meeting where I have to put a VR helmet on…. I can imaging Zuck and Carmak and others would love that people listen to them in stadium sized meetings, but I’m not sure how users feel. I’m sure one day there will be such experiences, but there seems to be nothing appealing to many individuals about them now. God help me when some CEO declares a VR mandatory meeting… Metaverse seems like a top down driven thing.
• AzzieElbab 4y ago
  I can't read Zuckerberg's mind, but getting into in-house hardware would have freed FB from Apple.
• still_grokking 4y ago
  Just to get the facts right: The "bullshit fractal" Bitcoin is currently at about 50% of it's all time high, and is raising again constantly since beginning of 2023. OTOH: Whether generative AI has any value beyond mass desinformation and making "creative people" unemployed only the future may show. Also: Given than you need super-computers to do the training it's unlikely it will become a technology that can be used by everyone. (The situation here is imho similar to "open hardware": You may be able to design the hardware but you're not able to actually build it in your basement—like it's the case for open source software, which made kind of a revolution possible. AI will likely remain purely a toy for the few richest companies on this planet, without any access for the masses, beyond being "customers"). Regarding VR (the "metaverse"): This was a dead idea already as Second Life was hyped. VR pops up every 10 - 20 years since the 60's, but never caught on; and likely never will for practical reasons. Even Bitcoin has more real wold applications average people would care about than VR (e.g. you can at least buy "stuff" with Bitcoin, or send and receive money against the will of your government).
  • grensley 4y ago
    Today's supercomputer is tomorrow's phone.
    • still_grokking 4y ago
      It took more than 25 years form super-computer to phone in the past. At least as long as you could apply Moor's "law"… (Which doesn't work any more for some time). [edit: no pun was intended, just noticed…]
      • CRConrad 3y ago
        No problem, none noticed either.
  • CRConrad 3y ago
    > Just to get the facts right: The "bullshit fractal" Bitcoin is currently at about 50% of it's all time high, and is raising again constantly since beginning of 2023. Is the economy of Bitlandia on the rise in real terms, or what? Huge export surplus, something like that? If not, then WTF is that to brag about?!? Big unmotivated swings in the exchange rate are a failure in a currency. What you're crowing about is that as a currency, Bitcoin sucks.
• ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along. These statements do not contradict- they can both be true
• ggm 4y ago
  If "bullshit fractal" wasn't a thing before, it deserves to be one now. The kind of bullshit which just invites even more bullshit when you dive in and try to pick it apart.. its turtles of bullshit all the way down.
• mbreese 4y ago
  > I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI I'm pretty sure that I agree with you, but what would Facebook/Meta do with LLMs? You wouldn't want to generate fake people to interact with (well, someone might, but Facebook wouldn't). Because that's what data they had would have been useful for. I mean, if you can predict what a person will say, or how they will react to an ad, that has value... but I'm not sure I know where that value is for a Facebook, outside of better targeting of ads. Maybe predicting consumer/voter sentiment about a policy or product before it's released? The same applies to Google in aa certain respect actually. I assume they have enough data from gmail to effectively recreate a conversation with me. This could be lucrative for some targets (not me!), but probably not in a way that Google would be able to legitimately capture. I could completely see how other actors would be able to use LLMs to predict or impersonate people on the Facebook/Google platforms, just not how the platforms themselves would be able to generate value. Google at least could merge generic LLMs into their search mission to catalog the world's information. But that's a harder pitch to figure out how Facebook would generate value from it. Am I missing something, or am I thinking too much about this like West World?
• throwaway292939 4y ago
  Meh. I'd argue that the conclusion for Metaverse/crypto hasn't been reached yet. (Why? There's a 1.2T market cap saying it hasn't). It's like saying internet grocery delivery is dead because Webvan died in the early 2000s. I'd give those two another 5-10 years before I expect to see real results — so much needs to be built first at the foundational layer.
• mbrochh 3y ago
  There truly is no value in crypto. But try researching again and see if you can find any useful value in Bitcoin.
• seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Metaverse can and probably will eventually pan out when tech is ready for it. I'm really happy Meta is subsidzing Oculus head sets, and I hope they keep cranking out new versions. That is one piece of hardware I can't live without, though I don't do metaverse or even game with it. Crypto seems to have been an easy money scam from almost day one.
• seventytwo 4y ago
  I think Zuck pivoting meta to the metaverse would be like Steve Jobs pivoting Apple to AI in the 80s. A metaverse-like concept is conceivable, but a long long way out.
