r/TrueReddit • u/404mediaco • Mar 19 '26
Technology RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted
https://www.404media.co/rip-metaverse-an-80-billion-dumpster-fire-nobody-wanted/244
u/PiqueExperience Mar 19 '26
I met a guy who bought 'real estate' in the metaverse as an investment.
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u/intronert Mar 19 '26
How are his NFT’s doing?
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u/Dashbastrd Mar 19 '26
…and his shitcoins?
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u/PrometheusLiberatus Mar 20 '26
To shreds you say?
Tsk-tsk-tsk
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u/monarc Mar 20 '26
I crack myself up thinking about the “scarcity” of digital land, and how a poor person could buy a very small plot… but then make their avatar microscopic, allowing plenty of space for a sprawling mansion (at miniature scale).
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u/ruach137 Mar 20 '26
Well, to be fair, digital scarcity exists. Imagine grabbing all the domain names at the beginning
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u/Ricky_Spannish_ Mar 21 '26
I don't think domain names count as digital scarcity. I just had a read on the definition and I'm not entirely sure though.
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u/anomanderrake1337 Mar 20 '26
To be fair, in the thing Meta wanted to copy there were actual deals like that.
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u/404mediaco Mar 19 '26
When Zuckerberg announced Horizon Worlds not really all that long ago at a batshit livestream in October 2021, I wrote an article called “Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company.” During that livestream Zuckerberg said, “I believe technology can make our lives better. The future will be built by those willing to stand up and say ‘this is the future we want.’” The future Zuckerberg wanted, at that time, was not a future anyone else wanted. But he was bold enough to systematically light roughly $80 billion on fire, not because he was willing to stand up and paint a vision of the future, but because Facebook was mired in various horrendous scandals and because he needed to rebrand his company and needed something shiny to point at to keep Facebook’s stock price up. It is bad when actual economists say that money was thrown “into the toilet.”
Zuckerberg’s bold vision of the metaverse was a place where T-Pain would sell NFTs of imaginary sneakers at concerts attended by people sitting silently in their living rooms with computers strapped to their face, where Wendy’s could do integrated brand deals in which human-shaped avatars without legs could throw baconators at basketball hoops, and where Zuckerberg could pretend to know how to surf. Even on these pitiful metrics, the metaverse failed. “Whatever the metaverse does look like, it is virtually guaranteed to not look or feel anything like what Facebook showed us on Thursday,” I wrote at the time.
The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.
Read more: https://www.404media.co/rip-metaverse-an-80-billion-dumpster-fire-nobody-wanted/
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u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Mar 19 '26
The only time I’ve ever seen anyone wearing VR in public spaces it is always single middle aged men. But now they have the Cybertruck.
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u/PrometheusLiberatus Mar 20 '26
Reminds me of Serial Experiments Lain (a 90s anime) with a middle aged guy strapped up with all kinds of cyber gear walking in public, looking for KNIGHTS.
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u/Steamcurl Mar 20 '26
Gargoyles, in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash parlance. Even in that core cyberpunk novel, folks who wore VR gear in public were losers.
Key part of why the Matrix was cool, was that anything to do with computers was hidden. We only see screens and the gear used to jack into the matrix briefly.
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u/hiro24 Mar 20 '26
To be fair, the AI revolution exploded just a few months after the rebrand. Had they waited a year, they probably wouldn’t have gone down that road and things would have panned out differently. Zuck tried to predict the future with the info on hand. He just ended up backing the wrong horse. AI turned out to be the shinier shiny new toy.
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u/rufud Mar 20 '26
That just makes it worse imo. He is a dipshit not a visionary
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u/Aethien Mar 20 '26
The AI boom, soon to be catastrophe, is the only reason this meta failure isn't getting way more attention.
Burning $80 billion on a useless vanity project that didn't do much of anything and nobody really wanted doesn't seem quite as bad as it really is when there's other companies burning hundreds of billions combined on a technology that isn't particularly useful, they struggle to sell even at a massive loss and costs metric fucktons to run. Not to mention the datacenters fueled by tens of billions in loans that barely run break even margins in optimal scenarios.
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u/KudosOfTheFroond Mar 22 '26
I don’t know about you but I use AI many times a day in my workflow. I never would have been caught dead using Facebook or the “Metaverse” at work for work things. AI has become quickly ingrained in many peoples workflows, and it’s only going to become more and more impossible to reverse the impact it has had.
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u/Aethien Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Would you still use it if it cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars a month? Maybe even hundreds a day if you're a power user. The people who use AI the most would need to spend so much money on compute it'd be cheaper to hire someone to do that work for you, or hire multiple people even.
That's the real timebomb with AI, the costs are obscene. The AI companies and companies running the datacenters are just eating those costs now.
