A Responsibility to the Industry

I think a lot of what Big Tech does these days is about kneecapping their competitors. Meta is selling much weaker hardware than Apple, so if Apple manages to trick Meta into making a fancier-but-more-expensive interface for their XR headsets, Meta headsets get laggier, less reliable, maybe they screw up and you go VR-to-ER.

To little fanfare in the wider world [1], Meta rolled out an update for the MQ3 that adds more transparency. It isn't really bad, it isn't really that fancy, it probably doesn't lag the headset much. But I see it as a regression. It used to be if I wanted to follow somebody I was playing with in Beat Saber I could hit the Meta button and the screen was right there. Now I have to hit the Meta button, and I have to click on the Meta icon, then I have to pick "People" (I think) from the app library, and then it is open to the wrong tab so I have to pick a certain tab and finally I have a choice to follow somebody I'm playing with.

Being a leader in social software is not about being good at social software at all, it's just about your customers being locked into a two-sided market. It's about being careless, even about the bottom line -- it's not like they "enshittified" the UI to make money, they just made it worse carelessly and I think they did it to ape Apple.

[1] what a luxury it is to be able to live your life unexamined by the breathless -- Thomas Frank pointed out how frickin' lame it was that youth culture was worked over in the media which leaves me feeling today that being a Generation Xer meant I could have my youth (and middle age) without being a bug on a slide.