Ah, redesigns, the preserve of the company who has run out of ideas. To be fair, I don't think that what Meta is doing is a redesign but plenty of other companies think that you make something look a bit swisher then everyone will come back.
My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Of course, nice UI is nice but people would rather achieve a task for a cost and UI is just icing. Even worse is when you change the UI/UX, people get really annoyed at that! "Where is that button I always used to click to do X?" "Oh, you don't do it that way anymore! You need to relearn what you have spent the last 5 years assigning to muscle memory but hey, the site looks cooler right?"
I mean what else would you expect if you employ 500 designers? They have to do something.
Had a friend who worked at one of those old internet portals. Their main portal was losing traffic. They wanted to redesign, but any A/B test of UI changes always resulted in faster loss of traffic (because of the "where is that button" effect). Ie people were only clinging to them because they were familiar with the UI and if that changed, they'd just go somewhere else.
The solution? Dozens of incremental changes to get from the old UI to the new one. Need to move a button across the site? Move it 10px at a time over a few weeks/month. Anything faster would just make the iceberg melt faster.
Haha, seems they just had to do that re-design, and wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember hearing the saying "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about programmers and it's also true about UI designers. If there's no clear direction to take the product, they'll just re-design, refactor, move classes around, change button colors, break things into microservices, rewrite in Rust, re-do the brand design, invent unnecessary custom controls, port it to a Raspberry Pi, add whitespace and 'flat' design, move the search bar to the bottom of the screen, and on and on and on. Programmers gotta program and designers gotta design.
A lot of the reasons companies do redesigns is strategic. When a company first gets successful, it builds for the tastes, preferences, and needs of the userbase at that time. And as it gets more successful, it progressively micro-optimizes for those tastes, so eventually the company and the users that made it successful are tightly intertwined.
For a company to grow, it needs to attract new users. And tastes change, often surprisingly quickly. What was hot for new users in the early 2000s looks incredibly dated now - just check out old.reddit.com or search for [google in 1998] for examples. As someone entering my 40s who was in college or just out of it at the time, those UIs fill me with nostalgia. But someone who's in college now would be like "What is this shit?"
As a side note, this is why HNers are generally terrible at predicting new product trends now, and tend to poo-poo a lot of things that are gaining remarkable traction. Most of us are in our 30s and 40s by now, a time when our habits are basically set and we have neither the time, energy, or social networks to tap into the cultural zeitgeist. To really get a sense of what captures peoples' energy, you need to be one of the people whose energy is captured (or at least watch them closely), which requires the lack of cynicism and judgment that comes with experience.
I'm glad you used old.reddit.com as your example and you also almost nailed my age group (45+). As a user, I'd point to Reddit as the quintessential example of unnecessary change for the sake of change. To my elderly sensibilities, old.reddit.com is better in every single way than the new travesty. Loads faster, less janky, nothing jumping around as content loads, no autoplaying, denser presentation, fills the browser window as I maximize it--by the way this is my #1 bugaboo with "modern" web design: stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser!!! I have a 27" monitor and I want to use the whole thing goddamnit.
So from the point of view of an end user like me, they took something great and ruined everything. I can't imagine that a 25 year old likes the new design better, but then again I can't put myself into the shoes of a 25 year old, so maybe they love jank, autoplaying videos, and constant pop-ups begging them to log in or use the app.
I'm sure from the point of view of Reddit however, the new design is awesome in all ways they measure. Probably revenue, "engagement" (ugggghhhh I hate that word), time on site (thanks to infinite scrolling), whatever it is they find important and prioritize. I can tell you they don't prioritize "usable by a 45 year old with disposable income".
On the few occasions I've talked to 20-25 year olds about Reddit and they happen to know about old.reddit.com, they're like "Wow that looks dated. And boring." All the other sites that young people actually use (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) look like the new Reddit version, and these sites are actually getting new users organically. Given that, I think it's fair to say that jank, autoplaying videos, and constant pop-ups are in.
I'll chalk this up to "Kids these days." I'm of similar vintage to you, maybe a few years younger. I don't really like this trend either, and use old.reddit.com when I can.
But you and I don't matter. Our consumption habits are already set, and realistically a start-up (particularly a mass media one) that we don't already patronize isn't going to get them. Businesses battle over the margins, the customers who don't already have buying habits, and fight aggressively to get them.
> stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser
I had assumed this general tend was to work well on mobile, yet Reddit couldn't do more to make it unbearable to use the website on mobile instead of their app. Constant popups to harass you into using the mobile app
Good design for readability suggest using line lengths which are around 60-70 characters long (at least in print with serif fonts).
My main gripe with narrow columns of content is that they rarely resize properly to smaller desktop sizes (I prefer side-by-side-by-side windows on my large 32" screen, so much that I am considering switching to new 42" oled screens showing up this year — if they were 8k and I had a gpu to drive it, I'd be ecstatic ;)).
I don't want to sound harsh but nobody needs 500 designers or 500 developers (or - pick your favorites) forever unless they have some real work to do that grows the business. The problem is that managers never let go soldiers from their army (let me use this metaphor) because they have to fight other managers to climb the company ladder. This is probably detrimental to the company but it's not what would they care about and it's ok. At best it's a symbiotic relationship in which they can jump host.
With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine. Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore. It might not use SSL so the browser will show ugly warnings or might even stop working completely. Security fixes need to be applied or the website gets hacked. The underlying webserver / platform gets outdated and the provider stops supporting it eventually - or just makes it more expensive. I could go on.
Do you need 500 developers for that? Well, that depends on the size. Maybe, maybe not. But your post gives this vibe of "build it and be done with it" and with software that just doesn't work, even if the business is not growing at all.
>With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine.
What? I usually see the opposite: it's the super-hip updates that break all the interoperability and standards compliance the site had. My usability add-ons more reliably work on old sites than on the hot new framework that doesn't consistently indicate clickable links or allow you to open views in a new tab.
>Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore.
The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone? Those end up being worse e.g. the fixed floating headers/footers that take 60% of the screen in landscape mode when the desktop version was actually usable. (With portrait not being much better.)
> What? I usually see the opposite: it's the super-hip updates that break all the interoperability and standards compliance the site had. My usability add-ons more reliably work on old sites than on the hot new framework that doesn't consistently indicate clickable links or allow you to open views in a new tab.
Not saying anything against that, nor that my example happens often. It should just illustrate a concrete and easy to undertsand example, not necessarily what happens most often.
> The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone?
There were and still are websites like "optimized for IE 800x600". Those might have worked for the majority of their visitors when they were created and maybe that was good enough at the time, even though we both agree that technically it was never great. But it does not work for the majority anymore today and hence might now be considered to need improvements.
Again, maybe not what happens to the majority of websites, but everyone understands the example as a case of "was good enough before, stopped being so because the world moved on".
