Let's be real: they don't care about VR per se. They care about it only insofar as it gets you to use a Facebook account.
This is what I see as the biggest overlooked consequence of web advertising--it's become so lucrative, that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems. All of the profits (and thus jobs, investment) is in how to tune the ad algorithm.
Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard. Writing games is hard. If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.
The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. It is the exact reason Facebook is a nice way to login to mobile multiplayer games.
> They care about it only insofar as it gets you to use a Facebook account.
Right. Facebook acquired a niche gaming platform that posed absolutely no threat to any Facebook business not because it was cool and extremely risky and why not. They acquired it to grow user counts in (checks notes) the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world.
I don't know dude. There are kids who use YouTube for years on the same device, easily and uncontrovertibly trackable without an account, who are bombarded with more advertising in a day than most high-tech-proficiency adults using Oculus, like me, using adblockers, see in a year. YouTube targets ads to users without accounts! Everyone tracks everyone without accounts, every day, every website you visit, all the time! And of course that includes demographic factors, as though watching kids YouTube material doesn't give away that a kid is watching. You don't need an account to tell you the user's demographics. Their friends and likes. You don't need those things.
And then what? So what if game developers learn the demographics and friends of their users. People have been measuring stuff about who goes to movie theaters, who checks out books, who listens to radio, for decades. What's the worst they're going to do, make more video games that find diverse, niche audiences they did not otherwise serve? Oh the humanity.
And then what the hell is some conventional brand going to learn from someone's Oculus play history? It's completely moronic, there's absolutely no economic value there.
Next you're going to tell me, oh it's horrible they created a VR Chat clone. Nobody is going to force Oculus users to use their shitty VR Chat clone (Horizon). What then are they going to learn from people? There is nothing to learn from VR Chat.
The user account story is just so absurd, it's so off the mark. Account or not they will be able to easily create quality, targeted advertising.
> The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists.
Matchmaking based on FB friends lists is a horrible idea, at least for competitive games. I don't want to play games with my young nephews, and I don't want to play random games with someone who is more or less experienced then me.
If you want to play games with friends, there are simple features exactly for that, and game-specific friends lists. Using the FB social graph for this is counter-productive.
You are treating VR like it's another browser. It's not. With cameras in every direction scanning and parsing your environment, data on your physical fitness and the always-on nature of the Quest 2 it is far more invasive than even Google Home speakers are. You offer a whole new set of very personal data to a company that has proven itself to mine it extensively for its own gain.
Are you saying FB is trying to target ads based on 3D mapping of homes/bodies while the headset is lying around unused? Or what exactly is the theory here?
If you own an Oculus, you know how eery the boundary mapping is. Before they switched it off, you'd be able to see your boundary from outside its fencing. Some users report being able to see the boundary from a different room. So not only does the headset map your environment inside the boundary, it actually maps and parses the rest as well. It doesn't have GPS so it wouldn't know how otherwise to determine your position relative to the boundary. This means Oculus maps every space it is in, including the objects in it. Really, this tells FB far more about your life and general affluence than any type of browsing behavior ever could.
Same goes for fitness tracking. Inside actual fitness games but in other VR titles as well. Again, this generates a ton of very personal data that, combined with other databases, unlocks a ton of value for advertisers.
This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account: For all this data to be really valuable, you need to be able to have it down to an individual resolution (that is: You know all the data is generated by a single individual, so you can combine it).
All of this, combined with existing data-generation, is a whole new level of invasion of privacy.
So far, targeted ads don't really seem to work that well (studies have found). I don't think getting the size of my rooms will be that much of an improvement. They can infer maybe how much money I have, but they can probably already guess that from my address and my credit card company also knows. It's not even clear that the data about my rooms is transferred to Facebook.
I don't think making better targeted ads is the play here. I think they want to dominate social networking, and they think a lot of social networking will take place in VR in the future.
This is complete nonsense and doesn't pass the face-value check. Why would all the tech companies hire thousands of engineers to fine tune an algorithmn that was proven to be worse?
Can you link me one of those studies? Assuming it's about modern hyper-targeted social media content based advertising, not last decade's old-school banners.
> Some users report being able to see the boundary from a different room.
This is relocalisation. Two things to note here
1) Facebook don't have enough GPUs to do this properly at scale.
2) For that kind of thing to work it needs either a GPS prior, or much more robust SLAM. the oculus isft doesn't have enough CPU/GPU to make robust multi-room maps (with big occlusions that is)
> This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account:
Its far more mundane than that. Its all about branding. The "brand" is all about "One facebook" or someshit so they want everyone to be interoperable. Thats why messenger and instgram are now able to communicate. I assume whatsapp will be added to that as well.
You're assumption is that facebook are a coherent force for evil. They really aren't that well organised. They are a collection of highly paid, naive tech people. Surrounded by some people with experience.
There's no reason to believe this. If facebook was uploading scans of your home for some reason, it has to be disclosed in the privacy policy. If you think the privacy policy is lying, then it's easy enough to find the code responsible and create a scandal.
> Physical Features: We collect information about your physical features and dimensions, such as your estimated hand size when you enable hand tracking.
> Environmental, Dimensions and Movement Data: We collect information about your environment, physical movements and dimensions when you use an XR device.
> We use information we collect when you use Oculus Products for the purposes described in the Facebook Data Policy under "How do we use this information?", including to provide, personalise and improve the Facebook Products (including seamless integration between the Facebook Products); to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads)
It's right there in black and white, they measure the dimensions of the participant and the environment, link it to a Facebook account, and use it to target ads.
Your over estimation of how good facebook are at room mapping is cute.
Do you know why those clauses are in the legal agreement? its because otherwise they can't make the slam cameras work. Which means you need light houses.
Also when you submit a bug, I'm pretty sure it uploads the state of the SLAM map, which would be impossible if they didn't have the legal cover.
