this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
1084 points (99.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
10160 readers
4107 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, it was doomed from the beginning. There was no vision, no problem to be solved, no benefit for the user.
Why would the world need this VR space? For meetings or chats? We have virtual meetings and this adds nothing of value. For games? The graphics are bad (to allow more people to use it) and there are better VR games. For companies to advertise? You would need something to get people to go there.
They should have created a benefit for the user first and if that is successful add more.
They could have started with a Sims clone or a WOW clone to get people interested and invested before adding the rest. Selling virtual land only makes sense if it's worth something.
They did worse than that imo. I was a very early consumer of VR; had the original oculus headset and absolutely loved it. Then zuck bought them out, mandated that all oculus headsets would need a meta account, and effectively dropped support for anything other than the mobile headset. I was legitimately the kind of consumer that would put 5 figures into that hobby over a few years, but I set it down and never looked back after that. Im sure I'm not the only one who fits that description
Same. I was one of the original kickstarter backer. Never touched it again after the meta account got mandatory.
I might get the Steam Frame and see how much has changed in the VR space.
It is weird that nobody pointed out to him that a meeting in VR is worse than a Zoom call in every practical way. I guess he reached the “surround yourself with Yes-Men” stage too long ago.
I don't even like video calls. The only value of it is to see if someone started talking while still muted.
I guess if you count screen-sharing as video calling, but that's distinct from the camera part.
It's also just not an option if someone has a medical condition that makes them predisposed to dizziness, vertigo, etc. Even without a medical condition, users frequently experience motion sickness with VR. And if certain team members can't use the meeting software, it ceases to have any value as a meeting software.
It always happens with any delusional fool.
They get lucky and so they hire smart people. Then those smart people no longer align with the fool. So they hire more people in hopes of changing the smart people's minds. But then smart people leave.
And now. All that's left is the people who were hired who think every time the fool farts, it's a blessing.
Should have led with porn
Sure, if they had created for example a 'second life' clone with a very lax custom content policy it would have drawn in the pervert community to build their dream harem / larp orgies AND the house builder / interior design community AND the second life larper community.
The question is, if big companies would still have wanted to advertise there. At least the virtual land would have been a bit more interesting.
One thing I would love for the Quest to be able to do would be to create a 3D model of my home’s interior and let me do things like knock down walls or place furniture.
There’s no technical reason it can’t do this except that nobody’s done it because it’s been pitched as a collaboration/NFT selling tool.
I think you can sort of do that with Hyperscape?
https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/meta-horizon-hyperscape-capture-beta/8798130056953686
So apparently facebook is funding research into that, still: https://facebookresearch.github.io/ShapeR/
Who knows what they'll actually do with the tech.
I’m glad they’ve at least thought of it, but I’m amazed they didn’t think this was a killer app for VR. Just the real estate market alone would have been huge.
Kinda ironic that he got the enshittification order right with facebook and instagram, but completely forgot it for VR. You need the people first, then you start banning porn to be "family friendly" and nice with big companies
To play the devil's advocate: this did happen during the crypto rush, when huge monetary value was assigned to nothings. If you buy into the idea that a JPEG of a monkey created by some algorithm brute-forcing KiSS can be worth a small fortune - it's not hard to see how VR "real" estate can be valuable.
Digital nothing CAN have value. Like imagine having a central plot on a long running popular Minecraft server, or having a large housing plot in final fantasy XIV, or a sick mount in WoW or any other MMO. The thing is that those are desirable not just because they're limited, but because the game is a desirable place to begin with. Artificial scarcity with nothing backing it is useless, like monkey jpegs and beanie babies.
So if the metaverse wasn't dogshit and actually drew in at least tens of thousands of regular users, yeah he could've made some money selling digital real estate. Instead, he led with "you can buy real fake land!" with no real reason other than exclusivity.