And I have a flagged& downvoted into oblivion comment on another article in the past on how the tech world has embraced this silly term "meta" for everything. People don't like when theres shade thrown on their buzz. Reminds me of things like "synergy".lol.
I know science fiction has really hyped up the idea of a metaverse, but I just don't see it happening culturally.
In most fiction where a "metaverse" or equivalent is popular, the world is in shambles. When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet?
The reason why social-media is so popular is because it's basically a way to highlight reality and engage with it.
I honestly don't see the metaverse taking off. Facebook should've went in the other direction IMHO.
The pandemic has shown very clearly that people want to engage with one another in reality, not on the internet.
The Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica depicted this somewhat believably, as being a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered over and over, extreme sex and partying with no consequences. I don't think that's what Zuckerberg wants to sell as a vision, but that seemingly has to be what something like this would become.
Ironically, the creator of the technology in that show was a lot like Zuckerberg. He naively believed he was creating some transformative device to make people better but then they only wanted to use it for sex, violence, and escapism. And his daughter ends up becoming a terrorist radicalized by religious extremists after being appalled by the no ethics nihilism of her dad's world, whose digital avatar gains its own sentience and goes on to become the first Cylon, whose followers and descendents eventually end human civilization.
I wonder what will eventually become of Zuckerberg's daughters, what they'll think of him when they grow up.
>a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered over and over, extreme sex and partying with no consequences
VRChat is full of escapism, alchohol abuse, underage users, and explicit erotic roleplay. The latter typically involves nude avatars with full-body tracking using HTC Vive trackers. By the way, this game is free without age restrictions on Oculus Quest, a product which itself has no parental controls. VRChat has no system for filtering or proactively tagging NSFW content, so even users who opt-out of the private adult worlds will probably still see nudity and more in public worlds. Also, vulnerabilities in the official client (mostly in the Unity rendering pipeline and Photon RPC stack) means users of modded clients can crash others' PC or Quest from inside the game. "Crashers", as they're known to all longtime users, have been a problem for years with no solution in sight. In earlier versions of VRChat, users could attach arbitrary C# scripts to their custom uploaded worlds or avatars. At least one arbitrary remote execution vulnerability has been discovered and responsibly disclosed to VRChat:
The VRChat staff ostensibly review moderation requests for issues like hate speech or nudity in public lobbies, but each video clip I've included (as the report guidelines strongly recommend) in requests I've filed has 0 views per my video upload dashboard. I keep seeing many of the same perpetrators again and again in public worlds. Again, there are no age checks, even good-faith "enter your birthdate" dialogs, and this platform is full of suggestive and explicit NSFW content. Communication is mainly via voice chat, so children are highly visible to adult users who would abuse them, who sadly are also present on the platform. Unsupervised kids are all over the place in this game. VRChat moderation staff do not have any in-game presence.
Despite these issues, VRChat continues to grow due to the total creative freedom it offers for user-uploaded content, its popularity among content creators on YouTube e.g. Jameskii, HeyImBee, SwaggerSouls, and the fact that it's a free game on Quest. It recently topped 50,000 concurrent active users.
Advanced VRChat users have modded support for teledildonics, as one streamer describes in this safe-for-work YouTube clip:
I did not realize that VRChat is still around. I only ever heard of it in the context of Ugandan Knuckles, a meme that was short lived but extremely hilarious and also offensive to some. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can search for it on YouTube (example: https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058). I have never used VRChat but as an outsider it reminds me a bit of the old Internet before Web 2.0 and before everything became political.
Ugandan Knuckles was most users' introduction to VRChat. It's been a dead meme for a while, but that doesn't stop 9-year-old kids from running up to strangers in VR yelling, "Do you kno dae wae?"
Aside from the risk to the children themselves, their presence in VRChat is a constant annoyance to adults. They tend to be loud and lack manners or social skills. If you meet an interesting stranger and strike up a conversation, some kid'll run up in your face mid-sentence to shout lines from Ugandan Knuckles or a TikTok meme. Ever since the great "Quest-mas" of December 2020, VRChat public lobbies have felt more and more like an unsupervised daycare.
VRChat's Terms of Service specificy a minimum age of 13 for COPPA compliance, but in practice it seems this is never enforced, and I'm not even sure how it could be. It's really a shame, as aside from the kids and "crashers," VRChat's total creative freedom is a breath of fresh air. If you can model something in Blender and export it as Unity project, you can upload it to VRChat. There's a huge range of beautiful and immersive custom worlds, and all sort of hilarious or impressive custom avatars. It's a new digital Wild West, with all the good and bad that metaphor entails.
Even in a dystopia, an immersive metaverse is totally impractical without something like neural implants. I think even the guy who wrote Ready Player One understood this.
> In most fiction where a "metaverse" or equivalent is popular, the world is in shambles.
I mean, the trajectory of the world isn't great right now...
I could easily imagine a VR "game" in the near future that is just "walk around a virtual zoo that has leopards, rhinos, orangutans, gorillas and giraffes" because the real world no longer has them.
> When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet?
This is a good observation, but it's important to remember that quality of real world life is very fucking far from uniformly distributed now. There are already many people across the world whose personal life is in shambles enough that they spend every free moment escaping it in media consumption and video games.
Sure, if you have a good life, the metaverse pales in comparison. But what if you're stuck in a shithole town with no jobs and no prospects? At some point, frame rate and vertex count becomes less of an issue than "not watching yet another friend get addicted to opioids".
