The Metaverse: Marketing Ploy or Internet-Level Paradigm Shift?
What's everyone's take on all the recent Metaverse hype? To me it seems like something no one really asked for. It seems much more like a desperate ploy for FB to stay relevant and profitable now that both FB and IG are losing social media marketshare and Oculus VR has remained just an expensive novelty despite having great tech and tons of investment. The Metaverse seems like just the newest in a long line of "solutions looking for a problem" invented use cases for VR in hopes your average person will finally treat it as something more than the Wii on steroids.
Hilarious to see everyone try to recreate second life a decade and a half later. And the graphics aren’t even as good
I remember the tech press (Wired in particular) dickriding Second Life in the exact same way as the Metaverse shit when SL first came out. They said the exact same things about SL and it totally fizzled after just a year or two and ended up just limping along on life support from a small core of weirdo whales who were either unhealthily obsessed no-life autists or using it exclusively for weird niche sex shit. Time is a flat circle.
This precisely. What these companies fail to understand is that VR environments which benefit from digital ownership are inherently biased towards people who reject or are rejected by real life. Aka, weirdos.
Metaverse is a media push to make the term "real" just like they did with social media about a decade ago. Metaverse has always existed. Second life has been going at this for a really long time in the aspect of virtual world building and persona. VR/AR have been products for years. It is a novelty that people use when they first buy it and then slowly stop using it because they already wear a mask all day at work, why would they to want relax by wearing a mini oven on their face. We all know corporate metaverse is useless and no one is asking for it. It is a sham and too hyped up.
Exactly. The only VR thing taking off is vr porn 😂
To your point though, porn adoption in a new platform is very bullish typically. Porn showed up super early in movies, TV, high definition internet videos, live streaming, and now VR. Probably missing a few. Metaverse as of today though, still feels to me like overhyped vaporware. It feels like a desperate top signal for an overleveraged tech market and might instead have its true growing point in the next cycle.
Oculus quest 2 starts at $299 lmao where are you getting the “expensive novelty” from?
Oculus owner here. I enjoy it, but it's still a novelty, and to do anything serious with it, you need an expensive amount of hardware.
Only on Blind would $300 be considered inexpensive for a glorified toy.