I wonder if no-one from higher-ups in Meta tell Zuckerberg that it is not going to happen and explain to him what sunk cost fallacy is.

Maybe Sandberg did, and he disagreed and now she's gone with a bunch of stuff leaked to try and embarrass her.

Anyone who says that to him will get fired, and that makes sense: In his mind, if you don't believe the vision that he's going all in in, then you're just detracting.

Another delusional CEO practically

I’d feel pretty embarrassed right now to be working in VR at meta while seeing coworkers getting laid off.

Why? If I were working there and on that tech, I’d stay. It’s a cool project and I like working on cool projects while being able to live a comfortable life.

What are you working on that’s more fascinating than VR?

> Aerospace software engineer, putting bits in space.

That’s pretty nifty. What do you like about it?

Edit: why did you use a throwaway to reply to my comment?

That wasn’t me, they were just quoting my bio. I wasn’t trying to compare my field to VR. I enjoying working on code knowing that it will (hopefully) be sitting in orbit soon, but there are more than enough negatives to turn one away (relatively low pay, ancient tooling, dated management practices and general industry inertia).

VR is cool. I didn’t mean to say that Meta VR engineers deserve to feel guilty, but I imagine it would be strange to be working in a massive cost center (which may eventually spell Meta’s downfall), while seeing coworkers dismissed. Definitely don’t think my job is any more fascinating to than VR (although I personally am more interested in my work).

Please don't comment like this on HN. This is not reddit or Facebook.

"I'd"

He doesn't work for Meta.

Oh missed that. Response would be the same. If someone doesn’t believe in the vision they need to leave.

Honestly, it is amusing to see him put so much effort into 2nd life II , but:

How can you call it a disintegrating corpse when it's been in the public eye for what, a few months? I don't get it.

Watch the Joe Rogan interview with Zuckerburg. There's a moment in there where Rogan gives Zuckerberg a reality check on it, it's hilarious.

This? https://youtu.be/rgh3ELuDZGY

The comments on that are telling. Does Zuckerberg always seem that forced when he’s interacting with people?

That's the one thanks! I was just searching for the link.

So the one-off point about it being creepy while gushing about it through the rest? Not much of a reality check.

When Joe Rogan is more in touch with reality than you are, you need to reevaluate your choices.

Why does it matter how long the casket's been open? If it's dead it's dead.

It is in fact the opposite of disintegrating - they only just got legs!

It's just for show. They don't have a leg to stand on.

Their MAUs have been declining consistently.

third life

Amusingly, there are a lot of Minecraft videos with that name as a title. I think it's a game type with a limit of 3 respawns.

I have this (maybe wrong) opinion that Meta can't be the one to bring an actual VR/Metaverse project because they are too "on the radar" of medias. Adoption of new technologies is always done by more fringe members and then picked up by critical mass. You can't successfully build a metaverse without accepting the kind of weird deviant stuff that goes on in VRChat and Meta can't accept the weird deviant stuff because they will immediately get called out for it.

So you get "Horizon" and its assortment of low-quality games that feel more like a tech demo than an actual world that you could lose yourself in.

iPhone was speculated about as an Apple product for years by the media before it came out. Newsweek even did a cover story about it.

Versus "windows phone" in its fifty billion iterations which was exactly what OP talked about.

If Facebook had quietly (and they were for the longest time!) continued to work on Oculus and done some internal skunkworks projects, instead of a big PR push and a company rename, maybe they could pull an iPhone.

Personally, I think they drank the meta verse koolaid to get everyone to stop talking about election interference and other things that were being blamed on them, and I think it mostly worked.

I guarantee it's going to be some furry working on VRChat stuff who finds its policies or technology too limiting and sets off to do something better. It's already sort of happened. I don't know that Frooxius started NeosVR for that reason, but it came after VRChat and is one of the major competitors.

> Adoption of new technologies is always done by more fringe members and then picked up by critical mass.

What examples are you thinking of? Did this happen with the PC or smartphone?

