I increasingly believe that Facebook’s pivot to Meta will end up going down as one of the biggest misses in the history of business. The metaverse is a real idea yes - but strapping a phone to your face and walking through your coffee table isn’t it. Especially not with a mediocre centralized FB owned “virtual world” where they inflict heavy taxes and content moderation. Facebook has neglected its core businesses for years and seems to have real trouble shipping hardware with reasonable spending.
Now they’re scrambling to ship an iPhone alternative to get out from under Apple policy, but it really seems like they’re on constant defense now and have a very tough lift to actually get something truly mass market. I would be shocked if Apple, Microsoft or Google were irrelevant in 2030, but it is really possible (if not yet necessarily probable) that Facebook/Meta might actually just not exist in the same kind of way anymore then.
When they first announced the rebrand I actually thought it could be genius and that there’s no way they could have been doing it without a really well considered, heavily backstopped plan… but epic strategic miscalculation seems to be going around a lot this year.
To play devils advocate, Facebook is more essential to my life than it ever was before.
* Marketplace was a huge success in terms of subsuming Craigslist. The quality of posts and the volume of postings makes me rarely even check Craigslist anymore.
* Small forums for various hobbies are almost entirely driven by Facebook groups now, instead of in the past where you’d find some custom bulletin board where the last post on most subforums was 3 years ago. It’s better than Reddit for certain things. Groups for communities (ie: your neighborhood or small town) are thriving, too.
* Messenger is the sole mechanism I have to keep in touch with friends from school that are now back overseas.
I think their general success is assured, even if the metaverse isn’t ready yet. They can afford to lose some money on a big bet.
On the other hand, I think that they missed the boat with the metaverse not being a big thing during covid lockdowns, because the cultural rebound of covid yields zero appetite for virtual existence. People want to make up for lost time.
Each of these: Markeplace, Forums, Messenger are non sticky and with countless alternatives.
For example one could easily have two-three chat apps and use each with different people. I still use Craigslist, I think it works better and has better organization of categories.
The main Facebook app, now that is a unique product - yet frankly, from my perspective it feels completely marginalized, the content there is in worse shape than ever. I find the news feed absurdly bad, GAG videos and ads.
The degree to which the main FB product rotted during the last few years was extreme. Scrolling FB was still a daily activity for me until the medium was overtaken by outrage.
It seems like FB goosed conflict on the platform until everyone decided they’d had enough and left or stopped posting. There is nothing in the newsfeed from my contacts at this point, the feed is either entirely ads or bottom barrel MLM scams. Instagram is going the same direction with everyone growing exhausted from competition for likes. TikTok seems successful in part because the primary purpose isn't to engage with your friends.
So where does that leave social networking amongst your peers? SMS seems to be making a comeback.
I think the strong disagreement in these threads are indicative of the new sub-culturing of social networks. I have friends who basically live in facebook, they are parents who spend most of their time looking for deals on marketplace. Meanwhile, most of my child-free friends have ditched facebook nearly a decade ago, and have either doubled down on reddit or have moved to tik tok.
Whether or not the metaverse is anything but marking would require me to look at a balance sheet, but facebook seems to be moving through the business life-cycle at a much more rapid pace than i expected it to. They are wringing the value out of the product for revenue growth at the expense of long term adoption. Always a mixed bag but I'm sure an MBA could explain it better.
Suffices to say. I have no idea whether or not their products have are long-run competitive, because I'm very much not the target demo.
They do this kind of profile targeting so aggressively it’s absurd. I also almost only get animal content and the occasional post from an ace group I joined, because I generally only post pics of my pup and peak at said group once in a while. Every so often I get lured into looking at something I find politically awful, and just instantly I get inundated with even more awful productized distillation of it. If I so much as slow my scroll for ADHD content, I’m smothered in ads for really horrifying scams trying to sell me miracle cures or shady guaranteed diagnosis. Yeah, FB serves content which it thinks targets your brain as audience. But it does so in a really astonishingly stupid and toxic way.
It is astonishing. I generally enjoy Facebook and while there are ads and click bait a lot of my feed is just my friends talking nicely, but it's a strange subset of friends.
I tried clicking on a few profiles I hadn't seen in a while and a lot of them had nice posts too. I saw everything from them for about a month then it disappeared again.
I am very worried about what will become of all the very private stuff in their database as they begin to decay.
Right now I assume it would take very sophisticated effort to steal all that messenger data, but what about if/when Facebook is a zombie company with a skeleton crew or an unloved subsidiary of a conglomerate?
It's such a shame. I would LOVE to keep in touch with news from friends and family with a simple chronological feed, but every social media company insists on shoveling trash down my throat with an algorithm.
A week or so ago a new tab appeared in my Facebook app that gives chronological timeline of people and groups I follow. I don't know if it's in Europe only: https://imgur.com/a/xMb2VWG
They did the same with Instagram. Click Instagram logo and select "Following" to get a chronological timeline. Possibly also only in Europe.
Back when I had Facebook, I had a contact who posted quite a lot. Often quite interesting stuff so I would read it when his stuff appeared in my newsfeed.
So Facebook just made his posts my... uh entire newsfeed. Like my newsfeed would just be 5-10 posts from this guy, some political bullshit and then another 5-10 posts from the same guy.
Even if that were the stuff I was engaging with, surely it is obvious that I don't want it in that quantity.
I'd love to hear from Facebook newsfeed product managers as it really seems like no humans actually contributed to decisions.
Possible, but what does that say about their algorithm that they only give me stuff I don't want? At this point I login to FB maybe once a month to check community groups for my neighborhood.
Animals could be a similar “no fill” response reflecting that your network doesn't have much going on.
>what does that say about their algorithm that they only give me stuff I don't want?
Do you engage with political content on facebook or other platforms where facebook has tracking agreements? they're maximizing engagement. facebook knows I'm way more likely to click on a "we rescued a dog" video than political stuff, so doesn't show me political stuff. Their data points don't just come from the facebook website.
Possible, but that wouldn't explain the lack of posts from anyone else. I checked once or twice, but at most I see folks organically posting once every 6 months or less - at this point I think I'd be surprised if anyone saw those posts.
Marketplace sucks compared to other alternatives out there (Craigslist has never been big in the European countries I've lived in so can't comment on that in particular).
Groups are a horrible alternative to forums. An algorithm decides which posts are "hot" and posts die over time. Forums can provide highly informative long-running threads (which FB groups and Reddit cannot). Sure, manually moderating a forum is hard work but the end result is so much better.
Messenger? There are so many better (and encrypted) alternatives to communication.
The only thing FB has going for it is that almost everyone is there. It's super easy to hook up with someone you just met the other day just by searching for them on FB, sending a friend requests and then you can be chatting within minutes. You don't even necessarily need to know their name, you can go through list of friends of a common friend and look for them by face. All other solutions practically involves having to remember asking someone for their phone number. This is also why marketplace/groups are "successful", due to the sheer number of people already on the platform.
> Each of these: Markeplace, Forums, Messenger are non sticky and with countless alternatives
True, but they are harder to maintain because of the spam. Facebook has more data on genuine users than a bank and it’s easy for them to block low quality or fraud posts. That’s the true value of Facebook - they know more about of your life than you do.
> If they knew so much about me why is it that I dislike most that they show me?
If you engage with it, they'll keep showing it to you. Their goal is not to make you happy, it's to keep you engaged so there is an audience for their ads.
In fact, this is why the outrage engine everywhere on social media. People who are upset are going to need an outlet to blow off that steam.
Completely disagree. Those three things are all gated by intense network effects. Social media type products are generally as sticky as they come. Facebook will continue to be the platform that everyone uses, because who wants to be on a marketplace or messaging app that doesn't have the most people?
> one could easily have two-three chat apps and use each with different people
I guess theoretically, but in reality, no. People are going to use one app. Apple realized this with iMessage and it's become one of their biggest advantages in the U.S. market. Texting an iPhone user as an android user is legitimately a bad experience, because apple knows that their users aren't going to download a new chat app so they can go ahead and make the experience dogshit for the out group users.
> who wants to be on a marketplace or messaging app that doesn't have the most people?
But it doesn't have the most people. I have long lost that sense that FB is where everyone is. That feels so 2016
> Apple realized this with iMessage
In general iMessage is not a good example because it a product that leverages the unique position of Apple owning the hardware. No other company can play the same game. Apple don't want you to use iMessage on other systems, they deliberately make the experience worse for Android. But who else can afford that?
You definitely can seamlessly use Whatsapp, Viber, FB Messenger, Telegram and Signal all at the same time on all your devices.
Your anecdote is noted, and I have a similar experience with regard to Facebook usage in my circle. That doesn’t change the fact that Facebook has more users than any other platform in the world.
I think you misunderstand my point about iMessage. Apple users have a very good reason to use different chat apps. Most people probably text non iPhones every once in a while. Yet every iPhone user I know refuses to download other chat apps. It’s not like there’s a big barrier to getting WhatsApp, they just don’t want multiple chat apps. People who are already using WhatsApp feel the same way, and there’s much less reason for them to switch, since the product doesn’t purposefully knee cap users.
This is only true in the US though. Everywhere else in the world iMessage is a dead product, because Apple doesn’t have the market share to push it. If Apple’s market share in the US ever drops significantly then iMessage will promptly die there too.
> because who wants to be on a marketplace or messaging app that doesn't have the most people?
People who care about something, like, here? I think FB was a transitory medium for people who were not on the internet to discover what's out there. Most of them are going to end up in topical communities because the central market is too crazy
Ah, I guess iMessage sends it directly right? I’m still confused as to why people wouldn’t switch to whatsapp instead. For example, if your connection sucks iMessage will fallback to text and if you’re abroad or talking to a foreign number then you’ll get charged, that sounds like a massive issue to me.
I guess we live in different bubbles, I can count on one hand the number of people I know that don't use whatsapp. Even my 87 yo grand mother uses whatsapp
i don’t know. the past decade has been everyone shouting about network effects, yet i can’t count on either hand the number of matching-related apps i’ve both left and joined over that duration. on the other hand, i’m still using basically the same http networking protocol during that same duration. network effects are real (hence http still dominating), but the higher you crawl up the stack the “softer” the effect.
All that can circle down the drain really quickly.
Facebook was my go to place to find events around me. Now they've dumbed down the page and removed the ability to search by date and location, and made it useless.
The same can and will happen to their other properties.
On Marketplace?! This blows my mind that you think this. It's a chaotic nightmare. Sellers post everything as free and then separately negotiate a price. Buyers repeatedly ask you if something's still available. Both of these mean something's very wrong with how people understand to use the system.
I've never used Facebook Marketplace but whenever I see some preview in my Facebook it's just bikini shots (apparently the skinny attractive women are selling the bikinis that they're wearing).
craigslist also has this problem, and it does seem pretty easily fixable, to my naive eyes:
someone has said "your price is fair, my agent will be over to pick it up with a cashier's check" for every single thing I've sold on craigslist. I don't think filtering out scumbags like this is a terribly hard problem.
Yes, the cashier's check is fake. And they will never meet you at the originating bank. I've even had cashier's checks mailed to me from my Craigslist ads. Called the originating banks and they verified over the phone that the checks were fake.
When I sell something on Craigslist, it's cash-only and they have to meet me at a public place and pick up the item in person. And I verify the bills are not counterfeit before I hand over the item.
This is what it's come to. Probably because the police can't be bothered with minor fraud nowadays, and the criminals know it.
Our local police station has a parking lot next to it with a big sign that says “online purchase transaction point” or something to that effect. There are cameras monitoring the lot. Just suggesting meeting at said location is usually sufficient to clear out the scammers.
The last few times I've bought cars I used a cashier's check on a local bank. Car dealers don't like credit cards because they don't want to pay a 3%-5% fee on a $35K purchase.
You can find stories about this. I don't have the link, but we have Google for that.
Basically, the bank will cash it, and days later, discover it's fake and demand that YOU give them the money back. There's a time delay which the scumbags are exploiting.
Cops put "financial crimes" way down their priority list.
If the cashier's bank is from Wells Fargo and you meet them at Wells Fargo, surely WF is able to check the authenticity of their own checks immediately?
If you receive a wire transfer to a burner checking account that only accepts deposits and not withdrawals, that would be fine.
I think the only risk there would be identity theft leading to payment with stolen money, but they're almost certain to get caught so it's fine.
If that's a concern: If you make sure the transfer comes from a business checking account, they only have 24 hours to report the fraud before the business is on the hook for the stolen money and not you(I think). I'm not sure if personal vs. business are externally-distinguishable in an automated way, however.
Plus the scams. There are tonnes and tonnes of them that get reported to us every day. I'm not sure what Facebook are doing to combat it, but it's clearly not working.
I think they are dealing with the inherited culture of Craigslist. Craigslist was such a clusterfuck for so many years, and had such a monopoly, that it has essentially defined what it is to do individual-to-individual noncommercial online commerce. The low balling and the attitude of some posters stems from there, because everyone thinks “that’s just how you are supposed to act when you sell something online.”
For every seller doing things the old way, there’s a handful of people doing things the cordial and respectful way, putting an effort into it. It’s getting better. You do have to learn how to read the page, but I don’t see how they could fix that.
For me, Marketplace buyers have flaked out more than Craigslist ones. Forums are less useful/dynamic than anonymous Reddit. And I don't even touch Messenger vs. numerous other chat apps.
And yet, I do those same tasks and don’t use Facebook for any of them. None of those are special and people could switch to one of the alternatives with barely a hiccup.
From where I'm from (Southeast Asia), Facebook is very essential too. From catching up with family, friends and most of the businesses here prefers transacting on Messenger.
We don't really care about Metaverse or anything of the same nature. I think that is just an American thing.
Opposite experience for me. I barely know anyone who uses FB marketplace, FB groups, or messenger. The only use case for Messenger is keeping in touch with "old people" who used it with me 10-15 years ago. That's like 2-3 people who are left and haven't moved off yet
In my experience, the FB ecosystem, other than Instagram and WhatsApp, is totally irrelevant to the younger generation.
If FB didn't own Instagram and WhatsApp I think it'd be dying in the next few years. These acquisitions are IMO what's keeping it relevant.
To play devil’s advocate to the devil’s advocate: I’m not on Facebook for anything. Been this way for so many years I can’t remember when I had an account. It feels like I’m missing exactly nothing. Spent some time recently going out of my way to see people in person. To me, it feels like that’s where it’s at: IRL.