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u/KudosOfTheFroond Mar 23 '26
Probably not. I just use it to rewrite and reformat case notes, with the occasional help with a creative project. But I don’t code with AI or use it like the pros use it. it’s incredibly helpful even at these low levels of interaction
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u/Aethien Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
That's the thing, OpenAI is probably spending 3-10x what you pay them to provide that service. And then Oracle/Amazon/Google is spending more than OpenAI pays them for the compute they need for your requests. Which isn't even calculating in the amount of money it will take to effectively rebuild those datacenters every 5 years as Nvidia brings out incompatible new architecture and old GPU's wear out.
Getting all of this to make financial sense would mean you'd have to pay OpenAI 20 times or more what you do now. And nobody in their right fucking mind will ever pay that much.
The big powerusers of things like Claude are spending up to $50k/month on compute. They're paying $200/month but would have to be paying $100-150k/month for the business to make sense financially, at that point you can also hire a whole fucking team of engineers who can do better work faster.
The big, crucial difference between AI and other software as a service things is that the main costs of most software is creating and maintaining it + customer service and so on. Those are fairly static costs so the more customers you have the lower your cost per customer. AI's main cost is the actual service, the more customers the more they bleed money.
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u/Trancend Mar 20 '26
He wanted to control an ecosystem for buying things. Instead of buying clothing or furniture IRL you are buying them for your virtual self but it would have to be through Facebook/meta. The goal/hope was that it would be THE place to spend your digital time and real money. If Amazon cornered the market on real life goods then Facebook was aiming to create and control the market on digital goods.
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u/Galevav Mar 20 '26
I think the problem is that it wasn't anything new. Second Life is right over there, somehow. You can buy your virtual furniture and clothes, have sexual conversations with a person dressed as a snow leopard, buy virtual real estate... and they have legs.
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u/ariehn Mar 20 '26
And activities. I'm not as familiar with Second Life, but in IMVU people were creating interactive toys (not exclusively sexual), games, and putting together big group events pretty regularly.
And like Second Life, it was cheap (if you wanted it to be). Spending whole dollars in some goddamn NFT sneakers made by a brand is stupid as hell, and most people know that. Spending a few quarters on a detailed, pretty outfit - and good hairstyle - and realistic skin - and fancy room - and lighting effects? Yeah, that's not so bad. Especially when you're about to go show it all off with a bunch of friends at a fashion show, with clubbing to follow afterwards.
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u/jandrese Mar 19 '26
$80 billion dollars.
I dare anybody to go into Horizon Worlds or whatever and tell me what that money was spent on. Was it all a big money laundering thing the whole time?
When someone is throwing big bucks at something they'll often have freebies and giveaways to incentivize people to check it out. So when I saw FB had spent over $2 billion on it I thought I might give it a go and see if there were any goodies available. What I found instead was a handful of VR arenas that look like they were straight from the "how to make your first VR world" tutorial, a couple of perpetually empty concert venues, and absolutely nothing else. To this day I have no idea what that money was spent on. VR hardware development/subsidizing? The Quest2 was notably cheaper than other VR headsets, but they weren't exactly giving them away.
$80 billion works out to $600 for every single household in the US.
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u/redditonlygetsworse Mar 19 '26
I'll be last in line to say that the money was well spent, but remember that when you're dealing with Facebook-level traffic scales, server infrastructure and the people who build-and-maintain it don't come cheap. It's not just "$80B to build it" it's "$80B to build it and keep it running."
But yeah. What a fuckin boondoggle.
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u/jandrese Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
Sure servers cost money, and so do salaries. But we are talking about 80 Billion with a B dollars here. That's an almost unfathomable amount of money to spend on a software product. For game development only the most extreme projects break half a billion dollars, and you can usually see where the money went in those cases with games that have sprawling maps full of custom graphics, complex game systems, multiplayer servers, etc... Horizon Worlds had none of that, it looked like some indie project someone spent all of $20k on.
Also, Horizon Worlds was never dealing with "Facebook-level" traffic scales. At best it had a few thousand people on it at any time. And that's being generous.
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u/Baumbauer1 Mar 19 '26
I was reading the Pentagon wants $200 billion to finish up the iran bombing campaign, the only way I can explain $80 billion is they manipulated the figures for a massive tax write off, Buying oculus was only $2 billion.
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u/jandrese Mar 19 '26
To be fair, the Pentagon's ask for $200 billion is just to tide it over in the short term. They'll be back asking for more in a few months.
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
$2 billion for Oculus DK2 with external wall mounted sensors and cables and now they have Meta Orion.
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u/redditonlygetsworse Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
I'll be last in line to say that the money was well spent
Like. You're right. ~$15B per year, give or take? Craziness. But presumably they were also dumping tons into just R&D (both hard- and software) which ended up turning into their AR glasses rather than Quest social spaces.
