10 ms·

Is Meta having growing pains or in a death spiral?

57 points by redbell 3y ago

robin_reala 3y ago
Transcript: https://slate.com/transcripts/aU1odU93ZWlMVlZjcTVJaXFTSmZVQXc5WUM4M1VJVmNVNG9Kazd4ZVQvaz0= https://slate.com/transcripts/aU1odU93ZWlMVlZjcTVJaXFTSmZVQX...
jacquesm 3y ago
One can hope.
otikik 3y ago
Por que no los dos?
jemmyw 3y ago
Neither? Just doing what a big company does, especially after making a bet that doesn't seem to be panning out.
andrewstuart 3y ago
The whole Metaverse thing was very strange. It should have been self evident to zuckerberg that wearing a vr headset will never be mainstream. Metaverse was “Zucks original idea”… a billionaires pipe dream - an average idea backed by untold money. The Metaverse showed that as they say “once you’re lucky, twice you’re good”.
- deleted 3y ago
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- lordnacho 3y ago
  I thought it was at best a thing to get a foothold in, not something to rename the company for. Plus if you're renaming the firm and making it the focus, maybe do a better job. Give people legs for instance? The whole thing looks ridiculously dated. Maybe spend some of the money finding out what people want.
  - checkyoursudo 3y ago
    I felt like Zuck thought the rest of the world loved "Ready Player One" as much as he did, and that was about the extent of his market research. Presumably, they thought people would love it so much that the initial offering being visually/functionally sub-standard would not matter so much?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I thought it was Snow Crash. That Facebook coopted the term "metaverse" from that dystopian world told me everything I needed to know about their intentions.
      - checkyoursudo 3y ago
        Oh, yeah, the term metaverse comes from Snow Crash. I was just recalling this incident: https://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-gives-all-its-employees-ready-player-one-2016-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-gives-all-its-employe... and Zuck referring to RPO in some interview: "I appreciate the RPO reference" here, https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-c...
- lagrange77 3y ago
  > an average idea backed by untold money Spot on!
- rob74 3y ago
  To me the whole Metaverse thing felt like Zuck thinking "ok, now I paid two billion for Oculus, I'd better come up with a plan what to do with it to keep the shareholders happy!". And then the plan got out of hand...
  - dageshi 3y ago
    2 billion for Facebook isn't particularly a lot of money, I doubt their shareholders would care very much so long as FB continued to be a money printing machine. The problem was tiktok. FB missed the short form video social media medium so it can't grow and if it can't grow it's no longer a "tech giant", so I think Zuckerberg desperately looked around and thought, "what comes after short form video?" and came to the conclusion it had to be VR because there isn't anything else that's obvious. And thus the pivot to the metaverse.
    - typeofhuman 3y ago
      FB missed short-form video, but Instagram didn't. People just like TikTok better.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Zuckerberg still owns a controlling stake. The only shareholder he has to keep happy is himself. This was an attempt to get ahead of a potential disruptive innovation that might cause a strategic inflection point (as per "The Innovator's Dilemma"). Some people thought that AR/VR devices might displace smartphones in the social media space the same way that smartphones displaced microcomputers. So far that isn't happening, but I guess it's still a possibility.
- Folcon 3y ago
  > an average idea backed by untold money I keep finding it strange that this doesn't have to be true? A repeated question I keep hearing as well as having myself is, "what is it for?" which personally seems bizarre. There are many possible valid answers to that question, but I as someone who's spent at least a few hours hearing about it really shouldn't have that question. That personally feels like a much more significant failure than anything else. Though perhaps I've missed it, maybe there's some clear articulation somewhere of what the goal is of the Metaverse, if so, feel free to enlighten me =)...
  - iamthemonster 3y ago
    The goal is to serve more ads into people's retinas
  - rob74 3y ago
    The ultimate goal of the Metaverse can only be to have something like the Matrix, i.e. have a significant part of the population "jacked in" to the Metaverse most of the time (which would only be the logical continuation of the current state of affairs, with most of us walking around like zombies, constantly looking at our phones). But that would be a bit too dystopian for most people's tastes, so they avoid mentioning it too explicitly...
    - Folcon 3y ago
      Sure, but if that's the goal then they're failing at the first hurdle, if you want to serve ads, you need space / context that holds people's attention and interest. That's literally table stakes. You can't serve ads to nobody. So even though that may be "what it's for", that can't be the sole reason, those people need a reason to show up. So for that audience or any audience, what is it for?
      - michaelt 3y ago
        The theoretical sci-fi promise of things like the metaverse would be having pretty much everything reality has, but better. A metaverse concert as good as attending a real concert in person, but also your friend who lives 500 miles away is right there next to you. Business meetings as good as meeting in person, but with infinitely luxurious surroundings and no travel time. Office buildings where everyone gets a private office and a dozen huge monitors. And so on. Obviously, that's not what Facebook are offering at the moment. I would say they are nowhere close. And of course, though to you and I such a thing controlled by Facebook might seem incredibly dystopian, Zuckerberg probably has a much higher opinion of facebook than normal people!
- dom96 3y ago
  A VR headset no, a set of AR glasses yes. What seems to be the issue is that creating usable AR glasses that have the quality of Quest is currently not feasible. Zuckerberg's real gamble was that they could figure out a way to make this happen (maybe they still can).
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    You also don't want AR glasses. The battery alone is a hassle, add the heating/weight of the device (same issues as VR) and a pinch of motion sickness and the faulty input haptics and you are back to the trusty ol' laptop, if you want to actually get something done, or to the smartphone if you are just consuming content. It's just a bad idea all around, perhaps it's easier to hack the optic nerve and feed images into the brain that way. There is nothing AR glasses can achieve at an industrial site (their main use currently with HoloLens) that a decent digital twin, being able to quickly zoom in/out across hundreds of yards of wiring/machineries, doesn't obtain easier/faster/better/safer/more comfortable. Just what the doctor ordered for a tired technician, crawl under the machinery to check for the AR gimmick some dude in a $4,000 chair designed, only for the thing to be completely unable to map the AR model to the physical object because there's barely any light under a 25 tonne industrial whatever.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      AR has its uses though. In the military, for example... imagine a squad of soldiers, with every soldier being digitally linked to a central command station that knows the precise location of each unit. A soldier could then see on their glasses - even at night - where their unit mates are, or get commands and status updates from leadership instead of by (often times barely understandable) radio.
      - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
        If they can stop themselves from vomiting, maybe [1] [2]. I am more afraid of drone swarms with pytorch object detection obliterating everything in sight [3], or what Geoffrey Hinton said about the self-healing mine field [4]. Was reading now the "HoloLens environment considerations" [5], most funny aspect: "Wormholes. If you have two areas or regions that look the same, the tracker may think they're the same. This results in the device tricking itself into thinking it's somewhere else." [1] October 2022, "Microsoft Hololens causes US army nausea and headaches", https://www.avinteractive.com/markets/government-and-defence/microsoft-hololens-causes-us-army-nausea-and-headaches-18-10-2022/ https://www.avinteractive.com/markets/government-and-defence... [2] January 2023, "Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens", https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-off-entire-teams-behind-virtual-mixed-reality-and-hololens https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-... [3] https://fedscoop.com/darpa-drone-swarms-with-1000-unmanned-aircraft-within-5-years https://fedscoop.com/darpa-drone-swarms-with-1000-unmanned-a... [4] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/minefield.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/minefield.pdf [5] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/hololens-environment-considerations#wormholes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/hololens-environm...
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  To me this Metaverse thing seems just a nice story to tell people who have no engineering knowledge at all (investors, shareholders et al), and sell them this sci-fi movie idea. It is just yet another "second life" (remember that?) software stack, plugged with social networks - the worst of the two worlds. I've jumped ship with social media stuff about a decade ago, and seeing how nasty it became, I'm just glad I ditched it. Pro tip: That common excuse "I use it to keep in touch with family blah blah blah" is not an excuse - you can keep in touch with family if you care about them. If you don't, don't waste everybody's time.
  - Mindwipe 3y ago
    Second Life still exists and is profitable... (Unlike Meta's efforts.)
    - duskwuff 3y ago
      And, perhaps a little ironically, Second Life isn't available in VR, and probably never will be.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      VR chat is also huge right now
  - twelve40 3y ago
    there is no replacement for keeping in touch with friends from far away and yes, remote parts of family, too - fb or insta. I don't go there much anymore because the endless promoted reels drive me insane, but i do miss that aspect of those services.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  Just looking at Horizon Worlds makes me wonder if the whole Metaverse thing was just a front to funnel funds into a top secret defense project and if WWIII would be preferable to playing that game.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  The Facebook/Metaverse kerfuffle is more fitted to "first as tragedy (the damage ad-driven social media has done to fabric of society is yet unaccounted for), second as farce (VR was a sad joke from the start—proud owner of the first HTC Vive, used it 10, maybe 12 times in 7? years)". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Louis_Bonaparte#First_as_tragedy,_then_as_farce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Lou...
- deleted 3y ago
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- kypro 3y ago
  The goal of the Metaverse isn't to be wearing something that feels like a VR headset though... AR/VR is likely to be the logical progression of physical screens, it's just we're not there yet. And it's not even that the current tech is that bad, it's just too clunky and cumbersome given the limited quality of the experiences at the moment. I think as the tech becomes less cumbersome and the experiences get better you'll start to see apps that people actually find interesting / useful. The whole cartoon virtual office stuff Zuck was pushing a couple of years back made it look like a joke. Given where the technology is enterprise productivity apps are clearly not the right product. If they instead invested in interesting AR/VR games and experiences I think they would have had more success. Imo the best stuff on the Oculus is the 3D video experiences and first person video games. But for some reason this isn't where Meta is investing to sell the tech.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    98 out of 100 people I know would never use a VR or AR headset beyond once to see some amazing demo.
    - CharlieDigital 3y ago
      I was going to make a counter point that the tech simply isn't there yet. Then I considered how people hate to even wear normal glasses. So even if the tech could be as seamless and compact as normal prescription glasses, uptake would be iffy.
      - traceroute66 3y ago
        > So even if the tech could be as seamless and compact as normal prescription glasses, uptake would be iffy. Remember the glasshole era ? (The short-lived project known as Google Glass for those who don't know)
    - vernon99 3y ago
      I wonder what would say average people of 19 century when offered to ride a car. Book reading was also not mainstream just as recently. Utility beats everything though. Is there utility in ar/vr glasses? Are you enjoying reading and typing from your small screen with your neck turned to the ground? With a friction of getting your phone in and out of your pocket 20 times a day. How could it not be obvious?
- cmsj 3y ago
  "was"? They're still going at it - they booked a $2.8bn loss on Meta Reality Labs in Q2.
  - typeofhuman 3y ago
    So much money. Seems like waste. Can you imagine a startup with that burn rate?
    - nradov 3y ago
      Magic Leap is a startup also in the "metaverse" space and was supposedly burning $50M / month. And that was actual cashflow, not just the charges and write-downs that comprise much of Meta's number.
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Metaverse only made sense to me as: - put in a lot of money in AR/VR - develop new things/tech required - hope to find something new to do with it ( a blue ocean) Eg. The virtual version of many defense/space projects.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  It's more than that. It comes down to owning a platform. Apple's iOS walled garden is a slap to Zuck's face. In VR, Zuck saw a chance to own an emerging platform. Remember the FB phone? Amazon's Fire phone? Both attempts to own a platform. If your revenue depends on ads, owning the platform is like adding fuel to fire.