Now thats not to say that if they had the tech they _would_ use those bits of information. However they don't because they really don't have the tech yet.
Firstly the features that the oculus extracts from the SLAM cameras really arn't great for room mapping. Well, the cameras are fine, the feature extractor isn't. it works short term, but not for long term, or dense reconstruction.
Secondly, streaming 4x slam cameras at 60hz isn't trivial in a lab, let alone on with a battery on wifi on a generic internet connection.
Thirdly, facebook dont have anywhere near enough GPUs do the required classification/mesh generation/segmentation etc.
Everything about the VR investment is a mid- to long-term bet. So "they really don't have the tech yet" doesn't really mean much, since they probably will have the tech in the next few years. Both in a better (data gathering) VR platform and better facilities to analyze the gathered data. Maybe it was built by naive techies but it is a new data stream and FB has shown that if they can mine it, they will.
This has the trademark hackernews "why would anyone use dropbox just get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" written all over it. Facebook has been involved in countless privacy scandals so that's the reason to believe this. Why you think it's easy for a random someone to dump a closed source, probably obfuscated piece of closed source embedded software and find a specific piece of code that does a specific thing is beyond me.
As far as I know, despite the scandals facebook has never been shown to blatantly collect data without disclosing it in its privacy policy. It's unreasonable to assume it will start, in a niche product, over what most people probably find more sensitive than most of the data is collects.
It's "easy" for a competent software engineer, yes, not a random person. But I assume that's most of the people on HN.
The author of that post lives in a world where a) Facebook has actually made the specific disclosures being discussed here, and many more; b) making such disclosures has had, at most, only trivial negative consequences for Facebook; and c) not making such disclosures could provide the sort of evidence used in the legal and legislative constraints on Facebook's operations that are sometimes proposed and occasionally attempted.
The Oculus privacy policy indeed indicates that they collect "information about your physical features and dimensions" as well as "information about your environment, physical movements, and dimensions when you use an XR device".
Their information collection is a legitimate concern precisely because they have both the incentives (profiling and advertisement) and legal basis to collect it.
Remember the outcry regarding Google Glass. They went with smart speaker instead and combined it with 360 degrees speaker. Its like how I remember Microsoft in ~2001. There was an RCE in Windows Media Player, and they patched it. But the update containing that patch also added DRM functionality. How they got away with that, I still don't understand.
> the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world.
Oh my me, please let this be true. That would mean anyone born from today forward will never sign up for Facebook. Eventually the billions currently using it will all just die off naturally, and the user base will shrink to zero because "possibly" nobody will ever use it again. beep beep beep beep beep. just my alarm clock waking me from a glorious dream.
I don't know if I'm misreading, but I took "the one app" to refer to "virtual reality headsets".
I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but there are some good arguments for the idea that VR may not meaningfully grow from the size it is now.
Your multiplayer argument was valid if VR gaming - or any VR, or perhaps any gaming - was multiplayer only. Or if VR was not available for any other activity than gaming! With the same effort you could argue not to use computers or your phone without logging into Facebook since those are for communication and collaboration! Multiplayer is one of the features not some exclusive condition to turn on your devise for god's sake! Even then mere sync certain(!) data from(!) a chosen(!) account was sufficient. Multiplayer works without Facebook, as we see with 'some' products.
Also tracking of individuals was NOT there for decades but for a population! Learn the difference. And still it was not all right at all if there was, there are laws made decades ago against unwarranted tracking and tracing! (so it is knowingly unwelcome, not being a nice things, especially for children, whatever loophole some make for themselves to do anyway!)
Also the complaint was not about others do more ad but that very few does real product development for the sake of good products instead of ad maximizing tricks and honeypots.
Good job. I recruit for Facebook. Send me you resume.
What people also don't get is Match making is a big problem while making babies too. Our Facebook Parenting portal makes baby making simple by requiring a Facebook account.
But its been a hard sell and we need people like you to enlighten the herd.
Your comment is written weirdly so I don't really get your point but I think you are being sarcastic and calling the dude you replied to a bootlicker. But that person actually had a valid point here. Login with Facebook is a relatively well received feature for third parties. Why would a first party platform use a bespoke solution?
Hating on Facebook has now become a conformist thought pattern. There's plenty of Facebook to hate if you look, but most people just blindly apply their dogmatic hate everywhere.
> Hating on Facebook has now become a conformist thought pattern
Is it so? Are you conveniently forgetting the privacy violations, data sharing with third parties and manipulation of public sentiment that FB was the agent for, not long ago?
VR is one of the few existential threats to Facebook’s dominance. Connecting with people is an obvious killer app of VR. That’s why Facebook bought Oculus.
This. Facebook bought Oculus for the same reason Google developed Android: As a response to a new platform that threatened to bypass their monopolies and render them redundant.
its really not. The existential threat is that they don't operate their own platform.
VR isn't their end goal, AR is. The big bet is that AR will replace mobile phones. Owning the platform means profit from device sales and 30% cut of all apps sold. Thats the end game.
You are probably right--but I don't understand why they are pushing this aside from wanting to further their Facebook application.
> The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. It is the exact reason Facebook is a nice way to login to mobile multiplayer games.
Can you elaborate? What's the issue with multiplayer games?
I own a Rift and I play (mostly Echo Combat) online... I don't see what's wrong with the games or why a facebook link would make it any better.
Having multiple login systems is an integrity/spam disaster waiting to happen. You have to reimplement whatever detectors and filters twice and hope that nothing messes up and lets Jim the perv who was kicked from messenger move onto courting Billy on the quest.
Why should Jim’s history on Messenger affect his account on Oculus? If Oculus accounts truly were kept separate than whatever mechanism Jim used to find Billy with his Oculus account, he could’ve also used to find Billy on any other communication platform.
I saw one comment in a previous post who echoes my sentiment perfectly: Facebook has not only become a universal identity provider but is now providing universal authorization, which is a problem.
