Meta Is Mad That Meta Employees Aren't Meeting In Meta's Metaverse

Meta's major moneymakers have made a massive muck over the fact Meta's employees aren't making it their mission to meet in Meta's metaverse.

According to a report from The Verge yesterday, Meta's Metaverse, dubbed Horizon Worlds, is so dreadfully buggy that Meta's employees have avoided using it.

If you're like Meta employees and have apparently forgotten Horizon Worlds is a thing, you may remember it from when Mark Zuckerberg excitedly posted about his avatar walking around the Horizon Worlds version of Paris, which to many looked like it was crafted for the Nintendo Wii in 2006.

Mark Zuckerberg launches Horizon Worlds in France and Spain with an eye-gougingly ugly VR selfie. Meta's metaverse ploy is surely dying in the dark. pic.twitter.com/j0l6yTYye4

— Ordinary Things (@ordinarytings) August 16, 2022

At the time, the fiasco surrounding Zuck's avatar highlighted to many the folly of crafting a virtual reality thats primary purpose seems to be "hosting meetings." While the jokes about Horizon Worlds eventually died down, Meta's insistence that Worlds needed to be a thing did not. According to The Verge, a memo sent by Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, chastised employees for not using Horizon Worlds enough, as many seemed to prefer to do "antiquated" things like "send emails" or "use Slack."

“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds," Shah wrote. "You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community."

funniest thing about even facebook's own employees never playing Horizons is that their solution is not "lets step back and figure out what about this isn't working" but rather "we must force employees to play it until they learn to love it" pic.twitter.com/UQ5jjIhb8M

— David (Meta) (@metaking64x) October 7, 2022

Shah also acknowledged an issue plaguing Horizon Worlds, which is that few people actually seem interested in it on account of bugginess and lack of obvious purpose.

"Currently, feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted."

He added in a separate memo, "Today, we are not operating with enough flexibility. I want to be clear on this point. We are working on a product that has not found product market fit. If you are on Horizon, I need you to fully embrace ambiguity and change."

The report is music to the ears of many Web3 doubters, as it suggests Meta is aware of what they've been saying all along — that the Metaverse is a superfluous concept that, to all the evidence seen so far, looks like a worse version of Second Life. For those more optimistic about the future of metaverses, it's a signal to strap in for a long ride. If Meta can't get its own employees behind the idea, it's safe to say the general public won't latch on either.