I quit FB for good about 5 years ago. At that point it was all trash.
> Marketplace was a huge success
Whoa they have a marketplace?! Since when?
> Small forums for various hobbies
For my hobbies there are still bulletin boards! Of course, Reddit's very useful as well.
It's likely that there's good conversations I'm missing out on because I'm not on FB, but I'm not aware of what I'm missing out. Don't really care.
> Messenger is the sole mechanism I have to keep in touch
WhatsApp (owned by FB) is ubiquitous. Nobody uses Messenger, even if both parties are on it.
Where I'm at (I'm not in USA), FB was all the rage about 12 years ago. But now none of my friends — people who I actually know — use it. However, I think a lot of people use Instagram (again, under FB), which I've never tried.
> For my hobbies there are still bulletin boards! Of course, Reddit's very useful as well.
Find me a forum with 10k members and hundreds of active users that’s dedicated almost entirely to the North American use of the BMW M57. Because that’s the sort of thing Facebook has.
You might think that you’re getting along fine without these forums but I promise you, if you’re not on the site you’re missing conversations.
In case you were wondering, 6 cylinder diesel BMWs are infact very popular in India. All powered by the N57 engine. Couldn't find too much with the older M57, but to be fair BMW sales really picked up in India only after the F10 5-series was launched at around 2010, and I'm not sure if they ever had the M57 engine.
Among car enthusiasts in India, the 530d is perhaps the most coveted sedans. (535d and 540d were never sold here. North America gets plenty of cool cars which aren't sold here).
Here are a couple of great reviews of the 525d and 530d with that engine on the aforementioned forum:
But there are all sorts of little secrets to these cars beyond a review. NABDOG (North American BMW Diesel Owners Group, on Facebook) has 3 independent mechanics between Michigan, Colorado, and Georgia that make a living just servicing members cars. We have guys 3D printing aftermarket air intakes and coolant plugs, and another guy who had connector caps injection molded. We have a big FAQ with all the information on what sort of oil TBNs and detergents are good for the engine. We have a list of common failures, like the fact that on the E70 the plastic rain trays at the bottom of the windshield have a poor design and will drip water down directly onto injector six if they crack, rusting it onto the head and potentially ruining the engine, or a tutorial on how to clean the sunroof drains. e90post/etc has some of this, but it’s not as good. NABDOG has a personality with its own memes and such, it genuinely feels like a community relative to a forum.
Probably the most useful part of NABDOG is that I can think of a question while I’m out in my garage, snap a picture and make a post, and have a handful of answers before I shut my hood. The real-time aspect of Facebook groups is underrated.
The other group that comes to mind is dedicated to disc golf in my city. People will post, “hey, I’m going solo to X course at 4:30, anyones welcome” and people will connect that way and become friends. I don’t think there’s a real replacement for these.
> all sorts of little secrets to these cars beyond a review.
Go deeper into the threads and you'll discover the secrets.
Since I neither drive a BMW nor live in USA to take advantage of the 3 independent mechanics between MI, CO, and GA, I suppose I'm not missing out on that :)
(Why'd you specially mention MI, CO, and GA?)
However, from your words I gather that NABDOG has plenty of useful information.
Hence, it's all the more important for them to have an independent website instead of living inside FB. Apart from being much more useful to a wider audience, at the very least, you'll still have the content when FB sinks ;)
> disc golf in my city
TIL that a sport called "disc golf" exists. Thanks. Like I mentioned in ancestor post, we both live in different universes.
I haven't logged into Facebook in the past 4 years and I don't know why I should. Most people I deal with (a decade younger) never had an account at all.
Same for me. Just a few days ago I realized that my hotel in Milan was next door to a hostel where an old friend was staying. I went out and walked there to say hi. The “nearby friends” feature let us realize this. How insanely awesome is that? It was like 30min before my train so he walked me to the station and we managed to get coffee and croissant before I departed.
Counter point: Outside of the US I don't know anyone using any of this except Messenger for keeping in contact with some people. And the last point is generally seen as a necessary evil, i.e. something they would love to change asap if they could.
To add to this, Facebook Events have been (and continue to be) almost exclusively how sports teams and societies organise events in UK universities. I don't think there really is even a viable competitor to this... Meetup charges organisers to use it.
What I think is interesting though is that they aren't too dominant in the gaming space. Apple has Apple Arcade and Microsoft recently bought Activision. What game companies does Facebook own?
I feel compelled to say that your second sentence is probably the funniest thing I've ever read on HN. It resonates very strongly with my belief that VR/Metaverse will continue to under deliver. What people want is an escape from reality. "Just like" Ready Player One or anything from a wide choice of science fiction novels. The problem is that these systems require a fundamental disconnect from reality. Not only do we not have the input technology, the closest thing we have is a monkey playing pong, but the obstruction of physical world signals is basically non-existent. If it were, then we wouldn't have people in chronic pain. Finally, we already know how this experiment ends. This is basically SecondLife 2.0 (ThirdLife?). We'll have 0.1% stay because they invested so much (money, time, identity) into the world that the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
I still don't understand what's the difference between MMOs and Metaverse. Like it's on mobile? That's all? Peak WoW _was_ a social network something Zuck is dreaming about (and that's while you also have to pay a monthly sub). I've read around and some people say that the difference people can _create content_ in Metaverse but... sandbox MMOs are also a thing for a long time (or just look at Minecraft/Roblox/Fortnite). Or the whole point just to attach your persona to your real name + Meta can monetize everything? But that still just sounds like some F2P korean MMO or a japanese gacha game.
Maybe there is more to that but to me at least 1, the Metaverse sounds more like a "vision" than an actual product (yet VR Chat already exist too if the main selling point is AR/VR) 2, if it's an actual product then it's an MMO reimagined for non-gaming "normal" people
As far as I can tell from the material Meta has released, they have an incredibly ambitious vision for the metaverse. Essentially, I believe they want to create glasses that you wear, that allow you to see other people in your space, wherever they are. So you could have a conversation with three friends in your living room, as if they were there, while they could be on different continents, making physical location irrelevant.
Now, I am not sure if they will get there, but they are investing heavily in the tech required (AR screen tech, SLAM, 3d body reconstruction etc), and even partial success could be enormous. Having spent a lot of time in VRChat, seeing people and interacting with them up close has something very powerful, even if if is just the beginning of the technology. I am very excited to see where it goes in any case.
One thing I don't get is why there is a such high regard of visual input. I mean, we can speak to our friends since the telephone age, and we can see them on screen too since maybe the 90s. Is there a huge demand to actually see them IN THE SAME ROOM?
I really don't think so. But maybe future generations have different ideas. I think VR can make a lot of difference in training (e.g. medical training) but it's not consumer stuff.
A lot of people find asynchronous and text-based communication to be unpleasant. This maybe isn’t the most common sentiment on a tech news discussion forum, but probably describes much of the population. I think the internet’s potential to help people socialize is really hobbled by the text form factor of social media, chat, and discussion forums. Video and voice calls are richer, but they aren’t good a good way to meet people.
I’ve found that VRChat makes for a more pleasant, natural, deeper experience than phone calls or video chat. For me, it really replicates the experience of hanging out with people in real life.
Part of it is that it has the thing where you stand next to the people you are talking to and you can move around and talk to someone else when the conversation ebbs and flows. You can go to smaller spaces where you know everyone, or bigger places with friends of friends.
This mitigates the problem with video or phone calls where you have to sort of mutually agree with the other party that you want to talk and when you are done talking. Instead, you can more naturally flow between different conversations. You can go to a crowd and meet new people, you can go on adventure with your close friend, or go hang out at your regular haunt.
There are a lot of problems with the service, though. One of the big ones is that the onboarding experience is shitty for new players. If you don’t already have friends who play, you’ll just end up with 14 year olds screaming obscenities at you in a public world.
Personally I find video (Facetime/Duo/etc) to be more immersive than audio-only when talking with someone. If there's a similar leap in perceived connection with some AR/VR gear then I'm all for it.
Video chats with more than 3 people start to suffer from an inability to have multiple conversations at the same time. Physical distance of a couple feet and visual queues like the direction of a speakers face allow that in 3d space. Maybe someone can overcome this in 2d? I haven't seen it yet.
I was on a casual call with ~10 people recently and the way only one person could speak at a time was so unfortunate. Really killed the experience compared to chatting in person.
Check out kumospace. Start up with a really fun, functional solution to this problem. Maybe just a novelty generally but for a remote happy hour it was a game changer.
I don't know! I do know that I vastly prefer meeting people in person, compared to talking on the phone, and I think it is the same for a lot of people. I prefer it so much that I occasionally spend hundreds of dollars on airplane tickets to travel to see friends and family and attend meetings in person.
There is clearly something different in in-person interactions that makes me do this, and if Meta or someone else can replicate part of that experience I believe that could be very valuable. Think even of the environmental implications - so much energy is spend moving people around, imagine if AR platforms could reduce the number of trips by even a small percentage!
Seeing people in the same room with a pair of glasses is the same vision for the metaverse that has existed for decades, there is nothing new or original about that part of Meta's vision.
The best choice they made was to sell a balanced Oculus (high-res and decent battery with low-power compute) as a loss leader rather than continue down the tethered high-powered Rift path.
AR screens, SLAM, 3d reconstruction has well over a dozen well-funded companies gunning for the same result. Several companies are going to lose hard, similar to Magic Leap's recapitalization.
On that note, I wonder if a pair of wide angle cameras could be used to create a reasonably convincing three-dimensional live stream via FaceTime. With VR glasses, participants in the call would be able to see each others surroundings in 3D space.
This sounds more immersive, and less goofy than the metaverse. It also seems like a feature that Apple could reasonably deliver with their rumoured glasses.
Colour me highly sceptical. Can they ever solve for latency? Playing a video game with rollback code is one thing. Trying to give me the nuance of a conversation with the latency of our global network is a fool's errand.
This all sounds great... If it worked. VR has been around since the 90s with impressive demos which fail to captivate audiences for one reason or another.
In terms of tangible results, Meta may as well have pivoted to autonomous vehicles. The only way this pivot makes sense would be if they had actually delivered a headset people wanted.
One great aspect of that vide: What event is reasonably full, but has people respecting a human-sized empty space next to you so your hologram friend can have a place to exist?
This is my response every time someone mentions metaverse as a new idea. Metaverses are awesome. I play one every time I play a video game, especially WoW back in the day. I don’t need some crap strapped to my face. A tv or monitor and the human sensory system works just fine. When I played Elden Ring recently for 300+ hours I was in that world, just as deeply as someone with annoying crap strapped to their head.
It’s just easier to get gullible investors to invest in your metaverse VR idea due to Gartner hype cycle rules, which are currently at Peak of Inflated Expectations.
> “the metaverse” can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that continue to exist even when you're not playing—as well as augmented reality that combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds.
These MMO's are the real absolute ceiling of whatever Meta is trying to do, but that's insufficiently gigantic to justify a pivot of Meta.
So they are pitching it as something that will extend past niche audiences (in absolute numbers they are huge but niche in terms of FB scale).
The incoherency of why non-gamers would be interested in this is revealed in their advertising. For example, a fitness buff talking about how swinging around a foam stick with a headset strapped to her face is the best workout of her life.
This is how I've felt since the beginning. Especially lately with all of this NFT -> "virtual land" selling in some cases for millions of dollars. Like... What? Why wouldn't you play a game where virtual land is, get this, free, and provides the exact same value.
From what I can tell, metaverse is just an attempt to make MMOs for "normal" people. So instead of a few million people spending 6+ hours per day in your "game", you have a few billion people spending 6+ hours per day in your "game".
If you're not aware, they did this in one of the final Shadowbringers patches. Most of the fluff that used to be part of the MSQ is now moved to optional sidequests.
Exactly this. I read a great quote from Gabe Newell talking to PC Gamer[1]:
"Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. And they've apparently never played an MMO. They're like, 'Oh, you'll have this customizable avatar.' And it's like, well... go into La Noscea in Final Fantasy 14 and tell me that this isn't a solved problem from a decade ago, not some fabulous thing that you're, you know, inventing."
nobody knows because it's not a real thing. It's one of those "there's something there and we need to be a part of it when it gets big" kind of things.
I don't believe that VR will ever become mainstream btw, but AR has huge applicability starting from business but also for people involved in all kinds of sports, especially anything to do with bikes / skis / motorcycles etc...
I strongly suspect Facebook will not be the winner of either use case.
Apple / Disney are much better positioned to capture the "virtual amusement park / mall" space than Meta.
Google / Microsoft are better positioned for the work / leisure time use case.
Rec Room and VRChat are like earlier social MMOs, but with the inherent appeal leaving them attractive enough to cut out the pretense of gameplay (e.g. OSRS, MUDs, were not that dissimilar in being mostly about chatting with a distraction present)
It also raises the question of what Facebook's metaverse could do that VRChat and Rec Room haven't. VRChat is the more successful of the two and has achieved the level of success of "video game more popular than you might realise", which for the small dev team is enough for a profitable business.
How do you make it profitable at meta scale? NFTs, loot boxes and cosmetic microtransactions seem to be the prospects raised by people promoting such ideas. But then how is VRChat + microtransactions - your local modder's blatant copyright infringement more appealing than VRChat?
Facebook’s metaverse is just marketing. It’s akin to AOL commercials implying that AOL is the whole internet. What meta is providing is a gateway to the metaverse and maybe a portion of it called Horizon. The metaverse is built on the internet. No single entity can own or control all of it despite what any marketing implies. (Ready Player One is fantasy masquerading as sci-fi imo)
The difference is that you play with your whole body, not just your fingers. You can duck for cover, or run, or kick and punch someone, or construct an item with your hands. It’s immersive and it could take gaming to a whole other level.
This is what AR and games are all about. Not necessarily what Meta wants to build.
I've never been convinced that physical immersion will ever be as compelling to the human brain as mental immersion through good story-telling. Having my real-life body and physical attributes thrust directly into a story/game just seems like the most non-immersive thing possible to me unless the game is entirely designed around moving the body, like DDR or Beat Saber or whatever.
