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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Silicon Valley has become a vehicle to secure VC funding. They've forgotten that is just step 2.
"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.
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.
This was the best illustration of that. Years and years of effort for some cash-grab that never happened.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
It died for the exact same reason every single aspect of life is getting shittier and shittier. Shareholders. When a company is publicly traded, it has NO CHOICE but to get worse and worse and worse, because shareholders will accept NOTHING beyond continuous growth. If you lose value in the market, they will run for the hills, if you plateau they will run, if you suddenly start making even slightly smaller gains, they will run. They are the sole reason for every decision, and because of that, every single decision will be a detriment to both employees and consumers. Underneath all the bullshit, this is why everything will go to shit eventually unless it is both privately held and by people with good intentions, which is rare to find tied together.
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.
This is the wildest take I've heard. People don't trust meta because it's Facebook, because it's Zuckerberg. We've all seen what they do with companies they acquire (I used to be an Oculus rift owner).We've all seen how poorly they handle data, seems like there is a data breach every year.
Hell, when I was an Oculus rift owner I worked inside of Virtual Desktop some days. I'd argue that Meta killed my desire to work in VR.
I think the article is accurate, and they make a good argument for the fact that Silicon Valley is anti-fun. Even without all the data tracking they still think people want to make money playing games, which is ridiculously out of touch
They also seem to think that continually spending money to do mundane things in a virtual world is not a problem for regular people who actually have to watch their spending.
In general, it's a tiny nerdy minority that doesn't trust meta or even cares at all about internet privacy. Unfortunately that's the only tiny minority who could have any interest in the meta verse.
And those are the same people who are running dev-ops, infrastructure management, and acting as CTOs of companies. If you rely on enthusiasts, you don't wanna piss off the enthusiast community.
The main problem is that they only focused on how much money they could make, and forgot to make it somewhere people actually wanted to be. Basically the developer equivalent of "here's the deal, you do something for me-" then they never finish the sentence.
They did the reverse enshitification, do it shit first and then.... wait what then?
That said...it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.
Exactly this. When you read about the metaverse in something like Snow Crash, it's a place built by enthusiasts, very cheap to use, and people have the choice of DIY, or paying someone to do things for them.
In the facebook's version, everything but connecting costs money, and it's all done by facebook.
It never even existed and was this ambiguous buzzword that got way too much traction.
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.
The Metaverse died because everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg isn’t trustworthy and really had no plan.
If there was any potential in a "metaverse", it would be picked up by people who know how to make something fun. In Silicon Valley or somewhere else.
That's not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
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.
The metaverse could be successful but it needs to be a protocol not a proprietary product by one company, least of all Facebook.
Right now anyone can make a website if they know how to program one. It can be hosted on any number of services or you can host it yourself if you have the hardware. Your website can look like anything, have any functionality you want, be as complex as you want, be as large as you want. You can use website builders or you can go entirely custom. There is a huge range of options.
What now needs to happen is that same thing for the metaverse. It needs to be a standard programming language or set of programming languages that people can learn, that will enable them to build experiences. Those experiences should be hostable on any old server and a routeing protocol needs to be developed so that people can access them without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Second Life does a very good job of modifying the web URL concept to work for virtual worlds, just copy that. There also needs to be a standardised API for returning feedback responses and querying available interfaces (vibration motors, speakers, lights, force resistance motors etc) that all headsets and interaction devices use.
Perhaps some kind of federation service that enables different servers to interact with each other for transferring items from one environment to another and making sure that they make sense in all environments.
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 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?
VR Chat is still here and doing well. Its good for niche stuff. When the tech is ready maybe it can reach the mass, but the current tech is not ready yet.
Was the metaverse ever alive? All I ever saw were posts about what the metaverse could be, but I never even knew it was an actual thing that existed.
Meta's very own Horizon Worlds still hasn't even launched globally, it is still restricted to a small handful of countries. On top of that it isn't even a Metaverse in any meaningful sense, it's just yet another VR chat application.
What separates a "real" Metaverse from a normal chat app is that it connects all the other applications into one unified virtual space, but Horizon Worlds ain't doing that and nobody else is either.
Sony's Playstation Home back from the PS3 days or Second Life are still closer to a Metaverse than any of the modern attempts.
I misread the headline as "Stardew Valley" and it was a real headscratcher
Engineers make Star Trek tech because people want to live in Star Trek. No one (besides Zuck) wants to live in Ready Player One.
I don't think it was ever born to have died. I think they grossly overestimated how much this tech would improve
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.