A VR MMO social software is bound to be soulless if it is designed and operated by a company whose customers are advertisers that want to minimise risks and hav

A VR MMO social software is bound to be soulless if it is designed and operated by a company whose customers are advertisers that want to minimise risks and have the broadest possible audience. Advertising is cancer, marketing is a blight upon every facet of humanity. It should be no surprise a medium designed to facilitate marketing first, and "be barely engaging enough to ensure most people can visit and be exposed to marketing without having a strikingly negative impression" is going to be soulless. Even in real life, businesses and stores are built where there is already demand. stores do not create demand. The commercial-first approach to a metaverse is akin to building a shopping mall deep in the Sahara desert and expecting people to move next to it and found a town. At most you'll get a town of the mall's employees. The Internet was successful because it didn't start out as what it is today. It was about people and their creations first. I hypothesise if e-commerce was indeed the first feature of the Internet, vastly less people would be engaging with the Internet nowadays. Why go to a store with the most unrelenting salesman ever by your side, on a medium you have absolutely zero idea how to use and interpret?