• Xerxos@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11 hours

    They tried to sell a nothing burger.

    What did they offer? A boring VR world.

    They should have tried to copy a known hit game to VR, like Minecraft, Sims, Second Life, or any of the popular shooter games… Of course, with enough changes not to get sued.

    After a successful start and a loyal player base, the chatrooms and monetization might have worked.

  • slaacaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 day

    It will not stop being funny that Zuck named the whole company after this failed shit. Hope “AI” will join it in the overhyped tech graveyard in a few years

  • Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    24 hours

    Anybody who tried VR chat instantly saw what an absolute failure the “metaverse” was. Still my most played VR game by a lot. i will never forget playing beer pong with Link or having deep technical discussions with an Australian salamander chilling on a couch.

    • perviouslyiner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5 hours

      Anyone who spent time in Second Life would know that user-generated worlds are terrible for graphical performance, because people want to stick in as much content as possible and don’t approach it in the same methodical way as a game designer would.

      So in SL that gets you sims with 3 fps on a good graphics card, and people who are greyed out because their clothing complexity exceeds your graphics limits. Now imagine wearing that 3fps glitchiness in a VR headset.

  • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
    1 day

    It’s weird that high tech CEOs didn’t learn the most valuable lesson from the Metaverse: people are not stupid. If they don’t like something, selling it to them harder is not going to make them like it more. It’s simply not solving their life’s problems.

    AI behaves much the same way. It’s not that it’s useless, it’s that faced with the actual cost, its usefulness shrinks to almost nothing. People dislike AI because they know better, not because they are too stupid to see.

    • Randelung@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5 hours

      Yeah, you make people depend on your product, lobby for a monopoly, and keep your captive audience just enough above starvation to not revolt. Like the healthcare system. Or gas companies. Or semiconductor companies. Or housing owners.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don’t need it to succeed. They don’t really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they’re pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that “appreciates their ability to be a visionary”.

      These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
        1 day

        Nah. Meta needs something to grow.

        Right now, they are sitting on social media platforms that can’t see meaningful growth and a messaging platform near the same. Nothing that Meta has tried to create after either defends their existing revenue streams from dying or creates a new revenue stream.

        Without significant change, Meta is a decade away from being another AOL.

        • thebestaquaman@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8 hours

          That’s definitely true, but the question is do the execs really care? I think that for a lot of these people, the only thing that matters is whether they can keep pulling those sweet sweet cash-outs. Just look at the absurd bonuses musk was promised from tesla recently. If he really cared about the success of the company, he wouldn’t take those, he would take a fair paycheque and allow the company to reinvest the rest of the money. Instead, he requires massive bonuses to keep working. We’re talking about the kind of money that could fund the entire educational sector in a small country for many years. He’s taking that out as a personal bonus, to the detriment of the company.

          That kind of thing makes me believe that he doesn’t really care about the long-term success of the company. What he really cares about is squeezing out cash from the company for as long as possible. If the company fails, he has enough money to buy up something else that he can squeeze cash out of. The modus operandi is basically

          1. Be rich
          2. Buy some company
          3. Wave your arms and wag your tung to get investor money into the company
          4. Cash out bonuses
          5. Go to step 3 until your cash-out has surpassed the investment cost
          6. Either sell out of company (if it’s been run to the ground), or go to step 3 until it has been.
      • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 day

        This article was written by award-winning verifiably-human journalist James Ball.

        The image is credited to Benny Douet, a human professional illustrator with a legit body of work which stylistically matches said image.

        By all means call out slop when it appears, but this isn’t it.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 day

    That’s what got me about the metaverse too: an astonishing wealth of junk content. I got through all the games and videos and experiences I wanted in less than six months, and clearly I’m not the only one.

    I do love VR documentaries though and hope those continue to thrive.

    • amgine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      There’s a YouTuber called redlyne_ that has a video series where he goes through dead online games. It’s great content

  • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
    1 day

    If they had been smart, they would have bought VRchat and Rec Room and left the teams alone to figure out how to merge those existing worlds and grow organically from there.

    • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1 day

      That couldn’t possibly have become a trillion dollar business, though. That was the fantasy they were selling to investors, a future where people would be living their whole lives in Meta’s virtual corporate dystopia.

      • PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.socialEnglish
        15 hours

        Sure it could have. They just needed to bolt a payment processor onto the whole mess and they’d have been printing money.

        • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
          11 hours

          They’d be printing millions, but they need the promise of future trillions to try and maintain their status as a growth stock.

  • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    1 day

    Will Meta also rename themselves when the shutdown occurs?

  • justaman123@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 day

    It seems the biggest hurdle for the tech czars who did one visionary thing is that once they get to that level they are so disconnected from people that their entire perspective shifts and therefore can no longer see something that would appeal to all of us, and only see something that they want. Because when they did make the visionary thing it was something they wanted.

  • Stupidmanager@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 day

    I will repeat this over and over. AI is not for you or for me, we are users of the byproduct which is money exchange. Look at search engines, google is perfect example. AI just makes it so that we users can make simple queries and get answers, Google did that too and then became this monster which makes absolutely nothing, but searching the internet is easier and billions in ad revenue.

    Some may argue there are some of us power users find beneficial use of AI, but we are small subset of users who in many cases were already smart enough to do the work. I love cowork for that reason, I share code I’ve written, projects with epics and work items and cowork makes the next project just like I did. What took a week, takes hours. Time which I now spend learning the next actual thing, quantum computing.

    • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
      1 day

      For those who are fed up by Google’s shitty searches, try Qwant!

      Kagi is also good, but it’s paid.

      • GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1 day

        I tried Kagi for a month. Several times I got “we couldn’t find what you were looking for” and the limit of 300 searches a month, even if I’m not going to hit that I FELT limited. I wanted to like it but it’s not for me.

      • _Nemo_@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1 day

        Qwant is nice, but it keeps blocking my VPN and locks me out if I happen to use a non-European exit node (“We’re not offering Qwant in your region”). And I’m not pulling down my mask for a fucking search engine.

        If you’re willing to put up with Duckduckgo but hate AI search, there’s https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

  • Waterpumpee@lemmus.orgEnglish
    1 day

    Who has the time to play in the metaverse? To actually put up with VR or normal gaming even you need to have 1+ consecutive hours to spend. Grown ups dont have that kind of time. Wasnt meta one of the first companies to jump the RTO bandwagon? Even further diminishing the little time we have…

  • paraphrand@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 day

    Lots of user generated content across most platforms is poorly designed nonsense.

  • kip@piefed.zipEnglish
    1 day

    voices of American children […] “Five thousand hamburgers please”

    art, life, satire dead, blah blah