Ask Lemmy

VR - It has been through a few hype cycles, but never quite makes it. Cost, weight, battery life (or tethers), lack of highly desirable games, required floor space, nausea (in some people), etc.

Starlink - when announced it sounded like the solution to ISP monopolies and rural broadband access. But the roll out was so slow that other solutions have caught up. For people with no option other than satellite internet, it is still great (if they can get it) but for a lot of people, better options now exist.

These ones I think had drummed up a lot of hype but failed to deliver:

• "ai" a.k.a. "Plagiarized Info Synth System". the magic is gone. it doesn't make decisions. hallucinations show how limited it can and doesn't match how it was marketed.

• "smart" cars. all the powers (and tracking) of smart phone apps inside your car.

  • "smart" ref/ fridge/ icebox. plays skyrim. supposedly orders for you when eggs go out of stock. tracking. dedj in a year or so.

  • "smart" tv. more ads. more tracking.

• NFT. owning the "receipt" of a digital resource is a funny idea. as long as you aren't the one owning.

  • digital ownership. those online and cloud libraries of your music, books, etc. I have seen news of amazon, steam, and others de-listing items here. if you own one of those, they're gone.

• "google+". touted fb-killer. nobody was there.

  • which leads to: any google product that was scrapped. because google killed it.

• hyperloop. vaporware. I mean, we can dream.

below are products that are solely in my opinion and YMMV:

• 4D movies. oh, seat is vibrating. i got wet.

• 1gb/2gb/4gb internet. promises up to advertised speeds. flat payment as if said speed was delivered.

• iphone. all the bright colors and jumping people on the ad. I don't see iphone owners being high as that. imo, the money i dropped on it is stockholming me -- i love it.

• salad. what's all these girls smiling and laughing at their salad?

Self-driving cars
I bought into the hype 10ish years ago. I had expected it to revolutionise road transport.

I was very excited one year to get an early Roomba vacuum. It looked so fun and convenient.

I wouldn't say it was bad, but it was very meh compared to the high hopes I had.

It went in a senseless pattern without setting up the electronic boundaries. It had trouble docking. It filled up very fast and had to be manually emptied. It was loud and slow. It just overall felt like it took longer and required more manual handling and maintenance than a regular upright and couldn't even clean everything, so I still had to vacuum.

On top of that, the battery died after about a year. I got an expensive rebuild with supposed better cells from a local reman company, and that died again in about a year. The new battery was more than the Roomba was worth by then, so I gave up on it.

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