Ezan Charo 
According to news sources all over the globe, the company Meta (formally known as Facebook) is currently undergoing mass layoffs – an approximate 13 percent of all staff, resulting in 11,000 employees having their jobs cut. The second this was announced, according to Wall Street Journal, the stocks for Meta (which tanked because of the recent Metaverse launch) jumped back from their decline.
The Metaverse being marketed and pushed is due to the rapid shifts into online integration with work and productivity, and as such owner Mark Zuckerberg saw a market on this, and proceeded to churn out as much Metaverse content as possible. In theory and in practice, the Metaverse is pretty strange coming from an average consumer perspective. The feedback from the general public has not been yielding great results, hence why stock in Meta plummeted.
Metaverse has been dragged down by a ton of strange choices. Recently they had a conference filmed and posted on YouTube where they announced that their avatars would finally have legs! Everyone online has been making remarks about how out of touch Meta is with their user interface and audience, comparing the Metaverse to other sites like VRChat and even Roblox, with much more detailed and expressive avatars and a more fleshed out and comprehensive platform.The Metaverse has also been sinking money – approximately $1.2 billion – into an Ethereum-based VR project called Decentraland, which reportedly only has 38 active users. This was an incredible loss to Meta’s wallet, bleeding them dry of a lot of money.
Meta’s passively making the money back, although it’ll take a lot of time for people to get used to the idea of an NFT-based virtual reality. A big problem I’ve noticed is that the Metaverse, to the average consumer (especially younger people), is confusing. A lot of these words, such as crypto and NFTs and decentralization, are striking and aren’t made clear in a concise and well-explained, easy to approach way.
What do you think of the Metaverse? Are you into it? Reach out to me and let me know.
By Ezan Charo, Junior, ChiArts
Twitter: @digitalwarlock8
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