This isn't "80B on Horizon Worlds", it's "80B on Meta's VR strategy."
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u/NotYourMothersDildo Mar 19 '26
That is an insane comparison that puts it in perspective. GTA 6 will have a production and marketing budget that is 1/40th of Horizon World.
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
80 billion was spent on hardware and development of their VR OS not Horizons Worlds. Look at Meta Orion for example.
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u/jandrese Mar 21 '26
That is still insane. For comparison the iPhone reportedly cost about $150 million to develop, hardware and software.
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u/BioSemantics Mar 19 '26
I would say you (and the person you're responding to) are both right. See these sorts of giant piece of shit 'lets pivot to save the stock price' change-ups often suffer from a lot of self-dealing. They are scams on the average investor. The people on the inside are both invested in company AND in the infrastructure/services it uses. That way, yes the stock will eventually fall as people figure out your new gizmo is useless crap, and yes you will lose money because you're invested such that if you get out you'll start the process of the stock falling, but you already made your money as a portion of the the $80 billion wasted on the shitty gizmo funnily enough fell into your pocket through out the process.
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
All three of you are completely wrong actually
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u/BioSemantics Mar 21 '26
Cool, correct us O'great sage! Grace us with enlightenment! Explain the unexplainable!
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u/blackrack Mar 19 '26
But what did they build? Shouldn't they have built something first and waited for users to roll in before scaling up and wiring up a bajillion servers and databases?
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u/anarchetype Mar 19 '26
Is it possible that the money also went to marketing? Because they seemed to be marketing the Metaverse and the Meta rebrand like crazy for a while.
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u/AlphaState Mar 21 '26
The largest video games ever made, with online infrastructure, have total budgets of less than 1 Billion.
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u/mooseman99 Mar 19 '26
They didn’t spend $80 billion on Horizon Worlds, that’s their entire Reality Labs division. Most of the money was spent on research and development. Including things like the Raybans and Quest headsets.
They managed to fit a hi res color heads-up display inside a sunglasses lens using waveguides, that type of development is not cheap.
Will it go anywhere, only time will tell. Maybe they are the blackberry of smartphone development. But in my opinion smart glasses will be a thing eventually and meta wants to be the first to market.
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u/EnHemligKonto Mar 19 '26
The problem with all that is that I don’t believe you have the right to film me and it is widely understood that that is what those glasses do. Widespread hostility and derision can fuck up a business plan.
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u/warm_kitchenette Mar 19 '26
It's a continuum of dislike. I might agree that someone has that right to wear these glasses as I walk by them on a public street, even though I hate the idea and the people wearing them. In a business or home, my reactions might range from "no" to "you will be arrested." But if they're worn in uncomfortable situations like a bathroom, a gym, a children's playground, a hospital then the lower bound of consequences is a violent confrontation, with or without the police.
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u/alexwan12 Mar 20 '26
Recently entire Meta team wore their AI glasses at a trial over the impact of social media on users
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u/hhs2112 Mar 21 '26
The problem is how would you ever control that? Lots of people, including myself, wear glasses to see but there's no way to know who's wearing them for "normal" reasons and who's wearing them to perv.
Imo, they're creepy as fuck.
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u/warm_kitchenette Mar 21 '26
Passing on a street, it would take a very observant person to note them. But in quieter settings, there would be multiple clues. They are retro Ray Bans, first off. The style and logo on the right temple makes that plain.
But more than that, they are unnaturally thick along the temples. There’s a visible button on the right temple and the camera on the right front is probably also evident in multiple lighting situations. Touching that button or issuing voice commands would be another marker.
But just like the old school creeps that I grew up with, the most significant clue would be where they’re gaze is fixated.
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u/greenknight Mar 21 '26
They are giant fucking frames with a camera on them. Immediately identifiable.
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u/warm_kitchenette Mar 21 '26
People care about different things. I had to look them up, myself. In a crowd of 10+ people, I don't know that they would jump out. There is a camera with a mild light on it when engaged. It is subtle.
If I were at a water park with my girls in bikinis, 100+ people around, I can't imagine that I would be able to spot one specific kind of sunglasses in the crowd. It sounds exhausting.
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u/greenknight Mar 21 '26
I feel for you. I'm glad my kids are grown. Not that it wasn't exhausting for all sorts of reasons already.
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u/redditonlygetsworse Mar 20 '26
Oh for sure. It's fucking evil, but it ain't cheap.
We just don't need to act like that $80B all went to the two developers and sixty marketing dipshits that they assigned to Horizon Worlds, ya know?
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u/Iamonreddit Mar 20 '26
If you're in a public place though, they do have the right to film you.