Maybe that's the real end-stage-capitalism opportunity for a soulless corporation: Everyone working on the metaverse is so focused on making it a primo experience that appeals to people already living well. Instead, maybe the audience to target is people whose real life already sucks. Sell virtual water in the desert, not the oasis.
Heck, it would just a one letter change for Facebook to go from Meta to Meth.
> the world is in shambles. Why would people reject the real world for the internet?
Things like a pandemic that forces people to be home. Rampant global warming that makes it hard to be outside comfortably.
Maybe small apartments in urban areas where its just too expensive to have a real home because zoning doesn't allow new apartments to be built fast enough...
The metaverse is for the Roblox and Minecraft generation who are supposed to be even more doom and gloom than the one that preceded it. So the world in shambles condition may already be met for some.
Gen Z have also grown up in this reverse Truman Show dystopia where everyone has their own TV show (Youtube, Snap, Tiktok) that allows them to edit out the blemishes and embarassments of real life to produce a nicely manicured image to 'build their brand' on.
An interesting interview, it's nice to see a little more substance behind the decision.I also appreciate that the interviewer did ask some of the sterner questions e.g. Facebook throwing money away from it's business
Maybe it's just the years of science fiction talking but I can't help but see this in a dystopian light. I don't want my social world to be created by"Meta". I want to use social media, and the internet more generally, as tools which enrich my life but don't dominate it. Directly opposite to how Zuckerberg pitches "Meta" in this interview.
My experience of the pandemic has taught me the primacy of physical, human, interaction. A VR headset isn't going to bridge that digital void. What's more, the internet is already addictive enough, already threatening those interactions I value. I recently read the short story "The machine stops" by E.M. Forster (available at http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html ), and I can't help but feel Facebook is building towards the dystopia it presents.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the vast scope of these ambitions. I'm lucky enough to be informed and privileged enough I can choose to ditch these companies but I worry for the many who can't.
Not to worry. Like every other attempt to replace the Internet with a privately owned space for communication, self-expression, and above all content consumption, this one will fail. If it weren't for the inattention to history of today's attention monopolists, we'd really be in trouble.
> every other attempt to replace the Internet with a privately owned space for communication, self-expression, and above all content consumption, this one will fail.
I wish you were right, but looking at Internet traffic on mobile devices [1]:
* 24% is YouTube.
* 10% is Facebook.
* 8% is TikTok.
* 8% is Instragram.
* 7% is Facebook video.
* 6% is Instagram.
* 5% is Google.
* 2% is Netflix.
That leaves about 30% for all other Internet traffic, including other large walled gardens like Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. So something like three quarters of all Internet traffic is in walled gardens now. Privately owned communication spaces are some of the biggest businesses in the world today.
Note that this is mobile data, because it was the first dataset I was able to find easily.
I don't doubt your overall conclusion that the majority of mindshare is with a couple big apps/sites, but mobile data seems like a very poor metric for this, and it's no surprise that big video and image sites dominate the list. Time spent per app/site seems like a much better metric. I spend a ton of time on HN but I'm sure my overall data transmission would barely equal a couple second video clip.
If I spend 10 minutes watching a 5GB video but 5 hours reading an ebook, what do I look like in your stats ? Probably more like a youtube couch potato than a philosopher, which would be misrepresentative.
And TikTok at 8% is only 5 years old. The point isn't "everyone uses different stuff" the point is "creating new things outside of the existing framework is possible" and I still think that is very much true.
> something like three quarters of all Internet traffic is in walled gardens now. Privately owned communication spaces are some of the biggest businesses in the world today.
100% of traffic goes to a space owned by someone. The fact that big companies can dominate profits, and still companies like TikTok can rise from no where is crazy.
Just because the internet is not decentralized IRC channels hosted in university dark corner offices doesn't mean that its a true walled garden in the typical sense.
I slack my coworkers, and imessaage my family, and facetime my partner, and discord my gamer friends, and use tiktok for entertainment, and use whatapp for my international friends.
Last week, i used teams for my coworkers and zoom for my family, and signal for my friends and ... and ... and ...
Apps come and go. TikTok is replacing youtube and Disney+ is replacing netflix and signal is (hopefully!) replacing something... While i wish that we actually owned our own servers, knowing that i can quickly change accounts and apps and "gardens" makes it better.
> knowing that i can quickly change accounts and apps and "gardens" makes it better
That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.
We're in a dangerous place where Apple is hardware locked to a single distribution channel (and its rules) & Android is heavy pushed towards a single distribution channel (and its rules).
It only takes a single round of bad legislation to get from there to "Your phone only runs what we say it can run."
Ironically, China has more diversity in app stores than everywhere else.
> Ironically, China has more diversity in app stores than everywhere else.
Are they all the same 3 apps the government approves of?
> That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.
I completely agree and hope apple gets pushed around until it opens up the hardware. I don't care (from a practical, non philosophical level) about APIs or federation or interoperable clients as long as i can just try something new. I have yet to find a single person who can talk with me over Matrix but a dozen who prefer signal.
A depressing statistic. But it's by downstream traffic. So it's heavily skewed to video. Also, Google may include Google cloud (video conferencing/video search/image search/mail/pics/video/whatever).
Notice how most of these are primarily video and image platforms. Anything which is primarily text, as most of the internet is, would never show up on this scale.
