Employees Reveal Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Vision Is A Clunky, Boring, Ego-Driven Mess
from the all-in-service-to-one-man's-gargantuan-ego dept
It will never stop being bizarre to me that a social media app tried to claim ownership of VR, AR, and effectively every next-gen, Internet-related technology under the “Metaverse” brand… and the entirety of the tech press just simply… went along with it. As a result, we’ve spent the better part of the last few years mired in an endless ocean of unhinged hyperbole about “the Metaverse vision” and what it means.
While the press and investors have spent countless hours propping up Zuckerberg’s ego on this subject, the actual end product isn’t much to write home about. Employees have found Meta’s flagship VR social network, Horizon Worlds, to be a buggy mess they don’t enjoy using:
“Since launching late last year, we have seen that the core thesis of Horizon Worlds — a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds — is strong,” [Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal] Shah wrote in a memo last month. “But currently feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted.”
At the same time, Zuckerberg’s ego has resulted in all Metaverse marketing utilizing the image of a CEO whose outward-facing charm is muted at best. Despite having an unlimited marketing budget and access to the best marketing talent in the world, most Metaverse marketing looks like it was barfed out of a 2007-era Xbox promotional demo, with Zuckerberg’s pasty visage bizarrely the singular focus.
The new Meta Quest Pro VR headset, released this week, could possibly be a huge evolutionary leap, but again, you’d never really know it because Meta’s update this week featured a gobsmacking and bizarrely heavy dose of poorly rendered simulacrums of an already charisma-challenged CEO.
But inside of the company, far away from early, fluff-filled press coverage, bad marketing choices, VC fawning, and Zuckerberg’s ego, Meta employees are making it clear that many neither understand nor actually like whatever the hell it is they’re building:
“Mr. Zuckerberg’s zeal for the metaverse has been met with skepticism by some Meta employees. This year, he urged teams to hold meetings inside Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, which allows users to gather in virtual conference rooms. But many employees didn’t own V.R. headsets or hadn’t set them up yet, and had to scramble to buy and register devices before managers caught on, according to one person with knowledge of the events.
In a May poll of 1,000 Meta employees conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional social network, only 58 percent said they understood the company’s metaverse strategy.
The foundational idea that Zuckerberg can convince the entirety of Facebook’s aging populace to migrate to a sometimes vomit-inducing walled garden of sweaty plastic headsets never made coherent sense. But because Zuckerberg is so wealthy, absolute legions of yes men and women have lined up in service to his ego. So far that’s not working out great, with Meta stock seeing a 60 percent drop in the last year alone.
In the U.S. there’s long been a steadily growing chasm between marketing and reality, and the Metaverse personifies this dominant American cultural trait. Marketing could go a long way toward covering the warts of Horizon Worlds, but there’s absolutely nothing about the current marketing that screams cutting edge or futuristic, and Zuckerberg’s mandated presence is just… odd.
Such terrible marketing can’t obscure the fact that Meta can’t seem to innovate its way around competitors like TikTok. Nor has it proven (at any point, really) that it can be innovative enough to become the kind of next-generation AR/VR global town square it envisions itself becoming.
Facebook has never really been known as an innovative company on the kind of scale we reserve for companies like Apple, but the Metaverse hype and investment train requires that everybody pretend otherwise in a strange, greedy, mass delusion. And with the FTC finally (for now) cracking down on the company’s longstanding catch and kill strategies, Meta can’t M&A its way to AR/VR dominance either.
Meta could still possibly succeed if it removed Zuckerberg’s ego (and possibly Zuckerberg himself) from the management equation, stopped using a man with the charisma of a damp walnut in absolutely all Metaverse marketing, and gained a little humility after the last few years of regulatory, political, and market headaches. But there’s scant evidence that any of that seems likely anytime soon.
Filed Under: augmented reality, ego, horizon worlds, hype, innovation, mark zuckerberg, metaverse, video games, virtual reality, vr
Companies: meta
Comments on “Employees Reveal Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Vision Is A Clunky, Boring, Ego-Driven Mess”
VR certainly would be quite a bit more vomit-inducing if you had to share it with a cartoonified Zuckerberg.
There's a bad sign right there.
… The company insisted on people using the VR headsets, but didn’t hand them out as company equipment like the laptops, monitors, etc are treated? That’s a firm “Nope” in my book.
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Reminiscent of when Blackberry stopped giving all their employees Blackberries. One doesn’t hear about that company or their namesake product much anymore.
