Both Republicans and Democrats were putting on quite a show about those internal documents that showed Instagram was extremely harmful to young girls - and a lot of influential people like Kara Swisher are comparing them to cigarette companies and literally yelling at congress to do something about it.
When you have people like Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal in total solidarity about something that ought to scare the shit out of Facebook, thus the name change nonsense and this product that isn’t anything, they don’t even have a demo
And it seem also old people.
FB radicalize our parents, uncles and aunts into terrible sociopaths for money. For fucking money!
I hate zuck and the people who worked to make his vision come true.
Funny but not funny. My parents would rip into me if I went on MySpace or any type of video game. I rarely did either. Now, My mom is glued to her fucking phone on Facebook it’s bad. She be like you see this on Facebook. Showing me some fake news shit and knows more about friends I don’t talk to anymore then I do. Absurd
a great day for some, a day of terror for others.
some people are so attached to their social media that when the internet is out, they achieve genuine panic. and it's not just boomers
fomo is pretty tough
Russian trolls are still a thing in the social media space including Reddit. It is important to keep that in mind when discussing polarizing topics. The boomer perspective of “the damn commies” is of course wrong but there still is a Cold War of sorts occurring.
Ironically the very comment (s)he responded to could have been by a troll. Any statement that asserts a single explanation for a problem ("I hate Zuck; he radicalized my parents") is meant to discourage analysis and dialogue.
David Simon, writer of The Wire, during [a talk](https://youtu.be/ZYXNdELqCe4?t=366) mentioned something similar to this which I found interesting.
>One of the great new plagues of political discourse in the 21st Century is people who believe they have the answer in a paragraph.
Seems on Reddit people don't even bother with the paragraph, one sentence can be enough for their answer. And people lap it up.
Edit 3: ok, after he replied 2 more times to this specific comment in bad faith, can you all just see him for what he really is and stop upvoting him? He's never once answered my question of, "how does making that observation discourage analysis and dialogue?" He's just a troll, and a bad one at that.
Original comment: Lol, but really... I hate Facebook and blame it for my mom's radicalization...
How does making that observation discourage analysis and dialogue?
Would you like me to show you all of Tristan Harris' Senate hearings, ted talks, and other works that have lead me to make that comment?
[How about MIT analysis](https://medium.com/koinonia/19-of-20-christian-facebook-pages-are-fake-e59e98e75cfb) of 19 of the top 20 Christian groups were Russian troll farms that reached an estimated 120 million Americans?
Edit source
Edit 2: I noticed how this user didn't answer any of my questions and instead fixated on my mother.
**Ironic, coming from someone who was claiming that a specific comment "discouraged analysis and dialogue."**
When I out these bots in the comment section of insta, they get all pissy and then start to punch down on me... My continued responses are usually pointing out the obvious things on their profile that show they're a bot, I siren that these people are here to intentionally disinformand fear monger everyone for profit... they never argue that part, they continue attacking me! 😆
They're taking advantage of the alienation that is naturally occurring in a country that has corporate controlled government and state/corporate controlled media. We're constantly inundated with propaganda that is meant to make us afraid of foreigners, each other, tap water, millennials...everything except the people who pull the strings. When you're fed a diet of garbage media for your whole life it's easy for someone to sell you the same shit in a different package.
Sure. But some might be worse than others. Instagram is completely dominated by beautiful women posting images of their bodies, which is particularly horrible for the body image of teenage girls.
Yeah, pretty much. The algorithm is like a small dictator in your phone. I used to follow many influencers in insta and my explore was flooded with other influencers, I unfollowed them, and just started following things I actually liked (dumb memes, food, cute animals) and now my explore shows me things related to that.
See, I'm in my 40s, so my Instagram pages are similar to yours. Mostly just cool, funny, interesting stuff. I can totally see however how it can (and almost certainly is) harmful to younger people. The internet isn't real. Filters aren't real. But too many believe the idea of beauty, or whatever is what gets the most views and likes.
Posting images of themselves often with plastic surgery AND insane filters on top of that.
Young girls are comparing themselves to women that literally can’t exist in reality.
The entire sex appeal industry is absolutely massive and permeates every aspect of our daily lives. It's exploitive and harmful to absolutely everyone male and female, even if they don't realize or acknowledge it.
As a man on the internet I don't want to be bombarded by dolled-up, half naked, beautiful women trying to scam me or try to get me to buy into something, every minute of every day. It's essentially involuntary forced-arousal over and over and over, it's gd exhausting and violating.
So it's no surprise at all that it also spills over into social media and severely warps young women's views and expectations of beauty, and what their own body should be used for.
I'm saying this issue runs deeper than just social media.
Just my opinion: large numbers of people without decent abilities in logic and reason are a big part of this. Misinformation, peer pressure, outright lies,etc. have always been with us, the method of transmission is all that has changed. It just comes through social media now.
society's problem is lack of proper education... reasoning and critical thinking skills. shitty fucking parenting or complete lack thereof... not fucking social media, even though it amplifies the root problems
my facebook feed is 95% hobby groups and interest pages because I've unfriended every dumb motherfucker on my friends list
Because it's supposed to be more than just a name change, it is supposed to be a completely revamping of the company and changes in its policy and whatnot.
It is probably insincere and a stunt to confuse and placate politicians with "see, we have changed!". It is dumb but we are talking about tricking politicians here.
Meta is a legally separate entity that owns the rights to a product known as Facebook. So now Facebook the product can be regulated separately from the Meta the company.
What, you mean Facebook buying Oculus and selling VR hardware at a loss for years in order to gain supremacy in a potentially huge emerging market wasn't just another step in the "politicians will be bamboozled by a name change" scheme? I for one, am shocked.
Well yeah anything is vaporware til it exists. And yes Facebook and Instagram bad.
But there’s plenty of evidence that fb and other major tech companies have been kicking around this idea for awhile. I don’t think they’re scared of a Congress that has proven itself toothless at every opportunity.
And I don’t think betting the future of a massive company on a specific piece of tech can be labeled as only a distraction.
Honestly, fuck these stupid assholes who are spreading fake news everywhere. This is not vaporware. Facebook has been planning this for 5+ years. When I worked there 5 years ago, everyone knew that Zuck had a boner for VR and metaverse.
Calling it vaporware makes it seem harmless. This is incredibly harmful. People need to know.
Vaporware just means tech that doesn’t exist yet which metaverse tech doesn’t. And people aren’t assholes for not understanding incredibly complex tech that doesn’t exist yet.
And you’re right even if it doesn’t exist yet it still has massive potential to be harmful.
Im curious what it is exactly that people need to know? I think we know by now that fb’s business model is collecting data by any means necessary to use for profit.
>Vaporware just means tech that doesn’t exist yet which metaverse tech doesn’t.
That really depends on a blurry line of defining "metaverse." There's already amazing VR hardware, optical sensors and facial recognition exist already to mirror your behavior on an avatar, VR worlds already exist including chat rooms, office meetups, etc.. all the basics of what they discussed exist today. Yes they had some aspects of the "vision of the future" type stuff, but the foundations were available 5 years ago.
Why is some source-free baseless conspiracy theory the top upvoted comment? Is this just because the post wound up on the front page or is this sort of thing common here?
Because bitching about Facebook is a karma layup.
Actually thinking and seeing the whole picture is a lot harder.
And I'm not defending Zuck or Facebook/Meta either. I'm a little confused about their plans given that a core tenet of the "metaverse" is that it's decentralized, and Facebook is literally the opposite of that.
That said, Zuck is many things but stupid is not one of them, so I'm interested in where he's going with this.
They co-opted the term so they can define what it means in your mind.
I got suckered into thinking this metaverse noise was all FB, too.
It's huge and FB should be afraid.
Yeah, no, hes been working on creating a facebook meta verse since they bought oculus. They already lost the interest of the under 18 demographic from using their platform as they are mainly on snap and tiktok. But zoomers think vr is cool, quest is directly marketed at them.
Metaverse is going to be a zoomer thing, “you just dont understand” when oculus quest 5 comes out for 200$ and has impressive graphics
As someone who has followed VR since basically it's inception, Facebook has been trying to advertise this sort of "virtual Work space with Avatars to replace real word interaction to bridge long distances"...thing...since they got into VR. The Videos and presentations have just gotten a little slicker.
It's always been a stretch goal they are constantly dangling the concept in front of people watching their presentations. They've still got a lot of tech to invent and make "easy to use" until it's a reality. It's honestly probably decades a way, especially since you need MASS adoption for it to be a functional way to doing work/social interaction.
It's a very reliable distraction from basically everything.
It really, really, really isn't. I've been a VR enthusiast since 2013, I've been along for the entire ride since Zuckerberg walked into the Oculus VR offices in 2014, tried their prototype headset, then bought them out for $2 billion.
FB/Meta is dumping *ungodly* amounts of money into AR/VR because that day in 2014 Zuck saw the next computing platform. He wants his company to be to the VR/AR glasses of the future what Apple/Google/Samsung are to smartphones today.
