Serious question about socially ethical investing.
Is one truly making a statement and helping Evilcorp by buying stock?
Or is it more of a zero sum game where it's going to the market price with or without you; might as well make more money there and use the winnings somewhere more socially responsible?
Specifically it lets them dillute and raise money at higher valuation, it makes the board happy with the current management and it lets them distribute employee shares at lower costs.
> Is one truly making a statement and helping Evilcorp by buying stock?
That's not the point. The point is that when you buy EvilCorp stock, you:
1. Are part of the owners of EvilCorp, i.e. participate in decision-making in EvilCorp (at least in theory), so you are taking partial responsibility for its actions.
2. More importantly, you are providing EvilCorp with more funds to do its evil work.
The above is completely irrespective of stock prices.
Not if you're buying stock on the open market - only in the IPO, or in additional sale rounds, are you providing funds for a company to scale out their operations.
That goes back to the issue of how long the market can stay irrational. Maybe a very long time. Maybe not long at all. So you risk giving a windfall to the contrarian investor but maybe no contrarian investor will arrive.
I'm pretty sure that China, Japan, Brazil, South Korea and the rest of the foreign sector will be gobbling up stocks willy nilly -- the foreign sector owns 40% of US corp equity and debt, and that number is increasing by about 7% every decade -- so I am a bit skeptical that Exxon needs you to buy their stock, or really any Americans at all - but I wont bet money it wont work in any specific case.
If I were to pick a stock most susceptible to price manipulation, I'd go for a smallish company that's more vulnerable.
>We don't need to keep living inside screens — especially ones controlled by Mark. We don't need to accept Facebook's domination of the digital world.
Right! No body is forcing you. Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with social media in the first place.
Kind of. Workplaces, schools, academic environments definitely force the usage of some tool over another, or spending more or less time on screens. I am thankful that my new university uses BigBlueButton and hybrid teaching, since I spent the past two years on Microsoft Teams.
> Workplaces, schools, academic environments definitely force the usage of some tool over another, or spending more or less time on screens.
But who's to blame?
I have the feeling that people are blaming the wrong people. Corporations are amoral entities whose mission is to maximize profit. If this doesn't bring social value or has obvious negative externalities, we should blame the politicians who set the rules, and vote for someone else.
I and many others over the years have just stopped going to Facebook, not because of Principles or whatever, but just because it's the same shit every day. I don't know anyone anymore that obsessively uses Facebook or Instagram (I know, anecdotal). "The youth" is on more entertainment-focused things like tiktok, and people that want to keep in the loop (and argue about it) go to twitter.
But I don't feel like people are beholden to anyone. But again, that's purely anecdotal. People who are unaware and/or indifferent are more at risk.
I don’t think many critics of FB draw a bright line between FB and TikTok/Twitter. These are questions of degrees and specific variations, but from what I’ve seen much of the criticism is at the fundamental mechanics which are more or less shared across the services.
This here. No more loud principles but what it actually does is more important. The last time I used Facebook it was full of ads, irrelevant posts and news. I rarely saw my friends or families updates anymore.
Ah the ol’ network effects are a real high value target for businesses but have no real impact on consumers argument.
Nice.
“Pathological gregariousness…” with the scale and degree of consumption of social media, don’t you think there’s a possibility that actually there’s a universal human desire to connect with one another and it’s the tools themselves that are exploiting it to a pathological degree?
That's a good point which hard to address adequately in a few sentences. I think, perhaps naively, that corporations would like to make more profit out of people actually feeling good using their services. You could say that being aligned with people's well-being is the long-term better profit, compatible even with the most cynical renditions of capitalism.
That's true. But a different interpretation is that natural selection is an optimum in progress. It can all end abruptly, but there can be many branches too.
We are absolutely being forced. Perhaps you didn't realise, but lots of kids were on Google Classroom, Zoom, etc last year during lockdown.
This metaverse BS aims to be an even more contained aggregation of all this. If you watch the presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vWShsmE20), its meant to include all aspects of one's life.
