[HN Gopher] Facebook plans to change its name as part of company...
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Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand
Author : schleck8
Score : 295 points
Date : 2021-10-20 13:04 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| h2odragon wrote:
| "Ministry of Information?"
|
| Ultimate Arbiter of Reality?
|
| Can Zuck resist the urge to proclaim himslef a God? How about
| High Pontiff of the new Holy SanFransican Church?
| pjmorris wrote:
| The Kwisatz Haderach?
| sgregnt wrote:
| I thought he is pushed to censor by the US and other
| governments, and practically does not have much room for
| freedom.
| aserdf wrote:
| he has more money than god - if not for a god complex, what
| reason to continue with the status quo? he can do literally
| anything on or off this earth that is within the realm of
| possibility.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/fIv2l
| [deleted]
| jaywalk wrote:
| Oh yes, one of the steps large companies inevitably take after
| their reputation is tarnished beyond repair. The problem here is
| that nobody cares what the parent company of Facebook is called,
| just like nobody cares what the parent company of Google is
| called. It's Facebook and Google.
| sorokod wrote:
| May work to some extent, remember Blackwater?
|
| Blackwater => Xe Services => Academi
| pdpi wrote:
| An accidental case of that is Accenture. It split with Arthur
| Andersen (and got renamed) just a couple of years before the
| Enron Scandal broke.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| I first thought of Comcast. People still call it "Comcast"
| instead of "Xfinity"
| azinman2 wrote:
| I thought Xfinity was a "product" of comcast?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| True, but Comcast Cable was still rebranded to it to avoid
| negative associations:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfinity#Branding
| josefresco wrote:
| It's a "brand" of Comcast (whatever that means)
|
| "Comcast Cable is the cable television division of Comcast
| Corporation, providing cable television, broadband
| internet, and landline telephone under the Xfinity brand."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#Comcast_Cable_(Xfinit
| y...
| albrewer wrote:
| Or RoadRunner -> Time Warner -> Spectrum depending on your
| region and age
| d23 wrote:
| Wow. It does work. I had no idea Spectrum was Time Warner.
| I was just wondering the other day about what ended up
| happening with Time Warner.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| That's because Google remains Alphabet's most used product.
| I've theorized for years that Facebook massively benefits from
| all the negative coverage because Facebook itself isn't that
| popular anymore.
|
| I would guess that if you were to split up FB into FB business
| pages, FB personal pages, Instagram, and Whatsapp, that FB
| personal pages would be the lowest-used product by a sizeable
| margin. If they rebrand along those lines, I'm guessing they
| could convince the public of that as well and lawmakers
| wouldn't be able to get their grubby regulating hands on it.
| alangibson wrote:
| Certainly the "news feed" has to be the most used feature?
| From shoulder surfing some Fb users, it seems like users
| spend most of their time scrolling until something triggers a
| response. Then back to scrolling...
| snarf21 wrote:
| Isn't this really just a Google > Alphabet kind of change? I
| assume there will be a new umbrella that FB, IG and WApp will
| just be things inside as well as pushing things like Oculus at
| more of a separate concern.
| munk-a wrote:
| And honestly - nobody calls Google anything but Google. These
| sorts of renames requires that the main line of business
| actually shrink relative to the company which strikes me as
| highly unlikely for both Google and Facebook.
| spinchange wrote:
| Alphabet's name change was part of a corporate and equity
| (shares) restructuring and also a change of the executive
| leadership guard and/or board, no? Perhaps that's going on at
| Facebook too. I don't think it is incidental that Facebook is
| already in the headlines and has other PR issues at the
| moment. Kind of goes without saying...
| gizdan wrote:
| Feels like Google had a valid reason, unlike Facebook, who
| seems to be only doing it because of PR issues.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I wonder if this structure also helps with reduced risk for
| antitrust cases succeeding.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I feel like the actual anti-trust risk is lower than
| people expect/want.
| jjcon wrote:
| Isnt it just unfounded speculation that it is for pr? To me
| it makes sense for the same reasons google did it.
| gizdan wrote:
| It sure does make sense, but the timing is hard to
| ignore. Either way, you are right, indeed it is unfounded
| speculation, hence why I said "who _seems_ to be only
| doing it because of PR issues. "
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| This seems like terrible timing if they are doing it for
| PR, since Facebook is currently in the thick of a
| negative news cycle that will immediately tarnish the new
| brand. The stories will all say: Facebook is evil, and
| also changing its name. It would make more sense to wait
| for the press to die down first.
| qqtt wrote:
| How would one "prove" the reason they changed their name
| is for PR? A company would never outright say "Our
| reputation is terrible so we are trying to trick
| everybody by coming up with a new name to redirect
| attention."
|
| Google did it because they were structuring businesses
| that matured out of Google X - like Verily & Waymo.
| Facebook doesn't have such a similar business reason.
| Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook are all in the social media
| space and all relate to each other. The alleged reason
| "to rebrand under a Metaverse umbrella" makes it clear
| this is a very different reason compared to what Google
| did.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I'm not sure how successful this rebrand will be when the words
| "Zuck" or "Zucked" in popular English literally mean "to
| arbitrarily remove or ban something for stupid or arbitrary
| reasons".
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Google did it before it went mainstream.
| genericuser314 wrote:
| to arbitrarily remove... for arbitrary reasons.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Popular English has taken a real hit in the last few years.
| worldeva wrote:
| If we're being pedantic, I'll one up you: The removal being
| arbitrary does not require that the _reason_ is arbitrary;
| see: selective enforcement. :p
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I'm not sure failing to proofread a throwaway comment on a
| social news site indicates anything about the state of
| popular English.
| lovich wrote:
| Does it mean that? I've only seen Zuckerburg used as a verb
| to mean cheating your business partner out of the business
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Anecdotally on Facebook itself I see the term "Zucked"
| thrown around a lot in groups for various topics, an
| example would be: "be careful with that post or you'll get
| the group Zucked". Maybe it's a regional or topic-specific
| thing but I see it quite a lot.
| Ftuuky wrote:
| "Zuckerberged" means "to steal an idea from someone but
| change it just enough that you can claim it as yours". [0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zuckerberged
| chubot wrote:
| One renaming I can recall is Philip Morris -> Altria, although
| apparently a new Philip Morris was spun off, so it exists
| again.
| Groxx wrote:
| Honestly, I think it _does_ work. Not perfectly, but somewhat,
| and that 's enough to be worth doing for them.
|
| People will continue to associate Facebook stuff and some of
| the parent-company shenanigans when they hit big news events,
| but it gives them another name for news releases and forcefully
| correcting news outlets that "Alphabet did X, and Alphabet is
| not Google".
| anf0 wrote:
| It worked for Arthur Anderson -> Accenture although they also
| restructured the business. E.g. Accenture is only the
| consulting part of the business.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Barely anyone knows Chiquita used to be the infamous United
| Fruit Company, so it can work.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I bet barely anyone would care if it was still United Fruit
| Company.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| If Googling your company name also brought up a bunch of
| See Also links to various genocides and military coups, the
| company executives would certainly care.
|
| In an age of ethical consumerism, it's undeniable that not
| breaking with the past would've had a significant impact on
| their profits.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Maybe, but there are a lot of companies with negative
| links, although perhaps not to the level of UFC's
| genocide or military coups. Nike, IBM, Mercedes, etc.
| Either way, management would have changed twice or thrice
| over by now. But I would still guess the vast majority of
| people do not care how their bananas got to them as long
| as they are 49 cents per pound or their avocados
| regardless of which Mexican cartel sent them.
|
| Does anyone really think clothing brands are avoiding
| Xinjiang cotton if their product still comes from China
| or another south/east Asian country?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Googling "United Fruit Company" doesn't give any Related
| searches that mention genocides or coups for me. OTOH,
| the very first thing when googling Chiquita is "People
| also ask... Is Chiquita a bad company?" with an answer
| that is basically "yes".
| aqsalose wrote:
| Genocide might be pushing it, but DuckDuckGo [1] first
| result is a Wikipedia article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company
|
| Some entries in the table of contents sound a bit
| embarrassing, like "Banana massacre" and "Aiding and
| abetting a terrorist organization". Description of a coup
| is to be found if someone reads the entry about
| Guatemela.
|
| Various other top DDG results are about the same three
| things, dictionary entries and Pablo Neruda's poem.
|
| [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=United+Fruit+Company
| &ia=web
| [deleted]
| RNCTX wrote:
| I gotta say I'm really glad that Facebook is all-in on Virtual
| Reality, because that's the shortest path to the ultimate failure
| of Facebook and the departure of a lot of its problem children in
| management.
|
| Virtual Reality as a concept is always going to fail.
| jonny_wonny wrote:
| Virtual reality as a concept has been validated since the
| initial release Oculus's DK1. You are quite behind the times on
| this one.
| [deleted]
| nelsonic wrote:
| Facebook is rebranding because they can no longer control the
| narrative around their toxic brand. They have tried with "Project
| Amplify":
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/technology/zuckerberg-fac...
|
| Some branding consultant has calculated that it will be _cheaper_
| for them simply re-brand than to try to recover the existing
| brand.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I always take it as a company is trying to hide from its mistakes
| when they do a rebranding. Long ago, International Harvester
| rebranded to Navistar, and I knew I'd never want to buy one of
| their products, ever, as a result.
|
| I wonder just how bad the stuff they're trying to hide is.
| stellalo wrote:
| Interestingly, this happens ~17 years after Facebook went online,
| same as what happened with Google/Alphabet in 2015
| dschuetz wrote:
| I suggest "hatebook" as the new company name if they mean it
| being transparent.
| [deleted]
| bawolff wrote:
| Feels a bit clickbait. The headline made it sound like it was
| rebranding the main app. Instead they're just pulling a
| google->alphabet, which is much less shocking.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I wonder if a name change for the holding company would help with
| recruiting. I can imagine that a lot of people don't want to say
| "I work at Facebook" -- but might be willing to say "I work at
| [holdco]". Sort of similar to the Google/Alphabet distinction,
| but FB probably has a worse image among SV types than Google ever
| has.
| ya3r wrote:
| After the new name fails to make any significant difference, they
| will try new CEO.
| kfprt wrote:
| They'll try but with his preferred shares he'll be like a leech
| that they'll never be rid of.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It honestly makes sense to name the company something else than
| their first product, especially as they now have multiple other
| products with similar user numbers.
| diomio wrote:
| Booky McBookFace
| marban wrote:
| _Hades_ comes to mind to use as the holding name.
| notafraudster wrote:
| The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Second Life
| has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty. Adding
| advertising and branded content and making it cost more because
| of high end hardware requirements and making it slower and more
| difficult to interface with because it's VR/AR instead of using
| existing interfaces is not an improvement; just like adding
| branded content and sticking it in the skeletal husk of a bad
| shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an improvement when Epic did
| it. All the CEOs who buy into this metaverse shit keep talking
| about the universe of possibilities, but the only possibility
| they're pursuing is building a Times Square Wal-Mart.
|
| Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable
| "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No,
| I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be
| more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-
| congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not
| being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites
| lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent
| "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future.
|
| It's a bummer because I think there probably are legitimate uses
| of VR/AR telepresence as the next frontier of video calling,
| which would seem to be right in line with Facebook's stated
| mission of connecting the world.
|
| But no, we'll get an exceedingly shitty videogame instead. Can't
| wait for them to power it all by NFTs.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/67sfZfreOrU
| 13415 wrote:
| It's more than embarrassing, it's in my opinion kind of crazy.
| Zuckerberg seems to be obsessed with "governing people" and
| "leadership", he mentions this in almost every interview. He
| really seems to believe that he's "governing people" on
| Facebook and that there will be even more governing to do in
| the "metaverse."
|
| I'm not blaming him personally, he might just have happened to
| have surrounded himself with a few too many people who lost
| touch with reality, but the metaverse and these plans to
| "govern people" seems to have gotten to his head. He sounds
| more and more like a lunatic.
|
| Not enough people are interested in virtual reality and even
| less people are going to be interested in one based on
| Facebook's arbitrary and vague rules (aka "governing people")
| and their algorithmic discrimination. Not to forget about
| actual governments who will also have a few things to say about
| some aspects of the planned metaverse such as its economy and
| payment systems.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Once somebody figures how to emulate all the five senses in VR,
| it's going to happen. Drink whatever you want, eat whatever you
| want, feel whatever you want, for as long as you want, from
| your La-Z-Boy? The whole world will rush to virtual reality.
|
| I agree that a VR helmet is not going to significantly change
| anything, but one day we will absolutely plug ourselves into
| the matrix and never leave.
| mbesto wrote:
| This is pretty simple. Facebook is taking bets on the next big
| Platform(tm) because they cannot afford to miss out on
| determining what comes after mobile.
|
| The FOMO is insane here.
| VRay wrote:
| Yeah.. I'm a bigger VR fan than most, but nobody has figured
| out the UX for it or any killer use cases yet. I don't think
| Facebook is particularly likely to be able to ship something
| that can compete with whatever Microsoft or Apple can put
| out, either
|
| BUT if it only costs then a few dozen billion to take a stab
| at it, they may as well. We can see what a disaster the
| mobile platforms locking down Facebook's spying has been for
| their ad business
| stcredzero wrote:
| A big part of the UX problem is the form factor. Same story
| as early 2000's "tablet computers."
| screye wrote:
| On the flip side VR is just 1 UX innovation away from
| blowing up.
|
| The rate of gains in mobile computing (M1x), mobile vision
| (pixel 6 pro) and mobile sensors will make the technical
| and monetary barriers to VR dissapear within the next 5
| years.
|
| Whatsapp was a small.iterative change to chat apps and it
| cost them $20 billion. Spending a few billions to get ahead
| on the next paradigm in interactive experience simply
| prudent spending.
| advrs wrote:
| I don't understand how you say this when Oculus Quest 2
| (owned by FB, of course) is probably the best + most
| popular VR experience. Is it early days? Yes, of course.
| But this quasi-religious idea that only Apple (or
| Microsoft? lol..) can create the "2.0" or "3.0" VR
| experience is a bit lacking in evidence.
|
| Not that I am saying FB will necessarily be the ones, but I
| think the only honest position is that "the jury's still
| out" on who owns this one.
| kaibee wrote:
| The issue is that we have like 40 years of UX improvement
| for desktops and now have super high resolution monitors
| that make that UX experience usable. We have like 5 years
| for VR and 0 years with a high enough resolution to make it
| usable. I think once high resolution enough VR comes out
| it'll pretty much be "oh I don't need monitors anymore, but
| keyboards/mice are still pretty much ideal for text
| entry/knowledge work, so lets keep those. probably more
| standing desks also." The metaverse thing is a solution in
| search of a problem, and in Facebook's case, clearly a
| solution in search of more money.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > I don't think Facebook is particularly likely to be able
| to ship something that can compete with whatever Microsoft
| or Apple can put out, either
|
| Yes, but the Oculus Quest 2 is pretty good for the price,
| and fact that its probably 5 years earlier than anything
| anyone else is putting out. They're really actually trying
| it seems, which is pretty welcome.
|
| I honestly think the coolest aspects of it are the simple
| AR-ish things they're doing (hand tracking, keyboard
| tracking, the camera based zone for where you can walk,
| etc).
| kibwen wrote:
| On that note, taking bets that their new brand name is
| "Facebook+".