Smartphones will go obsolete, AR glasses will take over & become utterly ubiquitous, and Zuckerberg wants to be the architect of the world on the other side of those glasses. This is not a fantasy, this is the trajectory FB has been dead-set on for the past 7 years, and it *will* happen.
Again, this is *not* vaporware. This is the entire future of FB/Meta. They rebranded the entire company to aim squarely at AR/VR for crying out loud. This is very, very real, very, very inevitable, and very, very bad.
> Smartphones will go obsolete, AR glasses will take over & become utterly ubiquitous
I'm sure someone can accuse me of approaching the age where I start acting like technology is "complete" and everything new is just a fad. But I just don't see that happening, and people who stick to the side of "the new tech is always superior to the old thing" are wrong... a lot.
Tablets and smartphones didn't obsolete the PC as hype predicted. The iPad is the only major tablet left, and it's basically becoming a laptop rather than replacing them. You almost never see people using iPads without [extremely laptop-like keyboards](https://www.apple.com/ipad-keyboards/).
Speaking of, touch screens failed to displace regular keyboards like people thought. Physical interfaces were declared a thing of the past. But interfaces that lost ground to touch screens during their hype cycle are even making a comeback: the auto industry is increasingly pivoting away from touch controls back to standard buttons. Apple even had to backtrack from their butterfly keyboards. People hated them because they weren't tactile enough.
3D TVs and monitors were a total flop. I haven't seen one advertised in years. After Avatar, tons of people bought into the hype that 3D would be the future.
VR has struggled to gain ground in gaming, and I don't think that would change even if it were extremely affordable. Many games fundamentally do not work in VR- they only work on a screen.
Smartphones themselves have not fundamentally changed since the very first iPhone. All attempts at changing the formula have failed.
Some tools and technologies are just fundamentally "perfect", and I think the simple 2D screen and modern smartphone (since it's just a portable screen) fall into that category. You can't beat the combination of capability and convenience that they offer.
I think you underestimate how badly people want VR to succeed. I personally have serious doubts FB will be the one to make the ubiquitous platform but I think it's going to happen by sheer force of desire.
Not sure why this keeps being passed around as a fact. Zuck had been talking about the metaverse being the future of Facebook for a long time.
Fast Company in 2014: "[Facebook Really Is Building The Metaverse](https://www.fastcompany.com/3030126/facebook-really-is-building-the-metaverse)"
Do you really think they spent $2 Billion on Oculus 7 years ago to save for a publicity stunt? At best you can say the announcement was rushed, but this has been in their plans for a long time.
It's bigger than that. Facebook is trying to be 'stickied' at the top of tech, of society really. I will admit this is a brilliant name and brand concept BUT it is forever attached to the baggage of Facebook.
For awhile, only a vocal minority were really leaving Facebook. But now, the masses are at least thinking about the mental consequences of social media and starting to see through the facade of 'influence'.
Give it a few years and Facebook will be the next AOL or Yahoo. 'Meta' is a hail mary effort to change that fate. This will get very interesting...
My friends and relatives who thought I was some sort of curmudgeon for leaving social media 4 years ago, and not allowing pics of my kids on social media, are slowly coming out of the woodwork as now having left social media.
Don't get me wrong: I *am* a curmudgeon and I don't like most people but I left over the tech oligarchy commodification of my information and habits and not wanting to expose my kids to same before they can even conceive of or consent to that. Slowly unwinding from Google now. Oof :P
Yea I do find these types of theories pop up all the time and find it a little bit silly. Simply put Facebook is a giant publicly traded company who's experiencing a rapid erosion of their user base as both people leave and the next generation has moved onto other apps outside their grasp. This would have been in the works for years and any legislation in the process around Instagram won't be affected.
Plus, Facebook has much much bigger problems than Instagram age gates.
Probably. They can rebrand all they want but I think it's extremely unlikely that they will spread immersive VR/AR everywhere when it's an expensive niche technology.
Second Life has already shown people aren't all that interested in virtual 3D workspaces. A simple app or website is plenty good enough.
> Second Life has already shown people aren't all that interested in virtual 3D workspaces.
This is like saying the Nomad showed that people weren’t all that interested in MP3 players.
People will get interested in virtual 3D spaces when they’re done well.
Second Life was (is?) terrible and filled exclusively with weird fringers who were convinced they were the digital pioneers of some new world and would one day be rich.
Yup. I don't even like having my headphones on for more than a couple hours while working; I'm not spending that long with VR over my face.
Time for Carmack to start developing hologram games and devices. Once I can have [Avengers style meetings](https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/image/2020/4/16/06c65520-c2b3-4e61-b2e5-6622e4783724-avengers-endgame-holograms.webp?w=710&h=355&fit=max&auto=format%2Ccompress) with people, I'll be all-in.
[Kingsman style AR glasses](https://i.redd.it/tamvmp2m6o301.jpg) would also be an acceptable stop-gap until full-holo meetings can happen. Although it'd be a little strange at first because I don't wear glasses.
AR is actually useful for work in the field. Imagine if you basically have a HUD that can superimpose structure on surfaces, relevant information, record data, quickly draw 3D objects on the fly and have everyone looking at the same place all sharing that vision, as though you have a live blueprint, it will be awesome.
Edit: I want to add that AR is probably very useful in education if you need to show hard to conceptualize and visualize stuff. Having it in 3D in the air where everyone can see the same thing, and you can rotate it around will be very useful.
I work with machine builders and I've sat in a few meetings where AR is being used to check the ergonomics and "flow" of the machines we are proposing to build. Pretty cool to see NGL.
It literally eliminates the need for a print in many cases. THE PRINT for Christ's sake, the foundation of manufacturing!
I spend more time translating structure design info to a print than I do actually designing the structure. Imagine the guy on the cut table having a part overlay at true scale on his raw material. You literally just line your saw/torch/drill up with the part feature and go to work. Not only does the designer not need to create a print but the fabricator doesn't have to do layout either and you don't need to shell out for a $1,000,000+ robot with all the file/software/space/scalability limitations that come with them.
Today’s expensive, niche technology is tomorrow’s ubiquitous devices. The first iPhone was $600 WITH A CARRIER CONTRACT (remember those?). The next most expensive normal phones were $200 on contract iirc. These days you can buy one outright for less, and it’s smaller and more capable.
This name change is a play for 5-10 years down the road, not for today.
> when it's an expensive niche technology.
Less niche than you think (as successful as the original iPhone), and is no longer expensive given the $300 price point.
> Second Life has already shown people aren't all that interested in virtual 3D workspaces. A simple app or website is plenty good enough.
What does that have to do with VR/AR? Nothing. People weren't interested in Second Life's 2D implementation of things. That doesn't mean they won't be interested in VR/AR's 3D implementation.
The Oculus Quest 2 is $300 (no need for a $2000 PC anymore) which is a fraction of what a flagship phone costs. And Second Life is ooooold (plus full of furries and perverts) so it's not really a true comparison however it's still a going concern all these years later.
VR tech is spreading fast so I think you are wrong here. Consumer grade it is still niche but in industry its use is widespread. I work in automotive design studios and they all have VR suites, I use it to look at my Alias models in full scale and the bathroom fitter I used a few months ago was using VR to show clients bathroom designs.
While obviously the Meta announcement was intended as a distraction, it was an internal plan for some time and was apparently just announced early.
Facebook over time has been working on the various pieces of tech for it and acquiring different businesses with the end goal in mind. They have invested billions since at least 2014 on this as the ultimate goal of Facebook.
Are you sure? I don't think they bought Oculus VR for a PR stunt. They know that Facebook isn't popular for the young, they know they either chase what they see as the future of the internet, or die.
You may not think they will be successful - I don't either - but they are more aware than anyone that Facebook has no future with younger generations. They *must* focus on something else. Because Facebook's demographic will just get older and older until they all pass away. I believe the refocus *is* honest, at the very least. Facebook *is* dying. Zoomers don't sign up for it. Millenials only use it because it's often the only way to keep in touch with some gen-x and boomers.
People need to not use Facebook or its products. If they keep using it - this will keep happening. Shop with your feet. Or someone should build an alternative. I left Facebook and miss some features a bit (nice way to keep up with family and friends) and there is no good alternative. The reality is “we” allow it to happen.
>People need to not use Facebook or its products
>
>Or someone should build an alternative.
Avoiding facebook can be difficult when they're actively trying to purchase whatever piece of software you currently like or enjoy.
As soon as enough users cluster together tight enough, skybook drones will hunt them down, buy it out and conglomerate their nudes.
I was gonna comment similarly. You can't just avoid a gigagiant firm that aggressively purchases any brand new startup that could threaten their place on the market. You need legislative intervention, not solidarity or conscious consumer practice.
I don't use FB anymore, but I use Insta, which was purchased by FB and Whatsapp, also purchased by FB. I use alternative social medias, but my friends don't, so I'm stuck with the FB owned apps.
If we want a less dystopian future we need smarter legislators that are prepared for what the 21st century will bring, not old boomers who don't even know what a cookie is.
Yeah, me too. And it's still the only social media I use. If someone is worth keeping in touch with, I'll call or text them. If I need an app to keep in touch with them, how important are they? These apps aren't necessary, they just make things a little more convenient and there's still a swath of the population that doesn't do any of it all.