I'm not oblivious to the threat of lock-ins. But as far as remote tools go, my experience during the lockdown was that of competitive capitalism working at its best.
There are lots of viable competitors in the field of remote meeting and groupware tools, but most people aren't in a position to choose which ones to use and which ones to avoid — they're generally required to use a particular one by work or school.
Sure, and there can be conflicting preferences within a person's society of mind as well. Workplaces and schools sounds like a decent scale of granularity for free market effects though. I'm not saying network effects don't exist of course.
They promised me that, while my class may not have political influence, at least I would have consumer power on the free market. Apparently that was wrong as well.
> Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with social media in the first place.
Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with hackernews in the first place.
> I should be able to click an app on my computer and have my own web page running in seconds, that anyone can find and follow.
There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of hosting providers and software packages that offer just that. I can get some hosting with DirectAdmin to install e.g. Wordpress on it within minutes. Following is through RSS feeds. Finding is down to Google, which in turn is down to you, the author, writing good stuff.
> There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of hosting providers and software packages that offer just that.
But most of them are incredibly confusing and off-putting to the majority of people FB attracts. Most contemporary net citizens don't have a functional mental client-server model such that they would even know they need a thing called hosting, let alone choose a service. And there's no tools that integrate a content feed, personal publishing, threaded comment and events/calenders in a coherent, secure, easy to use way. Most people barely understand that some code runs "in" their browser and some "on a server", or the relationship between the two. It can't be taught in a few minutes (it takes most of us here years to grok the subtleties and there's infinite edge cases).
To really get the whole FB experience, we also need "group-ware" (shared photos, tagging, shared calendar, private chat) with single-click installation, configuration and built-in templated branding.
You're right that all these tools exist, but they're fragmented and take time and knowledge to understand, use and integrate. And most of them are not interoperable.
> Following is through RSS feeds.
RSS is great in principle but all the tools that consume it suck: comment RSS feeds are treated at the same level as content, rather than "of" the content they refer to; most site still use RSS rather than ATOM, so you only get a summary of content; most readers keep you in-app rather than linking to full browsers, so you're trapped in webviews and inflexible, under-featured tools.
Yes, it's all "out there" but none of it matches the speed and comfort of FB.
(coming from someone who no longer has an FB account)
Not to mention that going with a third-party host is still relying on someone else's computer being trusted with your data. It's like saying we don't need physical drives anymore because Dropbox and Google Drive exist. And yet that's basically the environment we've constructed for the web.
Beyond the barrier of technical knowledge, there's also a barrier of access: many people simply do not have internet access that allows true static hosting. Even setting aside the historical issue of IPv4 address limitations, there's things like ISP port blocking, packet filtering and snooping, rate-limiting of upload, etc., that exist specifically to prop up rent-seeking hosting companies and "business plans" that charge ten times the money for the same exact advertised service just with the blocks turned off.
My theoretical app basically can't exist anymore without a lot of awkward hacks. Windows actually still has web hosting features built-in, but I can't use them outside the local network because my ISP blocks the port for HTTP (as well as a ton of other protocols), and dynamic IP means I can't link it to a domain anyway without third-party tools like DynDNS. Instead I'd have to rely on tunneling services like localhost.run, or peer-to-peer protocols that piggy-back in clever ways on existing open ports, or else pony up for a business account and pay more money for, often, less bandwidth than I have now.
Neocities is a website; websites can link to each other. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's far better than nothing – and it's easy enough to move your website with HTTP redirects (to the extent that you can ever change a URL).
- The CEO is not good but has dominant share of votes.
Facebook is relevant only because they spend their way out of trouble and buy competition. The US and EU regulators are going to remove that tactics. Good luck getting EU approval for any new Whatsapp, Instagram acquisition.
There is no clear avenue for them to stop doing the negative things they do, but they are not even trying. They just treat it as PR problem.
Network externality in social networks creates a situation where success is almost automatic once you cross certain threshold. FB did the initial growth well, then it has been mostly coasting and buying and shutting down competition using their market power.