Either way, it sounds like you're saying sites have all these designers to keep the product from being outdated. If, in practice, they're being made worse, that would strike against claim that all these designers are a benefit and in favor of the claim that they're mostly wasted spending.
I don't think it sounds like it. I agree that many redesigns (maybe even the majority) make things worse for users. It's just that this is a totally different point that does not conflict with "websites, including design, can get outdated over time and then needs someone to fix it to retain the original value".
Omg yes! Thank you for saying this. I cannot agree more. Designs "built for mobile" are the absolute WORST to use on mobile! They break the most basic functionality.
It's not the technologists. It's the market. Humans are well, um, human. Quirky, unpredictable, fickle, etc. A UI / UX that tests well with a dozen or two people might flop once the market gets to it.
And then of course, expectations evolve. It's less churn and simply life and humanity.
I know, we have to run to stay where we are. Nevertheless maintenance is usually less resource intensive than building. It's possible that the new features a company has to add plus maintenance of the existing ones require an ever increasing staff, but not for every single company.
I hate greenfield work until it gets in front of users. By that time it's maintenance...as are new features. I love maintenance because you have a working application (which is the goal) and changes are (or should be) in response to user feedback. "Features" that are derived from internal dialog usually sicken me because they are usually user hostile. Anything that isn't user focused and accessible boils my soul. Churn for user manipulation, and developer induced complexity really piss me off.
My favorite is when we build a decent application and then marketing brings the UX to it's gnees with 27 tracking cookies.
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit.
Users aren't supposed to care about the UI, at all. They're supposed to use it. Feelings about a user interface usually come to the surface when it's confusing, or makes their tasks more difficult to complete.
If you're users never think twice about the design, you've succeeded!
Yup. If I design a UI and you have any feelings about it at all (other than maybe 'oh, I like this font' or 'that's a nice color choice'), I've done it wrong.
Spot on. The UI and UX should be forgettable. Forgettable in the sense that the user should walk away with a feeling of their accomplishment, not how pretty the drop shadows were.
I would add that pushing users to behavior the company wants, but users mostly don't, as a very common reason. Sometimes more profitable features don't get the hoped for amount of traction, or the company wants to push users towards behavior that lets them collect more data or show more ads.
I've seen even stupider reasons too, where a team is sad that some functionality isn't getting used much, so they push for a redesign to shove users into it.
There are valid reasons to redesign an app but I would say that the majority of them are not done for the benefit of the users.
The irony is it's the usability thst sucks, no one realizes or admits it, and the blame gets placed on the design. The redesign comes up short. A head or two rolls. The process continues. Text book insanity.
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit.
IMO people's emotional response to UI is a lot like emotional response to cash as a compensation mechanism. If it's markedly insufficient they're unhappy, but there's a pretty modest cutoff point past which there are rapidly diminishing returns. And it if keeps changing in inconsequential ways they get nervous.
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit.
I believe we undervalue how much UI will get people in the door and overvalue how much it will keep them there. When a user is seeking novelty, design is a huge component of that. When they are seeking familiarity, any change is an anti-feature.
You pick a new restaurant based on the originality of its menu. You keep going because you fall in love with a couple of items on it. You stop going when they change things up and discard your favorite dish.
We usually see many downfalls when companies redesign. To remember one that really took off of their products: Dropbox. I couldn't stare at such destruction. Another company that I liked and had hopes was Typeform. Another example of horrible hipter design from a team who was quite bored and possible, a clueless head product.
Dropbox is the only SaaS I have ever used that fucked up its redesign badly enough to make me—a previously-thrilled customer—jump ship to a technically-inferior and more-expensive product. I don't regret it whatsoever.
For me Dropbox is still better than the competition (don't know about iCloud, never used it) and I don't even remember what redesign you're talking about. I've always used it as set and forget sync, I rarely see the interface or the web page.
I switched to iCloud and apart from not seeing the sync status in the menu bar (and the folder location being .. worse) it's as good as Dropbox. Set and forget.
I disliked the Dropbox redesign as well, then I went back to using it exactly the same way I've done for the previous 10 years -- not seeing any UI whatsoever.
I was on the free plan (which I'd worked up to 10.5GB of storage through various incentive programs they ran) and specifically objected to
1. Limiting me to three clients at once. (Work computer, personal computer (Linux), personal computer (Windows), phone—oops!
2. Bombarding me with "your storage is almost full!" notifications either by email or when I visited dropbox.com to, e.g., get a share link for someone. Usually I had over a gigabyte of storage left. The webapp was at times unusable due to the volume of notifications.
3. Prohibiting me from keeping offline copies of entire directories on my phone.
Now I'm spending $20/month on a VPS running Nextcloud and am much happier.
I would expect them to be getting more value from the $20/month VPS, otherwise they could go with a $5/month plan (half of Dropbox’s cheapest plan).
Myself, I resolved the 3-client limit (which they hit me with when switching to a new phone — trying to use backups stored in Dropbox) by a swift migration to OneDrive (where I have 40 GB of free space due to various offers and grandfathering, that’s plenty enough for me). The Linux situation isn’t ideal (there’s a reasonable CLI-only not-real-time client), but otherwise, it’s great. And if I did decide to pay, there’s a neat and cheap 100 GB plan for 2€/month, or a 69€/year plan with 1 TB and desktop Microsoft Office — a bargain compared to Dropbox’s 2-TB-and-not-much-else for €120/year plan. The only thing Dropbox has these days is name recognition and intertia, everyone else’s offerings are cheaper and have more features.
Well, Reddit was smart enough to keep the old interface online (and the one before that [0]), so when someone "oldschool" links to Reddit, they'll simply use the old link; slightly salty maybe, but they're still on Reddit. New, less technical users, on the other hand, will get the shiny, streamlined new interface.
You can say what you want about them, but they managed to push out a conversion optimized interface for new users while still keeping their core group/addicts at bay, which is not easy.
You have something wrong with your set up. I've had it set for years and it works fine. Maybe you have some strict cookie settings or tracking blocker interfering with it. Try with an unadorned browser (read no-plugins) and you'll find it works great.
Old Reddit was awful and I always used alternative UIs for it.
New Reddit’s design was a great improvement if it weren't for the fact that its developers were and still are absolutely clueless. That paired with a user-hostile management made Reddit even worse.
But the redesign itself was not the issue, it was the implementation.
I must emphatically disagree. On a single page, newreddit shows a fraction of the comments as oldreddit does. They expect you to manually click to expand dozens of "Read More" links and repeatedly suffer the associated loading times of their newly-bloated webpage. For reading comments, newreddit isn't just a disaster of implementation, it's a disaster of usability. It's obvious that their goal is to discourage commenting in order to get people back to scrolling the infinite feed, since that's where the ads are. But oldreddit, while it looks ugly, is (perhaps entirely by accident) an absolute dream for navigating large and highly branching conversations.