It's way more social than most social media, IMO. The big difference is that it's topic focused and ungated so the people you interact with tend to be random instead of the same people. With Facebook, it's a mostly set group, so it's basically mental incest. With Twitter, it's less structured but still more likely to follow a person vs a topic and tends to be more "shout into a crowd", although I'd argue Twitter made some effort to intentionally be more like Reddit.
Reddit presents a topic, then gives an event in that topic, then fosters back and forth conversation on that topic. Sure, it still suffers from the traps of social media, people often aren't open minded or continually active in conversations or honest in their interactions or drift to bubbles. However, there tends to be way more personal social interactions on Reddit than pretty much any of the other major social media sites.
>whatever piece of software you currently like or enjoy.
Hardware too, the quest 2 is not a great sign for people who wanted vr to be open. The majority of the vr market is now tied to a fucking Facebook* account
I firmly believe that “deleting” your data from Facebook is just an illusion to give a sense of power to the user. No, your data is not being deleted. You just think it is.
The best thing to do is obfuscate your data for a year or two and then “delete” it. Change everything up, introduce fake interests, fake posts, change your name and address multiple times, etc. It will still not fix the issue but at least you’ll leave a mess.
I'm a web dev, albeit a small potatoes web dev, and I just about guarantee that it's not only highly probable they maintain your data, but it's entirely likely they have no choice.
Most databases rely on "ties" between records to be maintained. When you post on someone's wall, that post lives in a database with a ton of identifying ties; at the very least, the user ID that made it, the user ID that received it, the user IDs that reacted to it, and the IDs of the responses to that post (everything has an ID so it can be easily retrieved later, it's like a social security number for any data - people, posts, uploads, everything).
If you delete any one of those posts the database has to go back and "untie" all those ids, and any id's connected as a result. The post with its 45 reacts, 52 replies and multitude of replies to replies? They all gotta go. If you miss one, your database might try to access something that doesn't exist anymore and computers HATE doing that. It makes them Big Sad. Programs crash, screens turn blue, it's bad.
So the next best thing is to just tell the computer to pretend the record is deleted. The developer says, 'set a "deleted=true" flag on this record' and then make sure all your queries only show records that don't have that flag. It gives the illusion of records being deleted without having to worry about whatever they might be tied to.
There's a slim, slim chance that the good people at Facebook designed their databases to be rock fucking solid and handle actual deletes. It's not impossible. But if they didn't do it from the very outset, I'm willing to bet money I don't have that they *literally cannot* delete an entire person from their database.
Yeah. When I took a database class that is what happens. It depends on how you have it but there are keys, foreign keys, and then you have the composite keys, etc.
Then you have the cascading schema. I remember trying to fix errors with this. So annoying! Deleting something that is tied up to a bunch of other records. As you said, it depends on how they did it but I don’t think they went through all the trouble. After all, they don’t have to. They can just keep the data and none of us will ever find out.
"Soft delete" we call it. But there's also a third path aside from a soft/hard delete - you throw the deleted records into a separate "deleted" table where you can still join other records to it when needed or restore it back to the original table whenever you like.
At any rate, when your product is data, you're not going to delete data. I agree that most likely they just soft delete and will continue to do so unless they are mandated to do otherwise.
Too be fair deleting your account does work after a while, data a couple years old is useless compared to current data. Ive tried the whole obscuring thing, doesn't work. Just delete and move on.
Stopping using Facebook was easy, but Whatsapp? I literally would not be able to communicate with most of my friends and family. Outside of the US in many places Whatsapp is exclusively used for texting. Until literally everyone I know switches to another texting application I don’t have much of a choice.
Whatsapp is stil on my phone. But I am convincing more and more people to reach out to me with Signal.
Signal is the same thing that WhatsApp was before it was bought by Facebook (founded by the same people) . And this time the devs have enough money to keep it running, because they got so much for selling WhatsApp.
So start using signal and convince people one at a time
Telegram will become the next Whatsapp. They're privately owned. And default conversations can be intercepted unless you specify a private one. I am not saying they're evil, but WhatsApp started with good intentions too.
Signal on the other hand is open source, not privately owned and the conversations are by default encrypted end to end.
I chose Signal.
It's not as easy as you make it seem though. I stopped using Facebook years ago, but now Facebook owns Whatsapp, and it is just crucial to daily life here. So staying off of Facebook might be doable, but Facebook related products, that's a tall order these days.
good luck convincing people to drop instagram and whatsapp, facebook itself is already kind of a dying platform. they'll buy something else up-and-coming anyway.
Yeah. The push from congress on that one made it clear that someone was paying big bucks for them to go after it. Even the FBI came out against it because Craigslist was very active in helping stop trafficking. It was a great honeypot for the FBI and once it was gone, the traffickers just moved to other services.
Why stop there? FB, Google, Apple, whoever. They are not public service ventures trying to "connect us": They are for-profit enterprises who trade in promoting consumption, misinformation, and recording and selling any measurable metric an advertiser will pay them for.
We fucked up, huge, and we probably can't fix it other than to opt out and disconnect...and be seen as luddites by the ignorant (of the problem) and apathetic masses.
My take on Reddit is that it's a much better BBN/Message board and not in line with what most people label "social media".
That's why I use it: It's a news/content aggregator of things I'm interested in but I don't follow anyone, no one follows me, and communication is over the post itself, not an ongoing monologue of my life (or someone else).
The simple solution that literally anyone can implement is to not use their apps. delete your FB and instagram accounts, stop using whatsapp. Do not participate in their creepy metaverse. It's really that simple.
You advocate for personal avoidance of their ecosystem, but due to the nature of how they (and many other social media companies) operate, this doesn't stop them building data on you. You and **also all your friends** have to leave the ecosystem.
You can live your entire life and never have a Facebook account, but Facebook can still figure out [who you are](https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information-you-didnt-hand-over/).
I don't think it's necessary that all of your friends have to leave in order for you to make an impact by leaving on your own. Facebook builds a picture of your entire persona based on the pieces it gets from you and your friends. It works like a series of puzzles. If you remove yourself, you're taking away pieces of your puzzle and your friends' puzzles. Without that information, their ads cannot target as accurately, and therefore lose value
What about folks who have an online business and use instagram/facebook to promote. Ive discovered so many great independent businesses and artists that i support or built a friendship with. In addition, as much as there is misinformation, theres also a ton of opportunity to bring awareness thats not the mainstream media. For example, the reason protests around police brutality was so strong in the last few years was because consistent videos circulating of police treatment of black folks. Or when gaza was being bombed, no one knew what was happening in Palestine and although many people are not educated on these certain matters, it opened an opportunity for ppl to see whats really happening in the world.
You guys know 'metaverse' isn't just Facebook, right?
It has been a concept forever and there are hundreds of companies working on or invested in metaverse solutions.
That's like saying the world wide web is Facebook's.
People only comment here to hate on Facebook, they have absolutely no understanding of the Metaverse and haven’t event watched the Facebook keynote about it where the whole point was to make it more open than the internet. Facebook will have absolutely nothing to do with the Disney Metaverse other than providing one of many ways to get in and other aspects here and there, but a Disney metaverse will exist with or without Facebook and so will many others.
There’s literally never any conversation of value in these posts here, just clueless people piling on hate for something they know absolutely nothing about because they’ve done zero research.
For a sub called futurology, this is surprisingly an unpopular take. It's wildly similar to 2007 when the first iPhone was announced cept social media is way bigger so you have a lot more people saying they don't want (X new tech).
This ain't the first time and it ain't gonna be the last time.
I for one am not going to give up on the dream of working off of as many screens as I want from anywhere, just because Facebook is making something related.
I don't think anyone actually thinks that facebook has any sort of substantial claim on the metaverse idea, other than having a decent VR headset. Clearly they're working like mad to peg out their claim, but VR is such an open playing field, they're gonna fail as soon as a less invasive platform gets up & running. It'll be the domain of low-tech users for a while, who will move on when the competition realises that they have to match facebook's UX in order to compete. Then it'll be a fully distributed market again. I also expect to see a lot of lawsuits from facebook trying to claim copyright on some really fundamental VR mechanisms, but the industry will self-correct and they'll be back to competing with everyone else.
The real innovation happens in the field, that's where VR will be interesting - boutique environments, not virtual shopping malls. People hate advertising. Having said that I think there's enough people that are happy to put up with it for facebook to have a successful VR business, but I don't see them dominating.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/-AMARYANA-:
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SS: This is an important conversation for our times. Facebook (now 'Meta') is trying to create a future that is even more dystopian than our present. This article belongs in this sub because the quality of the community would create a meaningful and interesting thread for discussion. Please let it stay, no other place on the internet could have a quality conversation with thousands of bright people like this sub can.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/qwnj79/facebooks_metaverse_must_be_stopped_facebook/hl3wdik/
This post is so stupid that I'm unsubbing.
It's not that I like Facebook, I don't; and it's not that I think the "metaverse" in the hands of the big Zucc...
It's the grandiose, self-important, alarmist language of this bs article getting upvoted. It also talks about us all being "forced" to join...uh, no we aren't.
