Meta's metaverse app in 'quality lockdown'

(Representative image: Reuters)

Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg found himself being memed online not too long ago after he shared a picture of his digital avatar on metaverse.

Reactions were swift and brutal, with people complaining that the graphical presentation looked really bad. Not the best advertisement for a company that rebranded itself from Facebook to Meta to emphasise that the future was metaverse or the bigger virtual world that transcended social media.

Now an internal memo, acquired by online publication The Verge, has found that people working on the metaverse app rarely use the platform. The Horizon Worlds team has been placed in "quality lockdown" for the rest of the year.

In the memo, Meta's VP of metaverse Vishal Shah said many employees within the team "don't spend much time in Horizon".

“Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it,” Shah wrote in the memo.

Even after the ultimatum, it seems the engagement was still unsatisfactory, forcing Shah to send out a second memo, warning that the company would begin holding "managers accountable" and was drafting plans to make it mandatory for team members to use the app.

“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it,” wrote Shah. “Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

Shah also pointed out that the current onboarding process was "confusing and frustrating" for users and told the Horizon team to "fix quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users."