It wasn’t with no regard. They were deliberately giving minorities power over majorities and splitting ethnic groups with borders to fuel conflicts.

Yeah, that’s why I don’t watch that show.

“let the machines” is the problem. They decide how it all works, and what it’s for. If there was an opt-in virtual world, with an independently certified logging out option, maybe manually checking in with everyone at regular intervals, then probably a whole lot of people would choose to be there.

And then he wiped out some cities, turned a woman into salt, had a guy’s family killed because he likes to gamble, sent a bear to kill children, killed every first born in an entire country, told his people to genocide another.

Chances are they’ll be a starving criminal or a homeless person who the police will be spending their limited time and resources on abusing, because they’ll be growing up in the families without the means to travel for healthcare.

One of the popular alternatives is that God created the entire universe, a hundred billion stars with trillions of other celestial bodies in our galaxy, multiplied across hundreds of billions of galaxies or more, and then on this rocky planet, added water, magnetosphere, atmosphere, millions of species, dumped a lot of fossils in the ground, killed his son, and said believe in him and you’ll be able to go to church forever.

At least the Mormons made a note of other planets existing, but still. I prefer to think of what else might be out there.

Guessing it failed because the migration was weighted towards people who were the least welcome on reddit, some maybe unfairly, but there are also good reasons to not want certain people/behaviors around.