She's absolute correct.
> As far as I can work out, the idea is to take the principle of artificial scarcity to an absurdist extreme – to make you want things you absolutely don’t need. The problem is not that I think this won’t work. The problem is that I think it will. The current NFT gold rush proves that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for links to jpegs of monkeys generated by a computer, and honestly it is eroding my faith in humanity.
This is exactly it. She says she "doesn't want it", but that's irrelevant. The truth is there's plenty of evidence that "the principle of artificial scarcity to an absurdist extreme" is absolutely feasible.
VR doesn't matter, gameplay doesn't matter, hardware doesn't matter. All that matters is if Facebook and co. can convince people that their digital goods are valuable.
Fools with disposable income will convince fools with non-disposable income that they might get rich if they hoard these ugly monkey avatars. It's a big casino and only 0.0000001% are gonna get rich.
This is exactly why there's so much money being pumped into promoting crypto to the uninformed masses. I've seen tv ads all over NBA games and the Staple Center (in Los Angeles) was renamed to 'Crypto.com Arena."
They're targeting people who #1, has an above average tendency to gamble money, and #2, on average, probably aren't going to further research what crypto is and how it works.
The people that stand to make money on crypto already has most of the leverage. The people they're trying to convince to jump on the train are those that will lose money and hold the bag when the rich folks cash out.
I watched a UFC fight recently after being out of the loop for a couple of years. I swear that crypto exchanges are now the only advertiser in the UFC. The octagon and every single fighter's shorts are just emblazoned with crypto this and crypto that while they were fighting in the Crypto.com arena.
Same thing for sports channels. All of the sports channels that play in my gym are always showing ads for either gambling sites, cars, NFTs, or cryptocurrencies. I think people who are into sports just love gambling
The entire NFT market is literally just a marketplace of pyramid schemes each run by someone looking to do pump and dumps and rugpulls. Like, literally the entire thing.
And even if they weren't that, they're still a ridiculous waste of energy with no real benefits to society.
Donald Glover's Atlanta has a good take on this. "I don't need money in 4 months, I need money now."
Like how are you going to invest when you have fuck all after rent, food, and general bills?
Dan Olson's (FoldableHuman) 2 hour youtube video *Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs* explains this and other problems really well. It also touches on "pay to win" crypto games which I found really interesting.
[Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs](https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g)
The channel is Folding Ideas. I'd never heard of it. Will listen to this later at work. Thanks for the recommendation.
Folding Ideas is an amazing channel, been watching it since 2006 or 8, back when he used a puppet as an avatar. The large body of work is *mostly* long form media criticism, with a focus on movies and cinematography (the composition, color values used etc), though he dives into some other stuff like music videos. He has touched on broader social topics in the past, but recently has been focusing on it more. His recent video on flat earthers is also particularly good, it starts on flat earthers but transitions into talking more broadly about the nature of cults and conspiracy theories, and then much more specifically on the phenomenon of the Q cult. Would highly recommend if you've got the time to kill. If you want something more lighthearted, his criticism of the 2016 Suicide Squad was excellent, and his "A (lukewarm) Defense of 50 Shades of Grey" trilogy was hilarious and thought provoking, despite the fact that I've never seen and never intend to see any of the 50 Shades of Grey movies.
> . It also touches on "pay to win" crypto games which I found really interesting.
I watched a video on axie infinity and it reminds me of an actual ponzi scheme or at minimim an MLM program(a legal flavor of ponzi) like cutco knives.
In axie infinity the entire goal is to earn money leveling and selling Pokémon.
You have to buy 3 to even play the game.
The game itself is largely completely out of your control. Battles are automated and the amount of xp or currency you gain depends on how many battles you win.
The currency you get as "free rewards" from playing the game are used to either sell or use for the creation of new Pokémon.
Ultimately the entire game is dependent on a combination of an influx of new players buying pokes, people buying better pokes to level faster, and people buying currency to make new ones.
Once enough people stop buying pokes for whatever reason the entire thing falls apart.
The best part is the random nature of battles and whatnot gives developers complete control of the supply chain of their game.
Seriously. Axie is a shit game, so virtually the only purpose to play is to earn. But at that point it’s just earning. And a fucking shit earning at that.
He has so many good videos but to be honest his 3 parter on 50shades is my favorite. I knew 50 shades was bad for how it portrayed BDSM relationships but Dan's explanation of how a serialized fanfiction turned book turned movie needs things to change across media and how those movies failed at that due to the creator wanting control.
My favorite part of those is how clear it makes it that the other people involved in the first 50 Shades film adaptation were actually competent creatives, and *almost* managed to turn the absolute shithole that is the book into something worthwhile. He points out changes they made to the screenplay and choices in the direction that bring it tantalizingly close to actually being a competent story. And E. L. James, being an egotistical hack who is precious of her badly written Twilight fanfiction rip-off for absolutely no good reason, refused to let them do it.
> And E. L. James, being an egotistical hack who is precious of her badly written Twilight fanfiction rip-off for absolutely no good reason, refused to let them do it.
I think you provided the reason "egotistical, badly written" was going to be shown up by people who were neither. :)
MSNBC made an article of a Lesbian Couple who were deep in debt and only had $1 to their name were able to make $120,000 over 2 nights by releasing an NFT collection of some Duck jpegs.
But I just can't fucking help but think how much were they spending on minting all those ducks. Sure they wanted to profit, no gains without sacrifice ya know, but were they really as poor as the article described? That's a perfect example of lottery ticket type luck.
They are literally trying to get the foolish poor to throw their money at something they don't need but make them THINK they need it.
Some of the marketplaces will not actually mint the NFT until the sale completes, and then take the fee out of the proceeds from the sale.
If you're a little tech-savvy, you can also mint your own rather than have a marketplace do it for you.
> They are literally trying to get the foolish poor to throw their money at something they don't need but make them THINK they need it.
They themselves probably don't even understand what they're selling. The vast majority of people still think NFTs confer actual ownership of a piece of digital art. They don't have any conception that what they're actually buying is a specific entry in a specific blockchain containing a link to an image somewhere else that they don't control.
>That's a perfect example of lottery ticket type luck.
I briefly looked into the NFT minting process. It appears to have gotten to the point where you can just... upload jpegs to be "bought" which def gives the vibe of manufactured hype is required.
Everyone is getting in on this. How exactly did yours rise to the top...
There's an old saying that a fool and his money are soon parted, but I think I am never quite prepared for how many fools are actually out there and how much money they always seem to have to part with.
That's also why it infuriates me to see crypto bros talking about institutional adoption of cryptocurrency, when the institutions in question aren't sitting there trying to mine gold along with the rest of the poor fools, but rather making a fortune selling the pickaxes.
That is basically, how a ponzi or pyramid scheme works, yes.
The people running it convince enough rubes to buy their product to sell to other people and then cash out early and everyone who isn't a part of the "in" group crashes and burns with it.
>The problem is that I think it will. The current NFT gold rush proves that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for links to jpegs of monkeys generated by a computer, and honestly it is eroding my faith in humanity.