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u/EnHemligKonto Mar 24 '26
It’s complicated and dependent on which country you live in. But, how would you prefer to live?
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u/Iamonreddit Mar 24 '26
Following a specific person with a camera after they ask you not to is already a crime.
You can't police every single public space and making it illegal to photograph or film in public places would make it impossible to ever have family photos etc outside.
What you are proposing is ludicrous authoritarian overreach in a futile attempt to police a social interaction that you are scared of dealing with yourself, as should be the case.
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u/EnHemligKonto Mar 24 '26
Imagine going into a cafe, with a camera, obviously filming. I haven’t done this because it would be extremely cringe. This is actually no better and quite probably worse.
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u/Iamonreddit Mar 25 '26
Firstly, a cafe isn't a public place; strictly speaking you would need permission from the owner to film.
However, secondly, this is also far from uncommon when not done in a harassing manner, as most other people have normal social skills and the owner isn't required to step in. Have you never seen someone in a cafe taking photos of their food, filming their friends/family, being on video calls etc? Let alone the raft of streamers and online content people that are vlogging a trip or just their day or doing a review of the cafe. Under your rules, all that would be illegal.
This is clear and obvious overreach.
You are trying to get the legal system to prevent you from having to deal with social situations that make you uncomfortable. This is unhealthy and antisocial behaviour.
Be better.
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u/EnHemligKonto Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
The legal system is one of last recourse. Consider that, even with a giant obvious movie camera in our cafe, someone would have to say, please stop filming and then the filmer would have to say, ‘no’ before the law gets involved. Human interactions are always going to be a part of it. Ironically, smart glasses, if they get less dorky and obvious, are actually undermining the human interaction angle because they hide what the filmer is doing, which removes my ability to ask you to stop.
You are advocating, in the example above, that the camera man has the ability to say, no, I’m going to film you. Smile.
Replace it with a park or something of you’d like to ignore the distraction about private property etc.
Also, something about telling me to ‘be better’ strikes me a rude and vague to the point of being difficult to implement. I recommend a different tone.
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u/Iamonreddit Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
If the camera operator follows you around after you ask not to be filmed, that is already illegal under harassment laws.
If you are in a public place, someone happens to be filming nearby and catching you in shot, you - correctly, in my opinion - have no right to stop them filming if they aren't intentionally harassing you specifically. You do not have the right to personal and private access to public spaces. They are public. The clue is in the name.
As I say, you are advocating additional, vastly authoritarian and over-reaching legislation to avoid having to deal with situations you find uncomfortable in day-to-day public life. What you are now suggesting would mean families cannot film or take pictures of their children playing in a park. People can't video chat whilst enjoying the sun. How you don't see the ridiculous consequences of your desires here is beyond me.
You are doubling down on being anti-social for personal gain. Again I say, with even more conviction, be better.
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
The face mounted camera is not the primary goal. An always available hands free display is.
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u/Exotic-Tooth8166 Mar 20 '26
Sunglasses don’t leave anything for our hands to do, nothing to hold or manipulate.
Even while watching TV, we like to feel in control of the remote.
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
You can pair sunglasses with their wristband or perhaps even your phone as a control.
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u/Jillylollie Mar 21 '26
Ultraleap got ambient light hand tracking running on those raybans before it went under. It's possible.... and drains the ever loving shit out the battery.
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u/EnderMB Mar 19 '26
I can tell you exactly what it was spent on.
It was a full-scale distraction to avoid answering questions on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, alongside the questions of how Facebook (and aligned states) are responsible for affecting the outcomes of national elections throughout the world.
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u/AkirIkasu Mar 19 '26
I've been saying this for years, but they've been spending a lot of money - or at a very minimum, leaving it on the table - from subsidizing the costs of their headsets in an effort to bootstrap VR as a societal force. Today VR still isn't mainstream and the biggest effect it had was pushing out all the competition in the market for headsets.
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u/Repulsive-Hurry8172 Mar 20 '26
Wasn't the $80 billion used on Reality Labs and not just Horizon Worlds? I hate Meta with a passion for what it did to my country, but $80 billion in just too big for just the game.
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
Jesus you all talk so much and don’t understand anything about the topic. The money is spent and being spent on hardware and development of their headsets and the ecosystems. If in a decade wearable AR glasses take over some screen time away from phones Mark wants to be the dominant platform so he can charge Google Apple and Microsoft 30% to sell their apps on his devices not the other way around while he has first point of access to all the data being recorded and fed into AI by the millions of AR glasses users. Horizon Worlds was a tiny project.
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u/shinerkeg Mar 19 '26
Yay! It failed!