  • pavlov 4y ago
    I think in Zuck’s mind the analogy is Bill Gates pivoting Microsoft to GUIs in 1983. Which seemed pretty crazy at the time when PCs ran at 4 megahertz and could barely fill a 320*200 screen with four ugly colors. But Gates had seen Xerox Star and Smalltalk and Lisa prototypes. VR’s “Mac moment” may be happening this year with Apple’s hardware unveiling. I suppose Zuck hopes to ship his mass-market “Windows 3.0” soon after. I’m very curious to find out what consumers think of the Apple product.
• danjac 4y ago
  While generative AI may be useful, to what extent is it useful to Facebook right now? I mean as a new business model, as opposed to helping them do better software development or moderation?
  • jayd16 4y ago
    It has a lot of uses for their metaverse push. You could imagine a future social platform where AI generated pictures and video instead of selfies is the communication medium du jour. But in that sense they're not far behind the pack as it is.
  • twelve40 4y ago
    Great point, there might not be anything for them there despite the insane hype right now. A couple of useful things here and there, sure, but not much to profitably "pivot" their billion users into.
  • m_fayer 4y ago
    Generative AI makes their business case for the meta-verse actually work. You can populate the meta-verse with convincing NPCs: they fit in, they finesse social interactions, they kickstart communities and befriend the unpopular, and every once in a while they drop some product placement. For an introverted, anxious, and digital-preferring generation, this could be perfect.
    • ulfw 4y ago
      It's an unbelievably sad future to live in what you're describing.
      • m_fayer 4y ago
        Brought to you by dystopia.inc
      • dralley 4y ago
        And literally predicted by South Park https://youtu.be/jCkL_zuXcY8 https://youtu.be/jCkL_zuXcY8 https://youtu.be/dCDIgoSlNXg https://youtu.be/dCDIgoSlNXg https://youtu.be/vtOgzVD_zDI https://youtu.be/vtOgzVD_zDI https://youtu.be/kklek8cNDIQ https://youtu.be/kklek8cNDIQ
• _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
  I feel exactly the same. I have friends that have been trying to explain to me what the huge advantages of crypto and NFTs are for almost a decade and it's still very hazy to me. Nobody explained ChatGPT to me. I saw prompt and started typing some questions about a python library and it was immediately obvious to me that this would be super useful to me.
  • tpmoney 4y ago
    Sometimes I think you need to use a new tech for a while before the benefits become obvious. I worked for Apple retail back when the iPhone was first released. I remember even after getting our hands on it release day that it was neat and exciting, but also something I'd completely written off at $800 because I just didn't see enough use for what it offered compared to a dumb phone and an iPod. Part of the sales experience at the time was they gave all of us one to carry around during our shift on the sales floor and encouraged us to show it off and use it to look up things we'd normally have gone to one of the demo computers to look up. About 2 months later, I'm taking a road trip with a destination plugged into my Garmin GPS (remember those?). I'm in the final stretches of getting where I need to go when the GPS says "you've arrived" while I'm driving down a road with nothing on either side of me. I go for another half mile or so just assuming it was off by a few hundred feet and I'd find an entrance but no such luck. Turn around, punch in the destination to the GPS again and try from the other direction, same deal. "You've arrived" in the middle of nowhere. Tried a couple more times and then pulled off to the side of the road and reached for the iPhone in my pocket to pull up some information / a map quest search, and then remembered that I don't have an iPhone in my pocket because I don't own an iPhone and just carry one on shift at work. That experience convinced me that there was value in this whole "smart phone" thing and that I would eventually be getting one. Which isn't to say that crypto or NFTs are like iPhones, but more that I think you can't necessarily understand how useful a given piece of tech is just by someone else explaining it to you. Some things you just have to use.
    • 908B64B197 4y ago
      > because I just didn't see enough use for what it offered compared to a dumb phone and an iPod. You weren't wrong for the iPhone v1. The UI was years ahead of everything else, but it was still quite limited. v2 was the first to support apps. To me that was the differentiator that made it a truly revolutionary product.
• johannes1234321 4y ago
  > I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up. I am quite sure he had the data that growth with Facebook, Insta, etc. was limited and threatened by TikTok and others. The Meta stuff was an attempt to break out of that I to a different space, where they could be the early mover. And then being blinded by own fascination for the space. I think many share the assumption that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook never really understood what users actually want and had luck their platform matched the spirit for some time.
  • Waterluvian 4y ago
    I wonder how brands like Nike manage to stay “cool” for generations but basically every social tech brand has a shelf life.