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Yeah, their usual play would be to see which innovative
| upstart begins to own the space and buy them out. But with
| all the antitrust attention and valuations being what they
| are, they can't expect to do that anymore.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Epic, etc, etc are all grabbing
| onto this metaverse thing and it is super embarassing. They say
| its about "not one company". There is only one reason why they
| all talk about this. Apple. Apple is obviously building its own
| metaverse and isn't inviting some of these companies to the
| party (NVIDIA) or making them pay high fees to join (Microsoft
| xbox, epic, etc). The kicker is going to be when all of these
| companies realize metaverse isn't a thing and Apple wasn't
| working on it all along. Instead, Apple builds up AR technology
| so they can make useful products that actually sell to
| everyone.
| serverholic wrote:
| This is one of the reasons Ethereum is so important. It
| creates a common foundation that no single company owns.
| echelon wrote:
| Your argument doesn't follow.
|
| Besides, Buterin and the other whales "own" Ethereum.
|
| Does someone with no money own any stake in Ethereum? No.
| They don't.
|
| Ethereum isn't a socialist paradise.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty.
|
| Sorry this is tangential, but anyone remember Active Worlds
| from Circle of Fire circa 1995?
| veqz wrote:
| Sure do. Was lots of fun, even though my skyscraper plans
| failed as there was a limit to how man objects we were
| allowed to stack in the Z-axis.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think you're mostly wrong.
|
| AR is an obvious candidate for the next platform and superior
| UX (if the hardware is possible) when it's ready.
|
| "Metaverse" branding doesn't matter, UI in line of site and
| ability to manipulate things in the real world just by looking
| at them and gesturing has obvious massive potential and appeal.
|
| I don't care about Ready Player One and the fiction stuff is
| irrelevant.
|
| The ability to have interactive virtual overlays in the real
| world is big, the potential for new things given that platform
| is enormous. If you think that hardware is impossible that's
| one thing, but to not even see it is just short sighted and a
| classic knee-jerk HN dismissal that can end up a joke ten years
| later.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| >The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing.
|
| I suspect it's less about a new incarnation of second life, and
| more about what happens when we've all got access to an AR
| layer while traversing the real world.
| wanderer2323 wrote:
| Execrable -- extremely bad or unpleasant
|
| I looked it up so you don't have it
| wdb wrote:
| There is a lot of fuss on Youtube about Earth 2.0 metaverse
| mchaynes wrote:
| Fundamentally the profit motive ruins true innovation
| aaroninsf wrote:
| It's comments like this that make it worth wading through HN
| each morning.
|
| Huzzah!
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| Seems to me like a play for patents -- the more they move
| forward in this direction, and file patents that are crucial
| for doing so, the more shareholders can profit off of the
| inevitability that something like a Ready Player One dystopia
| is indeed in America's near future. The embarrassment is the
| society that can't take ourselves off that track. Which I guess
| is just another way of saying 'don't hate the player, hate the
| game.'
| peter_retief wrote:
| VR makes most people nauseous and this is going to be far
| worse. I am watching from afar and seeing the B grade movie
| that is Facebook crash and burn.
| istorical wrote:
| This is a bit like saying 'vacuum tubes are too fragile and
| always break, computers will never succeed'.
|
| That being said, I do think FB will succeed on the hardware
| front but flounder on the software front unless they somehow
| completely reinvent themselves and stop being so "Disney".
| peter_retief wrote:
| Vacuum tubes? Didn't they get replaced with transistors,
| are they fragile?
| Karunamon wrote:
| I call maximum shenanigans on "most people", especially given
| the success of the Quest.
| peter_retief wrote:
| :)
| VRay wrote:
| The guy has a point, any experiences that move you around
| will make almost everyone who tries them sick after 10 to
| 30 minutes. Nobody's found a perfect solution yet.
|
| On the upside, even a boring "stand around and talk to
| people" game will be more immersive and fun in VR than most
| action-packed run-and-gun games without it
| moron4hire wrote:
| I think it's a bit like complaining that GUI operating
| systems aren't a good fit for text adventure games. It's
| a completely different paradigm. Shifts in dominant
| genres should be expected.
| peter_retief wrote:
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/1450876862910042113?s=20
| jonny_wonny wrote:
| That's absolutely false. Many people do experience
| discomfort when they are new to VR, but with time most
| people adjust, and are able to play for any amount of
| time with no negative side effects.
| jugg1es wrote:
| I can't think of a worse company than Facebook to be the first
| one to create a legit metaverse. The appeal of the VR in Ready
| Player One was that it was created from a core of sincerity.
| Facebook's approach would create it around their business
| model, which is arguably poisonous.
| serverholic wrote:
| This is why Ethereum is so important. With technology like
| NFTs, it creates a common, standard platform for these
| companies to build on.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| NFTs, aka StarCatalog 2.0 where you can pay some database
| owners to keep a record of your name next to some set of
| data?
| serverholic wrote:
| Yes a database of digital assets that you control.
| Forcing facebook to use a standard instead of full lock-
| in is good IMO.
| nivenkos wrote:
| How do NFTs help in any way?
| serverholic wrote:
| An NFT can represent any digital asset. Digital assets
| are a key part of any "metaverse".
|
| If NFTs become the standard then you could theoretically
| take your assets off Facebook into another Metaverse
| without losing your items. NFTs help avoid lock-in and
| put pressure on Facebook to play nicely with others.
| nikk1 wrote:
| I am shocked how this stuff hasn't made its way into HN
| yet. Everyone PLEASE DYOR and start by researching
| Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, you can spread out
| your NFT horizons from there.
| leesec wrote:
| Literally what are you on about lol. The Quest 2 was the first
| breakout VR system and they've already got Quest 3 and AR
| glasses coming down the pipe. I for one am glad a big company
| is taking this space seriously.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| This. I'll be the first to signup for the ad free Sony or
| Microsoft metaverse. I pay for cable and Netflix. I will have
| no problem paying the equivalent to pop into VR and
| experience whatever this becomes. My hunch is a hybrid of
| MUDs, Fortnite, Subreddits, Tinder and Peloton.
| smolder wrote:
| It's honestly making me depressed that this recoining of
| the term metaverse is being taken seriously and is likely
| to stick the way "cloud" stuck, and worse, that the things
| development will be driven by a company like FB. I'm not
| the slightest bit interested in Mark Z's vision of a
| metaverse. Instead, I am afraid about how many _more_ wrong
| turns we can take with how we develop our information
| technology and apply it across society. The FOSS vision of
| computing where software progress is shared and acts an
| equalizer, and where people _control their softwares
| behavior_ is what we need, not new and better attention-
| whoring surveillance-economy user-hostile junk. (Now in
| 3D!)
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I'll be shocked if we don't see a touch of Clubhouse.
| neartheplain wrote:
| That's what VRChat has been for 4 years now. Though it's
| less Clubhouse rooms packed with celebrities and clout-
| chasers, and more improv comedy meets "Humans of New
| York":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/syrmor/videos
|
| VRChat as a platform has (enormous) problems of its own,
| but right now it's the best way to meet and chat with
| interesting people in VR.
| headphoneswater wrote:
| I find relating things to litature like that kind of silly but
| VR is pretty amazing these days and the quest2 shockingly nice
| to use
|
| 3d interaction clicks with people, i'm not suprised they are
| doubling/tripling down while leading the market
| lm28469 wrote:
| No matter how good VR is it still is no competition for the
| real, and will never be.
|
| It might be a nice entertainment gadget or working tool but
| that's all, anyone believing in the VR revolution is a fool.
| The TV or internet could have been amazing things, but we all
| see how it turned out: ad infected, mega corps ruled,
| consumerism oriented, echo chambers of the dominant ideology
| moron4hire wrote:
| That is an extremely privileged world view.
|
| I work on a social VR product for learning foreign
| language. Yes, VR language immersions are never going to
| replace real life, in-country immersions. But moving
| halfway around the world to study a language is just not a
| realistic prospect for the vast majority of people. For
| one, it's expensive and extremely disruptive to the rest of
| your life. Our students aren't college students who can
| take a semester abroad, they're professionals already in
| their careers, with kids and mortgages. For another, most
| of our students are studying languages where they wouldn't
| be allowed to move to the target country--either by the
| target country itself or the students' employers.
| VRay wrote:
| Man, that's a great point. Most of the commenters here
| can afford to just hop on a plane wherever they want with
| their limited vacation time, and of course a real trip is
| usually going to be better than a VR one.
| wanderer2323 wrote:
| Execrable - extremely bad or unpleasant.
|
| I looked it up so don't have to
| antiterra wrote:
| > just like adding branded content and sticking it in the
| skeletal husk of a bad shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an
| improvement when Epic did it.
|
| The reductive 'Fortnite is for kids' dismissal reminds me of
| the angry reaction by a particular cohort to the first cel-
| shaded Zelda game on the Gamecube. They dreamed of 'realistic'
| graphics targeted toward serious gamers and even claimed they
| were betrayed by WIP footage that teased their dream.
|
| Fortnite is a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling around
| its building mechanic. I watched Jonathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendell
| (who is currently a 40-year-old and one of the earliest
| professional gamers) struggle in deep concentration on trying
| to incrementally improve his building speed and technique. I
| know many adults who play and enjoy the game, and they seem to
| enjoy the branded tie-ins. They are mature enough for their ego
| to be unaffected by the game's cartoon art style, chosen
| instead of a gritty Call of Duty realism. It has solid
| mechanics and the content has been highly polished, even when
| not tied in to branded content.
|
| Even so, I'm still not clear how that connects to Ready Player
| One being a dull and cynical exploitation of nostalgia
| shoutouts/callbacks.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| If you have 20 minutes, this video[1] presents a good
| critique without mentioning aesthetics. It's especially
| notable how central the shop is to the whole experience.
|
| I personally found Fortnite to be a huge slog to play - with
| tons of downtime compared even to games like CS: GO, let
| alone old-school arena shooters like Q3. The only thing that
| kept me coming back is the season pass reward tracks and
| daily missions.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
| bitwize wrote:
| If you want action, drop into an area dense with players
| (city areas are good, as they have lots of loot). Then,
| you're either very good and somewhat lucky, or you'll die
| straight off.
|
| Engaging with others early is recommended for top-tier
| Fortnite players for building your combat skills.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > If you want action,
|
| > recommended [...] for building your combat skills.
|
| Or log onto a 32-man running CTF-Face][
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > I personally found Fortnite to be a huge slog to play
|
| I think that applies to the entire battle royale genre.
| Unless you're good, it's 20+ minutes of downtime (between
| waiting for the map to set, load, and for you to complete
| your jump and start finding opponents) for at minimum a few
| seconds of gameplay with an opponent.
|
| It really pains me how so few people play arena shooters
| any more. They are brilliant, and you can get into (and
| stay in!) the thick of the action for the entire time you
| are logged on, save for the match ending and a new map
| loading.
| baq wrote:
| a recent example of an absolutely great release which
| flopped hard, diabotical by 2GD and company. Q3 physics
| with some twists, very limited downtime, as hardcore as
| it gets, unfortunately no players...
| bentcorner wrote:
| I play Apex Legends and I like that it's up to you for
| the kind of gaming experience you want. A buddy and I
| have played cautious slow looting gameplay, only 3rd
| partying near the end and have won many times.
|
| Sometimes we drop hot and fight as soon as possible. This
| is vastly less successful but makes for shorter, faster,
| more intense games.
|
| It helps that matchmaking and loading is generally quick
| so there isn't much "fluff" downtime.
| josefresco wrote:
| Fortnite has this same element. Drop immediately off the
| bus into an area with lots of loot and you'll have
| instant action until you either die, or kill off every
| opponent in the area. Sure the movement in Apex Legends
| is faster and "feels" better to me, but the speed and
| complexity are actually cons for me as I don't have
| significant hours to invest whereas in Fortnite I can
| easily jump in once a week and compete.
| kipchak wrote:
| I think one major cause of the decline of arena shooters
| is those who are very good can expect to never die versus
| new players, causing a very high Dropout rate. In Battle
| Royales like Fortnite where a player will eventually get
| the drop on a better player thanks to the element of
| surprise, picking off two players already fighting, or
| better gear.
|
| Titanfall 2 is a somewhat recent example of a way to
| balance around this, with the more fun to use guns
| (Kraber, Cold War, Mozambique) but less effective than a
| hitscan bullet hose like the CAR. This video is a good
| example of what I mean, giving good players something to
| do other than racking up kills with meta weapons.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5szruNvGT5c
|
| Double Action: Boogaloo, an action movie themed source
| mod, takes this a step further with score being earned
| based largely on the weapon being used, which makes
| running around punching people more effective than say
| sitting in a corner with a powerful weapon.
| fouric wrote:
| > one major cause of the decline of arena shooters is
| those who are very good can expect to never die versus
| new players
|
| Keeping track of MMR/ELO and trying to match players
| against others of similar skill is online matchmaking 100
| (not even 101). What reason could a game possibly have to
| not implement it, except for possibly "lack of resources"
| (e.g. someone's indie project)?
| kipchak wrote:
| It's probably worth tracking and considering as a metric
| for matchmaking, but a couple potential downsides could
| be lowering the player pool where other parameters like
| latency have to be expanded, it having the potential for
| reverse boosting/smurfing in order to grantee stomping
| worse players, and at least some people not finding it
| enjoyable depending on implementation/complaining about
| "forced" 50:50 winrates.[1][2] Not to say it's
| necessarily worse than the alternative, but there's at
| least some discontent with at least some of the
| implementations.
|
| Overwatch for example doesn't seem to try and fill in say
| 6 players of a range of 2500-2600 ELO, but will pull
| something like 2 higher ELO player and 4 low ELO players,
| partially due to there only being so many higher than
| average players to matchmake.[3] "Good" players get "bad"
| players to bring down their winrate and "bad" players get
| "good" players to bring theirs up. This miss-match might
| contribute to why some people become so toxic, especially
| when having fun relies on your teammates so heavily and
| everyone wants to be the DPS.
|
| Also personally I enjoy playing against better players
| (within reason) in order to improve my own gameplay via
| imitation.
|
| [1]https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-
| us/forums/84ad72a8b518479785...
|
| [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/blackopscoldwar/comments/ifwu
| y4/sbm...
|
| [3]https://win.gg/news/jeff-kaplan-on-overwatch-players-
| matchma...
| ineedasername wrote:
| _one major cause of the decline of arena shooters is
| those who are very good can expect to never die versus
| new players, causing a very high Dropout rate_
|
| I remember there was an interesting twist on this when,
| IIRC, Fortnite changed its matching algorithm to more
| likely place better players together with each other.
|
| A bunch of those players were frustrate-to-outraged over
| the change. The reason that at least some gave? They were
| losing too much, and sometimes they don't want all the
| high adrenaline & stress of competitive matches and just
| want to relax and have it easy. (Yes, _I know_ there have
| been more issues and complaints about the details of SBMM
| in Fortnite, this is just one of them)
|
| It struck me as a uniquely selfish view, as though the
| entire ecosystem should be structured to their own
| enjoyment rather than that of typical players. Like if
| Gary Kasporov wanted to play in the local High School
| chess leagues and threw a fit when he was told he
| couldn't.