  - fatnoah 3y ago
    My humble opinion is that it's about the AR endgame, and building out the technical capability to get there (via VR mixed reality, wearable devices, etc) AND owning the platform.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    The reason Meta's VR/AR effort has failed is because they didn't care at the top about making it for current users. The primary focus was for making long-term profitable/business platform too soon. If they had a clue they wouldn't have stalled on the success of the Quest/Quest 2 and made a Quest 3 in time for the next Sept-holiday season. Even late the projected specs for Quest 3 are short of expectations.
  - md_ 3y ago
    This. I understood the project as less about the flashy ten-year vision, and more about the same thing that drove Google to build Chrome and Android: not wanting to face lockout from competing platforms. I don't think this has been _successful_, but the concern about platform access seems _reasonable_ to me. If you think it's existential, burning billions on a long-shot might even be a good strategy, though one that seems likely to fail.
  - opportune 3y ago
    They’ve succeeded in building a platform, but they seem to have forgotten that for it to be valuable they need users to actually want to use it
- dangerboysteve 3y ago
  Every billionaire needs their own version of a Spruce Goose.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  It's such a generic pop culture idea though.
RHSman2 3y ago
Hopefully it dies.
lfkdev 3y ago
Against most opinions here, I think something like the metaverse can work. The hardware is just not there yet. Once it's a really lightweight device with good enough graphics people will use it.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  I think you're right. In fact I think permanently connected AR/VR computing is the next phase after mainframe -> desktop -> laptop -> phone. It's a good few years away - at least a decade or so. It won't happen until the hardware becomes stylish smart glasses instead of a clunky headset. And it won't be created by Zuckerberg.
  - Mindwipe 3y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. But Meta do have a heck of a patent portfolio for it if it happens in the next decade that will make life very hard for anyone else.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      US Patents expire 20 years after first filing, so in a decade, Facebook's collection will start to enter the public domain.
  - BillyTheKing 3y ago
    And the advances in generative AI are a pre-requisite for it.. just imagine people gesturing around in the air trying to create powerpoint presentations using VR/AR glasses - that just doesn't make any sense, no-one will interact with AR that way. For it to really become the next computing model it has to intuitively understand user-intend which has now become possible with generative AI. AR + generativeAI moves the interaction model from imperative to declarative, users will describe what they want (give me 10 slides with red backgrounds) instead of how to do it. imo generativeAI and LLMs will be primarily seen as a UX revolution (in light of AR)
  - laratied 3y ago
    [dead]
dpflan 3y ago
Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse? Why were “legs” an “incredible new feature” and not a given? Were/are there engineering or computational constraints limiting the ability to have “legs” / a high quality experience, and what were/are they? Meta has industry leading AI tech, i mean they research for “embodied AI” and interesting ideas like that, they have expertise in many areas of AI like generative AI… But if there is a CEO king, one must do as the king commands I guess.
- p1necone 3y ago
  > Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse? Not much, it's just a multiplayer video game - no different technically than the mmos we've had for decades. That's why Facebook betting the farm on it made no sense to me - this is something they should have contracted out to a good video game studio, not tried to develop in house when they don't have any experience building these kind of interactive environments. So much money down the drain for what exactly?
  - vernon99 3y ago
    To control the software of course - the source of the future revenue.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Seems like it would have been cheaper and more effective to buy a video game studio already doing that sort of thing, though.
      - JetSpiegel 3y ago
        Blizzard would love to be re-bought by an even worse slavemaster.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Legs weren't included because there's no way to do leg tracking with a headset. So to have them you have to build an inverse kinematics model and try to simulate them... Which also doesn't really work because you don't know the overall body position of the user. In a practical sense, a VR avatar is a disembodied head and hands - that's all the data you actually have. The legs thing was kind of a weak criticism. The issue isn't any one thing, it's that Facebook's overall vision is boring, and keeps putting "sell ads" first.
daedlanth 3y ago
[dead]
MrDresden 3y ago
The business model revolves around ads, and requires 'capturing' as many users as possible on the platform to be able to target effectively. And then the next evolution of this model hinges on unproven, still in development, cutting edge technology that has huge upfront monetary costs for anyone who wants to participate in it. I'm no business expert, but this looks like the perfect way of doing the exact opposite of what the ads business model requires.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
It is dead, but I think regardless of AR/VR the main issue was to make it a marketing/corporation/consumerism world, facebook has been profitable for advertising, like internet, but the first citizen were not corporation, corporation arrived after, when the first citizen moved for the counterculture, punk, science, porn, memes, etc. You can't really create the next new big thing and expect the "non-geek" to move there first, they move at the end, and corporations right after, Zucky just inverted the order of the populating the platform
BigCryo 3y ago
Once these big tech companies get really big and famous like Facebook and Google and stuff, they go awry in their hiring and management and business culture.. they start focusing on ideology, political ideology and censorship and so forth,.....and at that point they have all sorts of excess employees that do nothing but say write papers about political ideology and so forth.. that is when the software starts to go buggy.. Facebook is real buggy now much bugger than it used to be... As an example once Elon musk took over Twitter he fired like 80% of the employees and it works better than ever now
drumhead 3y ago
Its still generating tons of free cashflow, so there's still time and resources to pivot to something else, develop new businesses or just to pay it back to shareholders. Its relatively attractive now, especially with TikTok under intense scrutiny and facing bans in the West.
taylodl 3y ago
