It’s time for a rethink on how I use Twitter (image source: PC Magazine)
As longtime readers of my blog know full well, I have already severed all ties to Meta hardware and software, even going so far as to vote with my wallet and replace my trusty Oculus Rift PCVR headset at home with a Valve Index. (My final link to Meta was cut in August 2022, when I replaced my work VR headset, a second Oculus Rift, with an HTC Vive Pro 2.) This means that I am not on any of Meta’s social media: no Facebook, no Instagram, no Whatsapp. I shut down my Facebook account a couple of years ago, asking the company to delete all the personal data it had collected on me. I am done.
So, when Elon Musk announced earlier this year that he was going to take over Twitter, I already had some experience in cutting social media platforms out of my life. I responded by setting up an account on Mastodon, which I talk about here, here, and here.
Mastodon is a federated, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) microblogging app, quite similar to Twitter, but it is decentralized, and not subject to the capricious whims of billionaires! It’s free, but I choose to support it financially through Patreon. If you are curious and you want to kick the tires yourself on Mastodon, start here. You can also watch this two-minute YouTube introduction video:
I unfollowed 90% of the people I was following on Twitter, sending messages to most of them that I was moving to Mastodon, and inviting them to join me. Of course, most didn’t. I get it; change is hard.
So, while I was now posting to my Twitter feed automatically via my blog and via my new Mastodon account, I still found myself having to sign in to Twitter to follow certain people. I grew weary of dealing with Twitter’s algorithmic feed, with its pernicious advertising, and its suggested posts and topics, and its trending hashtags (usually an echo chamber for whatever the latest outrage happens to be). I looked for a solution.
I found it via the recommendation of someone I follow on Mastodon, named Per Axbom. who had posted a link to a blogpost he had written, titled Why I left algorithm-based social media and what happened next. I read about the process Per took to free himself from algorithmically-driven social media and take control over his own newsfeed, and one of the tools he talked about was Feedbin.
Feedbin is a newsreader with a website and associated mobile apps (to set up an account costs US$5 per month or US$50 per year), but it’s more than just that! In addition to following RSS newsfeeds, you can also use it to follow people on Twitter, as well as your favourite YouTube channels. In addition, it gives you a special email address to be used in subscribing to your newsletters, so that they feed into Feedbin, too. You can also use it to follow podcasts. I’ve been using it for a month, and it’s great!
Here are some of the features:
Twitter: Stop mindlessly scrolling through tweets. Feedbin fully unpacks media-rich tweets. If a tweet links to an article, Feedbin will attempt to load the full article and display it alongside the tweet.
YouTube: Follow your favorite creators, with channels and playlists. There’s no algorithm or confusion about what you have already watched, just the videos from your favorite creators in chronological order.
Newsletters: Get newsletters out of your inbox and into Feedbin. Every pro account gets a unique email address to subscribe to and follow newsletters.
Updated Articles: Articles are updated whenever the original changes, so you don’t miss any important changes. You can even see the differences to know what changed.
Full Text: Feedbin can extract the full content of an article for feeds that only offer partial-content. This way you can keep reading without leaving.
Search: Feedbin supports a powerful and expressive search syntax to find exactly what you’re looking for. Save frequent searches to always have the results a click away.
So now I only post to my Twitter account via Mastodon, and I only read tweets from people I follow via Feedbin. This means that I spend next to zero time actually on Twitter—no advertising, no trending hashtags, no outrage machine! My Twitter feed on Feedbin also pulls up any items retweeted by people I follow, and in many cases, any linked articles in the tweets will have their full text loaded, saving me a click. It’s not the same as quitting Twitter entirely, but until more people come to their senses (and when/if Elon Musk drives Twitter into the ground), it’s a fair compromise.
As for YouTube, I can finally browse through only the channels I follow, without YouTube’s irritating suggestions for what it thinks I want to watch next. (And suggestions of music mixes based on my YouTube Music listening habits.) And no advertising unless, of course, the videomaker has a sponsorship in the video! I may never visit the YouTube website, or use the YouTube mobile apps, again. I should have done this years ago, folks.
Feedbin is the greatest thing since sliced bread, in my opinion, and well worth the subscription in alleviating the aggravation of having to deal with Twitter and YouTube algorithms! And, if Elon Musk goes through with his plans to lay off 75% of Twitter’s staff and the platform becomes overrun with toxic content and spam, I already have one foot firmly planted in Mastodon, and between it and Feedbin, I barely have to interact with Twitter at all, aside from keeping my account there.