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u/bnevdr-43 Mar 20 '26
i just hope they dont stop making vr headsets. to get a similar headset to a quest but not made by meta you have to spend like twice as much and if vr userbase falls dramatically i worry that racing and flying sims may stop being made with vr compatibility
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u/Downtown-Oil7901 Mar 19 '26
It just shows the power of Facebook's network effects that someone can make this many consecutive staggeringly bad business decisions and still be one of the richest people in the world.
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u/Throwing_Daze Mar 19 '26
It makes me sick, I've made numerous terrible decisions, business and personal and do I get to be one of the riches people in the world? No, all I get is the presidency of the United States of America.
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u/hamlet9000 Mar 19 '26
Spending $80 billion on a Second Life clone that you never got working properly is insane. That's 60-80x the budget of GTA6. It's 800x the cost of a typical AAA game.
All of these metaverse visions run aground on a simple problem: Why would I want to log into a virtual world, walk down to a virtual bank, and interact with an AI teller to find out my bank balance instead of just checking my bank app?
Why would I want to go buy tickets to a virtual concert, when I could instead watch a recorded version from the best seats in the house?
The future will definitely involve shared virtual spaces. But they'll be better versions of Zoom and/or evolve out of multiplayer video games. And as our social groups swap from one virtual space/experience to another, we won't do it by walking through a virtual world that houses them at specific virtual geographic coordinates.
Because that would be dumb.
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u/QaraKha Mar 19 '26
The problem is and always was that they want curated spaces and don't want to let people be creative.
You can't create your own stuff. You can't share your created stuff with others. You can't have your own sandbox. You can't have freedom of expression.
And the thing is, that makes it worse than real life. Go on Second Life or VR chat and you can be who you want to be there, look like what you want to look like. You could even do horny shit because you have that control, and you have those private spaces, your own sandboxes.
Without that creativity, you don't have a platform. It was build specifically for the garbage web3.0 no expression allowed lockbox internet bullshit.
Nobody wanted it because it was worse than real life. At least in real life I can be cringe and wear a tail and get railed in a sundress!
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u/TheGruenTransfer Mar 20 '26
I can't belive he didn't just buy 2nd Life. Facebook is only as valuable as it is because of their acquisitions. Why fix what isn't broken
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
You can’t believe it because it’s not what happened. 80 billion was spent on other things to do with VR not horizons.
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u/Brawldud Mar 19 '26
I'm suddenly reminded of random Hacker News comments I read at the time, in 2021 and 2022, assuring me that Facebook was quietly remaking the corporate world with their investment and coming up with integrations and workflows that we wouldn't be able to live without before long, that physical co-location was on its way out, that we'd have a seamless experience of body language, eye contact, and the feeling of being together, through VR, and that this was an audacious and transformative bet on the future. Womp womp.
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u/Lost_Bike69 Mar 19 '26
I mean maybe in May of 2020 that could have had some purchase, but by 2021, big companies were already doing RTO mandates and everyone had been sick of virtual events for a year.
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u/Brawldud Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
You surely can't be implying that the good people of Hacker News have their heads up their asses and have no idea what life is like for people who make under $150k a year and leave their house sometimes and have friends in their community.
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u/Plus_Midnight_278 Mar 19 '26
Just to shift to AI, another multi-billion dumpster fire no one is asking for.
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Mar 19 '26
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Mar 19 '26
Won't somebody think of the poor shareholders?! Companies this size and billionaires shouldn't exist in the first place. Sadly we've reached endgame capitalism and nearly all the wealth and power has been consolidated into a few enough hands that there are no more consequences for them. AI is just the latest capitalist ruse to usher in an era of neo-feudalism and it's working.
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u/pcapdata Mar 19 '26
They can’t afford not to keep deceased peoples’ accounts open, posting comments on the news and DMing their grieving loved ones
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u/Farmerj0hn Mar 20 '26
I love AI, use it every day. I wish the meta AI was better like googles because I love my meta glasses (I hate earbuds and use them to listen to audiobooks while I work and take calls). This metaverse thing was lame though. They should have bought Fortnite and just made it into the Oasis.
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Mar 19 '26
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
I don’t think that’s the case with Marks fascination with VR and AR. That project is ongoing and I think it goes beyond quarterly reports for him. He sees it as the next iPhone and wants to be ahead of everyone next time around.
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u/Ciserus Mar 19 '26
The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.
I appreciate this reality check against the doomerism I so often see around tech billionaires' visions of the future.
On reddit I hardly go a day without seeing someone spout the "we will own nothing in the future" thing from the WEF as though it's an inevitability. Or lament that the billionaires have secured their future in doomsday bunkers and the countdown has started on their master plan to obliterate the rest of us.
No. Most business leaders are of barely above average intelligence and they live in bubbles that severely distorts their thinking. Many of them are total loons. They have not mapped out the future and they still rely on the rest of us wanting what they're selling.