| kipchak wrote:
| I believe there was similar complaints over SBMM in CoD
| Cold War. I'm mildly sympathetic to the view as playing
| players of different skill levels can be fun in some some
| situations, like learning tricks from better players or
| having a underdog comeback against a better team. Not
| quite the same highs or lows, if that makes sense. Some
| implementations seem more like they wind up targeting a
| 50/50 win rate, resulting in games that seem like the
| system expects them to be a loss. Overwatch felt closer
| to this for me.
|
| Overall I think the best solution is probably the old
| fashioned dedicated server, where people can find a group
| with a roughly similar playstyle and skill level, but
| still enough variety to not be overly same-ey per game. I
| have fond memories of going up against and cursing better
| server regulars, and then having it flipped around when
| on their team.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| It's a videogame. It should be structured for enjoyment.
| If you're not enjoying it, why are you spending your time
| playing?
|
| There's a whole problem around "people want to beat other
| actual humans", but in 1:1 competitive games, the average
| winrate is tautologically always 50%. In Battle Royale,
| the average winrate is more like 5% - But it's unevenly
| distributed, so some players are getting 20-30% winrates
| while others are getting 1%. The game is fun enough to
| play that people are willing to take 1% winrates, but at
| some level you want to win - That's where the real fun
| is. If you never win, the game is not fun. If you win
| occasionally, against skilled opponents, it feels like a
| great victory. If you win often, it's relaxing.
|
| (There exist some exceptions to "average winrate" -
| Asymetric games can have a per-player average winrate
| above 1, though can just as easily drop below - Dead By
| Daylight, for example, lists 1.5B "escapes" to 1.8B
| "sacrifices"[1] - Did the survivor "win" when they
| escaped? or did the killer "win" when they killed a
| player? It might make more sense to view it as a set of
| 1:1s, since each survivor might escape individually, at
| which case we're back to square 1)
|
| Ultimately, games live or die on being _fun_.
|
| [1]https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/dead-by-
| daylight-5th-anni...
| kipchak wrote:
| Creating ways for multiple players to win in one given
| match seems like it could be a way to balance out this
| issue. For example my team winning, top scoring, having
| the highest number of kills, the highest KD, scoring the
| most meta-XP or completing an achievement could all be
| different win conditions for different players. For
| example in Team Fortress 2 my team could lose and I could
| be bottom of the scoreboard and still feel like I won
| after getting a couple market gardener kills.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I like the movement in Titanfall 2 a lot. It feels like
| an evolution of the wall-jumping in UT2k4.
|
| I definitely believe that there's a high dropout rate for
| areas shooters. My experience was dying a lot until I got
| better - kind of like Dark Souls for multiplayer. But I'm
| still surprised that they're not popular anymore given
| how well single player Dark Souls sells.
| bee_rider wrote:
| In Dark Souls, other than a couple bosses which require
| playing reasonably well the whole way through, most
| enemies only have a couple gimmicks. You die to that
| gimmick once, go recover your souls, and then beat the
| enemy. There's a concrete sense of progress. Humans more
| likely have a pretty big bag of tricks, or just better
| fundamentals and map knowledge. I mean over the course of
| a game in an arena shooter, you'd probably just get
| incrementally better, right? It is unlikely that the top
| scorer of the leaderboard only had a couple gimmicks that
| you have to figure out and then win, haha.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Idunno I feel like most of the arena games did a decent
| job of holding your hand and providing a single player
| campaign that is good enough to level up skills with a
| bit. Also back in the day there were a lot more LAN
| parties, and with the dominance of server browsers it was
| easier to get into a community that was at a suitable
| skill level.
|
| But that does mirror my experience with newer games...
| the matchmaker usually isn't very good and I'm always put
| into games with players greatly better than me until I
| git gud.
| merlincorey wrote:
| You might enjoy the recently re-released and currently
| available "Late Game Arena" mode which you can start
| within 1 or 2 minutes and be back in the lobby for
| another round 1 or 2 minutes later.
|
| It starts you off the bus with a random but complete load
| out in a small circle with up to 60 (instead of 100)
| players.
| exdsq wrote:
| Redownloading Apex for this now :D
| Kiro wrote:
| > with tons of downtime compared even to games like CS: GO,
| let alone old-school arena shooters like Q3
|
| To me, they are completely different games. I love the
| slowness in BR and tension that builds up between the
| action.
| peeters wrote:
| > Fortnite is a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling
| around its building mechanic. I watched Jonathan 'Fatal1ty'
| Wendell (who is currently a 40-year-old and one of the
| earliest professional gamers) struggle in deep concentration
| on trying to incrementally improve his building speed and
| technique.
|
| When I think of the slogan "Fortnite is for kids" it rings
| true precisely for this reason. In my "old age" I simply
| can't keep up with the input rate/reaction time of high-level
| players.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yeah, and it's actually a pretty terrible attitude to have if
| you're into gaming because a large segment of the population
| thinks _all video games_ are for 12 year olds.
| merlincorey wrote:
| Everything you are saying about the skill ceiling in
| Fortnite, I completely agree from watching as well as playing
| the game over the years.
|
| Another point is that Creative mode in Fortnite is thought to
| soon allow full Unreal Engine Blueprints and open modding.
|
| The "mode selection" screen recently was turned into Netflix
| or Hulu like "tiles" with the majority of the tiles being
| Creative maps made by the community.
|
| Fortnite is making a pretty strong "metaverse" play with
| Creative and the recently released by Epic Games "Imposters"
| mode shows that you will soon be able to play nearly any game
| "in Fortnite".
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gfodor wrote:
| AR is going to be bigger than mobile and the PC, and you should
| be very worried if Facebook succeeds. Dismissiveness is
| foolish.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Not sure how it will be bigger than mobile. In public I won't
| be donning one of those headsets, but I will pull my phone
| out to comment on hacker news, or scroll news articles, etc.
| I don't think my scenario is unusual.
| istorical wrote:
| that's sorta like saying 'I can't see how computers will be
| bigger than pen and paper. In public I won't be using a
| mainframe computer, but I will pull my journal out of my
| pocket to take a note'.
|
| the implicit premise is that the category (AR/VR/XR)
| remains the same but the technology improves until its
| better for pretty much all usecases we currently use 2d
| screens.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| I can see your point, and admittedly I see how mine might
| come across a bit heavy on the Luddite. That said, I feel
| like this is one of those things that has been "just
| around the corner" for some time.
| gfodor wrote:
| Eventually it will be on contact lenses. The point isn't
| the hardware but the software stack whose outputs are "all
| visual and audio sensory perception" and inputs are "all
| body state." This will be the all enveloping abstraction of
| interactive computing. Everything we have today will run
| within that context. The headsets today are a transitional
| tech and will also on their own get very small, thin,
| light, and culturally accepted to wear in public. And no,
| they won't be ugly or hide your face.
|
| For many, not being seen via an avatar will be akin to
| feeling unclothed. It will be strange and unlikely to be
| fully accepted by people who are above a certain age.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That will take a while.
|
| AR isn't going to get big unless Facebook recruits other
| firms to make investments in content.
|
| Those investments are going to happen until a decent AR dev
| kit exists, but for now very expensive $2500 headsets are not
| good enough in terms of * image quality
| * brightness * size * drop a pair on anybody
| right now for a demo
|
| https://kguttag.com/
|
| points out the problems are difficult; industry badly wants
| full color, but a green-only design helps on all of those
| fronts.
|
| AR for the military is a real thing. The U.S. spends over $1
| million to train an infantry soldier, it can afford to equip
| one with a $2500 headset.
|
| Consumers will be sick and tired of metaverse promises long
| before Facebook can deliver.
| gfodor wrote:
| I wasn't referring to a specific hardware stack when I was
| referring to AR. I was referring to a software stack which
| also includes experiences that do not incorporate physical
| reality. And in my opinion the holographic transparent AR
| glass tech track is largely a dead end. I think passthrough
| AR devices like the Lynx-R are the best proxy for future
| consumer devices that incorporate the physical world.
|
| I feel pretty strongly we'll see a good Passthrough AR
| device from Apple in 2022.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. I'm still waiting on the Segway to
| revolutionize cities' transportation infrastructure.
|
| > _Steve Jobs, Apple 's co-founder, predicted that in future
| cities would be designed around the device, while Jeff Bezos,
| founder of Amazon, also backed the project publicly and
| financially._
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/04/engineering.hi.
| ..
|
| > _John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than
| the Internet[...] Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was
| "as big a deal as the PC"[...]_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway#History
| nonfamous wrote:
| Not to derail the topic at hand, but it was the Segway that
| proved the concept of dynamic stabilization, which in turn
| led to drones, bipedal robots, SpaceX's reentry boosters,
| and much much more.
|
| My point is that the Segway does seem like a silly device
| in retrospect, but it was actually profoundly impactful.
| progre wrote:
| No, it was the cheap, good-enough inertial sensors that
| made that impact. Segway didn't invent them. Segway was
| beyond all hope when Weird Al made "White and Nerdy"
| clairity wrote:
| that's exactly the the advancement that the segway
| represents, but while the sensors, actuators, and
| engineering were notable, it was mainly the advancement
| of computing power that enabled dynamic stabilization.
| before the segway, the computations couldn't be done in
| real-time without (relatively) very expensive computers.
| gfodor wrote:
| The Segway in some ways succeeded, but it came in the form
| of electric scooters and EUCs. The thesis was right -
| personal electric vehicles - but you can't rebuild cities.
|
| It is not a useful analogy in any case, for a variety of
| reasons. The question you need to be asking is if video
| games will be able to break into reality once a certain
| level of capability and UX is met. You may be too old: AR
| may be a young person's reality.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| That's not really a revolutionary thesis? At least, not
| to the point where I would hold it up as a prior for AR.
| Bicycles started appearing in the early 1800s, adding an
| electric motor was an obvious step once the technology
| was small enough.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > AR is going to be bigger than mobile and the PC
|
| AR will be a niche product constrained primarily to
| industrial applications.
|
| There, we've both made our blind predictions, now we get to
| see who's right!
| gfodor wrote:
| Mine isn't blind but based on the emotional connection I've
| seen happen in VR between family members.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| No, that's just a different kind of blindness: not
| recognizing your own experiences might not extrapolate to
| others.
|
| I'm sure there was pockets of people who thought 3D TV
| was the greatest thing ever, and look how far that
| technology has come. Alexa and Siri were once upon a time
| going to be the greatest things ever, until everyone
| realized how very meh the experience was in practice.
| Smart watches were similarly going to change the world
| and have since largely pivoted to being niche products
| for health nuts.
|
| BTW, I'm not saying you're absolutely wrong! I just don't
| think there's any reason to believe you're right, either,
| and a _lot_ of reasons you might not be, including sky-
| high costs, practical technology limitations, the lack of
| killer applications, social barriers to adoption (see:
| Google Glass), etc.
| neartheplain wrote:
| The point of AR is to layer one's reality with additional
| information, while the point of VR is to escape reality
| entirely. I think the latter is more compelling for most
| people, and the products for VR are here now.
| gfodor wrote:
| No these terms are going to end up being dropped - the key
| capability is being able to override visual and auditory
| perception fully. Physical reality is one of the inputs and
| can be used or discarded to the degree necessary. For
| example, a fully immersive VR app that takes into account
| objects and other things in the room to ensure the virtual
| experience generated doesn't lead to a person walking into
| things. This will, in many cases, be a knob a user can turn
| or the software will turn on their behalf: how much do I
| want the real world to leak into my eyeballs and ears? If I
| am walking down the sidewalk with a friend, we may be
| experiencing a quiet forest path, with other strangers we
| pass in the real world appearing as elves or animals to cue
| us of their presence, but as I approach the curb and go
| into the street, due to increased hazards, the real world
| will become more apparent and the forest will dissolve away
| so I can remain safe while I cross.
| neartheplain wrote:
| >For example, a fully immersive VR app that takes into
| account objects and other things in the room to ensure
| the virtual experience generated doesn't lead to a person
| walking into things.
|
| This already exists and works very well, in the form of
| the SteamVR and Oculus VR play area guardian systems:
|
| https://support.oculus.com/guardian/
|
| >If I am walking down the sidewalk with a friend, we may
| be experiencing a quiet forest path, with other strangers
| we pass in the real world appearing as elves or animals
| to cue us of their presence
|
| How will the system cue used hypodermic needles?
| nivenkos wrote:
| Both could be useful. Remember what life was like before
| mobile GPS?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Metaverse is supposed to mean poetry about poetry.
|
| https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/poems-about-poetry
|
| https://poets.org/lesson-plan/poems-about-poetry
|
| http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/
| hvidgaard wrote:
| Your comment was going pretty well until you wrote
|
| > Even crazier, most of them approvingly point to the execrable
| "Ready Player One" as an example of a vision to deliver on. No,
| I'm sorry, a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can
| be more aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-
| congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not
| being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites
| lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent
| "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future.
|
| Is pretty much as far from what actually happens in the book as
| you can get and completely misses the point on why it's used as
| a reference point to this metaverse stuff.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Did we read a different book? GP's description is how I
| remember it, too.
| jsemrau wrote:
| The book is even worse than the movie, IMHO. Shamelessly
| plugging my own article [1] But the movie had the potential
| to be a cultural game-changer in the same way as Hackers and
| surely The Matrix had to the adoption and "coolness" of the
| Internet at the turn of the century.
|
| [1]https://medium.com/@jsemrau/hackers-vs-ready-player-
| one-b6ad...
| r00fus wrote:
| The Matrix, yes. Absolutely iconic even to this day.
| Hackers was known by no-one I knew. Sneakers was a much
| better movie and still relatable.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > I was one of these young software engineers that saw
| Hackers back in 1995 and was totally blown away by the
| potential shown of network technology.
|
| > ... Hackers (1995), which after more than 20 years, holds
| still up amazingly well.
|
| I'm not sure you're demonstrating any appreciable sense of
| objectivity here.
|
| Hackers was an absolute joke of a movie; an exaggerated
| snapshot of ridiculous, misinformed 1990s pop culture
| thinking on technology.
|
| Ready Player One is pop culture fan service, played out
| amidst a dystopian corporate future. It's not even really
| trying to discuss technology at all.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Hacker surely was exaggerated, ridiculous, and
| misinformed but it made tech "cool".
|
| I believe that Metaverse tech, which is currently at the
| same stage is isolationistic and enjoyed by a fringe of
| users. Same as the Internet was seen in the early '90s.
| pram wrote:
| Hackers was a joke but it has an enduring cultural cachet
| with IT nerds at least. I hear "hack the planet" and
| references to "the gibson" all the time still. I don't
| think I've ever heard a single IRL reference to anything
| in RPO
| sushisource wrote:
| Huh? People refer to corny one liners from Arnie movies
| too, that doesn't mean they had a philosophical impact on
| the way those people think about guns, or whatever.
|
| Hackers is a hilarious and fun over the top movie but I
| don't think it changed the way anyone thinks about
| technology.
| pram wrote:
| I didn't say it did.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There were plenty of references, but they were to the
| same '80s pop culture that the book worships. Really, all
| of the VR tech was just a plot device to create a magic
| world where that Gen X nostalgia never ends.
