Ask HN: Give me feedback on my idea please

[slymerson]

I've been looking into consumer social for years now and I really do believe that the future of social media is going to look more like a video game than anything else.

So I had an idea. The idea is a social app that lets you create your own avatar and your own virtual world. You can then add friends and join their virtual world and see what they have. You can also join public virtual worlds with your friend and explore around.

For example, building a jungle world and exploring it with your friends.

It would be like Roblox but less "gamey."

It would be entirely user generated and you can socialize with friends and have fun.

[throwaway675309]

These ideas are unfortunately a dime a dozen and the biggest thing holding them back isn't necessarily features, graphics or customization - it's being able to hit the critical mass of users necessary to attract other users to your platform in the first place.

Also this game exists, it's called Second Life - Users can customize their own areas (logic, assets, rules, etc) and invite friends to it.

[swatcoder]

Second Life, Minecraft, VR Chat, Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, etc etc etc

If you have a personal edge and good financial contacts and a very developed idea, you might be able to raise money to get it started, with the hope that you’d be swallowed up by one of these big players later. But this is an increasingly hard time to raise money and starting up a project like this is mostly an abstract endeavor involving lots of phone calls and emails and spreadsheets.

If you’re passionate about the idea, you should just try to get a job at one of the many places already doing this. You’ll spend more time making something there and feel a lot closer to your idea becoming reality, even if it has somebody else’s signature on it as well.

[ninethirty]

Weirdly, people don't have as many friends as they used to. That's why TikTok beat Facebook. Facebook is useless if you don't have a friend-graph IRL, like a telephone system with only one telephone. I think the future of social is going to be 1-on-1 interactions, everything else just becomes rep-farming, crowd-pleasing, performance art, trolling, etc.

Who even uses 3D spaces besides gaming? User-generated content is usually terrible, like Mario-maker -- most user-gen levels aren't any fun.

Anyway, go play SecondLife for awhile before you spend too many more cycles thinking about this.

[GianFabien]

How would it be different from creating a community on SecondLife? or even Meta??

I read an article about SecondLife's infrastructure and it seemed to be rather substantial. Giving users tools to generate parts of a virtual world, avatars, etc requires a huge up-front investment. What are your plans in relation to implementing the idea?

[akerl_]

Zuckerberg, is that you?

[throwawaysalome]

Are you 12?