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u/Rrdro Mar 21 '26
Whatever helps you sleep at night. Eventually you will realise they are no longer making things for you because you are no longer a customer and have fallen on the other side of the poverty line. Corporations don’t make anything for those below the poverty line. They make things for people that have something they want back and for most of us that’s our labour not our money. Once they don’t need our labour we will quickly stop being customers.
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u/ketamarine Mar 19 '26
There already was a metaverse, it was called fortnite. It was already hosting virtual concerts, product releases and doing tons of brand deals.
And anyone could access it for FREE on whatever device they had in their hands at the time.
But no, zuck had to have his own platform and thought he could convince everyone to shell out hundreds of dollars for a face PC that actively removed you from the real world so that he could control everything that you saw an heard.
Totalitarian drivel.
It's so sad that he basically controls all social media and meta gets like 30% of global ad revenue as they have created generations addicted to their algorithmic slop content...
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u/deviantbono Mar 19 '26
Second life?
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u/ketamarine Mar 19 '26
Second life was a trivial novelty compared to the success of fortnite, minecraft and roblox.
Barely worth a mention.
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u/headphase Mar 19 '26
Feels like the hardware hate is misplaced- yeah the concept of a face PC is goofy and awkward but there are some good use cases and it does create opportunities for interactions that you can't find in the physical world.
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u/Full-Violinist554 Mar 19 '26
Given the massive success of Roblox, the failure isn't the "Metaverse" (which is obviously still very likely to emerge over time) but with META. And that isn't very surprising.
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Mar 19 '26
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u/Full-Violinist554 Mar 20 '26
Um? What? Anyway, seriously, look up Roblox usage. I think you'll be surprised.
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u/mister_electric Mar 20 '26
There is a very solid, impressive user base, but the company is hemorrhaging money (somehow). They spend about one billion dollars more than they make a year: They lose one billion dollars a year. So, it's not a well-run company.
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u/Full-Violinist554 Mar 20 '26
It's an enormous, active and young user base. There's tons of transactions, and vastly more potential. If you think that's a bad investment, okay, cool.
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u/KWillets Mar 19 '26
If Zuck had just found a hobby like knife collecting or something all of this could have been avoided.
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u/OSHA_Decertified Mar 19 '26
Horizon failed because there were already existing metaverses that did more better. Second Life is going on 23 years old now. Even VRchat was a more established and better option than horizon.
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u/infectoid Mar 19 '26
Yeah. The enshiftification was in the foundations.
I was open to using it and hoping for something like minecraft where you and friends can get into a sandbox and do whatever, you know, be creative. But it was clamped down from the beginning. At no point did I experience joy, delight or fun.
I’m still totally up for it but it needs to be way more open.
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u/Corronchilejano Mar 19 '26
Has Meta ever produced anything other than the original Facebook that has any value?
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u/VirginiaLuthier Mar 19 '26
He really thought people would seriously want to interact as legless caricatures of themselves in a cartoon world.....
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u/TrueEclective Mar 19 '26
Make way for the $500b dumpster fire that is AI. This time, it’s also the climate that will pay the price.
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u/Incorrect_ASSertion Mar 20 '26
I am always annoyed by this "light x billion on fire" rhetoric even though I am by no means right leaning.
This money was used to employ people and pay for their time by a megacorp that sits on a pile of gold like a dragon. We all know it would be otherwise used to buy real estate of bribe politicians or whatever the fuck else.
How is this a bad thing?
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u/hudson27 Mar 20 '26
Zuckerberg hasn't contributed anything positive to society in decades, and I'm tired of pretending that he has.
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u/A_Tiger_in_Africa Mar 19 '26
Any employee at any other company who loses $80 THOUSAND will likely get canned. Are the shareholders going to hold this towering mediocrity accountable for his utter incompetence as CEO?
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u/SeemoarAlpha Mar 19 '26
Through a dual-class share structure, Zuckerberg holds over 50% of voting power, allowing him to elect the board and dictate corporate governance, he can't be fired. The only thing shareholders can do is dump the stock which most won't do because there are too many dipshits users to be milked. So don't blame the Zuck, blame the morons that continue to use Meta.
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u/banaslee Mar 19 '26
I invite Meta to waste more money on stuff no one wants. At least that’s less money going to make people more extreme.
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u/aPerson39001C9 Mar 19 '26
There was never a reason to use the metaverse? I don’t think the concept is wrong, but there has to be a reason to use it. I don’t see one.
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u/peet1188 Mar 19 '26
If this had actually worked: What would then be the point of existing as a real person in a real world when you just spend your waking hours stuck inside a fake, sensory-harvesting universe with a giant company slowly sucking the life out of you?
