Ex-Meta Director Helps Confirm What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds: "No One Loved the Product"

Originally published on my Patreon

Kelly Stonelake is a 15 year veteran of Facebook/Meta, who recently filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging a series of highly serious charges around sexual assault, denied promotions, and a culture of discrimination. 

While her lawsuit has been covered elsewhere, her last role at Meta included Director of Product Marketing of Horizon Worlds, which deserves special focus here. As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR.

Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able to shed more light on what went wrong with Horizon Worlds -- once touted as Meta’s early entry into the Metaverse, which the company even promoted with a Super Bowl commercial. 

Seen that way, her insights also addresses a criticism I've come across often in recent years: If the Metaverse is supposed to be so important, why couldn't Meta, one of the wealthiest companies in history, succeed in creating it?

Because, Stonelake suggests, few people at Meta ever actually cared deeply about the product that was meant to help build it. 

Asked to review and comment on my article, for instance, her point of view largely gels with what I wrote in March:

“The point about engineers automating dogfooding [of Horizon Worlds] was news to me,” she tells me by e-mail, “but not surprising as it tracks with a larger theme of employees not wanting to use Horizon, and leadership demanding it happen anyway, instead of addressing the reasons for reluctance and workarounds.

“The mention of Boz [CTO Andrew Bosworth] discouraging acknowledgment of kids on the platform is consistent with my experience. I was explicitly told not to take notes on anything related to children in Horizon Worlds.”

Kelly is also able to help confirm another nagging question I’ve had since writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, but have never been unable to get an official reply on: Was danah boyd's research into VR causing females nausea ever discussed or even brought up during her long time at Meta? 

Not really:

“The leadership team was very interested in reducing nausea by identifying the sweet spot for frame rate to reduce dizziness,” as Stonelake puts it, “but I never heard anything specific about improving the experience for specific subpopulations. I did not see leadership engage with reporting or research unless there was an opportunity to accelerate or reduce barriers to growth.

Stonelake presenting Horizon Worlds at a conference

"I can only infer from my assignment to scale to more surfaces, younger audiences, and new markets, that the barrier to growth was initially seen as a matter of marketing the product.”

In all this she sees an even broader theme:

“When the New York Times’ ‘This is Life in the Metaverse’ article dropped in October 2022, Jeff Lin, who led product design, said in the Horizon Leadership Team group chat, ‘This isn’t that bad, other than employees not using it, but that’s a good reminder to the product team to get our act together.’

“[T]he deeper issue was that no one loved the product, in fact many people report not tolerating it at all.  When your own team won’t use the thing you’re building, it’s not a marketing challenge. It’s a hard truth.”

The irony here is that there were seasoned developers at Meta, like John Carmack and Linden Lab veteran Jim Purbrick, who have been passionate about virtual worlds for decades. Stonelake believes they would not be able to help turn around Horizon Worlds, even if they were given a chance:

“I don't know whether or not Meta tried to put people like that at the helm, but I do believe that their deep experience and genuine love for virtual worlds, as you say, would have made the job untenable for them” she tells me.

“They'd have been frustrated by the bureaucracy and departure from putting customers and developers first. Meta pushes for growth, while those who care about virtual worlds push for thoughtfulness, they understand that the best way to grow a virtual experience is by creating value for people. Meta's too focused on extracting it.”

Purbrick, as I’ve wrote, warned the company with increasing frustration to address issues of virtual harassment in Horizon Worlds, but was sidelined. 

Kelly Stonelake’s take on that:

“Jim Purbrick has been a long advocate of mitigating misuse and designing systems that anticipate how features could be exploited, which is not aligned with Meta Horizon World's priorities.”

As for Zuckerberg and Bosworth’s own guidance over Horizon Worlds, what little of it she got was related to her during onboarding: 

“[I was told] that both Zuck and Boz had issued a clear directive to move away from a reactive world where Meta is responsible for everything and instead shape a privacy narrative around how we give people controls,” she tells me. “The general interpretation was that Mark and Boz wanted to reduce legal complexity and exposure for Meta, where the priority should have been on reducing safety risks to people using Horizon.”

One upshot to all of this is Horizon Worlds failing to grow its user base, while VRChat and Rec Room became far more popular with Quest users. (To the point, as Purbrick recently told me, the company changed direction on Horizon so that it would more directly compete with VRChat.)

But a virtual world with a lot of unaddressed social toxicity, let alone a lack of genuine developer engagement, doesn’t encourage user growth: 

“Horizon claims to create value for people but is focused on harvesting value from them; their time, their money, their emotional wellness, their innocence,” as Kelly puts in. “If you’re not being bullied by kids [in Horizon], you’re immersed in it happening all around you. You’re at a minimum watching it happen while also dealing with product stability and quality issues. It’s no surprise people aren’t flocking to the experience.”

Another ex-Meta dev told me the company should open source Horizon Worlds. While broadly agreeing with that suggestion, Kelly Stonelake believes its relationship with third party developers would have to be repaired, for that to be viable:  

“Developers were part of the vision of the company I joined, but that vision’s curdled,” as she puts it. "Meta has a history of using developers, asking them to bet everything, then abandoning them. Open-sourcing now, with a public commitment to maintain an open source product, could restore some of the trust Meta has lost.”

But even if they did, she believes Meta would still need to make Horizon a much safer place for consumers:

“[O]pen sourcing doesn't remove the company's responsibility for user safety or replace the role of governance or regulators.”

Follow updates in Kelly Stonelake’s dispute with Meta on her Substack.

All images courtesy Stonelake.

Comments

[Patchouli Woollahra]

It's like we've always said for ages: If you can't be bothered to care about creating the Metaverse, don't bother trying to. It's just been a terrible waste of money when Meta could have gone for a smarter play like doing a take over of a working system and giving it a blank check to expand further.