Great article Yenli! A truly engaging read.
I found your point about Facebook (or Meta I guess) earning the attention of younger users through increasingly immersive experiences quite interesting.
There’s also a strong precedent of gamers, for instance, spending exorbitant amounts of money on digital assets that only have value within that specific digital economy. So I think Meta really has a chance, through the creation of its digital ecosystem and through it’s diversification into hardware, as you mentioned, at finding solid new revenue streams and shifting away from their heavy reliance on the ad service, recently hit by Apple’s privacy policies and the like.
A troubling realisation is that people are often willing to sacrifice their privacy for convenience. So if Meta manages to integrate itself well enough into people’s lives, it may be able to continue brushing off various scandals.
They also get an opportunity to use the environmental card in the marketing campaign, advertising the metaverse as saving people travel, for example.
On the other hand, still lots of potential issues and liabilities, from child safety to financial fraud concerns.
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