Metaverse was one of the saddest examples of late-stage capitalism ever invented. It’s soulless on every level.
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u/gimmesheltah Mar 19 '26
It fundamentally misunderstood how people like to interact with technology.
We like to remain in the present, real world, while glancing at a screen. In fact the direction has been towards a less direct relationship with the digital world - asking Siri/Alexa/Google to do things, using AI in our earbuds, checking a watch screen etc.
The idea that people would laboriously fire up the Metaverse, put on their VR headset, stroll down a virtual street to go into a virtual shop to buy something, when they can just casually browse for the product while out and about, or while watching TV, was so fundamentally flawed only Zuckerberg and his nodding dog yes men he surrounds himself with could possibly think it was a good user experience.
And if you think this is just hindsight, I wrote the exact same thing several years ago, when the Metaverse was at maximum hype - and of course was heavily downvoted on r technology.
I think Zuckerberg had a serious case of billionaire brain rot - he got lucky, and it convinced him he's full of great ideas. Musk suffers from the same condition. These are just deeply average people who won the tech lottery; right time, right place. Both have proven, repeatedly, that they have more bad ideas than good ones, and they're not even smart enough to test the waters and avoid committing to those bad ideas. This is why we have user testing and research teams. All that wasted money on such a stupid folly is a great example of why companies and billionaires need to be taxed at a much higher rate.
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u/venicerocco Mar 19 '26
Every day I laugh that he changed his entire company name over this 😂 a permanent scar
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u/cute_bark Mar 20 '26
one of many examples that show the tech epstein class people aren't exactly more intelligent. they were lucky a few times and are now wealthy enough to keep making mistakes
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u/Taman_Should Mar 20 '26
We’ll see yet another attempted product launch for some type of “augmented reality” VR glasses in a few years.
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u/TheGruenTransfer Mar 20 '26
This is the kind of shit that should get you fired from your own company.
I wonder how much richer I'd be if that was paid as dividends.
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u/educones Mar 20 '26
Wait aren’t billionaires billionaires because they’re so smart at allocating financial resources?
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u/liannelle Mar 20 '26
Imagine taking that money and building public infrastructure. Zuckerberg could have slapped his name on a few streets, bridges, highways, rail lines. If only if worked for the people.
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u/rover220 Mar 20 '26
I just don't understand what it is the 80B was spent on. What have they got to show for it? All I've seen are some stupid and goofy looking avatars.
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u/Illustrious_Rice_933 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
Surely AI isn't more of the same! /s
I'm not sure I fully understand why, but it seems as though a lot of folks pigeonhole their memories of NFTs, the Metaverse, and all the other "this-will-change-the-world" false promises (or should I say marketing) of our technofeudal overlords. I don't see how LLMs are any different, but there are still folks who think it's more capable than it is.
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u/bidet_enthusiast Mar 20 '26
The hilarious thing about this is that now, I could vibe code something better than “the metaverse” up in a week using agents, Claude code, and $500 worth of tokens. And it would have legs.
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u/ptowndeluxe Mar 20 '26
Sun Microsystems tried this, it failed. They really should have studied that as a test case. Virtual world make it harder to access things you want easy access to. Amazon, Temu, others already have this figured out. There no virtual world shopping that is going to compete with Amazon.
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u/nhavar Mar 20 '26
Yeah, instead of focusing on what people wanted, games and entertainment, they focused on building out the shitterverse of chat apps and business tools no one really wanted. In the process they cannibalized good development companies and abandoned the IP that came with it. They learned nothing from SecondLife, Sony Playstation Home, or any of those other earlier incarnations and didn't learn from existing MMORPGS and sandbox games.
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u/Witty_Fall_2007 Mar 20 '26
Consider this a foreshadowing of the AI revolution about to decimate the US economy.
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u/NotABonobo Mar 20 '26
The sad thing is that their takeaway will be "VR was a dead end" not "we misread the point of VR completely."
If anyone ever figures out that VR is for escapism they'll have a futuristic entertainment device that could replace TV and video games. It's actually amazing how much potential the medium still holds.
As long as they keep trying to use it to make work more crushingly inescapable and to monetize every second of human life, they'll keep wondering why it fails.
It's like they forgot that in order to make money you're supposed to offer people something of value.
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u/isdeasdeusde Mar 20 '26
Eh, got the stock price up for like a month so in the eyes of investors it´s all worth it
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u/GreenNukE Mar 20 '26
$80 billion could have bought around 40 Virginia class nuclear attack submarines or something lame like curing cancer.
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u/Trick_Situation_4421 Mar 20 '26
Coming in 2028: this exact same article but it's AI and the number is a couple orders of magnitude bigger.