It's not at all about those things. This move is about entertwining Oculus and Facebook in such a way that Oculus can't be trivially broken apart from Facebook once antitrust regulators set their sights on the company.
Regulators have a hard enough time believing true things about encryption and back doors — I expect that if regulators see FB do this and have a problem with it they will say “your problem, not ours” and order the split anyway.
We will see - this is exactly Facebooks strategy with Instagram right now: Arguing that they have invested so much effort to integrate it with Facebook services (which they were prohibited from) that it would be far too expensive to force them to change it back.
I hope the regulators throw that in their face and order it anyway, but the jury is still out.
So the reason they require a FB account is only pure altruism to create a better multiplayer experience for customers? That's cool and not absurd at all.
Tuning the omnipresent Algorithm by your actions in VR might not be a major driver, sure. But locking you into the FB ecosystem and by extension increasing your exposure to FB controlled "personalized" content sure could be. Of course it will also feed back into the Algorithm as well, because why not.
Please note that being clued in and being a zealot are very different things. Which is probably the greatest issue of our times - if you don't scream your support for something at the top of your lungs, you must be against it.
Nothing parent says suggest he's clueless. He just made a rather common sense observation that investing in a very niche hardware company has a very poor ROI if your goal is getting accounts. But by doing this he BETRAYED THE CAUSE, so you must call him clueless to put him in his place. Bah.
I beg to differ. PP seems to see nothing wrong with Facebook breaking your property - that is, rendering your games and your hardware literally useless - simply because FB doesn't "care" about VR.
No. Wrong. This is clueless. If I spend a few hundred dollars to buy a headset and a game, Facebook has no legal or moral basis to take it away from me just because I won't use their other services.
It isn't a "privacy" issue. It's a theft issue. Being pro-theft is clueless.
FB shouldn't require an FB account for Oculus, and Oculus is not a major source of ad data for them. I replied up thread, but given the ubiquity of web and app tracking for FB, Oculus is almost certainly not incremental to their understanding of almost any user.
Like disgruntledphd2 said. That's actually another very common fallacy - I defended parent, who wasn't criticising Facebook, so I must be pro-facebook and probably agree with everything they do. Just... what!?
The point touched was very very narrow: Facebook very likely doesn't invest in Oculus for the sake of getting facebook accounts. I'd probably argue that it's not even for the sake of getting more info about the users, though I haven't yet. But I definitely didn't say anything like "they can kill your hardware device if you give up your account".
I did criticise tribalism, polarisation and automatically assuming that a discussion has exactly two sides. Hint hint.
Why develop a game for a niche if you can just bombard an entire demographic with the same ads that no one outside of that demographic sees until they polarize themselves into purchasing a game you've already developed
1) Finding your friends on Oculus could be done with Facebook connectivity rather than consolidating Oculus accounts with Facebook
2)Facebook is NOT close to capturing all users imaginable and this will help in their global strategy of acquisition in the future (as VR becomes ubiquitous)
3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc.
> 2)Facebook is NOT close to capturing all users imaginable and this will help in their global strategy of acquisition in the future (as VR becomes ubiquitous)
They really, really are. They have 2.7bn MAU, and even the people who no longer use the service probably still have accounts. They almost certainly have an account on 80% of all the people in the developed countries in the world.
Like, most of their recent growth has come from the developing world, because they subsidise internet access to juice the user numbers for the Street. They're not doing it to make money today, it's all about making sure that they are ubiquitous.
> 3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc.
You are wildly underestimating the data that FB get from web/app tracking. Consider, if you're a gamer you probably visit game websites for socialisation or advice. The only benefit of the account stuff (from an ads perspective) is being able to sell access to Oculus users to Oculus app makers.
Like, FB already get pings from pretty much every website and app in existence, so they already know where people spend their time, no need for Oculus for that.
I personally think that tying Oculus to FB is a terrible idea which will get them in loads of trouble from an anti-trust perspective, but they're almost certainly doing it to reduce costs, rather than to get gamers data (which they already have, btw).
The problem of VR matchmaking is already solved via Steam. Oculus doesn't want to use steam, but most will agree that Steam is preferable to Facebook for matchmaking. It's a truly manufactured problem for a manufactured solution.
Personally, I think Mark Zuckerburg wants to run an OASIS. Merging Facebook and VR would be a long term strategy for generating the ultimate virtual second life.
YT ad targeting is crap. I watch bicycle videos and get ads for potato chips, shampoo and food delivery services exploiting young people working as bike couriers. It's like cable TV hogwash detergent commercials reloaded.
I think part of the issue is that there’s less variety of video ad content out there than static ads. There may not be very many ad dollars out there producing and buying time for video ads you find interesting.
I don't want to detract from companies doing good work, but ad tech and social media taking up so much of society's resource capital is a tragedy in my eyes. So much human effort spent on technology and software designed specifically to sell you widgets.
It's just not true. Like saying all our athletic prowess is being spent on selling shoes. That's how they make their money but it's a small amount of effort from the athlete. Most of their effort is focused playing their sport.
Similarly, only a small percentage of Google/Facebook's effort go towards ads. Most of it goes toward building products, languages, tools, and more.
>Let's be real: they don't care about VR per se. They care about it only insofar as it gets you to use a Facebook account.
Not only to use a Facebook account, but to have access to even more intensive and intrusive monitoring and information harvesting from users. All sorts of biometric and behavioral activity that is integral to using VR will now all be available to Facebook to integrate into customer profiles. Then there is the possibility of behavioral influence through the use of AI. Just like Facebook can influence behavior and choices by tailoring news feeds and ads to users, they will be able to mold the user's VR experience with behavioral cues and advertisements (both subtle and integrated).
Think about the effort they go through in order to track all of your digital movements now, and how valuable that is to them, and then consider how much more fruitful their efforts would be if you literally wore a headset that allowed them to monitor and influence your every perception in real time.
