It never died, because it already existed for fucking years: Active Worlds from 1995 is where I started, Second Life later, now the dominant “metaverse” is VR Chat.
The corporate simpletons just never did their homework to see what the market is like for this.
The word is meaningless, nothing like the metaverse as described in snowcrash ever existed. If you’re talking about a multiplayer game that tries to mimic the real word then you’re right. But that’s not what the metaverse actually is…or what the word stood for, before being ripped to shreds as a buzzword.
Yeah they (Facebook) chose the word as a form of marketing to rebrand something that already existed. It’s similar to how we went from “machine learning” to “AI”.
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That’s the thing I hate: the word AI is being misused. It’s not a buzzword, at least it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s artifical intelligence, not in the sense of having a brain but in the sense of being an intelligent algorithm solving an issue. The path finder algorithm A* (A Star) is in this group. Machine learning is a sub category of AI, nothing less.
I remember Blaxxun’s Colony City i think even earlier than that. VRML is the future of the past!
Oh my god I remember this too. It looks like there’s a revival project. https://www.cybertownrevival.com/
Is SL still around? I left my partially nude Darth Vader wearing a banana thong in someone’s art gallery and haven’t been back
Exactly, they should have included fursonas IMMEDIATELY if they wanted it to work.
Even basic market research should have told them this.
Even further back there was Lucasfilm’s Habitat all the way back in 1986. It’s kind of shocking how little the idea of the “Metaverse” has evolved since back then. It’s still just some virtual space with avatars, different hats and chatting.
Wow how fascinating! Thanks for sharing that video.
The Metaverse died because they tried to monetize it before it's even a thing. Buy a virtual plot of land? With crypto and NFTs? Hell no!
VR Chat exists and it, and it's free.
The metaverse died because it didn’t mean anything, there was no clear thing you could point to and say “this is the metaverse”. It was a collection of buzzwords designed to sell a dream to investors and nothing more.
It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.
Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.
Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.
Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.
In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.
Sums it up nicely 👍
This was the best illustration of that. Years and years of effort for some cash-grab that never happened.
As a developer who loves to tinker with web stuff, I feel most of the tech scene and Silicon Valley are full of people who went into development just for the money. I almost see it every day.
Silicon Valley has become a vehicle to secure VC funding. They’ve forgotten that is just step 2.
This is the cycle of co-option that takes place with any career that becomes profitable.
A lot of people don’t realize that computers and programming in general were seen as “women’s work” or “nerd shit” until especially the dotcom boom, and career women and nerds (of all genders) were displaced in favor of MBA-bros who the VCs and CEOs didn’t disdain (not by being forced out, but by not being given the jobs and funding; the “paper ceiling” is often used for this).
Machine learning and crypto were also relegated to being “nerd shit” in their nascent years, and now look who populates those particular spaces: non-technical MBA-bros and snake oil salesmen trying to cash in on the hype (and building on the uncompensated work of others… in machine learning’s case, quite literally so).
Yes, it wasn’t always the case. I was in the Silicon Valley in the 2000’s and it was full of techies who really believed in the open web, and even Google was a proponent of open standards.
A few years later it seems like the tech matured enough that being technically savvy was no longer necessary to be a successful founder. Slowly it stopped being about technical innovations and became about raising money, product marketing, A/B testing, etc.
Selling dreams to VCs has long been the game, but VCs started getting dumber and greedier as all the low hanging opportunities were used up. So tech startups had to make sillier and sillier claims and business plans to keep raking in VC dough.
Subscriptions have been big VC keywords for the last 7-8 years, as data harvesting started to be monopolized by a few big owners. Ads are trying to make a comeback as subscription fatigue sets in, which is why blockers are being targeted lately.
I’m not looking forward to the next method of extracting wealth from the masses in trade for VC investment. Probably another form of slavery or subjugation they haven’t found a way to hide yet.
I didn’t go into tech for the money, but after several years of grinding I’m definitely at the point where I’m only still in it for the money. I don’t even want to think about computers outside of work anymore.
Sounds like you are just not in the role or company that appreciates you. I’ve had a similar experience at the beginning, but I kept looking until I found a company that did, so I hope one day you do as well.
I feel the same way. They’re in it to become a unicorn and get a big exit. They don’t care about making good software, just profitable software. The vibe in Silicon Valley stopped being hackers and became bankers.