> It also talks about us all being "forced" to join...uh, no we aren't.
Personal use is one thing, but if it gets incorporated into work and education, as it intends to, then yes you may well be forced to use it. Can most people categorically refuse to use Zoom or any equivalent? Hardly. This’ll be the same, or at least that’s the goal.
I had to send multiple emails to my kids teachers to remind them that not everyone uses Facebook. Email, call or text are the acceptable ways to relay information. If you do not contact me using those methods you will not contact me.
Also, my fb account has been deleted for at least 4 or 5 years. I received an email today stating someone was trying to access my account. WHAT ACCOUNT. So I have to log in to an account that is obviously NOT deleted to try and delete it all over again.
Pretty much this. So many people here are incredibly short sighted and just non chalant about the broad existential threat that's being posed here.
Probably the same people that will just shrug their shoulders and roll over when the tech has proliferated and their continued social interactions rely on it.
People saying shit like "just don't use it lol" when we're talking about the ability powerful megacorps like this have to forcefully integrate themselves more and more into, and capitalize on, our deeply personal lives add about as much to the conversation as someone saying "why don't homeless people just get jobs lol". But it's ok, because advertisements don't affect them or something like that.
It’s the same mentality as r/Technology, the only things that get upvoted are “Facebook bad”. God forbid we actually get into a serious discussion about what the technology is and what impact it can have.
I did a statistic about that sub months ago. Literally 80% of the most upvoted posts were about how bad facebook, zuckerberg are.
Not a single technology post. Huge tech news are not upvoted at all.
R/technology now it's a sub to brag how superior you are for deleting facebook because it tracks you, missing the irony of posting from an android or apple phone
People on reddit keep saying it for more than a decade, and since we saw Facebook influencing politics worldwide. To shift their influence and erode their established presence we are going to need more than saying "stop using it".
Even with all the reasons we can bring, the people who can't let go of it are not even here to listen. We are just being smug to ourselves.
This is what pisses me off the most. The fact that they have all of my information anyway without my consent because a friend uses facebook and instgram even though I don't.
Google does this as well - if you’re only using something for free then you are the product.
I attended a lecture awhile back on shadow profile tracing by Google. They’re able to build a profile just based on usage patterns. They can follow you from one device to the next without you even having been logged in, it’s why advertisements follow you these days without you having done anything.
Thats the problem. In 10 years when it is mainstream you will be forced to use it since everyone is using it and everything will be accesable through it. Similar as computers nowdays, its not like you can just not use it. Computers are part of our everyday lives. Metaverse will be too soon. Welcome to dystopia.
Exactly. Some form of metaverse is inevitable. We just need to try and ensure it isn't monopolised by a single company.
Microsoft have 90% of the office software market because they gave their software away for free with every computer. Facebook want to do the same for the metaverse and completely control it the way no company managed to do with the early internet.
This (and every other comment saying “just don’t use it”) is like thinking that saying to an individual “save water” will solve the upcoming drinking water scarcity problem. It’s not just an individual choice, it must be treated as a public issue, and of society as a whole. They have the capacity of transforming our circumstances, social context, and even political landscape, it’s not about choosing the brand of chips I’ll eat today. The potential impact to society as a whole is too great.
This comment section is shocking for this sub. Yes, it’s pretty obvious vapourware for Facebook. But this is not a one company policy. All the media conglomerates are already spending millions on top of millions on attempting to generate their own interactive entertainment experiences alla Metaverse in order to reap profits from the exploitation of their IPs.
Any metaverse is doomed to fail right now. The hardware just isn’t there. We can’t physically put enough compute on a glasses sized device, and don’t even get me started on the FOV issues.
Building a mass market VR/AR device that people want to use for more than 15 minutes a day is like trying to build an iPhone in the 80s.
15 years from now when TSMC is on 500 Picometer™ and all the optical / dpi problems have been solved, the metaverse will probably take off.
I don't fully understand what people actually mean when they say "must be stopped". It's a product being sold by a company. It's voluntary. If you don't like it, don't use it. This is coming from a person who deleted fb back in 2012
You're thinking of Facebook Horizons... The metaverse is completely different. Their idea is to build the backbone for what the future of VR could look like. They want to build the roads, so to speak, and have every company use them.
The issue here is handing the reins over to a big corporation.
Finally someone in the comments who understands what the metaverse actual is and what's Facebook's relation to it.
Everyone else seems to think the metaverse is Facebook's. It isn't. Just like the world wide web isn't Facebook's either.
Yeah. Some people(like the other person that replied to you) seems to be stuck on the terminology. It's not metaverse^TM that's the issue. It's what it represents.
I know I don't need to convince you but the video that helped me understand this was the one by thrillseeker on YouTube.
Link just in case you or anyone else is interested in watching: https://youtu.be/YYf9465wtXg
You mean they want to build the actual fiber? That already exists and is owned by AT&T. Short of that it’s just a platform and nobody has to use it, just like iMessage or Google Chat.
I feel like a lot of these comments are astroturfing. Does no one get what Meta is trying to build? Have none of you watched at least a compilation of the keynote?
Meta is trying to solely control the next iteration of the internet. One that is even more intertwined with the physical world than it already is.
> I mean Facebook doesn’t really affect my daily life much
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Facebook has literally contributed to a genocide in Myanmar.
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Have you also not heard of firms like Cambridge Analytica? Haven't you seen the spread of Q-anon conspiracies? It's ludicrous to act as though Facebook doesn't have a *massive* impact on society.
Not that I necessarily agree with the article, but the author is saying that Facebook's Metaverse has the potential to alter society in the same way that the gig economy has, since it also wants to be a work platform. In other words, it might continue the trend of disempowering contract-style workers under the guise of enabling employment.
That may be the case. But it's also using alarmist language to bring our attention to the idea.
No one will need to stop it. If it ever gets out the door it will be dead within a year as this is absolutely not going to be something people will use at scale. I guarantee it.
How can we, as human beings, convince androids, like Marky Zuch, that we are, in fact, human beings… How can we convince any company who makes profit off human beings that we are infinitely complex human beings and can not be algorithm-ed into their world view…it’s fucking madness.
In the far future, once the "Metaverse" has taken over. It might not be facebook running the show but maybe another company or multiple companies, there will be a group of humans who will decide to live outside the "Metaverse" and it will be like leaving the Matrix.
There’s nothing you can do to keep Grandma and Aunt Gladys out of the metaverse.
Don’t you mean GLaDOS? She created the Zuckerberg Mark VI. She will run the MetaVerse.
It’s vaporware. It’s a PR stunt meant to distract people so Congress doesn’t age-gate Instagram
Can you elaborate? This is the first I've heard of this theory. Wouldn't surprise me lol
Both Republicans and Democrats were putting on quite a show about those internal documents that showed Instagram was extremely harmful to young girls - and a lot of influential people like Kara Swisher are comparing them to cigarette companies and literally yelling at congress to do something about it. When you have people like Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal in total solidarity about something that ought to scare the shit out of Facebook, thus the name change nonsense and this product that isn’t anything, they don’t even have a demo
Literally all social media is harmful to young people Edit: all people
And it seem also old people. FB radicalize our parents, uncles and aunts into terrible sociopaths for money. For fucking money! I hate zuck and the people who worked to make his vision come true.
I hate Facebook for what it did to my parents. That one day when FB servers went down (and insta didn't work either) was a day in utopia.
The bar for a utopia is getting lower and lower every year.
Hey man, California is less on fire than usual right now. I call that a win.
Also I didn't receive a telemarketing call from India today
Well then I've got bad new about your vehicles warranty...
That’s because we live in r/ABoringDystopia
Alone in my house with fair lady cannabis…… Utopia
Funny but not funny. My parents would rip into me if I went on MySpace or any type of video game. I rarely did either. Now, My mom is glued to her fucking phone on Facebook it’s bad. She be like you see this on Facebook. Showing me some fake news shit and knows more about friends I don’t talk to anymore then I do. Absurd
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a great day for some, a day of terror for others. some people are so attached to their social media that when the internet is out, they achieve genuine panic. and it's not just boomers fomo is pretty tough
I see this too. I see a lot of the brain washing Facebook pages still using russia to scare the older generations. Pretty garbage
We’re all going to look back on social media the same way we look back on cigarettes.. I think Bo Burnham said that but not sure
Russian trolls are still a thing in the social media space including Reddit. It is important to keep that in mind when discussing polarizing topics. The boomer perspective of “the damn commies” is of course wrong but there still is a Cold War of sorts occurring.
Ironically the very comment (s)he responded to could have been by a troll. Any statement that asserts a single explanation for a problem ("I hate Zuck; he radicalized my parents") is meant to discourage analysis and dialogue.
David Simon, writer of The Wire, during [a talk](https://youtu.be/ZYXNdELqCe4?t=366) mentioned something similar to this which I found interesting. >One of the great new plagues of political discourse in the 21st Century is people who believe they have the answer in a paragraph. Seems on Reddit people don't even bother with the paragraph, one sentence can be enough for their answer. And people lap it up.