> On a single page, newreddit shows a fraction of the comments as oldreddit does. They expect you to manually click to expand dozens of "Read More" links and repeatedly suffer the associated loading times of their newly-bloated webpage.
This sounds like the exceedingly stupid javascript override popup view a primary click on links gives. It's meant to make it easy to return to the list and keep scrolling forever.
Try opening the links in new tabs, or hitting "refresh" after clicking. That'll give you the full page view.
I don’t really use Reddit anymore, I’m just talking about their initial migration that everyone hated. Back then it wasn’t so user hostile, it was just a modernization effort with ajaxed loading and some initial bugs. Then things got worse instead of getting better.
I disagree, new Reddit is fundamentally flawed, and worse than old Reddit in almost every way. I will stop using Reddit the day old.reddit.com stops working.
Yeah it wasn't pretty but it was efficient and fast. I think those trump pretty any day of the week. With Reddit Enhancement Suite it's fantastic. However looks like RES has entered the "parked" status and they will only fix bugs now. I think the devs lost interest but in their defense it has been around for years. Unfortunately "new reddit" is still awful, but at least they tried to keep it alive long enough for reddit to get their shit together.
The main issue was that looking at the actual content meant visiting a different website, there was no way to see photos and videos in gallery view like you would on Facebook for example.
The difference with HN is that HN is not mainly for media. However HN isn’t great either. The button to collapse threads in on top of the thread in a 16x16-pixel touch target. Good luck finding it when you’re 12 comments down.
For being a text comment-only website, the HN experience is pretty poor. The only good thing HN has got going on technically is that it’s super fast. Heck it still doesn’t offer dark mode when it would literally be 7 additional lines of CSS.
Oh I see, your main issue wasn't with the UI design, it was with the UX design. The original intention was that it acted as a gateway to content on the internet - like with Google.
Unfortunately that UX isn't the best because most sites linked to are slow, annoying or broken in some way. Imgur fixed that though.
Reddit Enhancement Suite fixed all that. Sure it's a plugin but that's not that big of an inconvenience. Reddit devs really should have took inspiration from that instead of building the monstrosity they have now.
"But where are we going to put all these new features to mimic competitor X that nobody cares about that we promised to our investors we would add before next investment round to pump the valuation?" /s
I don't entirely hate "new reddit" but I prefer the old version and greatly appreciate them keep the old style around. The new version is so badly coded and slow. I think if they would stop "updating" and optimize efficiency of their interface it would be useable again.
I use the old reddit. I'm glad they give that option because the new one it sucks. Just the fuck it doesn't profit the entire width of the screen bogged me.
I'll go contrarian and argue (for the sake of arguing) that the decision to transition to Meta now makes sense if you think that two things will occur:
1.) Wearable VR becomes affordable, unobtrusive, and ubiquitous
2.) You can monetize real life
Meta has first mover advantage through Oculus, as well as a lot of resources. It comes down to whether or not the technology matures enough for mass adoption.
My guess is that they're betting on eventually becoming a main player in the smartglasses field, either on the hardware or software side. If Apple Glasses or something similar launches and becomes popular, they may succeed.
> 1.) Wearable VR becomes affordable, unobtrusive, and ubiquitous
This is way too early though.
They have first mover advantage but haven’t hit the target yet. So in practice they’re only a barely ahead of all the competitors coming from all sides.
I’d compare them to Microsoft during the Windows CE PDA area. They’re the major player in the field but it was so clunky that we were all waiting for the breakthrough. Perhaps MS could have renamed itself to “DigitalMobile” or something like that and put all its weight behind that wave, but I kinda don’t believe they would have pulled it off either way.
By the same token I think Meta’s vision is right, but I assume they are rushing ahead full steam because they clearly see it as an extremely tough race for them.
> I’d compare them to Microsoft during the Windows CE PDA area.
I completely agree. Smartphones turned out to be as much of a hardware issue (capacitive touch screens) as a software issue. AR won't go mainstream until someone releases something revolutionary, which will likely be an AR smart glasses device that looks like a pair of normal eye glasses. This could be Meta. My money is on Apple.
> By the same token I think Meta’s vision is right, but I assume they are rushing ahead full steam because they clearly see it as an extremely tough race for them.
I think it comes down to whether Meta's suite of applications (Facebook, WhatsApp, & Instragram) are still popular once consumer AR becomes viable.
I’m only a single point, but I have Oculus and an old Xbox. I spend much more time on the latter.
The Oculus is painful to wear for more than half an hour. I can only play when everybody has left the house or is asleep, lest I bump into them. I forget to charge it. The games are mostly mediocre. It’s difficult to show people what to do, even to put it on, especially if they wear glasses. Sharing is uncomfortably intimate.
I’ve found Oculus to be a novelty. It’s fun for the first 20 minutes, and after that, it gathers dust in a drawer.
> I’ve found Oculus to be a novelty. It’s fun for the first 20 minutes, and after that, it gathers dust in a drawer.
VR headsets likely aren't the answer. Unobtrusive smartglasses may very well be the answer.
Like I wrote in my previous post, Meta is a smart move if AR becomes ubiquitous. This will likely happen if and when smartglasses or something similar become a viable replacement for eye glasses.
If Apple Glasses takes off (who knows), Meta may look like a very prescient decision in a couple of years.
Meat - sorry, Meta - is going to be taken down by antitrust actions long before any of that becomes possible.
Ironically (IME) Facebook is mostly ignoring the one thing it's almost good at and which distinguishes it from TikTok - running the space that used to be filled by mailing lists and discussion groups.
The social element is more than a little half hearted now. And Second Life 2.0 isn't going to improve anyone's day any more than Second Life 1.0 did - smart glasses or no.
> Meat - sorry, Meta - is going to be taken down by antitrust actions long before any of that becomes possible.
I doubt this. There's no recent precedence for splitting apart a company of their size.
> The social element is more than a little half hearted now.
It doesn't matter. Meta is an advertising company. Augmented reality, if it takes up, opens up an unprecedented amount of advertising space for Meta or another company to target.
You underestimate the role of the previous generation. If I had kids they'd get a smartphone no earlier than 13 years old, for example. I know a good amount of families that periodically engage their kids in the real physical world so they're not constantly glued to screens. Those kids looks happier to me, compared to the constantly unhappy ones that always curse yet another "pay to keep playing" game while not realizing they are glued to a screen.
You are correct that if all the choices of a younger generation shepherd them to equally predatory places then they can't win. But again, don't underestimate the older people and their (sometimes) better perspective on things. They can show the kids that there are in fact other universes to explore.
The craziness that many corporations want to impose on us is passively resisted by many even now -- as in, they just avoid it.
This is something that the "growth hackers" miss in their so-called analysis: the passive resistance element. Many folks won't actively argue with you whether your super cool VR idea is good or not. They'll just shake their heads and leave.