I’d like to see a UI that abstracts Wireguard behind contact management UX
If I’m connecting to someone via that app it’s over a Wireguard tunnel. On desktop, let me drag files over, append to a synced message thread (stored in SQLite or something simple)
Open source design focused on beating desktop operating systems when it’s strength was always networking.
All the attention is on building tech for corporations to satisfy political memes. It doesn’t have to be if software people built different software
It's also not necessarily competing with meatspace. It's competing with other technologies that connect remote people together where there is no meatspace option. And it's all going to serve the purpose of selling influence over the users.
They are going to need foveal rendering to achieve the latency/resolution needed. That means they are going to expensive displays and eye tracking, which you might think would add to the price... but eye tracking on that scale is more valuable than any form of advertising information has ever been. It is the gold standard of attention measurement.
You can't even control the location, sequence, or time spent looking at different image content. They will know exactly what you are interested in, how much, and when that changes. They will know what distracts you most, and optimize it (for their customers the advertisers).
In the end I expect these to be given to high value (elite college students) consumers for free so that they can be monetized. Prepare to explain to your future wife why you always have goats in silk stockings on your feed!
Oh, also... compelling Metaverse content?! It will be user created. TikTok to the rescue!
Thinking about your comments on eye tracking combined with the weirdo retina scanning cryptocurrency thing Sam Altman is working on is some fun dystopian nightmare fuel.
Just FYI if you haven't visited the site before: several of their articles have made it to the HN front page before. I actually find Stratechery articles to be well thought through, deep and comprehensive, I like how the author (Ben Thompson) tries to give a balanced perspective of business and tech without being too one-sided, alarmist or opting for clickbait headlines.
I generally want people to have an opinion, often a strong opinion; but here Ben is trying to amass a vast amount of information, history and context, filtering down to the essense and presenting all sides. So, in a way, Ben is a moderator of tech information. Ben if you're reading this, thank you; and I highly recommend the Stratechery subscription if you haven't gotten one yet.
Strategery (from a Bushism I think?) + tech . Anyone know the word for a deliberately mispronounced word like strategery? Trying to think of others but they're escaping me at the moment.
I think a portmanteau requires every piece of the word to be part of another word, and semantics from each component word are partially maintained by the new meaning. Malapropism is what I was looking for, though - thanks to you both.
Because it seems to be a recent revelation for Zuck that childhood friendships could be more important than work - it's poignant and it makes me suspect he was lonely as a kid
So it appears Zuck decided he lost the mobile game and moved on to the next battle which is post-mobile, “the next big thing”, but now he’s taking you to the cleaners with an entire digital economy stack. You’re getting the ads and paying your virtual landlord.
He won mobile. He didn’t have to build phones to dominate mobile advertising. Facebook was a great beneficiary of mobile adoption and that’s why we’ve been seeing Apple attack their business model.
With Apple recent moves of blocking tracking he can’t properly monetize his assets anymore. He’s subject to the whims of the platforms. He wants to be that platform.
If you know of any "months ago" timeline for this that isn't from a facebook marketing person, then I'd like to know about it. The Facebook Files were published in September, and the WSJ was likely working on the story for months before then.
Are you implying that Facebook wasn't informed, asked to verify, or asked to comment on the publication of it's internal documents months ago?
Funny that I have to proof things when you're the one with the initial claim without any proof.
* But sure, let's start with to things. Right here in the thread, people who have acquaintances working for the original meta ulc under the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and them claiming they knew something is happening for months.
* The meta trademark transfer months ago
Also not sure why you think WSJ would contact them months before about/with a whistleblower. But I'm sure WSJ stated that somewhere then, right?
It was also pretty likely that this would be announced during Facebook Connect (former Oculus Connect), which always was around this time the last couple of years.
Was it still a welcome coincidence and convenient? Sure. And did they use it for that? Of course, too. Who wouldn't.
So for example, a BS narrative that worked was Zuckerberg claiming a week? before that he wasn't sure about the new name yet and that it wasn't set in stone yet. That was indeed eaten up by some media.
As someone who has worked on strategy in this industry, let me just say that Stratechery should be taken as entertainment, not education. The fact that this guy was willing to be a shill for Zuckerberg should show you that his ultimate wet-dream is to be close to these sorts of people, rather than coldly analyze whether the things they do make any sense whatsoever.
There’s a reason FB’s people called up this guy, rather than someone who would be willing to say, “this makes no sense and has no bearing on success for several quarters, if not years. I don’t care about your deflection strategy. Talk to me about the anorexic girls on Instagram and a culture that turns a blind eye to it, because if you lose the young female market the entire game is up.” (Which is the secret of our industry — young females will make or break you.)
It’s easy to look like a super-smart strategy dude when you’re making predictions as an already-big market is getting bigger. For some reason, none of these guys can ever “predict the future.”
Please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the site guidelines and sticking to them, we'd appreciate it. Note these:
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Hey dang, why did you downweight the "Facebook renames to Meta" post so hard off the front page? I remember seeing it on the second page with something like 600 votes and now I can't find it no matter how many pages I look through.
> The fact that this guy was willing to be a shill for Zuckerberg should show you that his ultimate wet-dream is to be close to these sorts of people, rather than coldly analyze whether the things they do make any sense whatsoever.
You must not know this blog then, because ben has been a well reasoned voice for years, and his bullishness on VR/Metaverse should not be confused as a shill. He has been critical of FB the company. If you read his other works (even posted today!) about fb nee meta and their social products he's less of a kind persona.
