this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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It appears Meta's Horizon Worlds may literally and figuratively not have legs after all.

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[–] hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 184 points 4 months ago (1 children)

and nothing of value was lost

[–] glibg@lemmy.ca 101 points 4 months ago (2 children)

(Except of course the billions of dollars spent building it)

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 74 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That's the only thing I like about this situation. That money went to the people who worked on the project.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 34 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Did it really or did it just grow market caps

[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 17 points 4 months ago

it wasn’t meta spending on privacy invading crap that sticks around so whether it ended up as salaries or fake money it didn’t go directly to bad things

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[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Then they all get laid off. And they lose their health insurance. And their houses get foreclosed on.

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[–] yakko@feddit.uk 26 points 4 months ago

Holy tax write-offs, Batman!

[–] artyom@piefed.social 87 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

Meta (the company hilariously rebranded with this non-sense as their foundation) has moved on to the next grift: AI and mobile video surveillance devices.

[–] NaibofTabr 45 points 4 months ago (2 children)

To be fair, they've been doing mobile surveillance for a long time.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 13 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Sure, but I did specifically say mobile video surveillance. Pretty sure their goal is to reduce the friction of taking out your phone to start capturing a video.

I've already ended a friendship over these stupid things.

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[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 6 points 4 months ago

after thier propaganda feeds in fb wasnt generating enough profit.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 15 points 4 months ago

I love that they changed their name to show how serious they were about the metaverse being the future of tech and it never even came close to being a thing.

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 74 points 4 months ago (2 children)
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[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 51 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Metaverse was like the AI nobody asked for getting pushed into apps. Nobody wanted Wii Mii like hangout rooms where you have to water a clunky headset.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 39 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I never watered mine. Was that the issue?

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I watered mine and now it makes weird smells :(

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Metaverse was like the AI nobody asked for getting pushed into apps. Nobody wanted Wii Mii like hangout rooms where you have to water a clunky headset.

I was willing to give a shot to something like the Metaverse, but the instant I heard it was a Facebook/Meta project I had zero interest and hoped it would die. This was my same experience with Occulus. These are both technologies I want for a cyberpunk future, but Facebook cannot be the one to control them.

[–] cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I actually liked it back when it was called second life

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 14 points 4 months ago

I never understood why Second Life wasn’t ported to VR circa 2020.

[–] bystander@lemmy.ca 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (8 children)

One of the original employees of Oculus stuck around after the buy out, until a couple years ago and rage quit. Because he said that Meta is killing it. So yeah.

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[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 50 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It’s funny how almost everyone from FAANG is failing hard in the gaming space. Like Google fails with Stadia, Amazon shutdown how many game studios, Netflix shutdown that studio that were making a Squidgame game and the Zuck dumped billions into the metaverse void. Looks like the Silicon Valley way of doing business just doesn’t work in the games industry.

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[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 36 points 4 months ago (2 children)

VRChat is the most popular “metaverse” and it’s still growing every year.

So it’s weird to call the metaverse dead when Horizon wasn’t even in the lead among its competitors.

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 13 points 4 months ago (12 children)

VRChat is not owned by meta, therefore not part of the meta verse.

Metaverse is not the same as VR.

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[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 32 points 4 months ago (7 children)

But a device you kind of use sometimes (if you remember you own it)

Oh shit I do own one. Thanks for the reminder

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[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 20 points 4 months ago

How can I say goodbye to a place neither I nor anybody I know has ever been

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

What's dumb is that they have the hardware for it, and 3rd party software can use the inside-out tracking to making your legs work (tho it's still pretty jank compared to a physical tracker attached to your ankle or even a Kinect setup). What the fuck is Meta's problem? Do they only have vibe coders on staff? Surely it's not the jankiness they have problems with; the hand/finger tracking is also janky as fuck.

[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Facebook once explained that their mobile app is so huge because they encourage everyone to just roll their own thing instead of sharing code, because it's faster to not have to coordinate or something. Well, if you never leverage other people's work ever, you're going to spend a lot of time reinventing wheels, and a lot of those wheels will look more like hexagons.

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[–] arsCynic@piefed.social 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Even his avatar looks dead.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 18 points 4 months ago

Pretty life-like tbh

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[–] SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world 13 points 4 months ago

This will die, but in one year GTA6 will release. People are already "working" virtual jobs for pennies in unofficial servers for the last game and Rockstar has prepared the ground even more for the next.

[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The metaverse, in some form, is nearly inevitable IMO. But it'll be a federated-like infrastructure and I'm very glad Facebook will have fuck all to do with it.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 4 months ago (5 children)

It seems that you understand what the term "metaverse" was even supposed to mean; care to enlighten the rest of us?

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 months ago

Not them, but I think I've got a bead on it, assuming you treat it as a general concept and not a trademark:

It's basically the Platonic ideal of a game lobby. Kinda like what Miiverse was supposed to be, or Ready Player One. They were both after my time but I think maybe kinda like Club Penguin or Roblox? Like an overworld with a custom avatar that you can socialize in and sync into other apps or games together.

It does seem basically inevitable, fast forward gaming 10 years and I'd be surprised if something like that wasn't the norm.

[–] Malgas@beehaw.org 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Like many crappy things these days, the name and some of the concept were stolen from good sci-fi. Snow Crash, in this case, in which it was as if the entire Internet was VR.

Which, the Web barely existed when that book was written, so wild visions of what the Internet might turn out to be were to be expected. And something like it remains a common cyberpunk trope to this day.

That said, I disagree with the other poster that it will ever happen, let alone is inevitable.

[–] cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Also, one of the protagonists of that book lives in a storage unit with a roommate works five jobs and uses a pay toilet across the street¹ despite having worked at multiple wildly valuable start-ups. It is not a novel about good things or a good future.

¹at which he can't afford the premium subscriotion that has toilet paper

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It is not a novel about good things or a good future.

If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson's short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I'm in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson's works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.

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[–] rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 months ago

That's the most human looking picture of Mark Zuckerberg I've ever seen

[–] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

I miss the Playstation Home game. Wish that was vr.

[–] onnekas@sopuli.xyz 8 points 4 months ago

Say 'goodbye' already??

I never got to say 'hello' in the first place!!

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

So long and thanks for all the memes. Definitely worth the billions of dollars spent on it.

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[–] boaratio@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)
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[–] Raiderkev@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago (6 children)

I love how Facebitch changed the name of the company to Meta, and still haven't changed it back.

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[–] SteveNashFan@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

"I just bought more land in the Metaverse"

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