That space has been increasingly been taken over by Reddit. Only the hyperlocal invite-only stuff lives on in Facebook, and instant messaging group chats on Whatsapp etc are rapidly displacing those too.
> When I can just slip on a pair of VR/AR glasses and throw away my monitor is the moment I believe VR/AR has "made it".
They also have to last a good amount of time between charges (wired AR glasses are likely going to be a no-go outside of the office).
It's likely going to be a while before AR becomes viable as more than just a novelty. My guess is that Meta is banking on there being an intermediate commercial stage, where enough corporate customers come on board for visualization & remote work use that they're able to maintain engineering momentum.
It's also possible that a consumer oriented product is farther along the development pipe than expected. Apple is likely the only company at this point that could force mass-adoption with a first generation product. If they release something in, say, 2023 and it becomes widely adopted, Meta would be positioned better than most competing companies to capitalize off of it.
I don't know, I really think we're at an inflection point with VR. People have realized nobody will buy a tethered headset, so things are either streamed over wifi from your computer or compute is on board; both work really well. Screens are getting extremely high-res and high-refresh for not that much money. You don't need a very powerful computer to drive them unless you're gaming, and the real killer app is replacing your work setup.
I think of that photo of the dude from 1980 with all the electronics equipment - microphone, camcorder, disc player, mobile TV, boombox, etc. - things that are all replaced by a smartphone everyone carries in their pocket. I think it'll be the same with my home office: desk, chair, monitors, monitor stand, microphone, webcam, computer - all will be replaced by a VR headset. The only thing it doesn't replace are input devices like keyboard & mouse, and pointing devices might get replaced by eye tracking. A common prediction is that the majority of knowledge workers will be in VR full time by the end of the decade, which honestly seems reasonable to me.
I think before anyone will be spending a day in VR, they’ll need to solve the motion sickness problem. I know people who puke within 30s of being in VR, violently.
Yeah people are very image conscious, as long as you look like robocop nobody is going to wear that stuff. It's fun to goof with, and maybe gamers will be okay with it in their basements and dens but it's not going to be "Ubiquitous until it's Inconspicuous"™.
> It's fun to goof with, and maybe gamers will be okay with it in their basements and dens but it's not going to be "Ubiquitous until it's Inconspicuous"™.
Or - hear me out - you could market the shit out of it until it's no longer goofy. Take Bluetooth headsets as an example - they used to be tacky and the users would appear obnoxious by default, until Apple made them white and expensive, and marketed them as aspirational products.
It's plenty sharp. I'm typing this on the quest 2 right now. Hard to tell exactly but the virtual monitor seems to have resolution better than 1080p at least. I use 23" 4k monitors IRL so it's a downgrade in that respect, but the flexibility is interesting.
I'm also looking forward to UI innovations moving beyond the desktop screen paradigm. Like each window floating in 3D space, stuff like that.
You don't even need to be fully blind for it to be untenable. There's a broad range of sight/eye issues and other issues that make VR a non-option for what I imagine is a not insignificant population. A lot of able looking people with 20/20 vision walking around with non-obvious problems that can be managed effectively in day to day life but strapping a self lit screen centimeters from the eye...
I'd like to read on that a bit, I haven't seen it talked about much.
I still don't understand Meta's obsession with the "metaverse" and Zuckerberg going all-in. Or what exactly the plan/paradigm is. With the world largely reopening again I feel being in a virtual world becomes less and less appealing. Especially for this younger generation who lost roughly 2 years of socializing and doing actual stuff in real life. If this metaverse was ready and useful right around when the pandemic/lockdowns started it might at least see some adoption.
It really felt like Facebook just had a perfect grip on the market since they had almost the whole planet signed up. But the rapid rise of tiktok, reddit, and in some ways telegram have just shown that the market has not settled and the current leader can be dethroned quite rapidly.
> and in some ways telegram have just shown that the market has not settled and the current leader can be dethroned quite rapidly.
There were a number of things that led to Telegram's (relative) success. One of them is the owner itself - Whatsapp has suffered in reputation with the sell-out to Facebook, especially when they announced to combine the data stores of both companies. From then on, it was widely seen as "yet another thing of Facebook where they want all your data" despite Whatsapp actually offering better encryption than Telegram. Telegram in contrast is seen as "independent" from any major political power - Durov's fight with the Russian government is well known, as is its opposition to Western demands.
Another issue was cross-device compatibility. Whatsapp used to be completely immovable between Android and iOS, and its web UI for a long time was tethered to the phone, meaning it would drain your battery. That has only changed recently, but (IMO) too late.
And the final thing were the mass-fanout capabilities. Telegram groups allowed quick dissemination and discussion of information, for open groups even without requiring a Telegram account. Whatsapp had neither. Then add to that the resistance of Telegram towards any kind of moderation, especially from Western governments... and suddenly a bunch of conspiracy theorists, vaccine deniers and outright Nazis had the perfect platform. No moderation from the platform side, no content requirements other than "please don't spread CSAM", and effective management tools for group admins to yeet off counterspeech attempts. These days, you have QAnon groups numbering six-digit subscribers [1], and the same for German copycats [2].
Telegram's success is mostly based on outright ignorance and defiance of the rules everyone else (including Facebook) plays by.
Agree to everything here. Telegram feels almost like a return to the old web where you have a ton of small groups which each have total control over the content. There is no global telegram news feed and no global admins or rules (other than removing spam and illegal stuff).
It’s almost refreshing in a way. There is certainly unsavoury content being shared around but it doesn’t affect the average telegram user in any way because they don’t see it if they don’t subscribe to it.
> Then add to that the resistance of Telegram towards any kind of moderation, especially from Western governments... and suddenly a bunch of conspiracy theorists, vaccine deniers and outright Nazis had the perfect platform. No moderation from the platform side, no content requirements other than "please don't spread CSAM", and effective management tools for group admins to yeet off counterspeech attempts. These days, you have QAnon groups numbering six-digit subscribers [1], and the same for German copycats [2].
How is that any different to WhatsApp? WhatsApp is used by neo-nazi groups[0], used to organise literal genocide[1] and is the main source of covid/vaccine conspiracy nonsense around the world (except for the U.S.)
The thing is, the scale of Whatsapp is completely different. WA can have 256 members in a group or broadcast, Telegram 200.000 - three orders of magnitude more.
Yeah Telegram is great for hate speech and other shady stuff. Wouldn't be surprised if it gets secret support from Russia to destabilize Western societies.
Telegram's founder was forced to sell his business to Putin's cronies and leave Russia after he publicly refused to cooperate with Russian secret services during anti-Putin protests back when he was still running VK (Russia's Facebook). A few years later, Kremlin banned Telegram in Russia. I find the idea that Telegram is funded by Russia ridiculous. He is as anti-Putin as you can get.
