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.

more than half of the metaverse’s active users are aged 13 and below.

The things being smuggled are ideas. "beyond the reach of regulators," see? It's the advertisement nature of what's being done here.

Nothing is being 'smuggled'.

They are just advertising. Regular old advertising which should have the same rules applied as any other advertising.

Bigger news to me is that people are using the metaverse.

maybe making news of problems that are "happening" in there are a way to, indirectly, trying to tell you "people is using this!! we are not wasted money!! we are relevant!!"

Hopefully that means less of the little bastards will be in VRC.

lol what? I’ve been using VRChat for almost 10 years and I’ve seen maybe 4-5 people with avatars that smoke.

I’ve never touched Roblox tho… I’m a bit offended that it’s considered a Metaverse.

Thats the thing. Adults talk shit about it. But it’s mostly the younger generations that are active in VR.

You have your demographics backwards.

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.

Do they have legs yet? Did they have cigarettes before they had legs?

Oh, so metaverse not Metaverse.

Yeah, that isn't confusing and stupid.

Vampire Recreational Coffins?

(VRChat)

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.

People use the Metaverse?

They're advertising tobacco to children, which is illegal. Why would you throw yourself on this hill?

If they are circumventing regulators, and they are doing that, then they are smuggling advertisements to illegal targets, yes.

What hill do you think I'm on?

My point was that they were advertising and it should be treated as advertising, including any legal pushments for advertising to children. Advertising doesn't involve 'smuggling' or other words that make zero sense in this context that make it sound like it isn't advertising.

The article specifically calls out advertising—how does 'smuggling' imply anything else? To smuggle here just means "to circumvent regulators." And yeah, I think it's appropriately terse.

You are reacting to what is, at worst, a bit of poetry. I don't understand why you're doing that.