Meta screwed up health care so badly that now they’ll never get their legs re-attached. /s
What’s really dumb is that VR could actually take off if it was done correctly, but these billionaires can’t think of literally anything besides profit so they base the entire model around that and just expect people to want it. If he had dumped an iota into further development of VR tech, and invested in some actual original VR content, games, etc then people would flock to it. That and actual affordable VR since everything is still overpriced since it’s considered a niche market.
VR isn’t a bad idea.
…Zuckerberg is just an idiot.
That’s really what it comes down to. Facebook has some neat branches and employees, but at the end of the day, its head decision maker is chronically flakey and makes catastrophically bad financial choices, repeatedly.
He’s just so freaking rich it doesn’t even matter.
I still remember the original Metaverse pitch basically being ‘We’re going to copy VRChat but without any of the bits people enjoy’
Having only seen videos of VR Chat, your avatar can be a 6 foot penis or a anime girl or a skeleton with a trumpet. And I think Metaverse was trying to provide that for businesses and the general public?
How can you create a social hub where you can’t be a 6 foot penis?
Like it should be, as Neil Stephenson depicted it in Snowcrash, 1992…
The original concept was more or less a virtual shopping mall with a character creator. Imagine VR chat but made by EA.
There will be a $12.99 monthly fee for imaging that
So WorldsAway but twenty years later?
I don’t know how to tell you but Worlds Away was 20 years old… a decade ago.
!Released September 1995!<
Delete this
And, in practice, take forever, don’t really promote it, and make it look like no one at Facebook has ever laid eyes on a video game.
He’s so stupid if he really thought companies were willing to buy a VR headset for every employee so they can go to virtual meetings (like actual meetings are not already a chore)
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Oh and add to that stupidity the fact that almost every company refused to keep working from home after the pandemic
Including Facebook.
Zuck loves a bandwagon.
Yeah, I don’t like the idea that failed ideas are a waste, because that kind of thinking stifles technological advancement.
I do like thinking that we can have both technological advancement and healthcare.
Imagine if he put that amount towards affordable housing in Cali
Honestly, that’s the government’s job after taxing the shit out of this billionaire.
I predicted this crash and burn at the exact moment I saw it for the first time.
All these dickheads steal one good idea, and they think that makes them geniuses.
Most reasonable explanation for this crap I heard:
- facebook is just a website that makes money through tracking and ads
- people need to use a device to access facebook, so they can get tracked and see ads
- apple and google own all your devices and started to block tracking and ads (except their own)
- Zuck saw a risky chance by investing in VR. The vision was to get everyone on their VR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads
cuckedberg bet that VR headsets were going to take over, which even back in 2018 seemed far fetched. He’d have had a better chance to fortify his stranglehold by spending all that money making fb’s own custom android and securing deals with phone manufacturers.
These tech bros call them moonshots.
Which I can see them repurposing all the Metaverse stuff into glasses.
But not that I would touch that and feed the Zuck machine.
Now the vision is to get everyone on their AR platform so they can continue to track you and show you ads through your smart glasses.
All this time, effort, and money spent to convince you to buy things you don’t need.
For context, $77 billion is more than most nations spend on their military.
What we could have bought instead; a list of real problems that money could help significantly with, or fix entirely (generated with AI):
Universal Healthcare (Medicare for All)
- Est. cost: $3–4T per year
- $77B covers ~2–3 weeks of healthcare for the entire US
- Or ~6–7 million people for one year
- ~2% of annual national healthcare spend
High-Speed Rail and Public Transit
- Est. cost: $50–120M per mile
- $77B covers 600–1,200 miles of true HSR
- 3–5 major national corridors plus urban transit upgrades
Homelessness, Veterans, and Mental Health
- Est. cost: $150k–300k per housing unit; ~$25k/person/year care
- $77B covers 250,000–400,000 permanent housing units
- 10+ years of care for all chronically homeless
- 100% of veteran homelessness eliminated
Roads, Bridges, and Infrastructure
- Est. cost: ~$5M per bridge; ~$1M per mile of road
- $77B covers 15,000–20,000 bridge replacements
- ~100,000 miles of roadway rebuilt
- ~15–20% of all structurally deficient bridges
Domestic Semiconductor Manufacturing
- CHIPS Act: $52B total
- $77B covers 150% of CHIPS Act
- 3–5 leading-edge fabs
- Full AI, defense, and automotive supply-chain security
Fusion and Advanced Energy
- ITER reactor: ~$22B
- SPARC program: ~$4B
- $77B covers 3 ITER-class reactors
- 10+ SPARC-class fusion programs
Climate Resilience and Clean Energy
- Est. cost: ~$1B per GW renewable capacity
- $77B covers 60+ GW clean power
- Electrification of ~10 million homes
- Coastal protection and grid modernization across multiple states
Public Sector Scale Comparison
- Equals 3+ years of NASA’s budget
- Equals 10 years of US homelessness funding
- Exceeds annual defense budgets of most countries
The art direction in that screenshot seems to be “make everyone else look so weird Zuckerburg looks normal”
John Carmack had some choice words when he left Meta.