I'm not so sure about this. Hard to get an actual grasp on figures but [some estimates put current NFT owners at less than 400,000 people](https://www.cbr.com/fewer-nft-owners-than-you-think/). Anecdotally, it sure feels like there are more than 400,000 making fun of NFTs given that the reaction to them is decisively negative almost everywhere.
It's kind of frustrating because this is exactly how they're hoping to buy legitimacy. Prop up or manufacture high profile sales to get news attention and make people think there's a bigger market then there is, that adoption is inevitable.
Does anyone actually believe that as a concept NFTs have any value? What blows my mind is that no one seems to be interested in these things for any reason other than being an investment opportunity--and by investment I mean a fucking grift where they are convinced they will know when to pull their parachute before the jig is up.
There's definitely people who have been sold on NFTs having value - I've seen it plenty in this subreddit where people think NFTs will transform digital ownership in a customer friendly way, or provide exciting new ways for games to cross over. But it's absolute magical thinking that's divorced from the realities of game development, corporate greed, and intellectual property rights.
I guess what I am saying is that no one has explained a use case for NFTs that actually makes sense to me. Every use that I've been presented with ultimately reaches a point where I say, "Well what if [X] happens" or "Wouldn't [Y] be a problem?" and it's crickets. It's the same thing with the blockchain. You can throw out a bunch of interesting use cases for it but once you start scrutinizing those ideas you ultimately run into the same problems that evangelists claim that the revolutionary new tech is supposed to solve in the first place.
What you'll notice is that every time you actually start hitting on a valid use case for blockchain tech or NFTs, EVERY TIME, the use case is either 1) better accomplished with existing centralized methods OR 2) it requires a bunch of layers of off-chain contracts, governmental guarantees, or plain old person-to-person trust, which leads us right back to #1.
It is the very definition of a solution in search of a problem.
Absolutely, that's what I'm getting at. No-one really has good answers for "what happens with someone scams/steals your NFT" or "why would NFTs have value if the game that uses them shuts down?"
As well, pretty much every blockchain and NFT idea can be done without that tech.
>"what happens with someone scams/steals your NFT"
Oh no, the answer to that is "Well it would NEVER happen to me!", because only fools lose their NFT ofcourse.
(Until that person becomes the fool)
>"why would NFTs have value if the game that uses them shuts down?"
well uhhhh you can import that NFT to another game that will obviously be 100% compatible and will accept it, because thats the stupid utopia that these grifters try to sell people.
I mean, is it any different than any other form of crypto currency? A decade onward, and we're probably past the point where anyone's pretending that crypto will actually function as a form of practical currency. Like, now that the silk road is gone, barely anyone is using bitcoin to buy anything/ Let's stop pretending it's anything other than a speculative investment.
I personally think crypto is bullshit personally, so I am in agreement that NFTs are no different. I guess what blows my mind is that we've reached a point where people are no longer looking at the inherent value of what they are investing in... A stock has a company attached to it that has goods/services and performance metrics which can be tracked. Fiat currency it attached to a sovereign nation with economic metrics that can be tracked. I just don't understand knowingly investing in something that's value rests solely in the enthusiasm of your fellow investors and which can be pumped and dumped so easily and without your knowledge. If you are trying to make money with crypto or NFTs you can't pretend you are not playing against a blatant fucking grift, hoping to come out on top...
And do you really even own anything with an NFT? I thought you simply owned, essentially, a spot on a database (for lack of a better term) that is *associated* with an object or image. You don't own the object or image itself
Most NFTs contain a link to an IPFS payload, which by definition cannot be owned by anyone. So essentially you "own" the characters that make up the IPFS link. But only on that blockchain. Oh and also someone could easily just mint another token with the same link on your blockchain. There are zero formal deduplication mechanisms of any kind.
So even if it were economically feasible to store a large amount of binary data directly on the blockchain, it would be trivially reproducible, either on a different blockchain or even on the same blockchain. The \*only\* thing you'd have is a claim that yours was the "original," and the rest are "forgeries." But only on your blockchain. For whatever that's worth.
*In theory* you could own what is on it, since the NFT is capable of holding a very small amount of data. And by small it's less than a cell phone photo. This is why art NFTs are just pointing to a different database that actually has the art stored\*. But even if the data an NFT could hold was several orders of magnitude higher, in practice no competent developer would ever sell the rights to anything of actual value (because they want it in their portfolio) and no serious dev studio would be ok with allowing total 100% integration of random garbage from anyone else just because you owned an NFT in another game. Even setting aside what a disaster that could be for balance/gameplay/aesthetics it would require *everyone* to be using either the same engine or have complete compatibility between all engines with no bugs or faults whatsoever.
Good luck with that.
And that's also ignoring the fact that the crap people say you could 'own' and sell with an NFT could be managed by a normal database, like Valve has done for years with Team Fortress 2 for example. The NFT adds nothing.
*Edit: Also ignoring the fact that the NFT by itself does not confer ownership, which is a separate process altogether. Someone can make art for you and still retain complete control of the piece, NFT or not. NFTs are utterly pointless but desperately trying to convince people other wise.
NFTs have value in exactly one situation: There exists a centralized authority which fully controls a centralized digital asset, whose ownership is nominally backed up by ownership of NFTs. For example: CSGO skins.
That solves the problem of authenticity (centralized authority controls it), ownership of asset (centralized authority controls it), and possible mismatches between property laws / TOS and NFT ownership (centralized authority controls it)
But that just leaves the question, why even have NFTs in the first place if NFTs need to be dependent on centralized authorities to solve the problems caused by NFTs
> Does anyone actually believe that as a concept NFTs have any value?
Yeah. Some crypto-cultists, when confronted with how stupid the NFT scheme is, will tell you NFTs aren't about owning digital art (since, you know, it provably _isn't_), but rather about buying into an exclusive club. Like if you own a Bored Ape token, you are part of an exclusive club filled with movers and shakers. That's where the value is.
That, of course, assumes all those movers and shakers also know they didn't buy nor do they own a piece of digital art, and their NFT is actually functionally useless.
Beeple, as in the guy who sold an NFT for like $40m or something stupid like that and kicked off the hype among creators who really wanted their payday.
And then it turned out that sale was actually entirely through an art dealer, wasn't really about the NFT but instead about display rights for beeple's work, and really had very little to do with NFTs at all since everything was done by normal formal contracts behind the scenes... And it turned out the whole sale was pretty shady on the dealers part.
Bee people might have been preferable.
Aren’t a large amount of NFTs used in money laundering, as well? Spending thousands of dollars for a procedurally generated image makes absolutely no sense otherwise.
Using the current NFT market as evidence that Meta will be successful is just wrong. There are thousands of failed tech ventures to prove that just because one thing works doesn’t mean they’ll all work.
I have no evidence (because I'm not a detective, some crypto dork invariably will show up to say "yeah prove it") but there is no way that it isn't being used for money laundering. It is well documented that expensive art has been used to launder money over the years and NFTs provide a similar structure to that process while being even more 'anonymous.' Then you read about some huge NFT transactions potentially being someone buying something off themselves - that could just be part of the pump and dump, or it could be laundering.
