Meta is Facebook's Google Plus without all the potential of Google Plus. Google Plus at least had the independence to potentially be something before the corpor

Meta is Facebook's Google Plus without all the potential of Google Plus. Google Plus at least had the independence to potentially be something before the corporate machine reasserted itself. Meta's VR stuff is ugly. People organizing and sharing photo walks helped carry Google Plus in the down months. Who's going to go on a photo walk in Facebook's idea of virtual reality? There's nothing there except what the machine has dictated must be built. And they've bet the farm on it in the same way Google turned the entirety of the company into a funnel for +. Instagram was still new enough to beat, and they had the seed for what a more patient company could have grown through all its early mistakes. They might very well have shown Facebook how important chat and photos were in trying to make a Facebook clone and drove them to buy WhatsApp and Instagram. Google built what Facebook had to buy, but they didn't understand what that meant and let them become just another unchanging set of things bolted on to Google. I don't know if the failure of Google Plus and all the changes they made to the company to serve it were the cause of Google's current state, but it probably didn't help. Facebook was already in the PR pit Google is in before the Meta rebrand. Meta isn't even good VR. There's so much better.