> Think about the effort they go through in order to track all of your digital movements now,
Yeah, they care about tracking people so much that they supply JS code for non-technical users to put on their websites, and provide an ad platform which is vastly confusing to encourage this behaviour \s.
I wonder how they’re thinking about it internally. Clearly they wanted to build OASIS from the novel, paid for it, and got VRChat instead complete with armies of foxy ear maids and full-body tracked sleeping sessions(literally bunch of dudes in random nicks literally sleeping together at literally night literally hand in hand)
Not a big difference in my book, humans are what we are. But with their emphasis on real name public face-book as their core business I suspect it could be.
Don’t worry. They’ll find the marketer friendly stuff they can put some super models’ face on, and run it into the ground. They just have to find the stuff that’s friendly to the normies.
This is a good point, and also kind of amazing. Advertising is so lucrative that there's no need to earn money from the kind of products that everyone else is paying to advertise.
The supremacy of advertising is also a very small example of the much larger picture of the entire western economy degenerating from something that made actual stuff[0] into a zero-sum game that leeches economic value from productive purposes and transfers it to non-productive middlemen who do nothing other than enrich themselves.
The other big example of this problem is the massive overgrowth of the FIRE sector, which has largely eaten the US economy whole while accomplishing nothing other than its own enrichment.
[0] For the purposes of this argument, 'actual stuff' does apply to intangible goods, like software, that expands the production possibilities curve.
I've noticed while listening to podcasts that the most frequent ads I hear on ad supported podcasts are for other podcasts. It always makes me stop and think that the podcaster is paid by podcasters who want to attract my attention so other podcasters will pay them in the hopes of attracting an audience for their podcasts.
This is also true of mobile games. In-app advertising is so lucrative for popular games that it has mostly replaced microtransactions, and yet every ad is for some other mobile game. It makes the whole thing feel like some kind of pyramid scheme.
I have worked in this industry on and off for almost a decade now, and in general, advertising is only used for users who will never pay. I mean, it makes sense right?
You can get $5 for one IAP, and if you are incredibly lucky $5 CPM which is 1000 impressions. In-app advertising is a tiny, tiny percentage of revenue for most mobile gaming companies.
That being said, everyone spends on it because the best way to find people who'll play mobile games is to target people who play mobile games.
Maybe what you’re encountering is cross-promotion on a network of podcasts? They want to sell ad spots, but they also want you to spend more time listening to their podcasts so they can sell more ad spots.
Cross-promotion also exists in just about every other media format (books, TV, movies...).
Well, I suppose I was just a bit harsh. There definitely are opportunities outside of ads. But some industries are more cut-throat than others.
The problem is of course not unique to software. Eg. it may be more lucrative for drug companies to research hair-loss or acne drugs than something like cholera.
> Eg. it may be more lucrative for drug companies to research hair-loss or acne drugs than something like cholera.
This doesn't seem especially unreasonable; hair loss and acne, to the extent they are problems, are unsolved problems. Nobody disputes that cholera is a problem, but it is very much a solved problem.
Cholera is mostly a solved problem, but the point stands in relation to other diseases. There's much more interest from Pharma in hair-loss, acne, Viagra competitors, and in $1,000,000-per-treatment cancer drugs than in mundane but vital tasks like finding better treatments for mental illness, finding better treatments for migraine headaches, or finding new antibiotics before our entire current spectrum of antibiotics stops being effective.
correct. Everything is a stepping stone towards AR. In their view VR is limited, where as AR is killer platform that will let them run their own platform, with users finally paying directly for services.
> Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard.
Facebook realised a long time ago that they are reliant on either apple or google's platform. this means two things: They are vulnerable to any policy change on those platforms AND they are not getting a cut of the profit from the hardware sales and apps store.
> that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems
Facebook are dumping _billions_ into developing AR. not millions, actual billions. Mapping, dense reconstruction, semantic scene understanding, actual fucking holograms. All of these are nowhere near solved, and facebook are gambling big that they can not only solve these, but fit them into a set of glasses that are practical.
> If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
If its such a risk with such a tiny reward why do sony, microsoft & nintendo still bother making consoles?
> Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.
The problem with all of this discourse is that it misses the fundamental argument thats at the heart of VR and later AR: privacy. It doesn't matter if facebook fails, the problems still exist.
AR is a fundamental threat to privacy regardless of who makes it. For AR to work you need always on hyper accurate location service.
They will also need always on cameras. They will have detection, segmentation and reconstruction systems that have to be capable of understanding the context of a street, shop, work and front room.
Even if we ignore the AI bit, the threat of an omni-recording head mounted camera is massive. (all password are recorded, every sound, every person you meed.)
finally 6dof centimetre accurate glocal positioning, with facial recognition, you basically have a system that can locate any face within 50m of a wearer of one of these glasses.
In conclusion: stop using facebook as a foil, and start to actually interrogate the technology.
In the case of AR, you are willingly trading that privacy for power you would otherwise be completely unable to get.
I have a government ID with my address on it, and I give out my address online to 3rd parties all the time because I understand I have to give up that private information if I am to expect packages to arrive at my door.
Similarly, AR would be a significant piece of tech that can offer a user a lot of functionality. As much as I am also sad to see privacy take another hit, I dont see what the alternative is. We need to be able to consolidate the processing of all the information necessary to make AR functional.
Always on cameras on everyone would also make you very safe in the streets. Which is necessary if we continue moving the country in a direction where there are few legal means for you to protect yourself
It is reminiscent of the old story about an AI that is put in charge of optimizing widget production and ends up killing all life in its pursuit of raw materials to build more widgets. Unrestricted capitalism is like an AI that is never taught that it shouldn't harm humans. It just keeps on vacuuming everything up that provides even the tiniest increase in marginal profit.
I'm not surprised this was downvoted. It is, however, inherently true.
American corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder return. The entire public company system in the US is a paperclip maximizer that is designed to vacuum up every bit of economic value available on the face of the earth and give it to shareholders.
