Comment by Simon K Jones on Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

[Simon K Jones]

As someone who bought a Quest back in the day and has mostly thoroughly enjoyed the experience, I can't help but notice that the main reason I stopped using it was Meta's involvement. It soured the experience and made it more fiddly, too. For a company so dedicated to VR and the Metaverse, that's not a great end result.

I'm still interested in VR, and if Valve make something affordable I'll be right back there. But I've no interest in Meta VR products.

And that's before you get into the social ickiness of Meta's overall offering. The idea of the people behind Facebook being in control of a metaverse and me voluntarily putting a thing on my head to be in a space controlled by them is laughable. VR inherently requires a huge amount of trust from the user, just from a practical sense if nothing else ("I hope I don't walk into my wall"), and Meta don't really have any trust from people.

The other aspect that has struck me is how disposable all of Meta's products are. Facebook was great for connecting with family and distant friends, but it's now easier to do that via chat groups (or even email). Instagram was fun for sharing pics, but that's now a faff, and it was hardly essential in the first place.

Compare it to another tech mega-corp, like Google, who have deliberately built services that are genuinely useful and hard to do without. Maps, email, search. Relying on one company for all of that isn't great, of course, but they've been far more sensible about creating an essential foundation for their business. I'd find it practically very difficult to stop using Google products; stopping using Meta products is easy and I don't miss them in the slightest. In fact, it feels like an improvement.