Betaverse
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The metaverse is bullshit
You're not losing your mind: it really does just sound like a worse version of the internet.
Games, NFTs, crypto, VR, AR, the blockchain, they're all wrapped up in this idea of a virtually-integrated society in which our Fortnite costumes will carry over to our Onlyfans accounts and we will never, ever have to log off.
The absurdity of it makes me want to scream, or maybe die, or maybe just spoon out the part of my brain that knows what an NFT is. But there's one thing that keeps me going:
The absolute gleeful, cackling, deep-in-my-bones certainty that it's all complete bullshit.
- The metaverse is bullshit because it already exists, and it's called the internet
- The metaverse is bullshit because tech moguls missed the part where cyberpunk is dystopian
- The metaverse is bullshit because its promised cross-compatibility doesn't actually work
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Betaverse:
The metaverse is bullshit because tech moguls missed the part where cyberpunk is dystopian
It's worse than the dystopian alternate universes dreamed up by Stephenson et al.. Quote from Snow Crash according to TFA:
"Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these."
Do you think metabook or whatever will actually let you run around like a giant talking penis? Nah, that'll likely get you banhammered.
As for the BS about blockchains and NFTs and cross-compatibility.
Perhaps the most cited claim about the metaverse as it pertains to gaming is that it's the key to uniting our digital lives into an ur-account. The magic of the blockchain will then let us, say, "own" and access the same weapon across Diablo and New World,
...
For example: "If you can carry food to a new world and eating restores health, that might really unbalance a game where you aren't supposed to be able to heal at all." Or: "A survival game might want actual nutritional values rather than a single 'food' value."The things that will be tied to your account and that are going to cross into different worlds will be stupid cosmetics. Skins. Maybe a virtual pet. Or maybe something like those hats that Valve sells in Team Fortress (IIRC). (It for sure won't be giant penises or purple dildos.)
The one thing we can be sure about is that if corporate designs the future, the future will be boring as fuck. Which makes it that much more dystopian.
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@Applied-Mediocrity linked to article in Betaverse:
The metaverse is bullshit because no one can actually explain why it's better
You're missing a step. The metaverse is bullshit because no one can explain what it actually is!!
It's just a made up nonsense buzzword, percent complete bullshit. Yes ok, the article points out that the name isn't even original bullshit but copied over from that Snow Crash fiction. But that doesn't change the point. There is zero substance behind this snake oil dystopia.Games, NFTs, crypto, VR, AR, the blockchain, they're all wrapped up in this idea of a virtually-integrated society
So just like a hodgepodge of the tech industry / VC's dumbest idea, and Suckerburg looks at it screaming
It's like they're in a race to constantly come up with more idiotic ideas.
The absurdity of it makes me want to scream, or maybe die, or maybe just spoon out the part of my brain that knows what an NFT is. But there's one thing that keeps me going:
The absolute gleeful, cackling, deep-in-my-bones certainty that it's all complete bullshit.
More than NFTs or cryptocurrency or any of the other brain-melting nonsense tied up in the tech landscape of 2021, this is the part that truly makes me want to stick my entire fist in my mouth and bite down. The push to create the metaverse, at least from companies like Epic and Facebook, seems entirely built on a teenage boy's reading of Snow Crash: zeroing in on the awesome vision of future technology while totally missing the book's satirical skewering of capitalism.
QFT
During Facebook's metaverse presentation, John Carmack called metaverse development as it exists today "a honeypot trap for architecture astronauts," aka "programmers or designers who want to only look at things from the very highest levels."
As basically a big Carmack fanboi, the only reason I can forgive him for working at/for Facebook is that for a game pioneer like him working on the VR goggles technology kind of makes sense.
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Do you think metabook or whatever will actually let you run around like a giant talking penis? Nah, that'll likely get you banhammered.
Figuratively, yes. And depends what said penis would be talking about. But that's more for the
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Stephenson's writing is so fun that I guess you could, maybe, misinterpret a society run by the pizza mafia as a good thing. But Tim Sweeney and Mark Zuckerberg don't see themselves as pizza mob bosses.
What this article fails to point out is that they instead see themselves as L. Bob Rife, but they probably realise that just as much as they realise Snow Crash amounts to a parody.
Zuckerberg calls the metaverse "an embodied internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it." Has he used the internet? Actually? How much of it would you like to embody?
I can immediately think of one niche in which this could be hugely popular very quickly. OTOH, I kind of doubt Facebook would allow porn on this metaverse.
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The whole thing sounds like Zuck went to see the Ready Player One movie and was all like "Yes! That is what we need! This will flood meatbag brains with dopamine!"