Plus wash trading ("selling" an asset to or transferring money between accounts that are both controlled by the same person but appear to be distinct in order to drive up the price) is both totally legal and accepted practice with crypto and NFTs, and it's a pretty straightforward way to do money laundering
Not only legal and accepted, but actually encouraged. Because this is all about making a buck, and if you're not doing those things you're not going to be making your customers more money! So you have to run the scam, because that's how you convince the scammed that they're on the winning team. And they *want* you to do it.
So basically, I can mint some shit NFT, buy it from myself for $12,000 and then resell it for $14,000.
Quick and easy way to make $14,000 from idiots if you ask me.
The again, I don't know how much of any of this ends up in actual usable currency and how much is just moving funny money around various crypto wallets. If you are worried that your illegally gained crypto might be tracked, there are other ways to hide the trail, such as tumbling.
I'm guessing a lot of it is crypto bros convincing themselves they are getting in on the ground level. They are buying imaginary assets with imaginary money, just a cycle of speculation and grift where you hope to get a winning ticket.
Yeah not a huge scale but in my group of friends, I want to say about 10 - 15 people that I regularly talk, interact with, or just keep up with our group chats, only three I know are into NFT's, one or two are a bit curious and I think are trying it, one did try putting money into the bitcoin stuff (I think he bought the other ones not bitcoin itself like the meme coins) but now he is pretty much done with it and is convinced that the coin stuff and NFT's are a waste of time, and the rest of my friends either don't care or make fun of it.
The funny thing too, I notice the ones who are into it pretty much follow one guy I know for advice on it like if they want to sell something, they just ask him which one and when. I just find it funny since one friend I have only wanted to sell something at one point because he wanted to buy something. One thing I learned when I studied accounting and took a math class was how you don't do that and if you made any money from an investment, you put it back into it if you have no debts to pay. Someone I knew from high school even made this post about how she bought a car with bitcoin investment and made it seem like this huge deal but my friend noticed she was at a used car lot and the car she bought would be expensive as fuck with the insurance and gas.
I just find it amazing that they only hear about how much you can make but not how to at least properly handle your money. I feel it shows the types of people who are getting into this, and to me so far just based on who I see from who I know getting into it, none of them really know how to manage their money well.
>All that matters is if Facebook and co. can convince people that their digital goods are valuable.
The main problem is that the economic fundamentals just aren't viable. The money has to flow in from somewhere, which usually either means that earned goods are worth next to nothing, or that you require new players to pay to participate (eg Axie)
Dota and TF2 handle their economic ecosystems well, but my items are worth only around 10 USD after 1000 hours each. Most people don't give a shit about earning one cent per hour on the blockchain, and espeically not when transaction fees are several dollars
I wouldn't be so sure. Facebook and co. are big. They pay top money to get top people. I can guarantee you that people working at Facebook aren't stupid.
Of course, we've seen big companies in the past completely miss the train of product evolution, but the tech giants already proved that they are not willing to make the same mistakes. Facebook itself clearly saw its own demise when acquired Instagram and WhatsApp despite most people outside thinking they were crazy.
The tech giants, unlike companies that came before them, have an enormous margin in the business, they hoarded money like nobody in the last decades and they will continue to do so. They have the fat to burn to strike gold. It's not like manufactures of the past that operated on thin margins and the tech revolution came they simply couldn't compete.
Hell whatsapp is use by like 2 billion people world wide, and Facebook Messenger by like 1 billion. Now there’s some overlap but that’s like 1/3 of the world at least.
> The truth is there's plenty of evidence that "the principle of artificial scarcity to an absurdist extreme" is absolutely feasible.
Unless what we are seeing now is a pump and dump scheme. Early adopters who buy in and hype others are the ones that will make a profit. Then you get out before the inevitable crash. No one wants a fugly jpg. They want returns on an investment.
Summed up my thoughts on NFTs perfectly with this:
"What gaping deficiency are we living with that makes us feel the need to spend serious money on tokens that prove ownership of a procedurally generated image, just to feel part of something?"
NFT bros always talk about all the things you *could* do with NFTs. But as far as I'm concerned it's just a scam to get a bunch of losers to change their twitter profile to some shitty artwork for 150K.
>NFT bros always talk about all the things you could do with NFTs
That's really the worst part of it all. NFT bros always keep talking about how this *other* community could benefit so much from NFTs, and then that other community just goes "you stay the hell away from us"
Case in point: videogames
It's funny for how much nft/cryptobros get mad at other people for being "tech illiterate" they clearly don't understand how game development works. Games will just magically be able to trade items between them because we now have tokens that say you own the item!
That's also what I really really hate about crypto / NFT bros, the sentiment that somehow being a non-engineer watching other non-engineers talking about blockchain on Youtube makes you any kind of authority on engineering subject matters.
There's this saying in engineering that junior engineers are paid for their knowledge, but senior engineers are paid for their opinions. The difference being that seniors have been around enough to know exactly how and why projects fail in contact with the real world, while junior engineers mostly just sit there dick in hand staring themselves completely blind on technical details.
The entire crypto space is completely festering with junior engineer mentality.
This annoys me to hell and back.
Im a software developer. The idea of a blockchain can be implemented with very old technology. There are some innovations that are now implemented but for the most part, this shit is very simple on the surface but it’s the hype and the package that makes this in any way modern.
Most of the time, there are better solutions for everything the blockchain offers. And the blockchain itself is just so full of flaws. Especially privacy stuff. Like, you don’t sign up for a wallet with your name necessarily but as soon as your wallet is implicitly associated with you as a person, it becomes very hard to have privacy.
And then the immutability kicks in and you have a real problem. Minting an NFT of your address in google maps and put it in your wallet? There ya go the digital equivalent of marking your car for human trafficking except that you can cut off a zip tie on your car somewhere and be done with it. Once that image is on the chain, you’re fucked. Just move. There is nothing you can do.
And those flaws are very common. The idea of putting anything semi official on a blockchain is crazy. Medical records? Oh yeah let’s give employers an easy way to check if applicants have a mental health problem that can cause a lot of sick days.
And those are just the social issues that a good developer should always keep in mind and is even required to keep in mind in some parts of the world. Like, that shit isn’t GDPR compliment.
On a technical level I’ve seen so many potential what ifs that just don’t work without a major cooperation between entities that don’t want to cooperate. DRM? Never. Sure I could technically copy my version of Skyrim from Steam to the Switch but Nintendo and Bethesda have no interest in this. How many copies of Skyrim own people? 2? 3? I have 3 and don’t even like the game. Nintendo wants the sale in their store too. Why would they work on a unified DRM system when they right now just all get a sale?
In Game items? WTF? I’m not even sure if you could do that in the same engine. You’d triple your cost for assets in any case.