With 80% of all US stock value owned by 10% of Americans[0], the emergent goal of the economy is to suck up every available cent and give it to people like Bezos and Zucker------.
For people like Bezos and Zucker------, that's a good thing. For the rest of us? Not so much.
That doesn’t seem like the conclusion of that article to me. For example, the author writes:
“The court may hold forth on the primacy of shareholder interests, or may hold forth on the importance of socially responsible conduct, but ultimately it does not matter. Under either approach, directors who consider nonshareholder interests in making corporate decisions, like directors who do not, will be insulated from liability by the business judgment rule.[9]”
This thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674 has a lot of quotes from primary sources and legal analysis, and reaches a similar conclusion: directors can largely do as they please.
In my view corporations are meant to do what their owners want them to do. It just so happens that the vast majority of shareholders want the company to give them as high a return as possible.
However this does not need to be the case. If the owners/shareholders want they can demand the company to be responsible for the environment, to be socially responsible as well, or to do basic research instead of maximising short term profits. It just requires the majority of shareholders to want that, and right now this still isn't the case.
This is actually something I picked up from reading Milton Friedman's books, where a corporation exists to do the will of the owners/shareholders. Maybe I read it wrong but that's what I understood it as.
It’s odd that this question which specifically refers to “legal obligations” appears on skeptics.stackexchange.com and not law.stackexchange.com. But the accepted answer hints at the true position when quoting another source that says “the business judgment rule ensures that, contrary to popular belief, the managers of public companies have no enforceable legal duty to maximize shareholder value.” That is, as pointed out in a less-upvoted answer [1], there is indeed a legal duty to act in the (financial) interest of the company and its shareholders, but courts allows for some risk-taking and for value to be realised over a long period, so you can’t prove a breach of the duty solely by reference to share prices.
The first conception of a entity that is legally bound to continue growing in perpetuity, beyond the point of of prudence or reason, was, in retrospect, the final straw that put capitalism beyond redemption. It is quite literally a cancer on society, growing until it starves out the host.
I disagree. I think they envision creating alternative worlds and virtual relationships and all that can be envisioned with VR. Unless it gets regulated, they will run with this to control people's behavior even further.
People will obviously get their physical needs met in the real world but much of the emotional stuff can move into their realms. If you get people hooked on this, who cares what happens in the real world if you can control their perception of things.
This is beside the main point, which is that Facebook openly says they will steal your property (take back your game and make your headset worthless) if you close your Facebook account, or if they decide to close your FB account, which they can and do do for no apparent reason at all, and for which you have no recourse.
It isn't OK just because they don't care. It's criminal.
It's not the only VR game in town so it's hardly an issue honestly. I think it's just the more recognized name, but these requirements will limit it's use amongst an already niche group of PC gamers.
What with VR becoming more mainstream and COVID rules, I'd guess FB sees huge potential in VR, most so when there'd be some prime real estate in VR land with some ads on it.
I deleted FB, I lost access to Oculus after being a KS backer, a DK1 first shipment user, a subsequent DK2 and CV1 user. I’m so angry about it I threw all my Oculus stuff in a dumpster and lit it on fire. VR is dead for me because of Facebook.
I wasn't quite as invested as you but pretty similar (KS backer, DK1 + DK2, banned from FB for refusing to send a copy of my drivers license, and now despise them with every inch of my soul)... but if anything this has motivated me to support anything VR that's unrelated to FB.
VR is incredible, I'm all-in on this being the right time for it (after many failed attempts in the last few decades), and I think it could really blow up now, but we really need to help alternate brands come up before FB fully owns VR in the way Google owns the web.
What I don't get is, why does Facebook want me to have a single friends list, under my real name?
I don't mind having an account with Facebook. I already have an Oculus account, and I add "Oculus friends" there, so I assume Facebook can get all my data from there, anyway (including my real name, as I added my credit card to be able to buy games).
But I find I mind having to befriend my gaming friends on Facebook, as I may share different content there.
In fact, if Facebook wants to become the ultimate social network, shouldn't they somehow offer better tools to manage different social circles? (Work, Family, Gaming, Sports, Politics...).
I don't think their play is to get my Oculus data to make better targeted ads. They already have that data.
What I could imagine is that the future of social networking will be in VR worlds, and since they want to dominate social networking, that's their power grab (they also work on a virtual world for that, Horizons).
But it seems to me their "friendship management tools" are not up to the task yet. I've never digged deeply into their controls, but it shouldn't be complicated.
It's not a new concept, either - weren't there "circles" in some network (Google+?). But it didn't work out. So instead of forcing this VR merge, perhaps they should focus on solving the circles problem first?
> What I don't get is, why does Facebook want me to have a single friends list, under my real name?
It's a neat solution to the multi-device problem (i.e. When I serve an ad to this device, is this a new user or the same one?)
Also, I get the view that Oculus is just a video game console -- but I don't think that's how Zuck views it
My impression is that he thinks Oculus/VR will eventually surpass 2d interfaces. So, if they can get away with linking all of their ad targeting information now, in the early stages, then it won't seem weird if they do it later.
To be fair to FB, this is exactly what they're doing with integrating IG and FB messaging. It's just that no one is really complaining about that.
Doing this in the middle of an anti-trust investigation seems ... bold, but it is consistent with their financial incentives.
Zuck is making a losing bet. He is out of touch. People still do not enjoy wearing regular prescription glasses that vastly improve VISION. Something that dominates human experience for most people.
I am really not convinced people will be willing to put anything on their face for extra (en masse). Not unless its no more than existing glasses, and you don't look dumb in it. I am not sure this is a technical feat achievable in zucks lifetime
Anecdotal, but I’ve spent a good chunk of money on quest apps and once they announced this change, I haven’t bought anything new and honestly it has been in a drawer for 1 month. Prior I was using daily.