|
| Ready Player One tells us about technology about as much
| as Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 does.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| nah that's basically it
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| It does completely and utterly miss the metaverse reference
| point. So wrapped up in regurgitating its reddit style take
| that it overlooks that the virtual world is all the current
| metaverse building crowd is taking from it. The characters
| and even the nostalgia are irrelevant for that purpose.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's also an inherent contradiction to it all. If you create
| a world where users can create their own content and have a lot
| of freedom - they will create lots of digital penises (see the
| aforementioned Second Life). But if you want an environment
| where "brands" are comfortable to "engage" with users you need
| to keep the space as penis-free as possible.
|
| Given Facebook's history of prudishness I suspect their
| metaverse will be closer to "Fortnite -shooting +ads" rather
| than Ready Player One.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > But if you want an environment where "brands" are
| comfortable to "engage" with users you need to keep the space
| as penis-free as possible.
|
| As always, advertising is the root of all the evils we face
| today in our technological society. When is this industry
| gonna be regulated out of existence?
| neutronicus wrote:
| Oh, I think you can still chase a few pointers up the Tree
| of Evil from advertising
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I don't doubt it. What are your thoughts?
| drusepth wrote:
| I would kind of prefer a space where I can "engage" with
| companies/people I'm interested in instead of a space full
| of peni.
|
| Without being reductive, though: there's obviously a
| middle-ground here. For example, property/space is "owned"
| by entities in Second Life and those owners can kick/ban
| others who aren't behaving from their space. It seems
| entirely possible for a large, 3D space to have areas where
| brands (or other entities) can ensure they have a penis-
| free space without dictating what the rest of the "world"
| is like.
| Animats wrote:
| _they will create lots of digital penises (see the
| aforementioned Second Life)_
|
| Actually, they rarely do in Second Life. As I mentioned in a
| previous posting, in a big 3D world, being a jerk doesn't
| scale. You can only make trouble locally. Second Life is
| about the size of Greater London.
|
| Most virtual land is leased to individuals, and the
| leaseholder can eject or ban annoying visitors. There's also
| peer pressure. People can and will tell jerks they are being
| a jerk. This works better in 3D than it does in text forums.
|
| There are a few public places in Second Life that are jerk
| magnets. These are the "social islands", where new users
| enter the system after completing the tutorial. They're the
| bus terminals of Second Life. They're intended as transit
| points. Most users take one of the portals and leave for a
| new destination. Some new users, confused about what to do,
| stay there. Some losers go there to harass new users. They're
| the same kinds of losers found in real-life bus terminals.
|
| People who write articles about Second Life sometimes don't
| get past the entry area, and they think that's typical of the
| whole virtual world. It's more like visiting only the Port
| Authority Bus Terminal in NYC and then publishing an article
| about your trip to New York.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Most virtual land is leased to individuals, and the
| leaseholder can eject or ban annoying visitors.
|
| > Second Life is about the size of Greater London.
|
| Both these statements are directly contradicted by
| https://secondlife.com/land/ which says land is bought from
| LindenLabs and that SL is not fixed in size but they
| continuously add more "land" with new users, so anyone can
| buy land themselves. Premium users get 1000 square meters
| free.
| Animats wrote:
| Linden Lab uses the term "buy" in promotional material,
| but it's really software as a service, hosted at AWS-
| West-2, and there's an ongoing monthly charge.
|
| Second Life Main Grid size as of 17 Oct 2021 is 1786.64
| square kilometers.[1] The area of Greater London is 1,572
| square kilometers.[2] The number of regions changes
| slightly from day to day, but not by much.
|
| [1] http://gridsurvey.com/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London
| RNCTX wrote:
| That was not always the case.
|
| Sticking with the Epic example, a great deal of custom maps
| made it into regular rotations in the original Unreal
| Tournament community, and a great many mods were played for a
| very long time.
|
| But people weren't doing it for money, or "brands" as you
| say. They were building stuff for their own enjoyment.
|
| A community polices itself, ultimately. If "brands" try to
| police it, then yes you will get penises and Hitler, because
| "brands" have assumed liability for said policing and the
| community itself is rightfully reluctant to help them do
| their jobs. Penises and Hitler are more often than not a
| subconscious lashing-out at the "brands."
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> If you create a world where users can create their own
| content and have a lot of freedom.
|
| Wasn't this the promise of the internet? A place where any
| and all information could be free? Now we have ongoing war
| over who controls the information and who can see what
| information when. We have companies that skirt users privacy,
| manipulate user data and manipulate users so they can
| monetize them to the fullest.
|
| I don't see how the "metaverse" will be any different than
| what the internet has become.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Wasn't this the promise of the internet? A place where
| any and all information could be free?
|
| Is it not? I do not think the promise was that any and all
| information on someone else's computers would be free.
| troyvit wrote:
| Yeah and it's skipping the first step of being an open
| network to start with. It'll be like AOL.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Do you mean penis-free as in beer, or penis-free as in
| speech?
| carols10cents wrote:
| This is the best comment I have ever read on this entire
| website.
| pjerem wrote:
| > penis-free as in beer
|
| Oh do I hope it is.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| I dunno.
|
| From my perspective it seems inevitable that somebody will
| create a killer VR app/world. If FB is really dedicating a
| large amount of resources to this, I'm sure they will be
| successful at some point. Their budget can be orders of
| magnitude higher than even the most expensive game ever
| developed, if they wanted to. I just hope they take cues from
| game designers and focus on making it "fun".
|
| I mean, a VR office could conceivably be a new normal setting
| to perform work in. The technology is not far enough along at
| this point though... imagine trying to code on a virtual screen
| in low res, hah. And many prefer the privacy of the new remote
| work normal, and probably wouldn't want to be "physically"
| present, even if in virtual form.
|
| Haven't really followed what their intention is with metaverse,
| but I imagine they are trying to build an actual
| endless/seamless virtual world where you'd spent a large amount
| of time in, and possibly even work in.
|
| But again, gonna be kinda hard to make it that engaging with
| current tech. And the amount of assets that would need to be
| created is enormous.
|
| Maybe they start with just VR meetings/office.
| peter303 wrote:
| Pokeman GO was an earlier killer AR app. Made Niantic a
| boatload.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I don't think there is any chance of Facebook becoming the
| company that hosts the most widely popular metaverse in 20
| years.
|
| Facebook, under Zuck's leadership in particular, is driven by
| greed and control. They repeatedly demonstrate a willingness
| to make user hostile decisions for short term gain: they
| build to commodify their audience, not to satisfy them.
|
| Times Square Wal-Mart _is_ Mark 's idea of a virtual
| wonderland, and that's why it won't win.
|
| The successful metaverse will be led by someone with the
| spirit of Willy Wonka - it must be whimsical and empowering
| and sincere. Facebook simply lacks that spirit and heart, and
| I see no path to them changing company culture that
| drastically.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >just like adding branded content and sticking it in the
| skeletal husk of a bad shooter game for 12 year olds wasn't an
| improvement when Epic did it.
|
| I'm pretty sure it was though. Fortnite is one of the most
| popular games in history and is single handedly responsible for
| Epic's financial success over the last 5 years.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Popular, successful == improvement?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Popular, successful == improvement?
|
| What other criteria do you have for improvement?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Surely you're not arguing that popularity/profitability
| equates to quality? If so, McDonalds represents the best
| hamburger and fries in human history.
|
| There are more dimensions than popular appeal.
| [deleted]
| Kiro wrote:
| What is quality?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Short answer: Usually not the lowest common denominator,
| by definition.
|
| Longer answer: Read _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
| Maintenance_
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >There are more dimensions than popular appeal.
|
| In the context of a consumer product, not really.
| Everything is always a tradeoff to optimize for multiple
| factors. Mcdonalds may not be the highest quality, but
| they've sold billions of hamburgers for a reason. Their
| product is what the market wants, with enough acceptable
| tradeoffs to operate at a scale that fulfills demand.
|
| tl;dr: The customer is always right.
| prepend wrote:
| > a horny 15 year old shaving his body hair so he can be more
| aerodynamic in VR while engaging in extended self-
| congratulatory monologues about what a Nice Guy he is for not
| being repulsed by his "Rubenesque" girlfriend while he recites
| lines from Ghostbusters in a series of completely incoherent
| "memba this???" vignettes, is not a vision for the future.
|
| Sadly, I think this may be the future where we don't solve
| climate change so more and more people just check out from
| reality.
|
| In Snow Crash, I don't think people liked the meta verse so
| much as their life in a shipping container sucked being in the
| meta verse was better.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The same could be said of social media, games, streaming
| entertainment, etc. in the modern day.
| codefreakxff wrote:
| Ready Player One movie was terrible. The book was fun. Felt
| more genuine and didn't have silly stuff like the movie
|
| AR/VR does run the high risk of creating a super dystopian and
| fragmented real world. It's definitely something to watch out
| for
| pharke wrote:
| I really hope that VR simply replaces screens and results in
| us being somewhat less sedentary. You're right that there is
| a great danger it could replace a lot more of the real world
| leading to a dystopian nightmare, things like real social
| interaction, time spent in nature, and making physical things
| but these are also the things that have been most severely
| impacted by screens, mass media, and the internet.
| psychometry wrote:
| Most of our screen time is spent working. 8+ hours staring
| at a screen is bad enough for our eyes and brains. Imagine
| how much worse it will be when that screen is an inch from
| your eyeballs. I highly doubt that VR will be replacing
| screens for anything but occasional recreation anytime
| soon.
| pharke wrote:
| I don't find there's too much difference between staring
| at a computer screen and using VR. VR headsets do provide
| a motivation to create displays that can allow your eyes
| to focus on closer or further objects though since they
| aim to reproduce reality and a big sticking point is the
| fixed focus nature of all current headsets. We'll have to
| see if there are any announcements at the next Connect
| event since they've been working on this technology
| https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/
| wongarsu wrote:
| AR is probably the bigger threat to social interaction,
| allowing us to use our phones without even looking down.
|
| VR lends itself more to MMORPG-like experiences, which are
| quite social. Similarly, Ready Player One didn't lack
| social interaction or real friendship.
|
| For time spent in nature or making physical things it's
| probably the other way around. AR could make these things
| much more accessible (even if "less pure"), while VR
| doesn't exactly promote them.
| pharke wrote:
| AR will likely be a subset of VR enable by pass through.
| Check out https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/
|
| Until we can perfectly simulate physical reality, virtual
| interactions will never be as real as real world
| interactions.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > virtual interactions will never be as real as real
| world interactions
|
| I'm not quite sure what makes an interaction more or less
| "real". The people on both ends of the interaction are
| real, so surely if they interact that is a real
| interaction?
|
| So far all virtual interactions lack some aspect of
| communication, but with full-body tracking and eye-
| tracking VR already offers the closest analog to face-to-
| face communication we have. Mapping all the tiny facial
| expressions will remain a challenge, but isn't really
| that far fetched.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| I don't know, Acererak playing Joust with the protagonist
| seemed pretty silly to me, and that was in the book.
| codefreakxff wrote:
| Well, yes. I didn't cite the specific silly things from the
| movie I was referring to. But the one from the trailers
| that always made me groan was the synchronized sitting down
| in and buckling themselves in for the car chase. Just tins
| of cringy stuff in the movie. The book was a quick read
| with silly things but spoke to my childhood so I enjoyed it
| [deleted]
| freyir wrote:
| It's not nice to trash the art and entertainment that other
| people enjoy, but man, I hated that book.
| wincy wrote:
| I quit reading it when there was an audience cheering the
| protagonist on for knowing facts about 80s video games, it
| just made me super embarrassed, in the same way I used to
| get when I'd watch the show Doug and he'd talk to Patti
| Mayonnaise, or literally any scene of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
|
| The difference is the evocation of that embarrassment was
| intended by the authors of the latter two.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I agree. The whole time I was reading the book I was
| thinking "I'd probably enjoy this more as movie" and I was
| right (although only a bit, still didn't care much for the
| movie). Name dropping a bunch of references for references
| sake is more effective when you can see them.
|
| Also it seemed clear to me that some chapters only existed
| to provide notes to a future movie production, and didn't
| need to be infodumped. (One chapter in particular the only
| thing that actually happened was he was sitting in class
| and letting his mind wander, IIRC, and did nothing to drive
| the plot forward, just infodump).
| r00fus wrote:
| You aren't alone. It was completely saccharine and the only
| reason I got through it was it was an audiobook and I had a
| long commute at the time.
|
| In retrospect rereading/listening to something like
| Cryptonomicon or Hyperion Cantos for the umpteenth time
| would have been much more enjoyable.
| toyg wrote:
| Dunno, the silly stuff is what saves the film for me.
| Underneath there is just a banal boy-meets-girl story with
| bad interpreters (classic Hollywood "attractive girl trying
| to pretend that she's not attractive", among others); but the
| ridiculous "VR van" and the smorgasbord of nerdpop references
| make for some decent smiles, if not laughs.
| VRay wrote:
| Most people are really attractive with the right clothes,
| makeup, and attitude.
| toyg wrote:
| I live 10 miles from where Olivia Cooke grew up, and let
| me assure you that she's not "average".
| riffraff wrote:
| but the book is like 70% nerdpop references too.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Spielberg is a better director than Cline is a writer.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I think what's even worse about Ready Player One is that
| everyone seems so bogged down in the minutia of the book of a
| poorly written 15 year old being in infatuated with a young
| woman without an eating disorder, they miss the whole distopian
| aspect of a world run by monopolistic corporations and corrupt
| governments powerless to stop them.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I was more "bogged down" by the alluring dog whistle of GenX
| early stage hacker cultural references: 2112, Tomb of
| Horrors, Atari, Joust, etc.
|
| Of course they left most of that out of the pathetic film...
| syshum wrote:
| The problem here is the unyielding reality that power
| corrupts. This is true if this power comes in the form of
| Government, or Corporations.
|
| Society today has self feeding feedback loop that is going to
| continue to grow where in government regulations are used to
| phase out small companies in favor of larger companies, as
| those companies become corrupt or at best at odds with the
| population, the population demands they be more heavily
| regulated which then leads to more power and more corruption
| in both government and corporations.
|
| The only real solution to this is less powerful more
| distributed government, but people largely fail recognize
| this reality instead focusing on "electing the right" people
| or party.
|
| Power Corrupts, the only way to end corruption is to deny it
| power.
| coliveira wrote:
| Government is less powerful nowadays than it has ever been
| since WW2. I don't think this helped in anything to reduce
| power of corporations, quite the contrary. Moreover, it is
| not government that control corporations/rich people, it is
| the opposite. The fight should be against the source of
| power, not against their powerless representatives.
| syshum wrote:
| >>Government is less powerful nowadays than it has ever
| been since WW2.
|
| I absolutely disagree with this. Under what metric and
| what government are you referring to.
|
| US Federal Government has continually and unabatedly has
| increased and centralized its power since at least the
| Great Depression, Taking power from local and State
| governments transferring it to the Federal Government.
|
| Under no metric can one say government in the US is less
| powerful today.
|
| >The fight should be against the source of power, not
| against their powerless representatives.
|
| The Source of government power is it monopoly on the
| initiation of violence, last I check it was only
| government with the legal power to steal, plunder,
| arrest, jail, and even kill people that disobey.
