nicetriangle

This was in Altspace VR which unfortunately got axed by Microsoft IIRC, but on there you kinda looked like a less shitty version of one of those Nintendo avatars customized however you wanted.

The craziest anybody looked on there would be to have like rainbow or blue hair or something along those lines. It was pretty tame compared to like the furry anime cat sex doll looking things some people run around in VR Chat with. It also wasn’t overrun with screaming children which I think is VR Chat’s biggest overall problem.

Anyway, that support group thing I think has since moved to another platform, I forget which.

There were no insane avatars, everyone looked pretty normal. Sorry to burst your bubble.

I’ll be honest I think their watch and AirPods both look kinda dumb, but they seem to be quite popular. And I distinctly remember that when both came out people were taking shots at how they looked, myself included.

And IIRC those are all PCVR sets and not standalone.

Some people call VR dystopian, but it’s got great potential too.

During COVID while I was living alone and we were under lockdown…

I used a Quest to watch movies in a virtual theater with a bunch of people from around the world. I remember being in a theater watching an absolutely ridiculous Nicolas Cage movie laughing my ass off with a bunch of dudes from Australia. Another time I watched a cricket game with some people who explained the rules to me and kinda gave me some play by play on what was happening.

I’ve also attended a few support group meetings in VR for coping with loss that had quite a lot of attendants. The meeting was run by a licensed group therapist and we took turns sharing and then reflecting on each others stories. It was frankly amazing.

I also played mini golf with friends of mine as well as had a couple meetings over a round of mini golf with the other guy on my design team during lockdown. Honestly the best virtual meetings I ever had.

All of the above were very social and very positive experience. I didn’t feel far away from people, I felt connected to them.

Same way a smartphone can be a useful tool that enhances your life or a screen you stare at for hours consuming bullshit TikTok videos. You’re in control of what you make of it. You can also stick to a dumb phone and not participate at all.

For my particular niche (illustration) it has a way better concentration of active (and also importantly) high quality actual working professional artists on it than mastodon.

The art scene on mastodon is pretty meh and the largest art centric instance is run by unstable authoritarians that are some of the biggest sources of drama on mastodon.

lol same

I got into scratch/trash building and kit bash modeling crazy mechs and stuff last year and it’s been a blast.

Lol my regional instance has some interesting upcoming events…

https://i.imgur.com/71tZ7fL.png

I had a post of mine flagged for multiple days on there because it had an illustration of a woman in a full length wool coat completely covering her and not in any way sexual. Shit is so stupid

Ah good catch

It wasn’t publicly spoken about much from what I understand, but headsets were sent to some select developers within a month or so of the announcement. A buddy of mine was working at a company that is basically totally AR/MR focused and they had around 3 units for development purposes. Disney had to have had them even sooner because they were demoing Disney stuff right at the announcement.

I wouldn’t be totally surprised if the Apollo guy was one of them. He’s an ex Apple employee and Apollo got called out or at least shown in Apple keynotes multiple times before it shut down.

Meh. I’ve already moved on.

Reddit’s been running ads for a while and has never turned a profit

Yeah I tend to agree. I think all communities have a critical mass and past that point they go downhill.

I was just googling for the rat overpopulation experiment because I think it works as a great example of this and it turns out this whole concept has a term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

Regular people didn’t know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We’re in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.

Yeah that was kinda my understanding too. And regardless of my feelings on it, I think rulings are mostly gonna go in AI’s favor.

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Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago… Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that’s their problem, not the stock market’s.

• Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
• The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
• Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
• Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
• The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don’t have data to back it up)

Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate “synergy” with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.

Yeah that’s why I’ve held off on buying one of these. I would love a color e-ink display for art/design books but the tech just isn’t there yet. I’d be ok with the colors just being so-so, but the darkness and lack of contrast is a big issue.