Comment by xd1936
5 days ago
Unbelievable. They re-architected the whole operating system around this stupid app. They discontinued their previous homescreen environments in favor of trying to promote Horizon Worlds, only to discontinue the blasted thing anyway? After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?
They also renamed the entire corporation from "Facebook" to "Meta" to prove how serious they were about it.
While simultaneously renaming the VR headsets to also use Meta branding instead of Oculus, even though Oculus was a great brand and the most recognizable name in the VR industry. What made it worse is that by that point they'd produced lots of headsets with Oculus branding, including an Oculus button on one of the controllers. So, they had to change that button to also have a different logo and name, and have the software presumably recognize which revision you had to draw the correct controller model in the VR view. It's insane how far they went in pursuit of what they saw as the next NFTs.
Funnily enough, it did end up as the next NFTs, just not in the way they hoped
IIRC the reason they abandoned Oculus brand was that Palmer Luckey sold the company with condition the Oculus headsets would not need a facebook account to use it. Later they renamed the company and headset, and would you look at that — it requires meta account now.
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Well, NFTs in 2026 are also not so popular
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Oculus had pizzaz and nice branding separation from Facebook. Which was a good thing.
Meta does not feel like a different brand from Facebook, given it is its umbrella. As brands they both speak "surveillance", "advertising", "scams", "AI slop", "manipulating your experience", "child harms" and "doom scroll regret".
They should rebrand the headsets back to Oculus, put them in a separate division, remove any dependencies. And never speak of Meta This or Facebook That or Zuckavatraphila again.
C’mon it was worth a shot.
Remember how amazing the original NFTs were?
Thank god Mark Zuckerberg is not self aware in the least bit because we can keep getting hilarious gems like this for probably the rest of his days. The guy probably lives as close to the Truman Show experience as one can realistically get.
Hah, you made me think of the future with regards to this fool. Why do I see a future where amongst all the chaos and destruction of a big climate-induced disaster, the headline "Mark Zuckerberg and his family have reportedly retreated into his doomsday bunker" will appear...
I thought the bunker is only a rumor, but DDGing it, it's "rumor" that's been covered in many news outlets, so, I'm guessing it's real although the news outlets might have some details wrong.
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Wild musing:
Did Zuckerberg invent Facebook.com or copy it from another person, during college?
I forget where history landed on that one.
And so I wonder if this corporate decision relates to that inventiveness of lack of.
In initial form, there wasn't anything to invent: it was implementing a digital phone book.
That idea was brought to him by the Winklevoss brothers.
He then built it (allegedly, and having to pay $65m to settle a claim about, while lying to his partners) and scaled the company into what is now Facebook.
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The rename was successful. The failure of Meta brand didn't directly impact the Facebook one.
Now they have to rebrand the company again to be about some AI hype spy glasses. The Metaverse was a flop.
The corporate metaverse was a huge flop. There are plenty of VR games and communities that are still thriving off the backs of the Corpo metaverse technology.
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Don't worry, they'll rename themselves LLaMeBook next, and this time will be different!
Moltbook, they bought this recently
They changed the name of the company to distance themselves from a number of scandals including Cambridge Analytica, COVID vaccine misinformation, and sitting on studies about teen mental health and social media use.[0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59083601
Not sure why you're downvoted but I absolutely do think that they changed their name for better branding. I also think they were involved in a number of antitrust lawsuits so renaming their company to Meta says "see, we're the underdog in this new big VR industry, we're not a monopoly".
Billions. Facebook has spent billions and billions over the past decade in VR. Starting with the Oculus merger and then in 2021 with the rebrand.
10 billion a year supposedly for the past 5 years now.
I kept saying to myself, they must be seeing something I'm not... I guess not
VR games are actually kind of neat and fun. But it’s too much of a hassle to set the thing up every time and, I dunno, the association with Facebook is too icky.
It would have been really interesting to see what Oculus could have become without getting bought. I do think they were a little neat idea, not at all ready for Facebook sized projects.
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"The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."
