By Alicia Maher
The announcement in 2021 that Facebook would be rebranding as Meta was welcomed with widespread scorn, and to be honest, Mark Zuckerberg’s marketing resources didn’t do the Metaverse notion credit. Since Meta’s shares have dropped 26.4 percent in a single day, backed by the first-ever dip in Facebook’s daily active users, a few of those exact criticisms are felt vindicated. After all, nobody needs a metaverse.
This result, however, could be a partial misinterpretation of the circumstance, both in terms of Facebook and the concept of a metaverse in context. For starters, there are a variety of explanations why Facebook isn’t working well. If you evaluate the platform today to the period it initially debuted, you’ll notice a significant difference.
Facebook today appears to be an aged and lumbering institution that’s difficult to manage and has become clogged with tired politics and uninvited, low-level sloganeering. Is it possible that a newer population would be drawn shortly, and several of its present users will be pleased with Zuck’s metaverse pivot?
Zuckerberg’s insights, likely foreseeing a web3 future based on blockchains, are unquestionably accurate, but the company he leads appears unprepared to a metaverse shift. In numerous aspects, Facebook has developed vital traits that are opposed to the features of a real metaverse.
Censorship
Without getting into cultural wars or getting bogged down inside the endless political dilemma of what’s being banned and for what reasons, it is reasonable to conclude that the large technology corporations have drifted far from the original principles of Silicon Valley as well as its technology founders in recent years.
There was a period when the ethos of technology was libertarianism, and it has been assumed that freedom of expression was an invincible ideal. Still, it seems that freedom of expression may be challenged.
Firms like Facebook had chosen to take it upon themselves to severely regulate information placed on their sites in ways that generally appear condescending, crass, and overly driven. Metaverses that don’t have any way for people to fight back against an unchecked centralized government aren’t very alluring, and cryptocurrency-based things don’t work with them at all (like web3).
Centralization
Inside the cryptosphere, decentralization is a foundation. You might have heard of the blockchain paradox, which claims that blockchain programmers must fulfill 3 requests: scalability, decentralization, and security, as initially expressed by Vitalik Buterin.
As is generally known, Ethereum struggles with scalability because of data traffic and costly gas charges. In contrast, Solana, for instance, is quick and affordable but is condemned for not being correctly decentralized. One of the most important aspects of a blockchain-based metaverse is that it must be completely free of any central authority and accessible and untraceable to anybody who wishes to participate.
It’s an insult to suggest that Facebook does not embody these attributes. It’s a typical, centralized organization, with consumers reporting to people in positions of control inside the organization. In other words, assuming Facebook was to transform into a digital region and become the metaverse, Chairman Zuck and his commanders would have totalitarian power over the metaverse.