That’s an extremely reductive view.

Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech.

There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.

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LunaSea 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> tangentially related to social media like VR

This is in no way tangential.

VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way.

And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".

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zaphirplane 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Advertising has existed and powered tv and radio before the internet. That’s great / grandfather territory for some

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esperent 6 days ago | parent [-]

The issue isn't advertising, it's targeted advertising which is a very different and far more problematic beast than the advertising of your grandparent's time.

In the interest of not getting bogged down in semantics, let's just always assume that when people say "advertising" in this era, they mean "targeted advertising". Then we can avoid yet another tired attempt at excusing Meta's behavior.

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zaphirplane 6 days ago | parent [-]

people should use the correct words

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esperent 6 days ago | parent [-]

They are. The meaning of words changes over time, and with context. When talking about advertising on the internet, it's all targeted advertising (except some tiny unimportant fraction). There's no need to type "targeted" every time, it's redundant.

	▲	zaphirplane 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t know why it’s so important to you to conflate the 2 and have privacy invading advertising synonyms with any form of advertising. I don’t think we have crossed the threshold to make them synonymous, feel free to provide data to back that claim globally not in some hip Silicon Valley I don’t own a tv market. My quick search shows targeted isn’t there

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StopDisinfo910 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What’s the issue with advertisement exactly?

It’s completely tangential at this point. Meta dreams of a metaverse but most of their investments have gone to solving foundational issues with VR.

If Meta wants to pay for that, well, I’m not going to bite the hands that feeds VR research. My starry-eyed teenage years are thankfully far behind me.

	▲	gellybeans 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I used to watch commercials during my starry-eyed teenage years as well. I used to think ninja turtles was anything but a 20 minute ad for toys when I was in preschool. Ads are actually horrible. Holy moly I'm so glad I can just ublock my way through the sea of garbage that is the internet nowadays. The fact there are people still indoctrinated by commercials makes sense, I'm just sorry you see that as a marker of maturity.
	▲	komali2 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> What’s the issue with advertisement exactly? Advertisement isn't showing you something you might be interested in. Advertisement is an industry of psychoanalysts spending untold man hours of effort crafting ways to psychologically manipulate the population into serving the needs of a given corporation. Instagram doesn't just show you cool clothes you might want to buy. It leverages dark pattern ux to keep you engaged with the app well past any healthy duration, and shows you content designed to enrage or arouse you to keep you in a mental state that will increase engagement and possibly lead to you engaging in shopping therapy. Advertising is releasing psychofauna into the world of YouTube kids to get your children obsessed with brand characters that they absolutely must have physical representations of. Or it gets even darker than that, look up Elsagate. Maybe advertising wasn't evil when it was a sweet potato hawker shouting their wares into the market. Now it's an entirely different beast and it is anti human and evil.

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waltbosz 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

In my experience, the metaverse offerings are a boring ghost town.

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procaryote 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The core product is somewhat relevant though

That you can get paid and have fun doing it, doesn't make the product better.

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Garlef 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"It wasn't all bad. They built the Autobahn"

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wafflemaker 6 days ago | parent [-]

Few more years and they would've finished Polarbanen. The northern Norway railroad connecting Trondheim to Tromsø, far inside the Arctic Circle. Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes.

But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.

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sapiogram 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes.

It's only $50 if the government pays for the rest of the ticket. $50 per passenger won't even cover track maintenance. Source: My ass, but I still think I'm right.

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procaryote 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> thousands people to death

I have some bad news to tell you about the overall number of dead related to that government

	▲	wafflemaker 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		You tell me, I'm from Poland. Talked to many older people, who remember the war. One thing that caught my attention, because it surfaced with every single old person I asked about the war: Germans/Nazis were horrible, but Russians/Soviets were an order of magnitude worse. Funny thing that now many people don't even know that it was Russia and Germany BOTH that started the war. And they were supposed to attack Poland simultaneously, but Stalin, PR animal that he was, delayed Red Army's attack by one week, thereby creating the legend that it wasn't Russia that started the war.