•  Big P   ( @peter@feddit.uk ) 
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    1511 year ago

    The metaverse died because it didn’t mean anything, there was no clear thing you could point to and say “this is the metaverse”. It was a collection of buzzwords designed to sell a dream to investors and nothing more.

      • Yes, it wasn’t always the case. I was in the Silicon Valley in the 2000’s and it was full of techies who really believed in the open web, and even Google was a proponent of open standards.

        A few years later it seems like the tech matured enough that being technically savvy was no longer necessary to be a successful founder. Slowly it stopped being about technical innovations and became about raising money, product marketing, A/B testing, etc.

        • Selling dreams to VCs has long been the game, but VCs started getting dumber and greedier as all the low hanging opportunities were used up. So tech startups had to make sillier and sillier claims and business plans to keep raking in VC dough.

          Subscriptions have been big VC keywords for the last 7-8 years, as data harvesting started to be monopolized by a few big owners. Ads are trying to make a comeback as subscription fatigue sets in, which is why blockers are being targeted lately.

          I’m not looking forward to the next method of extracting wealth from the masses in trade for VC investment. Probably another form of slavery or subjugation they haven’t found a way to hide yet.

      • This is the cycle of co-option that takes place with any career that becomes profitable.

        A lot of people don’t realize that computers and programming in general were seen as “women’s work” or “nerd shit” until especially the dotcom boom, and career women and nerds (of all genders) were displaced in favor of MBA-bros who the VCs and CEOs didn’t disdain (not by being forced out, but by not being given the jobs and funding; the “paper ceiling” is often used for this).

        Machine learning and crypto were also relegated to being “nerd shit” in their nascent years, and now look who populates those particular spaces: non-technical MBA-bros and snake oil salesmen trying to cash in on the hype (and building on the uncompensated work of others… in machine learning’s case, quite literally so).

      • I didn’t go into tech for the money, but after several years of grinding I’m definitely at the point where I’m only still in it for the money. I don’t even want to think about computers outside of work anymore.

    •  Thrashy   ( @Thrashy@beehaw.org ) 
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      251 year ago

      It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

      Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

      Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

      Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

      In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

  • It died for the exact same reason every single aspect of life is getting shittier and shittier. Shareholders. When a company is publicly traded, it has NO CHOICE but to get worse and worse and worse, because shareholders will accept NOTHING beyond continuous growth. If you lose value in the market, they will run for the hills, if you plateau they will run, if you suddenly start making even slightly smaller gains, they will run. They are the sole reason for every decision, and because of that, every single decision will be a detriment to both employees and consumers. Underneath all the bullshit, this is why everything will go to shit eventually unless it is both privately held and by people with good intentions, which is rare to find tied together.

    • I would argue Zuckerburg had a lot of control over this project, lost a lot of money, and shareholders, due to the structure of Meta as a company, could do fuck all about it.

      … But in almost literally every other company on earth, yea this is the case. And meta made these decisions in a world defined by the relationship you just described.

  •  java   ( @java@beehaw.org ) 
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    1 year ago

    The question implies that it was alive at some point. Was it though? All I know about Metaverse is that a lot of “tech” journalists were writing about it, but I don’t know anyone who used it. And I owned a Meta Quest 2 for 6 months.

    •  fer0n   ( @fer0n@lemm.ee ) 
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      1 year ago

      There is no metaverse. There’s VR games and multiplayer games, and metaverse became a word for anything that remotely touched any of these or that’s even remotely vaguely related. 3D assets → metaverse. Online game → metaverse. Video call → metaverse.

      If you’re talking about Horizon Worlds, that’s a multiplayer game/social experience. Nothing about this is a “metaverse” as it is described in the book where that word came from.

  • The main problem is that they only focused on how much money they could make, and forgot to make it somewhere people actually wanted to be. Basically the developer equivalent of “here’s the deal, you do something for me-” then they never finish the sentence.

    • They did the reverse enshitification, do it shit first and then… wait what then?

      That said…it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.

      • That said…it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.

        That was one problem yes. There isn’t really any need for the metaverse to VR only, at least not initially. Even Facebook actually came up with a sort of workaround for this problem where you could use your phone and navigate an avatar around with on-screen controls. It would have probably worked better on a desktop computer which is something they never bothered to implement but it wouldn’t be that hard to make.

        If it was actually fun and useful and people used it on a regular basis other people would be incentivised to go out and spend big bucks on a VR headset. Trying to get people to buy the VR headset first was never going to work, only enthusiasts were going to get one that way around, and they weren’t actually interested in metaverse all that much, they were going after traditional gaming experiences, watching 3D movies, and porn obviously.

          • Well that was always my problem with Facebook’s implementation as well. If I’m paying money for virtual real estate I’d rather just pay money for the server and then control it myself. It never made sense to me to let one company host the code, because there’s literally no benefit to me for them doing that. Usually the benefit of letting a company host the code is that it costs less money, but if I’m going to be paying virtual rent every month anyway I’d rather just have server access.

