this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Meh. If they've still got some free ones to give out I'll take it.
But in all seriousness, the Quest 2 is pretty good hardware, especially for the price. The problem is that Meta tried to build an ecosystem around monetization and then bring people in, rather than building something that appeals to most people and still allows them to profit. Kinda the opposite of the Facebook model really, which became a defacto online community and kinda kept the monetization a little quieter or behind the scenes for a long time
They could release the best possible VR hardware that puts your body into a dream state and allows you to experience things fully in VR for $99 and I still wouldn't touch it if meta, fb, or zuckberg has anything to do with it.
Iirc these headsets require your Facebook login to function at all?
Nope nope nope.
They fixed that. Still need to make a meta account but it's not Facebook.
Surely that is the exact same thing?
Yup its exactly the same
Yes and no. The Facebook thing was upsetting folks mainly because they would get banned from Facebook and lose their oculus.
Needing any account to use hardware I own is a 100% deal-breaker.
I wonder: Did the people who successfully pulled off the Facebook strategy get replaced by dumber, greedier ones, did they get overruled by dumber, greedier decision-makers, did they get overconfident and thought their current market position would let Meta get away with it, or did they get lucky in the first place and fail to take any notes on why it worked?
Corporations tend to run on "if it works, why change?" so mixing up your entire strategy to this degree seems like it must've been a deliberate decision. I'm just curious who made that decision, and by what reasoning.
Now they have to show rising numbers to shareholders quarterly. They can’t play the long game anymore. They need results every quarter, even if it sinks the company on the long run.
Capitalism was a mistake. The only innovation it breeds is how to exploit things for money.
It works when the company is growing. But when it has reached 100% of their potential users, the only growth is greed and that’s where it fails.
See: instant pot
One of my favourite song lyrics regarding this is "wild growth is called cancer"* - growing is fine, but if you need to keep growing to sate investors' demands for more and more profit, you end up doing more harm than good.
The song is in German by a band named "Saltatio Mortis" (Latin: Dance of the Dead) called "Wachstum über alles" (German: Growth above all). You can probably guess the topic from this context.
Yes.
They tried to speed run the enshittification process.