How will you know the next headset doesn't get bought out by Facebook? I think my minimum requirement now would be a guarantee of all my money back if the company is acquired by Facebook.
Am I the only one who thinks there will be a class action lawsuit over the Oculus requiring a Facebook login? The PS3 took away the ability to install Linux in an update and lost the resulting lawsuit, the Oculus isn't the same situation, but it's close enough that I think a lawsuit would have a good chance.
It's one thing if they just required you to make a login, but it sounds like you cant "just make a login". You have to give them your name, there's a good chance you'll get banned if you name is unusual or if you don't immediately make "friends", etc, etc.
The EU will 100% freak out in terms of anti-trust. This is textbook leveraging dominance in one market to get into another. The account is definitely not necessary to use the product, therefore it's not OK under GDPR.
Germany has already said that this is not OK, so I expect this to happen pretty quickly.
How do you know [any product you use] won't get bought by Facebook, resulting in users having to have Facebook accounts to use it? This is a risk we take in today's world. I could imagine a near future reality where I buy a monitor and then find I need to have a Facebook account in order for it to turn on, or a car that won't drive without logging in to Facebook. Or a refrigerator. Ten years ago these would seem totally ridiculous. Today, they are still silly but oddly believable.
They sued German company StudiVZ (in US & German courts) for using a similar interface, but swapping the blue color scheme for red.
I know Intellectual Property and Copyright lawsuits aren't the same as Patent lawsuits, but when you're arguing about human interfaces they might as well be.
.. and you can lose your FB account out of the blue too.
One morning you can get a notification that your FB account is blocked "due to suspicious" activity (apparently, no activity is suspicious activity too :) ). Unless you send a picture of government issued ID, that they "promise" to delete in 30 days. Thanks, but no, thanks.
Fortunately, for me it was good thing. No more pointless lurking, drama and being depressed by everyone else's perfectly portrayed lives.
It's going to become like Google for me. I rely on Gmail, so I don't use any of their other services. Wouldn't be able to delete accounts for their other products, might accidentally trip something that gets my Gmail disabled, etc. Not worth the hassle or the risk.
So no more Facebook, no more Instagram, don't currently use Whatsapp and will keep it that way.
The (small) difference with Google is that you can have a Google account without requiring any other services - just having a Google account doesn’t mean that you have to use email.
Facebook forces the use of its social network, and you can’t create an email without a profile. If you are inactive you can get banned.
Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of folks who abandoned Facebook without deleting their accounts, I haven’t heard of any of them getting banned.
If a Facebook account has $200 worth of VR game purchases associated with it, that's unlikely to be a spam bot. I think the team that deals with spam prevention hasn't gotten the memo yet but they aren't stupid.
I would love to hear the opinion (anonymously if needed) from some Oculus people about their opinion on this. It feels like Oculus is poised to make VR have its breakout moment, only to have some unrelated Facebook group come in and sabotage everything.
When Facebook bought Oculus, I remember Palmer promising that they would never require you to have a Facebook account. Apparently this statement was vetted by Facebook.
He is now offering a bounty for the hacking of the quest 2.
So the phrasing “Oculus Rift will never _require_...” means they can add something rudimentary, such as SteamVR plug-in, that could enable Rift to partially work, thereby satisfy “require” requirement.
Unless something is contractual and legally binding, I don't know why anybody would take a word of PR at any value. An SLA of 99.99% uptime, sure, I can probably assume there's organization incentive to uphold it, and even still, you should perform your due diligence. Some company like Facebook saying one thing and doing another is to be expected, especially when the stated reason is purely emotional and stands at odds with core business directives.
Not to be too coy, but gaming circles are already pretty bad about questioning marketing narratives. Anecdotally I think it’s gotten worse.
There’s a large incentive for, and a community around “hyping” things. So when they say “You’ll _never_ need a Facebook account” the outlets run with it, and the comments applaud it.
Similar things with the Cyberpunk 2077 “we will have never have micro transactions” statement. People believe what they want to hear in these communities. And it makes their emotional reactions very easy to manipulate.
Facebook did pay $2 billion for Oculus. That probably helped them position themselves to have a breakout moment.
But yes, it's unfortunate that Facebook is killing them this way. The good news is that everyone makes a VR headset now, and people are writing VR games, so it will probably be A Thing even without Oculus involved. Innovator's dilemma and all that.
Yup. HTC announced that they're working on standalone headsets, but right now all they've actually released is some 3d renderings. After buying a Quest, I have a bit of a dilemma because I never want to be tethered again, but I also don't want to support what FB is currently doing
Most of my Quest VR is still PC tethered (via Link cable or via Virtual Desktop over Wifi). But that being said, HTC does have a standalone Quest competitor... just not for the consumer market.
Arguably their reasons seem sound because how can they compete against Facebook in the consumer market with such a subsidized headset? Facebook is betting on being able to monetize your FB account and VR usage in a way that HTC can't with just hardware sales and software sales. Given that Quest requires a facebook account, it makes it a non-starter for enterprise/business use cases.
I don't think you understand what innovator's dilemma is.
Facebook is poised to crush the rest of the industry. They have the cash, talent, distribution channel and brand to do it.
Innovator's dilemma happens when
1) a low-priced, low-feature startup takes on higher-priced incumbent. High priced incumbent ignores low-priced startup.
No one can go lower than FB on pricing
2) Fear of cannibalizations (EV eating Gas-guzzlers for GM, BMW). FB has always let Insta, WhatsApp and Oculus to run like startups with plenty of freedom. Oculus is not a threat to core FB, but an enhancer.
I find it impossible to believe that Facebook will ban you for using Oculus but never posting anything to your Facebook account. It's such an extraordinary claim.