    • ModernMech 4y ago
      Nike makes shoes and other sports related stuff. If you don't want Nike, don't buy Nike. FAANG on the other hand aspires to infect every single facet of my life, and they have some glib self-serving narrative about how not only are they right to do so, they have the moral imperative. And so what do they do? They track every single aspect of my life that they can, the invade my privacy, they leak my data, they bilk me for cash at every opportunity. Dark patterns, bad UI, run arounds on the phone, locking out of accounts. I'm sorry but this entire industry is completely fucked, and it's only getting worse. As someone who has been in tech since the 80s, the scene is done. It's been overrun by vultures, bankers, and billionaires with more money than ethics, and they think you are just an NPC in their world, where they are celebrities, kings, and gods. That is why social tech brands have a shelf life, because none of them can resist the dark side. Nike has a dark side, but at least when I take them off my shoes aren't trying to take over my life.
    • NickC25 4y ago
      I think one of the reasons is that as others have said - they know their lane and stick to it - sports apparel. Nike doesn't try to take over all your interactions, doesn't try to own your life and doesn't grow beyond its domain. Shit, even within its own domain, it's failed with some projects long-term (Nike Golf clubs come to mind). They stay relevant by signing young upcoming athletes, some of whom go on to become known worldwide in sports that are popular worldwide like Soccer, Basketball, and Tennis. Nike does not have a platform, and in a roundabout way also benefits from their competition doing well (the more people that are active, the larger the potential customer base is). FB/Meta does not have that luxury - to them, if you're not on their platform, you're useless. Nike does not have that problem. Nike wants to own the experience when you're doing something athletic or casually physical (walking around). There's a limit to that as even pro athletes aren't physically active all the time. Since so much of our lives have a technology component to it, Meta wants to own that whole ecosystem , which is much more ambitious than anything Nike ever tried or will try.
• tinyhouse 4y ago
  You cannot compare VR with Crypto. VR can be super useful but the tech isn't there yet, similarly to where generative AI was two years ago. Once we have a breakthrough with VR it'll also be amazing and useful.
  • vharuck 4y ago
    In my (admittedly uneducated) view, VR can be useful for some professional tasks in the immediate future. Things like 3D modeling, architecture, explorative data analysis. But Facebook is a social media company. Aside from a small proportion of enthusiastic users, people won't want to socialize with VR. They'd rather check an app on their phone every so often while doing something else. If they want a more personal and engaged conversation, a video chat is better than VR. The Metaverse makes no sense beyond games. And the heyday of socializing in MMOs has long passed (much to my dismay).
  • PinguTS 4y ago
    VR is as useful as the whole movie industry and the game industry. Yes, it is important for entertainment. With all the streaming services the movie industry is moving from central cinemas to your home. So VR will be in competition with all the other entertainment industries. But is that useful in any sense just besides entertainment? I doubt. It started all years ago with Google Glass. Even at that time I doubted that there is value in this. Now, we are here and Google Glass is finally dead. I know it is in the rumors that Apple will bring its VR headset soon. But really? Will that make it better? I doubt. VR will be in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. It is something, you can't just do besides. It will need your full attention. I doubt that there is some real usefulness.
    • tinyhouse 4y ago
      Entertainment is not enough? What's our purpose in life? Work and reproduce?
      • PinguTS 4y ago
        I have an old farmers house with a land and I have historic cars and I travel the world for real, not virtually, because I want to learn the world for real, not virtually. My house is near a hughe lake. There are people swimming for real, not virtually; there are people sailing for real, not virtually; there are people windsurfing for real, not virtually.
• Quindecillion 4y ago
  Won't find me disagreeing with everything you said there about the broader crypto industry. It's nothing more than a massive affinity scam. But you're making an error if you're lumping Bitcoin in with "crypto".
  • _heimdall 4y ago
    Bitcoin is the OG cryptocurrency project. How exactly is it not accurate to limp it in with crypto?
    • Quindecillion 4y ago
      Bitcoin is an open source protocol. Open, neutral, accessible to everyone, decentralised, censorship resistant etc. Every other crypto project is a product/service created by a company or "foundation". There's a business plan (i.e. pump and dump), CEO, marketing team, PR etc. Think of it as the difference between TCP/IP as the base layer protocol for the Internet vs. all the dot com companies/services that have come and gone over the years... except many of those dot com companies actually provided useful services to people. Bitcoin is more akin to TCP/IP, whereas crypto is more like those dot com companies, except crypto doesn't provide anything useful to anyone, except shitcoin founders who need retail investors to pump and dump on as exit liquidity. That's the difference.