I get the impression that it's basically that he has never known defeat in his adult life and now he is eager tho find his limits. Supported by the old midlife-crisis mechanism, is this all there is? Now or never! And VR is likely a bit of a childhood dream thing: to people who grew up in the home computer era virtual reality is just as much "how the future was supposed to be" as space rockets and flying cars are to those born twenty years earlier.
FB managed to capture successive generations with FB then Instagram. But Tik Tok got the latest and that's the problem. FB can't grow any more because the young generation isn't going to use its products.
But what "social" thing is there after short form video? Something VR related, so FB is going to try and build it in the hope they can snag the generation after tiktok one assumes.
You nailed it. Rather than competing, he's going after a new market altogether. I don't recall FB ever innovating in a new space successfully, they usually buy it. Does not bode well for the long term of FB.
I don't even understand what it is. Is it something like Second Life? And is that like an old Vernor Vinge story called "True Names" which in turn is like a bunch of old Star Trek episodes and other such things? When I see "metamates"I read it as "metamites" and then as "catamites" and it makes me wonder what is really going on.
Apparently the currently available product is indeed like Second Life (aka VRChat, a game that was released in early 2017 with superior functionality and is still the most actively played VR game) but "The Metaverse" is apparently referring to a group of interconnected products that hasn't been fully released yet.
To be fair, Meta started working on the components of its "metaverse" before COVID-19. It is a weird gamble though. I get that Facebook needs a new product ready before Facebook and Instagram succumb to the next social media platform, or just lose relevance, but their metaverse seems like it's not thought through.
My main concern about the traction for the metaverse is how are they going to pull people in? The good thing about both Facebook and Instagram is that you can use both product on the go. You don't have to set aside time for it. Celebreties and influencers aren't going to move from Instagram, where they can do few posts during the day from where ever they happen to be, to a platform where they need to put on special equipment and allocate hours where they can't do anything else. I question whether or not you're actually able to be an influencer, if you spend hours a day in a virtual world. That's not inspiring or even that interesting.
The issue is that a company like Facebook no longer thinks in terms of "what would be a good product?". They think about revenue, margins, cash flow, business relations.
If anything Facebook should fix existing known problems with social media, work on the trust relationship between the company and the users (e.g. by retiring Zuckerberg) and then maybe think about how to integrate a social platform with augmented reality and VR on a big scale.
But as of now Facebook/Meta is not in the position to create a new userbase around some mediocre new app. Either it is so undeniably good that everybody understands it without a second thought, or they need to find a way to move their old userbase over to the new thing slowly.
But having a mediocre thing from an company that most people actively distrust is not enough.
VR does work for social media in a way because VR chat is the most popular VR app. I just don’t see how facebook can compete by building essentially the NFT version of VR chat where instead of limitless ability you get a locked down version of VR spaces.
It's easy to understand, put yourself in the shoes of someone who's life has been engrossed in facebook and social networks since the early 2000s -- warped vision of reality
I'll keep saying it; UI/UX is a fundamentally flawed field for a number of intersecting reasons, most of which boil down to not really distinguishing between when it's doing engineering, when it's doing psychology, and when it's doing fashion.
When it's merely doing fashion, fine, be honest about it. But when it's doing engineering/psychology -- the huge problem is that there's no skin-in-the-game incentives. It can harm people without fear of repercussion, and so it does.
I will take it seriously when someone is fined or thrown in jail for harming people through, e.g. dark patterns. This should happen, soon.
Is metaverse the new blockchain? As in a bit ambiguous, bit misunderstood technology that has the ability to attach itself to other ideas, making them "all new". We started out with blockchain money, but then got blockchain contracts, blockchain voting, reviews, art, whether it made sense or not. It kind of feels like Facebook wants to own the next cool pop-tech idea that will work as a money vacuum for all kinds of things that could get "metaversed", whatever that may mean.
Worse, they are combined together. Look into the average "metaverse" hype and you're likely to see NFTs/crypto floating somewhere around there too.
Partially this is just that it's still a major buzzword and so buzzword soup things will just have both because why not? But the (well, a) big problem for blockchain has always been the interface with the real world, so I suppose it's natural for it to be quite enthusiastically paired with the idea of a parallel digital world.
I care a lot about your redesign. I've been at a university that undertook a rebrand to the tune of millions of dollars during a hiring freeze and seen literally tons of expensive stationary scrapped for what amounts to an exec's vanity project. I've been at startups who have done the same while cash-strapped, once showering employees with new swag between layoffs (I don't understand why people fall for swag. I don't want to be your billboard). I couldn't really care about Facebook's rebrand. But most of the ones I've experienced have been extremely counterproductive.
VR won't take off until it much cheaper, the devices are less bulky and people have an actual reason to buy them. This strategy feels like a real loser.
The killer app for VR imo is just first person shooter games imo. It’s the most fun I have had in VR after trying almost every game on steam. I feel like a real life terrorist when I shoot my virtual AK-47 in the air.
If they can make it cheaper and less awkward it would appeal to a lot of gamers just for this.
I also thought this years ago, but I didn't foresee what an enormous percentage of the population would suffer motion sickness from VR. And even for the rest of the population, VR headsets are downright painful to wear for long periods; VR headsets will need to be lighter than headphones if they want people to go on long gaming binges. Games will need to have hybrid VR and non-VR modes in order to accommodate players who can't afford VR, or don't have the space for VR, or get sick from VR, or who are sore from using VR too long on a given day, and inevitably one group will start to complain about the other in the same way that controller users complain about mouse users. At best, the tech has a long, long way to go.
Thank you, I've been saying the same thing for years. I interned in a VR lab at NASA Ames in the late 90s, researching precision and comfort, and it was very clear that a significant fraction of people just can't do it, for physiological reasons. VR will never be a universal interface.
As interns and postdocs, we were all lab monkeys, and all got our turn in the helmet. Some people were utterly hopeless, always got sick, couldn't do the tasks. Others took to it like fish in water. I think this disconnect in proprioceptive adaptability leads people who have it to vastly overestimate the general public's ability to remain in a VR space for more than a minute or two.
One of the things the lab's senior scientist was researching was the effect of latency on performance at 3D tasks. For example, moving a ring down a twisted wire without touching[0]. There was a clear effect on both objective performance and subjective reports of comfort as latency decreased, and it hadn't bottomed out at 60 fps / 16 ms latency (one frame). This was true for every test subject, but greatly exaggerated for those with generally poor performance. I doubt even 240 fps / 4 ms would eliminate it. And how are you going to get 4 ms of input latency with modern USB drivers? Not even your keyboard has that anymore.
I share your skepticism, but this is the argument critics were saying about online video back in the day.
Who would want to watch a stamp-size video of horrible quality when we have TVs? This will never catch on.
You have to get started early on these sort of big transitions, otherwise by the time everything to make it successful is in place, you're years too late.