If Elon Musk buying Twitter doesn’t sit right with you, there are tools and alternatives!
In an article published today in The Wall Street Journal, titled Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short (archived version here), Jeff Horwitz, Salvador Rodriguez, and Meghan Bobrowsky report that Meta’s flagship social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, is falling short of the company’s own internal performance expectations. They write:
Meta initially set a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users for Horizon Worlds by the end of this year, but in recent weeks revised that figure to 280,000. The current tally is less than 200,000, the documents show.
Most visitors to Horizon generally don’t return to the app after the first month, and the user base has steadily declined since the spring, according to the documents, which include internal memos from employees.
By comparison, Meta’s social-media products, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, together attract more than 3.5 billion average monthly users—a figure equivalent to almost half the world’s population. Horizon is currently reaching less than the population of Sioux Falls, S.D.
…
In a survey of Horizon users, Meta researchers said users reported that they couldn’t find metaverse worlds they liked and couldn’t find other people to hang out with. Other complaints included that “people do not look real” and that the avatars don’t have legs.
The researchers noted that the survey included only 514 people because the available pool of users to survey is “small and precious.”
The number of Horizon users online at the same time, known as concurrency, trails far behind both the socially-focused upstart VRChat and Second Life, the pioneering cyberworld that was launched in 2003, said people familiar with the matter.
While the article doesn’t give user concurrency figures for Horizon Worlds, it does state that they “trail far behind” both VRChat and Second Life, for which we do have figures. Second Life user concurrency figures range from 27,000 to 51,000, depending on the time of day and the day of the week, with a recent peak of 55,737 on Feb. 5th, 2022. And according to Steam statistics, VRChat reached a peak user concurrency of 42,564 (blogger Wagner James Au has reported that VRchat hit an all-time high of 89,300 concurrent users during New Year’s Eve 2021 celebrations).
The WSJ report also states that only 9% of the worlds built by creators are ever visited by at least 50 people, and most created worlds are never visited at all. Also, men outnumber women in Horizon Worlds by two to one, a gender imbalance that can lead to women being harassed and feeling unsafe.
Among the persistent complaints from early adopters and testers, according to the documents, are that users have trouble adjusting to the technology, and that other users behave badly.
On a recent night, a female Journal reporter visited one of Horizon’s most popular virtual worlds, the Soapstone Comedy Club. It had about 20 users in it, all appearing as avatars. When the reporter introduced herself and tried to conduct an interview with a small group, one user replied: “You can report on me, baby.” The same user then asked her to expose herself.
One user who was flirting with a woman in the crowd was interrupted by what appeared to be his real-life girlfriend yelling obscenities at him in the background.
According to the documents, men outnumber women in Horizon by two to one. One safety feature Horizon has introduced is an option for users to create the equivalent of a 4-foot personal boundary for their avatars to deter unwanted physical contact.
Even worse, the WSJ article reports that “more than half of Quest headsets—the entry model costs about $400—aren’t in use six months after they are purchased, according to people familiar with the data.” This news greatly surprises me, because I would have assumed that, even if Horizon Worlds is not attracting and retaining users, at least consumers who bought the wireless virtual reality headset would be using it for games.
Last year, I avidly watched Mark Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives at the Facebook Connect 2021 event, as they proudly announced that the company would be rebranding as Meta, and pivoting to go all-in on the metaverse.
This year, I was too busy with my full-time job as a university librarian to watch the Meta Connect 2022 keynotes live, so instead, I read through the tech news media’s coverage of the event. And, to say the least, that coverage was mixed in its assessment of Meta’s new high-end wireless VR headset, the Meta Quest Pro.
Tony Vitillo (a.k.a. SkarredGhost), an Italian man whose blog, The Ghost Howls, covers the VR/AR/MR/XR industry and the metaverse, wrote:
Let’s be honest: Meta Connect was utterly disappointing.
The hardware to be launched at the event had already been totally leaked
We had no unexpected major VR game announced, nor news on GTA or Assassin’s Creed VR
Most pieces of news were already been announced or were not that relevant. Some of them, like the new avatars, were much worse than expected
It was a very lightweight talk about XR, social, the metaverse, and productivity, with almost no interest in giving important information. For instance, many writings were there for such a short time that I could not even take a screenshot: the price of the Quest Pro was on the screen for like 1 second and then disappeared. Some info was absolutely missing, like the specs of the Quest Pro were not specified during the launch. This was total nonsense.
