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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I'm increasingly convinced that Meta isn't betting the farm at all. They just wanted to rebrand away from something that reminds people of election manipulation and teen suicides and toward something that reminds people of the future.

All this VR stuff seems to be an experimental group combined with a marketing budget to cure FB's brand.

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It's more dire than that from their business perspective.

TikTok is killing them in the social media space.

They lost billions because of their reliance on Apple, who rug pulled them with the iOS privacy changes.

This is what they're choosing to pursue in response to existential threats to their business.

You think Meta is spending billions on a PR exercise ? Be serious.

There are many companies including Apple and Microsoft who do think that VR has the potential to offer ground-breaking new experiences and as such worth investing in.

Yes - I do think Meta is spending single digit billions on a PR exercise. That is not an unreasonable marketing budget for a several-hundred-billion-dollar company that is currently experiencing huge losses in brand value, and they are certainly looking at how to get a piece of the VR pie in order to get a discount on it.

This would be true if they weren’t releasing good hardware as well.

There are over 20K full time employees in Meta’s Reality Labs working on metaverse tech… this is not a marketing exercise.

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