I spent a week alone in the Metaverse

That was interesting, since I hadn't been exposed to a lot of hands-on horizon worlds experiences so far. The author mentions VRChat as a contrast (complete with some vintage footage of the platform!) Here are some thoughts from a cynical VRChat user.

Let me start by making this absolutely clear: VRChat has almost all of these problems, too.

Parts of VRChat are overrun with children during US day hours. The platform's terms of service prohibit users under the age of 13, but it will take anyone no time at all to encounter young kids on the platform. Yes, absolutely, for sure, real children, and definitely unsupervised. These children often rove around in packs and amuse themselves by being disruptive and offensive. The comparison to Lord of the Flies seems apt.

If it's so easy for any regular user to encounter children--even for someone like me, who deliberately stays away from public gatherings and events--you'd think it would be trivial for the company to deploy enforcers to remove them. It's not like these users are not getting banned; they often have a trust level of "visitor" (the one assigned to newly created accounts), which hints at a lot of churn. But more likely than not, I suspect they are banned only in response to reports triggered by their terrible behavior. I suspect VRChat's uneven enforcement of their own terms of service has the exact same motivation as Facebook's: They make the numbers look better. They bring in their friends. They might even spend some money eventually.

But when you see a child wearing an avatar with a huge cock and shoving it into someone's face, or with a status message hinting at sexual slavery that makes you seriously worried about the possibility of grooming, you start to think the whole situation is a powder keg that will blow up on the company's faces sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.

VRChat instance moderation was also reliant on "vote kicks", like the one in the video, for years. Recently, it finally became possible for users who are part of groups (group creation requires a paid account) to self-moderate their instances; let's see if that helps. That cynical part of me thinks VRChat is just trying to get us to deal with the problem so they don't have to.

As an addendum, I don't have a blanket dislike for young people on the platform. There are lots of older teens who aren't bothering anyone and clearly benefit from being there. I just feel like there are real legally grey and psychologically dangerous situations these younger, immature children are being exposed to due to the neglect of the company (and their parents).

And you will also encounter terrible adults in VRChat. Drunken hecklers? Absolutely. Mysoginists? Passionate Trump cultists? Could be anyone (and likely are). Adult bullies. Emotional manipulators. Screamers. Narcissists. We have them all!

Another problem mentioned in the video was emptiness. VRChat isn't so different in that regard, either. There are thousands of worlds that are completely empty at all times. I wouldn't be surprised if there were many forgotten worlds that haven't been visited by anyone in months. The reason is twofold:

First, the platform massively encourages anyone (with a PC) who sticks around for any amount of time to create and publish content. One's "trust rank", which affects what parts of one's avatar other people will see--but can also informally affect all kinds of other things--takes hundreds of in-game hours to upgrade, but this process gets a big boost when the user submits content to the platform. New worlds go into a temporary queue, "community labs" (which is freely accessible to everyone, by the way) before being manually approved when deemed ready. But the review process seems very permissive, and lots of worlds get approved every month that are just simple boxes, bedrooms, unity store asset packs (unmodified), etc. Even then, there are a lot of legitimately good worlds. There are just too many worlds for the amount of active users at any given time.

Second, it's a social platform (ideally). People want to hang out with other people. They'll go where other people already are, except for a minority of weirdos like me who sometimes like to go "exploring" the frontier (it's fun!) I don't see how that problem will ever be solved, or even if it should. At least the company finally has--over the last year or so--redesigned their menu to promote discoverability of more obscure worlds, which is a good thing. Now we just need better filtering of garbage worlds.

We don't have basketball hoops everywhere. Instead, we have pool tables everywhere! It's different, OK? We do have the beer pong though (not sure why, since it's janky as hell). Balls!

VRChat has been walking a fine line for years in doing their very best to make their experience fully accessible and as close to feature parity as possible for Quest users, even though Quest-mode VRChat is effectively a whole alternative, parallel multiverse with separate software, avatars and worlds specifically designed to be Quest friendly (which requires quite a lot of effort to maintain). Often, it has felt to me like the time their focus on this has been to the detriment of PC-mode users (everyone else, including non-VR desktop users).

It's important to VRChat to cater to the massive Quest market and their many unsupervised children, I suppose. However, the difference between VRChat and Horizon Worlds, and likely the reason for their success, is precisely their PC users. Make no mistake, both platforms aim to be walled gardens, strictly controlled by their parent company. VRChat has been progressively locking the platform down for a very long time. But devoted PC owners, with their access to beefy hardware and creativity tools, published a lot of stuff on VRChat over the years. It's the reason why VRChat just looks so much better than Horizon Worlds (as seen in the video), especially on a PC, and is such a more diverse experience (content-wise, at least). Facebook has to learn that even billions in investment cannot outdo the combined creative power and time of thousands of dedicated enthusiasts. It feels a bit too late for Horizon Worlds, but maybe their next effort will have different priorities.

Legs are, of course, trivial, Zuck. Everywhere else has them. A single person created a mod for Beat Saber, years ago, that gives you an avatar with legs. Works perfectly! You're using Unity, Zuck. Just go to the Unity Asset Store and buy FinalIK like everyone else.

I'd like to close with some thoughts on why I'm still using a platform as shady as I have implied VRChat to be. There's definitely an inertia component to it--it's where the people are and the content is. But also, with any sufficiently "large" social platform (using large in a relative way here), you're going to get all sorts. I'm still on the internet, which is also, by all accounts, overrun with groomers, antivaxers, dictator apologists, etc. But there are spaces where I can exchange thoughts with minimal exposure to those kinds of people.

The fact of the matter is, VRChat is "winning" because of the diversity within it, even if it's sometimes hard to figure out where to go. Hundreds of groups of all kinds running events of all kinds (although there's no easy group directory yet). Hundreds of beautiful or interesting or even (despite piss-poor platform support) functional worlds, if you can find them (you can search by tag, but there's no formal standard for tags, and each world gets only five, and some don't bother using any, or write them in japanese, or cyrillic). Thousands of friends-only instances you can't see as a casual youtuber visiting once and which require putting in the effort to find some normal people in the lord of the flies wild west dystopia of public worlds, making friends, and then being invited to hang out, and then finding out your VR "friends" are horrible people and maybe you need to find some better ones.

People who don't use their microphones are common on VRChat and more often than not just shy or not confident in their social skills. Sometimes they can't talk due to their surroundings. They're also nicer than average, as a whole. The company finally added text chat for them (after years of awkwardness). Technologically, at least, they've been making some good decisions.