That being said, I don't think this is going to be a winning strategy for Facebook either.
I think a better parallel is 3D TVs which required specialized hardware and specialized content. These never did catch on even though the hardware was less bulky and arguably less specialized than what's required for VR.
Marketing department egos get inflated to incredible, lofty levels when a redesign is planned and launched. It’s something quite amazing to behold. It causes work for many departments, updating logos, redesigning websites etc. Then unless it completely backfired it’s deemed a success and millions of dollars well-spent.
One can hope. But unlike MySpace I think Facebook has enough momentum behind it and has collected enough capital that they will be able to buy their way out of any decline. TikTok won't replace Facebook, though it may take some marketshare away from it.
Facebook may have momentum, but the VR side of things has little momentum at all.
For people to really start using this, they need two things: trust and goodwill. People trusted that Facebook would rectify its privacy issues at the start. Remember the promise of a global council for Facebook? That got killed pretty quickly, along with apps you could plug into Facebook and other innovative things for creators. But enough scandals and there is no more trust, so if Facebook launches something truly different then no one feels they can trust it.
And goodwill. There is no more of it left. For people to try something new from an existing company, it really takes a reasonable amount of goodwill before they will give it a try. Like the reasons for a lack of trust, there is a lack of goodwill.
So Facebook has momentum. This Meta VR or whatever it is called has none. And it’s unlikely to gather much at this point.
Frankly, as one of the people who distrust Facebook, I hope they die and wither on the vine.
It's a generational thing, Kids don't want to be seen on the same place as their parents. Youth know facebook by name but they won't touch it. Changing name to Meta might get some over by mistake until they see their parents and then they are gone again :-)
I wonder when it would be that I or my family elders would be online in a metaverse. Do you hop on during lunch time at work? Would you need the VR helmet thing? Or would there be some sort of text timeline showing what metamates are up to? Would people without powerful enough phones be outright excluded? If I'm setting up an ad campaign on the metaverse, do I have to "virtually physically" walk my avatar to some office in the metaverse to talk to an ad rep? If I have neck problems will this make it worse? Will it affect my eyesight?
I can imagine a Discord-type of world, basically Second Life without the game mechanics. Could I have my Pikachu follow me around? What about an avatar of my real dog?
This stuff exists already though. So the value add is that I feel more immersed, while simultaneously being more disconnected from the flow of my everyday life? It's already rude to get on your phone when you have company, how much worse is it if you have to don a headset or something to take a call?
Anyways, I'm 30 and it all sounds lame to me. I don't play video games. I didn't even get the Pokemon Go thing when everyone my age got obsessed. Maybe I'm just too literal minded. I guess I'll focus on buying real stuff with the real money I make by making virtual stuff for the metaverse.
Technically, MySpace is still alive, so while I do think that Facebook won't technically die, it may, at least for North America and Europe, functionally die, although its momentum might stop its fall in i.e. Africa (in a similar vein, the Opera name is very popular there even though it's no longer heard very much back in Silicon Valley).
An organization could indeed buy their way out of an decline, if it is flexible and fast enough and if the managment is able to spend the money on sane decisions.
An organisation could spend infinite funds wrongly and still fall, if not a single deciding person in your organisation is willing to not lie to themselves and act on it.
True and most large organisationa are institutionally rigid by default. They also don't like back-pedalling because shareholders get funny and share price is the main driver behind their decisions.
Even with massive amounts of cash, you can only support 72000 employees for so long. With most of these things, if you get enough downward momentum, income dries up, layoffs start, customers get more nervous etc.
I guess we don't have too many stories of very long-lived companies (certainly of Faang size) that have survived the changes in the world unless they have stuck to a strong core product, which hasn't changed so much in 100 years+ like cars, boats etc. What I wonder is if it is possible that a 1 product company like Meta can really survive in the long-term.
The very same thing is happening with facebook right now. The only people I see actively using it are either scammers, social pariahs or pensioners.
It's gone a looong way from a buzzing young-people focused site.
As soon as someone makes a social network site with up/downvote driven content curation instead of an obscure algorithm will be the new king.
Selection bias? A product needs to be kept fresh, otherwise customers will choose the competition just based on the first impression. I’ve redesigned a large enterprise CMS with a design team. It took just two weeks of implementation with just a few devs.
The line from MySpace's crash and burn to Meta's flailing seems tenuous at best.
MySpace really did crash and burn. There was nothing tying users to the site. Meta on the other hand has multiple properties with enormous captive audiences who mostly aren't going anywhere.
Sure, Meta's on the decline and TikTok is on the rise. But until TikTok opens up a Marketplace competitor or Groups competitor or TikTok produces a messenger that allows you to DM your Grammy a heart emoji on her cheap Android phone, FB and Meta will be mostly fine (and simply declining) for years.
Great summary. A friend once commented that there are no long term winners in social networks, drawing a path all the way back to compuserve. I thought it was an interesting point, but I remember thinking anything pre-web didn't really count (for no real reason I suppose).
Now I think I agree with him that medium doesn't really matter. The confidence of their user base is everything and once its gone, its like watching a giant fall over for years.
To be honest, MySpace never felt that big outside US: I don't remember having anyone I know having an account there (we of the IRC generation ;)), yet Facebook quickly turned very appealing to most people when it came in (it made sense to connect with your high school and university friends, and then family showed up too).
Facebook/Metas recent decisions strike me as completely mad. I don’t understand what the Metaverse should be, and I don’t get the impression anyone else does. Not even Meta, for that matter. Their buffalo ad is downright bizarre and their demos nothing. Renaming the company figures, but this whole Metamates business is beyond parody.
Am I a naysayer? A tech pessimist and a neo-luddite? Am I not clever enough to understand what’s happening? Out of touch perhaps? After all, I rarely use tech outside of work and like an offline life.
Losing your marbles might look a lot like what happens when you're desperately looking for something to reverse a decline.
There's only so many things that can sustain an FB size valuation, and most of those things have an existing 800 pound gorilla sitting on them.
So then you're left with speculative bets that could maybe balloon one day, and you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to believe in the thesis for one of them.
> Losing your marbles might look a lot like what happens when you're desperately looking for something to reverse a decline.
Somehow it feels like Facebook is a Ponzi scheme, except with users not money. Valuation always seems to be based on user growth. It’s amazing to me how quickly the sense of desperation kicks in once user count flatlines.
I think for a lot of the golden geese we're entering a period where entropy is going to force a change to how they're valued, simply because infinite growth is impossible. At some point (and I think we're there or close) you run out of people who both want and don't have a Facebook account, or a Netflix subscription, or whatever else it is you're shilling. Similarly there was a dip in Amazon's share prices after their latest earnings call after 2021 income only increased by two billion dollars.
I get that these companies all started as scrappy startups, but they're now the establishment, and maybe they need to stop chasing infinite share value growth and start talking about paying reasonable dividends to retain value.
