[ljm]

I don't know about that. Nobody was talking about the metaverse in earnest until FB went and rebranded themselves to it.

Before then, it was some fictional concept in a dystopian sci-fi novel. Now it's got Facebook--I mean Meta--all over it. So it's reasonable to bring this up when someone imagines the potential of neuralinking someone to the metaverse. It almost feels like the suggestion is making Zuckerberg's dream come true for him.

[Tenoke]

That's not really true. It was a real trend on which Facebook jumped on[0] but yes their involvement overshadowed that. And at any rate clearly the poster here used it in a general sense of a VR Environment rather than meaning Facebook's specific implementation.

0. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

[jakear]

Same holds for HN discussion in particular. It's interesting to look back to what "metaverse" meant to HN in 2018-2020: https://jacksonkearl.github.io/HackerTrends/?query=%22metave... (shameless plug for my project)