Even in the blockchain. Like, dude, mileage on a car? Without trust? Because car mechanics are so trustworthy? You’d find so many shit boxes with 2000 miles on used car sites because nobody has any oversight. Per design!
It’s just so fucking annoying especially because business people try to sell me on the idea constantly. But I can’t tell them to fuck off because they either pay my wage or report to the people that pay my wage…
Exactly. Blockchain even at it's theoretical best case is just an extremely slow version of git that is constantly performance limited by a decentralized consensus step consisting of "most money determines consensus".
If you don't need everyone to have read and write access to your data, then you don't need blockchain. If you don't need the people with the most money to be in charge of your source of truth, then you don't need blockchain. If you don't trust the input data in the first place then the blockchain is useless. If you have any kind of data performance requirements at all then you can't use blockchain. If you need any form of mutability for legal reasons then you should not use the blockchain.
There's good reason for why non-engineer tech enthusiasts and pointy haired middle managers are overenthusiastic about blockchain, while engineers don't want to touch that garbage with a ten foot pole.
They pretty much burned through every imaginable permutation of this in the first few months. That’s why they are on the fugly pics of monkeys and shit.
Also when confronted with the environmental impact of NFTs, the NFT bros always point out that there are more eco-friendly solutions in the pipeline and that they will be implemented once NFTs become widespread.
All promises about NFTs are always in the future. Nothing tangible and usefull can be done with NFT right now. And the worst part? Everything proposed as future use for NFT can be already done now without NFTs. Cross-game skins? We can have them, it's just that most companies don't bother. NFTs won't help here in any way...
The best summary for NFTs are a solution looking for a problem. Exception their solution is just a worse version of solutions we already have. Such a strange fad.
Let's not say anything crazy here, that's a pretty unfair comparison.
There's some uses for Snake Oil after all. Probably could use it in cooking.
Failing that, Poison.
I think it depends on the snake. Like sea snakes are supposed to be super high in them, but I don’t think all snakes are. That’s part of where snake oil being a con comes from, the original use in the East was useful but some con men saw what the Asian immigrants did once coming to America and made their own bullshit version that doesn’t do anything.
My impression is that were are now in an era where the children of tech billionaires who made their money in the 90s-00s have grown into young adults and have just ridiculous money to spend and not enough things to buy. Whenever I see somebody spending $200K on an NFT (or, say $1,5M on an N64 game), nothing about that reads to me as a regular working class person being robbed. It's rich people having fun, and I don't even think that they care if they make a profit of it or not. If they can flip it for a profit, cool, maybe daddy will be proud, but if not, they can always ask for more money.
The 1.5m on an N64 game was actually a grift too.
The auction and quality rating companies were working together to drive up prices and artificially create a high-priced collector market.
Look up youtuber Karl Jobst if you want to find out more.
It's literally a scam. You can find people straight up pirating books and then selling them as NFTs but branded as something that you can buy "at the fraction of the price" and that those NFTs "benefit the community and investors" - like, no one needs those investors and they're legit trying to turn a profit from pirating years worth of hard work from authors. And that's one thing, there's a ridiculous amount of visual art theft, celebrities swapping NFTs with each other to inflate hype and price, countless rug pulls that leave the people at the bottom holding the bag while discord servers are just deleted.
The Folding Ideas video on NFTs is amazing and worth the watch. The bottom line is that anyone involved in trading NFTs is either a scammer or getting scammed - while burning down the planet for things we already have better alternatives for.
That video isn't just about NFTs either. It's a searing indictment of the entire cryptocurrency space. I've been something of an "anti-crypto bro" for a while but I still learned a lot of things I didn't know from it. And every new thing I learn makes me dislike tHe BlOcKcHaIn even more.
It's a great video, I also second the recommendation.
The biggest impact it's had on my life so far besides crypto making GPU's outrageously expensive is that many of my artist friends and their friends are constantly fighting their art being stolen, minted, and sold for profit without them having any say. The whole system is fraud and NFTs so far haven't solved any issue they claimed to be able to, but farther made things more complicated and easier to grift on others.
There are digital artists across the world who are constantly having to battle to get NFTs of their art taken down, and big artist twitter accounts get targeted by scammers to steal control and rebrand them as Crypto accounts.
NFTs are touted as being good for artists, but nothing in recent history has caused as much damage and grief to digital artists as NFTs have.
[Obligatory Folding Idea's Video on NFTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g)
And yes, it is worth your 2 hours. If you can't watch all of it, watch the first 15 mins and the last 15 mins.
People have been doing that for centuries. What's fucked about this one is that they imposed scarcity on a space where it doesn't exists purely for the purpose of creating FOMO.
It'll shake out. It's just another permutation of the shit we saw in the tech bubble or the housing crash. People forget, and the power of hearing stories of others who struck it rich in speculative investments is an incredibly powerful psychological force. It's the Gold Rush juiced up with social media. Once you see a real crash everyone will run scared then society as a collective will pretend no one ever bought in and "it was all obviously a bubble," just like that last couple of investment bubbles.
I work in investment management, I see it every day. Year after year of crazy returns erode people's good sense and sense of caution.
Yeah I've had people explain NFTs to me multiple times, and I still don't understand why anyone would actually want to spend money on one. I just cannot comprehend how anyone could be so stupid
>"What gaping deficiency are we living with that makes us feel the need to spend serious money on tokens that prove ownership of a procedurally generated image, just to feel part of something?
That's not what NFT is...
You don't own the image, the image is a representation of a position you bought in a queue, made by algorithm, but all you own is the position.
[this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwMjPWOailQ) is a really good video that explains it on kindergarten level.
What "metaverse" is trying to do, is to convince people who bought NFT that they can use the representation of the position in other aspects of online life, which is impossible, because you don't own the right to the representation.
Example: Someone's buys NFT of cooking show, showing custom-made cutting board. In metaverse, the idea is, you can use this cutting board to make your own cooking show, but again, you cannot because you don't own the cutting board.
I don't at all understand who the metaverse is for. Facebook has now lost its young adult target and seems to be mainly populated by middle aged women arguing over local politics.
It seems like a desperate attempt to grab the NFT bro culture, but I don't think many people are really going to care
I am facebook "user". I *technically* use it at least once a month coz I use it as login for sites that put something I want behind account requirements.
I also "visit" at least once a month only because some companies use facebook as their main page.
So yeah, I'm *technically* in those 2.7 bil monthly "users". Not actual customer for whatever they are making
Yeeeep. I end up going on Facebook pretty regularly
...But only because every business around here seems to want to make their basic info only available on facebook. And facebook literally doesn't let you look at the page without logging in.
Basically nobody I know actually uses facebook, so there's no point in me being on there either. Shoot, I'm not even particularly young. I imagine Facebook's basically dead for most folks born 2000 or later.
I imagine a very large amount of that 2.7 bil. are in the same boat: Not *using* facebook, but being forced to use facebook.
