{"id":559849,"date":"2026-03-23T22:26:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T22:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/559849\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T22:26:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T22:26:16","slug":"zuckerbergs-metaverse-has-collapsed-its-a-small-win-for-bad-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/559849\/","title":{"rendered":"Zuckerberg&#8217;s Metaverse has collapsed. It&#8217;s a small win for bad tech"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Until very, very recently, you could still go to worlds.com, a 3D online chat program that launched in the mid 1990s, and navigate through its almost entirely abandoned <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=EMGiGCkzcMg\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">virtual space<\/a>, like an endless, pixellated Angkor Wat. Academic literature came to call spaces like these, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2017\/12\/second-life-leslie-jamison\/544149\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">and there are many<\/a>, \u201cDigital Ruins\u201d. Will we be left with\u00a0any similar remnant of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2021\/12\/09\/facebook-opens-horizon-worlds-vr-metaverse-app-.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Horizon Worlds<\/a>? Meta\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/communityforums.atmeta.com\/blog\/AnnouncementsBlog\/updates-to-your-meta-quest-experience-in-2026\/1369435\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">virtual reality social network<\/a> was once sold as a key piece of the puzzle that would eventually cohere as \u201cthe Metaverse\u201d, and early last week <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/meta-is-shutting-down-horizon-worlds-on-meta-quest\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Meta announced<\/a> that it was effectively shutting it down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until very, very recently, you could still go to worlds.com, a 3D online chat program that launched in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,2456,237,2455,68960,105,238],"class_list":["post-559849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-facebook","tag-internet","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-metaverse","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}