For people missing the irony here, the term “metaverse,” that Meta is named after, was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash.”
In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.
glimshe · 27m ago
If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook. Someone else would have done it.
But if Neal Stephenson didn't exist, we'd not necessarily have what he created. That's how unique his ideas are.
And Meta, billions of dollars later, is still no Metaverse...
Animats · 1h ago
I was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful.
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.
I'm still waiting for a Spawn reboot and universe now that Dune finally got a big budget version. Apparently Voltron too.
Don't give up hope.
neilv · 2h ago
CEO: "Bring me the head of whomever is responsible for this metaverse fiasco!" :)
VoidWhisperer · 1h ago
"Uh.. that would be you, Mr. Zuckerberg"
No comments yet
perihelions · 2h ago
What an ironic error to happen to a creator of cyberpunk dystopia. And also to Mr. Stephenson.
epgui · 2h ago
I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic.
Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
AceJohnny2 · 1h ago
Was this within the last couple years? How much you wanna bet the appeal is handled by an AI.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
Its probably just a variant on a placebo button.
analognoise · 1h ago
Where if you have the temerity to complain, you’re immediately labelled a rebellious non-conformer and banned forever.
pesus · 1h ago
I got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.
bachmeier · 1h ago
Are you implying that being banned from Facebook is a bad thing?
qualeed · 1h ago
I'm pretty sure they are implying that it might be a bad policy to not ban nazis.
bryanrasmussen · 1h ago
even if you would think people should be happy about being banned, they always get annoyed
It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
rl3 · 1h ago
>The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all.
Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.
Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."
Yeah, OK. Gross.
AceJohnny2 · 1h ago
"Shoot the messenger!"
diego · 2h ago
Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work.
I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
michalpleban · 1h ago
I have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change that. I got assigned to Vietnam for life.
Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.
I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
hnuser123456 · 1h ago
Is it possible your FB account has been compromised for a while? Is your ISP's RIR whois information correct?
anal_reactor · 1h ago
There's a mid-sized international bus company over here and once I bought a ticket for the wrong day, realized only after payment. I simply called the phone number, the lady spoke my language, reissued the ticket for a different day, that's it.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
uz3snolc3t6fnrq · 2h ago
my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know
lazide · 56m ago
Some GEOIP databases are rotting, near as I can tell.
I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago.
Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.
VincentEvans · 2h ago
Last time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will.
Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
viraptor · 2h ago
I got blocked for sending a post asking if anyone wants to grab a lunch when I'm back in (location).
bbarnett · 1h ago
Tangential, but a decade ago I lost my original Amazon account, because I bought bandages. Yes bandages.
I'd had it for 5 years, no excess returns, no issues. I click add and go to checkout... banned.
Some reasons about religious icons flashed on my screen. It was red cross bandages ffs!
And why ban me, and not the seller?!?
Calls, emails resulted in confused but unhelpful people.
SLHamlet · 3h ago
This is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse.
They are still quoting Fountainhead and thinking they are intellectuals.
SlowTao · 1h ago
A few years back Chris Hedges did a showshow/podcast or something and he was forced to finally read in depth a lot more Rand.
I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".
Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.
mchusma · 52m ago
I think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
wmf · 2h ago
Meta's recent strategy is more reminiscent of Rainbows End.
KaiserPro · 2h ago
I dunno who you were talking to, but the RL research areas I worked in had some definite Neil Stevenson fans.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
lenerdenator · 2h ago
There's precious little value for those types to read stuff like "Snow Crash".
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
nirav72 · 2h ago
Who has time to read when it's about 'Move fast and break things..." /s
saltysalt · 1h ago
If they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
copacopab · 2h ago
I have been locked out of my account for 5+ months -- and customer support has been a Kafkaesque nightmare. I am still locked out. (Oh, and I've spent $1M+ in paid META ads...)
ralphington · 2h ago
You seem to have funded your own demise
copacopab · 2h ago
Haha... it's crazy. And I have friends at META who've been trying to help, and they themselves get in a customer support hell as well. It's wild. $1.9T company.
SlowTao · 1h ago
Not surprising. The larger the company the more complex it typically gets at all levels. Probably take 7 months of paperwork to swap a light globe.
simpaticoder · 2h ago
On one level this is amusing. But what if both accounts are owned by the same person impersonating Neal Stephenson? My understanding was that he was not on any social media. Did that change at some point?
That domain has been registered since 2000, it's probably real.
It links to a google plus account, it's probably not updated promptly.
SLHamlet · 2h ago
That Facebook page is the one managed by his publisher.
He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.
Thoreandan · 1h ago
Huh. Posting a screenshot of the tweet just got my FB account suspended.
SLHamlet · 41m ago
Update, 3:03pm PT:
Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.)
But the irony goes on forever.
kitd · 2h ago
IIRC Sharon Stone got suspended on Bumbl for impersonating Sharon Stone.
AIorNot · 2h ago
well its obvious a rogue AI at Meta has gained awareness and just fired the first shot of the simulacrum wars by taking out Stephenson.
dekhn · 1h ago
"Preliminary Roko Enforcement"
nnechm · 2h ago
Had a similar experience with meta. Extremely opaque decision making, terrible UX. Account permanently disabled ... did not follow community standards, literally on sign up to get a dx account.