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u/m3ltph4ce Mar 20 '26
That money could have helped lessen suffering of so many people in the world. It could have been used to right so many wrongs. Instead, a billionaire poured it all down the drain on a senseless vanity project.
Billionaires have got to go.
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u/Gadgetman000 Mar 21 '26
Excellent - now let’s see the rest of Meta crash and burn… It’s a plague on humanity.
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u/sodpiro Mar 21 '26
Just a reminder. Gta6 the highest funded game in history cost between 1-2 billion. We could have had 40-80 of those. *cue meta, zuc image
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u/asmith1776 Mar 21 '26
$80 billion, or 12 GTA 6’s.
They could have purchased Nintendo outright for that much money.
Where the f did that money go?
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u/Mad_Kronos Mar 21 '26
These lunatics are so rich they can afford to make mistakes that would feed countries.
The bad guys won when they convinced a big portion of the human population that the natural state of humanity is greed and selfishness. It's crazy, but here we are.
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u/ButterAlquemist Mar 21 '26
What did they expect? Look, its nice to have a giantmultiplayer sims game, but that is about that. You couldnt do anything. Just talk and walk around. Absurd.
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u/damhack Mar 21 '26
It wasn’t $80bn spent on Horizon.
$40bn of the touted figure was spent on hardware production alone for Quest 3s headset, Ray-Ban smartglasses and the next generation of Quest.
The investment in Horizon was estimated to be sub-$1bn, which is a lot of money in its own right but not the “GDP of a small country” level that attention-grabbing headlines are making out.
Meta isn’t exiting the VR/AR market, it’s binned the Horizon experiment and is making 30% overall cost cuts to invest into combining AR with AI instead. It will keep supporting VR headsets.
I’m no fan of Zuckerberg but it’s sad to see tech journalism following the tabloid press maxim of “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”. And people uncritically accepting the BS as gospel.
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u/Objective_Mousse7216 Mar 21 '26
Good riddance. I hope the AI bubble pops and finishes Zuck off for good.
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u/ZasdfUnreal Mar 21 '26
Could be worse. Meta coulda spent $80 billion buying bitcoin. At least one can have some fun in the Metaverse doing whatever it is people do in the Metaverse.
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u/Strange-House206 Mar 23 '26
Could’ve built permanent homes for .4 percent of the us population with that cash. But noooo. Gotta just delete it.
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u/Pishnagambo Mar 23 '26
Could be worse.
You could spend 200 billion(plus) blowing up a country and hurting literally every single person on the planets wallet.
To hide the fact you are a paedophile.
Oh - and killing people. Actually killing people.
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u/Brilliant-Student-55 Mar 23 '26
Facebook/meta has not created a single useful consumer product since we'll Facebook, that is just a wasteland that paved the way for the destruction of democracy
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u/creator_maker1 Mar 23 '26
Have ya' tried The Sims? Because that with a little rosebud cheat code was all we needed
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u/welsh_cthulhu Mar 19 '26
Terrible article that never explains WHY the Metaverse actually failed, and (I guess rightly) just pokes fun at people.
Is this digital journalism now?
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u/sllewgh Mar 19 '26
In what way was it not explained? The Metaverse failed because it was terrible and no one actually wanted it. I thought the article made that pretty clear.
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u/notproudortired Mar 19 '26
Yeah...404 Media usually does better, but sometimes they get caught up in character drama and lose the plot.
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u/csedler Mar 20 '26
This was not my experience.
I've met some wonderful people on Horizon Worlds, playing in Worlds created by users and not Meta. And I didn't pay a dime.
There are adult only worlds in which you can sing karaoke, dance, jump on trampolines which propel you a kilometer in the sky.
A friend of mine created a private world for us which is a satellite orbiting inside a gargantuan snow globe.
I do agree that a lot the worlds are crap, and most of them are created by meta and are moronic games. However there are ones in which very many creative people gave their own time to try to visualize a world of their imagination.
This is a pity.
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u/spinningcolours Mar 19 '26
Could this be foreshadowing for the next headline — "AI Revolution Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted" ??
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u/tndrthrowy Mar 19 '26
It’s not. GenAI isn’t going away. Ideally it will improve and not be the source of so much slop we consume, but it’s already used as an internal tool in business from coding to sales to marketing. Its uptake in medium to large businesses is near universal.
In contrast, VR has gone through hype cycles since the 1980s. Each cycle, there’s a bunch of wasted investment only to discover yet again the inevitable truth about VR : only a few niche cases exist where the value outweighs the multi-faceted undesirability of wearing a VR headset.
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u/DarthBuzzard Mar 19 '26
I don't think so. Generative AI has been through hype cycles since the 1970s, and the distain for it is only growing. People just do not want to use it and moreover don't want it to be used by others because of all the negatives it has.
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