> There were no limitations on the interview; it was my choice to focus on the company’s new vision and not the current controversies about Facebook.
> I think that’s one of the reasons why we talk about why do entrepreneurial innovative people want to work in tech? Well, because you can actually work in the virtual world. You don’t have to deal with all the real world regulations and gunk and political problems and all those sorts of things, and it’s very attractive because you can just build.
That does not reflect any reality. If there was no need to care for regulation, guess what - facebook would not be under fire. Google wouldn’t be regulated left and right. There would be no GDPR, there would be no cookie consent.
I have nearly stopped paying attention after that sentence. Frankly, maybe that point is placed strategically in the overall writing because the most interesting question comes later:
> Is there a worry that Facebook is a liability for this future you want to build?
> MZ: Are you talking about the app Facebook?
> You can interpret that any way you want to.
Well, that’s a disappointing frame to the original question.
And how long has it taken for them to come under any sort of real fire? 15 years? Compare that to any company that creates a physical product. They’re highly regulated from day 1.
Sure. But let’s not gloss over the point that companies like Facebook prompted regulators to actually regulate this space. Once the process started, it goes fast.
It is like aerospace or automotive. There were barely any regulations in 1950s…
Uber, a taxi company that exists exclusively and explicitly to circumvent regulations around taxis (see also: AirBNB) is in a different situation relative to expected regulation than Google or Facebook (for whom essentially no applicable regulation existed when they were created).
Having the loophole whose exploitation is your business model get ever-so-slightly tightened is distinctly different than having lawmakers show up 10 years late to the realization that your business model has the potential to exacerbate societally self-destructive behavior (and I'm registering my bet now that neither Meta nor Alphabet will face any meaningful regulation).
As I said in another comment: it is like aerospace or automotive. There were barely any regulations in 1950s. Regulators take time to catch up. But they do.
Re Google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google. The whole switch to Alphabet isa direct result of anti-trust and the risk of forced split. Safe harbor and GDPR are direct effects of regulation. The fact that Google is sending me emails with info about third parties they share my data with is a direct effect of regulation. Google News was on the news pretty often over the years.
Reasonably, digital business can’t anymore be done without worrying about regulation.
If you think Uber sucks for society, you should have seen taxis before Uber was a thing, my god what a nightmare. I’m willing to bet Uber has saved 10s of thousands of lives from drunk driving accidents alone solely because they made getting a ride effortless.
I'm not saying they suck for society (my take is more along the lines of: they have certainly improved the taxi experience, which has made noticeable contributions to issues such as, per your mention, drunk driving; on the other hand, they have exposed and exploited externalities that impose their own serious safety, quality of life, and social costs on the areas where they are most active), I'm saying their business model fundamentally exists as a response to regulatory issues, so their business will inherently have more exposure to regulation.
Regardless of what non-us people want, the US is not the outlier - its the center - It is uniquely the source of most tech companies. Almost all of the major tech companies are american, or move to america. Everything is created in america and shared with the rest of the world by nature of their being no borders online.
I was really disappointed/anxious/upset over Zuckerberg's response to the liability question. As the CEO, how does he not immediately understand the intent behind the question? This is Facebook's most pressing current issue and he chose to stick his head in the sand and pretend that a VR vision and rebrand will whisk the problems away?
Or I guess here's the reality of it: Zuckerberg, I can only assume intentionally, has seemed to master the art of slipping his way out of tough questions non-stop. He lies to governments, he lies to users, he lies to advertisers, he lies to tech journalists; all behind the vail of a vague notion of where Facebook's perceived* value is. I have never, ever seen him get pinned down - this is not a compliment, he deserves to face real and tough criticism (regulation too), but I can only guess that every audience that's questioned him exists on a scale of ignorant to apathetic (on the apathetic side of the scale, see for instance how Ben ends this interview with a quip on touching base in 10 years; Ben's no dummy, he probably just grew exhausted from Zuckerberg's non-stop slippery, indirect answers. Zuckerberg stuck to his ,,human" script.).
* I stopped participating in social media years ago and my quality of life has skyrocketed (I'm here on HN to talk with others in my industry, so I view this as work-related). No one in their right mind can look at their 10-year vision of a metaverse and truly believe that Facebook will be the herald of this new economy.
>He lies to governments, he lies to users, he lies to advertisers, he lies to tech journalists
There's essentially no such thing as a CEO that is truthful, but serious question - what are you referring to specifically here, do you have any proof of these claims?
Lying to governments (Congress at least) is, typically, a criminal offense. Lying to users and advertisers would result in loss of revenue. Lying to journalists will get you exposed by said journalists upon discovery of the lies.
This might be the first time I’m posting before finishing the article but the audacity of Zuckerberg in this interview is so beyond my ability to comprehend that I’m leaving my cell phone in my apartment and going for a walk. I very recently finally quit what I guess is now “Meta”, And this makes me wish I had earlier.
I'm half surprised that this is one of the most upvoted comments, but also not really because the comments for any FB-related article here are typically a race to the fastest dunk. But there is zero substance to this comment. What specifically did you find audacious? Why did it make you want to take a walk?
If you are in the middle of a massive scandals (multiple massive scandals) about major issues like privacy, enabling genocide in certain countries, etc, if you really, really cared, your first step would be to stop what you are doing and fix things.
Instead of taking accountability, Zuck like always has some dumbass excuse about being "humbled". But humble people show they are humble.
