Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Commenting on my post about the failure of Meta to grow Horizon Worlds, longtime reader/veteran technologist Martin K. offers a big picture view impacting multiple metaverse platforms, relating it to recent trends in US society. It helps explain, for example, why Second Life merchandise seems to be 80% fashion/home decor-related, and why VRChat seems largely to be comprised of furry/anime avatars: 

Why does Horizon Worlds not succeed in the same way as Facebook did?

Why is Second Life not able to grow its user base?

Why do so many talented creators leave Rec Room?

Let me zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture.

Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, Second Life and other metaverse-apps with user-generated content are struggling with growing their user base.

One of my favorite concepts to think about some of these problems is laid out in the book The Big Sort by Bill Bishop published in 2008. One of its themes is political polarization of neighborhoods in the US. The idea is that there are several feedback loops at work that attract more politically aligned neighbors and push out people who don't "fit" into a neighborhood. This results in increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods.

My hypothesis is that there are analogous feedback loops in many UGC metaverse apps that lead to a rather homogeneous user base of each of these apps.

Typically it works like this:

– The app's algorithm recommends content based on what the majority of users are interested in

– Content that serves the interests of a minority of users is recommended less often

– UGC creators who care about the success of their content start creating more content that is recommended by the algorithm more often, i.e., content for the majority of users

– The result is that less content is created for users with special interests

– Those users with special interests leave the platform, which closes the feedback loop because now UGC creators have even less reason to create content for them

For Horizon World and Rec Room, the majority of engaged users are pre-teen children and young teenagers. If you have other interests than those kids, the app is unlikely to recommend interesting content to you and creators are unlikely to create content that is of interest to you. Sorry. Fare well!

How did Facebook (and many other social media) avoid this feedback loop that leads to a homogeneous user base?

By improving their algorithms to personalize recommendations such that users are not pushed out but sorted into fragmented groups based on shared interests. Individual groups might still be very homogeneous (with all the problems that come with that) but Facebook was able to keep the users.

This strategy of serving many special interest groups (instead of focusing exclusively on the interests of the majority of users) has an analogy in online stores: The Long Tail, the 2006 book by Chris Anderson. (On the technical side, this strategy for online stores is closely related to Web 2.0 and the early success of Amazon.) [Also, Anderson discussed the book with me in Second Life back in the day. – WJA]

Do decision makers at Horizon Worlds and Rec Room understand these dynamics? Here is a recent quote by Nick Fajt (CEO of Rec Room) about how their algorithm ranks UGC rooms (i.e. worlds) when recommending them to users:

For a room to rank, it needs a great thumbnail to convert people into visitors. It needs strong engagement once you’re in the room. It needs to be appealing to a wide audience (niche content starts to see its per user metrics degrade with more promotion). If the room has been materially updated recently or newly published – that helps. If the room effectively monetizes – that also helps. Still, it’s really about appeal and engagement of a broad audience. 

I guess, if the CEO of Rec Room does not want their algorithm to recommend "niche content" and wants it to promote worlds that are "appealing to a wide audience", the mentioned feedback loop will keep spinning as long as Rec Room can keep the lights on.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (George Santayana)

This is all roughly right, in my view — a platform's curation algorithms tend to skew toward a plurality of one community at the expense of others. Another factor, as I get into in the book, is how diverse the platform's default avatars are (or are not): Only make them attractive humans, and don't be surprised if most active users want to roleplay a Malibu Barbie and Ken lifestyle.

This also points out the importance of promoting user-driven blogs, videos, and social media, especially those which focus on a niche outside the platform's mainstream. You know, like, well, New World Notes.