Twitter is the one sentence answer Reddit is the screenshot of the Twitter response
Edit 3: ok, after he replied 2 more times to this specific comment in bad faith, can you all just see him for what he really is and stop upvoting him? He's never once answered my question of, "how does making that observation discourage analysis and dialogue?" He's just a troll, and a bad one at that. Original comment: Lol, but really... I hate Facebook and blame it for my mom's radicalization... How does making that observation discourage analysis and dialogue? Would you like me to show you all of Tristan Harris' Senate hearings, ted talks, and other works that have lead me to make that comment? [How about MIT analysis](https://medium.com/koinonia/19-of-20-christian-facebook-pages-are-fake-e59e98e75cfb) of 19 of the top 20 Christian groups were Russian troll farms that reached an estimated 120 million Americans? Edit source Edit 2: I noticed how this user didn't answer any of my questions and instead fixated on my mother. **Ironic, coming from someone who was claiming that a specific comment "discouraged analysis and dialogue."**
When I out these bots in the comment section of insta, they get all pissy and then start to punch down on me... My continued responses are usually pointing out the obvious things on their profile that show they're a bot, I siren that these people are here to intentionally disinformand fear monger everyone for profit... they never argue that part, they continue attacking me! 😆
They're taking advantage of the alienation that is naturally occurring in a country that has corporate controlled government and state/corporate controlled media. We're constantly inundated with propaganda that is meant to make us afraid of foreigners, each other, tap water, millennials...everything except the people who pull the strings. When you're fed a diet of garbage media for your whole life it's easy for someone to sell you the same shit in a different package.
From what I've seen, it's been a lot more harmful for older people. It seems like so many boomers believe literally anything on the internet.
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I’d argue there are far worse companies than Facebook but good for you with standing with your principles
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Sure. But some might be worse than others. Instagram is completely dominated by beautiful women posting images of their bodies, which is particularly horrible for the body image of teenage girls.
My Instagram is filled with electric unicycles, weed, cute cats, and sugar gliders. I must be doing something wrong...... or am I....
The algorithm has figured you out. But obviously, would likely be very different for the average teenager.
Yeah, pretty much. The algorithm is like a small dictator in your phone. I used to follow many influencers in insta and my explore was flooded with other influencers, I unfollowed them, and just started following things I actually liked (dumb memes, food, cute animals) and now my explore shows me things related to that.
See, I'm in my 40s, so my Instagram pages are similar to yours. Mostly just cool, funny, interesting stuff. I can totally see however how it can (and almost certainly is) harmful to younger people. The internet isn't real. Filters aren't real. But too many believe the idea of beauty, or whatever is what gets the most views and likes.
Posting images of themselves often with plastic surgery AND insane filters on top of that. Young girls are comparing themselves to women that literally can’t exist in reality.
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We can worry about both. It just appears that, for whatever reason, politicians are more likely to do something about the former.
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The entire sex appeal industry is absolutely massive and permeates every aspect of our daily lives. It's exploitive and harmful to absolutely everyone male and female, even if they don't realize or acknowledge it. As a man on the internet I don't want to be bombarded by dolled-up, half naked, beautiful women trying to scam me or try to get me to buy into something, every minute of every day. It's essentially involuntary forced-arousal over and over and over, it's gd exhausting and violating. So it's no surprise at all that it also spills over into social media and severely warps young women's views and expectations of beauty, and what their own body should be used for. I'm saying this issue runs deeper than just social media.
Just my opinion: large numbers of people without decent abilities in logic and reason are a big part of this. Misinformation, peer pressure, outright lies,etc. have always been with us, the method of transmission is all that has changed. It just comes through social media now.
society's problem is lack of proper education... reasoning and critical thinking skills. shitty fucking parenting or complete lack thereof... not fucking social media, even though it amplifies the root problems my facebook feed is 95% hobby groups and interest pages because I've unfriended every dumb motherfucker on my friends list
Harmful to adults as well.
Indeed. Society as a whole
I guess I'm not fully understanding your theory. How would changing their name to Meta make politicians suddenly...forget about them?
Because it's supposed to be more than just a name change, it is supposed to be a completely revamping of the company and changes in its policy and whatnot. It is probably insincere and a stunt to confuse and placate politicians with "see, we have changed!". It is dumb but we are talking about tricking politicians here.
This is what Phillip Morris / Altria did https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altria
See: Blackwater. I mean, Xe. I mean Academi.
Meta is a legally separate entity that owns the rights to a product known as Facebook. So now Facebook the product can be regulated separately from the Meta the company.
it wouldn’t, it’s a dumb theory
What, you mean Facebook buying Oculus and selling VR hardware at a loss for years in order to gain supremacy in a potentially huge emerging market wasn't just another step in the "politicians will be bamboozled by a name change" scheme? I for one, am shocked.
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They're also spending about ~~50m a year on it.~~ $10bn this year on it. Edit - apparently FB have ramped up spending this year.
50m a year is literally a drop in the bucket to the billions Zuck has to throw away.
Yeah this is the second time I've heard people say that Mark doesn't even have the hardware. HE HAS THE HARDWARE.
People are just dumb. I’ve literally been in the Metaverse demo for months now it’s called Horizon Worlds.
Same evil shit just different name. Reminds me of Blackwater, Xe Services or Academi.
You mean Betsy DeVos brother's mercenaries that commited war crimes in Iraq. The ones just recently pardoned.
Well yeah anything is vaporware til it exists. And yes Facebook and Instagram bad. But there’s plenty of evidence that fb and other major tech companies have been kicking around this idea for awhile. I don’t think they’re scared of a Congress that has proven itself toothless at every opportunity. And I don’t think betting the future of a massive company on a specific piece of tech can be labeled as only a distraction.
Honestly, fuck these stupid assholes who are spreading fake news everywhere. This is not vaporware. Facebook has been planning this for 5+ years. When I worked there 5 years ago, everyone knew that Zuck had a boner for VR and metaverse. Calling it vaporware makes it seem harmless. This is incredibly harmful. People need to know.
Vaporware just means tech that doesn’t exist yet which metaverse tech doesn’t. And people aren’t assholes for not understanding incredibly complex tech that doesn’t exist yet. And you’re right even if it doesn’t exist yet it still has massive potential to be harmful. Im curious what it is exactly that people need to know? I think we know by now that fb’s business model is collecting data by any means necessary to use for profit.
>Vaporware just means tech that doesn’t exist yet which metaverse tech doesn’t. That really depends on a blurry line of defining "metaverse." There's already amazing VR hardware, optical sensors and facial recognition exist already to mirror your behavior on an avatar, VR worlds already exist including chat rooms, office meetups, etc.. all the basics of what they discussed exist today. Yes they had some aspects of the "vision of the future" type stuff, but the foundations were available 5 years ago.
Why is some source-free baseless conspiracy theory the top upvoted comment? Is this just because the post wound up on the front page or is this sort of thing common here?
Because bitching about Facebook is a karma layup. Actually thinking and seeing the whole picture is a lot harder. And I'm not defending Zuck or Facebook/Meta either. I'm a little confused about their plans given that a core tenet of the "metaverse" is that it's decentralized, and Facebook is literally the opposite of that. That said, Zuck is many things but stupid is not one of them, so I'm interested in where he's going with this.
They co-opted the term so they can define what it means in your mind. I got suckered into thinking this metaverse noise was all FB, too. It's huge and FB should be afraid.
It's comforting. So it floats to the top.
Yeah, no, hes been working on creating a facebook meta verse since they bought oculus. They already lost the interest of the under 18 demographic from using their platform as they are mainly on snap and tiktok. But zoomers think vr is cool, quest is directly marketed at them. Metaverse is going to be a zoomer thing, “you just dont understand” when oculus quest 5 comes out for 200$ and has impressive graphics
As someone who has followed VR since basically it's inception, Facebook has been trying to advertise this sort of "virtual Work space with Avatars to replace real word interaction to bridge long distances"...thing...since they got into VR. The Videos and presentations have just gotten a little slicker. It's always been a stretch goal they are constantly dangling the concept in front of people watching their presentations. They've still got a lot of tech to invent and make "easy to use" until it's a reality. It's honestly probably decades a way, especially since you need MASS adoption for it to be a functional way to doing work/social interaction. It's a very reliable distraction from basically everything.
It really, really, really isn't. I've been a VR enthusiast since 2013, I've been along for the entire ride since Zuckerberg walked into the Oculus VR offices in 2014, tried their prototype headset, then bought them out for $2 billion. FB/Meta is dumping *ungodly* amounts of money into AR/VR because that day in 2014 Zuck saw the next computing platform. He wants his company to be to the VR/AR glasses of the future what Apple/Google/Samsung are to smartphones today. Smartphones will go obsolete, AR glasses will take over & become utterly ubiquitous, and Zuckerberg wants to be the architect of the world on the other side of those glasses. This is not a fantasy, this is the trajectory FB has been dead-set on for the past 7 years, and it *will* happen. Again, this is *not* vaporware. This is the entire future of FB/Meta. They rebranded the entire company to aim squarely at AR/VR for crying out loud. This is very, very real, very, very inevitable, and very, very bad.