According to every ethical standard there is. Zuckerberg bullied the Instagram and Whatsapp founders out of the company and now even Carmack is openly going against this ridiculous Metaverse idea
While I'm not a Facebook fan, there are some counterpoints:
- they have singlehandedly saved the VR industry by going all in on cordless / standalone VR which has increased the accessible market by at least an order of magnitude.
- almost the entire world are using React and Pytorch as de facto standards / defaults now
I don't know how you would measure these against outputs from other tech companies but it is clear to me that a bunch of innovation is happening inside Facebook (whether you like it or not of course is another thing).
Go was based entirely on Google's Daydream efforts. Hell, the Quest 2 still throws very Android ANR errors when a game crashes. Oculus's innovation into cordless and standalone is copied at best and outright plagiarism at worst. On top of this, the hardware itself it heavy on the head because they try to put it all in the visette. Sure, it might be aesthetically pleasing to just have one pair of goggles, but as a user I would much rather have a compute pack on my belt with a beefy heatsink to cool better hardware. If they did this they might even have the option of cordless body tracking in standalone VR before anyone else, but they won't because evidently Oculus still think they are making cardboard boxes.
This undifferentiated torrent of anger is diluting the message. I am not naive so I also expect the zuckerverse to be a laughingstock at best and very sinister at worst, but let them actually build it first. By being so critical before it even exist you are only sending the message "we will hate it irrespective of what it actually is because we hold a grudge".
Furthermore I think the "metaberg is a nefarious spy" messaging should be separated from the "living in VR is toxic even in concept" messaging, because I believe the former but explicitly not the latter, and I want to be able to be critical about the implementation of this while still being excited about the concept (and hoping it can be implemented humanely on top of open protocols)
The question is simple: Are they building it with end-to-end encryption? If not, it deserves all the criticism. Security/privacy has to be part of the design and cannot be bolted on post-facto.
I think Zuckerverse has shown that privacy doesn't exist in it. They could implement e2e but it'll be implemented in a way to so they can still sell away your privacy.
The one thing that's more annoying than Facebook are the whistleblowers of Facebook (like that frances haugen character, which I'm fairly certain is a spook). Such a cheap and condescending group of people who think they know more than the rest.
I'm all for saying you can't criticize a product that doesn't exist yet, but the company put our a propaganda video specifically so people would get excited for a product that doesn't exist yet and encourage investors to stay onboard with their plan to bet the farm on it. No one asked or required Facebook to reveal their vision at this particular time. As a result. I'm not particular sympathetic to the idea that they need protection from undifferentiated anger. I'm even inclined to say that they announced early specifically so that the anger at them could burn out before they have a product that merits the anger.
Not if the point of the criticism is "this should not be built by this company". It doesn't matter if the first version looks innocuous, if you can't trust that the next version will be.
More to the point, something this important shouldn't be built by any one or two or three companies, no matter who they are.
>but let them actually build it first. By being so critical before it even exist you are only sending the message "we will hate it irrespective of what it actually is because we hold a grudge".
Facebook has already put out positive messaging around what they're building. Is your point that positive messaging, promises, etc. are acceptable to be made but not criticism? That sounds like it'd unfairly skew the conversation to me.
If Facebook had to similarly "stay quiet" until they launched, then sure that's fair. But if your point is that Zuccerberg should be able to talk about how the Metaverse will redefine our connections and usher in a new digital life without criticism, then I strongly disagree.
I assume this will be an unusual opinion, but I'm actually very excited about Metaverse. I probably would not have chosen Facebook as the stewards of the first big VR-world, but I've been waiting a long time for some big co to make an investment in this direction. I think a (little m) metaverse is the obvious evolution for VR and could become ubiquitous.
I left Facebook about 3 years ago, around Cambridge Analytica time. It's bee annoying - very hard to plan events, chat with family, etc. - but I've felt strongly enough that the privacy cost wasn't worth the value.
When I heard about Facebook leaning hard into Metaverse, I immediately ordered an Oculus and signed up for a Facebook account (which is required to use Oculus). The value of being early in potentially the first big metaverse is well worth the privacy cost.
