lel Peak players: 66k Money spent by Meta on VR to date: $69,000,000,000 Investment per player, presuming VRChat were the goal: one million, thirty four thousand, nine hundred and one and 68/100 dollars Facebook started playing around with VR in 2019. It is now 2025. By way of comparison, MBS announced the Mukaab on February 16, 2023 with a target date of completion of December 31, 2030. So. A year longer than Facebook has been building their VR empire... but the Mukaab (if they pull it off) will house 400,000 people. In real life. For 48 billion. (if they pull it off) Zuck knows that the more Facebook faces the Internet, the more traffic and money bleeds out. The whole point of Facebook is to silo the shit out of everything they do so they can control the ad dollars and the content but ultimately, Facebook has to be HTML compliant; it is, in the end, a website. Put that shit in VR and they can control everything. If they can make it a place you'd rather be than the real world they basically own reality. And if you're high on your own supply you read Snow Crash and Ready Player One and you say "but it won't be a dystopia when I'm in charge" because far few techbros get that "are we the baddies" skit. The real problem is Linden Labs has economy worth a half billion dollars a year and has done for twenty fricking years and that number doesn't grow, that number doesn't shrink, that number is the reasonable, proven limit of a virtual world for grownups. To be Meta you have to look at Second Life and decide that it's worth blowing a hundred and forty years worth of the space's ENTIRE ECONOMY (not its revenue - its revenue is about $100m a year) to do the same thing, only in VR. Nobody at Second Life has ever asked for VR.My pet theory is that some Meta execs have seen the numbers VRChat has been doing and keep pointing to it as if it's something they can achieve, too.
The real problems under Meta's endeavor is that their prices are eliminating almost all competition, whilst also being the only one in the VR space to essentially abandon developers, in a space where developers have to take enormous gambles to even operate.
There are a lot of problems with headset based social media. First, unless there are major improvements to the base technology, headsets are not going to work that well. They’re big and bulky, maybe not heavy for short term use, but probably heavy enough to be tiring after a couple of hours. They’re ugly, thus no grownup is going to whip out their Oculus in public to use the internet. They’re fairly isolating as well, as you can’t participate in conversations around you while wearing an Oculus— your ears are blocked and no eye contact is possible. Second, a lot of adult Internet use is done while doing other things. You might surf while watching TV, or while eating or cooking, or talking to other people. And at least for me, I tend to dip in and out of th3 phone or iPad. Adults, in short are casual users of the internet. And if you’re trying to lock people into an environment, that actually doesn’t work well if the typical users of your service are casual users. And herein lies the problem— Zuck is using a technology that’s casual hostile to try to corral a user base that’s extremely casual. I don’t see this ever actually working because the friction between social media is extremely low. The cost of switching is basically zero, as it costs nothing to join any social media network you choose. The apps are free, the servers are free to join, and unless you’re in a very tight group of friends Theres no reason to choose one network over another. I can get the same stupid memes on X, insta, facebook, threads, blue sky or truth. And the interfaces are similar as well, which means that there’s no learning curve preventing a switch. Facebook is proposing to put a lot of negatives on their social media platform in an environment where Theres literally nothing to compel people to put up with those negatives.
I don't disagree with any of that. veen's minidoc was interesting and worth the watch. It (briefly, tangentially) touched on the following points: - a great deal of the space is given over to pr0n, which is awkward and weird, but - a great deal of the space is populated by neurodivergents, who mostly rawk anime avatars because - the tools to build a decent avatar come from the hikikikomori waifu crew, who colonized en masse and set the tone for the place - which is mostly in the hidden corners where the looky-loos don't know to stare That there is the recipe for a thriving counterculture. It's a freak-flag-flyin' festival, which the world needs more of. Such spaces, however, are notoriously difficult to monetize and the minute someone does, someone else will attempt to litigate their monetization away. There's also the very real problem of children in spaces they don't belong, or people doing things that shouldn't share space with children. Facebook, borne of Harvard's undergraduate social scene, is never going to make room for anything even vaguely countercultural. And yes, absolutely: Facebook has not is not was not never will be the primary screen in a multi-screen strategy.