Poor leadership leads to poor results. Everybody knows the emperor (Zuck) has no clothes and it's been known for quite some time. He got lucky, he made a lot of cash. Good for him! Now it's become painfully obvious he has no clue what to do. Why? Because he got lucky. The odds of hitting the unicorn jackpot are minuscule. The odds of hitting it twice? Relying only on luck? Practically zero. That's why Zuck is flailing.
- ctvo 3y ago
  > Everybody knows the emperor (Zuck) has no clothes and it's been known for quite some time. He got lucky, he made a lot of cash. Good for him! Now it's become painfully obvious he has no clue what to do. Why? Because he got lucky. > ... The odds of hitting the unicorn jackpot are minuscule. The odds of hitting it twice? Relying only on luck? Practically zero. That's why Zuck is flailing. Mark has been an excellent CEO by all measures. The purchase of Instagram may be the best acquisition in tech history and it was on his watch. Then he did it again with WhatsApp. It's hard to describe making mostly the correct decisions over and over for 20 years luck. Facebook is a money printer and continues to be one, detour into the metaverse or not.
  - galoisscobi 3y ago
    > Mark has been an excellent CEO by all measures. So would you agree that Mark has done excellent at building products that are good for society’s mental health and well-being?
  - notyourwork 3y ago
    Buying a competitor (insta) is the greatest acquisition of all time? Literally just building a moat, not something I’d describe as the best in kind.
    - ctvo 3y ago
      Great. Go start your company and buy some competitors and become more successful than Meta. The space of what to buy, when to buy it, what to build, etc. etc. is all so easy in hindsight. Instagram was making 0 money and cost 1 billion to acquire -- a large amount at the time. It could have blown up in their face, but it didn't. Then he did it again with Whatsapp. Please stop pretending like things are easy from your sofa.
cloudking 3y ago
Anecdotal, but it seems like the Instagram strategy of cloning TikTok with Reels is bringing some users back to the app. I've got friends who have been sharing Reels links in the past few months who weren't previously.
- throw38472 3y ago
  When I asked around my group, most of them were doing it only because they feared TikTok would be censored and banned.
rambojohnson 3y ago
growing pains? Meta is not a startup.
JohnFen 3y ago
It's awfully hard to gauge from the outside, but Facebook is showing many of the signs and behaviors that have accompanied powerful companies in the process of dying in the past.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
Death spiral, absolutely. All it took for me to have a Silent Generation (pre WWII birth) divest from about $1M in META was to have her ask her great grand-daughter "do you use Facebook?". The obvious answer was "NO, that's for OLD people!" As a late-30's American, I haven't been on FB since the early 2010's... good riddance!
- deleted 3y ago
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- fmajid 3y ago
  It's pretty clear to me that each successive generation will deliberately pick a different social networks than its parents, and FB is experiencing this generational churn. First it was millennials to Instagram, but Meta also owns IG. Gen Z chose TikTok (and Fortnite), however, neither controlled by Meta, and that's hurting them. The next generation (Gen Alpha) like my daughter will pick something other than TikTok, even if it hasn't been banned by then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Alpha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Alpha
- 121789 3y ago
  it sounds like this elderly person is making horrific financial decisions. nearing the end of life and investing in risky equities and changing significant investment allocations after hearing a 12 year old talk
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  you are aware that Meta owns instagram and whatsapp right and facebook is still very heavily used in the developing world? your little question is extremely naive and myopic and probably not the sort of thing you should be using to make investment decisions
Balgair 3y ago
You have to pay to clap for other people : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqrFa6pWLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqrFa6pWLA (starts at ~7min mark) What brain worms do the folks at Meta have? You're just trying to get this thing off the ground and you decide to start ganking people for clapping? I know micro-transactions are the 'in' thing now, but Jesus Lord, you can't fucking expect people to pay to show appreciation towards others. Wait until you get a billion users first you capitalist vampire squids.
johnny99k 3y ago
I've been using my oculus to workout for almost 2 years now. It's pretty much the only purpose for me. I played a few games when I first got it, which were fun, but I lost interest pretty quickly. I think it's great. When I don't have the time to go to the Gym, I can workout right in my home office.
elforce002 3y ago
Meta needs to invest first on hardware (prob. creating smart glasses ala google) and go all in with AR. VR is good but I don't think it'll be "ready-player-one" good and that's the thing. I could see a case being made of using AR all day if you add it to smart glasses.
nokya 3y ago
I think Meta had two problems to deal with. One that could be solved at anytime but we have no idea even that time will come, and another, which I believe can only be resolved through taking consumers hostage. The first problem is finding a good use case for meta. Many very disruptive technologies did not take off immediately from the beginning. Sometimes they didn't take off until their cost was low enough to align with their customer value. Sometimes they didn't take off because customers didn't know what they could do with the product, etc. Think books, TVs, cars, Internet, etc. I strongly believe that once valuable use cases have been identified by customers, the use of VR for metaverse experiences will take off. And it will not just "take off", it will skyrocket to the roofs. The second problem in my opinion is the brand itself. Facebook was built from infancy on the theft of personal data (remember female profiles and pictures from university sororities websites being scrapped into Facebook to attract testosterone-awkward males). That's Facebook DNA: collecting and processing personal data from people with their legal but informed and/or unwilling consent. The problem with this approach is that until the first problem is solved for mass consumers (i.e., finding a good use case), the only potential customers of VR/AR equipment are tech savy geeks. And this crowd tends to dislike anything that comes out of Facebook/Meta. Assuming the above is correct, the company has two options: 1. Finding a high-value use case that could attract a large but yet very specific customer segment, like children (parents), women, luxury, factory workers, etc. 2. Cleaning the company from everyone that destroyed its reputation (i.e., all C-level employees, at least) with immediate effect and bringing in someone who is known to treat privacy not as a legal topic but as a universal human right. As you can probably guess, I speculate that Meta's only way out is solving the first problem before it runs out of cash.