Surprisingly, as soon as I created my account, the account was locked for "not following community standards". I hadn't even seen the feed yet, and I was banned! I appealed the ban, and no dice - now it's permanent.
So now I am permanently locked out of Metaverse, presumably for the crime of not being a long-standing Facebook fan. When I imagine a world where a metaverse is a core piece of society, this sort of corporate gatekeeping is _exactly_ the thing I'd worry about.
The launch of Quest 2 is during US president election. It was maybe the worst time to create FB account because they will aggressively suspend fake accounts. I heard dozens of case that account suspended.
The same company that ships your Oculus to your door is the same company that you log in with (and probably the same one that has your info from scraping someone else’s contact list)
Very easy to tell that your “real” name does not match your CC or your home address.
1. All it takes is one single suspicion for FB to shut down your account and ask for your ID. That can be as simple as someone putting in a report that you might not be using your real name. (Speaking from experience)
2. CC and address are the tip of the iceberg of data that FB has. The content of all messages you send on Messenger or IG (including any time your name was used), data from a bunch of other apps on your phone including IP, your other usernames, your photos and files, locations you travel to, etc. Possibly voice to text stored of anything you’ve ever said while in the Oculus and almost definitely anything you’ve ever said to anyone else through the Oculus, the way you walk, and a hundred other data points that are slurped up in real time any chance they get.
3. There’s almost no option to get your stuff back if banned. The longer you use a Quest the riskier this gets. Every dollar spent on games? Gone. Friend list? Gone. Friends? Gone if you never got external contact info.
It’s easy to pretend you can get lost in the crowd and get away with it, and for some people maybe that’s true, but the data they have on you grows by the day...
I wonder if a VPN was involved. They probably have a set of red flags with different weights. Something tells me a VPN is a big red flag for them when it comes to new signups.
> I probably would not have chosen Facebook as the stewards of the first big VR-world
You make it sound as if Facebook will actually be the stewards of the first big VR-world, but all they did was announce something to divert attention from a serious scandal. They might as well have announced that they'll work on colonising Mars, and you'd be sad for missing your opportunity to get prime real-estate on Amazonis Planitia. Facebook are not building a metaverse; they're selling ads and trying to avoid regulation.
Love the HN swagger-talk even when it’s misinformed. Maybe they’ve accelerated the rebrand due to PR issues, but they’ve been heavily investing in AR/VR/metaverse for years, with Oculus back in 2014 and in the past few years poaching top silicon talent for low-power ASIC hardware. Their pseudo-AR RayBans commercially deployed few months ago. This has been a long time coming… FB has its issues to fix but no progress is going to come from falsehoods being thrown around.
They're not building a metaverse any more than anyone who's building VR apps or developing 3D games. It's possible that Zuckerberg wishes they were, and is trying to make himself believe that they are, but a company that is yet to master text communication has no idea how to build a metaverse. What they're doing is working on some VR meeting/chat apps.
Except they’re building the most popular consumer VR headsets by far? (Without going into any of the software/platform stuff that’s being developed). Also see ASIC part of comment for AR (they've been on a hiring spree for silicon)… The hardware is probably the most serious technical bottleneck because the sensory experience is kinda janky and isn't super-compelling, so that’s where innovation has to happen first.
> "Except they're building the most popular consumer VR headsets by far?"
While that statement may be true, its significance isn't as much as one may think. Remember the Blackberry? They owned the smartphone market - back when the market was extremely tiny and was primarily comprised of business executives. What made smartphones go mainstream? The iPhone.
The same may be true for VR headsets. Is the Oculus the most popular VR headset? I'll take your word that it is. However, I only know a handful of people who have a VR headset at all, and they're all über geeks. Like the Blackberry, the market is comprised of a non-representative sample of the population. Should VR headsets go mainstream it probably won't be the Oculus doing it - otherwise it probably already would have.
Will Metaverse make VR mainstream? I doubt it. The public doesn't simply trust Facebook enough for that and the public hasn't been very receptive to VR. I don't see the metaverse going anywhere.
I am really puzzled by the amount of people that basically dream up their own story for Facebook and act as if this is coming for sure.