The foundations of the post-2007/2008 smartphone were forged on the keyboards and screens of the Blackberry/Palmpilot-obsessed professional manager type person. Fringe statistically if not culturally.

I know there are countless counter-examples but:

- The "public" Internet, although since I used the word "deviant" people might not like me giving it as an example.

- Social media in general, which again not necessarily deviant, but before it reached critical mass a lot of people just found it weird and privacy invasive. I distinctly remember my family making fun of people posting their thoughts on early Twitter.

- eCommerce, was considered strange as you would put your CC information on some random website.

- Video games were for nerds and losers, now most people have an Xbox/Playstation.

- Drone/RC plane community was much more weird before the likes of DJI which lowered the bar significantly.

- More recently remote work was usually for a small portion of workers and people commonly said you had to be a certain type of person for it to work at all. Fast forward a pandemic and remote meetings are common and even requested by would-be employees.

I feel like there a fallacy somewhere in my arguments for sure, but there definitely seems to be a trend where things are weird, dumb and strange until they just aren't by reaching critical mass. Strapping a screen to your face to play video games and chat with people is definitely one of those until it isn't and I'd bet that within 10 years it will be already much more common.

Agreed - kind of like how Friendster and MySpace paved the path for the little startup called Facebook?

Well, they missed the boat being a platform on mobile or desktop. So, now they have Apple/Google dictating terms to them.

They are really desperate to own the next big thing. Whether that'll be VR, who knows.

They've lost $10b on the metaverse so far; you'd think you could design a phone at least SOMEWHAT decent for that price, and at least get a TINY foothold back into the market.

They gave it at least a weak try, with terrible results.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/heres-why-the-facebook-phon...

That's the amazing thing, they tried it once, badly, in 2013 and never bothered trying again.

Wow, can't believe it's almost been a decade since that was a thing. Back when HTC was still around making some of the best phones at the time too, I miss my HTC One.

Also, same thing happened when Amazon tried releasing the Fire Phone. I think a combination of being carrier exclusive and using sub-optimal hardware was a big contributing factor to both their demise.

Facebook making a phone would have had similar problems as VR: what would be the draw of a Facebook phone? If it's an Android phone it's just an Android phone with Facebook branding. They can't deliver exclusive features to only Facebook Fone owners as their money comes from ads so they need the broadest reach for features.

If they rolled their own OS they'd have to spend a lot of effort building and maintaining that platform. If Microsoft and Amazon can't will a third phone platform into existence Facebook definitely can't.

Their $10B metaverse spend is a waste but I think it would have been a waste on a phone as well.

This was Zuck’s biggest mistake. The money spent on Metaverse would have been better spent just making a Facebook phone.

They made a phone once, and it didn't pan out. [Source](https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/heres-why-the-facebook-phon...)

HN and Reddit always get it wrong about the future, the Metaverse is still an on-going under development ecosystem and Facebook bad image gives it a negative perspective.

I detest the Meta metaverse as much as the next Hacker News user. But there is one use case where I could see it luring me in. Virtual meetings. Really virtual social events or happy hours. Professional ones mainly with my remote distributed team. This would be the killer app in my view.

The key to me it seems would be in the audio. Like if I turn to face someone, the audio adjusts so everything else in virtual room get quieter (but still audible). I can have a conversation with the person I'm facing. Multiple conversations can go on at once. Just like in a real room!

Anybody know if this is something that current state of the metaverse supports? Is this something being actively researched and developed?

It takes balls to do what The Zuck is doing. Facebook is stagnant and dying. It's being chipped away by Tiktok and neutered by Apple's monopoly.

He could ride the facebook ship into the sunset and have it die 20 years from now.

But no, he's betting big and going for broke. I hope he succeeds just for the sheer stones he's displaying. Really inspiring to see a man aim so high.

I'm sure there are lots of competent people putting a lot of effort in "Metaverse", but to me it looks really just yet another VR world. Does anyone know what is the concrete new thing it would make successful?