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I've gotten some YouTube ads for "gaming in the metaverse" and it seems incomprehensible. If I can't tell you what your product is after your ad, that seems like a bad thing. Right now I don't want anything to do with it, whatever it is, not least of which is because its connected with the artist formerly known as Facebook.
I was quite young when the internet was taking off, so part of me wonders: were people equally skeptical and confused about wtf the internet was in it's earliest days as consumer product?
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@HannibalRex said in Betaverse:
I was quite young when the internet was taking off, so part of me wonders: were people equally skeptical and confused about wtf the internet was in it's earliest days as consumer product?
What do you mean, "were"? But yes.
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@HannibalRex said in Betaverse:
it's earliest days as consumer product?
I remember the days before it was a consumer product, when it was pretty much used exclusively by the military, universities and a few tech companies. It was a nicer place.
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@Zerosquare I did; there wasn't a lot to the internet except email and Usenet back in those days. Yes, there were flame wars and obnoxious people. Naturally, it depended on which groups you participated in. Groups like, say, comp.lang.c or rec.bicycles tended to have less drama than — what was it called, soc.motss, or something like that — and I generally avoided groups with a high probability of drama. And when drama did arise, newsreaders had a built-in tool for ignoring it, if you chose to do so. I tended to put subjects, rather than people, in my killfile, because even obnoxious people sometimes had useful contributions to other topics, but ignoring an obnoxious person was as simple as (IIRC) ^k. Bye, bye, troll. Ignoring a topic was slightly more effort — open your killfile in vi (or emacs, if you were one of those people) and copy-pasta the subject you wanted to ignore.
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@Zerosquare said in Betaverse:
@HardwareGeek said in Betaverse:
It was a nicer place.
I guess you didn't use Usenet, then.
Even the trolling was better back then, in part because both uploading and downloading images (and patches) took a lot of effort. I remember uudecoding files, only to discover that a critical post in the middle had gone missing, rendering the result complete gibberish.
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Even the trolling was better back then,
Trolling back then was different. Drag something bogus but plausible through the newsgroup and see who bites. Nowadays it's just about being an arsehole for the lulz.
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@HannibalRex said in Betaverse:
If I can't tell you what your product is after your ad, that seems like
a bad thingany other mordern ad.Last time I found any kind of remotely useful information in an ad was probably some time around 1990 or so. Advertising is all empty buzzwords, canned positive feelz, and appeals to base instincts, because that's what actually gets the stuff selling.
Seriously, for most products these days I can't even tell what they are after visiting the their frigging main web page.
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The things that will be tied to your account and that are going to cross into different worlds will be stupid cosmetics.
The idea that all programs will suddenly be able to use stuff from each other is the most science fictiony thing about this. To think such a thing is possible is to be completely ignorant of how actual software works and is developed.
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@boomzilla said in Betaverse:
all programs will suddenly be able to use stuff from each other is the
old style of things, prior to Win95. Before that, any program was allowed to read and write at memory positions used by any other program, or none at all, or even by the OS proper.
Then, suddenly, lots of AccessViolationExceptions popped up...
Welcome back to the brightfutpasture!
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@boomzilla said in Betaverse:
The idea that all programs will suddenly be able to use stuff from each other is the most science fictiony thing about this. To think such a thing is possible is to be completely ignorant of how actual software works and is developed.
Obviously it will need to be "opt-in" on each program's side. I.e., they'd define some sort of API and exchange format for the relevant media. Why would anybody "opt-in"? Well, the metaverse is going to be a walled garden, so if you want your stuff to be on there, you get to follow their rules and requirements. (Publishing content from your program to other programs needs to go via the walled garden as well, and Meta is happy to take a cut for that.)
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@boomzilla said in Betaverse:
The idea that all programs will suddenly be able to use stuff from each other is the most science fictiony thing about this. To think such a thing is possible is to be completely ignorant of how actual software works and is developed.
Obviously it will need to be "opt-in" on each program's side. I.e., they'd define some sort of API and exchange format for the relevant media. Why would anybody "opt-in"? Well, the metaverse is going to be a walled garden, so if you want your stuff to be on there, you get to follow their rules and requirements. (Publishing content from your program to other programs needs to go via the walled garden as well, and Meta is happy to take a cut for that.)
That API and it's datastructures must be utterly godawful to describe everything anyone would need for this vision to work.
On top of that we add that people can't even get GET/POST/DELETE correct in HTTP.
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. I.e., they'd define some sort of API and exchange format for the relevant media.
:why_not_16_competing_standards:
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@BernieTheBernie said in Betaverse:
Welcome back to the bright
futpasture!Careful. The pasture is full of
.
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That API and it's datastructures must be utterly godawful to describe everything anyone would need for this vision to work.
