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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.

They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.

If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8

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Some part of facebook wanted to make Robolox, another wanted to make a virtual monitor room, another still wanted to make second life.

They were all smooshed together with ~2000 non-game dev engineers and told to learn on the job.

I think what Meta didn't realize (or maybe they did and ignored it) was that they were not pioneering the metaverse. They already existed on the platforms you just mentioned. I've never played Roblox or Second Life but I know kids and teens who live on Roblox and adults who live on Second Life. Those worlds _were_ their metaverses, and there was no reason to jump ship to another platform when they already had a digital life established. And meta just ended up making a shitty version of the metaverse anyway for the reason you mentioned.

It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.

Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.

I think the biggest problem that you hint as is that "metaverse" is an ill-defined term. When they rebranded, and given that I had been working in the 3d industry for _many_ years, I couldn’t define what the metaverse was.

To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.

Shocking to watch this human imitate us, no shade to anyone neurodivergent either, but obviously it could track he would allegedly[1] OK with his bots sexting literal children—he’s obviously only making an effort to be like us (but he isn’t)

[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)

> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.

I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.

> they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.

No reasonable person shared this expectation. It was Juicero-tier delusion.

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