57 points by redbell 3y ago

Transcript: https://slate.com/transcripts/aU1odU93ZWlMVlZjcTVJaXFTSmZVQXc5WUM4M1VJVmNVNG9Kazd4ZVQvaz0= https://slate.com/transcripts/aU1odU93ZWlMVlZjcTVJaXFTSmZVQX...

jacquesm 3y ago

One can hope.

otikik 3y ago

Por que no los dos?

jemmyw 3y ago

Neither? Just doing what a big company does, especially after making a bet that doesn't seem to be panning out.

andrewstuart 3y ago

The whole Metaverse thing was very strange. It should have been self evident to zuckerberg that wearing a vr headset will never be mainstream. Metaverse was “Zucks original idea”… a billionaires pipe dream - an average idea backed by untold money. The Metaverse showed that as they say “once you’re lucky, twice you’re good”.

deleted 3y ago
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lordnacho 3y ago
I thought it was at best a thing to get a foothold in, not something to rename the company for. Plus if you're renaming the firm and making it the focus, maybe do a better job. Give people legs for instance? The whole thing looks ridiculously dated. Maybe spend some of the money finding out what people want.
- checkyoursudo 3y ago
  I felt like Zuck thought the rest of the world loved "Ready Player One" as much as he did, and that was about the extent of his market research. Presumably, they thought people would love it so much that the initial offering being visually/functionally sub-standard would not matter so much?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I thought it was Snow Crash. That Facebook coopted the term "metaverse" from that dystopian world told me everything I needed to know about their intentions.
    - checkyoursudo 3y ago
      Oh, yeah, the term metaverse comes from Snow Crash. I was just recalling this incident: https://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-gives-all-its-employees-ready-player-one-2016-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-gives-all-its-employe... and Zuck referring to RPO in some interview: "I appreciate the RPO reference" here, https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-c...
lagrange77 3y ago
> an average idea backed by untold money Spot on!
rob74 3y ago
To me the whole Metaverse thing felt like Zuck thinking "ok, now I paid two billion for Oculus, I'd better come up with a plan what to do with it to keep the shareholders happy!". And then the plan got out of hand...
- dageshi 3y ago
  2 billion for Facebook isn't particularly a lot of money, I doubt their shareholders would care very much so long as FB continued to be a money printing machine. The problem was tiktok. FB missed the short form video social media medium so it can't grow and if it can't grow it's no longer a "tech giant", so I think Zuckerberg desperately looked around and thought, "what comes after short form video?" and came to the conclusion it had to be VR because there isn't anything else that's obvious. And thus the pivot to the metaverse.
  - typeofhuman 3y ago
    FB missed short-form video, but Instagram didn't. People just like TikTok better.
- nradov 3y ago
  Zuckerberg still owns a controlling stake. The only shareholder he has to keep happy is himself. This was an attempt to get ahead of a potential disruptive innovation that might cause a strategic inflection point (as per "The Innovator's Dilemma"). Some people thought that AR/VR devices might displace smartphones in the social media space the same way that smartphones displaced microcomputers. So far that isn't happening, but I guess it's still a possibility.
Folcon 3y ago
> an average idea backed by untold money I keep finding it strange that this doesn't have to be true? A repeated question I keep hearing as well as having myself is, "what is it for?" which personally seems bizarre. There are many possible valid answers to that question, but I as someone who's spent at least a few hours hearing about it really shouldn't have that question. That personally feels like a much more significant failure than anything else. Though perhaps I've missed it, maybe there's some clear articulation somewhere of what the goal is of the Metaverse, if so, feel free to enlighten me =)...
- iamthemonster 3y ago
  The goal is to serve more ads into people's retinas
- rob74 3y ago
  The ultimate goal of the Metaverse can only be to have something like the Matrix, i.e. have a significant part of the population "jacked in" to the Metaverse most of the time (which would only be the logical continuation of the current state of affairs, with most of us walking around like zombies, constantly looking at our phones). But that would be a bit too dystopian for most people's tastes, so they avoid mentioning it too explicitly...
  - Folcon 3y ago
    Sure, but if that's the goal then they're failing at the first hurdle, if you want to serve ads, you need space / context that holds people's attention and interest. That's literally table stakes. You can't serve ads to nobody. So even though that may be "what it's for", that can't be the sole reason, those people need a reason to show up. So for that audience or any audience, what is it for?
    - michaelt 3y ago
      The theoretical sci-fi promise of things like the metaverse would be having pretty much everything reality has, but better. A metaverse concert as good as attending a real concert in person, but also your friend who lives 500 miles away is right there next to you. Business meetings as good as meeting in person, but with infinitely luxurious surroundings and no travel time. Office buildings where everyone gets a private office and a dozen huge monitors. And so on. Obviously, that's not what Facebook are offering at the moment. I would say they are nowhere close. And of course, though to you and I such a thing controlled by Facebook might seem incredibly dystopian, Zuckerberg probably has a much higher opinion of facebook than normal people!
dom96 3y ago
A VR headset no, a set of AR glasses yes. What seems to be the issue is that creating usable AR glasses that have the quality of Quest is currently not feasible. Zuckerberg's real gamble was that they could figure out a way to make this happen (maybe they still can).
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  You also don't want AR glasses. The battery alone is a hassle, add the heating/weight of the device (same issues as VR) and a pinch of motion sickness and the faulty input haptics and you are back to the trusty ol' laptop, if you want to actually get something done, or to the smartphone if you are just consuming content. It's just a bad idea all around, perhaps it's easier to hack the optic nerve and feed images into the brain that way. There is nothing AR glasses can achieve at an industrial site (their main use currently with HoloLens) that a decent digital twin, being able to quickly zoom in/out across hundreds of yards of wiring/machineries, doesn't obtain easier/faster/better/safer/more comfortable. Just what the doctor ordered for a tired technician, crawl under the machinery to check for the AR gimmick some dude in a $4,000 chair designed, only for the thing to be completely unable to map the AR model to the physical object because there's barely any light under a 25 tonne industrial whatever.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    AR has its uses though. In the military, for example... imagine a squad of soldiers, with every soldier being digitally linked to a central command station that knows the precise location of each unit. A soldier could then see on their glasses - even at night - where their unit mates are, or get commands and status updates from leadership instead of by (often times barely understandable) radio.