As a technologist, the tech of VR is neat but as a human I haven't found the use case of the social Metaverse compelling and I don't see how better fidelity or tech will make it fundamentally different enough to suddenly become "must have" to the mass market.

VR is great for some kinds of immersive gaming and I can see media consumption as compelling when the resolution, optics and FOV get there but I'm no longer confident there's some magic use case waiting to be discovered that makes the social Metaverse "the future" Zuck thinks it can be (even if it's not Meta who finds it). As for telepresence, the 'Zoom-like' format works well enough and I don't feel any need for increased immersion.

I admit I could be wrong, and the technologist in me kind of hopes I am, but I now think there's a real possibility it just never goes big.

All the people having fun are in VRChat or Neos, and most of them are furries. :)

This is always what I think of when I hear about how the Meta side of things is going.

Give furries and anime folk good tools and a bit of freedom without the Meta-moralizing, and you end up with spaces people actually want to check out, not just duplo brick copies of mundane daily life.

"the whole metaverse is some sort of Matrix-style life-force drain"

That's hell, in other words: a great variety of worlds, all are somehow restrictive and repetitive, where a bunch of poor souls are stuck, "leaking life-force". They are bound to those worlds by uncontrollable desires, that make them suffer, but also give them a sense of wicked pleasure. Zuck has a great intuition.

This is what a socially awkward billionaire who lives on his own island thinks is socializing. Not surprising at all.

The issue with Zuck's metaverse is they ignore existing products like VRChat, half-ass everything, and doesn't seem to give a crap about users minus the 2 Quest product line.

Yes, I know their goal is to create walled garden and milk the * out of everyone. However, you need something that people are willing to became the sheep, which zuck's lacked.

> Still, I can’t help noticing how many of the stories tonight are about being alone — about not getting laid, not talking to the girl, not having someone there when they take off the headset. Seen through the lens of the metaverse, America looks so huge and so lonely.

TL;DR: author moves from the UK to the US. Checks out the metaverse because life is so isolating in most of America. Turns out it's full of sad, horny, lonely Americans, many of them below the age of 18. Author eventually moves back to the UK and does not miss the alienation of the US one bit.

This article was actually pretty hard to get through. Seems like the Metaverse has a vibe somewhere between 4chan, online gaming, and a shopping mall in 2002; it's kind of boring, but a lot of people have so little else to do that they spend time there anyway.

Also apparently most of the people in the Metaverse use the headset for virtual porn, because they're lonely. It sounds like a very sad place.

The entire "they're all young lonely people" is such a bizarre narrative especially when it comes from techies, reminds me of how gamers or even just computer people in general were stereotyped as being reclusive nerds before it became cool to be in tech.

They're young people with enough free time and money to play around with emerging technologies that are still a bit too fiddly and niche. It's kind of a given that such a demographic probably doesn't have to worry much about relationships. Being young, it's also a given that a lot of what they do involves sexual references even if they aren't seeking any sex in real life.

After reading through the article I'm not really seeing the loneliness these other people are supposedly experiencing. It's just typical internet banter, not too unlike what people sharing a discord server might engage in.

While I don't know anyone who frequents Meta's platform, I do know many VRChat regulars (personally I average ~5-6 hours a year in it, while they might be around an hour daily at least) and none of them would say they're lonely, many of them aren't in relationships, but that isn't from a lack of ability, they simply aren't at a point in life where being in a relationship matters to them.

Yeah, I feel like if this author had jumped in some IRC channels back in the late 90's/early 2000's, they would've described the users there as lonely

Enormous nitpick that I apologize preemptively for: Ireland is not in the UK. Northern Ireland is, but the author is from Dublin, Ireland.

Thank you, that's an excellent point. I often forget that Ireland is still in the EU!

Being in the EU has nothing to do with the UK, which Ireland has been independent of since 1921.