Facebook did announce something very vague, didn't show any tech or proof of concept and for the most part it was just "tech visionairy" babble with some buzzwords sprinkled on top. What makes anyone think Facebook has the ability to create even a decent basic game/3D experience? A very basic decent VR experience? Let alone some kind of VR world encompassing MMO?
Companies with the most experience and specialized talent in the world in those sectors fail very regularly at the attempts to just create basic decent 3D experiences that don't feel like complete jank.
And we have also seen the silicon valley arrogance of non gaming companies with a "It's just <anything related to gaming or 3D> how hard can it be?" attitude fall on their noses plenty of times.
The whole "metaverse" announcement gives me the vibes of a mix between Ouya (all the empty PR babble) and Star Citizen (overpromising way too much).
> all they did was announce something to divert from a serious scandal
I would argue that Facebook are not the stewards of the first big VR world, Linden Labs are. Second Life has been a thing for a long time and, while not exactly the decentralised dream of an open metaverse we would want, its a hell of a lot more open and unregulated than whatever Zuckaberg's boffins could cook up in a month for the keynote scripted demo.
Now, I could sing the praises of Second Life (and parallel efforts like Open Simulation) for a long time, but it would be unfair of me not to mention that it is not officially a VR experience. All VR access to "The Grid", as they call it, is done through third party "Viewers" (effectively a web browser for the metaverse) based on the now open source code for the official Linden Viewer. That said, there has been serious efforts made into making a VR Viewer for The Grid, and I expect such efforts will only be enboldened by the new direction Facebook/Meta is taking.
Full agree here. Even before VR, Second Life is/was the biggest example of a metaverse. But, that's not a high bar - I don't know a single person that is active in Second Life. The small group of people I know that have even heard of Second Life at best gave it a try for a couple weeks. Second Life just never got momentum.
The thing Facebook brings, regardless of what you think of their technical prowess, is a network. I don't know yet how they'll get devices on people's faces, but if Facebook has anything it's access to a massive userbase. That's arguably more important than any tech.
I was on Second Life for a while around 2005(-ish) and back then it was a very colorful world striving with potential ... no idea what went wrong there, but back then it felt like "everything" is possible on there. From people who "worked" there for Linden Dollars, over not that bad arcade flight sims, relaxing Japanese Gardens to disturbing fetish outlets ...
> imagine a world where a metaverse is a core piece of society,
It's up to the society to make sure that doesn't happen. If we fail to ensure that, we get what we deserve. It's not like we don't have the advance warning. We just need to listen to it.
WTF the link to the "meta" keynote presentation by Zuckerberg requires me to login to their website!? Anyone has a link that doesn't require me to login?
* First everyone ignores Meta Inc.
* Then everyone laughs at Meta Inc. <==== We are here.
* Then everyone fights Meta Inc.
* Then Meta Inc. wins (again)
Judging from the comments, since it is hard for everyone to ignore Meta Inc and also looking at the emotional reaction to Meta's drive to build the metaverse with other metaverse-related companies, is history going to repeat itself with Facebook Inc. winning once again, but under a different name with the same CEO?
I wish this website did not recommend another walled garden, Signal, and recommended Matrix instead. That would be in line with other recommendations of federated platforms.
Funny that in the alternative section they dont talk about VR alternatives, who is what facebook (or meta if you prefer) is going for...
About metaverse i often see people here talk about vrc (vrchat) here but there also some open-source like the fork of High Fidelity (Vircadia) that who are more near of what facebook is doing. But there is not much community on it last time i checked, i need to check it again tho. Today iv stop and move around NeosVR who is already proposing many thing that facebook whant to do and yes i know its not open source.
Also i didnt do much research on open-source VR alternative so if you know some more i will happy to know them.
113 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadSee all you haters in 10 years :)
Is one truly making a statement and helping Evilcorp by buying stock?
Or is it more of a zero sum game where it's going to the market price with or without you; might as well make more money there and use the winnings somewhere more socially responsible?