If HN gets confused about why there is so much rage at people like Zuck, it's because we can actively see our lives getting worse because at 19 brolord here figured out how to get college kids to sign up for website. I mean, great idea, but I feel like that might, just might affect how you see the rest of the world and nobody in society agreed to this.
He needs to show that he's responsible, that he's grown up. Instead he's doing the next big thing and the next big thing is what any teenager that watched a recent Spielberg money would come up with. If Zuck and some of these tech savants want to impress people maybe they need to finish college so they don't still sound like high schoolers in their 30s.
We should demand more. We're tired of people like Sam and Graham and Zuck complaining about how hard it is when people criticize their work. They want to have insane wealth and have people kiss their ass.
I no longer speak to several family members because they were radicalized thanks to information & groups that Facebook fed to them.
Is it FB’s fault that they fell for it? No. Is it FB’s fault for recommending them very obvious QAnon groups? Yes. Especially since Facebook was aware of the misinformation on its platform: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-documents-misinformati...
Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!
I guess it's not surprising that one of Zuck's heroes growing up was the first Emperor of Rome. It's true, look that up. It says a lot about the guy. I mean who saw Rome and thought I want to be that murdering little jerk?
Are you Jonanin from the old Xgen forums? If so, random thanks for giving this random kid free web hosting back in the day! If you happen to be around the SF bay area, it'd be my pleasure to buy you a drink sometime. contact info in profile.
I’m just as surprised as you, my comment is dumb. But him talking about deeper engagement with the brand and their products doing more physical tracking just had me very irritated. I’ve recently gone from the kinda mainstream “I don’t have anything to hide “ mindset to self righteously seeing my continued use of “Meta” (among other companies) products as me financially contributing to something that I don’t agree with or like. It’s dumb, I’m dumb, but I don’t have any bigger problems so it really irked me
I'm old enough to realize most of my prognostications about where tech are headed are wrong, but I can't emphasize how much I hate this entire fucking idea. It makes me viscerally angry. I mean, it's like someone sat around and said "Gee, you know what the world needs more of? Replacing real, physical human connection with 3D cartoon avatars with no legs."
It's like someone watched Wall-E and thought it looked like a utopia. I've been in tech for over 20 years and, at least in my mind, it really "peaked" in the late mid-late 2000s, before everyone became a phone addict. At that point most of the tech giants still believed in their own benevolence, instead of today where it's hard to even convince their own workers of their benevolence despite dumping boatloads of cash on them.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but every year I have a stronger desire to just chuck my phone and laptop out the window and go full Walden Pond.
From my vantage point, Facebook hasn't had a next move for a decade. Zuckerberg years ago decided VR was the future and has stuck to it.
Now he's decided to make it even more of a bet. To me, it seems painfully clear that until the tech gets to a point where people don't need low res and heavy VR googles it will stay a niche.
Maybe it happens, eventually, I guess it will. But the future is rarely laid by the first movers. It's cemented by the first correct to market.
It is hard for me to take what Zuck said on its face value any more. Every F8, Facebook announced new things that was going to work for the next ten years, and mostly nothing happened.
Every year since 1990s, Microsoft was talking about new paradigms of computing, in the living room, smart devices, voice controls. Things shipped, and fell on the side ways.
Products are built one after another. They are not willed into existence through a vision announced to the world beforehand.
We may as well just hold a World's Fair and let these mega-corps to host "Metaverses of Tomorrow". At least it is going to be fun to visit.
Is no one concerned about the Black Mirror possibilities of the meta verse? Zuck is talking about how the experience will be centered around you rather than an app, and that it will carry who you are and things like your virtual goods seamlessly between different experiences. I worry that other things will also follow users around everywhere. For example things like ratings or social credit scores, even if they’re user driven instead of state driven. Or perhaps people who committed some crime can be ostracized and blocked on everyone’s VR set, as if they didn’t exist. Maybe I am worrying about nothing, but various episodes of Black Mirror have played out the horrifying possibilities of pervasive connected augmented reality devices, and if the metaverse is going to be as amazing and powerful as Zuck thinks it will be, I anticipate there will be many such issues. Ultimately I am still left wondering why we need any of this. Can humans not simply exist and enjoy their real life analog experiences?
Meta’s goal seems to become a “3D-Internet” browser/platform. But unless the concept of a “3D-Internet” is widely adopted and the related standards/technologies are built/adopted by the major players it might be gargantuan task for one company to pull this off. IMHO the Vision is great and inevitable.. but needs Industry support.
I cannot think of a scenario in which the metaverse is a tangible benefit for society and humanity. To me this is highly sofisticated escapism and may seems benign today, but in 10-15 years, if it catches on, will be very scary.
Even tho Mark believe he's doing the right thing here, to me this metaverse thing is evil.
117 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadIn most fiction where a "metaverse" or equivalent is popular, the world is in shambles. When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet?
The reason why social-media is so popular is because it's basically a way to highlight reality and engage with it.
I honestly don't see the metaverse taking off. Facebook should've went in the other direction IMHO.
The pandemic has shown very clearly that people want to engage with one another in reality, not on the internet.
Ironically, the creator of the technology in that show was a lot like Zuckerberg. He naively believed he was creating some transformative device to make people better but then they only wanted to use it for sex, violence, and escapism. And his daughter ends up becoming a terrorist radicalized by religious extremists after being appalled by the no ethics nihilism of her dad's world, whose digital avatar gains its own sentience and goes on to become the first Cylon, whose followers and descendents eventually end human civilization.