      • _heimdall 4y ago
        Bitcoin has been effectively run by a company since they bitcoin gold fork. Not even to say that's a bad thing, but the network was being guided by a company set on limiting bitcoin throughout while building the L2 lightning network to solve that problem outside the bitcoin protocol > Bitcoin is more akin to TCP/IP, whereas crypto is more like those dot com companies, except crypto doesn't provide anything useful to anyone, When you say crypto here do you mean cryptography, cryptocurrencies, or a subset of smart contract based projects? All currencies, whether bitcoin, shitcoins, or USD are ultimately pump and dump schemes the all meet the technical definition of a Ponzi scheme
• endisneigh 4y ago
  I agree. I have 4 Quests and know many with Quests. It's funny how all of us used it very frequently in the first couple months and now they're gathering dust. The fact of the matter is, if you have people you can hang out with in person you're not going to bother with VR, or the metaverse.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • cableshaft 4y ago
    I use my Quest regularly, although mainly for gaming and fitness. I've played around with the social aspects, and they're interesting, but I don't really have friends with a Quest and I struggle to make friends just by butting in on random conversations, so I haven't really done it much. Have had a couple of interesting conversations about movies with a movie nerd in a virtual hangout in the Bigscreen app, though, and did some dancing in a virtual nightclub a couple times, which was actually pretty fun (I think I'd feel a little too weird doing going to an actual nightclub nowadays, I'm a little old for the scene).
  • fatnoah 4y ago
    > The fact of the matter is, if you have people you can hang out with in person you're not going to bother with VR, or the metaverse. Several of my friends have Quests, and we use them regularly with each other, but the catch here is that we all live in different parts of the country, so it's great for some more informal goofing off while we chitchat.
• tmountain 4y ago
  Given Facebook’s track record with politics, I am glad they didn’t pivot to generative AI. I don’t see anything “good” coming from that push as far as societal outcomes are concerned.
• version_five 4y ago
  Generative AI is the same. Behind crypto was interesting technology that was warped out of recognition by charlatans. Exact same is happening with AI.
• jayd16 4y ago
  It's pretty silly to compare metaverse to crypto. Crypto is a solution looking for a problem where as the metaverse exists in many forms today with the question being whether the tech and userbase can evolve fast enough to sustain Meta. They could both fail but I don't think you can predict one from the other.
  • hoseja 4y ago
    The crypto problem has an army and intelligence apparatus and ostensibly, legality. Some people may think it would be nice to not have to lose portions of your savings by indirect taxation whenever the problem decides to print money, plus of course the rest of the spectrum of wild authoritarian control.
• threeseed 4y ago
  It's too easy / lazy to joke about Meta and their bet on a future AR/VR world. But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC. Do people really want to bet against the company that has had so many consumer product successes even ones for which there was widespread doubt e.g. Apple Watch, AirPods etc. And what if it takes off ? There will need to be another platform similar to iPhone/Android and isn't that the type of bet Meta should be making.
  • AlexandrB 4y ago
    I think the Apple headset will be a (relative) disaster. I'm sure it will sell OK, but we're talking Apple TV numbers not iPhone numbers. What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app, like Pokémon GO (in its heyday) or World of Warcraft or something. Not another headset. People will put up with all kinds of discomfort/inconvenience/cost if there's something interesting to do. The current crop of Metaverses don't cut it in this regard.
    • machiaweliczny 4y ago
      I think market will be there it’s just like 5 years from now and most people seem to know this such as Roblox and Epic (creative 2.0). It will be speed up by generative AI
    • ghaff 4y ago
      You certainly can do somewhat useful AR on a phone. See e.g. some of the ML photo and sound identification tools (e.g. Merlin, Google Lens) that have very quietly gotten quite useful. But AR that is really a killer app almost certainly needs a fashionable, light, easy to use headset and that's a hardware problem to a significant degree that probably doesn't have a quick fix. Yes, you can do something that's effectively a prototype that's more like a "headset" but that's almost certainly not a mass market device that most people will walk around wearing. (There's also the social glasshole issue but my guess is that goes away with a useful enough device even if some people hate the idea.)
    • 4y ago
• Dalewyn 4y ago
  It's worth remembering that unlike with cryptocurrency, our ("reasonable people" as you put it) apathy for the "metaverse" stems from the fact that most of us experienced it a long time ago, long before that term even came into common(?) use: Multiplayer games, and especially MMORPGs. Be it Ragnarok Online, Runescape, Ultima Online, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Minecraft, or whatever, anyone who has played multiplayer games of any kind know exactly what the "metaverse" was trying to sell to us and the common masses. We also know that multiplayer games, unlike practically every romanticized depiction, generally sucks to play with strangers. You absolutely need a tightly knit group of good friends to play with to be able to truly enjoy them. So when we said the "metaverse" would never take off, it's because we have literally been there and done that.