That's not the point. The point is that when you buy EvilCorp stock, you:
1. Are part of the owners of EvilCorp, i.e. participate in decision-making in EvilCorp (at least in theory), so you are taking partial responsibility for its actions.
2. More importantly, you are providing EvilCorp with more funds to do its evil work.
The above is completely irrespective of stock prices.
I'm pretty sure that China, Japan, Brazil, South Korea and the rest of the foreign sector will be gobbling up stocks willy nilly -- the foreign sector owns 40% of US corp equity and debt, and that number is increasing by about 7% every decade -- so I am a bit skeptical that Exxon needs you to buy their stock, or really any Americans at all - but I wont bet money it wont work in any specific case.
If I were to pick a stock most susceptible to price manipulation, I'd go for a smallish company that's more vulnerable.
In any case, best wishes.
MVRS stock is actually a great buy right now.
I will either make the world a better place, or make a (in)decent amount of money.
Right! No body is forcing you. Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with social media in the first place.
Kind of. Workplaces, schools, academic environments definitely force the usage of some tool over another, or spending more or less time on screens. I am thankful that my new university uses BigBlueButton and hybrid teaching, since I spent the past two years on Microsoft Teams.
But who's to blame?
I have the feeling that people are blaming the wrong people. Corporations are amoral entities whose mission is to maximize profit. If this doesn't bring social value or has obvious negative externalities, we should blame the politicians who set the rules, and vote for someone else.
But I don't feel like people are beholden to anyone. But again, that's purely anecdotal. People who are unaware and/or indifferent are more at risk.
Nice.
“Pathological gregariousness…” with the scale and degree of consumption of social media, don’t you think there’s a possibility that actually there’s a universal human desire to connect with one another and it’s the tools themselves that are exploiting it to a pathological degree?
This metaverse BS aims to be an even more contained aggregation of all this. If you watch the presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vWShsmE20), its meant to include all aspects of one's life.
Talk about lock in!
Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with hackernews in the first place.
Is it part of the joke that this page is empty without JS and contains dozens of fingerprinted resources, many of them from Facebook's CDN?
Edit: BTW, mbasic.facebook.com is one of the most accessible and compatible sites out of all the big leagues.
This would be a more convincing pitch if it didn't end with "now just use different centralized services that nobody uses".
We need protocols, not platform capitalism. We need easy self-hosting, not reliance on third-party middle men and rent-seekers.
I should be able to click an app on my computer and have my own web page running in seconds, that anyone can find and follow.
The fact we don't is how platforms like Facebook are able to dominate, and the even worse fact is this was deliberate.
There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of hosting providers and software packages that offer just that. I can get some hosting with DirectAdmin to install e.g. Wordpress on it within minutes. Following is through RSS feeds. Finding is down to Google, which in turn is down to you, the author, writing good stuff.
But most of them are incredibly confusing and off-putting to the majority of people FB attracts. Most contemporary net citizens don't have a functional mental client-server model such that they would even know they need a thing called hosting, let alone choose a service. And there's no tools that integrate a content feed, personal publishing, threaded comment and events/calenders in a coherent, secure, easy to use way. Most people barely understand that some code runs "in" their browser and some "on a server", or the relationship between the two. It can't be taught in a few minutes (it takes most of us here years to grok the subtleties and there's infinite edge cases).
To really get the whole FB experience, we also need "group-ware" (shared photos, tagging, shared calendar, private chat) with single-click installation, configuration and built-in templated branding.
You're right that all these tools exist, but they're fragmented and take time and knowledge to understand, use and integrate. And most of them are not interoperable.
> Following is through RSS feeds.
RSS is great in principle but all the tools that consume it suck: comment RSS feeds are treated at the same level as content, rather than "of" the content they refer to; most site still use RSS rather than ATOM, so you only get a summary of content; most readers keep you in-app rather than linking to full browsers, so you're trapped in webviews and inflexible, under-featured tools.
Yes, it's all "out there" but none of it matches the speed and comfort of FB.