Tbf, I think what he wants to do is basically the Amazon/AWS and Google/Waymo pivot where they basically use their massive piles of cash and engineering talent pipeline to try to capture the Next Big Market. And with a PE ratio based on growth that they'll struggle to achieve that roll of the dice might even be the best (or least worst) option.
Problem is they're just so unfocused and goofy about it. To the extent that VR immersive experiences become big (which is likely not as big as Zuck thinks), it's more likely to be dominated by a company with a culture based around immersive worldbuilding and storytelling, not a company culture based around advertiser metadata and surfacing stuff people click on. And rebranding itself as a metaverse whilst all it has to show the average user is a website which has been around in essentially the same format for 15 years underlines that.
Growth expectations are a seemingly inevitable side effect of the stock exchange: imagine there was a perfectly highly profitable and perfectly stable (in both directions) company. To people sure of that stability, a "correct" share price would be defined as a function of central bank interest rate. Buy when below, sell when higher. But if that perfect stability existed in reality, people would not know. Even if the average expectation was spot on perfect stability, it would be a bell curve distribution with some being more optimistic and others less. Share transactions only go one direction, pessimists selling to optimists. You end up with an all-optimist ownership after pessimists and realists are bought out.
There is a corrective mechanism to this dynamic and it's called the takeover bid. As soon as the "optimists" fail in their growth goals (and they will fail at some point, pretty much by definition), their valuation drops and the pessimists who had better foresight can take back control.
But before that happens, any amount of "grow or die trying" can take place: as long as inertia keeps the lights on, team "reinvent ourselves!" enthusiastically digs an ever deeper hole. Occasionally those do strike gold I think, but I can't really think of an example right now.
Some might say Nadella Microsoft, or the iPod company, but I'd say that the former wasn't quite down enough to qualify, and iPod-age Apple wasn't a growth bet at all: everything they did at the time would have been considered a success if it only stabilized on the level reached by the CRT iMacs.
> Losing your marbles might look a lot like what happens when you're desperately looking for something to reverse a decline.
Facebook still has an user count who's market limit approaches the human population, has lost users for the first time just last month and is still the largest social network, despite being said dead for 5+ years now. Facebook-the-company (Meta, I guess) also still has Instagram, which does not look like it's loosing out against TikTok, and WhatsApp+Facebook Messenger, which together have an enormous market share in the messenger market.
I don't think there's really a need for panic, yet.
Instagram users are, or will be, parallel TikTok users. If you are up tight about adding users this is a panic situation. In real terms it's not a concern to anyone but Facebook and TikTok. Users just shrug and use what interests or benefits them. Facebooks business model is quicksand because if they leverage users to enter another market welcome to antitrust. They could do payments and a million other things but social it is because that's what created the beast. They dominated a market that has no costs for users to walk away from. Customer value proposition is/was thin.
Maybe those people were right all along. The problem is that their valuation is based on continued growth, that can no longer be assumed based on last quarter.
Yes and: the audience for "metaverse", crypto ("libra" IIRC), etc are developers. For both retention and recruiting. IMHO.
Tangent: I'm reminded of when tabloids paid premium salaries. For pretty much all the same reasons. Having National Inquirer on your CV severely limited future prospects, the work sucked, the world and your peers hated you, etc.
FB's initial success relied on a lot of variables coming together, and Zuck is smart enough to know that.
He's also smart enough to know that people are smelling weakness, and that's a bad time for him and Meta, because the parts of the tech world Zuck has allied himself with are ruthlessly mercenary and when he + Meta become a liability, all their friends and allies are going to drop them like a rock. The main contribution Zuckerberg brought to the table was an understanding of and an outlet into digital youth culture. Now we're hitting adulthood and Zuck's approaching middle-age, and you can't be the bright young kid forever. He's realizing that he needs something concrete for his power and influence to last, but I wouldn't be shocked if either:
a.) The people with the decent ideas/the ones who could tell Zuck 'no, that's a batshit idea' that he'd listen to have all bailed. They're not going down with the ship.
b.) He's tanked his reputation to work with so much that he can't assemble the teams he'd need in order to make something like the Metaverse actually feasible. There are no Savarins, McCollums, Hugheses, or Moskovitzes around. He has ideas, but he's so obsessed with being on top that he's forgotten that an army of a million soldiers with a commander in chief but no generals or officers is not going to be very effective.
Metaverse isn't a product or even suite of products. It's just a nebulous vibe that's trying to front-run and capture mindshare in the event that something, probably created by someone else and acquired, can navigate it and find a hit.
It also has the side benefit of glossing over the general sense of toxicity over becoming a 'facebooker' that's been blooming in the industry for a while.
It’s really crazy. Like there’s no way this thing takes off, it looks like a nightmare. VR is suuuper far off from mainstream adoption if it happens at all.
This comment reminded me of the time when I was in school, and I thought I'd learn HTML to build the school's first website.
As I was trying to figure out how to do it, it dawned on me that 2D HTML was old fashioned and that the future was VRML, because of course you'd want everything to be 3D, it's obvious, right?
Luckily I was not smart enough to build the school website in 3D.
It reminds me on those crypto scams that just try to generate hype by acting as if you are the next big thing. And I say acting because ultimately you don't care about realizing an actual working product, but about getting capital from people who buy into the hype.
Metaverse = More immersive 'Second Life'/'Roblox'/'Minecraft' but with more expensive hardware requirements?
I anticipate that the biggest market for a 'metaverse ecosystem' will be virtual sex. You'll be able to buy NFTs of specific acts, performed by specific people and download them to your, umm, VR/AR accessories. I'm only half-kidding with this stupid mashup.
Well, I'm not sure he had his marbles at the start, as he's always had that whole "unfeeling megalomaniac" vibe going.
Still, FB has been on the VR/AR kick since pre-Oculus acquisition. Merging that thrust into the now-popular "metaverse" buzz may be an effort to capitalize on marketing/branding as much as anything. And, the timing dove-tails with the clear beginning of decline in their (formerly) namesake business at a time when their "acquire to maintain relevance" strategy may be nearing the end of its utility. So, this may all be a rational response under that set of conditions.
But, this doesn't mean the "metaverse" is any more well-defined or meaningful on its own. And, it doesn't make me any less concerned about the idea of a world living inside Zuck's mind.
I think back when Occulus was a thing and Carmack was involved, Zuckerberg thought it was just cool and bought it because it would've been fun. A complete guilty (and kinda expensive) purchase. There was no way from the get-go to make it profitable. Nobody wanted to see ads in their eyeballs. But he did it anyway. Maybe he thought they could branch into gaming, but somehow that dream died. Now 8 years later Carmack is gone and VR hasn't really progressed beyond chat rooms. They're left scrambling for ideas as their valuation is tumbling. They tried rolling their own crypto and that shit failed hard. People already have instagram, and whatsapp is slowly eroding in the west. A dumb little rebranded music app is eating their lunch.