Part of why I personally believe it is I've seen how Facebook really doesn't want people making fake accounts. I had a Facebook account and was friends with like, 2, family members, never really used it. Somehow Facebook decided they needed to see a photo of my drivers license to let me use the account. Nope. I decided to consider this a feature, and there has been a time or two over the last several years where that persistent requirement for a drivers license to unlock my account has kept me from giving in to peer pressure. Facebook has helped me avoid using Facebook. It has been to my advantage.
I believe that it's an algorithm thing. Since you aren't acting like most people on facebook then you have tall poppy syndrome and the algo locks your account and sends you a notice to provide more evidence that you are who you say you are. Then since they basically have no customer service you either do what their AI says or your account stays locked.
There are already tons of people complaining this is happening. Headset owners create Facebook accounts which are quickly disabled. Just do a quick Google: oculus facebook ban
Technically they are not banning people on that ground. What they say is they found their accounts violating “community guidelines” or some BS, and that “this decision is final”.
If you think that’s an extraordinary claim, well, that’s the kind of behavior international users of American SNS is usually forced to go by. Since 5-10 years ago Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc all started banning people by flagged content counts and their agenda based algorithms with “violated community guidelines” types of phraseology instead of citing any particular offenses picked up or verified by human moderators.
There’s plenty of anecdotal proof if you just check the Oculus Quest subreddits. The amount of people who didn’t have Facebook accounts are probably not the majority so I guess their strategy has been to ban first and deal with all the frustrated users on a support call basis. Not a bad business decision but a shitty human decision from a moral standpoint (for whoever made the final call within Facebook)
Just tell your Quest it is OK for it to post all of your achievements to your feed. You know they will have this as an option to opt-out of (if you can find the hidden button). "Hey FBUser, your friend just achieved new ability for their Quest. Log in to see."
Facebook's leadership team including Zuckerberg are not normal people. Insanity and lack of healthy human thinking. The whole company should be taken over by normal people who understands the impact and responsibilities of a service like Facebook.
The business model have to be changed back to what it suppose to be: a sharing platform for friends and family. Not an ads driven morally ill platform.
Best would be to forbid the entire platform. I am pushing various people here in the EU to move towards that direction.
Every time I deactivate facebook, using facebook login on spotify (which is how I setup my Spotify account years ago) re-activates my FB profile... ridiculous.
Ring Fit Adventure for the Switch feels like VR to me. It doesn't use a headset, but I don't understand why that is seen as a prerequisite for it to be VR.
I'd rather be required to have a Playstation account to play Playstation games as opposed to a random social networking account that has been trying to collect every data point about my life since high school
Facebook not having a track record of suing jailbreakers might have something to do with facebook hardly having much history of making anything that would warrant jailbreaking.
Valve and Windows Mixed Reality (HP, HTC, others) are making great hardware too. Just at a slightly slower pace and higher price. But still great stuff. HP Reverb G2 will get way better sales than they probably forecasted with how much hate FB is getting for their new Quest 2 practices.
They clearly believe the benefits they gain from requiring facebook outweighs the benefits of keeping users who will leave.
Considering their revenue model, its not a surprise. But that sort of means that they also better believe they can build tech that is better than their competitors who wont have this drawback.
Waiting for the day they try forcing this on the Rift S, but maybe they won’t bother because their support for it was already shit. I don’t think it has ever just worked the first time I have plugged it in, and the only palatable solution is to install the tray tool to restart Facebook’s own trash software. If you search for connectivity issues you find forum post after forum post of people getting the runaround from support. Facebook just releases broken shit and don’t care. A social media website company does not have the discipline to sell and maintain hardware, goes I’m not surprised.
I’m ultimately not that upset, the Rift S is good for the price and was my first HMD. I’ll take my money elsewhere when it’s time to upgrade, but I think I’ll be happy with this for a while yet as pretty much all I play is beatsaber lol
They 're certainly not orthogonal, at least that's my experience. VR fans are technical, mostly gamers, congregating in platforms other than facebook (discord twitch etc). Not the usual self-obsessed facebook/instagram crowd
You must be doing facebook wrong. Millions of people use it to just keep in touch with their family and friends, and couldn't care less about the self-obsessed "influencer" crowd or collecting "likes", or any of that childish stuff.
I've used Facebook a lot in the past, but through actions like this I find I'm already using my FB account like I do LinkedIn - a utility I have to use but barely use.
if you are buying something with a credit card then the company knows your legal identity.
There is nothing stopping you have a "real name" account for oculus. You don't need to use that account for anything else.
and no, they won't ban you. They'll only do that if you are stupid enough to pay with a credit card with a different name. because that's a strong signal for fraud.
And again, if you're using a credit card they know your legal name and a boat load of other details.
They are locking accounts for people who "don't have enough account activity". You literally can't create a Facebook account for just Oculus. You have to post status updates on Facebook to keep your account in good standing.
The Reverb G2 looks like the best of the current crop - it launches in a week, however it needs a high-end gaming PC to run, and costs twice as much as a Quest 2.
Well...money. They've got all the user data. Probably did a cost analysis and found that enough people would rather put up with FB than give up on VR games.
I know some principled, driven, and wonderful people who work for Facebook.
While I despise Facebook as a company, that doesn't reflect negatively on said people, at least insofar as they do not work on the kinds of things that I dislike Facebook for.
I would however hold them to account and openly criticize them if they did start working on such things. And I can and do criticize them when they spin apologia for Facebook as a company.
> Do you believe it's possible to work for Facebook without at least indirectly benefiting the company as a whole?
No, probably not. But I still draw that distinction.
I'm not a strict consequentialist. I think that people's intents matter and that their inner lives have moral significance.
So, for me, that outcome (Facebook benefiting) is only one factor in the moral calculus. In the case of the people I know (and likely John Carmack, though I don't know him), it isn't the dominating factor.
"On November 13, 2019, Carmack announced that he is stepping down from the Oculus CTO role to become a "Consulting CTO" in order to allocate more time to his work on artificial general intelligence (AGI)." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Career)
People need to also know that it extends to Oculus. I can't wait to see these companies broken up. There is no reason FB should have ever been allowed to buy IG and Whatsapp either. Hopefully we come back to a sane view of antitrust soon.