(coming from someone who no longer has an FB account)
Beyond the barrier of technical knowledge, there's also a barrier of access: many people simply do not have internet access that allows true static hosting. Even setting aside the historical issue of IPv4 address limitations, there's things like ISP port blocking, packet filtering and snooping, rate-limiting of upload, etc., that exist specifically to prop up rent-seeking hosting companies and "business plans" that charge ten times the money for the same exact advertised service just with the blocks turned off.
My theoretical app basically can't exist anymore without a lot of awkward hacks. Windows actually still has web hosting features built-in, but I can't use them outside the local network because my ISP blocks the port for HTTP (as well as a ton of other protocols), and dynamic IP means I can't link it to a domain anyway without third-party tools like DynDNS. Instead I'd have to rely on tunneling services like localhost.run, or peer-to-peer protocols that piggy-back in clever ways on existing open ports, or else pony up for a business account and pay more money for, often, less bandwidth than I have now.
The majority of internet users don't have a computer
Pixelfed is part of the ActivityPub Fediverse, as is https://write.as (a https://writefreely.org instance). These are protocols.
- the least innovative,
- has the worst corporate governance,
- purest advertising company,
- The CEO is not good but has dominant share of votes.
Facebook is relevant only because they spend their way out of trouble and buy competition. The US and EU regulators are going to remove that tactics. Good luck getting EU approval for any new Whatsapp, Instagram acquisition.
There is no clear avenue for them to stop doing the negative things they do, but they are not even trying. They just treat it as PR problem.
According to what? FB has had a tremendous growth.
If a company wants to be international, they must do what regulators in their main markets say.
While I'm not a Facebook fan, there are some counterpoints:
- they have singlehandedly saved the VR industry by going all in on cordless / standalone VR which has increased the accessible market by at least an order of magnitude.
- almost the entire world are using React and Pytorch as de facto standards / defaults now
I don't know how you would measure these against outputs from other tech companies but it is clear to me that a bunch of innovation is happening inside Facebook (whether you like it or not of course is another thing).
Second is not their business innovation. It's open source. They do also good research.
Furthermore I think the "metaberg is a nefarious spy" messaging should be separated from the "living in VR is toxic even in concept" messaging, because I believe the former but explicitly not the latter, and I want to be able to be critical about the implementation of this while still being excited about the concept (and hoping it can be implemented humanely on top of open protocols)
Why can't you criticize something based on leadership's ongoing behavior until after the project is done? That doesn't make any sense.
Not if the point of the criticism is "this should not be built by this company". It doesn't matter if the first version looks innocuous, if you can't trust that the next version will be.
More to the point, something this important shouldn't be built by any one or two or three companies, no matter who they are.
Facebook has already put out positive messaging around what they're building. Is your point that positive messaging, promises, etc. are acceptable to be made but not criticism? That sounds like it'd unfairly skew the conversation to me.
If Facebook had to similarly "stay quiet" until they launched, then sure that's fair. But if your point is that Zuccerberg should be able to talk about how the Metaverse will redefine our connections and usher in a new digital life without criticism, then I strongly disagree.
I assume this will be an unusual opinion, but I'm actually very excited about Metaverse. I probably would not have chosen Facebook as the stewards of the first big VR-world, but I've been waiting a long time for some big co to make an investment in this direction. I think a (little m) metaverse is the obvious evolution for VR and could become ubiquitous.
I left Facebook about 3 years ago, around Cambridge Analytica time. It's bee annoying - very hard to plan events, chat with family, etc. - but I've felt strongly enough that the privacy cost wasn't worth the value.
When I heard about Facebook leaning hard into Metaverse, I immediately ordered an Oculus and signed up for a Facebook account (which is required to use Oculus). The value of being early in potentially the first big metaverse is well worth the privacy cost.
Surprisingly, as soon as I created my account, the account was locked for "not following community standards". I hadn't even seen the feed yet, and I was banned! I appealed the ban, and no dice - now it's permanent.
So now I am permanently locked out of Metaverse, presumably for the crime of not being a long-standing Facebook fan. When I imagine a world where a metaverse is a core piece of society, this sort of corporate gatekeeping is _exactly_ the thing I'd worry about.
sounds like a thing programmers believe about names: that you can tell when one is fictional or real.