"What can we do?"
"What about facebook, IN VIRTUAL REALITY?"
Because absolutely the last thing anyone wants to do is see their dreary fucking facebook feed in 3d. So here we are, a rename later, somehow thinking that will do anything. The last hurrah is to pretend we somehow operate as a parent company with independent subsidiaries because our brand is so toxic that years of bad press and a myopic pivot of our core product has finally caught up to us.
>Maybe he thought they could branch into gaming, but somehow that dream died.
Personally, I saw some logic. Before social media, many people socialized in online games. They could meet and talk to new people, and navigating the map was a natural way to avoid a deluge of messages. IMO, Facebook and Twitter were the two biggest reasons MMOs lost popularity.
Which, ironically, supports your point:
>"What about facebook, IN VIRTUAL REALITY?"
This won't be popular. People left immersive worlds for Facebook because they preferred a simple message feed they could glance at while doing something else. They often get sucked into Facebook and don't do something else, but I think putting on VR equipment and deciding not to do anything else for a block of time is enough of a barrier to make it unpopular. Even if VR ends up dominating the gaming market, VR social media will be niche.
> IMO, Facebook and Twitter were the two biggest reasons MMOs lost popularity.
Interesting, never looked at it this way. You're likely correct.
To add to this as a former MMORPG player, I'd say those games also lost popularity because there was no development there. You got through several super slow grinds -- leveling and gearing up at the very least -- only to land in a quicksand from which there's no escape: end-game dungeon and raid grinding for better and better gear which is done for... you guessed it, so you can do higher level dungeons and raids. You do that and you're waiting for the next tier to be released. Warframe and the Destiny games suffer from that same thing as well.
We the humans don't like annoying and soul-draining routine. We like leisurely routine, and sadly MMORPGs are often not that. Heck, a lot of modern games are not that. They are like jobs.
Thinking back, I cherish most moments in WoW when I socialized with people while doing the raids and dungeons. I never enjoyed the grinds however. I kinda sorta liked them up to a point -- beautiful scenery, nice voice acting, some role play etc. but it quickly loses its appeal and just becomes dreary.
At one point this catches up with enough players for there to be mass exoduses -- although mind you, all these games have a core fanbase that will never leave no matter what; that however is no indication of popularity or success (something I believe people constantly use to shut down discussions like "is the game on a downward spiral?", "lol no it still has X million players").
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Back to topic at hand, I'd say something like this definitely applies to social networks as well. People's careers get cancelled over a seemingly offensive comment on Twitter, for example. Other people take notice and start self-censoring while others are like "feck this, I am out".
It seems that all social networks and MMORPGs -- or maybe all communities in general? -- eventually succumb to being an echo chamber and are driven by tradition.
Apparently that's the best that we as a species can offer. Sigh.
This is why they bought it. Go back and check the interviews after the aquisition years ago. Whether you think that's realistic or not, Zuck doesn't care about things like gaming.
Selling ads on social media is slowly dying. Either you bet really big on some new magical tech or you'll have a hard time justifying your valuation in a couple of years. At this stage, the vaguer the better.
Ads have driven out all other content on social media.
Part of the reason it is so intolerable to use Facebook and Instagram is because between one in three and one in two pieces of content that they display to you is sponsored.
It seems to be wholly lifted from Pete Blaber's "The Mission, the Men, and Me" (https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Men-Me-Lessons-Commander/dp/0...). For what it's worth, the book is fascinating, and I took away some valuable leadership lessons from it, but, much like most "corporate values", I sincerely doubt it'll see successful implementation in Facebook culture.
Founders invariably suffer from some cognitive dissonance around the nature of their "shared goals" (eg: the "mission") when compared to those they employ. I can recall a cofounder insisting on including a section in performance self-review, wherein she expected us all to list how our personal dreams aligned with those of $employer.
When Mark Zuckerberg announces his company values are “Meta, metamates, me.” it sounds like he means "Meta, Metamates, and Mark Zuckerberg"
I mean, it's his company so I guess he can have those corporate values if he wants, but it's straying in to radical honesty to say the aims of the company are specifically to further his own interests.
I think I must be the only one who thinks the Metaverse thing will be lucrative for Facebook. Just imagine corporate VR work rooms and VR school classrooms with billboards in the background.
I think the weird hype words are just because the marketing department is twiddling their thumbs while the engineers are building.
But this is also why I don't play in the stock market because everything I bet on in my mind usually tanks.
I don't think it will be lucrative for fb because Microsoft is already working in that problem space, and has been for a while. They were working on it via Xbox Kinect back during the Xbox 360 days, and merged that into HoloLens suite 5-ish years ago I think. That's a big lead time, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.
Additionally, Microsoft actually is able to engage with the big corporate clients that want or have a need for data visualization, the US government chief among them. The "VR workroom" or conference call is a neat gimmick - the VR or AR security briefing or military planning session is a massive leap forward in capability, and there's a lot of money there.
You're not wrong, but Microsoft was in a position where they could invest over a period of _many_ years, if not a bit more than a decade, to get to a point of 53% market share. I don't think fb/meta has that kind of time - Microsoft was able to do all that while their core business (selling licenses to enterprise customers) either held steady or grew.
> Just imagine corporate VR work rooms and VR school classrooms with billboards in the background.
Yeah, we are imagining that, and that is exactly the reason we think it will crash and burn, because, come on. What sane person would want that? What sane person would use that? Why would anyone bother? That is both boring and awful at the same time.
You sound very sure of yourself on that, but I can't imagine why. The US elected a reality TV star and inspiration for 80s movie villains a while back, Ukraine is currently run by a comedian. People are apparently paying large sums of money for cryptographic nonsense. Pretty much everyone is trying really hard to pretend that climate change isn't a big deal after spending decades pretending it didn't exist so that they wouldn't (and don't) have to change their lifestyles at all...
I could go on. It's remarkably easy to go on.
Point being, you may feel better by insisting that it's just 'cheap cynicism', but I remain unconvinced. "corporate VR work rooms and VR school classrooms with billboards in the background" seems like a frighteningly real possibility from where I'm sitting; I watch people spend their lives staring down at a rectangle designed to shove ads in their face all day because "it's the best way to keep in touch".
Not to mention that Meta is not a ship on which all the lives of the mates depend...hence the original saying that puts the ship before the people on board.
My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Of course, nice UI is nice but people would rather achieve a task for a cost and UI is just icing. Even worse is when you change the UI/UX, people get really annoyed at that! "Where is that button I always used to click to do X?" "Oh, you don't do it that way anymore! You need to relearn what you have spent the last 5 years assigning to muscle memory but hey, the site looks cooler right?"
I mean what else would you expect if you employ 500 designers? They have to do something.