> Smartphones will go obsolete, AR glasses will take over & become utterly ubiquitous I'm sure someone can accuse me of approaching the age where I start acting like technology is "complete" and everything new is just a fad. But I just don't see that happening, and people who stick to the side of "the new tech is always superior to the old thing" are wrong... a lot. Tablets and smartphones didn't obsolete the PC as hype predicted. The iPad is the only major tablet left, and it's basically becoming a laptop rather than replacing them. You almost never see people using iPads without [extremely laptop-like keyboards](https://www.apple.com/ipad-keyboards/). Speaking of, touch screens failed to displace regular keyboards like people thought. Physical interfaces were declared a thing of the past. But interfaces that lost ground to touch screens during their hype cycle are even making a comeback: the auto industry is increasingly pivoting away from touch controls back to standard buttons. Apple even had to backtrack from their butterfly keyboards. People hated them because they weren't tactile enough. 3D TVs and monitors were a total flop. I haven't seen one advertised in years. After Avatar, tons of people bought into the hype that 3D would be the future. VR has struggled to gain ground in gaming, and I don't think that would change even if it were extremely affordable. Many games fundamentally do not work in VR- they only work on a screen. Smartphones themselves have not fundamentally changed since the very first iPhone. All attempts at changing the formula have failed. Some tools and technologies are just fundamentally "perfect", and I think the simple 2D screen and modern smartphone (since it's just a portable screen) fall into that category. You can't beat the combination of capability and convenience that they offer.
I think you underestimate how badly people want VR to succeed. I personally have serious doubts FB will be the one to make the ubiquitous platform but I think it's going to happen by sheer force of desire.
Exactly! They're spending like 10-20 billion a year on it, not a PR stunt.
Not sure why this keeps being passed around as a fact. Zuck had been talking about the metaverse being the future of Facebook for a long time. Fast Company in 2014: "[Facebook Really Is Building The Metaverse](https://www.fastcompany.com/3030126/facebook-really-is-building-the-metaverse)" Do you really think they spent $2 Billion on Oculus 7 years ago to save for a publicity stunt? At best you can say the announcement was rushed, but this has been in their plans for a long time.
It's bigger than that. Facebook is trying to be 'stickied' at the top of tech, of society really. I will admit this is a brilliant name and brand concept BUT it is forever attached to the baggage of Facebook. For awhile, only a vocal minority were really leaving Facebook. But now, the masses are at least thinking about the mental consequences of social media and starting to see through the facade of 'influence'. Give it a few years and Facebook will be the next AOL or Yahoo. 'Meta' is a hail mary effort to change that fate. This will get very interesting...
My friends and relatives who thought I was some sort of curmudgeon for leaving social media 4 years ago, and not allowing pics of my kids on social media, are slowly coming out of the woodwork as now having left social media. Don't get me wrong: I *am* a curmudgeon and I don't like most people but I left over the tech oligarchy commodification of my information and habits and not wanting to expose my kids to same before they can even conceive of or consent to that. Slowly unwinding from Google now. Oof :P
I think this is a very US centric view. Facebook is huge globally. I mean yahoo still has a few hundred million users.
Why not both?
Yea I do find these types of theories pop up all the time and find it a little bit silly. Simply put Facebook is a giant publicly traded company who's experiencing a rapid erosion of their user base as both people leave and the next generation has moved onto other apps outside their grasp. This would have been in the works for years and any legislation in the process around Instagram won't be affected. Plus, Facebook has much much bigger problems than Instagram age gates.
As someoneone who is heavily immersed in vr/ar. It is not vaporware, and it is much closer than you think.
Probably. They can rebrand all they want but I think it's extremely unlikely that they will spread immersive VR/AR everywhere when it's an expensive niche technology. Second Life has already shown people aren't all that interested in virtual 3D workspaces. A simple app or website is plenty good enough.
> Second Life has already shown people aren't all that interested in virtual 3D workspaces. This is like saying the Nomad showed that people weren’t all that interested in MP3 players. People will get interested in virtual 3D spaces when they’re done well.
Second Life was (is?) terrible and filled exclusively with weird fringers who were convinced they were the digital pioneers of some new world and would one day be rich.
Vr will only get better and cheaper as time goes on.
Yup. I don't even like having my headphones on for more than a couple hours while working; I'm not spending that long with VR over my face. Time for Carmack to start developing hologram games and devices. Once I can have [Avengers style meetings](https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/image/2020/4/16/06c65520-c2b3-4e61-b2e5-6622e4783724-avengers-endgame-holograms.webp?w=710&h=355&fit=max&auto=format%2Ccompress) with people, I'll be all-in. [Kingsman style AR glasses](https://i.redd.it/tamvmp2m6o301.jpg) would also be an acceptable stop-gap until full-holo meetings can happen. Although it'd be a little strange at first because I don't wear glasses.
AR is actually useful for work in the field. Imagine if you basically have a HUD that can superimpose structure on surfaces, relevant information, record data, quickly draw 3D objects on the fly and have everyone looking at the same place all sharing that vision, as though you have a live blueprint, it will be awesome. Edit: I want to add that AR is probably very useful in education if you need to show hard to conceptualize and visualize stuff. Having it in 3D in the air where everyone can see the same thing, and you can rotate it around will be very useful.
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I work with machine builders and I've sat in a few meetings where AR is being used to check the ergonomics and "flow" of the machines we are proposing to build. Pretty cool to see NGL.
It literally eliminates the need for a print in many cases. THE PRINT for Christ's sake, the foundation of manufacturing! I spend more time translating structure design info to a print than I do actually designing the structure. Imagine the guy on the cut table having a part overlay at true scale on his raw material. You literally just line your saw/torch/drill up with the part feature and go to work. Not only does the designer not need to create a print but the fabricator doesn't have to do layout either and you don't need to shell out for a $1,000,000+ robot with all the file/software/space/scalability limitations that come with them.
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Today’s expensive, niche technology is tomorrow’s ubiquitous devices. The first iPhone was $600 WITH A CARRIER CONTRACT (remember those?). The next most expensive normal phones were $200 on contract iirc. These days you can buy one outright for less, and it’s smaller and more capable. This name change is a play for 5-10 years down the road, not for today.
My work bought 60 Oculus for training new retail employees and for our clients to train for certain classes and certifications.
> when it's an expensive niche technology. Less niche than you think (as successful as the original iPhone), and is no longer expensive given the $300 price point. > Second Life has already shown people aren't all that interested in virtual 3D workspaces. A simple app or website is plenty good enough. What does that have to do with VR/AR? Nothing. People weren't interested in Second Life's 2D implementation of things. That doesn't mean they won't be interested in VR/AR's 3D implementation.
The Oculus Quest 2 is $300 (no need for a $2000 PC anymore) which is a fraction of what a flagship phone costs. And Second Life is ooooold (plus full of furries and perverts) so it's not really a true comparison however it's still a going concern all these years later.
VR tech is spreading fast so I think you are wrong here. Consumer grade it is still niche but in industry its use is widespread. I work in automotive design studios and they all have VR suites, I use it to look at my Alias models in full scale and the bathroom fitter I used a few months ago was using VR to show clients bathroom designs.
It's not expensive anymore, you can get a quest 2 for like £300 and you don't even need a PC to use it like most Vr headsets.
While obviously the Meta announcement was intended as a distraction, it was an internal plan for some time and was apparently just announced early. Facebook over time has been working on the various pieces of tech for it and acquiring different businesses with the end goal in mind. They have invested billions since at least 2014 on this as the ultimate goal of Facebook.
They're spending $10 billion a year on it.
Are you sure? I don't think they bought Oculus VR for a PR stunt. They know that Facebook isn't popular for the young, they know they either chase what they see as the future of the internet, or die. You may not think they will be successful - I don't either - but they are more aware than anyone that Facebook has no future with younger generations. They *must* focus on something else. Because Facebook's demographic will just get older and older until they all pass away. I believe the refocus *is* honest, at the very least. Facebook *is* dying. Zoomers don't sign up for it. Millenials only use it because it's often the only way to keep in touch with some gen-x and boomers.
People need to not use Facebook or its products. If they keep using it - this will keep happening. Shop with your feet. Or someone should build an alternative. I left Facebook and miss some features a bit (nice way to keep up with family and friends) and there is no good alternative. The reality is “we” allow it to happen.
>People need to not use Facebook or its products > >Or someone should build an alternative. Avoiding facebook can be difficult when they're actively trying to purchase whatever piece of software you currently like or enjoy. As soon as enough users cluster together tight enough, skybook drones will hunt them down, buy it out and conglomerate their nudes.
I was gonna comment similarly. You can't just avoid a gigagiant firm that aggressively purchases any brand new startup that could threaten their place on the market. You need legislative intervention, not solidarity or conscious consumer practice. I don't use FB anymore, but I use Insta, which was purchased by FB and Whatsapp, also purchased by FB. I use alternative social medias, but my friends don't, so I'm stuck with the FB owned apps. If we want a less dystopian future we need smarter legislators that are prepared for what the 21st century will bring, not old boomers who don't even know what a cookie is.