Meta keeps saying VR is the future, but everything it shows us is an inferior rehash of the things we already have. Its event today was, between assurances that everything is great in the Metaverse, a collection of tacit admissions that the best they can hope to do is ape a reality we are all desperately trying to leave behind.
His fellow writer at TechCrunch, Darrell Etherington, had this to say:
At Meta Connect 2022, the company’s annual developer conference for its VR efforts and Oculus hardware platform, the company announced a lot of stuff — but what it communicated more effectively than anything else was just how incredibly thirsty — one might even say desperate — Mark Zuckerberg is for his metaverse bet to pay off.
Meta just showed off its latest headset, the Meta Quest Pro. While it’s got real-time expression tracking and mixed reality, it’s also going to set you back $1,499. So who’s buying this tech that costs roughly the price of three current-gen consoles? The answer is…working professionals. Mark Zuckerberg wants to replace your dreary work computers with VR headsets…
VR headsets can be clunky, sweaty places, and many people get severe motion sickness in them. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg seems confident corporations will pay top dollar to entrap their workers in them. And maybe they will. VR is currently being used to train surgeons, analyze road scenarios for automobile companies, and design architecture. Maybe I wouldn’t hate myself if I had to write blogs while wearing a plastic headset. Ugh, okay. I can’t do this anymore. I would absolutely hate it. Corporate would have to take my MacBook from my cold dead hands.
All these advantages come with one big cost: the Meta Quest Pro’s battery life sounds very bad. I was told the headset would last between one and two hours on a single charge, then take around two hours to recharge, either on the dock or with a cable. (My demo was held at a series of separate stations with multiple Quest Pros, so I didn’t experience the limits firsthand.) That’s a little more than half the time you’d get with a Quest 2, which lasts two to three hours. The back-mounted battery isn’t easily removable like the Vive Focus 3’s, so you can’t just swap it out and keep going.
This narrows the Quest Pro’s flexibility as an enterprise device. HTC, Magic Leap, and other enterprise companies tend to emphasize how long their products will last — offering either comparatively long-lasting batteries or swappable ones.
I get using Quest for creative and scientific endeavors, such as designing shoes or looking at a virus from all possible angles, but putting on your headset to check your email or make a PowerPoint presentation? Somehow, that just doesn’t sound that exciting.
Avatar legs will be coming first to Meta’s Horizon social VR platform, though it’s unclear exactly when. They’ll be coming to “more and more experiences over time as we improve our technology stack,” Zuckerberg said. During the Connect event, they seemed to move quite naturally, though because it was a prerecorded video, we’re not sure yet how they’ll look in practice.
Meta isn’t just working on legs; it’s planning to add a whole bunch of new avatar-related features. The company is exploring how to make expressive and photorealistic avatars to represent yourself in different situations, for example. You’ll be able to bring avatars to Reels so they can be featured in your videos or to Messenger and WhatsApp for video chats. (They’re coming to Zoom, too.) And Meta is launching an avatar store in VR later this year so you can more easily shop for clothes and specific looks.
But Paul Tasso of Forbes was particularly scathing in his criticism, writing:
When your most significant announcement is the fact that after years and years of investment, you’re on the verge of debuting virtual characters with legs, something has gone wrong.
The entire problem with Mark Zuckerberg’s fascination with the metaverse is that he’s trying to force a sci-fi reality to happen long before the rest of the society wants or needs it to actually exist. His version of an AR/VR-based metaverse remains a niche, not something to focus a trillion dollar company around. And given the trillion dollar company in question, which has spent the last decade rendering Facebook and Instagram close to unusable, this company being trusted with this supposed key part of the future is not something anyone has a lot of faith in.
As they say on RuPaul’s Drag Race, NURSE! Third degree burns over here! (Paul’s not wrong, though.)
But, in addition to the rather underwhelmed response of the major tech news websites, there was something else I noticed. There’s been a shift in attitudes by the general (non-tech) public towards the concept of the metaverse, in the twelve months between Facebook Connect 2021 and Meta Connect 2022. The mood seems to have shifted among some people.
I’m not talking about those people, like me, the early adopters and VR fanatics who have been active and building in various metaverse platforms for years. And I’m not talking about the passionate adherents of the various virtual worlds like Second Life, who were likely around the last time the metaverse was a buzzword. (By the way, The Wall Street Journal’s four-part podcast about Second Life and what it means to today’s metaverse ambitions is one of the best things I’ve listened to in years, and should it be required listening for the employees of any metaverse company seeking to inherit SL’s mantle in the present day—including the beleaguered staff at Meta.)