I wonder what will eventually become of Zuckerberg's daughters, what they'll think of him when they grow up.
The future is now. Welcome to VRChat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s
VRChat is full of escapism, alchohol abuse, underage users, and explicit erotic roleplay. The latter typically involves nude avatars with full-body tracking using HTC Vive trackers. By the way, this game is free without age restrictions on Oculus Quest, a product which itself has no parental controls. VRChat has no system for filtering or proactively tagging NSFW content, so even users who opt-out of the private adult worlds will probably still see nudity and more in public worlds. Also, vulnerabilities in the official client (mostly in the Unity rendering pipeline and Photon RPC stack) means users of modded clients can crash others' PC or Quest from inside the game. "Crashers", as they're known to all longtime users, have been a problem for years with no solution in sight. In earlier versions of VRChat, users could attach arbitrary C# scripts to their custom uploaded worlds or avatars. At least one arbitrary remote execution vulnerability has been discovered and responsibly disclosed to VRChat:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-c...
The VRChat staff ostensibly review moderation requests for issues like hate speech or nudity in public lobbies, but each video clip I've included (as the report guidelines strongly recommend) in requests I've filed has 0 views per my video upload dashboard. I keep seeing many of the same perpetrators again and again in public worlds. Again, there are no age checks, even good-faith "enter your birthdate" dialogs, and this platform is full of suggestive and explicit NSFW content. Communication is mainly via voice chat, so children are highly visible to adult users who would abuse them, who sadly are also present on the platform. Unsupervised kids are all over the place in this game. VRChat moderation staff do not have any in-game presence.
Despite these issues, VRChat continues to grow due to the total creative freedom it offers for user-uploaded content, its popularity among content creators on YouTube e.g. Jameskii, HeyImBee, SwaggerSouls, and the fact that it's a free game on Quest. It recently topped 50,000 concurrent active users.
Advanced VRChat users have modded support for teledildonics, as one streamer describes in this safe-for-work YouTube clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUZoSiZV_I&t=19s
Aside from the risk to the children themselves, their presence in VRChat is a constant annoyance to adults. They tend to be loud and lack manners or social skills. If you meet an interesting stranger and strike up a conversation, some kid'll run up in your face mid-sentence to shout lines from Ugandan Knuckles or a TikTok meme. Ever since the great "Quest-mas" of December 2020, VRChat public lobbies have felt more and more like an unsupervised daycare.
VRChat's Terms of Service specificy a minimum age of 13 for COPPA compliance, but in practice it seems this is never enforced, and I'm not even sure how it could be. It's really a shame, as aside from the kids and "crashers," VRChat's total creative freedom is a breath of fresh air. If you can model something in Blender and export it as Unity project, you can upload it to VRChat. There's a huge range of beautiful and immersive custom worlds, and all sort of hilarious or impressive custom avatars. It's a new digital Wild West, with all the good and bad that metaphor entails.
I mean, the trajectory of the world isn't great right now...
I could easily imagine a VR "game" in the near future that is just "walk around a virtual zoo that has leopards, rhinos, orangutans, gorillas and giraffes" because the real world no longer has them.
> When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet?
This is a good observation, but it's important to remember that quality of real world life is very fucking far from uniformly distributed now. There are already many people across the world whose personal life is in shambles enough that they spend every free moment escaping it in media consumption and video games.
Sure, if you have a good life, the metaverse pales in comparison. But what if you're stuck in a shithole town with no jobs and no prospects? At some point, frame rate and vertex count becomes less of an issue than "not watching yet another friend get addicted to opioids".
Maybe that's the real end-stage-capitalism opportunity for a soulless corporation: Everyone working on the metaverse is so focused on making it a primo experience that appeals to people already living well. Instead, maybe the audience to target is people whose real life already sucks. Sell virtual water in the desert, not the oasis.
Heck, it would just a one letter change for Facebook to go from Meta to Meth.
Things like a pandemic that forces people to be home. Rampant global warming that makes it hard to be outside comfortably.
Maybe small apartments in urban areas where its just too expensive to have a real home because zoning doesn't allow new apartments to be built fast enough...
lots of things come to mind.
Gen Z have also grown up in this reverse Truman Show dystopia where everyone has their own TV show (Youtube, Snap, Tiktok) that allows them to edit out the blemishes and embarassments of real life to produce a nicely manicured image to 'build their brand' on.
Maybe it's just the years of science fiction talking but I can't help but see this in a dystopian light. I don't want my social world to be created by"Meta". I want to use social media, and the internet more generally, as tools which enrich my life but don't dominate it. Directly opposite to how Zuckerberg pitches "Meta" in this interview.
My experience of the pandemic has taught me the primacy of physical, human, interaction. A VR headset isn't going to bridge that digital void. What's more, the internet is already addictive enough, already threatening those interactions I value. I recently read the short story "The machine stops" by E.M. Forster (available at http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html ), and I can't help but feel Facebook is building towards the dystopia it presents.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the vast scope of these ambitions. I'm lucky enough to be informed and privileged enough I can choose to ditch these companies but I worry for the many who can't.
I wish you were right, but looking at Internet traffic on mobile devices [1]:
That leaves about 30% for all other Internet traffic, including other large walled gardens like Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. So something like three quarters of all Internet traffic is in walled gardens now. Privately owned communication spaces are some of the biggest businesses in the world today.Note that this is mobile data, because it was the first dataset I was able to find easily.