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      If they can stop themselves from vomiting, maybe [1] [2]. I am more afraid of drone swarms with pytorch object detection obliterating everything in sight [3], or what Geoffrey Hinton said about the self-healing mine field [4]. Was reading now the "HoloLens environment considerations" [5], most funny aspect: "Wormholes. If you have two areas or regions that look the same, the tracker may think they're the same. This results in the device tricking itself into thinking it's somewhere else." [1] October 2022, "Microsoft Hololens causes US army nausea and headaches", https://www.avinteractive.com/markets/government-and-defence/microsoft-hololens-causes-us-army-nausea-and-headaches-18-10-2022/ https://www.avinteractive.com/markets/government-and-defence... [2] January 2023, "Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens", https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-off-entire-teams-behind-virtual-mixed-reality-and-hololens https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-... [3] https://fedscoop.com/darpa-drone-swarms-with-1000-unmanned-aircraft-within-5-years https://fedscoop.com/darpa-drone-swarms-with-1000-unmanned-a... [4] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/minefield.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/minefield.pdf [5] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/hololens-environment-considerations#wormholes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/hololens-environm...
hashtag-til 3y ago
To me this Metaverse thing seems just a nice story to tell people who have no engineering knowledge at all (investors, shareholders et al), and sell them this sci-fi movie idea. It is just yet another "second life" (remember that?) software stack, plugged with social networks - the worst of the two worlds. I've jumped ship with social media stuff about a decade ago, and seeing how nasty it became, I'm just glad I ditched it. Pro tip: That common excuse "I use it to keep in touch with family blah blah blah" is not an excuse - you can keep in touch with family if you care about them. If you don't, don't waste everybody's time.
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  Second Life still exists and is profitable... (Unlike Meta's efforts.)
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    And, perhaps a little ironically, Second Life isn't available in VR, and probably never will be.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    VR chat is also huge right now
- twelve40 3y ago
  there is no replacement for keeping in touch with friends from far away and yes, remote parts of family, too - fb or insta. I don't go there much anymore because the endless promoted reels drive me insane, but i do miss that aspect of those services.
heavyset_go 3y ago
Just looking at Horizon Worlds makes me wonder if the whole Metaverse thing was just a front to funnel funds into a top secret defense project and if WWIII would be preferable to playing that game.
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
The Facebook/Metaverse kerfuffle is more fitted to "first as tragedy (the damage ad-driven social media has done to fabric of society is yet unaccounted for), second as farce (VR was a sad joke from the start—proud owner of the first HTC Vive, used it 10, maybe 12 times in 7? years)". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Louis_Bonaparte#First_as_tragedy,_then_as_farce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_Lou...
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kypro 3y ago
The goal of the Metaverse isn't to be wearing something that feels like a VR headset though... AR/VR is likely to be the logical progression of physical screens, it's just we're not there yet. And it's not even that the current tech is that bad, it's just too clunky and cumbersome given the limited quality of the experiences at the moment. I think as the tech becomes less cumbersome and the experiences get better you'll start to see apps that people actually find interesting / useful. The whole cartoon virtual office stuff Zuck was pushing a couple of years back made it look like a joke. Given where the technology is enterprise productivity apps are clearly not the right product. If they instead invested in interesting AR/VR games and experiences I think they would have had more success. Imo the best stuff on the Oculus is the 3D video experiences and first person video games. But for some reason this isn't where Meta is investing to sell the tech.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  98 out of 100 people I know would never use a VR or AR headset beyond once to see some amazing demo.
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    I was going to make a counter point that the tech simply isn't there yet. Then I considered how people hate to even wear normal glasses. So even if the tech could be as seamless and compact as normal prescription glasses, uptake would be iffy.
    - traceroute66 3y ago
      > So even if the tech could be as seamless and compact as normal prescription glasses, uptake would be iffy. Remember the glasshole era ? (The short-lived project known as Google Glass for those who don't know)
  - vernon99 3y ago
    I wonder what would say average people of 19 century when offered to ride a car. Book reading was also not mainstream just as recently. Utility beats everything though. Is there utility in ar/vr glasses? Are you enjoying reading and typing from your small screen with your neck turned to the ground? With a friction of getting your phone in and out of your pocket 20 times a day. How could it not be obvious?
cmsj 3y ago
"was"? They're still going at it - they booked a $2.8bn loss on Meta Reality Labs in Q2.
- typeofhuman 3y ago
  So much money. Seems like waste. Can you imagine a startup with that burn rate?
  - nradov 3y ago
    Magic Leap is a startup also in the "metaverse" space and was supposedly burning $50M / month. And that was actual cashflow, not just the charges and write-downs that comprise much of Meta's number.
NicoJuicy 3y ago
Metaverse only made sense to me as: - put in a lot of money in AR/VR - develop new things/tech required - hope to find something new to do with it ( a blue ocean) Eg. The virtual version of many defense/space projects.
CharlieDigital 3y ago
It's more than that. It comes down to owning a platform. Apple's iOS walled garden is a slap to Zuck's face. In VR, Zuck saw a chance to own an emerging platform. Remember the FB phone? Amazon's Fire phone? Both attempts to own a platform. If your revenue depends on ads, owning the platform is like adding fuel to fire.
- fatnoah 3y ago
  My humble opinion is that it's about the AR endgame, and building out the technical capability to get there (via VR mixed reality, wearable devices, etc) AND owning the platform.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  The reason Meta's VR/AR effort has failed is because they didn't care at the top about making it for current users. The primary focus was for making long-term profitable/business platform too soon. If they had a clue they wouldn't have stalled on the success of the Quest/Quest 2 and made a Quest 3 in time for the next Sept-holiday season. Even late the projected specs for Quest 3 are short of expectations.
- md_ 3y ago
  This. I understood the project as less about the flashy ten-year vision, and more about the same thing that drove Google to build Chrome and Android: not wanting to face lockout from competing platforms. I don't think this has been _successful_, but the concern about platform access seems _reasonable_ to me. If you think it's existential, burning billions on a long-shot might even be a good strategy, though one that seems likely to fail.
- opportune 3y ago
  They’ve succeeded in building a platform, but they seem to have forgotten that for it to be valuable they need users to actually want to use it
dangerboysteve 3y ago
Every billionaire needs their own version of a Spruce Goose.
cyanydeez 3y ago
It's such a generic pop culture idea though.

