[brendanyounger]

Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.

[StableAlkyne]

> a metaverse that no one wanted

That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.

What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.

As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.

[michaelt]

The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.

They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.

If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8

[KaiserPro]

Some part of facebook wanted to make Robolox, another wanted to make a virtual monitor room, another still wanted to make second life.

They were all smooshed together with ~2000 non-game dev engineers and told to learn on the job.

[abustamam]

I think what Meta didn't realize (or maybe they did and ignored it) was that they were not pioneering the metaverse. They already existed on the platforms you just mentioned. I've never played Roblox or Second Life but I know kids and teens who live on Roblox and adults who live on Second Life. Those worlds _were_ their metaverses, and there was no reason to jump ship to another platform when they already had a digital life established. And meta just ended up making a shitty version of the metaverse anyway for the reason you mentioned.

It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.

Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.

[KaiserPro]

I think the biggest problem that you hint as is that "metaverse" is an ill-defined term. When they rebranded, and given that I had been working in the 3d industry for _many_ years, I couldn’t define what the metaverse was.

To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.

[Barbing]

Shocking to watch this human imitate us, no shade to anyone neurodivergent either, but obviously it could track he would allegedly[1] OK with his bots sexting literal children—he’s obviously only making an effort to be like us (but he isn’t)

[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)

[vanillameow]

> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.

I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.

[bhickey]

> they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.

No reasonable person shared this expectation. It was Juicero-tier delusion.

[georgefrowny]

Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg.

I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.

[Duralias]

Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.

Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.

[kakacik]

Indeed, physical world, nature, mountains, beaches, human look-in-the-eyes interaction, breeze of fresh air on a hill you climbed and so on is something extremely important to humans. Some feel it more, some less but ie everybody recharges in nature, just not everybody is so connected with their own bodies to actually recognize it.

I like a bit of gaming and VR seems like almost-there, but its just a gimmick in one's life, and for life quality purposes never should become more than fringe relax activity.

And for corporate-privacy-destroying virtual spaces - they would have to pay me massive amounts to spend, unwillingly, any time there. Those are the last people who should be in charge of such place

[mark_l_watson]

Indeed! Your comment is probably the most important in this thread. The Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes a lot about losing humanity because of tech advances.

I am retired so this is easier for me to do: For every hour each day I spend on tech (personal AI research, writing) I spend 90 minutes hiking with friends, playing games like Bridge, enjoying meals with my wife and friends, reading good literature and philosophy, etc.

I worked for 50 years before retiring, but even working, I tried to balance human time vs. tech and work - often leaving 'money on the table' but it was worth it.

Pardon an old man ranting, but I think so many people seem caught up in the wrong things.

[Duralias]

The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest. A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays. https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...

But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.

[ben_w]

> That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.

The problem here is that "the metaverse" has a specific meaning, and that meaning was a Potemkin-elevator-pitch.

People were envisioning the ability to take a rocket launcher from Halo and use it directly in all your other games. Which is a fun sketch*, but nobody thought past the sketch into any concept of why any game developer would support that, well, meta.

To the extent that VRChat gets around this, it's because it's being a playground rather than a meta-game. So, again, the "meta" part isn't there, at least not to the extent envisioned by people who saw Ready Player One and thought "Yes! Also, I like what Nolan Sorrento is saying, how many more ads can we put into our stuff?"

* e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MqK90Aq8bE

[dgellow]

There is a niche interest. Meta bet was on the next iPhone. They were either way too early or completely off.

Though I’m personally happy to see massive corporations spend their money on pushing the state of the art in niche fields instead of using it for more evil stuff. I’m not sure why people care that they burn their own money on risky bets, that’s great for my point of view. We need more of that

[tim333]

I'm not sure how you define metaverse but some games where you get together with friends in virtual worlds like Fortnite have been pretty successful - $9bn+ revenue on that one. I've never been a big believer that it's important to strap the computer screen on your face rather than looking at it in the normal way.

[m4rtink]

Yeah, they totally did not get it & burned a lot of money. They could basically just dumped a much less money into VRChat (or even 1:1 cloning it) and getting almost assured success.

[Eisenstein]

The dot com bust wasn't at all like that, though? What 'arose' were the players that had leadership with an actual plan besides 'launch IPO based on hype and wing it from there' or 'get a catchy domain name, pretend to do something useful with it, and get acquired by Yahoo'. The old guard that ended up being taken down were the legacy corporations that tried to ride the wave while refusing to let go of any of the practices that were completely incompatible with being able to operate in a new paradigm. Actually, now that I spelled it out, I get it. Good job, sorry for doubting you.