I mean, yes. Remember Carmack complaining about architecture astronauts? This is where those guys come in.
But, that's also missing the point. Ultimately, when they've burned through a pile of cash and random architecture astronauts, they'll realize that they don't need to describe everything anybody would need. What they'll need to have something that allows Metabook to sell virtual hats (or whatever) to people. That's it.
Edit: Which isn't to say that rendering a hat is going to be easy. Different material / lighting models in your rendering engine? Well, shit.
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@cvi the former is also absolutely conflicting with the latter, and thus facebook’s goal of making money. Skipping over all the steps why this bullshit doesn’t work, if it did I’d simply make my own little bubble in the Betaverse with a Star Trek post-scarcity utopia.
Money printerReplicator goes Brrrr.
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@topspin Meta is happy to import & bless the objects from your bubble for general metaverse use as long as you pay them this small fee...
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@cvi I for one welcome our micro-transaction overlords.
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I for one welcome our micro-transaction overlords.
There's a small fee for that as well.
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@boomzilla said in Betaverse:
The idea that all programs will suddenly be able to use stuff from each other is the most science fictiony thing about this. To think such a thing is possible is to be completely ignorant of how actual software works and is developed.
It sounds a bit like:
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replace all proprietary document file formats.
Yeah, that worked out well.
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As the article itself says:
It would be improper to call ODA anything but a failure
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@HardwareGeek Which is why I mentioned it …
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So what is “the metaverse,” exactly?
Will we all live in the metaverse soon? Or is the idea just Second Life redux?
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My take on that... "thing" is slightly different. I believe that Zuckerberg & al. aren't entirely stupid and know how bullshitty the whole thing is. But they also know that, until now, most stuff on the internet has a limited life-span. We had Yahoo, Geocities... and see where they're now.
So Facebook knows they need to be able to change their activities swiftly if they want to stay relevant -- which they've already done across the years with e.g. WhatsApp or Instagram, but that's already a few years past. Now maybe Facebook has reached a position where they might not suffer the same fate as those in the past, and maybe the industry as a whole also has changed. But given they have oodles of money, it's a small investment for them to try and stake some different ground, just in case. Worst case scenario, this metaverse is a total flop, they've lost a few billions, who care? Best case, some sort of VR pops up and becomes mainstream, and they've already positioned themselves to profit from it, whatever form it ends up taking.
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until now
Is there a particular reason that you added this qualifier to an otherwise agreeable statement?
I mean, is it supposed to express their belief that it will be different this time or yours?
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@Applied-Mediocrity It's meant to express
. Or "past performance is no guarantee of future performance."I don't know what Facebook & al. foresee for the next 5 to 10 years and it's probably of little interest anyway as they're as likely as anyone to get it wrong. But if someone wanted to make an argument that the internet of 2020 is significantly different of the internet of 2000, or 2010, and that therefore the failures of the past will not be repeated, well, I would laugh at them as I would laugh at anyone saying "this time it's different", but in the end they may still be right, sometimes it is different, and the thing is that we can't know it until the future has become the past.
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@remi So... the first one?
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@Applied-Mediocrity
says... 
Do I have to have deep thoughts and justifications for every word of my posts?
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@remi No, I just decided to be a bit of an asshole, and your post came up first in the big raffle. How's my driving?
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Leaked screenshot of the beta iterations of the betaverse:
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
Anyone who uses the term "metaverse" otherwise without disclaimers needs to be slapped in the face.
Seoul will be the first city government to join the metaverse
The virtual platform will be a place for cultural events and city and business services
Fuuuuuck, that's a lot of slapping I need to do.
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@topspin It's only the Seoul government that will join, which is not that much slapping (though it might be rather hard to do due to the bodyguards).
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@Bulb Delegation is how you win. Ask the bodyguards to do the slapping.
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
Anyone who uses the term "metaverse" otherwise without disclaimers needs to be slapped in the face.
Seoul will be the first city government to join the metaverse
The virtual platform will be a place for cultural events and city and business services
Fuuuuuck, that's a lot of slapping I need to do.
What they don't mention is that the only way to get in will be via an ActiveX plugin.
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@Applied-Mediocrity Iceland verse? So … the first one of this song, then?
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@JBert Probably going to be a long thread.
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Sounds like we have a winner: 
enterprise metaverse 
EDIT: Also, great summary:
If only this weren't such a new idea, there might be a markup language for such things. It might be called VRML and be 25 or so years old even, but I hesitate to speculate further.
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@Gribnit thanks, now I have that crap back in my brain; it had only taken me a good decade or so to fully purge it or so I thought.
Open Document Architecture - Wikipedia