|
| I think it is fine the fight against both
| coliveira wrote:
| > Under what metric and what government are you referring
| to.
|
| In the metric that matters: who bought the US government.
| Current US government is bought by corporate interests
| and does absolutely nothing that goes against big
| corporate power. This indicates that government is
| subjugated to the capitalist oligarchy, and the crimes it
| commits are allowed or supported by the same capitalist
| oligarchy.
| syshum wrote:
| So we have come full circle, and you are basically
| restating my original thesis.
|
| Government created corporations, corporations are not a
| free market invention. With out government there can be
| no corporations as they are simply a fictitious legal
| entity created by government for the purposes of
| liability protections, and investment
|
| You seem to have this impression that Corporations hate
| regulation, this is false, I mean hell Amazon, Facebook,
| even Google has BEGGED for regulations at various points
| because the know it kills competition in the market.
|
| But yes, keep blaming capitalism for problems created by
| government, I am sure more government will solve those
| problems....
| coliveira wrote:
| > corporations are not a free market invention
|
| Well, if a "free" market cannot create corporations, then
| what can it really do? You're talking about a fantasy
| created by your head, not about a free market.
| nybble41 wrote:
| The argument is that _limited liability_ is something
| which can only come from a government and not a free
| market--not companies in general. To a small degree this
| is probably true, but you can get very close through
| ordinary contracts. For the most part limited liability
| only shields you when it comes to your creditors and
| ordinary business dealings; if you harm someone
| deliberately, or through negligence, your status as an
| agent of a limited liability corporation will not prevent
| you from being found personally liable. And it 's not
| difficult to specify in a contract that any compensation
| for breach of contract is limited to the assets of the
| company and not its owners, so that much does not require
| any government intervention. That leaves a "grey area"
| limited to accidental harm not involving negligence where
| the corporation lacks sufficient resources to cover the
| liability--which is a tiny minority of all cases where
| corporations probably receive more protection than the
| corresponding organizations would in a free market, and
| really not something worth obsessing over.
| thrashh wrote:
| I have to disagree with you too.
|
| Government is more weak now because people have become
| very distrustful of it (reasonable given Vietnam and the
| events since). Because of that, the government has a lot
| less teeth nowadays to implement policies.
|
| I know people talk about things like abortion and vaccine
| mandates and these issues are extremely important, but
| IMO they are extremely small scale topics that are more
| related to current cultural norms than long term
| policies.
|
| We're not dealing with the cultural issues of the 1960s
| these days. What we deal with are the 100 year old
| bridges, infrastructure projects, processes and programs
| that previous generations built. To me, these issues are
| much more important than anything else because they
| require investment now and yet their returns don't
| realize until much later.
|
| Yet our corporate tax rate is the lowest in a very long
| time and corporate tax evasion is huge, yet the
| government hasn't had the support they need to do much
| about it. At the same time, people are (understandably)
| hugely distrustful of politicians, but all that does long
| term is hamper the policy making that we need now to set
| the stage for our grandchildren.
|
| I think people vehemently taking pride and fighting over
| a lot of the current issues now is so short sighted.
| syshum wrote:
| I see the fundamental issue here. You are looking at from
| a perspective of what the government should be doing for
| you, where I do not believe the government should do
| anything for me.
|
| I look at from what the government is or can do to me,
| what freedoms they take from me, you mention vaccine
| mandates and call it a "small issue". However from my
| perspective it is a HUGE issue, mandates to me are a
| complete intrusion into my body autonomy, if I loose that
| I cease being a free individual.
|
| I look at things like the War on Drugs, War on Gun
| Rights, War on Terror, and 1000's laws that attempt end
| runs around the constitution and individual rights as an
| extreme expansion of government power
|
| Where you look at crumbling bridges, a service I do not
| believe should be in the purview of the federal
| government at all in the first place, as seen a weakened
| government.
|
| Roads at best should be a Local and State government
| issue not Federal Government. The fact that the federal
| government as taken over that function is an example of
| Expansion of government power.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Roads at best should be a Local and State government
| issue not Federal Government. The fact that the federal
| government as taken over that function is an example of
| Expansion of government power.
|
| But that still means the issue is insufficient government
| strength, though right? Simply at the local and state
| level rather than the federal level. Perhaps you can
| reframe it then as a power misallocation, but it still
| means _some_ government is not powerful enough to get
| things done.
| syshum wrote:
| Nationwide roads are not bad. There are some states that
| are worse than others for the roads. Most of the big
| stories however have been about Interstate system bridges
| which are funded by mostly an 18.4c per gallon tax on gas
| and a commercial tax on diesel for trucks.
|
| The federal government massively under funds the federal
| highway system.
|
| That said, Road maintenance is not a government power
| issue. Road Construction might be if they need to seize
| land.
|
| The calling out of roads is a red herring, Road account
| for a infinitesimal part of the budget, even the so
| called "build back better" plan has very very very little
| money in it for roads and bridges (about 3% of the
| spending)
|
| To focus on that as an example of government being weak
| is ridiculous and completely miss understands the role
| and scope of government in the lives of everyday people.
|
| If the government privatized all the roads would people
| that support this argument then claim we are in an
| stateless society because the government no longer builds
| the roads...
|
| We can agree that the government is terrible at
| maintaining roads, however I do not view that as an
| example of government weakening, it is an example of
| government incompetence. Incompetence is universal and
| all encompassing for all government programs
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| Yes, yes, we get it. You're incapable of independent
| thought, and you repeat talking points without ever
| considering them meaningfully.
|
| Thank you for letting us all know that you have given up
| your mental autonomy, and that you are incapable of
| thinking or saying anything remotely interesting.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I think it's because the monopolistic corporation meme has
| been done to death, so the focus is instead on the mindless
| "fun" adventure aspect.
| bitwize wrote:
| Doesn't matter. Monopolistic corporations are one of the
| four horsemen of the apocalypse (alongside the climate,
| income inequality, and social justice) so we must be
| constantly reminded of them.
| advrs wrote:
| "social justice" ? Explain
| bitwize wrote:
| That LGBTQ/BIPOC/etc. are oppressed must be fronted as a
| theme in media, just like the climate, income
| disparities, and huge corporations controlling
| everything.
| zemo wrote:
| if by everyone you mean the author then I agree
| ttepasse wrote:
| > The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing.
|
| Tangentially: If I remember Snow Crash correctly, the
| Metaverse/Internet in that novel belonged to only one person -
| who was the villain of the piece. He wanted to use the
| metaverse to distribute a "mind virus" which would enslave the
| world population to him.
|
| Somehow I do think Facebooks PR flunkies have not read the same
| novel as I.
| pbw wrote:
| The metaverse was an open standard in Snowcrash. The villain
| L. Bob Rife was distributing a mind virus in the metaverse
| and in real life using a drug, but he didn't create or own
| the metaverse.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
| ttepasse wrote:
| I took another look. In one way yes ...
|
| > The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol,
| hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of
| the Association for Computing Machinery's Global Multimedia
| Protocol Group.
|
| > In order to place these things on the Street, they have
| had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol
| Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning
| approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit.
| The money these corporations pay to build things on the
| Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the
| GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery
| that enables the Street to exist.
|
| ... but in another way this:
|
| > ,,I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying
| pseudojournalist who "interviews" him. He's sitting in his
| office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. "All
| television going out to consumers throughout the world goes
| through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from
| the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse
| --the entire Street--exists by virtue of a network that I
| own and control."
|
| So somewhat the moneychanger-in-Klondike approach.
|
| ("He" = Bob Rife, the villain; CIC = privatised CIA)
| BatFastard wrote:
| I was on the IEEE committee that worked on the
| "metaverse" standards back in 2007. I gave up after
| companies added members who pushed their own proprietary
| visions into the standard that made it meaningless. I
| have no hope for open standards.
| istorical wrote:
| It would be really cool if you could share some of what
| you guys envisioned for the metaverse at that time and
| how developments in AR and VR since have lined up with
| what you foresaw vs diverged, etc.
| disqard wrote:
| Piggybacking on here to +1 the request for perspective.
|
| I'm sure you can share some interesting stories and/or
| arcs of what-was-envisioned vs. what-ended-up-happening.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Simplest example, how does an Avatar from one proprietary
| system travel to another? You would need a common(open
| source) format for the avatar metadata (what meshes make
| it up, how/where are they attached to each other, what
| animations the avatar has, what textures they have, what
| shaders they use), a common format for the animations,
| the meshes, the textures. You also need a common name for
| avatar actions, walk, run, crawl, wave, etc. Of course
| everyone wanted their own proprietary format to be the
| standard. This doesn't even touch on more complex issues
| like currency, voice communications, video
| communications. The problem is everyone has to find value
| outside of their proprietary systems, which 14 years ago
| was as much of a problem as it is now. Only outcome I can
| see is we will live with silo's until we get AI good
| enough to convert from one systems format to another's.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I believe PKD's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" is
| a better metaphor for what Facebook wants to do with the
| Metaverse, but it'll end up more like "The Three Stigmata
| of Palmer Luckey".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_
| E...
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm getting more of a "This Perfect Day" vibe from it, with
| how self-important Mark Zuckerberg treats himself.
|
| _Christ, Mark, Wood and Wei,_
|
| _Led us to this perfect day._
|
| _Mark, Wood, Wei and Christ,_
|
| _All but Mark were sacrificed._
|
| _Wood, Wei, Christ and Mark,_
|
| _Gave us lovely schools and parks._
|
| _Wei, Christ, Mark and Wood,_
|
| _Made us humble, made us good._
| fullshark wrote:
| I'm not going to bash anyone interested in shaking up the
| status quo of the internet, cause a Times Square Wal-Mart is
| what we have right now and it seems to be getting worse.
| Kiro wrote:
| Long comment just to say it's not for you. I am excited but
| wish it was pioneered by someone else than Facebook.
| nikk1 wrote:
| We are pioneering on Twitter and Discord. Look into
| Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
| this_was_posted wrote:
| I sincerely hope this ages better than the comments rejecting
| the initial announcement of Dropbox saying no one will need it.
| I'm afraid that Facebooks best bet to grow even bigger is to
| try and force themselves in the aspects of our life that are
| now still mostly "offline". Facebook doesn't have to get
| everything right from the start it just has to be able to use
| its resources to outpace the competition.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| I don't use Dropbox and never have. Jobs was right
| humantorso wrote:
| Do you use any cloud storage service?
| pram wrote:
| Dropbox didn't invent uploading stuff to the internet.
| thesausageking wrote:
| A different view: they've lost the narrative and this is a way
| to reset it. Facebook used to be seen positively by users as it
| connected the world and brought people together. That's no
| longer the case. There's been scandal after scandal and users
| now associate Facebook with all of the negative things Facebook
| has become.
|
| At this point, they can't win the war on changing people's
| minds on these issues. So, instead, they need a new narrative
| to build around. They're ditching the Facebook name and
| branding, and focusing on a new vision around the Metaverse.
|
| It doesn't matter if this is real or not, or if VR/AR doesn't
| become the next computing paradigm. The narrative itself is a
| new, interesting thread to build their brand around.
| kmlx wrote:
| > users now associate Facebook with all of the negative
| things Facebook has become.
|
| who are these users you are writing of?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > It doesn't matter if this is real or not,
|
| In a way it does; because if it is widely perceived as phony
| and yet another distracting ploy, then it much less chance of
| actually changing the narrative around the reputation of "the
| company formerly known as FaceBook". In fact, further
| "sleight of hand" manoeuvres would fortify the dodgy
| reputation.
| thesausageking wrote:
| They need to convince people to buy into, but the
| technology itself doesn't need to be real. Not in the 5
| year time frame.
|
| Tesla's self-driving product is a great example of this.
| They got consumers to buy into the vision of self-driving
| cars way before it was actually ready. This allowed them to
| sell a lot more cars and pre-orders as well as have a
| narrative for investors to pump their stock. If they get
| FSD to work, it will be great. But, even if it never is a
| successful product, they've benefitted tremendously from
| the narrative itself and have been able to turn it into
| sales and cheap capital to invest in the business.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > They need to convince people to buy into, but the
| technology itself doesn't need to be real.
|
| Maybe. But on the other hand, Tesla was starting out with
| a _lot_ more user goodwill than FaceBook.
|
| Tesla isn't perfect, they have (IMHO) a good basic
| product, but with some build quality issues, labour
| issues, over-promising self-driving issues etc, and yet
| ... these issues have not shifted the narrative from
| basically favourable. Part of me still wants one, even
| though I know it's not going to drive itself. Maybe
| narratives are sticky?
|
| So, FaceBook is going into this with a massively negative
| narrative. Shifting it will be hard. We're all really
| cynical about FaceBook already.
| ldbooth wrote:
| >They're ditching the Facebook name and branding, and
| focusing on a new vision around the Metaverse.
|
| I doubt they are ditching it, and instead just abstracting
| the ownership chain one degree with a holding company and
| installing a straw man to blame. Watch him copy Larry and
| Sergei's moves, he may one day realize he held on too long
| and became something hard to un-become: infamous.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Idk if it's that hard when your that rich. Bill gates did
| it.
| bagels wrote:
| It only took quitting and giving away all his money.
| fsociety wrote:
| Agree with this. To add, I think they initially tried to
| rebrand as a privacy/security-first company but that, IMO,
| failed because they didn't commit to being a radically
| transparent company. Now they are trying to rebrand as
| something bigger.
|
| I still think they should just take a leap of faith and
| become radically transparent.
| bitwize wrote:
| RPO was obviously written by Cline's inner geek:
| https://youtu.be/CknjDqOeRnU
|
| The concept of a "metaverse" comes from _Snow Crash_ , which
| was a more realistic and cooler depiction of large-scale
| networked VR environments -- cooler because it reflected the
| early 90s internet, full of freaks and weirdos.
|
| If we're going to have a real metaverse, can it be the one from
| Croquet? I've always liked saying Alan Kay was building the
| metaverse, but only as a stepping stone to his true goal of
| building the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from _The Diamond
| Age_...
| yurlungur wrote:
| I think it's either an embarrassingly stupid business move made
| by execs who have no idea what they are doing (best case). Or
| worse it'll be a success and make Facebook an even more
| dystopian force. The potential for VR/AR to deeply damage
| society and sow discord is huge...assuming it's ever a thing.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Second Life has existed for 20 years and it's a fun novelty.
|
| Eh. My mother learned English in Second Life by paying an
| actual company that provided classes in Second Life. Instead of
| a boring chapter with some canned dialogue about, say, an
| airport scenario, they would take the class to a virtual
| airport, and roleplay there.
|
| Having a setting where everyone could interact led to organic
| conversations and seemed much more effective than the textbook
| approaches.
|
| Not sure I would call it a novelty.
| ajdegol wrote:
| That's actually pretty brilliant.
| Animats wrote:
| _The metaverse stuff is really, really embarrassing. Second
| Life has existed for 20 years and it 's a fun novelty._
|
| As a Second Life user and creator, and client developer, I
| agree. I think Second Life could be bigger if the technology
| was improved, and can see ways to do that. But the concept will
| not scale to Facebook levels. Besides, we have no way to do
| full dive technology in a home environment. (Location-based,
| maybe. The Star Wars Experience and omnidirectional treadmills
| indicate it's not impossible with enough space and machinery.)
