Facebook’s VR Platform ‘Horizon’ Sucks

Alex Heath, for The Verge:

Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge. [...]

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.”

The answer is right in front of Shah’s face: Horizon obviously sucks. Early-development bugginess wouldn’t keep employees from wanting to use it if it were exciting and fun. If Horizon were promising, they wouldn’t have to mandate using it — they’d have to fight to keep employees from trying to get in on the beta.

Using a turd of a product more isn’t going to make employees fall in love with it. You either love something — or someone — or you don’t. You can’t be forced to fall in love.

★ Saturday, 8 October 2022