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-most-used-apps-b...
The reality is that globally, mobile now surpasses desktop in terms of times spent: https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d....
And it's about 50/50 for the U.S.
100% of traffic goes to a space owned by someone. The fact that big companies can dominate profits, and still companies like TikTok can rise from no where is crazy.
Just because the internet is not decentralized IRC channels hosted in university dark corner offices doesn't mean that its a true walled garden in the typical sense.
I slack my coworkers, and imessaage my family, and facetime my partner, and discord my gamer friends, and use tiktok for entertainment, and use whatapp for my international friends.
Last week, i used teams for my coworkers and zoom for my family, and signal for my friends and ... and ... and ...
Apps come and go. TikTok is replacing youtube and Disney+ is replacing netflix and signal is (hopefully!) replacing something... While i wish that we actually owned our own servers, knowing that i can quickly change accounts and apps and "gardens" makes it better.
That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.
We're in a dangerous place where Apple is hardware locked to a single distribution channel (and its rules) & Android is heavy pushed towards a single distribution channel (and its rules).
It only takes a single round of bad legislation to get from there to "Your phone only runs what we say it can run."
Ironically, China has more diversity in app stores than everywhere else.
Are they all the same 3 apps the government approves of?
> That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.
I completely agree and hope apple gets pushed around until it opens up the hardware. I don't care (from a practical, non philosophical level) about APIs or federation or interoperable clients as long as i can just try something new. I have yet to find a single person who can talk with me over Matrix but a dozen who prefer signal.
Or any of the other user count indices.
Whew! $10 billion in funding and you call that "from no where".
What % of the 20-year old's day goes to YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix?
You can add more traffic to the internet but you can't add more hours to your day.
Once our attention spans are saturated, that's when things get really hard.
If I’m connecting to someone via that app it’s over a Wireguard tunnel. On desktop, let me drag files over, append to a synced message thread (stored in SQLite or something simple)
Open source design focused on beating desktop operating systems when it’s strength was always networking.
All the attention is on building tech for corporations to satisfy political memes. It doesn’t have to be if software people built different software
You can't even control the location, sequence, or time spent looking at different image content. They will know exactly what you are interested in, how much, and when that changes. They will know what distracts you most, and optimize it (for their customers the advertisers).
In the end I expect these to be given to high value (elite college students) consumers for free so that they can be monetized. Prepare to explain to your future wife why you always have goats in silk stockings on your feed!
Oh, also... compelling Metaverse content?! It will be user created. TikTok to the rescue!
More if you're interested: https://stratechery.com/about/
Goes to show you can still launch a successful blog with a name that no one can pronounce or understand.
That might be the saddest thing I've ever read, and perhaps the first time I've ever felt sympathy towards Mark Zuckerberg.
Expertly executed, infotainment media ate it up, 10/10, would be distracted again...
Seems to me they could've handeled it a bit better then :)
Are you implying that Facebook wasn't informed, asked to verify, or asked to comment on the publication of it's internal documents months ago?
* But sure, let's start with to things. Right here in the thread, people who have acquaintances working for the original meta ulc under the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and them claiming they knew something is happening for months.
* The meta trademark transfer months ago
Also not sure why you think WSJ would contact them months before about/with a whistleblower. But I'm sure WSJ stated that somewhere then, right?
It was also pretty likely that this would be announced during Facebook Connect (former Oculus Connect), which always was around this time the last couple of years.
Was it still a welcome coincidence and convenient? Sure. And did they use it for that? Of course, too. Who wouldn't.
So for example, a BS narrative that worked was Zuckerberg claiming a week? before that he wasn't sure about the new name yet and that it wasn't set in stone yet. That was indeed eaten up by some media.
There’s a reason FB’s people called up this guy, rather than someone who would be willing to say, “this makes no sense and has no bearing on success for several quarters, if not years. I don’t care about your deflection strategy. Talk to me about the anorexic girls on Instagram and a culture that turns a blind eye to it, because if you lose the young female market the entire game is up.” (Which is the secret of our industry — young females will make or break you.)
It’s easy to look like a super-smart strategy dude when you’re making predictions as an already-big market is getting bigger. For some reason, none of these guys can ever “predict the future.”
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks for your work!
You must not know this blog then, because ben has been a well reasoned voice for years, and his bullishness on VR/Metaverse should not be confused as a shill. He has been critical of FB the company. If you read his other works (even posted today!) about fb nee meta and their social products he's less of a kind persona.
> There were no limitations on the interview; it was my choice to focus on the company’s new vision and not the current controversies about Facebook.
That's how he opens the interview.
That does not reflect any reality. If there was no need to care for regulation, guess what - facebook would not be under fire. Google wouldn’t be regulated left and right. There would be no GDPR, there would be no cookie consent.
I have nearly stopped paying attention after that sentence. Frankly, maybe that point is placed strategically in the overall writing because the most interesting question comes later:
> Is there a worry that Facebook is a liability for this future you want to build?
> MZ: Are you talking about the app Facebook?
> You can interpret that any way you want to.
Well, that’s a disappointing frame to the original question.
And how long has it taken for them to come under any sort of real fire? 15 years? Compare that to any company that creates a physical product. They’re highly regulated from day 1.
It is like aerospace or automotive. There were barely any regulations in 1950s…
Google is barely regulated. Especially in america.