|
| What will scale, and I suspect this is Facebook's vision, is AR
| goggles. Facebook, in your face, all the time. The dystopian
| vision of this is the "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's all too
| achievable, and very much in line with Facebook's business
| model.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
| disqard wrote:
| Every time you mention this video, I will thank you for
| posting it!
|
| It is a brilliant distillation of the commercialization of
| AR, and a "must watch" for all fanboys of the m-word.
|
| Many of us saw the potential of the Internet, the WWW, and
| have lived long enough to see its trajectory from pure
| promise and world-changing potential, into mostly commercial
| milking medium.
|
| I see no reason to assume that Zuck's vision will be any
| different.
| Animats wrote:
| That's what worries me. We can't do Ready Player One level
| immersion yet, but the Hyperreality level of AR is very
| close. About two more generations of Ray-Ban displays. And
| it's so Facebook.
|
| Business opportunity: "METADWEEB.COM" is unregistered.
| 015a wrote:
| Its especially ironic how none of the CEOs seem to recognize
| the entire story of Ready Player One being about an evil
| corporation desiring complete control of the "metaverse" in
| order to push advertisements, while enslaving people in virtual
| to pay their debts.
| [deleted]
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| North Central Positronics
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I can see why it might be frustrating to run a company full of
| different efforts, some of which are intended to be brand new or
| a change in direction, but nevertheless remain known as the one
| blue thing.
|
| Hopefully this also allows Zuckerberg to stay technologically
| strategic, where his gifts want him to be, as opposed to mired in
| questions of ethical standards for platforms used by teens and
| children.
|
| (Ideally an ethical platform could then also be cultivated
| through some of that technological power given back to community
| as well...In some ways one of the biggest hurdles to jump in the
| future is IMO allowing for such ethics systems to develop in a
| standardized, yet diverse fashion. If everybody has to use the
| same admin and moderation system the same way, for example, it
| incentivizes abuse by power users. Each new community or group
| will have its own psychological dynamic and deserves the
| opportunity to get off the ground without being pulled down into
| platform-sameness by a possibly angry or bitter set of power
| users.)
| elliekelly wrote:
| The window of opportunity for Zuckerburg/Facebook to run "an
| ethical platform" has long since closed. The only ethical play
| Zuck has left is to pull the plug and that will never happen.
| narrator wrote:
| Neal Stephenson, having coined the term in his book _Snowcrash_ ,
| is probably getting a good laugh out of this.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Someone needs to organize an HN AMA with Neal once they rename
| the company Meta and pivot the whole trillion dollar entity
| into the Snowcrash universe. It's just the sort of thing he
| would have written himself.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| It seems funny to name it Meta, as FB doesn't have anything to do
| with metaverse. They brought real names to the internet and still
| cling to that, but that means that instead of infinite
| personalities you have only one, the boring old personality that
| you always had and hated.
| ciconia wrote:
| "Facepalm"
| 14 wrote:
| They can become just like Nestle trying to hide who they are
| through countless different names so it is hard to follow who the
| parent company is.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Whatever name they want to call it I still refuse to use social
| media. It's a cancer and I'm happier without it.
| bil7 wrote:
| ok hacker news commenter
| ddtaylor wrote:
| There is a big difference between things like focused forums
| / discussion boards and social media. On HN and Reddit I
| engage with people about specific topics we have shared
| interests in. On social media (Facebook) you're either
| subjected to opinions about divisive topics or you exist in
| an echo chamber =/
| tytrdev wrote:
| Lolol
| Jemm wrote:
| Willing to put money on them changing to FB.
| [deleted]
| diego_moita wrote:
| I think Facebook has, by far, the best implementation of AI in
| tech today.
|
| No, really! I know the tricks of AI and even I, sometimes, get
| tricked into thinking that Zuckerberg is an actual and real human
| being, not just an AI bot faking empathy, decency and ethics.
|
| They pass the Turing test, with honors. That's how well they do
| it! :)
| mbg721 wrote:
| "No, you cannot call yourselves 'Meryl Streep.' "
|
| "Maybe she'll be flattered!"
| goldforever wrote:
| Change it to CIA.com
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Discussed yesterday as well (57 comments), from _The Verge_ ,
| which is the _Guardian_ 's source:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926089
| agumonkey wrote:
| Already rebranding ? strnge.
| pkulak wrote:
| Rumor is, it will be the Scheinhardt Wig Company.
| jdlyga wrote:
| "The Verge reported that the new name for the holding company
| could be linked to Horizon"
|
| How about Verizon? That's a creative name.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _The Verge reported that the new name for the holding company
| could be linked to Horizon, a word used in at least two virtual
| reality products that the company is developing._
|
| Did we just accidentally cross over into Shadowrun lore?
| Everyone's talking about the whole corporate dystopia thing but I
| didn't think we'd be this literal about it, they could just take
| the slogan as well while they're at it
|
| https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Horizon
| barberpole wrote:
| "Snakehead"
| peter303 wrote:
| "Faceverse"
| lioeters wrote:
| Into the Zuckerverse. Get the Zuck outta here..
| dougmwne wrote:
| This is a pretty worthless take from the HN community that
| Facebook==Bad. I've been watching the investments in VR, and I
| think it's a pretty bold move and only one that a founder-led
| company could even do. Fact is that Facebook has been largely
| responsible for VR up to this point and has sold the vast
| majority of all the HMDs out there. The VR/AR tech is brimming
| with possibilities and even a few days spent playing with the
| Quest 2 makes that obvious for anyone paying attention. They'll
| soon have 20k employees working on VR/AR. They are releasing a
| new HMD in a week that's rumored to bring face and eye, and
| potentially body tracking. They are announcing a company rebrand
| at the VR conference. Zuck has every indication of being all in
| on a pivot, from stale and dangerous social media that may soon
| be regulated out of existence, to fresh new pastures.
|
| Tech companies already sit in the middle of so much of our
| relationships with each other and each one of them delivers a
| terrible low-bandwidth experience. I believe Facebook's end game
| here is no less than digital teleportation. Put on a pair of
| sunglasses and you can be in the room with anyone in the world.
| It will be radically personal and intimate after decades of
| impersonal, disconnected, inhumane and isolating tech.
|
| And anyway, regardless of outcome, it will surely be more
| entertaining to watch a trillion dollar company go fully down the
| rabbit hole of some kind of cyberpunk fantasy than to watch them
| continue to dig the hole deeper on their society destroying
| social media tech.
| kixiQu wrote:
| > And anyway, regardless of outcome, it will surely be more
| entertaining to watch a trillion dollar company go fully down
| the rabbit hole of some kind of cyberpunk fantasy than to watch
| them continue to dig the hole deeper on their society
| destroying social media tech.
|
| I think the problem is that they seem to be headed towards
| doing both.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yes, they will do both as long as there is money in social
| media. There will be gobs of money there, up until the point
| it's made illegal or defanged. I think the probability of
| that happening continues to increase, either the democracies
| will save themselves or the future autocracies will do it for
| them.
| skizm wrote:
| > regulated out of existence
|
| Regulation would further entrench Facebook as the only social
| network able to implement everything legally required to be a
| social network. Facebook wants legislation the same way Amazon
| and Walmart want increases in minimum wages: so they can push
| out smaller competitors and upstarts easier.
| donmcronald wrote:
| It would be great if Facebook announced an open platform that
| focuses on enjoyable experiences rather than a closed platform
| that misappropriates PII and pushes negative interactions in a
| misguided quest for engagement. I won't hold my breath though.
|
| The value in VR is easy to see. Most kids I've seen that get to
| try out VR come out of it like a meth addict that wants to dive
| back in for the next high. It's insane.
|
| I think VR has a huge natural appeal and Facebook will just buy
| everything so they can own an entire growth industry. They'll
| keep the HMDs locked down and will destroy all competition with
| anti-competitive practices while regulators continue to look
| the other way. The entire VR industry will end up reaching a
| fraction of it's potential, but it'll still be profitable for
| Facebook so everyone will consider it a success.
|
| I'd pay to see MarkVR where once a month the community gets to
| vote to put Zuckerberg into a VR community on the Facebook
| platform and he live streams the experience for 1h. I think
| that's one way you can tell the difference between a
| visionary/enthusiast and someone that's just buying things they
| think will make money. One loves the idea of participating in
| the community they're building and wants to build a healthy
| community with enjoyable experiences. The other would do
| everything in their power to avoid it because making money is
| the only goal and it doesn't matter if the community and
| experiences are terrible. Which one do you think Zuckerberg is?
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Put on a pair of sunglasses and you can be in the room with
| anyone in the world. It will be radically personal and intimate
| after decades of impersonal, disconnected, inhumane and
| isolating tech.
|
| And how will that makes them money? The only thing that's going
| to be more "personal and intimate" is the way in which they
| deliver ads and the same divisive and polarizing content. It'll
| be be way worse that it is now. Imagine how bad things got
| simply by inserting text and pictures into your social media
| feed. What happens when you're fully immersed in the
| "metaverse" with ads and divisive content literally be all
| around you. And no two people get the same content either. It's
| horrifying.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Fully recording and controlling an immersive environment
| sounds like the ultimate money making proposition to me.
|
| I've spent time playing Poker Stars, Table Tennis, Rec Room
| and Alt Space interacting with adults. The interactions I've
| had are nothing like posting void-screaming updates to your
| feed and are everything like being there with a real person.
| People are kinder too, this is after all a real person in
| front of you and it is just as intensely embarrassing to make
| a fool out of yourself as it would be in real life. I
| recently had a nice conversation with a man about his
| partner's cancer diagnosis and was able to offer him real
| human empathy in a moment where the headset and avatars fell
| away. It reminds me of the intimacy that old POTS telephone
| lines had, like whispering into each other's ears. The
| potential is all there and the execution lies in the decade
| ahead. We will see, but I am paying attention.
| jonny_wonny wrote:
| We don't have to imagine what it's like to be surrounded by
| ads, because that's literally the physical world. Billboards,
| posters, and screens creating awareness for new brands and
| content are everywhere we look. It's been that way for
| decades, and the world hasn't ended yet. It's not that big of
| a deal.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I don't think what you're talking about, where I live, life
| is not at all like you described. Billboards aren't allowed
| except on reserves here in Canada. Unless you're in a
| commercial setting, you don't see posters or screens
| everywhere.
| pixiemaster wrote:
| Renaming to ,,The Circle"
| rvz wrote:
| Fecebook - Steve Jobs.
| amelius wrote:
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/04/steve-jobs-facebook-emails-ap...
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| So, nothing like a re-brand[1] to sidestep negative associations.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altria#History
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Dad joke, but they should call themselves "Newton". . . .
|
| Because after an Apple whacked them on the head, they started
| coming to grips with the gravity of the situation :P
| bena wrote:
| Because Google changed to Alphabet and everyone calls it that and
| never uses Google when they talk about who owns DeepMind or
| Fitbit.
|
| I mean, it's probably necessary for corporate structure or
| whatever, but no matter what they rebrand as, it'll still be
| "Facebook".
| meh2frdf wrote:
| I don't think anyone talks about Fitbit anymore ...
| kfprt wrote:
| I initially thought this was some kind of april fools joke but
| no, they're just that desperate.
| tobyscammell wrote:
| Meta.com
| babelfish wrote:
| Already owned by CZI, too
| slater wrote:
| ^ my money's on this.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| Deadbook
| Arete314159 wrote:
| This is what tobacco companies do. RJ Reynolds --> Altria.
|
| This is what oil companies do. British Petroleum --> BP.
|
| You rebrand because people have a bad taste in their mouth about
| you.
| snejad123 wrote:
| A true metaverse will be very difficult to create until we have
| brain-computer interfaces.
|
| All VR devs are entirely focused on the visual/audio output of
| devices but one very important detail that is missing is the
| illusory sixth sense, the kinesthetic receptors.
|
| You can solve x-y axis movement with treadmills, but how do you
| simulate z axis movement without anyone getting sick ?
|
| This is why a lot of people get nauseous on VR roller-coasters. I
| personally cannot use a VR device for more than 30 minutes
| without getting ill.
|
| Personally, I think the steps of XR evolution will go like this:
|
| (1) VR restricted to stationary games that don't require a lot of
| movement. The stage we're at right now.
|
| (2) AR goggles/glasses are most likely to be more desirable than
| VR within the next 100 years because they're improvements on the
| existing world rather than replacements. Workplace tools, heart
| rate metrics, etc. Basically the first working versions of these
| will be porting the main apps of iWatch to a glasses interface.
|
| (3) Lateral (x-y axis) VR could be improved to provide more
| immersive entertainment and games. Still nothing groundbreaking,
| and you're going to be restricted to using a very expensive
| treadmill.
|
| (4) Once brain/computer interfaces are successfully developed and
| approved by government regulating bodies for production and
| release, then people can plug into the "metaverse". I'm guessing
| this is at least 100 years or more away (that might be optimistic
| too)
|
| Also an important thing to note is that the infrastructure needed
| to support a living metaverse is very important. There is a big
| question mark on what this is going to look like coming out of a
| megacorp (especially one as greedy as FB). The internet had the
| luxury of being open/free/ad-free in the beginning, and had a
| strong developer community. Apple was successfully able to build
| a dev community for their iPhone but them and Android are really
| the only good examples I can think of.
|
| People even avoid developing on Microsoft's OS for less
| restrictive open-source alternatives.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| When is the last time you saw two people at a party adding each
| other on FB? It's been a pretty long time.
|
| Probably no other option of FB at this point.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| > Facebook would change the name of its holding company but not
| that of its eponymous social media platform
| htrp wrote:
| I would argue that Epic / Fortnite has a leg up on the metaverse
| than facebook. They are already doing virtual-esque events like
| that concert and it's only a matter of time before they add the
| VR/AR aspects.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Facebook needs to just buy Epic already.
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| Tim wouldn't sell. There are higher chances that Epic will be
| bought by Microsoft or by Sony PlayStation division. Or...
| they will go the Valve way, by creating their own platforms
| on open source, see Steam Community, OS, Deck, Index, etc.
| Many don't know but Steam Workshop and Community are
| extremely active, many social/creative things are going on
| across many gaming communities.
