In early 2023, Dan Olson at Folding Ideas made a scathing, smart, almost two-hour-long video essay about Decentraland, the metaverse that was one of the poster children of the web3 era:

Most of what Decentraland does, and what it fails to do, are things that would be considered forgivable or quaint in a Kickstarter MMO that had clearly bitten off more than the creators could ever chew, but given that this is a project founded on cryptocurrency, all of those foibles are laced with the language of finance and landlordism. Strolling down Decentraland’s spacious boulevards at 5 frames per second rewards the user with a seemingly endless parade of virtual billboards brightly proclaiming that the space you see is all available to rent.

In May this year, Nick Heer at Pixel Envy wrote a copiously annotated birds-eye overview of Meta’s metaverse attempts thus far, in an essay called The Metaverse Fever Dream:

Officially, Meta is still all-in on the concept around which it pivoted the entire company in 2021. It still has a whole marketing page proclaiming its belief “in the future of connection in the metaverse”. You can go shop its lineup of Quest headsets which Meta says represent the best and most immersive metaverse experience, though its flagship model is now two-and-a-half years old. It has awkwardly promoted its Ray-Bans as “A.I. glasses” despite them becoming the company’s most successful line of mixed reality products, and it is desperately trying to connect its newest muse of A.I. with its last one. The single mention of “metaverse” on its Q1 2026 earnings call (PDF) is when Zuckerberg claimed to be “excited for more of our metaverse efforts to be powered by the A.I. models we’re training as well”.

I linked to Meta’s metaverse reviews before, but I thought these two (very) deep dives are great to invest in, side by side. Both of the failed metaverses look similar only on the surface. They were spun by very different organizations, started with different goals and premises, and their creative and maybe even ethical bankruptcies have a very different dimensionality.

In the context of this blog, it’s also interesting to reflect on how poorly they’re both made, which is extra fascinating given the disparity of budgets of the efforts. My guess would be something like this:

• Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s leadership do not understand design, so even though there might be a lot of talented designers at Meta, their efforts do not end up mattering as much.
• Decentraland is ostensibly “open source” – or at least open-source-flavoured – and open source generally struggles with attracting talented designers.

These are two interesting and distinct failure modes – although, as the essays make abundantly clear, no amount of design talent, execution, or craft could turn successful an idea whose entire premise is a house of cards made out of newsprint-grade paper and magical thinking.