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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • They wouldn’t have slammed into it, if they’d kept their safe distance as @XTornado@lemmy.ml wrote. I’m in no way defending Tesla‘s „Autopilot“, it should be banned until they pass a very difficult test proving true self driving capabilities and multiple layers auf fail safes (which they can’t right now). But examples where an autopilot Tesla did something stupid and other people making human errors are disingenuous: if somebody drops their cigarette and breaks unexpectedly and the cars behind don’t keep their distance and slam into it, the reason they have an accident is not the cigarette but their dangerous safety distance.




  • Despite everyone wanting them to fail, this is inaccurate. They’ve sold as much Quest hardware as Microsoft sells Xboxes in the same time period, and those cost figures include hardware, and ALL their VR software, across multiple different games and apps. They did not spend that much on Horizon Worlds which is their failed second life clone.

    Neither Microsoft or Facebook are making relevant money from hardware. All of those headsets (like all those xboxes) have only one purpose: selling software, which the platform owner takes a cut from.

    Incidentally: from 2021 to 2022 reality labs both sold less hardware and less software, while growing their costs, probably due to research and development and preproduction for both Quest Pro - which is cancelled already - and Quest 3. Let’s wait and see, what Quest 3 is getting Facebook, but currently reality labs is failing, no matter how much I personally want them to, as well.




  • Not really surprising. All corporate social media follows an initial trend, which steeply drops off after the first few days/weeks. Doesn’t mean Threads is doomed or anything.

    Twitter wasn’t really “popular”, especially outside the US (and Japan, if I remember correctly), no matter how much so called “journalists” amplified its content. Even the most favorable estimates (which will be completely wrong, considering how many sock puppets and bots there are on any given platform), put Twitter’s MAU at a quarter of Instagrams’, which itself isn’t even the biggest social network. This speaks volumes to how interested the general population is in a text-first social network, compared to an image centric one.

    Instagram’s large user base and the exclusivity/scarcity narrative, which is customary for new social networks forever (Threads was touted as so evil, it was banned in the EU! This was definitely not meant as a cautionary tale but felt very gimmicky to me) will have helped Threads acquire a lot of curious Instagram users, who quickly lost interest in a wall of uninteresting text and returned to their algorithmically presented pictures.

    I believe a lot of engagement on Twitter to be completely fake, crediting it in part to bots and in part to an outrage fueling algorithm. When a lot of famous Twitter users migrated to Mastodon a few months back, the first thing they noted has been the much lower engagement, partially due to the smaller user base, but also due to much less bots. A lot of them are still looking for a new home, but cannot get rid of the dopamine hits of a “viral” twitter post and Zucc might just have the stuff for them.

    Threads will stay around and probably split or assimilate the negligible small user base of Twitter in time, while truly federated platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy will have trouble on boarding (and retaining) comparable user groups, since they are missing the outrage farming algorithm and the fake engagement.