    • Exactly this. When you read about the metaverse in something like Snow Crash, it’s a place built by enthusiasts, very cheap to use, and people have the choice of DIY, or paying someone to do things for them.

      In the facebook’s version, everything but connecting costs money, and it’s all done by facebook.

      • I can’t ever forget the first trailer where they pulled street art out of a street into virtual space, and then they had to tip so it wouldn’t disappear. It was insanely transparent how any attempt at imaginative play was superficial, that the creators were completely out of touch with what people wanted, and squeezing money out of people was the ultimate goal.

    • This is the only true answer here.

      Even Meta themselves said they want to “build the metaverse”, at that point the word still had a somewhat clear definition. It then became a bullshit buzzword and lost all meaning. Now even Meta is using the word as a synonym for “VR” or “Multiplayer”, which has nothing to do with the snow crash definition of the word.

    • There’s way, way too many buzzword chasers out there. How hard can it possibly be to assess something by it’s own merits instead of looking for keywords that other Successful Cool Guys™ are promoting? Instead, we get people copying each other’s hype to the point they build entire markets in intrinsically worthless things on occasion.

  • i would add cost as a barrier to entry. as cheap as the hardware it, it needed a more heavily subsidized distribution.

    apple only exists because they practically gave away equipment en masse to school districts as the market became flooded with ‘ibm compatibles’
    they built an entire generation of apple-loving folks by dumping huge amounts of money/resources into those programs.

  • If there was any potential in a “metaverse”, it would be picked up by people who know how to make something fun. In Silicon Valley or somewhere else.

    That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.

    • That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.

      Realistically, the only thing you’d actually want to do in the Metaverse is something you can’t do in real life, utilising the features of a virtual reality computer generated environment to do things that are physically impossible. If only there was some way you could use a computer, with or without a VR headset, to fly a spaceship, use magic, and explore beautiful environments. There could even be these computer generated characters that could give you ideas about things you could do and places you could go, by giving you a reason to go there and do those things, and all of this could tie into a narrative element that turns it into a kind of interactive story, so you’ve got a reason to keep engaging with the computer-generated environment and characters. And maybe you’d get some of that cool computer-generated swag while you’re there, which you could dress your avatar in…

      Hmmm… there could be money in that idea. Someone should try making something like that.

  •  NaibofTabr   ( @NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ) 
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    1 year ago

    There’s no use case for the metaverse that gives it any more value than a video conference. But I can set up a video conference for free, while the metaverse is set up to constantly extract money from the user. On top of that, the barrier to entry is too high in both cost and practicality. I can buy a high quality webcam for a fraction of the price of a VR headset, and I don’t have to strap it to my face just to have a meeting.

    In order to justify the cost of being in the metaverse, there has to be a value return that makes it worthwhile - something that can’t be replicated with other simpler and cheaper options. Right now, the metaverse is a platform run by grifters ripping off other wannabe grifters and the gullible.

    • There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun. Unfortunately, it seems designed specifically to be brand safe for future advertising instead of appealing to real people.

      • There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun.

        This is fine, for a video game. But the metaverse isn’t being marketed as a video game, it’s being marketed as a social and utility platform.

        Also if it is just a video game then there’s nothing more compelling about it than any other video game… and also it’s a crappy video game built around microtransactions. It’s not fun, it’s a dead mall.

  • The metaverse could be successful but it needs to be a protocol not a proprietary product by one company, least of all Facebook.

    Right now anyone can make a website if they know how to program one. It can be hosted on any number of services or you can host it yourself if you have the hardware. Your website can look like anything, have any functionality you want, be as complex as you want, be as large as you want. You can use website builders or you can go entirely custom. There is a huge range of options.

    What now needs to happen is that same thing for the metaverse. It needs to be a standard programming language or set of programming languages that people can learn, that will enable them to build experiences. Those experiences should be hostable on any old server and a routeing protocol needs to be developed so that people can access them without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Second Life does a very good job of modifying the web URL concept to work for virtual worlds, just copy that. There also needs to be a standardised API for returning feedback responses and querying available interfaces (vibration motors, speakers, lights, force resistance motors etc) that all headsets and interaction devices use.

    Perhaps some kind of federation service that enables different servers to interact with each other for transferring items from one environment to another and making sure that they make sense in all environments.

      • I’ve just invented a pillow that bombards your dreams with ads.

        For the user it is free, and it is literally the most comfortable pillow you will ever lay your head on

        It has a White noise generator, and a built-in fan so that it’s constantly the cool side of the pillow. It is exceedingly soft and yet surprisingly supportive but you will see ads every single moment of REM sleep for the rest of your life and once you’ve gotten used to using it if you stop using it you will never be able to fall asleep again.

        Currently Microsoft meta Amazon and Netflix are all in a bidding war to purchase this technology from me.

    • Small correction - Steve Huffman is u/spez, he’s the current CEO. Alexis Ohanian was one of the co-founders and was on the board of directors for a while but I don’t think he’s involved with Reddit any more except probably as an investor.