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| Introducing the "InYourFacebook"
| mtalantikite wrote:
| "Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice-president of global affairs, has
| said he now takes his Monday morning meetings in the metaverse
| with a virtual table and whiteboard."
|
| I once had a short consulting engagement with a VR company that
| spun out of Second Life and had to be "in world" the entire time.
| They had made a VR office space for the dev team to congregate
| in. The first time I beamed into a meeting room and saw a dozen
| blank faced avatars staring back at me I got filled with anxiety.
| I've been working remote for 13 years and I can't remember
| another time I felt anxious like that running a remote meeting.
|
| The people were great and the spatial audio was interesting, but
| I found it really distracting to have to be in a VR world when
| really I just wanted to be in emacs coding. I felt mentally
| drained by the end of every day, worse than being in an office
| working a full day. I felt "always on" in a way I don't in an
| office (and certainly don't when remote). Maybe there's a niche
| here, but it's really not for me.
| gfodor wrote:
| You're presuming the technology and software is fixed. It isn't
| - there are continual leaps forward and it isn't going to stop
| anytime soon.
| goldenManatee wrote:
| Ugh Nick Clegg. No doubt a future seat as Harvard/Stanford
| Dean, if not just UK PM. The man talks out both ends -
| impressively so, I might add.
| phatfish wrote:
| The UK already knows he talks out of both ends. His name is
| toxic here, Facebook oviously don't care much about
| converting more people in the UK to the cause with him
| involved.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| If they're already rolling Nick Clegg out to defend their
| metaverse ambitions then they can't think they're going to be
| very good for humanity.
| angellxr wrote:
| Appreciate their contributions to the metaverse, but they'll
| never build "The Metaverse," or "A Metaverse." They definitely
| will never own the Metaverse.
|
| The metaverse is open, collaborative, privacy focused, and free
| by default. It should be a public good. The walled gardens, and
| efforts to control are really part of the metaverse, rather than
| the entire metaverse itself.
|
| There are so many other orgs and people working hard on ensuring
| that it can't be owned. They can hire 100,000 more people, and
| they still can't own it. It's bigger than that.
| buzzert wrote:
| I relate with the platitude, but who is actually working on a
| free/decentralized metaverse right now? This just seems like
| something hackers are completely uninterested in, so the
| corporations will fill the void.
|
| This isn't quite like the Internet in the early days, which was
| born free and decentralized because it was invented by highly
| motivated hackers.
| ID1452319 wrote:
| TheFacebook
| mrkramer wrote:
| Is this a joke? Zuckerberg won't ever change the name of his
| first successful and beloved project just like Page won't ever
| change the name of Google or he already did with Alphabet but you
| know what I mean(we still all call it Google not Alphabet).
| laserlight wrote:
| Sounds like the stunt Google did with Alphabet. Total BS.
| bloomper123 wrote:
| This is a good idea. Their brand is fu*ked right now. All age
| groups hate facebook for a variety of different reasons. They are
| synonymous with misinformation and terrible privacy. This is a
| good move by Facebook.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| The metaverse push shouldn't be a surprise if you've read The Art
| of Surveillance Capitalism. The first step is to get data from
| the digital, from our online presences. The second step is to get
| data from the physical world. Google did this with StreetView and
| then with Pokemon Go (Niantic started as an internal Google
| startup). Facebook needs more data and the metaverse is a thinly
| veiled attempt to get it.
| launchiterate wrote:
| 1984
| amelius wrote:
| PropagandaBook
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| New name: meta mark
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lostgame wrote:
| Rather than fixing the issues behind the brand, just change the
| name?
| asteroidimpact wrote:
| May I suggest, "Altria"....oh,..I forgot.
| janlukacs wrote:
| wash away the shame? won't work.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Imagine if instead of or in addition to changing the name of the
| corporation, its head changed his whole ethos.
|
| Imagine if he learned the value and intrinsic satisfaction of
| facilitating happiness, respect, and connection to humanity, and
| made these the central tenets of the platform.
|
| Imagine if profitability fell a little, but not enough to stop
| the new ethos.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I say, you're a dreamer.
| [deleted]
| gfodor wrote:
| They're not the only one.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| They hope one day you will join them... and dont forget to
| press the like button, subscribe to the channel and hit the
| bell to get all the notifications
| mikro2nd wrote:
| I'd be watching for pigs on the wing.
| whymauri wrote:
| They can hire 20k engineers to build a doomed-to-fail metaverse
| that most of the world neither wants nor understands, but they
| can't dedicate the same headcount to making their platform
| healthier.
|
| Incredible.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| They have no duty whatsoever to make their platform
| healthier, and honestly it's getting repetitive, hearing
| people bemoan a _completely-optional-to-your-life_ social
| media company for being too good at getting people to talk to
| one another.
|
| And no, there is no possible argument you could make that
| says you must use Facebook because of anything Facebook has
| done except be extremely valuable and easy to use for its
| users.
|
| Nobody _has_ to use WhatsApp, nobody _has_ to use Instagram,
| they _choose_ to because other people decided to use them. It
| 's not Facebook's fault entire governments decided to run out
| of WhatsApp, and those governments/your friends could switch
| to/add on a different platform if they wanted to, they just
| don't because what Facebook offers for free (the network) is
| a lot better than what other technology offers.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > They have no duty whatsoever to make their platform
| healthier,
|
| You could say the same thing about any addictive substance.
| And yet I doubt people would argue that controlling
| substance abuse is a bad thing.
|
| For better or worse Facebook has made a thing that through
| the sum of its parts is harmful to society. I doubt any
| specific line-level engineer or product planner ever
| intentionally decided to end up with this end product, but
| here we are.
|
| > hearing people bemoan a completely-optional-to-your-life
| social media company for being too good at getting people
| to talk to one another.
|
| The issue isn't that it's getting people to talk with one
| another, it's that it encourages negative engagement.
|
| The same thing happens with news - people are enraptured
| with gossip and death and will watch that more than
| something less salacious. But FB has scale and targeting
| unmatched by any other service. Google probably had a "and
| there but for the grace of god go we" moment - their search
| results _probably_ has /had similar problems but hasn't
| incurred as much outrage. If Google Plus actually succeeded
| maybe they'd be the ones in the hot seat today.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > They have no duty whatsoever to make their platform
| healthier...
|
| Of course they do. They may have no legal duty to behave
| morally, but they, like everyone else, still have a moral
| duty to behave morally.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| The analogy that comes to my mind is as if all of my
| friends and family and customers and employers did heroin.
| Yes, I could choose not to do heroin, and yet, staying
| around those people, the likelihood of me continuing to use
| heroin is high (pun intended) so I could continue to fit
| in. One of the best ways to stop using heroin is to
| disconnect from those friends and family.
|
| So yes, they may be completely-optional-to-my-life in terms
| of using it directly, and yet choosing to not use them
| often means disconnecting from people not just on those
| platforms but in life in general.
|
| An example that's almost the opposite: I traveled a lot
| overseas and my close group of American friends would use
| an SMS chat group to stay in touch. While overseas, I'd use
| a local sim and couldn't receive the group texts. I wanted
| them to switch to Whatsapp or a similar platform that would
| work over the internet. A few of them refused. So they
| stayed on the platform and I felt myself becoming more
| distant from them, not just in texts but in general. I felt
| a very similar disconnect after I deleted my FB account a
| few years back, and then again, after I built a new FB
| account and muted all of my FB friends.
|
| At some point, I think a company becomes so large and
| integrated into society that it becomes a pseudo-monopoly
| and often in the US we treat those as public utilities.
| Yes, I think I could live without electricity in my city,
| and yet the electric company would still impact my life.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Facebook is not as bad as heroin. Facebook is not as
| necessary as electricity. It's insane to me that this is
| where we are in the discourse, that those are the
| analogies being used to describe one of _dozens_ of ways
| to communicate with others.
|
| The sad reality is that if it weren't Facebook, it'd be
| Twitter. If it weren't Twitter, it'd be TikTok, and so
| on. The people you're mad at aren't the companies making
| it easier to communicate, it's the people doing the
| communicating, and they're doing the communicating on
| whatever platform becomes most popular.
|
| You may be mad at the users for not... I dunno, saying
| better things on these platforms, and you're seemingly
| taking it out on the platform. You're mad at society, and
| you channel it through to the services that society uses.
|
| Facebook is not causing any of the problems you're upset
| about, it's just the platform where those problems are
| manifesting. It's still just a product, and if something
| better comes along, people _will_ switch to the better
| thing. Network effects are real, but they 're not
| permanent or impenetrable.
| whymauri wrote:
| >Facebook is not as necessary as electricity. It's insane
| to me that this is where we are in the discourse, that
| those are the analogies being used to describe one of
| dozens of ways to communicate with others.
|
| Once again, this is a very Western-centric point of view.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| No, Facebook/WhatsApp is a _choice_ various countries and
| cultures made, and that _choice_ can be unmade. You can
| 't un-make the choice to adopt electricity, you can make
| the choice to support Signal or Telegram or MMS or
| whatever.
|
| Again, your complaint is about _people_. You don 't like
| a choice they made, but it _was_ a choice those people
| made and continue to make.
| cmckn wrote:
| > for being too good at getting people to talk to one
| another.
|
| Not sure if you've been on FB in recent years, but people
| aren't really talking to each other so much as they are
| spewing into a void. By far, the most common p2p
| interaction is arguing between strangers. Facebook is
| actually terrible at its initial premise of connecting
| people who know each other IRL, or those who might want to.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Your comment brings up a point that actually bothers me
| the most about this discussion -- the delusion we all
| seem to have that Facebook conversations are Very Super
| Bad, and if _only_ we could pry Facebook out of the hands
| of the naive, dumb little users, they 'd be free from the
| spell Facebook has cast on them and start posting
| insightful, kind, witty writing again.
|
| No, super duper no. People are shouting into the void
| because there's a burning need for humans to shout into
| voids. If it weren't Facebook's void, it'd be some other
| void. The common denominator here is _people_.
|
| Human brains validate their existences by communicating,
| and Facebook built the most effective communication tool
| that's ever been created. It's not Facebook's fault that
| most people aren't able to create anything other than
| hateful shouting.
| cmckn wrote:
| I've been a Facebook user since 2008. I regularly use it
| today. I don't consider myself or any of my Facebook
| friends "naive, dumb little users." The interactions on
| Facebook in, say, 2010 were decidedly less awful than
| they are today. In 2010, my news feed was composed
| primarily of content from my Facebook friends, or pages I
| specifically followed. It was fun. Old connections from
| my childhood church, etc. would comment on a photo and
| we'd chat. Someone would post a status, and I'd reply. I
| don't think human nature has shifted very dramatically in
| a decade. The platform influences what interactions
| happen. I'm not making an appeal to technological
| determinism; people are people. But Facebook is not an
| impartial middleman that is only "connecting" people.
| phatfish wrote:
| Well lets see how well that attitude works out for them.
| They are barely addressing the problem currently so unless
| some serious changes are made governments will simply force
| their hand and compel real moderation of the content they
| allow as a media company.
|
| No one HAS to look at gore or CP in their feed, they can
| block that "friend". So why does Facebook bother to remove
| such content (rhetorical question, i realise the
| implications of them allowing CP)?
| macintux wrote:
| Facebook has incredibly destructive impact on my society,
| on my government, even if I never use it (which I don't).
|
| The U.S. is currently engaged in two major crises: is our
| democratic system of government legitimate, and how do we
| deal with a pandemic?
|
| In both cases, Facebook's algorithm is encouraging
| divisiveness in the name of engagement.
| qeternity wrote:
| And what responsibility do the users have?
|
| I'm no fan of FB but it's absurd to say their algorithms
| encourage divisiveness. Their algorithms have no concept
| of divisiveness, they are simply fitting their cost
| function which is engagement (well, proxies for
| engagement). It just so turns out that a lot of people in
| society want echo chambers where their pre-existing views
| can be strengthened and validated...that's what is
| causing divisiveness.
|
| I'm not really sure what FB is supposed to do. Does a
| fast food company have a responsibility to ensure that
| people are eating a healthy diet? Where do we draw the
| line?
| d23 wrote:
| > Their algorithms have no concept of divisiveness, they
| are simply fitting their cost function which is
| engagement (well, proxies for engagement).
|
| Which can absolutely be a proxy for divisiveness.
| titzer wrote:
| Two things:
|
| Network effects are real. I would not continue to use
| Whatsapp unless other people were on it. It got big
| _before_ Facebook bought them and has dwindled (in my book)
| ever since. The network effect applies to a lot of things,
| from the internet to telephones to bars.
|
| Addictive dark patterns are a thing. Facebook is armed with
| a metric asston of computational power that is _all_
| dedicated to getting you to keep hanging out on it, feeding
| your dopamine cycles, coaxing you in with candy, and
| _distorting reality_ around you. It is in fact, these
| myriad reality distortion fields that is its primary path
| to ad revenue.
|
| > what Facebook offers for free
|
| Because it has hundreds of billions in its bank and sucks
| in tens of billions of ad revenue. Little competitors
| _cannot do either of those_.
| whymauri wrote:
| There is no duty for a corporation to be ethical, sure.
| Arguably, the incentives to produce endless profit and
| growth drive the opposite. But the decision to be unethical
| says something about that company's leadership and their
| values. I mean -- their motto was literally "Move fast and
| break things." What could go wrong?
|
| Further, this strikes me as a very Western-centric
| argument, particularly with WhatsApp. WhatsApp is nearly
| infrastructure in many countries outside the US, and your
| argument approaches saying "nobody has to use the Internet"
| -- which I suppose is true? But strikes me as being similar
| to saying "nobody has to have electricity."
|
| You also seem to frame Facebook as somehow unwittingly
| finding itself in a position of power through WhatsApp,
| instead of that being a multi-year strategic campaign
| through marketing and their free-Internet push in the
| developing world (but only for FB's walled garden, which is
| clearly anti-competitive).
| mynameisash wrote:
| > but they can't dedicate the same headcount to making their
| platform healthier
|
| A FB recruiter contacted me a few years ago to ask me about
| leading a "new anti-abuse team." At the time, I merely had a
| bad taste in my mouth for the company, but I figured if they
| were trying to combat abuse, it was worthy of having a
| conversation.
|
| TLDR, the interview was a standard normal ML loop with no
| talk about abuse reduction. When I brought it up, they just
| talked up my experience and wanted to focus on that. Nice
| bait-and-switch. One interviewer raved about how awesome it
| was that he got to do ML at work (??), and it was all in
| video recommendations to keep eyeballs on the site.
|
| That was a big (but not the biggest) turning point for me in
| my perspective of the company. I'm convinced they don't
| intrinsically care to fix the problems of abuse, and we need
| regulation to make them extrinsically motivated.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Its unhealthiness directly correlates to its profitability,
| so nothing to do with capability.
| DrammBA wrote:
| That is a level of existential flexibility not yet known to
| mankind.
| martini333 wrote:
| Faceplant?
| Ajay-p wrote:
| How about "FaceReality"
| rapnie wrote:
| I thought more like Zuckerscape Playgrounds.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| For them, FaceTheFacts and FaceTheMusic would be amusing
| trademarks too.
| akudha wrote:
| WeTheCreepy with gollum as the mascot would fit too
| iamacyborg wrote:
| My Precious (advertising dollars)
| ezconnect wrote:
| They will name it Universe Inc.
| tgv wrote:
| Or Megadodo, and develop space ships in order to move to Ursa
| Minor.
| jenny91 wrote:
| Rebranding as Horizon? That'd be no less "we are creepy and
| intrude on your whole life" than Facebook...
| zahma wrote:
| That's the point. They're focusing on the metaverse now. People
| who finally realized Facebook is no good will fall right back
| into their hands for the next shiny object used to extract data
| about their being.
| sgregnt wrote:
| I believe the way this answer is stated, paints a very biased
| picture. Allow me to provide an alternative vision, which I
| believe is shared by many (though not as vocal as the other
| opinion). So, let me share my hopes here:
|
| Maybe some people will finally see through media propaganda,
| and conformism to realize how much value Facebook brings to
| their life and how is (US based) facebook is better than
| other alternatives. These users will hopefully embrace
| metaverse to have even better interaction will other human
| beings across the world for business, please and joy, which
| will allow the to have reacher more meaningful life
| experiences
| zahma wrote:
| Yes I am biased. I loathe Facebook and all it stands for. I
| don't have a problem with the metaverse even if it's
| probably going to be the thing that ages me. My problem is
| that Facebook will inevitably use it to colonize more data
| that they do not have a right to. If a simple name change
| is in order, it's only because people still don't
| understand what exactly Facebook is. Its creation wasn't to
| be Good. Its creation was, and ever will be, to exploit
| these data to the detriment of society which overwhelmingly
| outweighs whatever good it makes.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| More like Deepwater Horizon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
| jpdus wrote:
| On that topic by M.G. Siegler on 10/6:
|
| "Facebook is not dying as a business, but they've died as a
| brand. The company needs to move on to 'what's next' as quickly
| as possible to distance themselves from the social network. This
| is nothing new, of course -- I wrote this over six years ago.
| They've more or less been trying to do this for years. But even
| in creating an umbrella company, they called it 'Facebook', which
| was dumb. It was the exact opposite of what they should have
| done. Because, again, Facebook, the brand, is over."
|
| https://500ish.com/facebook-is-too-big-fail-eb8c143a9afc
| alangibson wrote:
| Fully agree about Fb the brand being dead. That's a stink
| that's not coming off. I think the business has good prospects.
| They're just learning how to monitize Ig and haven't begun to
| wring cash out of Whatsapp.
|
| Does anyone really think though that Fb the company has what it
| takes to produce another world beating product? Call me
| pessimistic, but their best shot is buying up innovative
| companies and not strangling the cool out of them (ie Oculus)
| barbazoo wrote:
| As far as the ordinary user is concerned, there is no stink
| at all. People are not as aware of FBs negative impact or
| scandals to the degree that the average HN user is.
| alangibson wrote:
| It's gone mainstream. Even the most ordinary user watches
| cable news. My close relations are as out of touch as it
| gets, and even they hold their noses when they use Fb now.