I am talking about those people who possibly first heard about the metaverse in the splash of publicity which the October 2021 Mark Zuckerberg keynote address at Facebook Connect 2021 ignited. People like the CNBC news correspondent Sam Shepard. Please watch this short news segment where he tries to grasp the concepts; I found it quite illuminating:
In twelve short months, we’ve gone from the general public not really knowing much about the metaverse, to the general public not getting what all this fuss is about, like Sam Shepard.
Even worse, between the ongoing crypto winter and Meta’s many missteps this year, the public is starting to sour on the concept of a metaverse. Most still don’t know a lot about it, but when they see many of the projects to which the term “metaverse” has been attached (like the various now-struggling NFT metaverse projects, and Meta’s attempts to sell Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms), they seem to be developing a distaste for the idea.
I’m sensing a rising tide of antipathy. Many non-technical people, like Sam Shepard, are either scratching their heads, or have already formed a negative opinion. (I’m seeing it arise in places like the cryptosnark community on Reddit, r/Buttcoin, where blockchain metaverse projects like Decentraland are being roundly critiqued, even mocked.)
Many economists are now predicting that 2023 will bring a severe global recession (exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine), and rising inflation sharply affecting the everyday cost of living. People have more important things to worry about—like putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads. They likely will have less disposable income to spend on gadgets like a US$1,500 virtual reality headset.
Last Christmas, the Meta Quest 2 was a hot seller. This year, Meta’s Quest Pro, at four times the price and with half the battery life of the Quest 2, will most certainly not be under very many Christmas trees. It’s just not that exciting a product and (at least until there’s a killer app for it), Meta will just keep trying to sell it to businesses and consumers who aren’t yet convinced that virtual reality—and the metaverse—are all that necessary or compelling in the first place.
Brace yourselves: the next few years might be nasty. And I predict that many projects and companies in this space are going to struggle to get attention, attract users, and gain traction. A few firms might decide to repivot (as Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity has already done), to focus on areas where they can make money. Other companies will simply fold.
But those individuals and companies who can tell a story that ignites people’s imaginations, and come up with compelling use cases for virtual reality and the metaverse, might do very well. Savvy marketing and an unshakeable, clearly articulated vision will be key. Who knows, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg’s investments will pay off, in five or ten or twenty years. But it doesn’t look too terribly promising in the short term, does it?
Yesterday, Alex Heath of the tech news website The Verge covered the current state of Meta’s social VR sister platforms, Horizon Worlds (for consumers) and Horizon Workrooms (for business users), and things are not looking good.
In one of the memos to employees dated September 15th, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year to “ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”
It would appear that there are numerous bugs in the software:
“But 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.”
A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, Shah said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. 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.”
It’s never a good sign when you have to basically ORDER your employees to use a product that they are building, is it? The article goes on to say:
He went on to call out specific issues with Horizon, writing that “our onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users” and that the team needed to “introduce new users to top-notch worlds that will ensure their first visit is a success.”
Shah said the teams working on Horizon needed to collaborate better together and expect more changes to come. “Today, we are not operating with enough flexibility,” his memo reads. “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.”
I wonder if part of the problem is that there is such a large team working on Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms, part of a large multinational corporation, with all the bureaucracy that such an organization entails. In addition, there have been rumours of turmoil and turnover in Meta’s staffing, with a number of senior executive departures, such as Vivek Sharma, the former Vice President of Meta Horizon, who left in August 2022. You might remember the kerfuffle when Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg tweeted out a lacklustre picture to promote Horizon World’s expansion into France and Spain (which you can see in the screen capture of Alex’s article above; I wrote about it here). Meta then had to scramble to assure people that they were working on improving the graphics within its social VR platforms.
Well, at the upcoming Meta Connect 2022 conference, to be held on October 11th, many will tune in to see how Mark and his executive team are going to spin what clearly are some serious development problems with their social VR platforms.
UPDATE Oct. 10th, 2022: Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have published recent articles about Meta’s metaverse woes:
The WSJ article is a short read, but the NYT one is excellent, giving an in-depth, inside look (using anonymous sources) at what’s going on in Meta as they attempt to pivot to the metaverse. Both are highly recommended reading.