This is what the makers of text adventures said about graphic adventures, just in a different dimensional context. And we all know how that turned out... :-/
True, although I still feel more immersed in a good text adventure than some of the best AAA games out there. I played 'Lost Pig' [1] about a year ago and the 'visuals' are still fresh in my mind.
I don’t understand this comment. Isn’t having your real life body put into the story/game like a textbook definition of being more immersive than just engaging with sight and sound?
How's that going to work in my living room where there's an ottoman, a coffee table, the dog's running around, etc. Or do I need to build a new room just for AR/VR stuff? I mean, yeah you can do some interesting stuff like having virtual Jenga on your coffee table, or whatever, but thinking in terms of HalfLife 4, or even sitting around chatting with 3 other friends who are in different locations, it sounds like it would start to become impossible just because of the space I'd be in. (Or expensive if I have to have a new space that I keep clear all the time.)
The level of magical thinking and SV delusion around the practical downsides of this reminds me of what Steve Jobs apparently said about the Segway "If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen."[1]
You get a kind of treadmill which is stationary and you move inside it. Come on guys, stuff like that have been described in sf literature decades ago. It's not like we run out of ideas. We already have kinetic games for more than a decade now.
As for your friends, they can sit wherever the fuck they please. They're holograms, or on a more crude version just simulations from an AR/VR set.
So basically like "Ready Player One" where you need a full motion capture suit, 2-D treadmill, and handheld controls. There's probably a niche market of hardcore gamers like the people who build full cockpits for flight simulators. But this complicated stuff is never going to penetrate the mainstream mass market.
Auto/afk [anything] is a staple in lot of mobile MMOs. Like auto-battle, auto-questing etc. Yeah I don't know why would you even "play" at that point but then again those games are insanely popular. Kinda like "gamifying a game" if that make sense.
I don't think this is even broadly true. We just locked everyone in their houses for the pandemic and people hated it. They want to get out and do stuff and see the world. Not sit on a couch with a screen strapped to their face.
Likewise! In fact, it was the first time my disabled spouse was able to get some family to talk to her since now they were in the same situation. It also opened up a bunch of services for disabled people since now everyone needed delivery and not answering the door for packages was no longer weird.
yeah, that's real. I'd lost a lot of connection with friends after my mobility deteriorated, and then suddenly I had a mahjong social club every Thursday with old friends! I didn't feel outcast for being shut-in.
VR Chat is Second Life 2.0. Horizon Worlds is shaping up to be VR Chat 0.8. People Make Games interviewed people in VR Chat [0] and gave great examples of how behind (intentionally in some cases, in terms of not having lower halves of avatars) Horizon Worlds appears to be.
I've used both and Horizon Worlds' lack of development is mind-boggling. It's positioned as the crown jewel of the Metaverse, the core from which Facebook will build the rest of the concept, and yet it's so barebones it's like no one is even working on it.
VRChat has completely user-made avatars. To support this, they have a robust content moderation system with a fair amount of user control, and bounded performance requirements. Horizon has very limited Mii-like avatars, but with even less customization. This means they don't have to moderate avatars or worry about performance, and also crushes the boundless possibilities of self-expression into a sea of identical corporate art style drones.
VRChat also has user-made worlds. So does Horizons. The difference is that Horizons worlds can only be made out of primitives (cube, sphere, triangle, etc.) This makes it easy to enforce performance requirements and also makes the entire metaverse look like a poorly developed PS2 game. It also runs worse than a well-optimized environment mesh, but apparently Facebook doesn't trust their users to figure that out. Second Life actually shipped with this system originally (in 2003) and later abandoned the system because of these and other problems, but learning from the past is apparently not in vogue at Facebook.
VRChat has a fairly granular safety system, with configurable boundaries, default permissions, friend settings, etc. Horizons has a half-hearted attempt at this but leans mostly on the ominous promise that Facebook is recording everything you say and do, and if someone reports you an unreachable Facebook admin will review your past actions for content violations. This works about as well as you'd expect.
These and other problems are, IMO, all bad decisions, but they're also low effort decisions and that I do not understand. I actually like VR and want Facebook to succeed here (hopefully incentivizing competition), and the department formerly known as Oculus is doing a great job with the requisite hardware. So why, why, given that the entire company has been bet on this, is the flagship Metaverse software of the world's largest social media company lagging behind a random startup making their metaverse in Unity with practically no money?
> world's largest social media company lagging behind a random startup
This seems to be a really common recurring theme in the tech industry and particularly the games industry, and I wish I understood why
Just look at Minecraft, Valheim, any of the recent Pokemon games... A single person or a skeleton crew can somehow always seem to outproduce gigantic companies full of engineers and artists on the same level as the ones from the skeleton crew.
I think this is because once you are a running on infinite cash, it becomes a no-brainer to apply what you've already learned to achieve that success. Also, stakeholders will require that. So pull in a bunch of management, MBA-s, designers, analysts, etc. What you end up with is lot of friction and no real innovation.
I imagine they're going with Mii-like avatars because they have business contexts in mind. What they could do instead is to give people at least two avatars for different contexts and then let the tool/environment set which they're using.
e.g., if you're in a business meeting, it automatically runs with your Mii-like avatar, otherwise if you're roaming a desertscape to relax on the couch after dinner, you can be a pink lemur in a cape and cowboy hat. Might as well prep for both contexts now rather than putting off either potential customer.
Echoing your thoughts, I used a friends Oculus and it was really awesome and inspiring and had echoes of that tech I fantasize from science fiction novels. But after five minutes it was really like, I can't wait for version 17 of this thing, because it's so close and yet so far.
> It resonates very strongly with my belief that VR/Metaverse will continue to under deliver.
Just offer VR porn applications, and a lot of people will urge to get a VR headset and a decent computer to support it. For a lot of kinds of media, porn was the killer application.
I want VR to be a thing. I want Ready Player One. I want the Star Trek Holodeck.
But I also want a time machine. And honestly, that seems almost as likely as the metaverse ever being a "thing". The technology simply doesn't exist and we are so far off that pivoting to it now seems...either wildly optimistic or HBO Silicon Valley level out of touch.
VR only underdelivers when compared to full emergence. You don't need a television when you have a VR headset. I think that Meta's headsets will be the the consoles for the next generation because TV sets are not a given anymore. So a console becomes more expensive because you have to also buy a television.
I have to say, that based on my family and friends who I occasionally watch TV shows and movies with, I'm the only person who is able to focus on the TV screen without my phone in sight. Everyone else I know is constantly half-listening, half-watching, while simultaneously browsing IG, Zillow, YT, TikTok, etc. I think our very real phone addictions are going to play an adverse role in VR adoption until the VR app space fully replaces everything in the mobile app space (plus the time it will take for people to break their phone habits and replace them with VR habits)... seems like a uphill slog for Meta.
> I'm the only person who is able to focus on the TV screen
I don't know why you'd want to do so for most TV. I like to idly code at 1/4 speed during average shows. Like if the cousins want to watch Moana for the 34th time, I'm not gonna dedicate my full attention the whole time, but I do want to hang out with everyone else in the family.
On the other hand, I've never wanted to pick up a phone while my VR headset is on my head. It's engrossing! But the downside of VR is that it's so isolating. There's no way for me to be half in a head-mounted display. No one can casually look over my shoulder, nor can I causally peek up from my screen when someone says something interesting.
I used to do that a lot, and I finally realized that I actually didn't care about what was on the TV and just started leaving it off. Either a show is worth actually watching or it isn't IMO.
I guess it's a little bit of a different story if it's just the centerpiece of family time, though..
The first killer accessory in the metaverse will be some kind of pass-through phone gateway or phone proxy that people can use as a substitute for their physical phone, to satiate their compulsive need to (ABC) Always Be Checking it. I don't see people accepting strapping on a headset that blocks access to their primary addiction.
I don't think it'll be particularly hard to mirror your phone screen into your virtual space. Closely similar things are already done in a bunch of apps.
The mental image of a bunch of virtual avatars sitting at a table on the moon all silently staring at their virtual phones and scrolling through reddit seems so hilariously stupid that it just might happen.
Every time I put on a VR helmet, I flash back to being a teenage boy and cringe while I wait for one of my “friends” to punch me in the crotch. I can’t really see VR taking off for most people because middle school bullying aside, it’s very claustrophobia inducing to be unable to see your surroundings.
Vision and sound covered too, though vision can get better with more res and variable focus. Sound can get better with 3d scanning for custom HRTF's matched to the user's ear shape and body (sound reflecting off shoulders etc.).
Proprioception cannot be fooled. No matter what you do to your vestibular system it's not going to realistically feel like you're in a fighter jet or a race car. It can't even make walking on an omnidirectional treadmill feel like real walking. Galvanic vestibular stimulation is not really a good idea, independent of the fact that it literally sends high voltage electricity through your skull.
Walking on a VR treadmill is actually the opposite example of what you are claiming I believe. It exercises your proprioception without giving you the right vestibular response (except on huge military 12x12ft treadmills and stuff that can accommodate decent amounts of real acceleration from locomotion, I'm assuming you mean consumer "slipmill" type setups where you fully run in place).
Not really. Your proprioception is accurately sensing the same as your vestibular system, which is that you are moving your limbs but you don't have forward momentum because you're not moving. Which is totally fine and indistinguishable from normal in the steady state of walking in one direction at a constant speed as on a regular treadmill, but the illusion falls apart the second you try to turn or change speed, as you'll want to do on a VR treadmill. And it doesn't matter how big the treadmill is, the problem will occur whenever the treadmill changes direction or speed.
If you apply galvanic vestibular stimulation to try to "correct" at least the vestibular sense, you will lose your balance and fall over, because you can't fool physics. Even if you're prevented from falling by a harness it won't feel right. The disagreement between your vestibular and proprioception senses will be uncomfortable.
I mean, yea, earplugs and a blindfold work too, but how do I feel like I'm walking through a pasture with wet dirt between my toes if you cannot simulate the sensory system? That's what people imagine. A home-bound person wants to feel what it is like to skydive, not watch a POV video.
I have seen young people dismiss studies that say that being out in the forest will be beneficial for mental health by saying that for them it's the opposite. Forests gives them high anxiety and being in urban areas will calm them. This included parks.
Fair points though I suggest technology is farther along than monkey playing pong. Consider Neuralink for one. I read the book metaman back in the late 90s and even then they had very simple brain to chip interfaces.
I actually think we had those escapes since I-don't-know-when. People don't need to actually see virtual reality to escape from reality. Actually a good book does a good job too.
In the 90s, the internet was very much being used. It was so exciting that my friends and I sat waiting for 20-30 seconds to see content. We exchanged messages, played each other on Comamand and Conquer, looked at edgy content on forums.
Now, my Oculus headset sits gathering dust in a cupboard. Nobody I know wants it because it's so boring using it for more than half an hour.
I agree with you, but my 9 year old uses our Oculus more than her tablet. She plays games with her friends from school mostly, but also watches movies on Netflix, etc.
Just because your lived experience is that "VR sucks" doesn't mean it's like that for everyone.
As a total counter example, I'm in my 30s, live with my girlfriend (in her 30s) and we play with our Valve Index together several times per week. We also have friends over for house parties where we play VR together (as well as Nintendo Switch.)
Now, imagine this is still "v0" of VR, that I am playing it on a weekly basis etc with my non-gamer girlfriend, I can easily imagine this being massive in 10 years.
sure but the ground has shifted dramatically, in large part due to Meta because of standalone devices. You can't overlook that and pretend the tech is still 90's era.
I remember walking into a computer shop in the late 90's and saying I wanted to install Wifi in my house. They looked at me like I was an alien. One of them literally said "Why would you want that?"
It was probably less than 5 years before Wifi was ubiquitous.
The most disruptive thing about gmail was that it was obscenely expansive webmail space compared to your typical webmail provider. But webmail was already pretty damn common when gmail came out, and email had been the killer app of the internet for a decade already.
Facebook Mobile is... I'd have to think hard about what it actually is, so I'm not sure that qualifies as disruptive.
Now the iPhone was disruptive. But although you'd fairly classify Apple today as an "established mega-corporation", it's a lot harder to do so when the iPhone came out. To the extent that Apple can use its market share to wield a powerful bludgeon against those who dare cross it--which is what I associate the phrase with--that market share doesn't exist until the phenomenal success of the iPhone. It certainly couldn't do that on the basis of its OS or computers (indeed, you can argue that it still can't do that today). The iPod, or more accurately iTunes, may have given it that power against the music industry, but that's the closest to any sort of tyrannical power it might have held at the time.
The most disruptive thing about Gmail had @&$@ all to do with user features. It just needed to be "good enough".
The key feature of Gmail was scale, which allowed it to offer much better spam detection, which allowed it to capture more market share, etc.
Facebook mobile is the idea that you have something (Facebook) that was popular somewhere (PCs), that for strategic reasons (TAM / global penetration, location-targeted advertising) pivoted to a completely different medium, and invested non-trivial company resources in making that happen.
The iPod/iTunes were pretty damn big. And specifically, big in demographics that were ideal iPhone customers. Apple in 2007 was very different than Apple in 1997.
Gmail was an already popular concept whose differentiator was a company was willing to set money on fire to have two or three orders of magnitude more storage than their competitor. AFAIK, that's been their only differentiator - free storage space.
iPhone was a breakout product from a decidedly no-longer mega corp who practically died in the 1990s. I guess they had already made a resurgence with the iPod, but I think iPod leading to iPhone is similar enough that it's the same jump.
A mobile app from a company is a breakthrough product in your eyes?
There was a time when Facebook existed primarily on the PC web. Everyone thought Zuckerberg was dumb for pivoting substantial company resources into mobile (initially HTML5, then pivot to native app).
Sorry, don't buy into this. The main difference to me is "the people" in the 90s were nerds. Now in the best business scenario for facebook its the opposite: the more nerdiness, the worse business outcome. They have to cater for folks looking for anything but.
> The field is in its "90's internet phase" right now. The tech is still immature, but is rapidly growing in capability and ambition.
This has been said to be the case (though for the first several waves with a different analogy, for obvious reasons) for every wave of the VR hype cycle since at least the mid-80s.
But it keeps not sticking, and I don't see any convincing reason to believe that the people pushing, or buying into, the hype understand why it keeps not sticking, much less have done anything in the most recent wave to overcome those problems.