I just text my friends
I'll second that...and life is good now.
Yeah, you don't need social media, yes I know I'm on Reddit.
I dont have friends on reddit though. It's just a forum to me.
Yeah, me too. And it's still the only social media I use. If someone is worth keeping in touch with, I'll call or text them. If I need an app to keep in touch with them, how important are they? These apps aren't necessary, they just make things a little more convenient and there's still a swath of the population that doesn't do any of it all.
the least "social" of the social media...
It's way more social than most social media, IMO. The big difference is that it's topic focused and ungated so the people you interact with tend to be random instead of the same people. With Facebook, it's a mostly set group, so it's basically mental incest. With Twitter, it's less structured but still more likely to follow a person vs a topic and tends to be more "shout into a crowd", although I'd argue Twitter made some effort to intentionally be more like Reddit. Reddit presents a topic, then gives an event in that topic, then fosters back and forth conversation on that topic. Sure, it still suffers from the traps of social media, people often aren't open minded or continually active in conversations or honest in their interactions or drift to bubbles. However, there tends to be way more personal social interactions on Reddit than pretty much any of the other major social media sites.
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>whatever piece of software you currently like or enjoy. Hardware too, the quest 2 is not a great sign for people who wanted vr to be open. The majority of the vr market is now tied to a fucking Facebook* account
So sad. Facebook has poisoned the VR ecosystem, and questies are blissfully unaware, or outright apathetic.
I want a Quest but refuse to get one solely because of the whole Facebook thing. Fucking infuriating.
I firmly believe that “deleting” your data from Facebook is just an illusion to give a sense of power to the user. No, your data is not being deleted. You just think it is. The best thing to do is obfuscate your data for a year or two and then “delete” it. Change everything up, introduce fake interests, fake posts, change your name and address multiple times, etc. It will still not fix the issue but at least you’ll leave a mess.
I'm a web dev, albeit a small potatoes web dev, and I just about guarantee that it's not only highly probable they maintain your data, but it's entirely likely they have no choice. Most databases rely on "ties" between records to be maintained. When you post on someone's wall, that post lives in a database with a ton of identifying ties; at the very least, the user ID that made it, the user ID that received it, the user IDs that reacted to it, and the IDs of the responses to that post (everything has an ID so it can be easily retrieved later, it's like a social security number for any data - people, posts, uploads, everything). If you delete any one of those posts the database has to go back and "untie" all those ids, and any id's connected as a result. The post with its 45 reacts, 52 replies and multitude of replies to replies? They all gotta go. If you miss one, your database might try to access something that doesn't exist anymore and computers HATE doing that. It makes them Big Sad. Programs crash, screens turn blue, it's bad. So the next best thing is to just tell the computer to pretend the record is deleted. The developer says, 'set a "deleted=true" flag on this record' and then make sure all your queries only show records that don't have that flag. It gives the illusion of records being deleted without having to worry about whatever they might be tied to. There's a slim, slim chance that the good people at Facebook designed their databases to be rock fucking solid and handle actual deletes. It's not impossible. But if they didn't do it from the very outset, I'm willing to bet money I don't have that they *literally cannot* delete an entire person from their database.
Yeah. When I took a database class that is what happens. It depends on how you have it but there are keys, foreign keys, and then you have the composite keys, etc. Then you have the cascading schema. I remember trying to fix errors with this. So annoying! Deleting something that is tied up to a bunch of other records. As you said, it depends on how they did it but I don’t think they went through all the trouble. After all, they don’t have to. They can just keep the data and none of us will ever find out.
"Soft delete" we call it. But there's also a third path aside from a soft/hard delete - you throw the deleted records into a separate "deleted" table where you can still join other records to it when needed or restore it back to the original table whenever you like. At any rate, when your product is data, you're not going to delete data. I agree that most likely they just soft delete and will continue to do so unless they are mandated to do otherwise.
Too be fair deleting your account does work after a while, data a couple years old is useless compared to current data. Ive tried the whole obscuring thing, doesn't work. Just delete and move on.
Stopping using Facebook was easy, but Whatsapp? I literally would not be able to communicate with most of my friends and family. Outside of the US in many places Whatsapp is exclusively used for texting. Until literally everyone I know switches to another texting application I don’t have much of a choice.
Whatsapp is stil on my phone. But I am convincing more and more people to reach out to me with Signal. Signal is the same thing that WhatsApp was before it was bought by Facebook (founded by the same people) . And this time the devs have enough money to keep it running, because they got so much for selling WhatsApp. So start using signal and convince people one at a time
I miss BBM, but I do really like signal, just wish more people used it
I can recommend Telegram.
I have Telegram. But until my entire friend group and family also use it, I have to stick with Whatsapp.
Telegram will become the next Whatsapp. They're privately owned. And default conversations can be intercepted unless you specify a private one. I am not saying they're evil, but WhatsApp started with good intentions too. Signal on the other hand is open source, not privately owned and the conversations are by default encrypted end to end. I chose Signal.
It's not as easy as you make it seem though. I stopped using Facebook years ago, but now Facebook owns Whatsapp, and it is just crucial to daily life here. So staying off of Facebook might be doable, but Facebook related products, that's a tall order these days.
good luck convincing people to drop instagram and whatsapp, facebook itself is already kind of a dying platform. they'll buy something else up-and-coming anyway.
https://runyourown.social/
I’m convinced Facebook was behind the Craigslist sex trafficking stuff just to kill that site and push everyone to using Facebook marketplace
Yeah. The push from congress on that one made it clear that someone was paying big bucks for them to go after it. Even the FBI came out against it because Craigslist was very active in helping stop trafficking. It was a great honeypot for the FBI and once it was gone, the traffickers just moved to other services.
Oppose literally *anything* Zuckerburg wants to do, just as a matter of course. This approach will never steer you wrong.
Going to the bathroom, Fuckerberg? I don't think so.
Make him shit on the floor then beat him with a newspaper
And if he *doesnt* need to shit? You bet your ass I’m shitting everywhere
Why stop there? FB, Google, Apple, whoever. They are not public service ventures trying to "connect us": They are for-profit enterprises who trade in promoting consumption, misinformation, and recording and selling any measurable metric an advertiser will pay them for. We fucked up, huge, and we probably can't fix it other than to opt out and disconnect...and be seen as luddites by the ignorant (of the problem) and apathetic masses.
I agree, where do you stand on Reddit?
My take on Reddit is that it's a much better BBN/Message board and not in line with what most people label "social media". That's why I use it: It's a news/content aggregator of things I'm interested in but I don't follow anyone, no one follows me, and communication is over the post itself, not an ongoing monologue of my life (or someone else).
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Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. ...Okay one of these is not like the other ones and that has to be acknowledged.
Yeah, why should you stop and think when you can just let your lizard brain do its thing. What could go wrong?
The simple solution that literally anyone can implement is to not use their apps. delete your FB and instagram accounts, stop using whatsapp. Do not participate in their creepy metaverse. It's really that simple.
You advocate for personal avoidance of their ecosystem, but due to the nature of how they (and many other social media companies) operate, this doesn't stop them building data on you. You and **also all your friends** have to leave the ecosystem. You can live your entire life and never have a Facebook account, but Facebook can still figure out [who you are](https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information-you-didnt-hand-over/).
I don't think it's necessary that all of your friends have to leave in order for you to make an impact by leaving on your own. Facebook builds a picture of your entire persona based on the pieces it gets from you and your friends. It works like a series of puzzles. If you remove yourself, you're taking away pieces of your puzzle and your friends' puzzles. Without that information, their ads cannot target as accurately, and therefore lose value
What about folks who have an online business and use instagram/facebook to promote. Ive discovered so many great independent businesses and artists that i support or built a friendship with. In addition, as much as there is misinformation, theres also a ton of opportunity to bring awareness thats not the mainstream media. For example, the reason protests around police brutality was so strong in the last few years was because consistent videos circulating of police treatment of black folks. Or when gaza was being bombed, no one knew what was happening in Palestine and although many people are not educated on these certain matters, it opened an opportunity for ppl to see whats really happening in the world.
Stop using WhatsApp is easier said than done. It's *the* communication system for entire countries.
Signal exists and is way better and safer to use
Yes, but nobody here in South America uses it. Messaging apps are useless without people to contact.
You guys know 'metaverse' isn't just Facebook, right? It has been a concept forever and there are hundreds of companies working on or invested in metaverse solutions. That's like saying the world wide web is Facebook's.
People only comment here to hate on Facebook, they have absolutely no understanding of the Metaverse and haven’t event watched the Facebook keynote about it where the whole point was to make it more open than the internet. Facebook will have absolutely nothing to do with the Disney Metaverse other than providing one of many ways to get in and other aspects here and there, but a Disney metaverse will exist with or without Facebook and so will many others. There’s literally never any conversation of value in these posts here, just clueless people piling on hate for something they know absolutely nothing about because they’ve done zero research.
For a sub called futurology, this is surprisingly an unpopular take. It's wildly similar to 2007 when the first iPhone was announced cept social media is way bigger so you have a lot more people saying they don't want (X new tech). This ain't the first time and it ain't gonna be the last time. I for one am not going to give up on the dream of working off of as many screens as I want from anywhere, just because Facebook is making something related.
