Meta is Deada

Back in 2015 I was involved in an experiment. A close friend and investor had been leading up the fund-raising for a new company that had a noble vision of making the world a smaller place through an open world VR community that would be like nothing else. A safe place for exploration, discovery, and creativity where friends around the world could join forces and create their own art, music, and theater, immersed in an exploratory universe where friendships can be made and nurtured. In 2018 that dream became a reality with the launch of our massive multiplayer universe in VR where you could set up your virtual life, own an apartment or business and begin exploring and creating in the virtual universe.

Sound familiar? It is because the same idea has played and is playing out across tech companies today and the results are going to be the same.

Facebook’s Meta “Horizon Worlds” is failing, even with a baked in audience of three billion users, an insignificant pittance tried the platform and most of it is nearly vacant, with just 9% of the “worlds” having been visited by more than 50 people. Another virtual social platform Decentraland (valued at over $1B) is experiencing the same problem with daily stats showing active users of hundreds and some days that number is less than 50.

This isn’t a problem of slow adoption, it’s a problem of building something that no one asked for or wants, a lesson we learned all too hard in our venture.

There is a faulty belief in looking at the success of social networks that humans want to share, we are social creatures are we not? Reality is something much different and Zuck of all people should have known it.

The dirty little secret of social media is that it is all about the 1%.

Most people are surprised to discover that just 1% of social media users are “contributors” and start nearly all conversations on social media! Just 9% occasionally like and share content and a full 90% of social media users are “lurkers” (they watch and read, but never like or share). Even amongst those “sharers” they are usually selective on where they share, for instance, I am a heavy LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook contributor, but I spend more time on TikTok and Reddit but I have yet to contribute to TikTok and have contributed only one post to Reddit.

Commercial success on social networks is measured by likes, comments and shares, AKA “engagement” yet 90-99% of the people on social platforms are either NOT engaging or rarely will.

This not a new phenomenon, back in the early days of the internet it was found that messages on messages boards mostly came from a few users (3% of users sent 25% of the messages) and these were the early adopters, the super users.

Most of us are not social on social media, we are there to watch. So how could companies like Meta think that somehow by putting on a headset we are all going to come out of our shell and socialize?

There will be applications for VR in training, real estate and more, but turning us all into Simpsons characters so that we can float around and make friends isn’t going to work, a few billion dollars in investment has now proven what we already knew back in 2018.

For the most part we consume social media the same way we consume video – we watch. This hasn’t changed since the first message boards on the internet, and it certainly isn’t going to change with VR.