“Metaverse” was the idea that you would use only Meta services instead of the wider Internet. Much like AOL and Yahoo tried back in the 90s and 00s.
Monorail Monorail Monorail 👋👋
I call the dumb one Zucky
Isn’t fun just defined as “a period of user base growth followed by extracting every last dollar possible in an exponential growth pattern forever and ever because that’s totally possible mhm it totally is!” to them?
Indeed. “Funnel. Us. Notoriety.”
The metaverse was stillborn.
It was the hype for like 4 weeks and was dead before it even existed
It’s crazy how Zuckerberg hyped it up to the extreme, even renamed his company for it and than never actually build anything remotely worth of that name. What is going on in Horizon Worlds still looks less interesting than what they demoed with Facebook Social all the way back in 2016 on Oculus Rift.
Just give me a virtual space where I can watch movies, play games and go shopping with friends. It shouldn’t be that hard to build something that at least feels a bit deeper than just yet another chat app. Or take the silly stuff CodeMiko is doing, that is what I expect to be happening in the Metaverse, yet it happens in 2D on Twitch. Even Meta’s own conferences are still real world events with video screens, not events in the Metaverse.
I don’t mind the idea of the Metaverse, but the implementation is lightyears behind of where it should be.
I feel like part of the impetus for the name change, and perhaps the extreme hype to some extent, came from trying to distance themselves from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I’m pretty sure it is hard
Other businesses got hyped and signed up in droves, but they forgot they need a user base.
The crazy part is that it is not even clear what they signed up for. Everybody started talking “Metaverse” as if it was an actual thing. But it never was. There never was an app, a standard or much of anything.
Second Life ain’t exactly perfect either, but at least that’s an actual thing that exists and in which you can open up your virtual advertisement booth.
I think this article makes reasonable sense. Also that quote from Spez is so disheartening. Glad I’m not on reddit anymore
God, they even want to make leisure time into a side hustle. Is it so much to ask that they let me not think about my participation in capital for like, two hours?
I’ve just invented a pillow that bombards your dreams with ads.
For the user it is free, and it is literally the most comfortable pillow you will ever lay your head on
It has a White noise generator, and a built-in fan so that it’s constantly the cool side of the pillow. It is exceedingly soft and yet surprisingly supportive but you will see ads every single moment of REM sleep for the rest of your life and once you’ve gotten used to using it if you stop using it you will never be able to fall asleep again.
Currently Microsoft meta Amazon and Netflix are all in a bidding war to purchase this technology from me.
Small correction - Steve Huffman is u/spez, he’s the current CEO. Alexis Ohanian was one of the co-founders and was on the board of directors for a while but I don’t think he’s involved with Reddit any more except probably as an investor.
Dear tech developers, if you are listening please put VR projects on the back burner. They are an interesting future technology but the currently possible technology that people would adopt if it were economical to do so is AR. A simple heads up display with an integrated personal assistant has enormous potential in both personal and business uses right now if it was reasonably priced and reliable. You could replace cell phones.
VR is just a marketing hype to collect VC money, that’s it.
Just like crypto, AI, Cloud, Big Data, share economy, Internet of things, etc. They all get hyped like hell, burn billions of VC money, and after a few years actually useful products might appear, but are several orders of magnitude more mundane.
It’s so predictable, that even Gartner found out about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
AR has a huge battery life and size problem. The amount of video processing that thing would need to do to be useful, would result in an enormous device with an hour or two of battery life. Rendering it useless for any real world consumer application.
On top of that it has a gigantic privacy and surveillance problem.
And if that wouldn’t be enough, what the heck are you going to do with it? Everything an AR headset could do, you can do today with your phone already. There is very little need to wear that functionality on your head all the time.
For some rare business use cases it can make sense, that’s why Microsoft Hololens is still around, but even they struggle to finding any areas where it makes it past the “nice idea” stage and actually into a working product.
A simple heads up display with an integrated personal assistant has enormous potential in both personal and business uses right now if it was reasonably priced and reliable. You could replace cell phones.
I’m honestly wondering if the new Apple thing will take off like this. It’s overpriced, but this is the company that sells $700 wheels to people successfully, and the concept looks great.
You know all those programmer memes about screen arrangement? You could have them all and more with a single headset.