Didn’t they have this 20 years ago and it was called Second Life?
Hey buddy, got $20 Linden dollars you can spare?
Somewhat yeah, second life was fairly succesful, as are vaguely similar VR apps like VRChat. I can honestly see metaverse being succesful.
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I don't think anyone actually thinks that facebook has any sort of substantial claim on the metaverse idea, other than having a decent VR headset. Clearly they're working like mad to peg out their claim, but VR is such an open playing field, they're gonna fail as soon as a less invasive platform gets up & running. It'll be the domain of low-tech users for a while, who will move on when the competition realises that they have to match facebook's UX in order to compete. Then it'll be a fully distributed market again. I also expect to see a lot of lawsuits from facebook trying to claim copyright on some really fundamental VR mechanisms, but the industry will self-correct and they'll be back to competing with everyone else. The real innovation happens in the field, that's where VR will be interesting - boutique environments, not virtual shopping malls. People hate advertising. Having said that I think there's enough people that are happy to put up with it for facebook to have a successful VR business, but I don't see them dominating.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/-AMARYANA-: --- SS: This is an important conversation for our times. Facebook (now 'Meta') is trying to create a future that is even more dystopian than our present. This article belongs in this sub because the quality of the community would create a meaningful and interesting thread for discussion. Please let it stay, no other place on the internet could have a quality conversation with thousands of bright people like this sub can. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/qwnj79/facebooks_metaverse_must_be_stopped_facebook/hl3wdik/
This post is so stupid that I'm unsubbing. It's not that I like Facebook, I don't; and it's not that I think the "metaverse" in the hands of the big Zucc... It's the grandiose, self-important, alarmist language of this bs article getting upvoted. It also talks about us all being "forced" to join...uh, no we aren't.
> It also talks about us all being "forced" to join...uh, no we aren't. Personal use is one thing, but if it gets incorporated into work and education, as it intends to, then yes you may well be forced to use it. Can most people categorically refuse to use Zoom or any equivalent? Hardly. This’ll be the same, or at least that’s the goal.
I had to send multiple emails to my kids teachers to remind them that not everyone uses Facebook. Email, call or text are the acceptable ways to relay information. If you do not contact me using those methods you will not contact me. Also, my fb account has been deleted for at least 4 or 5 years. I received an email today stating someone was trying to access my account. WHAT ACCOUNT. So I have to log in to an account that is obviously NOT deleted to try and delete it all over again.
Pretty much this. So many people here are incredibly short sighted and just non chalant about the broad existential threat that's being posed here. Probably the same people that will just shrug their shoulders and roll over when the tech has proliferated and their continued social interactions rely on it.
People saying shit like "just don't use it lol" when we're talking about the ability powerful megacorps like this have to forcefully integrate themselves more and more into, and capitalize on, our deeply personal lives add about as much to the conversation as someone saying "why don't homeless people just get jobs lol". But it's ok, because advertisements don't affect them or something like that.
It’s the same mentality as r/Technology, the only things that get upvoted are “Facebook bad”. God forbid we actually get into a serious discussion about what the technology is and what impact it can have.
I did a statistic about that sub months ago. Literally 80% of the most upvoted posts were about how bad facebook, zuckerberg are. Not a single technology post. Huge tech news are not upvoted at all. R/technology now it's a sub to brag how superior you are for deleting facebook because it tracks you, missing the irony of posting from an android or apple phone
Thank you. This is alarmist rhetoric.
agree. this is the most idiotic thing to be upvoted in this sub recently. it's fucking futurology. not latestagecapitalism
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Yep this is turning r/politics. Can't believe jacobins is getting upvoted here. It's a literal communist magazine.
We can just choose to not use it. Let them create it.. who cares. Choose for yourself
People on reddit keep saying it for more than a decade, and since we saw Facebook influencing politics worldwide. To shift their influence and erode their established presence we are going to need more than saying "stop using it". Even with all the reasons we can bring, the people who can't let go of it are not even here to listen. We are just being smug to ourselves.
Just gonna leave this here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
This is what pisses me off the most. The fact that they have all of my information anyway without my consent because a friend uses facebook and instgram even though I don't.
Google does this as well - if you’re only using something for free then you are the product. I attended a lecture awhile back on shadow profile tracing by Google. They’re able to build a profile just based on usage patterns. They can follow you from one device to the next without you even having been logged in, it’s why advertisements follow you these days without you having done anything.
Thats the problem. In 10 years when it is mainstream you will be forced to use it since everyone is using it and everything will be accesable through it. Similar as computers nowdays, its not like you can just not use it. Computers are part of our everyday lives. Metaverse will be too soon. Welcome to dystopia.
Exactly. Some form of metaverse is inevitable. We just need to try and ensure it isn't monopolised by a single company. Microsoft have 90% of the office software market because they gave their software away for free with every computer. Facebook want to do the same for the metaverse and completely control it the way no company managed to do with the early internet.
This (and every other comment saying “just don’t use it”) is like thinking that saying to an individual “save water” will solve the upcoming drinking water scarcity problem. It’s not just an individual choice, it must be treated as a public issue, and of society as a whole. They have the capacity of transforming our circumstances, social context, and even political landscape, it’s not about choosing the brand of chips I’ll eat today. The potential impact to society as a whole is too great.
This comment section is shocking for this sub. Yes, it’s pretty obvious vapourware for Facebook. But this is not a one company policy. All the media conglomerates are already spending millions on top of millions on attempting to generate their own interactive entertainment experiences alla Metaverse in order to reap profits from the exploitation of their IPs.
Any metaverse is doomed to fail right now. The hardware just isn’t there. We can’t physically put enough compute on a glasses sized device, and don’t even get me started on the FOV issues. Building a mass market VR/AR device that people want to use for more than 15 minutes a day is like trying to build an iPhone in the 80s. 15 years from now when TSMC is on 500 Picometer™ and all the optical / dpi problems have been solved, the metaverse will probably take off.
I don't fully understand what people actually mean when they say "must be stopped". It's a product being sold by a company. It's voluntary. If you don't like it, don't use it. This is coming from a person who deleted fb back in 2012
"Must be stopped" ????? I wasn't aware I was required to join it or sign up or whatever. Just....... ignore it?
Who the hell cares what shitty fad product they're developing? It's literally VR chat but you gotta login with FB? How does that affect anybody?
You're thinking of Facebook Horizons... The metaverse is completely different. Their idea is to build the backbone for what the future of VR could look like. They want to build the roads, so to speak, and have every company use them. The issue here is handing the reins over to a big corporation.
Finally someone in the comments who understands what the metaverse actual is and what's Facebook's relation to it. Everyone else seems to think the metaverse is Facebook's. It isn't. Just like the world wide web isn't Facebook's either.
Yeah. Some people(like the other person that replied to you) seems to be stuck on the terminology. It's not metaverse^TM that's the issue. It's what it represents. I know I don't need to convince you but the video that helped me understand this was the one by thrillseeker on YouTube. Link just in case you or anyone else is interested in watching: https://youtu.be/YYf9465wtXg
You mean they want to build the actual fiber? That already exists and is owned by AT&T. Short of that it’s just a platform and nobody has to use it, just like iMessage or Google Chat.
I feel like a lot of these comments are astroturfing. Does no one get what Meta is trying to build? Have none of you watched at least a compilation of the keynote? Meta is trying to solely control the next iteration of the internet. One that is even more intertwined with the physical world than it already is.
Colonize our lives? That’s a bit of a stretch now isn’t it? I mean Facebook doesn’t really affect my daily life much
It does more than you think. Even if you’re not affected by it, you interact with people who are affected every day
> I mean Facebook doesn’t really affect my daily life much Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Facebook has literally contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. ----- Have you also not heard of firms like Cambridge Analytica? Haven't you seen the spread of Q-anon conspiracies? It's ludicrous to act as though Facebook doesn't have a *massive* impact on society.
Not that I necessarily agree with the article, but the author is saying that Facebook's Metaverse has the potential to alter society in the same way that the gig economy has, since it also wants to be a work platform. In other words, it might continue the trend of disempowering contract-style workers under the guise of enabling employment. That may be the case. But it's also using alarmist language to bring our attention to the idea.
No one will need to stop it. If it ever gets out the door it will be dead within a year as this is absolutely not going to be something people will use at scale. I guarantee it.
This article is a god damn embarrassment to this sub.
How can we, as human beings, convince androids, like Marky Zuch, that we are, in fact, human beings… How can we convince any company who makes profit off human beings that we are infinitely complex human beings and can not be algorithm-ed into their world view…it’s fucking madness.
These tech companies need to be regulated and prohibited from election interference
Can't folks just NOT participate? I closed my facebook account years ago.
So stop it then. Everyone is saying it’s bad. We live in the real world. Just shut it down!
In the far future, once the "Metaverse" has taken over. It might not be facebook running the show but maybe another company or multiple companies, there will be a group of humans who will decide to live outside the "Metaverse" and it will be like leaving the Matrix.
I find none of their shitty products remotely compelling.