Corresponding a report from The edgemeta horizon worlds The Metaverse app is so terrible that even the people who make it don’t want to use it. So if you woke up this morning and wondered, “I wonder if anyone figured out what the Metaverse is for?” Rest assured, it still isn’t.
horizon worlds is, according to these memos, “a synchronous social network where creators can build compelling worlds.” That means it is Second Life, but in VR and with meta-branding. The groundbreaking promises of a metaverse have always been as ambiguous and elusive as pixie dust, and no one has ever been able to pinpoint what makes it special or different from online spaces that have been around for decades. And while everything is being wagered on it in a world where nobody under 30 knows what a Facebook is, Meta’s attempts to make sense of it seem to be going so badly that the creators themselves don’t bother to to use.
The edge say they’ve seen internal memos from Meta (née Facebook) discussing how their flagship VR app for the so-called “Metaverse” is – according to playtester feedback – so full of bugs, “quality issues” and “paper cuts ‘ is ‘that it’s ‘too hard for our community to experience the magic of horizon.”
“A lot of us don’t spend that much time on it horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this quite clearly.” The edge Metaverse Vice President Vishal Shah wrote in a memo to employees last month. (Dogfooding, I’ve learned, is employees using a product before it’s made available to the public.) “Why is that?” he continues. “Why don’t we love the product we’ve developed so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
There is something so gloriously awful about this supposed internal communication, written in a language, that suggests a crooked smile and clenched teeth.
This all follows on from last month’s hilarious car crash involving multiple clowns when Meta’s Grand High Poobah, Mark Zuckerberg, tweeted the colossally awful avatar graphics horizon was for sports. These sub-Nintendo Wii Mii-likes were quickly reconnected, with promises of improved faces that brought the application into the PS3 era, but the damage was done. In the meantime, it seems, these internal memos were flying around meta HQ, asking why their own employees aren’t logging in.
“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with her horizon worlds‘ are said to continue these nagging memos from Shah. “You can’t do that without using it. come in there Organize times to do this with your colleagues or friends in both internal builds and public builds so you can interact with our community.”
Oh, it’s like a glee bath. Commanding employees to love something despite just two weeks earlier complaining that external feedback made it clear the project was unusably bad. If only they fucking loved getting better!
Perhaps the most devastating line from those memos The edge saying they read comes as Shah vents about employees not collaborating and not “working with enough flexibility.” He goes on to say
“I want to be clear on this point. We are working on a product that is not suitable for the product market. When you are turned on horizonI need you to fully embrace ambiguity and change.”
The “metaverse” so often promised by anyone looking to raise venture capital for their Web3 concept is an ethereal idea that remains unfazed by the intricacies of reality during a funding round. It’s only when someone has to sit down and start converting all this rambling into actual code and graphics that the mirage is revealed.
This is a brutal reality that Meta seems to be trying to combat with the power of love. Maybe try wishing next month.
We reached out to Meta for comment, but there was no response at the time of publication.