The fact that "Metaverse Twitter" is a thing, implying that even the people most religiously devoted to the metaverse are still using Twitter rather than a 3D metaverse space tells me all I need to know. It smacks of the old skeumorphism craze: why bother "migrating" to a virtual rendition of an obsolete part of meatspace when you could just use the novel solution for interaction that already works great in meatspace, and would be unchanged in the metaverse?
I had thought that "Meta" was supposed to be a cool-sounding conceptual name, but it seems that folks are taking it literally to mean a very specific reference to a "metaverse" in an actual 3D virtual reality environment.
Don’t confuse investor sobriety after an epic party with strategic miscalculation.
Zuck is taking a gamble. Good for him. It’s extremely rare for a big co to have the balls and for leadership to have the autonomy to do this these days. He has both.
He may fail. But at least he took a big hairy audacious risky shot at first to market and a chance at being what Steve Jobs is to smart phones.
I wouldn’t count him out just yet. What he’s doing with Oculus as a
loss leader is interesting, and the tech is hitting an interesting inflection point as it becomes wireless, low latency and cheap for the first time.
Hate on FB and confirm your biases all you want, but watch this space.
Isn't every terrible business decision a gamble that "could have paid off" if one thing or another happened?
Being wrongly infatuated with a concept as Meta seems with metaverse is not a gamble IMHO.
It seem more like a stupid decision done by someone that became successful by being in the right place at the right time. And now they want to prove that it wasn't an accident and that they have it takes to repeat hence become infatuated with an absurd idea that we want to be inside the FB world.
> It seem more like a stupid decision done by someone that became successful by being in the right place at the right time
This is massively underselling what led to Facebook's success. As someone who started using Facebook-alternatives in 2001, there were a ton of competing social networks at the time. Many very superficially similar to Facebook, and many with a multi-year headstart. FB drove them all to extinction and became the social network via a combination of great product management, and engineering execution. And this was all led by a teenager in his second year of college. The vast majority of people in his shoes would not have achieved the outcome that he did.
I think a combination of the tight control over design/aesthetic (no customization) and the exclusivity was extremely alluring and created the first wave of adoption that just cascaded. I think timing really was a massive deal at that point. Clubhouse attempted to do this recently, and had the same massive wave of initial success, but struggles to maintain that growth because the product itself isn't very interesting.
It can be both an admirable bet and the failure the OP describes. In fact I think the fact that it's a big hairy audacious risky shot is why OP may prove correct and it's discussed in MBA programs for the next 100 years.
Is it though? He'll be a billionaire the rest of his life. His grandchildren will be billionaires. What's the risk? Other then his employees jobs. The dozens of vendors that serve Facebook and their employees. The local businesses that depend on Facebook.
I think it's important to note too that he can only really make this big, audacious bet because he is the controlling shareholder. Most other big companies wouldn't be able to get a consensus to agree to something this big a gamble.
Not because there shouldn't be legitimate concerns about VR, but because it's pointing to Facebook execution fail as the only thing that matters to the success of the metaverse, and it's expecting that the timeline should have been further along by now.
Facebook has always built mediocre products. Its strength is in acquiring or copying good ones, and then jacking the internal engineering on them up to 11.
Apple is seen as putting out good products, but they put out the Newton, ROKR, and even internally designed the iPad before they released the iPhone. There is time to build a good product, and chances are, Facebook won't be the one to build it.
And yet - first year iPhone sales and first year Quest 2 sales are somewhat on par. There's reason for optimism, or at least not heavy pessimism, yet.
I'd also point out that a huge number of disruptive technologies that succeeded where other had failed did so because of... content.
It's effectively impossible to buy sufficient content to meet AAA platform expectations these days. Because you're competing against incredibly competent, experienced, and well-stocked legacy alternatives.
Consequently, either (a) "upgrading" an existing deep pool of legacy content (Google search, iPhone/web) or (b) turning every user into a content producer (Facebook, TikTok) have very good chances of success.
And finally, to call out a fundamental blind spot: if Facebook doesn't lose, they win.
Everyone pretends Facebook needs to win the VR market. They don't. They just need to keep enough of an eye on it that they aren't blindsided by a competitor, and then scale up their engineering once a seed appears successful. Their size, revenue, and ubiquity will win by default.
If FB has 100 engineers working on VR for 20 years with nothing to show for it, but that allows them to ramp up when something magic finally happens (right hardware breakthrough, etc), then that's FB money well spent.
Re: comment aging poorly - somewhere on this site there's a really old comment of mine saying I couldn't believe Facebook didn't accept the Microsoft buy-out offer. I correctly predicted the then-soon coming backlash against Facebook and that they would become "uncool", but I failed to predict that that wouldn't impede Facebook much as a business nor lead to the mass exodus of users.
The question is whether or not this is even a category that will ever be more than a niche. What value does this kind of VR environment really provide beyond its novelty, and is this something that the average person actually wants? I am not so sure about that, and history is full of technologies that sound cool on paper, but have limited use in practice.
Consider, for example, the repeated attempts at making 3D televisions a thing. It keeps popping up every couple of years, then people figure out that they don't really need it, and it fades away again. This kind of VR technology could very well be the same. Even 3D gaming remains a niche despite some serious attempts by major players to turn it into something more than a gimmick.
I would be shocked if VR/metaverse does not massively grow within the next 10 years. I think the headsets alone will continue to get massively better which will convert most of humanity, just like how much better iPhones got since the first one. In fact, I would bet anything on the foregoing, as I have near total confidence in that aspect.
It’s much harder to figure out which companies will profit off of that, so it’s certainly possible Meta will miss. But they have a leader with a vision, and are pouring more money into this than any other major player. Will that be enough? Who knows. But I think it’s a mistake to count them out so early in the process, when they are the ones putting R&D into this.
In my mind, it’s like starting an auto company right when cars arrive and people are still skeptical of them, and being the company to pour the most money into developing them. That’s who you want to bet against?
Taxes and moderation are considerations, sure, and may backfire partly, but I think the users will go where the tech is. Just like people buy iPhones not withstanding the cost, moderation, App Store tax, etc, because the iPhone is what users want. If Meta makes an excellent headset and software platform, people will use it. Most people don’t care about the things HN cares about (like App Store fees).
I am just curious as to what data suggests this is going to be a hugely popular thing. In my mind there are two examples of recent products that were on the same lines... Second Life and 3D TVs. Both were unsuccessful.
I'm just not seeing where the insight comes from that this is something people will want on a huge scale. Even if you solve the current problems of the headsets being painful to wear over long periods. I just don't think people want their attention to be hijacked.
> I think the headsets alone will continue to get massively better which will convert most of humanity
How will it get better? The only way it can meaningfully get better is if it disappeared.
The problem with the current state of VR is not the software, the app store or moderation, it is the form factor and the ergonomics.
Very few people want to strap on a giant heated helmet to their face and experience the eye strain associated with watching a very bright light from a point blank distance through lenses that need to be adjusted perfectly every time. It is just too much of a hassle.
A neuralink-type chip, if at all feasible, is a much more promising approach.
You are ignoring that plenty of people, especially young people, already tolerate headsets enough to spend many hours wearing them.
Making the headsets much much lighter, less hot, wireless, better optics, higher res, higher refresh rates, etc., will improve the experience massively.
Look into what is already public: companies are exploring eye tracking, varifocal lenses (so your eyes are not always looking at the same focal plane), etc.
You can even compare the Index versus the Quest 2 to see what a difference a better screen can make.
People already deal with eye strain by staring at a bright screen from a fixed distance for most of their life.
Neural link, sure, eventually. For now, if you don’t think ten years of progress won’t lead to hundreds of millions of devices sold, well, wait and see.
All the parts and pieces to make the iPhone were available in the 2000s.
I’m not so sure about VR. It’s a huge power hog. Either the battery life would be limited or you’d need to carry around a backpack to keep it running or it would stay at your desk with more wires in your head than a William Gibson protagonist.
I could see some limited use cases for VR, like training and education. But as a replacement of the world in the way smartphones have been? I just don’t get how that will be physically/technologically possible.
But if there’s evidence to the contrary believe me I would love to change my mind.
To be clear, I don't think most people will live in VR for all of their waking life (although some will).
But I do think VR has the potential to be "huge" like cellphones, in the way that nearly every kid in the world has a headset, and spends hours of time in there each day. I think it can eat up a ton of time currently spent on movies, TV, video games, socializing in places like Minecraft or Roblox, concerts, sports games, etc. The average person spends way too much time watching TV for example, but if every kid in the world wants to spend 2 hours per day in VR instead of watching TV, that will be an enormous TAM notwithstanding that people won't want to literally live in VR with all day battery life. Although there will always be outliers, and I think there will be many people that will easily choose to spend 8 hours + per day in VR.
And even currently, the Quest 2 provides hours of battery life without wires, which will only continue to improve.
How old are you by the way? Today phones last nearly all day, but people used to carry around multiple phones for their batteries and swap them out. IF they are at home, they could do the same with VR until the battery life improves.
Facebook was always doomed for failure, just like every social platform that came before it. The pivot should've happened years ago with a focus on Instagram and content creation (their shot at streaming was at least in the right direction).
At this point, Facebook has simply waited entirely too long, and the likelihood of any pivot working for a company of their size is basically nonexistent.
You could also say that "they won" and there's no where to go but down now.
Nothing can grow forever and things that try are known, in the biological domain, as cancers or infestations. There's quite a few corporations that "won" their market, so they're primed for a decline-- if you can still even call it that after enough people made more money than god and retired.
Facebook having such a bad rep across the board of people did not help at all. Like why is FB not doing any major enterprise initiative or cloud computing? Especially now with their stock dropping, having another $100B in value would help a lot.
They haven’t monetized Messenger or WhatsApp much either. Maybe they can’t or it won’t ever be enough. Less than billions in profit won’t help much. Which does make them having won and are now going down seem more correct.
> Like why is FB not doing any major enterprise initiative or cloud computing...
They "sort-of" did. The Open Compute Project (https://www.opencompute.org/) is an effort in which Facebook played a major role. The motivation, for them, is to break free of the shackles put on them by computing and networking equipment vendors (like Cisco). Facebook is big enough that they could design their own stuff, and try to make it a commodity which, as a side-effect, allows others to get involved and benefit from as well. It's hard to say how well this has worked but it was "an initiative".
I feel that social networks are best done in an descentralized way: Like IRC, and Usenet on its own time. There should be no "winner" or local entity that tries to milk profits out of it.
Because exactly as you said: Facebook "won" the social network game several years ago: Everybody was in there. From there the only thing it could do to try to milk more profits was to bring it down.
Instead, we've got IRC or Usenet that, years and years after their "peak", they are still going well and good. Gone are the "ethernal septembers" and most of spam. And the protocol and networks (that matter for the people using it) are still in there.
a) Facebook is not doomed for failure. Their audience just got older and rather than abandon them they acquired companies more suited to younger generations e.g. Instagram, Oculus instead. And it's a strategy that has unquestionably worked.
b) Facebook isn't really pivoting to metaverse any more than Apple is pivoting to services. It's an additional revenue stream alongside their existing ones which are still very healthy and lucrative.
> Their audience just got older and rather than abandon them they acquired companies more suited to younger generations e.g. Instagram, Oculus instead.
This strategy has run it's course. Regulators are keen to weaken FB and will obstruct further acquisitions. Acquisition targets know they can beat FB in the long run and will no longer agree to be purchased.
I'll add to the pile of speculation of "I know why facebook is failing (when it isn't)". To me it's the fact that it became less and less of a useful tool. It used to be this simple thing where you could connect with your friends or people you would meet (perhaps with the intent of dating them). There was a news feed that was sorted by chronological order, and you would mostly see updates and photos posted by people. Creating an event was easy.
Today, nothing is chronological, profiles are (somewhat) public facing, people just posts links, photos has basically moved to instagram, messaging has moved to whatsapp, and events hasn't changed a bit. Plus there's a ton of other new features that dilute the tool.
I think Facebook (the company) have known that Facebook (the social network) was never going to live forever.
The first pivot was into Photos. A mini pivot, but an important one as being a glorified contact list and blog was on the way out.
Then they saw another competitor rising, so they bought it to ride its lifecycle. Instagram.
Then into Messaging, with messenger and WhatsApp. Most people I know use one or both of these and not Facebook.
There have been other smaller pivots to stay relevant overall, even if any one piece of the business is dying, and I think that’s good business practice.
Whether the meta verse turns out to be the next wave or not is essentially their current bet.
It's hard to post to a platform when you know whatever you say that's controversial, or even whatever you say that becomes controversial, will follow you the rest of your life.
Facebook is going down? I don't think they are. They own Instagram which is generating lots of money and then they own WhatsApp which is not even monetized yet. FB might not exist in a decade but Meta isn't going anywhere.
Meta reported revenue of $27.9 billion in Q1 2022. They will continue making billions from ads for decades even if the metaverse play goes nowhere. But if you believe that VR/AR is going to eventually go mainstream then Meta is positioned to be a player in that market, even if it’s just a 2nd or 3rd place player that’s potentially billions in additional revenue.
I don't think most people think it will crater and be gone tomorrow. I suspect people tend to think that if it is on a decline it will be a long slow death.
They make $200/year per user in North America, all 250 million of them. Cut that to 1/3 and their value as a company is far lower, but they still make more per user than a subscription service like Netflix. Now, you can say "nobody thought that ARPU was sustainable", but they have a long history of making unbelievable numbers bigger.
Their real mistake was not pushing to own the entire vertical stack, building unassailable moats like Google and Apple. Oculus is that bet, and other companies like Valve are pursuing similar strategies.
That's a pretty selective lookback. The big slide was 4 months ago. If you look at trailing 6 months, FB is down 40%, vs down 10% for S&P500 or 23% for NASDAQ.
You said "past few months" and so I quickly pulled up a 3 month history which is a dropdown option in the UI I was looking at. I replied with what I saw.
anyone who follows the stock market will not accuse me of being hyperbolic about FB’s stock plummeting in recent months, and yes 5 months is also “a few” lol…
10% is about what everyone in today's economy seems to be doing. it's the bigger slide from Apple blocking their tracking that should be more worrisome than a natural economic hiccup
The entire internet subsists on ads. Even Amazon retail, a store that sells physical goods makes its profit selling ads. If anything they're only going to become more important as to internet becomes more accessible to low resource individuals around the world.
