How about, no authentication to use the device and an open platform of app stores and/or sideloading?

good idea...but less profitable, though Facebook will continue to track these "banned" users as they roam around the network and trade on their information anyway.

So sick of "but that's less profitable"... these companies should exist to serve their customers, not shareholders

I'm not sure if you're serious about this, but it seems very short sighted. If this were the case, I don't think the word "company" would still apply.

However, capitalism doesn't leave consumers with no options - vote with your wallet!

So you're saying that modern capitalism has completely supplanted the original reason for starting a company in the first place?

I did not write what I wrote as a parody. Shareholder primacy is the foremost blight on this modern existence and is responsible for an innumerably large portion of the negative externalities that cause so such much suffering today.

I would vote with my wallet, but that will accomplish exactly jack shit. There are few who will stand with me if it means threatening their pathetically precious creature comforts which our modern capitalism so dutifully provides.

Also, it is worth noting that the entire goal of capitalism is to eliminate those options, using "free-market economics" as cover for its seemingly insatiable lust for competitors to gobble up or otherwise drive out of business. Some of the very first things they teach you in b-school, about moat building and competitive advantages and all that other crap, is an outright attack on the marketplace model

> However, capitalism doesn't leave consumers with no options - vote with your wallet!

That really works with monopolies! /sarcasm /are-you-serious

Oculus doesn't have a monopoly on VR headsets. They have the most popular offering, but there are still plenty of others to choose from

less profitable wouldn't matter if the law would dictate that every device needs to support multiple vendors with feature parity and the user/owner of a device is legally entitled to use it in whatever way they see fit.

Yes, this would cause price increase. But a lot of people would gladly pay for it. The ones who don't want to, could accept a "discount" in exchange for becoming a glass citizens.

> Yes, this would cause price increase.

Actually, it wouldn't. Facebook makes obscene profits. Rather than be uncompetitive, they'd keep the same price.

If it's not profitable, then that means the market can't solve it, ergo we need regulation

> but less profitable

If we gave Facebook the choice of stopping stealing from people like this, or getting shut down, they'd do this in a second.

In a sane society, Facebook would have been shut down years ago, after the 2016 election.

Why do "apps" even need to be installed on it. Isn't it just a sensor array and a couple of displays?

I used to think everyone should learn a programming language just so they can experience its expressive power but more and more I wish they would so they wouldn't get duped by really dumb marketing.

Because Quest 2 is a stand-alone VR headset. It is not a display device for a computer, it is an all-in-one. So you install games on it to play them.

The camera based tracking is a marvel of modern engineering. Making something seem simple is really really hard.

That might already be the reason why the Oculus is not available in Germany and Belgium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375652

It seems like they're pushing FB as an authentication method for everything. Try and comment on a local news article (yeah, I know) and it wants to authenticate you with your FB account. Same thing with trying to buy something from a small independent web vendor. "Log in with your Facebook account" is becoming the default everywhere and it sucks.

I agree that’s not a great state to be in, but think about it from that locals new org’s point of view: comment spam is a major and hard-to-solve problem, and by tying commenting to the real-world identity and enforcement of bots that Facebook provides, the news organizations get to solve that thorny problem for free. Plus news orgs are already using FB to syndicate/share, so it’s really a no-brained for them.

I wonder what the world would look like with a independent, trustworthy, non-advertising-based company/organization which provided a similar anti-spam service for free, with the option to publicly tie to verified identities as well. (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)

> (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)

Did we not see the same studies?

As I recall Google+/YouTube's real name policy came under fire because a large minority of people received substantially more hate speech.

I've been writing about and pushing for a decentralized system that doesn't require centralized services or verified identities - because any centralized system will have biases and flaws, and having real identities tied to your online comments has can have serious real world consequence.

https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati... - With this, a site or users of the site can choose many trusted moderators from the network and as the system grows it gets better over time.

What about to use DISQUS? I rarely see spammed DISQUS comments.

If you want to be authentication for everything then you definitely can't intermingle the authentication part of that (who is this person) with the authorisation part of that (what are they allowed to do). In other words, Facebook deciding I don't have the right to use it's service should have no bearing on whether I have provided evidence that I am who I assert to be, and whether other services should choose to service me.

My sentiment exactly. It’s crazy to think Facebook can simultaneously ban me from their platform and essentially steal whatever $X amount of dollars I spent on the oculus store. What makes it worse is they’re not even letting people who’ve made an oculus account in the past escape from this as they are now forcing ALL accounts to be linked to Facebook in the next couple years.

FB sounds like it's trying to be an multinational version of WeChat by becoming the operating system of life. There are many cultural reasons why this is feasible in China but not in the US (and many other places)

What are these cultural reasons?

I'd guess for starters that an extreme authoritarian centralized state is already normalized in China. USA is creeping that direction but there's still a ways to go

Facebook sounds more like the communist party, where they are requiring your real name, web activity, or get banned and have all your things taken away (Oculus usage, paid apps, can’t message friends, etc).

I think we need full separation of hardware and software. One company makes the hardware, others make the software. And let's not forget that it was like this for a long time (IBM+clones vs Microsoft, OS/2, Linux).

Today, the distinction between hardware and software is murky. Hardware can't even be tested without co-development of software. Even making these things happen in separate departments of the same business, by people who eat lunch together, is inefficient when trying to move fast and create new things. I often have hardware and software development tools open on my computer at the same time.