Very easy to tell that your “real” name does not match your CC or your home address.
2. CC and address are the tip of the iceberg of data that FB has. The content of all messages you send on Messenger or IG (including any time your name was used), data from a bunch of other apps on your phone including IP, your other usernames, your photos and files, locations you travel to, etc. Possibly voice to text stored of anything you’ve ever said while in the Oculus and almost definitely anything you’ve ever said to anyone else through the Oculus, the way you walk, and a hundred other data points that are slurped up in real time any chance they get.
3. There’s almost no option to get your stuff back if banned. The longer you use a Quest the riskier this gets. Every dollar spent on games? Gone. Friend list? Gone. Friends? Gone if you never got external contact info.
It’s easy to pretend you can get lost in the crowd and get away with it, and for some people maybe that’s true, but the data they have on you grows by the day...
Don't you know other retailers?
You make it sound as if Facebook will actually be the stewards of the first big VR-world, but all they did was announce something to divert attention from a serious scandal. They might as well have announced that they'll work on colonising Mars, and you'd be sad for missing your opportunity to get prime real-estate on Amazonis Planitia. Facebook are not building a metaverse; they're selling ads and trying to avoid regulation.
While that statement may be true, its significance isn't as much as one may think. Remember the Blackberry? They owned the smartphone market - back when the market was extremely tiny and was primarily comprised of business executives. What made smartphones go mainstream? The iPhone.
The same may be true for VR headsets. Is the Oculus the most popular VR headset? I'll take your word that it is. However, I only know a handful of people who have a VR headset at all, and they're all über geeks. Like the Blackberry, the market is comprised of a non-representative sample of the population. Should VR headsets go mainstream it probably won't be the Oculus doing it - otherwise it probably already would have.
Will Metaverse make VR mainstream? I doubt it. The public doesn't simply trust Facebook enough for that and the public hasn't been very receptive to VR. I don't see the metaverse going anywhere.
Facebook did announce something very vague, didn't show any tech or proof of concept and for the most part it was just "tech visionairy" babble with some buzzwords sprinkled on top. What makes anyone think Facebook has the ability to create even a decent basic game/3D experience? A very basic decent VR experience? Let alone some kind of VR world encompassing MMO?
Companies with the most experience and specialized talent in the world in those sectors fail very regularly at the attempts to just create basic decent 3D experiences that don't feel like complete jank. And we have also seen the silicon valley arrogance of non gaming companies with a "It's just <anything related to gaming or 3D> how hard can it be?" attitude fall on their noses plenty of times.
The whole "metaverse" announcement gives me the vibes of a mix between Ouya (all the empty PR babble) and Star Citizen (overpromising way too much).
> all they did was announce something to divert from a serious scandal
This is what it boils down to.
Now, I could sing the praises of Second Life (and parallel efforts like Open Simulation) for a long time, but it would be unfair of me not to mention that it is not officially a VR experience. All VR access to "The Grid", as they call it, is done through third party "Viewers" (effectively a web browser for the metaverse) based on the now open source code for the official Linden Viewer. That said, there has been serious efforts made into making a VR Viewer for The Grid, and I expect such efforts will only be enboldened by the new direction Facebook/Meta is taking.
The thing Facebook brings, regardless of what you think of their technical prowess, is a network. I don't know yet how they'll get devices on people's faces, but if Facebook has anything it's access to a massive userbase. That's arguably more important than any tech.
It's up to the society to make sure that doesn't happen. If we fail to ensure that, we get what we deserve. It's not like we don't have the advance warning. We just need to listen to it.
EDIT: found it on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOn2CZWnxxY
About metaverse i often see people here talk about vrc (vrchat) here but there also some open-source like the fork of High Fidelity (Vircadia) that who are more near of what facebook is doing. But there is not much community on it last time i checked, i need to check it again tho. Today iv stop and move around NeosVR who is already proposing many thing that facebook whant to do and yes i know its not open source.
Also i didnt do much research on open-source VR alternative so if you know some more i will happy to know them.