I don't understand how people can make this statement and not immediately realize their is something deeply, deeply wrong about this situation.
Ads derive their value from the product being sold, the fact that ads themselves have become the economic underpinning of the entire internet, rather than actual things being sold, should tell you there is a problem.
Everybody realizes it's wrong. The issue is not a lack of understanding. The issue is the lack of an alternative.
People will not pay a penny for the vast majority of the internet, whether they be social networks or just plain websites. They won't donate either or do "micro transactions", not at the scale in which ads currently deliver revenue.
So for the vast majority of the internet, no ads = no money. And it ends right there, hobbyist bloggers aside.
I was recently taken aback by how much some of the online major destinations make per site load with ads. It is over $.04 USD. People visit hundreds of pages per day. What consumer will pay over $10 daily to access content that is free with ads?
Ads are here to stay. At best they may do less tracking in the future, but they remain.
Another unpopular thought...in a fully online, digitized society, how are companies supposed to advertise their existence or their products if there's no ads?
Not my problem, many would say. Well, it is your problem. Because you probably work at a company and they sell things.
Ads artificially increase the price of a product or service, because the cost of advertising is embedded in the price of what's sold; you're paying more money to be manipulated to buy something.
There are other externalized costs that aren't calculated, e.g. what's the cost to society on top of the "$10"/day?
What if ads also make us sicker, make poorer decisions, wasteful decisions - perhaps as simple as buying lower quality products because they have a higher profit margin and so it's the product you're exposed to, and then because we're sicker we spend more money on health?
There's not much conversation about all of this. I think the natural mechanisms of how information propagated via word of mouth before communications became what they are, how we are able to bypass those natural mechanisms, has some very negative impacts on society, e.g. buying products/services from people that didn't earn or deserve the attention, instead able to buy and manipulate you with cheap-shallow ads; what would the world look like today if this wasn't the case, what would your buying patterns be, what type of person would be amassing profits from the different buying patterns that would exist if there weren't ads, and what would the cascading consequences of that be?
> What consumer will pay over $10 daily to access content that is free with ads?
I have a similar question to "what customer will still load ads". And the answer is probably anyone still using Google Chrome after they upgrade the manifest version to v4 and finally kill adblocking.
Disclosure: I worked at WhatsApp, part of Facebook, until the end of 2019.
If you think the name change means they're focusing on the metaverse, that's just convenient. The fact is, Facebook is a toxic brand and Meta is just a silly looking brand. Post name change, they can do acquisitions and brand them as X by Meta without associating to the toxic brand. (Plus, maybe they can get the Mennen ad team to add 'by Meta' to the end of all their ads with audio)
I'm curious where this belief comes from that large companies do not mistakes. It's almost as if you're implying that they're omniscient. Just look at Twitter for examples of how these large companies absolutely can and do misjudge markets.
The real pivot for FB was their pivot to Instagram, with facebook.com pivoting to a "secret police" business model and shutting down open discussions, which used to flourish there. They've done this very well. FB today is more of a political organization than a business organization especially in the US. The Metaverse is just a distraction from this development that will have no impact on their cash cow Instagram.
The nice thing about Instagram and Twitter, as far as Washington lobbyists are concerned, is that it's influencer driven and there's very little room for bottom up discussion between "normal" people. The original Facebook was a tool where dissent could grow in a bottom up fashion, with friends posting and realizing, "holy smokes! I was thinking that too!". This doesn't happen any more now that everyone knows that big brother is watching.
Insightful observation. Arab Spring changed Facebook and social media, across the whole world.
Don't forget the AI moderation-on-post. Just recently, a popular 'influencer' posted a scam. I left a comment saying such, along with a comment that the influencer should be ashamed of himself, and immediately, an AI filter told me that my comment may go against the Community Standards, and that repeated attempts to comment would lead to account deactivation. There is no appeal button.
To those building these technologies, beyond false positives and coverage error, it takes one law or PR incident for you to re-train this model against dissent. And to those building technologies like Apple's CSAM scanning, it takes one DB replacement to make it flag photos of the Hong Kong protests or Tank Man.
I think the Metaverse will fail because it's a creepy futurism project. Creepy futurism says the solution to climate change is to replace real experiences with virtual experiences that don't burn any carbon. The pièce de résistance of creepy futurism in the metaverse is intended to be the virtual child experience[1]. You satisfy the instinctual drives to destroy the climate with more children[2], but instead you do it in a sustainable simulated way. Kind of like instead of living forever, which is utterly unsustainable, we upload our brains to the metaverse and have your carbon body used for plant food or whatever and our friends and family get the simulated experience of still having us around! Like most creepy futurism projects, nobody really wants this except the people who spend their days trying to figure out how to save the planet by any means necessary and have come up with all sorts of fake climate friendly substitutes, like the vast array of vegan meat substitutes that nobody eats, but seem to be fully in stock in every grocery store and fast food chain.
Like all creepy futurism projects, there seems to be an unlimited amount of money and associated ESG and "The Current Thing" street credibility behind these projects that see them funded and cheerled in the press to absurd levels even as the public is absolutely luke warm about it all at best.
I attended a USENIX LISA conference a few years ago in Seattle. I met a lot of people and saw a lot of demos. Before I went, I thought Facebook was a joke. After the conference, I was convinced they were doing large systems better than anybody.
Maybe that has changed, but at that time they made the other big companies look like they were way behind.
Not to mention that the metaverse "universe" looks, for lack of a better word, kind of shitty. I mean all those billions of dollars (or maybe more) invested to get something that looks like this [1]? Or like this [2]?
Not since Google+ have I seen so much hybris when it comes to one of the big SV companies, but at least back then Google didn't bet the entire company on Google+ succeeding or not the same way as Facebook (ok, Meta) seems to be doing right now with the metaverse (yes, I know about the "all small arrows behind one big arrow" or something like that speech that came from Page but it turned out not even the Google higher-ups believed in their prep-talks).
I see things completely opposite, other than my agreement that the current meta implementation is categorically bad.
The way I see it, Facebook is dead. It lost its place in society by forcibly combining free online expression with personal identity and responsibility. What remains is a culturally normative repository of groupthink with fewer and fewer participants deriving novel value, and that is reflected in the userbase trends.
What meta represents philosophically is a return to semi-anonymized and immediate human-to-human interaction, without the pretense of permanence or the necessity to project only socially righteous behavior. It is a natural, and by nature ephemeral medium. It is the only hope for meta long-term, and beating apple out of the gate is an encouraging sign to me.
FB/Meta seems to be transitioning into a tech conglomerate. For the longest time (and even now), you associate FB/Meta with Facebook (ie facebook.com). But it's clear that the facebook.com product is dying. If Meta survives the next 10-20 years, I see them move to a model where they are a tech conglomerate.
The new generation won't associate FB/Meta with Facebook, they will associate it with Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and any future acquisitions. I'm sure facebook.com will still be kicking around, maybe just the popular features like Marketplace and Pages sans the traditional news feed and updates.
IMO this is the only way I see this company surviving. And the reason I haven't mentioned the Metaverse is because I personally think that it will be a giant ass flop right out of the gate.
People on HN have been predicting facebook's demise for nearly a decade now. People on HN have been wrong. Almost any popular sentiment on HN, especially tech related, seems to be nonsense.
> The metaverse is a real idea yes - but strapping a phone to your face and walking through your coffee table isn’t it.
And the idea of people watching video on a tiny smartphone was initially thought to be absurd.
> When they first announced the rebrand I actually thought it could be genius
Did you really?
> but epic strategic miscalculation seems to be going around a lot this year.
Right. Like facebook's miscalculation in buying instagram, whatsapp, etc.
I've never used facebook. Think the world's better without facebook and most social media and large tech companies like apple, microsoft, google, etc. But man, you people have been so wrong for so long and it's hard to take the facebook haters seriously anymore. Just like the tesla haters a few years ago.
Agreed that FB hasn’t actually proven they can build something from scratch that reaches critical mass. They would’ve have been long doomed had they not bought Instagram. Every other popular app eg Oculus and Whatsapp was also acquired.
They also copied the timeline feature from Twitter.
Before that, people had a wall and you could go there and read what they wrote and poke them ... remember poking?
They do seem rather good at buying good product companies or copying ideas, which could serve them well in the metaverse-space (ugh...), once it's established.
I miss that site. It had a real sense of community, threaded conversations that worked, no suggested posts, no adverts woven into the content. Then it was gone.
A big company acquiring small things and developing them successfully is a pretty common tactic. Many of Google's product, if not most, were also from acquisitions. This includes Maps and YouTube, and some of the less successful ones were not acquired.
Yeah but that isn’t what I’m referring to. It’s clear FB is investing billions to build their vision of the Metaverse in house, at least for now, and my point is that they haven’t actually proven to anyone that they are capable of building a brand new thing from scratch that reaches critical mass without acquiring it elsewhere. In that sense I agree with investors who have sold the stock that this is a big risk.
Their Like button was pretty ingenious and Instagram is still a market leader. Disregarding the fact that they didn’t create it, they have been good stewards. Also, while VR isn’t big, they did create a hit hardware device with the Oculus 2. While Oculus was acquired Oculus 2 is nowhere close to the experience of the Original wired dev kit, and they iterated from that to the Oculus Go to the Oculus Quest 2.
Also keep in mind Apple has been doing a LOT of prep work for AR. We just don’t notice it but each iPhone comes with a full advanced AR sensor suite, capable of super imposing objects into our field of view. The only missing piece is the physical strapping of the iphone to one’s head, but if you did that the iPhone is capable of delivering Hololens-like promised experiences.
Zuckerberg created a culture of copying rather than innovating, driving out all of the talented employees. The long-term consequences of that leave you with a banal organization incapable of shifting with the market.
Interesting then that the community has massively adopted React and PyTorch as defacto defaults for web dev and deep learning. How is it that these untalented lifer's left behind are doing these wildly crazy good technical things?
I suspect Reacts adoption is more along the lines of "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" than because it was genuinely novel. The space of JS frameworks was very well explored by the time React was created.
PyTorch is based on Caffe which was created by Yangqing Jia at UC Berkeley.
You can argue (and I'd agree) Facebook has talent for cherry-picking the best parts of innovative projects. But cherry-picking in and of itself doesn't constitute innovation.
I think the huge confusion they are partaking in the difference between data and UI. A 3d virtual world can exist independently from a headset. The headset is just a phone you strap to your face. And the data behind that 3d virtual world is just a 2d virtual world with a z-axis. We've been building 3d games for decades and we've built 3d UIs for nearly as long and they never catch on. They're hard to navigate and, more importantly, convey absolutely no extra information. The entire move from physical interaction like shopping at a store to virtual interaction like e-commerce is that the 2d world is way more efficient. We've already built a fully functional metaverse. We've built fully digital models of commerce, healthcare, education, communication, finance, travel. All of which has UIs that work perfectly well on flat screens. Putting that inside a headset is just not a groundbreaking change.
It's the thirty year anniversary of the Newton, a complete failure as a product. When it failed people said that people would never carry around computers, there was no need. They were bulky, a huge hassle and didn't do anything better than paper. All of this was true. Yet I don't think it is a coincidence that the iPhone came from the same company.
I don't like Facebook as a product. But I like that Meta is trying to make something work that isn't possible today, but may be possible in the future. It may not work out for them and their vision may never happen. But when someone makes fun of "strapping a phone to your face" I hear "get a horse". It doesn't take brains or vision to see the limitations of present technology.
She is also at that age where she can retire very comfortably. It's a smart move by her. She can take a few years off to recharge and if the right opportunity comes, she will aim to be CEO of the next big thing. All she will ever be at FB is COO. Staying on this sinking Titanic any longer will only tarnish her business reputation.
> The metaverse is a real idea yes - but strapping a phone to your face and walking through your coffee table isn’t it.
We should not confuse the technology with the use case. Once you are the standard-bearer on technology, any future use case is something you can easily piggyback and dominate.
E.g. early versions of iPhone did not support NFC payments, while some competitor models did. Nevertheless, Apple Pay is fairly dominant.
I ran stats on an event I wrote software for, Apple Pay was 70%+ of all 1-click checkouts, Google Pay was under 30%. I was a little shocked at the difference though after spending more time trying to develop for Google Pay I can't help but wonder if that factors in. That and them renaming it every other week and removing features, it's a dumpster fire here in the US from what I can see. I've only ever seen my friends use Samsung Pay on their Androids.
Consider for a moment that Metaverse as a "product" is a thinly-veiled smokescreen to deflect government regulators away from monetization of their monopoly on the Western social graph, and it doesn't seem that misguided. And if the product somehow generates revenue in the future, then it's just fortuitous happenstance.
this is the correct answer. Everything from FB so far has been a huge PR campaign to make it seem as if they aren't a data mining company that hoards as much data as possible to serve ads. Most people are being fooled and FB is going the extra mile to distance themselves from their old image to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
AR, like it has been depicted in sci-fi where digital objects can be placed within the real environment in the users full field of view is very hard to do and is decades away, if even possible.
What some companies call AR today isn't, it's just a HUD. Those will all fail.
In the near term the opposite of real AR: "passthru-VR", for lack of better term with cameras taking in real world and merging it with a digital VR world, have a chance of becoming popular.
Not exactly .... what will really happen is the distinction will go away.
All the next gen VR headsets are building in color passthrough so that they effectively operate as AR devices - but better ones in some ways because they can actually replace reality fully when they want to, not be constrained to just tweaking it.
Honestly I was offended as I would say their rebrand is cultural appropriation.
They didn't invent the "metaverse" it's a by now decades old idea you find in many, maybe even most science fiction novels. Neither is using the term meta in this context.
In some way they basically try to forceful appropriate this to redefine it as a Facebook thing.
But this might also be why they might fail!
Because the term metaverse is already used in such a generic way by so many parties that it only stands for a vague "interconnected vr world" thingy, i.e. you could argue that even by now any trade mark protection law suite is already a lost cause (at least in the EU).
Similar have fun protecting Meta as a trademark for anything which is meta (like metadata, like most things in VR...).
I mean sure Apple is called Apple, but that only works because they have nothing to do with Apples...
Anyway putting that aspect aside there is another three problems with there vision:
- added values
- convenience
- accessibility
For success the added value must outclass any inconvenience especially such cause through problems of accessibility.