VisionPro might work as monitor and TV replacement, but I don’t see it taking of as some kind of person assistant that you wear when you go outside your house. Battery life alone completely kills that usecase
Wait, is the battery life public? It’s a separate battery pack connected to the set by wire, so it doesn’t have to be terrible.
Yes, it’s public and official: “The external battery supports up to 2 hours of use, and all day use when plugged in.”
VisionPro can barely be considered a portable/mobile device and it won’t even last through a modern movie.
Yikes!
Yeah, it’s probably going to be relegated to toy status then. Maybe we’ll revisit this in a few years once we figure out how to do it on lower power.
i would add cost as a barrier to entry. as cheap as the hardware it, it needed a more heavily subsidized distribution.
apple only exists because they practically gave away equipment en masse to school districts as the market became flooded with ‘ibm compatibles’
they built an entire generation of apple-loving folks by dumping huge amounts of money/resources into those programs.They almost died after that. Jobs putting colored plastic on the outside of Macs saved them.
Well, and them replacing the rotting husk of MacOS 9 with a bastardized version of NeXTSTEP. That kinda helped, too.
I misread the headline as “Stardew Valley” and it was a real headscratcher
Those damn farmers, always working the fields instead of generating entertaining VR universes!
The question implies that it was alive at some point. Was it though? All I know about Metaverse is that a lot of “tech” journalists were writing about it, but I don’t know anyone who used it. And I owned a Meta Quest 2 for 6 months.
There is no metaverse. There’s VR games and multiplayer games, and metaverse became a word for anything that remotely touched any of these or that’s even remotely vaguely related. 3D assets → metaverse. Online game → metaverse. Video call → metaverse.
If you’re talking about Horizon Worlds, that’s a multiplayer game/social experience. Nothing about this is a “metaverse” as it is described in the book where that word came from.
There’s no use case for the metaverse that gives it any more value than a video conference. But I can set up a video conference for free, while the metaverse is set up to constantly extract money from the user. On top of that, the barrier to entry is too high in both cost and practicality. I can buy a high quality webcam for a fraction of the price of a VR headset, and I don’t have to strap it to my face just to have a meeting.
In order to justify the cost of being in the metaverse, there has to be a value return that makes it worthwhile - something that can’t be replicated with other simpler and cheaper options. Right now, the metaverse is a platform run by grifters ripping off other wannabe grifters and the gullible.
There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun. Unfortunately, it seems designed specifically to be brand safe for future advertising instead of appealing to real people.
There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun.
This is fine, for a video game. But the metaverse isn’t being marketed as a video game, it’s being marketed as a social and utility platform.
Also if it is just a video game then there’s nothing more compelling about it than any other video game… and also it’s a crappy video game built around microtransactions. It’s not fun, it’s a dead mall.
People don’t go to virtual spaces because they want to compulsively buy things, they want entertainment and social interaction. The more “buy this! buy that!” you shoehorn into a platform that is hardly ready for even normal gaming experiences is not going to take off imo.
Roblox is terrible but they worked out the model a little bit more intelligently. Make an engine where it’s free to join, host experiences and create new ones relatively easily. They have a shop where virtual items can be bought and sold and Roblox takes a major cut of virtual currency to real currency and store transactions, but outside of that their involvement within the games themselves is less pronounced.
Even if I don’t play Roblox myself, it’s popular with kids and this platform I think is more capable of becoming a VR universe than Horizon worlds or other buzzed “Metaverse” implementations.
Even Garry’s mod servers have more interesting interactions than Meta’s pet project. And I don’t trust Meta enough to touch a platform they develop.
After I watched a guy having to pay real dollars for clapping(!) in a vr open mic night thing I had no further questions about “the metaverse”.
It never even existed and was this ambiguous buzzword that got way too much traction.
There’s way, way too many buzzword chasers out there. How hard can it possibly be to assess something by it’s own merits instead of looking for keywords that other Successful Cool Guys™ are promoting? Instead, we get people copying each other’s hype to the point they build entire markets in intrinsically worthless things on occasion.
This is the only true answer here.
Even Meta themselves said they want to “build the metaverse”, at that point the word still had a somewhat clear definition. It then became a bullshit buzzword and lost all meaning. Now even Meta is using the word as a synonym for “VR” or “Multiplayer”, which has nothing to do with the snow crash definition of the word.
VrChat
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Don’t dismiss an entire group on the actions of a single person.