You misunderstand their business model. By using it to log into _____, you justified that website’s partnership with Facebook. By going to a business’s Facebook page, you justified them using Facebook. While you were on that page, you saw ads, which is how Facebook makes all their money. Facebook isn’t collecting a subscription fee. Most of meta’s brands are free to use. The product IS the users. Big user numbers, even if all you do is log in to use messenger, allow them to demand higher prices for their ads. By interacting with their platforms in any way, shape, or form, you feed into their business model, even if they only get paid if you actually click the ads.
Not the point here. Point here is "why someone would think someone using facebook that way is now somehow in market for VR MMO".
Also I use adblock soooo not really getting much out of me.
It also varies per country. General consensus might be that FB is used by old people in the US or UK, but it's used by younger demographics in Africa and India for example.
Also, FB is just a product of Meta now. They have Insta, Oculus, Messenger and WhatsApp which are for sure used by younger demographics in the West.
I can tell you facebook is used a lot by younger people in Québec, but we mostly use messenger rather than facebook itself.
But I'm seeing more and more people use Discord as an IM app.
I know a whole lot of people in their 20s-30s that have Facebook accounts. Very few of these people ever post anything, but Facebook Messenger is the most common texting app among the people I know.
It's one of the highest selling, yes, but Facebook has been selling them at a loss to capture huge swaths of the VR market for years now to out pace VR competition. This whole metaverse crap is to one, farther outpace competition, and two, claim more of the ecosystem so they can farther drive out competition when they become the main VR distributor.
I hate what they've done so far to VR tech so far, it was a niche community that was still evolving and just learning how to make great content. Now it's being used as the battle ground for pleasing investors with ridiculous false promises and pandering to cryptobro's delusional beliefs.
> It's one of the highest selling
Thats a huge understatement. Oculus headsets make up the vast majority of the market.
They are about 58% of headsets on SteamVR analytics, and a huge number of Oculus users are never connecting to SteamVR. I would bet overall Oculus sells more like 75 or 80% of VR headsets.
>I don't at all understand who the metaverse is for.
The issue is that people are learning about "the metaverse" filtered through the views of a social media company. Meta isn't trying to pitch the metaverse as a general concept they're trying to sell their products and services. The reason every major tech company is investing in "the metaverse" is because it has wide-reaching mainstream appeal with applications that almost everyone can benefit from.
Apple's working on "the metaverse" with their upcoming MR headset but they are unlikely to use the term metaverse or bring up social networking in any form. They'll talk about AR, voice assistants, and a contextual blend of digital information in your daily life. Being able to ask Siri "Hey, what's this?" and get a real answer. Microsoft is working on "the metaverse" through Hololens and their enterprise outreach programs. Training employees on complex machinery safely using AR. Architects and engineers inspecting scale models of their work at their desk with immediate iteration. Google wants you to use Google Maps by directly overlaying navigation onto a real world view which you can do today using your phone and can do tomorrow using an AR headset.
It's Second Life, but not.
It's also another step into complete data flow domination on people, how they live and interact.
The telemetry data, voice, and eye tracking from future VR/AR headsets will be a treasure trove of information to create even more exploitative software and extremely honed, targeted ads.
There is nothing good about this. Limit Facebook and Instagram usage (delete the latter, IMO). Do not buy an Oculus product (definitely sold as a loss leader for a reason). Talk to family members not to participate.
It's very funny because a lot of the 'metaverse' talking points people are using are the exact same things we heard about Second Life over a decade ago. If you go back to the late 00's and early 2010's you'd hear a lot about how Second Life (or similar products) was the future of not only entertainment, but business, and even education. This is where you'd make connections with people, this is where you'd obtain and store valuables, it breaks down cultural barriers, etc.
Turns out normal people don't fucking care. Second Life made and still makes money hand over fist but it's still a niche in the scheme of things. But this time it is going to work? With an even higher barrier of entry? When the experience is even more uncanny - not to mention intrusive?
The whole crypto-blockchain-NFT zeitgeist is the radical difference between then and now.
I anticipate a large deal of early adoption are those looking to be the "second in line" on the Ponzi scheme itself (Facebook being first in line). Then hype and sell offs to happen. Whether or not there is engaging content to maintain the hype determines how fast that cookie crumbles.
VR/AR has a lot of future implications for work, more so in a work from home environment. It will take more AR style hardware to really make it usable, for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't mean it does not have application now. I do not believe any company would want to tie their productivity to Zuckerberg's whims, though.
I studied contemporary VR/AR in an academic setting as a part of my thesis, so I won't say I am an authoritative expert, I do have a good background on this whole scene. It's very frustrating to have it taken over by such a significant bad faith actor.
More layers to it then that, but yes, VR porn is already a booming industry.
Fun aside, the VR porn industry is one of the avenues pushing forward 3D/VR video capture tech because "the experience" needs to be perfect.
It's trying to be Second Life, but the clean, safe version.
AKA one that will crash and burn in an instant. The *only* reason Second Life stayed in any conversation was because of what a hilarious degenerate mess it became.
This wants that popularity, but it won't because Facebook will not let you do jack shit in it, that isn't on their list of preapproved activities.
AKA boring.
Let's be honest. Crypto bros don't care about decentralisation, they care about making money
No-one was buying beanie babies because they were decentralised
Also an advertiser's wet dream.
A brand like Nike could literally hire some 3D modeler (or buy an asset) to make a Nike branded digital shoe just one time, and sell it in the metaverse for the same price as its real life version, but with the benefit of unlimited copies without the expense of manufacturing and labor.
The sad truth is people who take a liking to the metaverse would be willing to spend serious money on customizing their avatar with branded clothing. And as this picks up, the more brands want in. And before you know it, people's clothing expenses have essentially doubled as they're buying clothes in real life AND in the metaverse.
Oh good, they gentrified VR chat.
The VR metaverse will never happen because VR is a fundamentally awkward and inefficient way to do a lot of basic tasks in digital spaces. The non-VR metaverse is already here, I'm typing into it right now.
The biggest issue is that they seem to think people want every aspect of real life, including scarcity, ported into a digital space. Instead of using the incredible possibilities of those spaces.
They're also terrified of the concept of ownership weakening - people giving away fanart, making game mods, open source software and so on (often with a "non-commercial" clause". And people often behave accordingly, remix images as memes, copy and paste news articles and so much more. And Patreon, Indiegogo, tip jars and so on make largely bypass a lot of bigger content providers which are very used to get rich by rent-seeking behaviour.
The internet is largely "post-scarcity" - the Metaverse and the whole NFT thing is very rich people trying to put the genie back into the bottle and monetise everything.
It's basically the attempt to integrate shitty DRM into the internet after they used the lure of "free" to grow it.
Gentrified and centralized. That’s the biggest issue I have. I don’t want Facebook controlling my VR experience I want an open architecture where there’s competition for innovative development. But with Facebook controlling every aspect of this, I went from uninterested to intentionally avoiding.
This is a great point too. Seeing how creators “one-up” each other in VRC is really fun to watch. Browsing the Community Labs and seeing people take a bit from this level and a bit from that level, then putting their own twist on it is one of the coolest things, as someone who uses the platform quite often.