But for multiple of their use cases this is not the case, like e.g. the VR meeting rooms are much less convenient then voice/video calls and add hardly any value. Worse their are less accessible and might legally not be usable by any company hold to accessibility standards.
Another example would be e.g. 3d web, which died because for most use cases it added hardly any value over 2d text based web.
Similar things like slack became successful due to it being simple text based, if it would have been based around a vr room it would have flopped even if everyone has the right hardware to run it performant.
Pretty much the main important point I think Facebook would need to succeed in is to convince most people working in front of a computer that they want to work with a VR headset instead, but who wants to ware a VR headset 8 hours a day.
I believe FB management saw the writing on the wall, multiple world governments were no longer going to allow them to sway elections/perception + kids never want to use what the 30/40 year olds use, it was a matter of time before FB became uncool.
Staring at this reality, instead of going down with the ship, the logical decision was to take their still enormous resources and pivot to the next big thing. Meta isnt it, and they probably know it, but its their best idea.
Im old enough where Ive seen HUGE things everyone on the Internet was using, die quickly; IRC(as the main internet chat), ICQ, MS Messenger, AOL, Napster, MySpace, Yahoo, Geocities.
It seems like a concept like "the metaverse" will become necessary at some point as a kind of abstraction layer for communication via future technologies such as Neuralink. The comments I have seen from Zuckerberg on the topic of the metaverse, however, do not suggest that they are conceiving of it at this level of generality, instead focusing on extant video-game related concepts (VR, DLC purchases, etc.). Apple's work in this area (as rumored) also reflects the same limited vision of the concept.
>Facebook has neglected its core businesses for years and seems to have real trouble shipping hardware with reasonable spending.
I don't think there's deliberate neglect here. Fashion shifts and facebook is no longer as fashionable. It is very very hard to stay at the forefront of fashion unless you're product is one that reinvents itself on an annual basis (see the fashion industry)
The meta pivot seems to be more of a desperate anticipation then a strategic opportunity. Facebook conveniently announced meta just before the earnings call.
I have zero faith in FB being able to deliver on the metaverse and more importantly, on hardware. They bought their way into VR and we still don't know if they will screw it up just as badly as they have every other hardware product they've attempted.
Google is king of web, iffy on software, and decent on hardware (when they commit).
Apple is king of hardware/software and sucks on web (it's really embarrassing at this point, I want to pull my hair out when I use almost any of their web-based tools, consumer or developer focused)
FB is decent on social for now but they haven't innovated in forever, they just buy up things like IG/WhatsApp/Oculus , I'm not convinced they are capable of producing anything interesting internally.
Maybe my comment will age badly but I'm not at all worried about FB "owning" the metaverse or anything like that, they have a terrible track record.
The metaverse already exists, Im in an elevator in Hong Kong and you're prob in your toilets in Idaho. We speak in a language that I'm not native of (Im French) about subjects that barely concern France or China.
So, what more magic can we add to the internet? Bulky headsets you can only use home, 3D avatars with no more mood cues than a forum smiley ? Micropayment for vanity objects not worth more than my karma count on reddit ?
Exactly. I try to underline the fact that catering to audience with multiple opinions, often contradicting one another, is not easy, and can only be a compromise. Everybody will constantly complain, no matter how optimal the moderation and general governance would be.
I'm guilty of both. I want looser enforcement of IP laws and better/more moderation of genuine harassment. Unfortunately economic incentives generally point in the opposite direction.
The pivot to Meta is genius because it helps to move away from the Facebook brand, which is more and more toxic by the day. Whether the future of the company is the "metaverse" that Zuck is selling, or doubling down on Instagram or Whatsapp, or some other yet known product line remains to be seen. What we do know is that the Facebook app (and name) is on the the path to irrelevance.
> but it really seems like they’re on constant defense now and have a very tough lift to actually get something truly mass market
What about the metaverse ? :) Isn't it something not defensing and mass market ?
I feel like you are reproaching Meta to not do exactly what they do. They are having a massive innovative bet on how people will spend their time in the future.
Facebook dominated in part because people would endlessly scroll during class, at the bus stop, waiting on line, etc.
VR and the Metaverse require a much bigger commitment by comparison. You can't casually use them. Heck, you can't really even eat or drink while a VR headset is strapped to your face.
VR is just a stepping stone. AR glasses can't be far behind, and they're even more convenient than phones. Really the end game here has to be star trek style holodeck or matrix style dream state, at which point the company effectively controls your entire life.
> VR is just a stepping stone. AR glasses can't be far behind, and they're even more convenient than phones.
I could see how they would be convenient for a few applications, but they don't have the range of uses a phone has. In particular, any kind of content creation seems like it would be nearly impossible. Though this same line was said about phones in the past.
On the other hand, no one expected that mediocre "show your domain" centralized networking platform with pictures and commenting will attract three billion people, but here we are.
Indeed. I think AR will prove to have higher utilization and usefulness. Google glasses were too soon for true HUD, sure. But perhaps we arrive there sooner.
That said, kudos on the strides VR has made in the past decade!
The rebrand was mostly PR. Sure they are working on Metaverse, but they are still trillions to be made under the current model. If there’s one thing I’ve learned is to never count Zuck out
The first week I had the Quest I thought it was the most game changing device of my entire life. Especially during the pandemic it was incredible to transport to another world. I was long a nay-sayer on VR but then completely changed my mind, I couldn't shut up to all my friends about how incredible an experience it was...
That wore off less than a month later. Even in a house it takes up too much space to use. Using it too much still gives me a headache. Plus being teleported to another world, while amazing at first, does feel isolating after too much use. I have put orders of magnitude more time into playing switch on my couch than my Oculus (which collects dust in my basement) and I got my switch a few months ago.
The most damning thing though is how little interest there is in VR by the broader gaming community. I never hear anyone on major gaming sites or youtube channels mention VR other than brief, occasional mentions when talking PC performance.
Outside of the tech community nobody I know at all cares about VR in the slightest. The Oculus is a huge step forward, but after having been so excited about it, I'm even more convinced that it will never really take off.
> The first week I had the Quest I thought it was the most game changing device of my entire life.
Did you own a Quest or Quest 2? Quest 2 is noticeably better.
> That wore off less than a month later.
A major use case for me is cardio exercise. Imo the Quest 2 is better than a Peleton for the variety of workouts. Many games are low key fitness apps. This is what keeps me coming back. I’ve lost 20 lbs so far with the Quest 2
> Using it too much still gives me a headache.
This might be related to Quest 2’s inflexible IPD adjustment. It probably isn’t an issue on higher end XR headsets like the upcoming Apple headset as well as PSVR2
> Plus being teleported to another world, while amazing at first, does feel isolating after too much use.
The trick is to only play multiplayer apps or games.
> The most damning thing though is how little interest there is in VR by the broader gaming community.
There are two major reasons for this:
1. Meta is still a toxic brand. Slightly less toxic than FB, but it still prevents a lot of early adopters from even trying it
2. Other alternatives are drastically more expensive AND complicated. While Quest 2 starts at $299, other VR systems start at $499 - $999, and they need a VR capable PC starting at $1599.
> 1. Meta is still a toxic brand. Slightly less toxic than FB, but it still prevents a lot of early adopters from even trying it
If Facebook wasn't behind it I would probably own a Quest 2 (even though I'll buy Apple's VR headset at release) but as-is I won't touch that with a 10' pole.
It’s rumored that the Apple headset will cost $3000. Hopefully, that’s not true or XR adoption will continue to be slow. Imo Apple will get XR into mainstream if they can control the price. The industry will either be made or setback by Apple
Triangle Strategy was a surprisingly fun and addictive game you might be interested in. Close to Final Fantasy Tactics in gameplay but with a branching narrative.
I have also been really enjoying my switch recently while my Oculus collects dust.
If they let me use it offline without an account I would be tempted. I have no desire to have hardware that only works when connected to the internet via an account.
To my knowledge, Nintendos are the only mainstream device or platform that allows that for well over a decade now. Everything else requires an account and internet access. If you want multiplayer, then no mainstream gaming device or platform will fit your needs.
Right business move would have been to just keep enough engineers to keep facebook and instagram running. Cut costs aggressively and milk that slowly sinking ship for the next 3 decades.
That's in your local bubble. In some countries Facebook is no. 1 and on same level or even more important as Google Maps for businesses. Wished it was not the case though.
These kinds of changes always start in some sort of localized group or community. While it's wise to not assume that every small movement is going to turn into a large one, it's still worth paying attention to what's going on at the fringes so that you don't get caught with your pants down.
As another anecdote, Facebook has died out amongst my peer group, it used to be heavily used for event planning amongst friends but now it's been abandoned despite no good replacements in the wings because nobody is on Facebook to see your events. Instead we are back to using text messages and emails.
They did it to themselves. The minute your feed/notifications went so ad-filled and algorithm-driven that you couldn't find events and announcements before they happened... Facebook killed the golden goose.
> That's in your local bubble. In some countries Facebook is no. 1 and on same level or even more important as Google Maps for businesses. Wished it was not the case though.
Facebook is an American company, if it fails in that market, it will most likely eventually fail globally as well. Orkut being super popular in India and Brazil didn't save it.
Why do people always bring this up when people talk about "Facebook"? Whenever I see people use "Facebook" used to describe the company, I think of all the products they offer, not just facebook.com.
With that being said, anecdotally, in younger (American) circles, facebook.com isn't used much as a social media/content sharing platform. However, other facebook (meta) products like messenger, and instagram are still used a ton, not to mention facebook.com "subproducts" like marketplace, or using facebook pages to act as a landing page for a business. Just because younger people don't use facebook.com doesn't mean they have little relevance within that subgroup.
This isn't even including the huge influence of whatsapp, granted it still(?) doesn't generate any revenue. Facebook developer products like react or pytorch also have a very strong foothold among young developers.
> Why do people always bring this up when people talk about "Facebook"?
Wasn't one of the points of their recent rebrand to Meta to better define "Facebook" as a singular product, and not the company and its other products?
Correct, but in this particular context, the top level comment used "Facebook" to refer to the collection of products under the "Facebook" (meta) umbrella. So saying "No young people use Facebook" implies that no one uses instagram, whatsapp, etc. in this context :P
I see this a lot in other threads pertaining to Meta/FB but its all semantics at the end of the day. And even if they are referring to "Facebook" the singular product being irrelevant, its not really informative since at the end of the day Facebook is a B2B company that sells data and serves targeted ads. It doesn't matter if they get that information to you through oculus, facebook.com, instagram, or whatsapp, and as of now, their "core" products (fb.com, instagram, whatsapp, messenger, oculus) still cover a huge market of people they can glean data from.
I'm 40 and never been on either of those. Facebook came out when I was in college. If I didn't have it I don't have a good alternative to keeping track of all the friends I made at that time. I'm sure I'm not alone with that.
Their anecdote is worth a lot more. Most people under 50 that any one knows don’t use almost every thing. It likely isn’t true that no one is using it around you. I’ve had a friend say that before when I know mutual friends who use it. There’s too many different things so most things won’t be used among any ones anecdotes. For something to be used in different anecdotes is a pretty big deal.
Are you using FB and IG and have tried friends most people you know and actively check if people are around those platforms or how else would you know? I find it hard to believe much of any one who is active on the internet does not know any one who does not use FB or IG. There are a lot more people on IG than most people realize because of it being harder to find people. For a community I run, no one knew half of the other members on IG until I listed everyone out to members.
If a random person has all their friends using any of my web apps, that’s huge. In most cases anecdotes are not worth much. Not in all cases. Not all anecdotes are specifically about billion plus people. Anecdotes were never needed for this convo any way. We have Meta’s data on the usage of their apps and their revenue.
I’m 35 and it’s the only place to find and hang out with my friends. I also post pictures of my kids so grandparents will ooh and ahh. My wife gets hundreds of likes on her posts.
Also the ads I get are generally shockingly relevant to me. I buy stuff from Facebook ads sometimes.
1) Meta has a lot of active users across all of their properties (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp). Even the core Facebook product generates a lot of activity, which can be seen from their financials.
HN commenters (and their friends) don't overlap with Facebook's userbase as much as the general population. It doesn't make sense to try to extrapolate from individual anecdotes when vast quantities of research and data are available on the topic. It's reminiscent of people who refuse to acknowledge climate change because it's not hot where they live. Ignore your bubble, focus on the plentiful data available.
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook creatively or as a primary vehicle for widely-shared creative or entertaining content. Certainly nothing like Instagram or TikTok.
I see a lot of young people who end up creating (mostly empty) Facebook profiles jut to use the groups features or for events. There still isn't a good alternative to those on Intagram or other platforms, and my guess is as young people get older they start having to use Facebook in some way.
I hadn't seen this before today, but NY Times claims that around a year ago (after the Jan 6th insurrection), Zuckerberg and Sandberg started to go their separate ways.
"The pair continued their twice-weekly meetings, but Mr. Zuckerberg took over more of the areas once under her purview. He made the final call on issues surrounding Mr. Trump’s spread of hate speech and dangerous misinformation, decisions Ms. Sandberg often lobbied against or told allies she felt uncomfortable with. Mr. Zuckerberg oversaw efforts in Washington to fend off regulations and had forged a friendly relationship with Mr. Trump."
Sandberg has shown herself to be a true champion of moderation. One of her fine achievements at Facebook was to mobilize a team of enterprising Facebook employees to suppress allegations of harassment made against her then boyfriend, Bobby Kotick, from the news.
"Sitting by Mark’s side for these 14 years has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime. [...] In the critical moments of my life, in the highest highs and in the depths of true lows, I have never had to turn to Mark, because he was already there."
If this is an accurate reflection of her experience, I don't expect it's a side of Mark Zuckerberg most of us imagine exists.
Having spent a couple of years at Facebook, I was honestly surprised by how different Zuckerberg is vs the outside perception. Now, I wasn't part of his inner circle or whatever, but in his weekly Q&As he came off very thoughtful, well-rounded, human, at times opinionated, and willing to engage on any topic. He fought to keep the weekly sessions going despite the leaks, something Google gave up on as I understand. Zuck has his faults, but a robotic, non-empathetic humanoid he is not. He struck me as a strong introvert that over time got comfortable communicating with his growing organization. I don't think he's ever gotten comfortable communicating with the rest of the world (and admitted as much). Ironic that he's in charge of a communication service.