> There would be no GDPR, there would be no cookie consent.
I wish! those cookie consent prompts are annoying.
Having the loophole whose exploitation is your business model get ever-so-slightly tightened is distinctly different than having lawmakers show up 10 years late to the realization that your business model has the potential to exacerbate societally self-destructive behavior (and I'm registering my bet now that neither Meta nor Alphabet will face any meaningful regulation).
Re Google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google. The whole switch to Alphabet isa direct result of anti-trust and the risk of forced split. Safe harbor and GDPR are direct effects of regulation. The fact that Google is sending me emails with info about third parties they share my data with is a direct effect of regulation. Google News was on the news pretty often over the years.
Reasonably, digital business can’t anymore be done without worrying about regulation.
Regardless of what non-us people want, the US is not the outlier - its the center - It is uniquely the source of most tech companies. Almost all of the major tech companies are american, or move to america. Everything is created in america and shared with the rest of the world by nature of their being no borders online.
Or I guess here's the reality of it: Zuckerberg, I can only assume intentionally, has seemed to master the art of slipping his way out of tough questions non-stop. He lies to governments, he lies to users, he lies to advertisers, he lies to tech journalists; all behind the vail of a vague notion of where Facebook's perceived* value is. I have never, ever seen him get pinned down - this is not a compliment, he deserves to face real and tough criticism (regulation too), but I can only guess that every audience that's questioned him exists on a scale of ignorant to apathetic (on the apathetic side of the scale, see for instance how Ben ends this interview with a quip on touching base in 10 years; Ben's no dummy, he probably just grew exhausted from Zuckerberg's non-stop slippery, indirect answers. Zuckerberg stuck to his ,,human" script.).
* I stopped participating in social media years ago and my quality of life has skyrocketed (I'm here on HN to talk with others in my industry, so I view this as work-related). No one in their right mind can look at their 10-year vision of a metaverse and truly believe that Facebook will be the herald of this new economy.
There's essentially no such thing as a CEO that is truthful, but serious question - what are you referring to specifically here, do you have any proof of these claims?
Lying to governments (Congress at least) is, typically, a criminal offense. Lying to users and advertisers would result in loss of revenue. Lying to journalists will get you exposed by said journalists upon discovery of the lies.
If you are in the middle of a massive scandals (multiple massive scandals) about major issues like privacy, enabling genocide in certain countries, etc, if you really, really cared, your first step would be to stop what you are doing and fix things.
Instead of taking accountability, Zuck like always has some dumbass excuse about being "humbled". But humble people show they are humble.
If HN gets confused about why there is so much rage at people like Zuck, it's because we can actively see our lives getting worse because at 19 brolord here figured out how to get college kids to sign up for website. I mean, great idea, but I feel like that might, just might affect how you see the rest of the world and nobody in society agreed to this.
He needs to show that he's responsible, that he's grown up. Instead he's doing the next big thing and the next big thing is what any teenager that watched a recent Spielberg money would come up with. If Zuck and some of these tech savants want to impress people maybe they need to finish college so they don't still sound like high schoolers in their 30s.
We should demand more. We're tired of people like Sam and Graham and Zuck complaining about how hard it is when people criticize their work. They want to have insane wealth and have people kiss their ass.
Is it FB’s fault that they fell for it? No. Is it FB’s fault for recommending them very obvious QAnon groups? Yes. Especially since Facebook was aware of the misinformation on its platform: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-documents-misinformati...
Or you can ask the victims of the genocide enabled by Facebook: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
I’m glad it seemingly hasn’t effected you, but doesn’t mean others don’t feel that impact.
though, when is that ever not true...
I guess it's not surprising that one of Zuck's heroes growing up was the first Emperor of Rome. It's true, look that up. It says a lot about the guy. I mean who saw Rome and thought I want to be that murdering little jerk?
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks.
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
Are you Jonanin from the old Xgen forums? If so, random thanks for giving this random kid free web hosting back in the day! If you happen to be around the SF bay area, it'd be my pleasure to buy you a drink sometime. contact info in profile.
It's like someone watched Wall-E and thought it looked like a utopia. I've been in tech for over 20 years and, at least in my mind, it really "peaked" in the late mid-late 2000s, before everyone became a phone addict. At that point most of the tech giants still believed in their own benevolence, instead of today where it's hard to even convince their own workers of their benevolence despite dumping boatloads of cash on them.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but every year I have a stronger desire to just chuck my phone and laptop out the window and go full Walden Pond.
Now he's decided to make it even more of a bet. To me, it seems painfully clear that until the tech gets to a point where people don't need low res and heavy VR googles it will stay a niche.
Maybe it happens, eventually, I guess it will. But the future is rarely laid by the first movers. It's cemented by the first correct to market.
It is hard for me to take what Zuck said on its face value any more. Every F8, Facebook announced new things that was going to work for the next ten years, and mostly nothing happened.
Every year since 1990s, Microsoft was talking about new paradigms of computing, in the living room, smart devices, voice controls. Things shipped, and fell on the side ways.
Products are built one after another. They are not willed into existence through a vision announced to the world beforehand.
We may as well just hold a World's Fair and let these mega-corps to host "Metaverses of Tomorrow". At least it is going to be fun to visit.
Even tho Mark believe he's doing the right thing here, to me this metaverse thing is evil.
You say the metaverse is evil but where do you draw the line? If you fill your waking hours pursuing other forms of fiction, is that any better?