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> It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.

This is not true, the Internet took off in the U.S. in the mid-90s: https://ourworldindata.org/internet

The driving force was the WWW, not smartphones.

Personally, I would say exactly the opposite, the only advantage a smartphone has over a desktop computer for Internet usage is portability, otherwise the experience is worse in every way.

A big reason the internet took off is one that I guess will be banned by default in the metaverse : 18+ content.

The metaverse that wins will allow 18+ content.

Not Zuckerberg.

But there is no P in FAANG. And Steam/etc don’t make their living on adult games. And youtube has no porn on it.

I think the issue with winning it with adult content will remain unchanged, at least for a while. Porn is so classic, that it cannot tunnel through this potential barrier.

Google and Microsoft absolutely serve porn. "Safe search"? It's what Bing is known for.

People use their Apple devices for porn, controlling sex toys, and much more.

Amazon sells lube, sex toys, lingerie, and a whole host of other totally NSFW products.

Netflix has a ton of shows with nude actors bearing their breasts. Their show "Sex/Life" shows penises in a very sexual way.

Twitter, though admittedly not FAMNGA, notoriously allows and supports porn. They're very much the opposite of Tumblr, which died the moment they banned it.

Patreon thrives on porn.

Steam absolutely sells a whole bunch of porn. It may not be a majority, but it sells plenty.

Today. Since 2018. Steam itself launched in 2003, so literally took 15 years, and still in a very limited basis(IIUC).

And this is probably why facebook won't win.

And anonymity. See how many are active in VR community under their legal full real names. Some mention their IRL names on social profiles as footnotes, but if they did care, that person is not important in VR.

> It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.

What?

Honestly pre-2008 spending time online was pretty niche. I spent maybe a couple hours a day max on MySpace and LiveJournal and maybe a couple of forums once or twice a week. This was between pirating music and burning CDs for friends in high school which gave me a pretty high score on the nerd-index.

I was listening to a podcast on Flat Earthers and the host basically traced the explosion of True Believers to the advent of the smartphone circa 2008 onwards; suddenly hundreds of millions more people were spending hours a day online.

If the problem was really just the quality of headsets, you'd expect some dose-response relationship, I think. Headsets may not be good enough, but they're much better than they used to be, so you'd expect SOME stable growth in using it for shared environments Second Life style.

But that hasn't happened. I'm thinking the problem isn't lack of good VR, it's that a truly shared metaverse isn't really something we want.

We want our own spaces. We want to have the option to just "watch", to be invisible to the world we're exploring (or to lurk, in forum/chat terms).

When even better VR comes, I think it will be used for far more solitary activities than social ones. We do see some hints of a dose-response relationship there, with reasonably popular VR games like Half Life Alyx.

What are you saying? Lol

I could attribute the little use of internet pre-1994 to lack of ISP services, or the fact that people preferred html and modern search engines to the old protocols (ftp, archie, gopher), etc. But 2008, seriously?

I spent lots of hours in internet in college (pre-www) and later paid for CompuServe. By then www was already becoming known. Again, 2008. In what country do you live?

And you should try consuming internet in a desktop or laptop. Even a Chromebook works ok (but a gaming PC is better). Most apps offer a limited experience in mobile, or tablet (it sucks) and seriously, sites render much faster on a fast PC. I can right-click 10 links on the browser, send them to open in the background, consume each tab a close what doesn't work. It is so much nice and faster experience.

> Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.

Thats the point. The answer to "when do I have time to use the meta verse" is "you have time to watch tv/entertainment, so yo have time to meta verse". Because people think of this as _something added_ to their life, not something augmented.