this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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Meta Horizon Worlds is a giant unlicensed and unmoderated daycare.
So there are people parking their toddlers in a VR world?
The overwhelming majority of vr world users are children ages 7-14. There are almost no adults. The adults that are there are trying to interact with kids in an environment where there is zero supervision.
There's a lot of VR chat communities that heavily self moderate that crap out so adults can actually enjoy games/social instances. This approach created a whooooole lotta Wild West space full of every IP stealing debauchery you can imagine, but like the early Internet also allowed for a ton of creativity and fun. Meta's approach was to try to simply not allow anything that would be inappropriate for anyone ever to sanitize for corporate sponsors, leading to a sterile and soulless waste of time.
Utterly shocked which one has regular users creating and exploring.
Fun aside but I went into one of these heavily moderated adult communities on Meta and I was using a headset that was enterprise controlled so it had no personal meta account attached which meant I didn’t have an avatar.
When I showed up I appeared as a featureless grey avatar. I made a lot of friends until the moderator with a heavy southern US accent called me a hacker (because I was grey and featureless) and started genuinely freaking out and yelling.
A whole crowd gathered around me and some people were saying that I was a government agent (lol) and another suggested I was Russian. Anyways, they banned me for 7 days which sucked.
I went through a VR witch hunt because I was GREY.
The most funny thing about this is that they banned you for 7 days. No permaban for the russian government agent, just 7 days!
Yeah it makes the first experience with a Meta headset extremely awkward. You boot it up they and they really want you to go into these worlds. Okay, so I did. Immediately I'm bombarded by the sound of 20 unsupervised children raiding a virtual McDonald's. Okay, maybe I should find an 18+ world and try that. This was also a mistake.