No? The huge investment Facebook made in launching a virtual reality social media platform that Mark Zuckerberg predicted would take over the internet? It was so important that Zuck renamed his whole company to Meta! How could you forget?
Well, now it’s safe to purge your memory banks. The Metaverse is dead or dying.
Horizon Worlds launched in late 2021 and never found its footing. The platform never drew more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users, which isn’t enough for a project that consumed billions of dollars. Reality Labs, the Meta division responsible for VR and metaverse development, has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020. In the fourth quarter alone it posted an operating loss of more than $6 billion.
The costs were always the argument for staying the course. Zuckerberg had promised the metaverse would reach a billion people and generate hundreds of billions in commerce. Pulling back meant admitting those projections were wrong.
I am impressed that Zuckerberg can throw away $80 billion on a bad gamble on a whim. Surely this means the stockholders will rise up and depose their incompetent leader…nah, no, you know that once you’re rich enough you are free from consequences.
You might hope that they’d learn something from this, but no — their future is instead going to be built on AI.
What changed the calculus was AI. When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, Meta pivoted its public messaging fast. Its AI research division, long led by scientist Yann LeCun, gave the company a credible foundation to build on. Ad revenue improved. The stock recovered. By 2024, Meta had nearly tripled in value from its 2022 lows.
AI seems to have a niche in building stock market confidence and ad revenue, that’s nice. I think it’s going to face some consequences in the near future, as people realize they’ve been sold a shiny bill of goods, and maybe people will learn to tell Zuck to shut the fuck up.
Zuckerberg has something like a 50-61% of the voting shares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms, so no one can vote him out even if they tried. Our only hope is a collapse and mass migration away from all or at least most Meta properties…
I am quite certain that in the long run (hundreds to thousands of years) ‘AI’ will be extremely valuable, but in the short run – as a consumer product – it is a waste. Businesses should answer their own phones, cars should have human drivers, etc., because the glorified spellcheck is just not up to those tasks and won’t be any time soon.
Facebook was a good idea implemented very badly.
Everyone gets their own website to post cat photos and garden photos.
We we got was a predatory company that vacuums up as much of your personal information as possible and sells it and monetizes it.
I canceled my Facebook account over a decade ago and never missed it or go there without a compelling reason.
One thing I noticed is that almost none of my Boomer friends ever opened a Facebook account anyway.
The whole ‘metaverse’ was a stupid clone of SecondLife, which was also stupid. It was clear at the start.
Wow. So much stupid. Much money lit on fire.
Facebook is good if you like vintage aircraft.
I have also found plenty of people who share my views on social issues.
I do not consume much these days, so my personal information is worthless to the techbro billionaires.
AI will be useful for Facebook and other online services that depend on user uploaded content. Meta can have AI agents create and post content, so people’s feeds will always be filled with new material without actually having to have people post anything.
What Facebook doesn’t want is people using AI agents to read their Facebook account and filter it to posts by family and friends. They also don’t want AI agents creating Facebook accounts then reading and posting for other companies, that dilutes the value of advertising on Facebook. So there will be user agreements that ban that sort of thing and constant fighting to detect AI.
I realized last year that the Facebook algorithm has my number, as I was wasting far too much time reading superficial-but-amusing crap instead of working on Projects (of which I have enough to keep me busy longer than my expected remaining lifespan). So I cold-turkeyed in December, and now drop in once a month or so just to catch up on a few family and friends. To help me resist the temptation, I changed my password to Firefox-generated gibberish, logged out and deleted the entry from Firefox. The added effort of having to do a recovery each time is enough to discourage me — it now requires intent as opposed to being a spur-of-the-moment default behaviour.
I never understood the case for the metaverse.
The case for AI is pretty clear: fire all the workers. The numbers don’t work out and I expect a crash as the number of actual use cases is way smaller than what they’re building out for but at least the goal makes sense for making money.
Accordingly the latter is far more dangerous to society.