RHSman2 3y ago

Hopefully it dies.

lfkdev 3y ago

Against most opinions here, I think something like the metaverse can work. The hardware is just not there yet. Once it's a really lightweight device with good enough graphics people will use it.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
I think you're right. In fact I think permanently connected AR/VR computing is the next phase after mainframe -> desktop -> laptop -> phone. It's a good few years away - at least a decade or so. It won't happen until the hardware becomes stylish smart glasses instead of a clunky headset. And it won't be created by Zuckerberg.
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. But Meta do have a heck of a patent portfolio for it if it happens in the next decade that will make life very hard for anyone else.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    US Patents expire 20 years after first filing, so in a decade, Facebook's collection will start to enter the public domain.
- BillyTheKing 3y ago
  And the advances in generative AI are a pre-requisite for it.. just imagine people gesturing around in the air trying to create powerpoint presentations using VR/AR glasses - that just doesn't make any sense, no-one will interact with AR that way. For it to really become the next computing model it has to intuitively understand user-intend which has now become possible with generative AI. AR + generativeAI moves the interaction model from imperative to declarative, users will describe what they want (give me 10 slides with red backgrounds) instead of how to do it. imo generativeAI and LLMs will be primarily seen as a UX revolution (in light of AR)
- laratied 3y ago
  [dead]

dpflan 3y ago

Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse? Why were “legs” an “incredible new feature” and not a given? Were/are there engineering or computational constraints limiting the ability to have “legs” / a high quality experience, and what were/are they? Meta has industry leading AI tech, i mean they research for “embodied AI” and interesting ideas like that, they have expertise in many areas of AI like generative AI… But if there is a CEO king, one must do as the king commands I guess.

p1necone 3y ago
> Does anyone know the computational resources necessary to make a good metaverse? Not much, it's just a multiplayer video game - no different technically than the mmos we've had for decades. That's why Facebook betting the farm on it made no sense to me - this is something they should have contracted out to a good video game studio, not tried to develop in house when they don't have any experience building these kind of interactive environments. So much money down the drain for what exactly?
- vernon99 3y ago
  To control the software of course - the source of the future revenue.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Seems like it would have been cheaper and more effective to buy a video game studio already doing that sort of thing, though.
    - JetSpiegel 3y ago
      Blizzard would love to be re-bought by an even worse slavemaster.
XorNot 3y ago
Legs weren't included because there's no way to do leg tracking with a headset. So to have them you have to build an inverse kinematics model and try to simulate them... Which also doesn't really work because you don't know the overall body position of the user. In a practical sense, a VR avatar is a disembodied head and hands - that's all the data you actually have. The legs thing was kind of a weak criticism. The issue isn't any one thing, it's that Facebook's overall vision is boring, and keeps putting "sell ads" first.

daedlanth 3y ago

[dead]

MrDresden 3y ago

The business model revolves around ads, and requires 'capturing' as many users as possible on the platform to be able to target effectively. And then the next evolution of this model hinges on unproven, still in development, cutting edge technology that has huge upfront monetary costs for anyone who wants to participate in it. I'm no business expert, but this looks like the perfect way of doing the exact opposite of what the ads business model requires.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

It is dead, but I think regardless of AR/VR the main issue was to make it a marketing/corporation/consumerism world, facebook has been profitable for advertising, like internet, but the first citizen were not corporation, corporation arrived after, when the first citizen moved for the counterculture, punk, science, porn, memes, etc. You can't really create the next new big thing and expect the "non-geek" to move there first, they move at the end, and corporations right after, Zucky just inverted the order of the populating the platform

BigCryo 3y ago

Once these big tech companies get really big and famous like Facebook and Google and stuff, they go awry in their hiring and management and business culture.. they start focusing on ideology, political ideology and censorship and so forth,.....and at that point they have all sorts of excess employees that do nothing but say write papers about political ideology and so forth.. that is when the software starts to go buggy.. Facebook is real buggy now much bugger than it used to be... As an example once Elon musk took over Twitter he fired like 80% of the employees and it works better than ever now

drumhead 3y ago

Its still generating tons of free cashflow, so there's still time and resources to pivot to something else, develop new businesses or just to pay it back to shareholders. Its relatively attractive now, especially with TikTok under intense scrutiny and facing bans in the West.

