Originally published at: The metaverse is no more | Boing Boing
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and porn.
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I do think that something like the metaverse from Snow Crash would be pretty cool, but I’m very glad that the facebook metaverse has failed. If it had somehow succeeded in taking off, and people were spending a large chunk of their lives immersed in facebook 3D, that would quite possibly be the worst thing that could happen to a society already on thin ice.
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Good. VR as a Web3 cash grab was something I was dreading having to avoid.
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Can you really say that something is “no more” when it clearly never was?
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Paging Mr. Lovecraft…
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I wonder if they’ll keep their name or change it soon.
Meta still works as an umbrella company name imo but it’s a reminder of how badly they missed the mark.
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Jesus, did you even read that dumb article? Some Business Insider guy has extrapolated that Meta has deprioritized the Metaverse on the basis of a few public statements by Meta executives that didn’t concern the project and from actions taken by other companies. And on the basis of that, you conclude that Meta has “completely abandoned” the project?
From Zuckerberg’s Q1 2023 earnings call:
“Building the metaverse is a long-term project, but the rationale for it remains the same and we remain committed to it."
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$100,000,000,000. It is disgusting to think of the societal good that could have come from investing that money in the real world, the real “social network”.
Not to muddle capitalism and religion, but I find it interesting that $100B is 10% of the valuation of Meta before the MetaVerse fiasco. The tech sector tithe?
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I’m embarrassed to say that it took me this long to wonder if the whole purpose of the Meta-Metaverse was embezzlement or money laundering? That might help explain why it was so needlessly crappy from the beginning.
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CNBC host Jim Cramer nodded approvingly when Zuckerberg claimed that 1 billion people would use the Metaverse and spend hundreds of dollars there, despite the Meta CEO’s inability to say what people would receive in exchange for their cash or why anyone would want to strap a clunky headset to their face to attend a low-quality, cartoon concert.
That alone should have been a clue as to where Metaverse was headed.
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Wired: AI
Tired: Metaverse
But is it dead? No, but it’s quickly going the way of 3D movies. Forgotten.
If you have to struggle so hard perhaps you’re doing it wrong or it shouldn’t be done at all.
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Meta has spent phenomenal sums of money on the metaverse since the project was announced, including more than $100bn (£86bn) on research and development (R&D) and product development in the sector – $15bn in the last year alone.
I doubt they hired 150,000 software developers for it, so where did they find the holes to piss $15bn/yr down?
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The Metaverse, shared VR worlds, exists and is thriving. It’s called Fortnite and Minecraft, each is its own isolated island and none have anything to do with Meta and its need to find a platform to dominate and stave off irrelevance as Facebook and Instagram are hit by the fact each generation has its own social network, usually not the one of its fuddy-duddy parents, and they have chosen TikTok.
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Don’t page him three times while looking in a mirror.
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Now there’s an idea. Get minecraft or roblox players to pay for the privilege of building out your meta verse.
Honestly the only way something like this is going to get adopted is through open standards not through one company’s walled garden.
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VR Chat, too, and prior to that Secondlife. The “Metaverse” has been a thing for the last 20 years (or more) and isn’t going anywhere. It’s cute that Zuck et al think that they are the ones deciding the fate of technology that evolved organically outside their control.
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Well, the vision is not wrong (although I think AR has more of a chance to replace smartphones as the next platform than VR). It’s the execution that sucks, and John Carmack forensically dissected the reasons for that (which boil down to paradoxically too much money being spent on bad ideas).
Also, they they thought by cornering the market in hardware (mostly by selling them at a loss) they would control the software, which flies against the face of everything in computing history over the last 40 years.
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