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They’re still around – in a different market though, no consumer devices so not on a lot of radars.
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BlackBerry devices were still on the market when they cancelled the employee phones. By then they were Android phones made by third parties; still, the cancellation suggests they didn’t think highly about these third-party efforts. No longer did they think employees might actually be excited to get a BlackBerry-branded device as a perk.
The company is lumbering along, but they’re little more than a holding company (and minor patent troll) for mostly-unrelated businesses now.
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If the equipment is mandatory to do the job, then it needs to be supplied by the company. Nobody expects an office worker to buy their own desktop PC for work, and nobody expects a public transit bus driver to spring for his own bus.
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It sounds like a way for Meta to recoup costs on making a dud product, by charging the people foolishness to work for them. Which makes sense as a perverse scam, but is a cruel thing to do to employees. Telling, though.
Already?
It’s been years already? And they actually launched something besides lofty pie in the sky vague speech? Did not know that.
I guess my strategy of not caring at all is paying off.
Who needs VR when reality these days is much crazier than you can make up?
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Probably people who can’t take reality as it exists and need to substitute their own. See for example: flat-earthers, Q folks, well over half the GOP…
This is a rather dubious explanation that does not seem to consider the history of this space. The media was just as excited about Second Life, which didn’t have a billionaire founder or even a well-known or powerful corporation behind it. So I doubt it’s about Zuckerberg at all. Perhaps it’s somewhat about Facebook, in that the media and investors think they may have the money and power to make this happen.
I think, more likely, that people are concerned about missing out. News organizations were opening “offices” in Second Life a decade and a half ago, probably because nobody wanted to be the last such organization without an office, the one who “didn’t get it”. Or maybe people just think it’s cool, based on fiction such as Neuromancer, Snow Crash, The Matrix, and Ready Player One. There’s certainly some appeal to the idea of unifying our hundreds of separate virtual spaces. (And rather less appeal to the idea of giving one person or company control over everything—hence the dystopian themes in much of that fiction. Still, one can benefit from being friendly with dictators before they rise to power.)
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I take that particular sentence as aimed more at Zuckerberg’s immediate circle – i.e. internally at Facebook, there’s a bunch of Yes-folk not willing to tell Zuckerberg that his meta avatar is a marketing disaster and that they should have someone who is not the charismatic equivalent of a soggy, moldy blanket as the Face of metaverse, if there is to be a face at all. Just as an example.
That part has nothing to do with the media itself, and everything to do with Facebook’s marketing strategy, which is apparently designed to fail horribly.
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Why would Zuckerberg’s personal wealth have any bearing on their actions? If anything, they’re sycophantic because they want Facebook’s wealth, but such greed occurs even at non-wealthy companies.
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While the “yes-people” phenomenon is something that seems to come with power, great personal wealth seems to make it worse. See president of twitter’s texts to Mr Musk re twitter content moderation, and Musk basically blowing off an offer of serious discussion and consideration.
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One does not even need to look at Second Life when a more recent direct competitor exists.
It’s VRChat. It’s just as buggy as Horizon Worlds, and a lot less secure, yet it’s taking off… in Japan.
It’s not me dismissing the history, mind. There’s a very similar trend of real-world corps and events doing VR events in the VRChat environment. It’s just that VRChat does the same thing, with a ton more vibrancy and less company control, all while having a fraction of the budget, staff and being shackled to a old-ass version of Unity, due to public backlash over them adding anticheat as a stopgap measure to shore up security and nixing mods to presumably free up manpower to tackle a massive backlog.
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The whole news thing can be explained by news orgs not wanting another “Vietnam” under their belts from ignoring technology again.
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So I read those books, saw those movies; my take away was that a ‘metaverse’ would be an awful and uncool place to exist. As a way to access information, a text-based interface seems better and maybe that’s why webpages full of text continue to outlast attempts at getting people to adopt a technology that most people don’t find as cool as enthusiasts.
As you point out, they’re dystopian fantasies that use a cyber realm as a major plot device and to a lesser degree a major part of their settings. However, even in those fictions people who spend a lot of time in VR are outcasts or at least niche weirdos practicing what’s essentially an arcane and unpopular art.
I feel like anyone trying to bring those worlds into existence either lacks critical thinking skills and would be easily exploited, or are those intending to exploit them.
About a year ago I visited a local VR arcade to do some research for the story. It was incredibly off-putting and reminded me more of a basement recroom (despite being ground floor) than an arcade of any kind, even the now-defunct LAN arcades from when I was younger. Aside from myself, my partner, and the proprietor it was empty for entire time I talked to him.