taylodl 3y ago

Poor leadership leads to poor results. Everybody knows the emperor (Zuck) has no clothes and it's been known for quite some time. He got lucky, he made a lot of cash. Good for him! Now it's become painfully obvious he has no clue what to do. Why? Because he got lucky. The odds of hitting the unicorn jackpot are minuscule. The odds of hitting it twice? Relying only on luck? Practically zero. That's why Zuck is flailing.

ctvo 3y ago
> Everybody knows the emperor (Zuck) has no clothes and it's been known for quite some time. He got lucky, he made a lot of cash. Good for him! Now it's become painfully obvious he has no clue what to do. Why? Because he got lucky. > ... The odds of hitting the unicorn jackpot are minuscule. The odds of hitting it twice? Relying only on luck? Practically zero. That's why Zuck is flailing. Mark has been an excellent CEO by all measures. The purchase of Instagram may be the best acquisition in tech history and it was on his watch. Then he did it again with WhatsApp. It's hard to describe making mostly the correct decisions over and over for 20 years luck. Facebook is a money printer and continues to be one, detour into the metaverse or not.
- galoisscobi 3y ago
  > Mark has been an excellent CEO by all measures. So would you agree that Mark has done excellent at building products that are good for society’s mental health and well-being?
- notyourwork 3y ago
  Buying a competitor (insta) is the greatest acquisition of all time? Literally just building a moat, not something I’d describe as the best in kind.
  - ctvo 3y ago
    Great. Go start your company and buy some competitors and become more successful than Meta. The space of what to buy, when to buy it, what to build, etc. etc. is all so easy in hindsight. Instagram was making 0 money and cost 1 billion to acquire -- a large amount at the time. It could have blown up in their face, but it didn't. Then he did it again with Whatsapp. Please stop pretending like things are easy from your sofa.

cloudking 3y ago

Anecdotal, but it seems like the Instagram strategy of cloning TikTok with Reels is bringing some users back to the app. I've got friends who have been sharing Reels links in the past few months who weren't previously.

throw38472 3y ago
When I asked around my group, most of them were doing it only because they feared TikTok would be censored and banned.

rambojohnson 3y ago

growing pains? Meta is not a startup.

JohnFen 3y ago

It's awfully hard to gauge from the outside, but Facebook is showing many of the signs and behaviors that have accompanied powerful companies in the process of dying in the past.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

Death spiral, absolutely. All it took for me to have a Silent Generation (pre WWII birth) divest from about $1M in META was to have her ask her great grand-daughter "do you use Facebook?". The obvious answer was "NO, that's for OLD people!" As a late-30's American, I haven't been on FB since the early 2010's... good riddance!

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fmajid 3y ago
It's pretty clear to me that each successive generation will deliberately pick a different social networks than its parents, and FB is experiencing this generational churn. First it was millennials to Instagram, but Meta also owns IG. Gen Z chose TikTok (and Fortnite), however, neither controlled by Meta, and that's hurting them. The next generation (Gen Alpha) like my daughter will pick something other than TikTok, even if it hasn't been banned by then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Alpha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Alpha
121789 3y ago
it sounds like this elderly person is making horrific financial decisions. nearing the end of life and investing in risky equities and changing significant investment allocations after hearing a 12 year old talk
anthonypasq 3y ago
you are aware that Meta owns instagram and whatsapp right and facebook is still very heavily used in the developing world? your little question is extremely naive and myopic and probably not the sort of thing you should be using to make investment decisions

Balgair 3y ago

You have to pay to clap for other people : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqrFa6pWLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqrFa6pWLA (starts at ~7min mark) What brain worms do the folks at Meta have? You're just trying to get this thing off the ground and you decide to start ganking people for clapping? I know micro-transactions are the 'in' thing now, but Jesus Lord, you can't fucking expect people to pay to show appreciation towards others. Wait until you get a billion users first you capitalist vampire squids.

johnny99k 3y ago

I've been using my oculus to workout for almost 2 years now. It's pretty much the only purpose for me. I played a few games when I first got it, which were fun, but I lost interest pretty quickly. I think it's great. When I don't have the time to go to the Gym, I can workout right in my home office.

elforce002 3y ago

Meta needs to invest first on hardware (prob. creating smart glasses ala google) and go all in with AR. VR is good but I don't think it'll be "ready-player-one" good and that's the thing. I could see a case being made of using AR all day if you add it to smart glasses.

nokya 3y ago

I think Meta had two problems to deal with. One that could be solved at anytime but we have no idea even that time will come, and another, which I believe can only be resolved through taking consumers hostage. The first problem is finding a good use case for meta. Many very disruptive technologies did not take off immediately from the beginning. Sometimes they didn't take off until their cost was low enough to align with their customer value. Sometimes they didn't take off because customers didn't know what they could do with the product, etc. Think books, TVs, cars, Internet, etc. I strongly believe that once valuable use cases have been identified by customers, the use of VR for metaverse experiences will take off. And it will not just "take off", it will skyrocket to the roofs. The second problem in my opinion is the brand itself. Facebook was built from infancy on the theft of personal data (remember female profiles and pictures from university sororities websites being scrapped into Facebook to attract testosterone-awkward males). That's Facebook DNA: collecting and processing personal data from people with their legal but informed and/or unwilling consent. The problem with this approach is that until the first problem is solved for mass consumers (i.e., finding a good use case), the only potential customers of VR/AR equipment are tech savy geeks. And this crowd tends to dislike anything that comes out of Facebook/Meta. Assuming the above is correct, the company has two options: 1. Finding a high-value use case that could attract a large but yet very specific customer segment, like children (parents), women, luxury, factory workers, etc. 2. Cleaning the company from everyone that destroyed its reputation (i.e., all C-level employees, at least) with immediate effect and bringing in someone who is known to treat privacy not as a legal topic but as a universal human right. As you can probably guess, I speculate that Meta's only way out is solving the first problem before it runs out of cash.