From the outset, people pretty unanimously called bullshit on the metaverse and ridiculed Zuckerberg. Facebook's own advertising of the metaverse wasn't even ever designed to attact users, it was very obviously designed to make people think there were revenue sources buried in the multiverse. They never had a product or even a particularly coherent idea for one.
> So far every metaverse project I've seen has zero idea what they are going for. I don't even get Facebook's concept.
Neither did 99% of those who jumped on this World Wide Web thing about 20-25 years ago, and yet it turned out to be a big deal after all.
Not saying this is clearly headed in the same direction, and I couldn't think of a worse steward than Facebook, but there's a chance this will also be a big deal so people (and companies) are staking claims, associating themselves with it and hyping things up. It sounds like a load of bullshit, but hey, I've been wrong before. On the other hand, I have been wrong about being wrong before, too.
>Metaverse is not bullshit. It's a sign of desperation.
Or a sign that Zuckerberg's read all the popular fiction on the subject but failed to comprehend how much of it was either satirical or meant as a warning.
> If a metaverse is hosted by FB, it'll come with all the drama, nonsense and toxicity we see on there today
It is ridiculous to imply that it's somehow unique or exclusive to Facebook.
It exists on all of the social media platforms, across the web and in the real world. It is more a byproduct of anonymous interaction than something Facebook is specifically doing.
> the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means
If you root cause on that you come back to, Zuckerberg made a big splash with his announcement and then followed up with .... nothing. As much as anything, these other things were filling a vacuum. Of course it got filled up with toxic garbage.
The inexplicable thing to me is purely that Meta has failed to deliver anything closely resembling an experience that represents their own advertised ambitions. Case in point, Horizon Worlds still even now hasn't even launched in my country (near to one of the top 10 economies in the world). How is it even possible that something the company put at existential level of importance hasn't even launched? It's either a massive fail of execution or they never really actually had their heart in it.
I do wonder if Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency", flattening of the org structure and refocusing on engineering leadership is in part borne from the reality check of basically failing to deliver on all this at a technical level.
> After a much-heralded debut, the Metaverse became the obsession of the tech world
This is patently false. So is the title. ChatGPT did not have an effect on the metaverse. It was dead the day it launched due to it's own inadequacy. It was so bad it reinforced the "Zuckerberg is an alien who doesn't understand humanity" conspiracy theory.
>Some sort of standardized metaverse protocol is absolutely the next layer that will put the current "internet" to shame.
Yeah, no... that was true until Facebook came along and decided they owned "the metaverse," and then the hype train suddenly and all but universally decided they did, before they even did anything.
Facebook is going to write the standard and the protocol and it probably won't be game changing in a way anyone likes.
> It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems.
Those problems, at their recent peak, are that – recent.
Yet I know, for a fact, they have been working on the new concept for very long now. I spoke to a FB insider about a year ago already and he, in very diluted way, described what we know as metaverse now.
> Metaverse could be the next big thing and the long shot facebook needs.
I'm skeptical. With all their money and knowledge and whatnot, they've only managed to create something that looks like a dated console party game but not more. I don't see how that's the future.
Furthermore, do they expect everyone to buy a... say... $400 headset to use the Metaverse? The low entry barrier was probably one of the biggest reasons for the success of Facebook. If you need specialized equipment nobody will use it.
> the ‘metaverse’ is cruelly mocked in all corners
The Metaverse thing is just a passion project. It's what you invent when the initial vision of your main gig (Facebook) starts going down the doldrums. Facebook is basically in maintenance mode now.
>People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time
I believe people want Meta to fail because the spent the better part of last 5 years completely eviscerating their reputation and goodwill. While Facebook, at its prepandemic peak was hemorrhaging young users and becoming known as the platform for misinformation and arguments due to the chase for engagements at all costs, Zuckerberg was bust cosplaying as presidential candidate. People want Facebook to fail and I think that's a consequence of how terrible their reputation has become.
> FB doesn’t really care about the gaming all that much, but gobs of profit from meta verse advertising, real estate, cosmetics, etc would be worth risking and losing tens of billions in dev costs right now.
The problem is the users largely don't give a shit about any of that. What VR adoption there is among the public is exclusively gaming, apart from the weird crypto-web 3 adjacent real estate scams going on in this second life clones. Which, while they have a lot of big numbers to throw around, most of it has been a massive [insert fart noise] in terms of generating anything tangible like new technologies or better performing systems. It's just a crypto sub-culture that includes some (notably bad) VR games bolted to their sides.