The hype for VR revives itself time and again, since the heydey of Jaron Lanier. Who fears really seem to be Zuckerberg’s playbook. Oh well, Sweet Baby Rays in 3D!
You know Horizon Worlds is as dead as Facebook’s new name when you DIRECT COMPETITORS are more vibrant, if just as buggy and have more security issues than the entirety of the Internet.
Yes, I am talking about VRChat.
No sexx0rs?
It does not matter if it is good or not. As long as Meta insists there will not be any sex in their virtual world it will continue to be a dead end. The corporate revulsion to anything outside of their idea of what is mainstream will mean that a world that is an ideal platform for open and free expression will never have the spark to make it interesting in any sense.
*monocle pop*
All that money to throw at this, and Meta can’t even beat a single VTuber in terms of imagination and self-expression. Now that’s comedy.
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Heck, they got nothin’ on a two-state PNG tuber.
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It’s even worse.
All that money, and their direct competitor manages to recreate the demo…
In hours.
I’m oversimplifying things, of course. But VRChat had one of its users recreate the Horizon Worlds demo and release it as a VRChat World for a bit.
Bleh!
Imagine trying to market a product for work when more then 30% of users get motion sickness. They might want to add a puke emote when people vomit in meeting.
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Top used emoji to be sure.
That says it all, really. People shouldn’t be “scrambling” to buy something they need for work before managers notice, they should be supplied by the company, with managers chasing up supplies for staff who haven’t got them yet. A culture where employees’ needs aren’t met just for the basics of what they’re being told to do, and instead encourages people to keep secrets from managers and go behind their backs, is not a healthy one.
As for the VR meetings, it probably makes sense with an ego-maniac used to filling rooms with paid sycophants like Zuckerberg, but unless they get their message worked out, it’s less then useless. People already struggle with Zoom/teams meetings, but at least you can still participate through audio only or chat if something screws up. Then, most meetings don’t require 100% of a person’s attention, so you can work on another screen while someone spends 10 minutes rambling through something you already knew and could have been an email.
With VR, it seems to me that it’s the worst of both worlds. You have to drop everything to go to the room where the meeting is taking place, wait around for everyone else to turn up and being unable to silently continue working, as with a physical room. But, now you have additional peripherals and setup, waiting for people to connect and work out minor tech issues like you do on Teams, only this time without a solution to replace whatever’s so unique and exciting it has to be done in VR.
This just seems like something that sounds cool to a boring guy who doesn’t have anything fulfilling in his life outside of boardroom meetings and playing around with tech that looked amazing in whatever 90s movie he wants to emulate.
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That’s who this is being sold to now. I think even Zuckerberg realizes that he can’t sell this to the general public, so he and Meta are pivoting to the class of people they can sell this to: ego-driven office managers who want to take back the power and control they lost when work-from-home became a thing. Those managers could compel their work-at-home employees to do their work in the Metaverse, after all—and what better way to make sure people are doing their jobs from home than by returning them to the office, even if only virtually?
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I’m not going even to start on Meta’s ideas about emulating a keyboard and other aspect of a normal work environment in VR. I keep imagining people tethered to virtual cubicles and forced to wear headsets (that they paid for) to do any work at all, entirely in that virtual space.
Neo’s desk job in the Matrix is a great comparison in some ways and a big nope to that. Seeing that did a lot to push me to go into the liberal arts instead of continuing some IT-related path in college. Unfortunately I never quite escaped the tech matrix.
metaverse
why does ANYONE think that a life lived primarily in virtual reality is a good thing? It seems to be a formula for utterly destroying human life; for a channel to complete control over populations and societies; for utterly destroying all the good qualities of human life. How was this observation not made by everyone when the concept was first introduced rather than treating it as another, possibly, revolutionary business and profit-making machine. And now the criticism isn’t about what a horror the idea is but rather how badly it has been pursued.
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There is actually a (plausibly) good reason to essentially live in VR: where physical maladies prevent someone from interacting with people or leaving their homes IRL (like those who are so immune-compromised that literally live in a plastic bubble their whole lives). Not everyone is capable of having a healthy social life through normal means.
Metaverse is a great technology. You can read about it here: https://www.visartech.com/blog/uncovering-businesses-opportunities-in-metaverse/ But Zuckerberg makes everything seem so weird and unappealing. It’s really upsetting.
He would have made a good pastry chef.
Metaverse
This is an excellent collection of good informative blogs about the metaverse.