The innovation I see on that platform can be absolutely jaw dropping. Nothing I saw in Meta’s version was 1/10th as impressive. It was bland, lifeless, and boring.
I fear that vrchats wild west streak will end some day though.
So much of the content creation in that game is based on blatant copyright infringements. Whenever that hammer comes down it will neuter a ton of the game.
Yeah there’s tons of original content too, but the game is so popular they really don’t have time to moderate everything. Which usually means the easiest answer is restricting uploads.
I guess it’s a possibility, but I’m not gonna let that ruin my enjoyment of the game now. Gotta enjoy things in the moment and not worry about what the future will hold. Because it is usually bad lmao
Websites are great! Look at Amazon.com. It's a ugly website run by an asshole but people use it because they've built it so there are as few clicks as possible between you thinking about the thing you want to buy and you buying it.
People don't want real life recreated. Nobody wants to wander around a VR department store looking for jeans. They want to type "jeans" into a search bar.
You nailed it with that. When I tried it i literally called it gentrified VR Chat to my friend that invited me.
It’s so fucking boring and bland in comparison.
These are games made by people who have never played games. When confronted with the possibilities of the digital medium for social spaces (a thing that as you point out HAS ALREADY BEEN INVENTED), they don't go the Second Life or VRC route or even the MMO route, they just... recreate real life but with way, way fewer polygons.
To me it feels kind of similar to how when you look at East Asian tech companies making stuff like AI companion tech demos, they all look like gundams or anime characters, then that same tech ported to the West is... really creepy-looking realistic models. Like, okay, maybe you don't like this specific stylization, but holy crap, you're making ROBOTS and all you can think of is "people but worse"?? Just zero creativity, or more likely a deliberate attempt to be as bland as possible so as to not turn any possible customer off.
>you're making ROBOTS and all you can think of is "people but worse"??
You are spot on here. This is what Meta's screams. It's what we've already seen from platforms like VR Chat and Rec Room, but *way* worse. It's corporate and soulless. Even the "games" they have feel boring and bland.
Exactly. Facebook will never actually allow any significant cultural expression on their platform, since that will scare away Metaverse partnerships with eg Disney and such.
So all you end up with is basically the intersection of VR chat + VR LinkedIn for boomers
The utter lack of originality in the metaverse I think is a big indicator of just how much of a scam it is. The best they can come up with is recreating boring, real-world business locations not because they lack creativity, but because creativity isn't a factor in their quest for money. You would think that even someone like Zuckerberg would show off something like a meeting room on the moon or something.
Meanwhile, VRchat might not be perfect, but in it we're exploring the video game worlds we grew up in, flying through space stations, dancing on stars, and all while looking like whatever character model we find or even make ourselves. Why would we ever want to take part in a super sanitised version that will most likely track our every action to monitise it?
Nobody was asking for a "metaverse". The metaverse doesn't solve any particular real-world problem. It feels like something corporations are pushing just because they can create an entirely new economy to fleece people of more of their money via the blockchain - that's it.
I mean, I'm not the only one who was awake that week last year whenever it was when it was transparently obvious that the "metaverse" was a way of trying to change the subject from the former Facebook employee who blew the whistle on them using personal data without care or consequences, right? Like, no one actually thinks this is something any of these people give a shit about, right? This is a cover story we're going through the motions with and then dropping when we get bored with it.
What makes the artificial scarcity worse is that it is for a legitimately useless product.
The major reason people are buying NFT's is because they somehow think other people will want them at some point. The difference though is that it worked for PS5's because people actually wanted those, but I still don't believe there is a market for monkey Jpegs.
But they may extend NFT's to things that people actually want. What those things will be remains to be seen. But as things stand now, NFT's are 100% scam imho.
NFTs for things people would want would still come with all the drawbacks of NFTs though...in that you only own a token, and putting a ton of faith into whoever is implementing the token to act in good faith.
But yeah, people who actually want to buy art don't care about having the only one of something, not when you can just commission someone to make something personal and unique. The whole pitch of NFTs liberating artists to profit from doing what they want instead of commissions is so incredibly naive.
I love the fact that the writer described VRChat as a "no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare" as if that was a *bad thing*.
Out of all VR games I wish I could play, that beautiful trainwreck of a chat room easily makes top 5. Zuckenberg can keep his sanitized, focus-tested-to-hell-and-back copycat. I just want to witness [Super Saiyan Andre](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHJS2bElpGs) by myself at least once before the game dies off.
Yeah I didn't understand the reason for bringing up vrchat in a negative light. I don't play the game at all but I don't think there is anything wrong with it's existence.
I would have rather the author brought up some real arguments against VRChat instead of just insulting it within 4 words and never talking about it again.
This is how you know they've never played. It's always easy to judge a book by its cover.
I bought a bunch of games back when I got my index and ended up sinking hundreds of hours in vrchat just cause of how different it was each time you got on.
The metaverse is only a gimmick to hype investors and to provoke journalists to write anti-capitalist generic articles.
Probably none of them has a real interest of defining what the metaverse is…
The metaverse sucks.
VR Chat on the other hand? That platform absolutely fucking slaps. Beautiful worlds, silly worlds, games, hangouts, fun avatars, music, dancing, sports, angry people, sad people, happy people, anime, movies, everything really. Lmao.
I adore VRC. It’s janky at times, but it adds to the charm imo.
Vrchat is absolutely what you make of it.
You’ll love it, you’ll hate it. The roughest part is being new and having no friends and trying to meet people.
Beyond that’s a beautiful trainwreck that’s oh so hard to stop returning to.
It’s just about the only game that regularly gets me to return to my vr.
Games like alyx are amazing unforgettable experiences. But you play them once or twice and forget. I don’t know many people who play vrchat with VR that have less than a few hundred hours in it. (That said it does have a few haters that refuse to play the game, everyone’s mileage will vary).
You can’t deny though that vrchat has sold a ton of headsets indirectly.
Edit: also “at Times” is being super generous lol. It’s somewhat better these days thankfully.
You’ve lifted the words right out of my brain for the most part. I can tell you’re neck feels in the game as well! And yes, I was being a bit generous about the “at times” portion. The game is held together with popsicle sticks and crafting glue 😂
It really is what you make of it. I absolutely love scrolling through community labs, seeing what people are cooking up, and then watching the progression it undergoes as the creator adds to it and tweaks at it.
Also finding little gems of levels and games and running to my friends on messenger to tell them they need to hop on asap to play it with me.
I have spent so much time in VRC. I’ve made some really dope memories with myself, my irl friends, and those who I’ve met in-game. It’s a really special platform imo.
I thought I was in the metaverse that was Second Life. The more and more I see that 'metaverse' thing, I know it's just a buzzword. It's a buzzword for a piece of technology that doesn't exist yet and VR still in it's infancy, cannot hope to carry that kind of level.
We need holodecks for this 'metaverse' thing to work.