If you're not a tech nerd, but just a parent trying to buy the cool new thing for your kids for that "unignorable" holiday at the end of the year, you just might not know Oculus has anything to do with Facebook. I just went to the Oculus Quest website, and as soon as the page loads there is an animation in the upper left corner that shows the Oculus logo with the text "from Facebook" that animates away. The only other Facebook mention is tucked away at the footer of a long scroll that says "from Facebook" in a non-style guide adhering white font. Doesn't look official at all.
Yeah we just had to accept the new ToS a few weeks ago selecting between 1. switching to Facebook right now or 2. staying with an Oculus account for now and switching later or lose access when they remove dual login. So they made us "agree" with their ploy just to continue using the device.
Of course it sucks. That's why I never had an FB account. But Google, Apple, Amazon and any other big monopoly are equally bad, and worse. I don't understand why people single out FB.
Facebook -> Google -> Amazon -> Apple
My personal order of disdain. Top of the list always gets the most attention. Nothing hard to understand about that.
How do you measure who is at the top? By the amount of bad press, which is easily manipulated? For me, Google is top evil, by far. You just can't avoid it no matter how hard you try.
My logic is that Facebook is actively manipulating people by the algo's decision on what to show someone in their feed. Plus it tracks everyone everywhere across the internet.
Google just tracks everyone everywhere across the internet.
They are only interesting hoovering up all of the data. Facebook plays with peoples emotions.
Google follows your every step, not only on the internet, if you carry an Android phone, as most people on this planet. Facebook knows your public data, that you shared voluntary, but google knows your private data: emails, search queries, documents, locations etc.
Unifying everything under the same account infrastructure is simply the right engineering choice. There's no need to try to explain this with ridiculous conspiracy theories about how the only reason Facebook pumped billions into VR to get a million people to create a FB account.
Account security benefits massively from economies of scale, both in the sense of infrastructure and operationally. Oculus did not have that scale. There's probably a couple of million Oculus accounts vs. ten billion Facebook ones. The Oculus accounts are probably a similar PR nightmare waiting to happen, like the Ring accounts were for Amazon or the Nest accounts for Google.
In concrete terms, Facebook accounts will have better 2FA implementation than Oculus. They'll have better protection against credential stuffing or enumeration attacks. It's less likely there's going to be some kind of an authentication bypass, or a bug where plaintext passwords are getting logged, etc. Basically, for Facebook to continue using the Oculus account system rather than migrating off would be irresponsible, and the main surprise is that they've taken this long post-acquisition to do it.
FWIW, I've never had a Facebook account, despite some minor social pressure to get one for like the last 13 years. But that's just because none of their services has ever seemed interesting in any way. But I was totally OK creating one a few days ago after buying the Quest 2.
The only problem is that at least for now a Facebook account == Facebook social network profile. I wish they were more like Google or Microsoft accounts in that a) having an account doesn't imply use of any particular Facebook product, b) they allow use of separate profiles tied to the same main account (e.g. a MS account can be associated with Xbox gamer tags for gaiming, a Google account with Youtube brand accounts for posting videos). But that's something they haven't needed until now, I'm sure it'll come.
If you make a Facebook account just for just the purpose of playing Quest 2, you will eventually be asked to provide ID verification of your account, or it will simply be locked. I am unsure if you find this an acceptable compromise, or something you thought about when you recently bought Quest 2, but I am very sure I do not find this acceptable in any sort of way. There's just no excuse for the need of ID verification just to be eligible to play a game on a device.
Regarding your point of unifying it under a single account, sure, but does that account need so much data just to function? And on the other hand, why not just be able to create a partial account? A facebook account is so much more than just some random account, why would I need such an intricate account to play a game? So in short, yes in a technical way it's logical, but in every other way it's like shooting a mosquito with a bazooka.
It didn't seem to need particularly much data, and all of it was justified. It's pretty much exactly the same as I gave e.g. Github and Steam.
I don't particularly expect Facebook to continue locking accounts used to just for VR. Locking accounts is expensive, both in terms of customer support and PR. They don't want to do any more of it than they absolutely have to. Their team for preventing bulk account creation just hadn't considered this particular use case. But there's a ludicrous amount of signals available for non-bulkiness here, I expect them to sort it out very quickly.
The examples you mention are both more lax in the data they require for registration, then compared with a Facebook registration. If you want a GitHub account you just give a username, email and pass. For Steam it's similar. You don't even need to give your first and last name.
Facebook bans accounts for atypical behavior and incompatibility with their profit model. If you only use it for playing Oculus games and never post status updates, then you're simply counting the days until you are banned and your purchases are gone (the latter according to their ToS).
This is just total economically illiterate nonsense. The value of an active Facebook user for advertising is about $25/year in revenue, $6/year in profit. Facebook spent $2 billion on Oculus. They've sold a couple of million headsets. Let's say that they're all still active users. That's $1k per user.
Do you see how utterly implausible your theory about the VR just being a vehicle to drive revenue is? It's not that the numbers don't add up. It's that the numbers are off by orders of magnitude.
And oh, just by buying a Quest 2 and a few games, I'm already a far bigger source of revenue to Facebook than an average user of the social network part. The idea that they'd be knee-capping the whole ecosystem by intentionally disabling paying customers just to make pennies more on ads is ludicrous.
I think it's basically guaranteed that the explanation from my original post stands: their anti-abuse team did not consider this use case when building their bulk account models, but will obviously consider it in the future.
I'd happily make a bet that my account will not get "banned" in the next year, despite not having any Facebook friends or Facebook social network activity.
This is what I see as the biggest overlooked consequence of web advertising--it's become so lucrative, that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems. All of the profits (and thus jobs, investment) is in how to tune the ad algorithm.
Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard. Writing games is hard. If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.