I hate Facebook more than most people, but I have to admit that I can believe this.
I noticed that the news always seems to go out of its way to find inhuman-looking badly-tinted photos of him making strange expressions. Lately he's become something of a scapegoat IMO, probably because an introverted billionaire with some creepy tendencies/background makes such an easy target.
This is one of the heuristics I use to judge the trustworthiness of newspapers and magazines: do they choose photos of people that make them look like idiots? If so, their bias may show up in more subtle ways, too. Whatever you think about the possibility of objective journalism, an editor can do better than choosing a demeaning photo of someone they don't like.
It is a well known open secret in the newspaper industry that if you want to make sure they use a bad photo of you, just be a jerk to one of the journalists. They talk to the photographers.
The reaction from most was to call him lame or approval hungry, but my thought was, “That is SO cool and badass and I have misunderstood this man completely.”
I feel like there needs to be a hyper-specific term for when the CEO of a social media company personally directs the ads targeted to you based off what he observes of your behavior by shoulder surfing your internet browsing.
My father is a pastor, so this story has always been plastered over our house in some kind of painting or other artifact. I'll print one with what you said and send him. He'll probably disown me.
It's curious how gentle the transition for many companies from powerhouse to irrelevance is in the common perception. To realize they're already at the point where intelligent ridicule supplants impassioned critique kinda blows my mind, and as far as I can tell you're not wrong.
I'm no Zuckerberg fan, but I imagine being in his inner circle is probably a very good experience.
I fundamentally and vehemently disagree with his goals and the effect Facebook has on the world, but (outside of the early years) I haven't heard anything toxic about him as an executive.
That's a surprisingly balanced position. When you say he's not toxic, do you mean that he doesn't yell or act sexist? Or that he's actually an honest, upfront businessperson? Because things like systematically lying about privacy policies, or gaslighting the world about net neutrality / "Free Basics' were neither early in his career nor deserving of any respect.
I wonder about being the sibling of someone that successful. Do you expect your bro to buy you a yacht and just party? Do you feel the need to compete? How can you?
I've thought about this too. I think the only sane option is to maintain a quiet life where you occasionally privately name drop to help your own networking. Who'd begrudge a sibling getting ahead in life with a little help from you? But meanwhile there is this. Can't imagine the internal dynamic between them w.r.t. how this portrays his hard earned professional image, I imagine words have been spoken
Maybe I'm a bad networker because it would never occur to me to namedrop a famous relative. Nor do I know it would be that useful, unless you want to act as a second appointment secretary to your relative filtering out deals to bring them.
I imagine you could couchsurf to the various vacation properties off-season when they would otherwise be empty, which would be nice.
Hi schrep! Unrelated to the article, but I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to talk to me at the 'Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge' event in Nov 2010, back when I was just a 2nd year cs student! You not only motivated me to aim high and to apply to FB, but also actually submitted an internship referral!
I didn't end up doing an internship that year (was my first ever coding interview and I did not do well!!), but partly because of this very positive interaction, I later on did end up joining Facebook right out of university! I spent seven years there from 2014 to 2021 working on messaging infra and had a great time (and i miss our infra stack)! Thanks again for talking to a clueless 2nd year student back then!
I gotta say, seeing the Meta CTO / Senior Fellow pop up on HN is an unexpected treat! (Oddly, a relative and an ex-boss of mine both worked with you at CenterRun back in the day. Silicon Valley is a small place indeed)
I've gotta say... Changing the name of everything to Meta to try to change the perception was a bit absurd. Just stop requiring Facebook accounts to use VR devices.
Curious how a group of people that seem to care so much for each other could care so little for everyone else. That is the thing I just can't wrap my head around with Facebook... what did you/do you believe the mission is, before it was VR?
I'm usually skeptical of corporate BS, but I imagine they did have a strong relationship. 14-year stints are very rare, esp. for people that have plenty of options knocking on the door
I dont know if im interpretting this right, but this seems like she is leaving immediately just a few weeks after it was clear her next vesting tranches of options/equity etc. were heavily devalued or worthless as the impact on them from the privacy stuff was possibly outdone with the broader tech decline?
I think you're both choosing to believe the reality you want to be true, as opposed to the one that actually is. To interpret her comment they way both of you are doing seems like reaching at best, and malicious at worst. I am no fan of FB or Zuck, but come on.
Malicious? I think Zuck will be fine, mentioning that a sentence about him sounded kind of passive aggressive isn't exactly my definition of malicious.
Mark Zuckerberg's interview with Lex Fridman changed my perception about him. He seems really an empathetic person. Maybe he's too deep into his own dogma but he's definitely not robotic.
I've updated by opinion (judgement) of Zuckerberg.
Previously, I believe he's a moral cripple, quite skilled at discombobulation. Like giving long-winded non-answers to critical question to thwart deeper inquiry.
Now I think he's primarily a philosophical cripple, incapable of deep introspection. From this interview, Zuck was unable (or unwilling) to rise to Lex's challenge to steelman the arguments made in The Social Dilemma. That's just sad.
You're probably right that Zuck does not completely lack empathy. I now think it's more that he's just oblivious. Painfully, willfully, happily oblivious.
This is closer to Kara Swisher's position, which I hadn't really given much weight. (She knows all these unicorn neurodivergent wunderkind personally.) Like when talking about freedom of speech, Zuck blathers Just So platitudes, completely divorced from humanity's entire history wrestling with these kinds of problems. No nuance. No acknowlegement of paradox. No calculus for balancing mutually exclusive outcomes.
This interview does reinforce my view that having someones like Zuck, Dorsey, and others in full control over medias central to our culture and discourse is like giving flamethrowers to a bunch of young boys going thru their firebug stage.
At least Zuck's not (apparently) purposefully malicious, trying to burn down the whole world, like Murdoch. If intentions matter more than outcomes.
> I have never had to turn to Mark, because he was already there
I've not read anything (else?) Mrs Sandberg has (or hasn't) written, but this turn of phrase has a "professional" feel & taste. It's contrived. It's not something you would say about someone truly dear to you, your best friend, your parents, etc.
If you listen to Lex Friedman, he said the thing that surprised him the most about mark zuckerberg when he met him was his overwhelming humanity and compassion. He said that part of him never comes through the media, but when he interacted with him he said it was undeniable how humane and compassionate he was.
> If this is an accurate reflection of her experience, I don't expect it's a side of Mark Zuckerberg most of us imagine exists.
That's because CEOs aren't public figures such as actors or musicians. They should not be that and they should not be politicians. The fact that people know Mark Zuckerberg name or his face at all is in itself an anomaly.
CEOs are the ones who get to sign off the quality of life that their company provides. That's about it.
I don't know the name of Shell CEO but I know they are the person who get to sign off the quality of life which comes when I take a trip to Mexico or fill the tank of my Navigator and they also get the blame for externalities in lieu of me, which is nice...otherwise the green tree hugger loons such as extinction rebellion would attack my car.
I think Sheryl is going out near the top here. She literally rode this generation of SV wave from the beginning. From a Larry Summers’ protege to one of the most influential executives on the planet. Despite all the negatives associated with Facebook, I think she was the best thing to happen to FB and Mark Zuckerberg.
> She literally rode this generation of SV wave from the beginning.
> she was the best thing to happen to FB and Mark Zuckerberg.
Or -hear me out- the person most influential in current SV business is not the best thing to happen to a (very young, impressionable) founder trying to grow his business. Pre-Sheryl ads were businesses having fb pages and advertising when your friend bought a product (very social-based). Post-Sheryl ads tracked you everywhere and learned about you.
I think she was simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to FB. Some of the issues of the company are squarely at her feet. The revenue org is a huge clusterf** of mismanagement and improvisation that should have tamed years ago. When I was there a couple years ago I wasn't impressed at all by how it all worked and was wondering if this "beautiful journey" post was about to happen.
Sandberg has been exceptionally quiet in the last few months, and given that the succession underneath her has been horribly bungled, I suspect she's chosen this time to bugger off.
I'm not sure what this means, but I hope Sandberg's style of disingenuous personal "brand" disappears with her. Just say what you mean and give us time back.
after Mark D'Arcy left, there was a large re-shuffle and the person with the most experience didn't get the job, and left. After that there has been a steady roll of dominoes.
Well, more time to "Lean In" to activities like being in a relationship a guy that systematically covered up the sexual harassment of his female employees, I suppose?
I am always deeply saddened by the fact that so much of our digital social infrastructure was built by a company with little humanity. How many interactions have been enhanced, as opposed to monetized, by Facebook technology? My understanding is Sheryl was a supporter of this numbers based approach to the business, and maybe this will be a change for the better.
I’m not convinced anyone else would have done anything different. I don’t believe this is a case of “the wrong people in the right place” since any unregulated massive opportunity in history has gone this way. Saying the wrong people were in charge robs us of learning for next time. More useful to say that this is a lesson in human nature and we should prepare for the next Facebook accordingly.
Not sure I believe this. Instagram could’ve conceivably killed Facebook a decade ago if they’d chosen not to sell. Reminds me of Steve Jobs talking about Microsoft bringing about the dark ages of desktop computing: https://512pixels.net/2010/05/the-desktop-computer-industry-....
Then the question becomes whether Instagram would’ve become Facebook if they kept going. I believe they would have once they hit Facebook’s scale.
Ironically, I believe you could take that Jobs quote, swap Apple for Microsoft, and you’d be talking about the mobile industry. I doubt I’m even the first person to observe that. You really do become the villain if you gain enough market dominance.
Yes and: Facebook's algorithmic hate machine is the paper clip maximizer of understanding the human psyche. Facebook understanding of hate and fear are unsurpassed, at the expense of every other human quality.
I think Sheryl Sandberg might go down as the Thomas Midgley Jr[0] of the 21st century; the single person most responsible for internet pollution and toxicity.
Zuckerberg and Google have far more share of responsibility than Sandberg, even though Sandberg is certainly also a morally bankrupt person who enthusiastically contributed to the poor state of modern society.
I wander what this means for Nick Clegg, and how much of his promotion to be “the same level” as Sheryl and Mark was related to her intention to leave.
He obviously isn’t a COO, but then Facebook has an existential legislative risk. So maybe that’s the indication, they need to be co-run by a policy leader, and opps is a solved problem.
Has it been a little more than a month since it was revealed she used Facebook employees to protect her boyfriend at the time from media scrutiny? They were launching an investigation on April 21, 2022
It's just sad that people spout this as an absolute unchangeable truth. She's won financially, completely lost morally and ethically. As a human she's a failure, as a capitalist she's a winner.
Yes, it is the system, does not mean I will call that an outstanding job because we focus on one metric: profit/making money. It's pretty stupid to reduce existence to these terms because of an economical system.
What does this mean to you? I'm actually not sure what the actual impact of CA was (Democrats claim it got Trump elected?) I also have no idea what her personal culpability is - it seems possible that FB had a leaky walled garden, and then their standard ad targeting mechanisms were used to achieve aims orthogonal to democracy?
I think it's really deserving of praise that Sheryl managed to join Facebook in 2008, joining right as it was clear Facebook would become a behemoth. She then spent 14 years helping to steer a young Mark Zuckerberg through some of the most immoral, damaging and discrediting decisions a company can make. Now, at the absolutely peak of Facebook, where it's losing users, it's reputation is so bad it literally had to change it's name and "pivot", now she steps aside.
"To the victims of genocides organised on my platform, to the little girls who self-harmed looking at photos on our platform, to the businesses we destroyed through our arbitrary and capricious policy changes, my job is done here, it's been an honor"
She also personally approved an anti-semetic smear campaign against Soros, because his trust gave money to some non-profit that were critical of facebook.
This* from today was marked a dupe but it has new reporting with the likely causes instead of the PR:
>More recently, there was a fresh irritation: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal contacted Meta about two incidents from several years ago in which Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve an article about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, and a 2014 temporary restraining order against him.
>The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the people said. The couple has been engaged since 2020.
>As of May, that review was continuing, the people said.
If VR doesn’t pay off, there might be a Ballmer/MS situation. Zuck leaving might boost the stock and at the end of the day, he is just one big investor (with voting power).
Note that while she linked to Dave's FB profile, she did not link to (her new fiance) Tom's profile. I guess even those at the top of FB value their privacy while they continue to invade ours....?
> Sandberg said the decision to step down will allow her to focus more on her philanthropic work.
After heading the company that created enormous psychological and sociological issues in the world and was/is involved in shady, anti privacy, illegal, anti-competition dealings she just gets to retire and focus on her "philanthropic" work. She's the modern equivalent of a robber baron.
Facebook pivoting to focus on the metaverse will be one of the greatest business case studies of this century.
They'll either own the entire next generation of the Internet, or faceplant so hard they end up being a marginal Craigslist replacement.
Given that the Meta rebrand was received as if they'd just offered to turn everyone's lives into a permanent Zoom call, I'm in the faceplant camp for now.
Imagine if Facebook said they were investing in fixing hate speech, online bullying and said they would lose 4 billion a year fixing it. THAT is a company I believe everyone would get behind and support.
What's there now is a joke, and Sheryl cashed big paychecks while looking the other way.
What are the secrets to how they made 3 billion people so happy to be users of Facebook (Meta)? Or, how the heck, 14 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, could anyone have predicted the 3 billion people? Astounding. Any ideas how to understand that?
The time for an online people-directory was ripe. There can only be one such (for normal people), and Facebook made some fortuitous strategic decisions early on (minimize ads, real name policy, target university students, and more). Once Facebook achieved critical mass then they just had to avoid silly mistakes in order to succeed.
"According to an April 21, 2022 report in The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg was part of a coordinated campaign to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order given to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, by a former girlfriend. At the time of the order, Kotick and Sandberg were dating. Reportedly, in 2016 and 2019, Sandberg and Kotick worked with a team including Facebook and Activision employees to devise a strategy to convince the Mail not to publish the article. The article stated that Facebook is now reviewing whether Sandberg violated the company's rules."