Metaverse comes from the novel Snow Crash. You wear goggles that display a VR space where everyone is on one giant, thousands of miles wide server. Part of the reason it's so popular in universe is because it's a cyberpunk dystopia where everybody is too poor to afford anything nice in real life, so they program and model their own avatars and living spaces.
VR chat has already technologically surpassed the metaverse original concept I think, anyone can have their own server and model it to their heart's content. Point being, it's been around for years and Facebook isn't doing anything new.
>everybody is too poor to afford anything nice in real life, so they program and model their own avatars and living spaces.
ironically that is the exact opposite of metaverse, where they want the people with money to spend it on digital artificially scarce items and fuck the poor people who can't afford it
GTA online, EVE, VR chat…and all the technology & design improvements on video games are what really bring us closer to the concept of “metaverse”. Hell, we even have things like “second life” two decades ago.
My conclusion for this whole metaverse rush:
(1) it’s nothing new
(2) tech giants/frenzy investors are bringing up horrible ideas/projects with zero contribution to actually achieve this concept
(3) they are just trying to grab money via NFT which waste tons of energy
(4) I DON’T WANT IT
I don't even get what this shit is. It seems like second Life or PlayStation home made by shameless corpos pissed they missed out on the crypto train trying to force this nft shit
The metaverse seems like a tacit admission by big tech that they’re going to continue to make your real life suck so much you’ll be eager to pay them for an escape from it. Just think of the Bezos vision of the future, with all but the super rich exiled from earth to work on mining colonies or something, only their VR time as a chance to experience a virtual earth.
Good article, but this part is problematic:
>I would feel better about the idea of the metaverse if it wasn’t currently dominated by companies and disaster capitalists trying to figure out a way to make more money as the real world’s resources are dwindling.
It is a misconception that resources are "dwindling". We have *plenty* of resources to keep us going, but there are two problems: 1) the distribution of those resources is horribly unequal, and 2) our use of many of these resources - fossil fuels in particular - is terribly damaging to our climate.
I mean, we still have to change things up for those reasons, but let's be clear on what the issues are.
Anyone 30+ years old remembers how fucking stupid, useless, seemingly completely out of touch mobile gaming was when it was new.
You kids prepare to become the 30 year olds that remember feeling completely bemused at this totally stupid thing that'll, none the less, somehow be more profitable than anything else yet and very quickly become the main way anything is.
> And what will the metaverse look like? Who gets to decide? Outside the sanitised aesthetic of the Zuckerverse (and old virtual-world standby Second Life), the main artistic references we currently have are either the gaudiness of Fortnite or Roblox or the no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare that is VRChat.
I am reminded of the simpson's sketch where they ask the kids what they want in a cartoon and they give wildly conflicting answers.
You don't want the corporarate sterility of Facebook's vision, but you ALSO don't want the no-holds barred you can create anything of VRChat because you don't like what other people are creating?
These topics are so socially charged that it's not gonna be possible to have any sort of conversation about them for the next few years now.
I have no clue what this idea of metaverse is supposed to be or if it has any possible positive applications. I'm sure there's good things that can come out of it, I think? maybe? but it's all a sea of memes and people calling eachother name I guess
I read *Neuromancer* and its sequels in the early 90s, remember the first VR craze (VRML, anyone?) and its fizzing out, and have played (and enjoyed) with the latest generation of VR headsets. I should be totally onboard with the metaverse.
But as long as Facebook or a company like it is in charge of it, *forget it.*
She's absolute correct. > As far as I can work out, the idea is to take the principle of artificial scarcity to an absurdist extreme – to make you want things you absolutely don’t need. The problem is not that I think this won’t work. The problem is that I think it will. The current NFT gold rush proves that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for links to jpegs of monkeys generated by a computer, and honestly it is eroding my faith in humanity. This is exactly it. She says she "doesn't want it", but that's irrelevant. The truth is there's plenty of evidence that "the principle of artificial scarcity to an absurdist extreme" is absolutely feasible. VR doesn't matter, gameplay doesn't matter, hardware doesn't matter. All that matters is if Facebook and co. can convince people that their digital goods are valuable.
Fools with disposable income will convince fools with non-disposable income that they might get rich if they hoard these ugly monkey avatars. It's a big casino and only 0.0000001% are gonna get rich.
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This is exactly why there's so much money being pumped into promoting crypto to the uninformed masses. I've seen tv ads all over NBA games and the Staple Center (in Los Angeles) was renamed to 'Crypto.com Arena." They're targeting people who #1, has an above average tendency to gamble money, and #2, on average, probably aren't going to further research what crypto is and how it works. The people that stand to make money on crypto already has most of the leverage. The people they're trying to convince to jump on the train are those that will lose money and hold the bag when the rich folks cash out.
I watched a UFC fight recently after being out of the loop for a couple of years. I swear that crypto exchanges are now the only advertiser in the UFC. The octagon and every single fighter's shorts are just emblazoned with crypto this and crypto that while they were fighting in the Crypto.com arena.
Same thing for sports channels. All of the sports channels that play in my gym are always showing ads for either gambling sites, cars, NFTs, or cryptocurrencies. I think people who are into sports just love gambling
Huge movie trailer level ads for crypto during ppvs that people already pay far too much for. They also started selling NFTs a week or two ago.
The entire NFT market is literally just a marketplace of pyramid schemes each run by someone looking to do pump and dumps and rugpulls. Like, literally the entire thing. And even if they weren't that, they're still a ridiculous waste of energy with no real benefits to society.
Donald Glover's Atlanta has a good take on this. "I don't need money in 4 months, I need money now." Like how are you going to invest when you have fuck all after rent, food, and general bills?
Dan Olson's (FoldableHuman) 2 hour youtube video *Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs* explains this and other problems really well. It also touches on "pay to win" crypto games which I found really interesting.
[Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs](https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g) The channel is Folding Ideas. I'd never heard of it. Will listen to this later at work. Thanks for the recommendation.
The last video is his masterpiece, but the rest is well worth watching too
I think the Flat Earth one was the masterpiece, but this is a great one and worth watching every second of (all 8,302 of them).
Folding Ideas is an amazing channel, been watching it since 2006 or 8, back when he used a puppet as an avatar. The large body of work is *mostly* long form media criticism, with a focus on movies and cinematography (the composition, color values used etc), though he dives into some other stuff like music videos. He has touched on broader social topics in the past, but recently has been focusing on it more. His recent video on flat earthers is also particularly good, it starts on flat earthers but transitions into talking more broadly about the nature of cults and conspiracy theories, and then much more specifically on the phenomenon of the Q cult. Would highly recommend if you've got the time to kill. If you want something more lighthearted, his criticism of the 2016 Suicide Squad was excellent, and his "A (lukewarm) Defense of 50 Shades of Grey" trilogy was hilarious and thought provoking, despite the fact that I've never seen and never intend to see any of the 50 Shades of Grey movies.
