197
Smoking avatars and online games: how big tobacco targets young people in the metaverse
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
197 points (95.4% liked)
Technology
75143 readers
2042 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They're so desperate to make the real-life Snowcrash, Ready Player One, Matrix, they haven't even acknowledged how hard metaverse flopped, nor how there's no "smuggling" anything into a virtual "space". They can't stand the idea that what they really made was Worse Second Life 30 Years Later.
Apparently it mostly appeals to young children, or maybe people pretending to be young children.
This is because they include stuff like Roblox in the definition of Metaverse. I personally hate that.
If we kept it to SocialVR titles, the demographics would shift to something more balanced, afaik. VRC bans people under 13 when they are discovered/reported.
Oh, so metaverse not Metaverse.
Yeah, that isn't confusing and stupid.
Yeah it sucks. Meta shit all over the term. And then every other company jumped on board claiming their stuff is a metaverse too. Even Microsoft claimed Teams was a metaverse.
Jesus I can't think of anything I would want less than a Teams metaverse. Although I do have a macabre fascination as to how they could make the product even worse.
Hopefully that means less of the little bastards will be in VRC.
Vampire Recreational Coffins?
(VRChat)