[Torien]

Logged in for the first time in years to say, I appreciate you leaving this up and being able to change your view. Thanks!

[bonesss]

Zuckerberg runs a company beholden to its platform operators: Apple, Google, and Microsoft who dictate online advertising access.

Metas investments into VR make abundant sense as an effort to capitalize on a market where Meta was leading, has mindshare, and owns the platform (Oculus). If the bet paid off, or pays off, it would create a sorely lacking competitive moat and potentially provide Enterprise inroads where Meta is otherwise a non-player.

Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.

Carmack was on board, he remembers Pets.com too.

[jarjoura]

VR was never the endgame though. It was always AR, except, the "metaverse" bet assumed people were going to adopt AR in the same abundance that they adopted phones.

It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.

However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.

It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.

VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.

[KaiserPro]

> AR was a terrible business idea.

I don't think they've learnt that. Orion, the "new" glasses should have shipped in 2020q4.

[mark_l_watson]

I have had an Oculus 2 for many years and while I love it, I rarely spend more than an hour or two a month using it because time in VR competes with activities like walking outside getting fresh air and sun on my face or sitting with my wife or a friend having coffee, or spending time writing a book.

I think we need more wonderful technology that is designed for brief high-value periods of use.

A good example: I get huge value from using AI, but cumulatively I spend perhaps two to three hours a week using Claude or Gemini. Quality products that I appreciate but don't need to spend a lot of time with.

[chris_money202]

I always thought the AR/VR plays were just ways to collect human data to train humanoids, similar to what Tesla does with vision and their cars.

Would align with recent reports of meta employees watching the videos coming off their sunglasses

[KaiserPro]

Former facebook acquiree here.

The metaverse is what happens when you let your leadership/product team convince you that the key to speed up what you want to deliver is to throw people at the problem, and not put any constraints on deliverables.

The original plan for oculus is to establish a VR eco system that would have transitioned into AR glasses, allowing facebook to have a platform of its own.

VR was/is a bit niche, because it required lots of expensive hardware, and there were limited games/uses.

first logical step: remove the need for a high end PC, make the thing cheap.

That drops one barrier to adoption: expense.

The next one is, great I have this $400 device that does VR, but what can I actually _do_ on it? That means you need content and features. This is where it all turned to shit. Zuck looked at steam, and itunes and said: "make it so", and they started tapping up devs to make small games, and AAA to make big ones.

But, its expensive to port games, and it takes time, why not buy studios that are making great games and get them to make more? so they bought a bunch of indie studios. Those studios had to fight to keep their devs, because facebook normally fires/rehires, forcing everyone to re-interview for their job. Games devs aren't really hired because they don't pass the technicals (Don't know why, given that games devs need to be good or the FPS drops like shit.)

with all that upheaval, those games studios don't really produce extra games to sell.

All the while a small team had been making a roblox clone. It was slow and a bit buggy, and you could make shitty games. During lockdown we all had a play. Needed a new generation of hardware to work properly, because it was a unity game with a bunch of hacks to allow custom maps and rules.

Never mind, we are doing E N T E R P R I S E now. enter work rooms. Again a small initiative, which basically asked, can we make better VC if we are in VR? The answer is yes, yes you can, but selling it is hard. There were a lot of hard problems to solve, like needed to detect keyboards, how do you present your screen if you can see your computer? how can you do computer passthrough or virtual monitors in VR?

Zuck saw this and jizzed his pants, so made it a priority. This meant the small team (probably less than 40) swelled to like 4000. Most of the people who moved were not games devs, or had ever worked in graphics/3d. This meant that loads of silly lessons had to be learnt in prod. Nothing was stable, everything was high friction, and no, there was no public API to allow you third parties to integrated into the app.

For the longest time it took >5 minutes to join a VR meeting.

Basically Zuck loves features, and cant understand that user experience is way way more important than features. He throws engineers at the problem which means that instead of solving product issues, they endup solving people issues.

[alex1138]

Facebook is a company that doesn't believe in boundaries (seen when Zuck refused to acknowledge the problems with graph search or with gay people being added to groups that outed them by posting on their walls), the CEO is someone with a warped view of people (they trust me, dumb fucks). I have no doubt their VR ploys are either "it's cool" (while spending no effort on account support on Facebook proper) or "must monopolize everything". Zuck is smart but he's... well, single minded as far as that goes. He wants domination