It's difficult after an experience like that to see how they are so successful. Is it because their users are so addicted and ad sellers will do anything to get onboard ? It's probably just a few dark patterns here and there to bump up impressions at will.
SLHamlet · 3h ago
"Today in 'you can’t make this stuff up,' Meta has suspended my Facebook account because they suspect me of impersonating someone noteworthy"
michaelbuckbee · 2h ago
As someone in the burbs + middle america, Facebook still has a frustrating grip on many of the community social communications which tend to take place in private Facebook groups (Girl Scouts, community HOA, etc.)
VWWHFSfQ · 3h ago
And then went straight over to X, another social media silo, to post that his other social media account at the other silo was banned.
What a world we live in.
petcat · 3h ago
Megacorp turf wars. It's silos all the way down.
jasonvorhe · 3h ago
There's always nostr.
echelon · 2h ago
That's designed for nerds. Like Matrix and the other platforms that will never see mainstream adoption because they lack product management and crazy distribution.
Normie design and hyper distribution always win.
timeon · 3h ago
Reminds me Shadowrun.
lemonberry · 2h ago
I loved this game! I still have the original rulebook. That my AD&D 2nd ed. books, Star Frontiers and Gamma World boxed sets may be my most prized possessions.
gopher_space · 2h ago
Throw a few Uncle Al catalogs on the pile and we’d have similar childhoods. Gamma World was actually pretty amazing.
solardev · 2h ago
Did you ever try the CRPG Shadowrun Chronicles games?
lemonberry · 2h ago
I did not. I didn't get into computers until much later. Though I did die of Typhoid a bunch of times on the Oregon Trail when I was in junior high.
debo_ · 2h ago
I'm running a Cities Without Number campaign now, but I sure do steal a lot from Shadowrun.
neilv · 2h ago
More cyberpunk than this would be for the official author side to be a `.onion`, with a vanity subdomain that took a borrowed farm of GPUs a week to compute, and an RSS/Atom reader feed from that, plus a Fediverse/Mastodon account for the normies that you host yourself from an offshore data haven, paid for with mixed BTC, and a Reddit account just to keep some twerp from grabbing your name, all of which you access exclusively through Tor Browser, from a dedicated/compartmentalized immutable device. :)
But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.
(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)
unsupp0rted · 2h ago
People go where they’re treated best
the_real_cher · 2h ago
X is pretty lenient with the banning though.
It seems like the best of the worst.
numpad0 · 1h ago
Twitter is "lenient" with ban evasion because it runs on cognitive load and they have no time to deal with it themselves. It's just completely beyond cognitive capacity of its controlling parties(including financial owners) that it could appear that they are chill with speeches it hosts as well as unilateral cultural influencing capabilities it has.
Gibbon1 · 1h ago
Friend of mine complain about twitter and then turn around and send me twitter links.
Headdesk.
NKosmatos · 2h ago
The problem with all big companies nowadays... Getting to a real (competent) support person that can help is almost impossible :-(
GlenTheMachine · 1h ago
I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
That was the only "help" he could provide.
ViscountPenguin · 1h ago
The Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
iammjm · 2h ago
I've opened a ticket with Microsoft regarding a M365 Business account and an actual person called me within an hour and fixed my issue right away, and I am not even exaggerating here. It was a trivial issue and I am not claiming it's always like this, but it CAN be like this.
cloudwalk9 · 2h ago
Business account though. Everyone else is just a waste of time to provide support to.
I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.
Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.
gtirloni · 1h ago
How would one go about suing in cases like this?
chihuahua · 1h ago
You would start by reading the complete terms and conditions of service. Somewhere in there is a paragraph that states that your account can be suspended and/or terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason. Then you find the paragraph that limits you to mandatory arbitration. You conclude that you're wasting your time if you attempt to sue anyone over this. Eventually you realize that you're better off without a FB account.
zelias · 2h ago
Clearly the counter-AI that counteracts the ban happy AI isn’t in place yet
uz3snolc3t6fnrq · 2h ago
can't wait for ai juries, 12 different ai models by different companies & they all have to reach the same conclusion, but one of them is a 300m parameter 2 bit quantized model and keeps hallucinating, causing an eternal hung jury
brador · 1h ago
Why is their no libre clone of facebook?
Zak · 1h ago
There is, but creating the software was never the hard part.
In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.
But if Neal Stephenson didn't exist, we'd not necessarily have what he created. That's how unique his ideas are.
And Meta, billions of dollars later, is still no Metaverse...
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8WYiYcaRY4
Don't give up hope.
No comments yet
Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/facebook-deleted-my-account...
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.
Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."
Yeah, OK. Gross.
I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.
I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago.
Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.
Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
I'd had it for 5 years, no excess returns, no issues. I click add and go to checkout... banned.
Some reasons about religious icons flashed on my screen. It was red cross bandages ffs!
And why ban me, and not the seller?!?
Calls, emails resulted in confused but unhelpful people.
Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...
I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".
Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
That domain has been registered since 2000, it's probably real.
It links to a google plus account, it's probably not updated promptly.
He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.
Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.)
But the irony goes on forever.
What a world we live in.
Normie design and hyper distribution always win.
But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.
(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)
It seems like the best of the worst.
Headdesk.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
That was the only "help" he could provide.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.
Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.