"An investigative report from The Wall Street Journal in November 2021 identified that despite his earlier claim, Kotick had been well aware of the past allegations mentioned in the California lawsuit but did nothing to change corporate policy, and had protected an employee who sexually harassed from being fired. Further, the report asserted that Kotick himself had threatened to kill an assistant on their voice mail.1 Activision Blizzard's board issued a statement that supported Kotick's efforts to lead the company,2 while employees, shareholders, and other voices from the industry urged Kotick to resign or to be replaced in light of these allegations.3,4,5"
Today, I am sharing the news that after 14 years, I will be leaving Meta.
When I first met Mark, I was not really looking for a new job – and I could have never predicted how meeting him would change my life. We were at a holiday party at Daniel L Rosensweig's house. I was introduced to Mark as I walked in the door, and we started talking about his vision for Facebook. I had tried The Facebook, as it was first called, but still thought the internet was a largely anonymous place to search for funny pictures. Mark’s belief that people would put their real selves online to connect with other people was so mesmerizing that we stood by that door and talked for the rest of the night. I told Dan later that I got a new life at that party but never got a single drink, so he owed me one.
Many months later, after countless – and I mean countless – dinners and conversations with Mark, he offered me this job. It was chaotic at first. I would schedule a meeting with an engineer for nine o’clock only to find that they would not show up. They assumed I meant nine p.m., because who would come to work at nine a.m.? We had some ads, but they were not performing well, and most advertisers I met wanted to take over our homepage like The Incredible Hulk movie had on MySpace. One was so angry when I said no to her homepage idea that she slammed her fist on the table, walked out of the room, and never returned. That first summer, Mark realized that he had never had a chance to travel, so he went away for a month, leaving me and Matt Cohler in charge without a ton of direction and almost no ability to contact him. It seemed crazy – but it was a display of trust I have never forgotten.
When I was considering joining Facebook, my late husband, Dave, counseled me not to jump in and immediately try to resolve every substantive issue with Mark, as we would face so many over time. Instead, I should set up the right process with him. So, on the way in, I asked Mark for three things – that we would sit next to each other, that he would meet with me one-on-one every week, and that in those meetings he would give me honest feedback when he thought I messed something up. Mark said yes to all three but added that the feedback would have to be mutual. To this day, he has kept those promises. We still sit together (OK, not through COVID), meet one-on-one every week, and the feedback is immediate and real.
Sitting by Mark’s side for these 14 years has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime. Mark is a true visionary and a caring leader. He sometimes says that we grew up together, and we have. He was just 23 and I was already 38 when we met, but together we have been through the massive ups and downs of running this company, as well as his marriage to the magnificent Priscilla, the sorrow of their miscarriages and the joy of their childbirths, the sudden loss of Dave, my engagement to Tom, and so much more. In the critical moments of my life, in the highest highs and in the depths of true lows, I have never had to turn to Mark, because he was already there.
When I joined Facebook, I had a two-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter. I did not know if this was the right time for a new and demanding role. The messages were everywhere that women – and I – could not be both a leader and a good mother, but I wanted to give it a try. Once I started, I realized that to see my children before they went to sleep, I had to leave the office at 5:30 p.m., which was when work was just getting going for many of my new colleagues. In my previous role at Google, there were enough people and buildings that leaving early wasn’t noticed, but Facebook was a small startup and there was nowhere to hide. More out of necessity than bravery, I found my nerve and walked out early anyway. Then, supported by Mark, I found my voice to admit this publicly and then talk about the challenges women face in the workplace. My hope was to make this a bit easier for others and help more women believe they can and should lead.
I am beyond grateful to the thousands of brilliant, dedicated people at Meta with whom I have had the privilege of working over the last 14 years. Every day someone does something that stops me in my tracks and reminds me how lucky I am to be surrounded by such remarkable colleagues. This team is filled with exceptionally talented people who have poured their hearts and minds into building products that have had a profound impact on the world.
It's because of this team – past and present – that more than three billion people use our products to keep in touch and share their experiences. More than 200 million businesses use them to create virtual storefronts, communicate with customers, and grow. Billions of dollars have been raised for causes people believe in.
Behind each of these statistics is a story. Friends who would have lost touch but didn't. Families that stayed in contact despite being separated by oceans. Communities that have rallied together. Entrepreneurial people – especially women and others who have faced obstacles and discrimination – who have turned their ideas into successful businesses.
Last week, a friend saw a post about a mutual friend of ours having a baby and told me that she remembers how before Instagram, she would have missed this moment. When the women in Lean In’s global Circles community couldn’t meet in person, they used Facebook to encourage each other and share advice for navigating work and life during the pandemic. At an International Women’s Day lunch, a woman told me that her Facebook birthday fundraiser generated enough money to provide shelter for two women experiencing domestic abuse. Just last month, I heard about how in India, the Self Employed Women’s Association connects over WhatsApp to organize and increase their collective bargaining power. I’ve loved traveling the world (physically and virtually) to meet small business owners and hear their stories – like Zuzanna Sielicka Kalczyńska in Poland, who started a business with her sister selling cuddly stuffed animals that make white noise to sooth crying babies. They began with a single Facebook post in 2014 and have gone on to sell in more than 20 countries and build a workforce mostly made up of moms like them.
The debate around social media has changed beyond recognition since those early days. To say it hasn’t always been easy is an understatement. But it should be hard. The products we make have a huge impact, so we have the responsibility to build them in a way that protects privacy and keeps people safe. Just as I believe wholeheartedly in our mission, our industry, and the overwhelmingly positive power of connecting people, I and the dedicated people of Meta have felt our responsibilities deeply. I know that the extraordinary team at Meta will continue to work tirelessly to rise to these challenges and keep making our company and our community better. I also know that our platforms will continue to be an engine of growth for the businesses around the world that rely on us.
When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life. I am not entirely sure what the future will bring – I have learned no one ever is. But I know it will include focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women. And as Tom and I get married this summer, parenting our expanded family of five children. Over the next few months, Mark and I will transition my direct reports and I will leave the company this fall. I still believe as strongly as ever in our mission, and I am honored that I will continue to serve on Meta’s board of directors.
I am so immensely proud of everything this team has achieved. The businesses we’ve helped and the business we've built. The culture we've nurtured together. And I'm especially proud that this is a company where many, many exceptional women and people from diverse backgrounds have risen through our ranks and become leaders – both in our company and in leadership roles elsewhere.
Thank you to the colleagues who inspire me every day with their commitment to our mission, to our partners around the world who have enabled us to build a business that serves their businesses, and especially to Mark for giving me this opportunity and being one of the best friends anyone could ever have.
That's the great mastery of bullshitting right here. The facade paints a picture of wise and humble leaders, visionaries even, that use their powers with humility and keep bad advertisers in check. In reality they are plant managers of a slaugherhouse who meet at a fine dining place to discuss better ways to extract milk and meat from their cattle.
Pretty much every comment is relating this to Meta and it's pivot to the metaverse, but isn't this far more likely to be fallout from her attempts to pressure Daily Mail into not reporting on her then-boyfriend, Bobby Kotick?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sandberg-facebook-kotick-activi...
When you set out seeking to establish a colony you chose to name Facebook, you might not have willed it to expand into such a big universe. It's highly unlikely you could deduce how good a control you would have of your denizens who you would successfully turn into junkies over time. Now you are used to exploiting their malleability which gave rise to hegemony now palpable in your Meta.
VR ain’t it. Not yet. The path goes thru Turing tested, AI powered, Digital Assistants. TADAs for short. Once the NPCs are intelligent enough to interact with humans, they will naturally entice consumers into VR for added intimacy.
Nothing will change significantly until the TADAs are declared the new killer app.
your welcome for the free analysis.. obvious really.
My guess is she wants to succeed where Hillary failed and needs to distance herself from Zuck in preparation for 2028/2032, particularly after the effect the 2020 election and Jan 6 had on Zuck's and FB's public image
I would take the opposite side of this bet. I don't think she'll run for president. She has too many skeletons in her closet, especially related to protecting Bobby Kotick.
She may be more clean than they are, but they convinced their voters that they're ethical people -- or at least ethical enough. And all of them (except Trump) started with a clean slate in their first election, before running for president.
Sandberg is starting from a bad spot. She has all the liabilities of Clinton without the decades of campaigning to give her a base of support.
My thoughts on Meta and the whole Zuckerverse thing is still "yeah, I think I'll sit this one out". I really don't want one of those Facehuggers strapped to my face.
That's pretty surprising. I know that there has been tons of controversy swirling around the company the past few years, but things have seemed relatively quiet lately, other than their recent bad revenue growth.
Do people here think this is a shakeup at the company or that she legitimately wanted to do something else?
Pre-Trump era she was more the public face of Facebook than even Zuck. Then when the Cambridge Analytica scandal basically did a 180 on the entire reputation of the company she effectively disappeared from the public eye.
There could be other reasons she stepped back around then. Her husband suddenly and tragically passed away - it’s not a mystery if one’s life trajectory completely changes after an event like this.
pretty clear that she did not want to be the face of a controversial company given that she often leveraged her role to talk about being a woman exec in tech eg “Lean In” and that all but disappeared when the perception of the company completely changed.
Yeah. I suppose I mean that she's been disappeared for the public eye for a while, so why leave now? My guess isn't that maybe she's lost too much influence and just doesn't find the job interesting anymore.
Does that still matter the second year and after that? In other words, is there a difference between having 100m and 200m? I would assume you can afford pretty much the same things with both of the amounts... (no first-hand experience)
Yes. Wildly rich people are incredibly greedy? Wildly rich people seem to care about more money far more than someone making low 6 figures.
Neoliberalism is the most popular ideology by far in the world. Something that is tightly roped into more and more money and greed being important. Look at how Howard Schultz, Bezos, Musk, and all the other rich people in those companies are reacting to unions. It’s as if them losing 10% of their insane wealth is the end of the world.
Hopefully people can think more like you. The world would be a better place.
You don't get paid that much money without being incredibly ambitious. Sure you got all the money you need, but what comes next? Sheryl Sandberg has literally changed the world. I'd guess choosing to redefine her life took a lot of thought.
> Mark’s belief that people would put their real selves online to connect with other people was so mesmerizing that we stood by that door and talked for the rest of the night.
Real selves, ha! More like jealousy (and other negative emotions) evoking versions of selves.
As much as I hated Facebook's attempt-to-validate-your-real-name move back in the day, I think it's made the platform better than the competitors which never even tried.
Facebook has a view of the world on two axes: medium and audience. Audience here means if it's 1 to 1 (eg DMing) or 1 to 1,000,000 (eg Twitter). Format is seen as a progression: text -> audio -> video -> VR -> AR.
I personally am skeptical that VR will ever be anything other than a niche and there are lots of reasons for this. Most notably after 10-15 years it's still yet to find that "killer app".
My interpretation of this situation is that Facebook is directionless but this began years ago.
This was most evident when Facebook decided to try and moderate objective truth online in response to the misinformation that really went mainstream in the 2016 election and since only ballooned further. It's a noble-sounding goal but a thankless one that you will never succeed in. People will disagree on what it's true. Additionally, Facebook's DNA is to optimize for interactions and nothing generates interactions better than misinformation, hate and preaching to the choir.
The next misstep was to merge the online messaging platforms, probably to challenge the supremacy of iMessage. Nobody was happy about this. People don't actually want interoperability between FB Messenger, WhatsApp and IG Messaging.
Beyond this IG lost its streamlined production direction in service of propping up other products.
The Metaverse is just the latest iteration of an idea wildly hoping to find a product market fit. Many of us have read Snow Crash and VR is a common theme in sci-fi but I think it's just not going mainstream for a long time if ever.
So we can only read the tea leaves here about why Sandberg left. Chris Cox famously left (and later came back) and used words that seemed to indicate he wasn't energized about the company's direction (when that direction was fighting misinformation).
Sandberg obviously has generational wealth at this point so doesn't need to work. Is this departure a judgement on the direction of the Metaverse? It's really hard to say. But Sandberg is widely respected so this isn't a good outcome. It's even more interesting that she won't be replaced. I do wonder what the organizational impacts of this are.
I suspect she may be also positioning herself for a possible run at US President, if Biden retires in 2024 and Kamala Harris doesn't work out. She came to Facebook from DC, and now may be aiming to return there.
She was positioning herself that way years ago, with the book and lots of press etc, before it became widely accepted that Facebook was a pestilence upon the world on her watch. I think that ship has sailed.
Since you read it all, can you tell me if there is anything in it aside from meaningless corporate platitudes? Is the expectation that more senior=more platitudes since nobody reads them and just looks at how long they are anyway?
I mean, many people would consider her leaving to be an important event. For all intents and purposes, she ran one of the largest internet platforms for 14 years.
It's possible this announcement was intentionally timed against the media-consuming Depp/Heard trial verdict announcement in an attempt to bury the news.
Meta stock went down a few points immediately after the announcement.
These moves are prepared months in advance. I'm not sure why you would link an unrelated trial about a movie star to the announcement. Sheryl is a billionaire, she probably wants to take time off.
> I'm not sure why you would link an unrelated trial about a movie star to the announcement.
They told you why, to bury the news, which they all have an incentive to do. If it wasn't the trial verdict (which is dominating the news), they could have waited until something else to displace it. News outlets have finite space and time and the public has a finite attention span, not too hard to take advantage of that.
the COO of facebook stepping down isn't a major event outside of some niche circles , if anything it's announced today because it's the 1st of the month
The Washington Post is covering the trial heavily, as the defamation suit resulted as a response to an opinion-editorial that Heard wrote in The Washington Post (the trial is in Virginia because that is where the servers and printers of the WaPost are located).
if you read some of the leaked documents from FB, I strongly suspect you'd revise this opinion.
When have you ever seen FB act in such a quick, noiseless and effective way?
its a 130k people, and Sandberg is the head of the chattiest part of it. Not only that there is Boz who appears to want to not only subsume the CTO position but also COO (see dinner comments)
TL;DR:
FB is far to big and uncoordinated to manage something like this.
Now they’re scrambling to ship an iPhone alternative to get out from under Apple policy, but it really seems like they’re on constant defense now and have a very tough lift to actually get something truly mass market. I would be shocked if Apple, Microsoft or Google were irrelevant in 2030, but it is really possible (if not yet necessarily probable) that Facebook/Meta might actually just not exist in the same kind of way anymore then.
When they first announced the rebrand I actually thought it could be genius and that there’s no way they could have been doing it without a really well considered, heavily backstopped plan… but epic strategic miscalculation seems to be going around a lot this year.