"We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.
“It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.”
Imagine getting John Carmack on your project and ignoring him. Like, what was the point? Zuck got lucky in the beginning and was cut throat enough to hold on to it, but he has no entrepreneurial talent.
that whole episode was a waste of a perfectly good Carmack
Insert Karma joke here.
Can’t invent one because Carmack seems to be a decent dude.
I don’t know his political tendencies but he’s extremely smart and he does seem decent, so… yea my world would crumble if I learned he’s right leaning
Facebook would make considerably more money if he stayed out of the decision making processes and just let talented people do it. But ego is going to ego I guess.
The dictator. First they get popular (or here rich I guess) but that was luck or network or maybe genious, but now the world moves on and that luck/network/genious doesn’t work for those new problems.
So in a democracy you vote him out, in a company you use up all the money while trying to bribe your way to more money because the dictator in this new setting is dumb as shit.
Zuckerberg was paying for the Carmack name but thought he knew better.
Well obviously!
One of them is a celebrated, accomplished developer. And the other is Zuckerberg.
I do remember a youtube video on C programming language had comments arguing about whether Dennis Ritchie or Mark Zuckerberg is the better programmer.
I remember watching that episode in the Silicon Valley series.
I like to think of the average tech billionaire as Dustin Hoffman from Rain Man specifically in the Casino scene. He’s a savant at counting cards, and Tom Cruise’s character (the investors) see that and help him rack in a shitload of money at blackjack.
Then Hoffman’s character decides he wants to try a roulette-type game, a game for which savant-like card counting skills offer absolutely no advantage, and the investors, unable or unwilling to see how roulette is nothing like blackjack just blindly sign on and Tom Cruise quickly loses $3,000.
Why the fuck do we think the dweeb who made Facebook in college and hasn’t lived as a normal human for two decades would have any particular insight into how people would use VR?
The scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk7eA4gVDno
Zuck wasn’t marketing VR to the average consumer or even the tech enthusiast. He was marketing it to middle managers who wanted to regain control of their WFH peons. During covid, those types lost a lot of control while the workers continued without much change. Now that back to the office is being forced, the target demographic isn’t interested.
The middle managers don’t even matter in this scenario. No executive wants to buy hundreds or thousands of VR headsets just so their employees can meet in a video game instead of Teams. Actually moving any part of the workplace into VR comes with a massive upfront hardware cost and I have yet to hear anyone articulate a real benefit that justifies such an investment.
Facebook bought Oculus in 2014.
Yes and?
Facebook was marketing their virtual office space stuff during covid. In the infinite wisdom of Zuck, that’s the best use of the tech today.
My point is …what was the plan before COVID? What did VR have to do with social networking?
Second life!! /sj
I don’t think he had a plan in the beginning. These people aren’t pioneers. They got lucky once, get labeled as a trend setter and then you have to try and maintain that image. VR was going the next big thing, so Zuck bought a company without a plan. Tech companies do that all the time. They see themselves falling behind on something and just buy some random company to appease the shareholders/press.
The VR office thing was just the limits of Zuck own creativity and saw covid as an opportunity to keep their product relevant.
Zuck bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they weren’t mistakes. His purchase of Oculus is similar.
I suspect the losses on VR will eventually be offset by AR and smart glasses.
He also bought giphy, onavo, parse, ctrl-labs, eyegroove, daytum, and like a dozen other companies, maybe more. Some of these are totally a waste (onavo and parse were shuttered relatively quickly, giphy cost almost a half billion and got basically no roi, etc). It’s more that you’re bound to hit a few zingers if you can just keep trying because you basically have an infinite money glitch.