Like I have just never seen any evidence at all that regular people are interested in the lightest in participating in any of these metaverse spaces. Video conferencing has purposes, and we saw that demonstrated well during the pandemic, but like, doing what is basically video conferencing with shitty graphics and bland visuals with everyone running around as corporate-art-styled avatars just... sucks ass. It really tremendously sucks and offers no real benefits over standard Zoom calls which we already have numerous profitable services offering. That, combined with collaboration spaces like Slack and Teams and good old telephones has basically all business communication covered, and none of it is made better in the slightest with the stupid metaverse proposed by Facebook.
And for the public, I mean, what can you even say is better? Wandering around a crappy 3D mall to shop for products is infinitely more work for a customer than just opening Amazon. We've already learned this lesson! For a while there we had websites that emulated traditional storefronts with image mapped jpegs representing products on offer and just like... no. The market spoke deafeningly loud: It was WAY EASIER to shop from a list of things to buy instead, and it was way, WAY easier for businesses to maintain those lists rather than building what amounts to a custom videogame to sell their products within.
VR is really cool tech. The metaverse is a dud and Facebook doesn't have enough money, nor really does anyone, to force it the way it would have to be to see wide adoption.
You are giving this person too much credit. His only other big thing besides getting lucky with Facebook itself is the metaverse, a soulless "Second Life 2 with VR and blockchain support".
> Can someone explain how a company like Meta arrives at a decision like this?
Maybe everyone just gave up, they know they have no way to fix Meta, so they are just gonna squeeze the lemon really, really tight one last time?
> In my opinion, the technical know-how of Zuck was perfectly valid to build Facebook, but not this.
Technical know-how is the least of their problems. The tech is irrelevant to me. Facebook's user-hostile and abusive actions have made it so that now anything they make is automatically something I want nothing to do with.
In my opinion, no matter how good the tech is, anyone foolish enough to participate in Facebook's "Metaverse" is just bending over, spreading, and asking to get screwed over and over again. The company has repeatedly demonstrated that it is toxic, criminal, and actively harmful to their users. No amount of fancy VR tech could ever be cool enough for me to let them use me. They can change their name as many times as they like, but they've already shown us what they are.
> 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?
Zuckerberg's business model isn't making products that people want, it's selling marketing and finance people the lies they want to hear.
No one is going to a zoom meeting in a Facebook virtual reality world. In fact, no one is going to a virtual reality world period, it's a failed concept from the 1990s right up until today. But the fact remains that Facebook is only valued by an audience that will soon be dead (boomers who like posting about politics all day), so they have to have some carrot to dangle which distracts from that reality.
> If there is going to be a metaverse, I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. It's like a bad sci-fi pulp story.
I'm confident I don't want them to own it - or for it to be owned by a single party of any kind, for that matter.
> Given their investment and research, I wonder if they should open it all up (even if contradictory to short-term gains in ad revenue) so it has a chance to grow?
I mean, that would be nice for users, but:
a) I don't think Facebook is constitutionally able to give up ad revenue gains: what they do is maximize ad revenue, basically
b) I strongly suspect they have other means at their disposal to maximize growth. After all, every FB-IG-WA user is a Meta user now, right? How much would it cost to just send every one of them an Oculus headset for free?
And if that sounds insane, consider that this announcement is basically saying "we're betting our entire brand on this particular future" - I suspect they'll do everything in their power to make that bet succeed (or appear to succeed).
> Going on a tangent, even after all this time people still don’t understand what the metaverse is. The metaverse is simply an AR / VR platform that has online access. That’s it.
And that’s because Meta did a shitty job to tell people what it is! Have you heard or seen one of their ads? In Germany, they go like „the Metaverse will help doctors to do complicated surgery. It might be virtual, but the Metaverse will have a real impact“
It’s like pure essence of bullshit, on the level of those self-reordering fridges promised in the 90ies. If Meta would just release a single, convincing use case now, maybe things would look different. But they don’t, because they can’t, because there isn’t one. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
Did they?
From the outset, people pretty unanimously called bullshit on the metaverse and ridiculed Zuckerberg. Facebook's own advertising of the metaverse wasn't even ever designed to attact users, it was very obviously designed to make people think there were revenue sources buried in the multiverse. They never had a product or even a particularly coherent idea for one.
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