this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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I mean I'm a big fan of VR but it's clearly been a money pit for meta, their massive investment in it is never going to pay back, they were betting on selling "metaverse" real estate rather than making money on the hardware
they weren't paying attention when people tried that very same thing in SecondLife
Somehow they also made it worse than second life.
It could have worked with a more measured approach, but they've been stupid about it.
That whole thing was weird. Like, even if it was a perfect simulation, it still wouldn't keep me dry and warm like real real estate, nor could I keep my stuff there.
They tried to jump right into the "popular thing drives high demand for popular spaces in popular thing" and skip the whole "make thing popular" step, banking on their name and people thinking it'll make them a ton of money.
Though tbh I can't say that was necessarily the wrong move (at least not if their entire goal is maximizing gains), since it wasn't going to get popular like they wanted in the first place, so skipping that step and going straight to fleecing those dumb enough to throw money at it might have made the most sense.
That said, I think they put more money into it than they got out of it, so I doubt that it was deliberate. Zuck probably just thought if he paid people to make it, users would just flock to it and it would be as popular as fictional VR worlds are, despite missing the tactile VR system they tend to use or the whole "VR world is popular (or the focus of everyone's life)" being a plot point rather than the consequence of someone building the world and people choosing to spend their time and money there.
Also, I'm in the demographic that probably would have been the most interested (like as a user of VR, not someone looking to just make money from it), but their offering didn't even raise enough curiosity for me to check out what they made. There is an anti-meta bias in play, but even if it had been offered by a separate entity, I still wouldn't have been interested because it sounded enshitified from the moment of concept.