  • jayd16 4y ago
    Aren't we on a multiplayer chat board with strangers here? I think you hit the nail on the head as far as how the metaverse is not new, but I think your pessimistic take is not so obvious to me and presumably many people bullish on metaverse ideas.
    • grumbel 4y ago
      The thing that would make a Metaverse interesting is if it acted as glue between all those very similar services, i.e. being able to hop from one MMO into another one with your complete party, without having to switch accounts, avatars and all that. Kind of like your browser can access and follow links to numerous different websites, but with 3D and multiplayer included. The problem with Meta's Metaverse is that that's exactly what they don't want, their vision of VR is one where the have complete control over everything. Thus you aren't even allowed to access their Metaverse with hardware not made by them.
• wg0 4y ago
  Not to mention, ruined the brand value along with it. People knew Facebook, good or bad, Facebook was Facebook. There was still a lot that facebook could do. Could gradually evolve into integrating payments becoming a PayPal in the process, a store front and what not. Bringing a video platform of its own with same revenue sharing model fully integrated and what not. Yes, there are other companies and products in similar spaces but Facebook would have been cash positive in each of those ventures pretty soon if not crazy profitable. Whereas the Meta VR demos are almost close to what we can see from 80s, not to mention that they add no value to gaming, entertainment, communication or commerce.
  • paganel 4y ago
    I don't think the European Union regulatory bodies would have allowed Facebook/Meta to integrate stuff like payments and, as such, to "become PayPal in the process". Maybe if that all had happened before 2015-2016, but in today's political and business climate I see no way for that being allowed to happen.
    • manquer 4y ago
      Don’t have to launch in Europe . Payments aren’t like other SaaS apps launching in every country is lot of paperwork and apps will choose to work in only some geographies . Also WhatsApp does integrate payments in some geographies so it is not like FB wasn’t already having a step there . FB is just chasing fads, few years back it was libre coin at the peak of crypto interest . They will keep throwing stuff to see what sticks until they run out of money
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. This seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. At the time, the biggest concern Zuckerberg had was that they didn't own a platform. Apple had the iOS ecosystem, Google had Android, Microsoft had Windows, Amazon had AWS and their logistical moat. Zuckerberg made a bet that the world would move to VR similarly to the way the world moved to PCs in the 80s, which allowed Microsoft to take over a big chunk of the world. Zuckerberg's fear wasn't unreasonable, he just bet wrong. Apple's privacy changes had a huge impact to Facebook, and the other FAANG without a "moat-defining platform", Netflix, is also in the most precarious position among the big techs. That said, I agree with most of the other comments. I can see VR evolving a little beyond gaming I guess, but it's actually kind of a nightmare to imagine myself wearing a fucking headset all day. At this point I think Zuckerberg knows he bet wrong and AI is the future, and he's clearly trying to pivot, but it's really hard to move a big company like Meta quickly, and it also means he has to admit he just lit billions and billions on fire.
  • 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    >This seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. 2nd Life, The Simms, various MMORPGS. We have loads of experience buildings virtual worlds with virtual belongings and conducting meetings virtually. I was part of a WOW guild that had meetings about raids and other small bits of admin stuff in game. But a company known for being sketchy as heck slaps on 3D goggles and makes it less fun and I’m supposed to want to be in it? I think you’ll find that a lot of people were skeptical.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      I don't disagree that the company is "sketchy as heck", but the fundamental bet was that the main computer interface display device would move from being a monitor (and also perhaps the smartphone display) to being VR. And yes, there were people skeptical about that, but I don't think that idea in and of itself (that is, taking Facebook's nefariousness out of the equation) was that outlandish a couple years ago, despite my personal disdain for the idea.
• roenxi 4y ago
  > It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Were these reasonable people banking with Silicon Valley Bank like all the smart guys? Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k. Tether has survived something like 2x depegs so far. We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
  • Kbelicius 4y ago
    > Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k. What is bitcoin resilient to? Not falling to $0? > We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet. I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped.
    • roenxi 4y ago
      > What is bitcoin resilient to? Not falling to $0? If we cherry pick, say, the Vanguard Long-Term Treasury ETF [0] in the last 3 years it is down 30%. So bitcoin isn't as resilient against value loss US treasuries but we're seeing changes in magnitude in price that is similar to a long term bond ETF. That is a lot better than I expected, and probably a lot of others. Really good performance compared to the gains, I suspect. No obvious counterparty risk, so probably superior to the debt-laden US government in some sense. > I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped. Someone is paying for bitcoin to burn a medium country's worth of energy to keep running. That speaks to a certain sincerity in their disagreement with you. [0] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/vglt https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
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