Also ctrl-labs is neural interfaces. Creepy name for that right? Especially when fucking meta owns it. Yuck.
I suspect only creeps will buy his peep glasses for rapists and pedophiles. They should be banned and if they are not they should at least be like the apple ones, which are basically a gigantic sign that says “this person desperately wants to follow you and your child into the bathroom and videotape it. They want it so bad they spent $3200 and walk around with this stupid asshole shit strapped to their face”
I suspect only creeps will buy his peep glasses for rapists and pedophiles.
I don’t understand this. Even voyeurs benefit more from the optical nature of glasses than the camera part.
Do you not understand the benefit of saving things for later when one has privacy? More nefariously for creating a collection of illegal voyeur content to use for trade on illicit networks of illegal content
Ah. OK. I’m obviously not in the right mindset.
Probably says something good about you tbh
They were at least in the same wheelhouse. Close enough to be seen as a threat to FB. Oculus was just a total shot in a new direction.
Communication would be the underlying theme.
Did zuck personally buy these or did a team of analysts doing research make proposals and he picked some?
Zuck seems quite hands on for big purchases e.g.. I’d lean more to the former than the latter, but I’m sure there’s a team of lawyers and analysts somewhere.
He had it. Once.
After that, he’s just another mogul with tons of money trying to impose his products by abuse of predominant position.
Still wild to me that someone like Carmack was in all this. Like, how did he think this would turn out? I guess the salary must have been enormous.
The company got bought so I guess Carmack thought he could just continue developing the headset, with loads of more cash too.
Note that this was a 10% cut. Meta has a lot of staff. They are also slightly pivoting to AR glasses, as they say Ray-Ban Display sales are much higher than anticipated. I think they see their chance of cornering the VR market as gone (probably because of android xr) (see https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-pauses-third-party-horizon-os-headsets/ ) but think they have a chance to dominate AR glasses / wearables.
Could you include the link next time? (Or is it only lemmy.world that doesn’t show it?)
Edit: found it, if anyone else wants it: Meta Lays Off Thousands of VR Workers as Zuckerberg’s Vision Fails
Facebook is a boomer infested, depressing, idiot shithole. I’m not spending extra money for hardware so I can experience that in VR.
If I wanted to experience that, I can visit my shitty boomer mother for free in reality.
I detest everybody who posesses more than 5 million. All above is absurd greed and should be punished.
$73G to make VR Miis with no legs
Meanwhile, VRChat:
This just proves any VR project without any trans people is doomed to fail
Who else could know what it’s like to walk in another’s skin and see a face you don’t recognize in the mirror?
Every software project should have three groups: furries, trans people, and Linux users. Without all three the software becomes doomed, with too much of one it becomes niche, with a balance of all three it becomes incredible :3
Do they have to be three separate people? Because the Venn diagram of those three groups is a circle
Are furries considered trans or what am I missing? Serious question.
It’s best when the van diagram is a circle :3
It wasn’t even obvious how to get into this thing. We got a Quest headset, the kids use the heck out of it for gaming and hanging with friends, and I poked around in it trying to find this Zuckerberg World and you have to work to find it. I mean, if he wanted this thing to be big it should be the default, but nope. Anyway, the headsets are a ton of fun for gaming with others, but as far as VR interaction with other’s avatars for the purposes of social interaction? Nope.
as far as VR interaction with other’s avatars for the purposes of social interaction? Nope.
Except vrchat is actually HUGE. Now I’m sure the metaverse could never have unseated it as #1, but it could have been a thing if zuck actually made it not look like shit and didn’t try to commodity the hell out of it.
Don’t forget that it took, what, 1 week after release for someone to “grope” a journalist avatar and have meta desperately try to patch out shitty human behavior, removing avatars’ hips and legs and forcing them to stay 1.5m away from each other at all times
I feel like Rec Room solved this issue ages ago.
Vrchat exists because of porn, mostly. If metaverse added big tiddy avatars it probably wouldn’t have failed as hard.
Vrchat exists because of porn
That’s a weird take. I’ve played VRchat for around 100 hours, of which most was spent just bullshitting around and randomly inserting yourself in conversation that can go on for hours. Never noticed any porn rooms or whatever you meant by that, but I guess we have different goals in games
