I remember watching my half‐sister play Active Worlds all the way back during the dot com boom, and aside from the lack of virtual reality it sounds like it was almost identical to this: level‐building, character creation, custom textures and models, vanities like pubs and rollercoaster rides, but it had a substantially larger userbase and consequently more content. (It probably even looked better than this, too.)

That was a little over two decades ago. It should be no surprise to anybody that this latest entry in the glorified chatroom genre was dead on arrival: the only new thing that it brings is the virtual reality aspect, which isn’t good enough and just makes accessing this product more expensive.

Everything else that this offers has already been done and done better in Active Worlds, Second Life, Roblox, and other glorified chatrooms that have more than umpteen times the content of this gimmicky crap. They don’t even care enough to moderate it properly!

It would be awesome if this bankrupted Meta, but I’m sad to say that they’ll probably have to do a lot worse than this. Maybe Elon Musk can give Meta a few pointers—or seize it himself.