- All The President's Men
Sometimes it’s just a jobs program to keep people busy so that they can’t build something else that can threaten your business
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The product isn't Facebook, Quest, or Instagram. The product isn't advertising. The product isn't even people.
The product is the stock price.
Viewed through that lens, keeping the hype going at all costs makes sense.
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There is. Reality Labs is not just VR. There are several divisions doing things non VR related. These areas have significant investment.
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Is that a bad thing? That's 10b that engineers and other employees now have and Facebook doesn't have. And while VR might never make them money, is it bad from our pov that they did the research and development?
It's probably a bad thing for anyone who doesn't already own a house near Menlo Park and wants to buy one.
So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.
> So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.
And the tens of billions spent on AI at Meta... As a result, we're all using "Meta Code CLI" and "ChatBook" and "Geminizuck" right?
Seriously: while we're all on Claude Code using the Anthropic models and many are happy with Gemini and ChatGPT for other stuff, where is Meta's AI offering? I love their Segment Anything Models (SAM) but what the heck has Meta to answer to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI?
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> a fraction of the AI investments
you realize 99% of those announced "investments" have yet to occur as recognizable transactions, correct?
Meanwhile, the barrel of $70b in metaverse waste was actually spent
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What's the quote:
"A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about some real money."
I meant hundreds of millions on Horizon Worlds specifically. Virtual concerts and the like. Big "Hello Fellow Kids" energy.
Can you blame them? They saw the huge success Fortnite was having in that space.
Facebook's core competency is copying other successful products. Sometimes it works.
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Reality Labs is more than VR
Not on Horizon Worlds
They could have just waited until AI came out, now they can spend $1 million on tokens and slop :)
I still remember the VR hype of 2015, they predicted a market size for 2017 that we won't even reach by 2027, and probably 2037
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50 billion can't solve world hunger. It's not even a money issue.
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The usage numbers probably reflect what happened in this house: since the pestering to confirm age and the horizon worlds update the Meta VR devices have literally not been recharged.
They had the foundation of something half reasonable at one point, but their product management clearly got in the way.
but their product management clearly got in the way
I'm pretty sure the buck stops with Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg wants a cyberpunk future, not some 3D immersive HR department on your face.
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And at the same time VRChat is reaching record popularity and user counts with tiny fraction of the budget Facebook wasted.
And it is so simple - just listen to your users and give them what they want - which seems to be VR cat girls.
I think that's the issue Meta had, they were trying to introduce VR to the greater public. VRs actual community is a niche of individuals who love the technology, they didn't want what Horizon was offering. VRChat is too weird for the average person, but Horizon was not interesting enough for the average person either.
I do believe that the recent Meta headsets pulled in a lot of users who will stay, thanks to their price point and performance.
There was a solution for meta though but they failed to pivot. Almost every generation as a whole disliked VR, except for children. Gen Alpha is into VR, but meta failed to market it as their NES or much better Roblox. Instead, meta marketing stayed focused on disinterested adults. Maybe it was because the children were using their parent’s accounts since it’s apparent that meta’s marketing department didn’t touch their VR devices? Otherwise, they’d realize the horizon and every online VR game was filled with kids.
> After all of those millions of dollars spent trying to make virtual events happen?
Billions. $70 billion since 2021 to be exact.
Not millions. Many many billions. (not on virtual events, but on the platform itself--that's the crazy part)
Mark isn’t in charge because he’s smart, he’s in charge because of voting rights.
Or, to put it another way that actually gives him some credit, because he founded the company.
Personally, I find it refreshing that he’s one of the only ultra large CEOs that’s willing to go big or go broke. Otherwise, you end up with fossilized X trillion dollar company that amounts to a combination of safe haven/growth stock for retirement accounts and whose innovations amount to little more than finding pretty ways to machine different types of metal cases and who seemingly has entire research teams dedicated to discovering various new shades of grey every year. (This take isn’t fair to Apple, tbh, but they have gotten booooring under Tim Cook.)
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No, not millions. Billions. Like $70+ billion.
Thats a lot of money to (attempt to) remake Ready Player One, and then abandon it??
They rebuilt half of their company around this thing and countless people saw promotions all around.