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| Oculus at least was a strategic acquisition for whatever this
| metaverse product is going to end up being. If job listings
| are any indication, they are sinking a ton of money into VR
| research and devices. Something big is in the works. Given
| their stated goal of pivoting to the metaverse, I think their
| long-term goal is to make a ready-player-one style full
| virtual world, and Oculus and related products and
| technologies are gonna be a big part of that
| Duralias wrote:
| > Does anyone really think though that Fb the company has
| what it takes to produce another world beating product?
|
| Is what they are trying with the Metaverse stuff. Kinda weird
| considering that buying "the next big thing" has worked so
| well for them before.
| alangibson wrote:
| The libra fiasco should make anyone wonder if Fb is going
| to be able to sell the public on a big new project. At this
| point it feels like users tolerate Fb purely due to the
| network effects they have.
| chadlavi wrote:
| They don't have to, they just have to buy it
|
| Edit: yeah, what you said.
| phgn wrote:
| It's baffling to me that people still use the main Facebook app.
| It has gotten too big for its original purpose. I suppose if you
| curate your friends carefully and only share personal things it
| can be useful - but that's not the type of content that gets
| popular.
|
| Instagram as a way to share moments I can understand, and
| WhatsApp is a utility not a social network.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| There is a browser extension that automatically unfollows
| everything on Facebook for you. I used this extension and then
| re-followed the handful of people I actually care about. It
| brought Facebook back to the early ~2010s era. Gone are all the
| useless memes, embedded ads, "news" articles, and daily
| ramblings by people I don't care about. Instead it's a tool I
| can use to keep up to date with my friends and loved ones. My
| feed even has an end again. Only this time the "end" says:
| "Something went wrong. This may be because of a technical error
| that we're working to get fixed. Try reloading this page."
|
| Here's a link. I highly recommend it.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfollow-everyone-...
| phgn wrote:
| What happens when the people you manually re-followed share
| content you dislike?
|
| What I'd use Facebook for is keeping up with friends - for
| that it doesn't have to be the largest social network around.
| It would probably be better at that purpose if it was
| smaller.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| Click the 3-dot menu button on the right side of the post,
| click "Hide all from <shared source>". Now if the person is
| sharing from <fake news site>, or <annoying meme page> you
| won't see it. If someone is continuously sharing nonsense
| from a wide-variety of sources, they get unfollowed (and
| they probably were not someone I selected to follow in the
| first place). This is impossible to manage if you are
| following everyone in your network (as is the default), but
| becomes doable if the default option is "unfollow" as
| enabled by this extension.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I unfollowed everything on Facebook the old fashioned way. I
| deleted my Facebook profiles. There is enough news out there
| to eat up each day without it.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| Congrats. Pat your self on the back. So brave...
|
| This does nothing to help the people that enjoyed the
| functionality of the early Facebook and would like to
| configure their page to return to that, rather than
| dropping it entirely.
| cube00 wrote:
| It's still not enough, even if you don't join any groups you'll
| still have the news feed flooded with "suggested for you" posts
| which you can only hide on a page by page basis while you
| _still_ miss out on posts from your friends.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I pretty much only use facebook to talk to my grandparents
| these days.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| I'd say "your network" has likely gotten too big for your
| original intent. I'm not exposed to the 3 billion people on the
| platform. I only have family and close friends.
| phgn wrote:
| True, with more personal discipline you can probably make
| Facebook work for personal connections - as a few people
| commented about here. I just dislike that it's so easy to get
| into all the other crap.
|
| It's the same for me on Twitter - spending time muting words
| & blocking some people made it a lot more valuable.
| xtracto wrote:
| I wrote this in a previous HN post that talked about Facebook.
| I sit on the opposite side of the scale: My Facebook account is
| quite nice; I've got friends from all over the world (I've
| lived in 7 different cities throughout Europe and the Americas
| in my 40 years of life) and my Facebook feed/network makes it
| possible for me to see where are they now, what are they up to,
| and when one of them has a kid in Serbia, or another has some
| milestone in Chicago I get to cheer them. The last post was
| about a cousin that just had his first solo airplane flight! I
| haven't seen him in like 5 years, but still it is nice to tell
| him "wow, that's great!".
|
| When people say that their Facebook stream is "very angry", it
| seems to me that it is mainly a reflection of the network that
| they happen to be part of.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I think the biggest problem with FB right now is the way they
| force groups content into your feed. It's way, way overdone.
| Back when people joined those groups they were smaller and
| more focused and people were hoping to get occasional updates
| on some topic they're interested in.
|
| Now it's at least half your feed if you don't trim the groups
| and your actual friends get lost in the noise. I'm sure FB
| has some data about engagement or some such, but they should
| remember why people use their service and refocus.
| AaronNewcomer wrote:
| I pretty much only use Facebook for the groups and pages I
| follow. So it seems they did tailor it for the reasons I
| use it.
| phgn wrote:
| That's what I meant by "it has gotten too big for its
| original purpose" - keeping up with friends is what Facebook
| was built for, and it's great at that.
|
| It's awesome if your network is still like that. For me, it
| becomes hard to filter out the widely shared & "angry"
| content some people share - it just propagates so easily.
| tehabe wrote:
| I wonder what will inspire Zuckerberg for the name. Google
| founders Page and Brin were apperantly inspired by the ABC-
| Strasse in Hamburg, where the German Google offices are located.
| nikk1 wrote:
| They should rename to Innovative Online Industries (IOI), because
| that is the role he will be playing in the metaverse.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| are we getting MANG or HANG instead of FANG?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| If they changed their name to "Goodguys", we'd get GANG
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| bad guys would be funnier BANG
| the_snooze wrote:
| This may sound radical, but have they tried being decent ethical
| people instead?
| skipfitz wrote:
| "Fakeblock" is a great name.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_p3tkGPPw8
| TedShiller wrote:
| How about "Creepy+Greedy, Inc"?
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| If only they would `rm -rf remove *` inside the website's code
| directory instead. One can only wish.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I wonder if this means they no longer have to write "Instagram
| from Facebook" and "Whatsapp from Facebook".
| kavalec wrote:
| I suggest "TruthSmash"
| caturopath wrote:
| I have been surprised Facebook has experimented so little with
| diversifying their lines of business. Hopefully by moving their
| flagship social media platform to be formally one step lower
| down, more equal with various other lines of business, it will
| align with a model where they figure out something good to spend
| their money on.
| pavlov wrote:
| Facebook employs over 10,000 people on products that are not
| consumer social media: Workplace, Portal, Oculus... It's
| certainly not for lack of investment.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| Facebook is a stupid name to begin with.
|
| Aliens would ask "wait it's not a book with faces in it?"
| deltron3030 wrote:
| A book strapped to your face = vr headset
| riffic wrote:
| geez, just let this blasted company initiate its own collapse
| like myspace already.
|
| Twitter won't be too far behind.
| rhplus wrote:
| Something like "The Meta Company" seems like the most likely bet
| here. Zuckerberg already owns meta.org through the Chan
| Zuckerberg Institute, and meta.com was updated yesterday to
| redirect to that same site.
|
| https://who.is/whois/meta.com - updated yesterday
|
| https://who.is/whois/meta.org
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_(academic_company)
| drocer88 wrote:
| Imagine the "metastasis" comments, though.
| [deleted]
| pvaldes wrote:
| We are a brand new company now, and want to help the people
| affected by our former ultra-addictive products so we are
| proud of introducing you our new and improved social net for
| women: Meta-donna
| abhiyerra wrote:
| You know I had the domain metafirm.co and someone purchased it
| from me on the Sedo marketplace after a year of being on the
| market on Monday. Wondering if you are right.
| coolspot wrote:
| I had a meta****.com domain for sale on sedo for couple
| years, it was sold last week.
| busymom0 wrote:
| > Meta
|
| That name seems to remind me of Reddit for some reason.
| majjam wrote:
| R/highqualitygifs always references meta
| annadane wrote:
| Oh so it's just like when they had internet.org with their
| dishonest Free Basics program; a URL that would imply something
| not belonging to a company so naturally the company buys it to
| raise importance/awareness of itself
| quitit wrote:
| The interesting thing with that is "facebook" comes across as
| simple and human-like, despite there being a lot of complexity
| behind it.
|
| Meta is the opposite of this. It sounds robotic, abstract and
| lacks an emotive trigger. While this is more fitting for the
| company, it drops the perception-curtain that "facebook" hides
| behind.
| svachalek wrote:
| Seems a lot like the creation of Alphabet. Nothing says
| faceless conglomerate like deliberately naming your company
| Alphabet.
| grupthink wrote:
| The name is a double entendre. It also refers to making an
| "alpha" bet.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Not sure why you are downvoted, this is straight out of
| Larry Page's letter to the public about the
| restructuring.
|
| > We liked the name Alphabet because it means a
| collection of letters that represent language, one of
| humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of
| how we index with Google search! We also like that it
| means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above
| benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are
| not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with
| related products--the whole point is that Alphabet
| companies should have independence and develop their own
| brands.
|
| https://abc.xyz/
| hckrnrd wrote:
| As this reorg was Ruth's Noogler project, she came from
| the investment banking world where seeking alpha is the
| name of the game...so making bets to yield alpha is
| pretty much what the company does.
| Y_Y wrote:
| No they're referring to their mountaineering tendencies,
| their "Alp habet".
| waterhouse wrote:
| My reaction to Alphabet was, "If you wanted to look like
| supervillains who planned to own everything in the world
| from A to Z... that would be how you'd do it. Was that
| intentional? I don't understand what else they might have
| intended."
| carlmr wrote:
| I didn't have that initial reaction, I thought alphabet,
| because their company Google, needs to dissect a lot of
| language, the basic building blocks of which is the
| alphabet.
| lopis wrote:
| Definitely has potential. Whatever it is, I'm very certain it
| will be a short, common dictionary word, that will poison its
| general meaning forever, like how Tesla is not Nikola anymore.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Oh God, please let it be "VI" or "Tab".
|
| Emacs and Spaces FTW!
| aerovistae wrote:
| I seriously doubt it will poison the word. When you hear the
| word alphabet, do you think of Google? These companies are
| too deeply ingrained in the public consciousness to
| meaningfully change their name. It's a legal thing, nothing
| more.
| news_hacker wrote:
| hijacking the cultural cache of the phrase "that's so meta" -
| deviously clever and annoying
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Man, that's one dystopian name. I'd expect that in some post-
| apocalyptic tv show.
| schleck8 wrote:
| It's also the most startup name ever. A single, short word
| from the dictionnairy.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| After Amazon and Alphabet, my money is on Aardvark.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| And, earlier, Atari, Activision, Accolade, Acclaim, and
| Absolute Entertainment (https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Pro
| blem_with_Licensed_Game... ); and the Russian accounting
| software juggernaut 1C... It's an old tradition, somewhat
| forgotten after the decline of phonebooks.
| mrkramer wrote:
| But why it would be .org? Isn't .org usually non-profits but
| Facebook Inc. is all about profit.
| TheDong wrote:
| If the larger company name is "The Meta Org" or "Meta
| Organization" or such, then .org would grammatically fit well
| with the name.
|
| The tld splitup of ".com is commercial, .org is non-profits,
| .co.uk is british websites, .io is indian ocean websites" is
| pretty much out the window. Only a subset of those still are
| used consistently, such as ".gov is government-affiliated"
| and a few ccTLDs like ".cn", ".jp", and ".co.uk" being pretty
| consistent. Some of them have enforced restrictions (like
| some european ccTLDs require you to have an address in the
| country), but many of them don't.
|
| .com, .net, and .org are the wild west and might as well mean
| nothing.
| rhplus wrote:
| Someone has pointed meta.com to meta.org
| Fordec wrote:
| Wasn't that the name of Steve Mann's AR company?
| deltron3030 wrote:
| Apple bought Meta.io (German AR company) a couple of years ago
| an may hold some naming rights, getting the brand name could be
| tough.
| Groxx wrote:
| With the header-ad, page-header, and "support journalism" footer,
| I literally see less than 10 pixels of whitespace worth of
| content.
|
| That's beyond ridiculous.
| stanfordkid wrote:
| Seems right out of the Google -> Alphabet playbook
| easton wrote:
| "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."
|
| - Don Draper.
| Fordec wrote:
| Ya'll ever heard of Worldcom?
|
| https://youtu.be/KbbZc2pab9k
| awill wrote:
| I have a friend who works at FB, and he says he does standups and
| other meetings in VR. um.... No thanks.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Does he work on a VR adjacent team? I'd be surprised if
| everyone did this, but wouldn't be surprised if some teams are
| expected a certain amount 'dog-fooding'. I have a friend who
| works at M$ and always has some broken beta build of windows/IE
| running.
| ineedasername wrote:
| This reminds me of when Philip Morris Companies changed its name
| to Altria in part to distance itself from the negative
| connotation.
| jl6 wrote:
| If I was losing faith in the long term sustainability of my core
| product, and wanted to start hedging by branching out into new
| spaces with new brands, a rename of the holding company would be
| my first move.
| juanbyrge wrote:
| This feels like the Google Plus fiasco all over again. Throwing
| an entire company at making a social product that nobody will
| use. Good luck!
| neartheplain wrote:
| >Under the plans, Facebook would change the name of its holding
| company but not that of its eponymous social media platform,
| known internally as the "big blue app".
|
| Nothing to see here. Just another Alphabet-type holding company.
| lefty2 wrote:
| How about "Facey McBookFace"?
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