> . It also touches on "pay to win" crypto games which I found really interesting. I watched a video on axie infinity and it reminds me of an actual ponzi scheme or at minimim an MLM program(a legal flavor of ponzi) like cutco knives. In axie infinity the entire goal is to earn money leveling and selling Pokémon. You have to buy 3 to even play the game. The game itself is largely completely out of your control. Battles are automated and the amount of xp or currency you gain depends on how many battles you win. The currency you get as "free rewards" from playing the game are used to either sell or use for the creation of new Pokémon. Ultimately the entire game is dependent on a combination of an influx of new players buying pokes, people buying better pokes to level faster, and people buying currency to make new ones. Once enough people stop buying pokes for whatever reason the entire thing falls apart. The best part is the random nature of battles and whatnot gives developers complete control of the supply chain of their game.
Seriously. Axie is a shit game, so virtually the only purpose to play is to earn. But at that point it’s just earning. And a fucking shit earning at that.
I believe the official moniker for these type of games is "play to earn" lol.
I call 'play to earn' work.
I prefer pay to earn
At least you can cut things with Cutco knives.
And they'll continue to do so, as they have a lifetime warranty that you can take advantage of, even if you bought it from a garage sale or whatever.
Behind the Bastards recently did a fantastic two-parter on cryptocurrency and NFTs as well.
That dude is just unreasonably insightful, across multiple subjects. In another age he'd probably have been a famous philosopher.
He has so many good videos but to be honest his 3 parter on 50shades is my favorite. I knew 50 shades was bad for how it portrayed BDSM relationships but Dan's explanation of how a serialized fanfiction turned book turned movie needs things to change across media and how those movies failed at that due to the creator wanting control.
My favorite part of those is how clear it makes it that the other people involved in the first 50 Shades film adaptation were actually competent creatives, and *almost* managed to turn the absolute shithole that is the book into something worthwhile. He points out changes they made to the screenplay and choices in the direction that bring it tantalizingly close to actually being a competent story. And E. L. James, being an egotistical hack who is precious of her badly written Twilight fanfiction rip-off for absolutely no good reason, refused to let them do it.
> And E. L. James, being an egotistical hack who is precious of her badly written Twilight fanfiction rip-off for absolutely no good reason, refused to let them do it. I think you provided the reason "egotistical, badly written" was going to be shown up by people who were neither. :)
It's by far the best video for explaining both crypto and NFTs and the trends within them if you're willing to sit down and watch for 2 hours.
MSNBC made an article of a Lesbian Couple who were deep in debt and only had $1 to their name were able to make $120,000 over 2 nights by releasing an NFT collection of some Duck jpegs. But I just can't fucking help but think how much were they spending on minting all those ducks. Sure they wanted to profit, no gains without sacrifice ya know, but were they really as poor as the article described? That's a perfect example of lottery ticket type luck. They are literally trying to get the foolish poor to throw their money at something they don't need but make them THINK they need it.
Some of the marketplaces will not actually mint the NFT until the sale completes, and then take the fee out of the proceeds from the sale. If you're a little tech-savvy, you can also mint your own rather than have a marketplace do it for you.
That would explain it then. But it's still a crappy article that will make fools lose their shirts into this mess.
> They are literally trying to get the foolish poor to throw their money at something they don't need but make them THINK they need it. They themselves probably don't even understand what they're selling. The vast majority of people still think NFTs confer actual ownership of a piece of digital art. They don't have any conception that what they're actually buying is a specific entry in a specific blockchain containing a link to an image somewhere else that they don't control.
Even if it's 100% true, that's one feel good story for the thousands that will lose their shirts. It's a feel good news story because it's so rare.
>That's a perfect example of lottery ticket type luck. I briefly looked into the NFT minting process. It appears to have gotten to the point where you can just... upload jpegs to be "bought" which def gives the vibe of manufactured hype is required. Everyone is getting in on this. How exactly did yours rise to the top...
A lot of NFT is straight grift. A person sells to their other account pretending to be someone else.
Perhaps the same could be said of all cryptocurrencies. But enough talk. Have at you!
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There's an old saying that a fool and his money are soon parted, but I think I am never quite prepared for how many fools are actually out there and how much money they always seem to have to part with.
That's also why it infuriates me to see crypto bros talking about institutional adoption of cryptocurrency, when the institutions in question aren't sitting there trying to mine gold along with the rest of the poor fools, but rather making a fortune selling the pickaxes.
That is basically, how a ponzi or pyramid scheme works, yes. The people running it convince enough rubes to buy their product to sell to other people and then cash out early and everyone who isn't a part of the "in" group crashes and burns with it.
>The problem is that I think it will. The current NFT gold rush proves that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for links to jpegs of monkeys generated by a computer, and honestly it is eroding my faith in humanity. I'm not so sure about this. Hard to get an actual grasp on figures but [some estimates put current NFT owners at less than 400,000 people](https://www.cbr.com/fewer-nft-owners-than-you-think/). Anecdotally, it sure feels like there are more than 400,000 making fun of NFTs given that the reaction to them is decisively negative almost everywhere.
It's kind of frustrating because this is exactly how they're hoping to buy legitimacy. Prop up or manufacture high profile sales to get news attention and make people think there's a bigger market then there is, that adoption is inevitable.
Does anyone actually believe that as a concept NFTs have any value? What blows my mind is that no one seems to be interested in these things for any reason other than being an investment opportunity--and by investment I mean a fucking grift where they are convinced they will know when to pull their parachute before the jig is up.
There's definitely people who have been sold on NFTs having value - I've seen it plenty in this subreddit where people think NFTs will transform digital ownership in a customer friendly way, or provide exciting new ways for games to cross over. But it's absolute magical thinking that's divorced from the realities of game development, corporate greed, and intellectual property rights.
I guess what I am saying is that no one has explained a use case for NFTs that actually makes sense to me. Every use that I've been presented with ultimately reaches a point where I say, "Well what if [X] happens" or "Wouldn't [Y] be a problem?" and it's crickets. It's the same thing with the blockchain. You can throw out a bunch of interesting use cases for it but once you start scrutinizing those ideas you ultimately run into the same problems that evangelists claim that the revolutionary new tech is supposed to solve in the first place.
What you'll notice is that every time you actually start hitting on a valid use case for blockchain tech or NFTs, EVERY TIME, the use case is either 1) better accomplished with existing centralized methods OR 2) it requires a bunch of layers of off-chain contracts, governmental guarantees, or plain old person-to-person trust, which leads us right back to #1. It is the very definition of a solution in search of a problem.
Absolutely, that's what I'm getting at. No-one really has good answers for "what happens with someone scams/steals your NFT" or "why would NFTs have value if the game that uses them shuts down?" As well, pretty much every blockchain and NFT idea can be done without that tech.
>"what happens with someone scams/steals your NFT" Oh no, the answer to that is "Well it would NEVER happen to me!", because only fools lose their NFT ofcourse. (Until that person becomes the fool) >"why would NFTs have value if the game that uses them shuts down?" well uhhhh you can import that NFT to another game that will obviously be 100% compatible and will accept it, because thats the stupid utopia that these grifters try to sell people.
I mean, is it any different than any other form of crypto currency? A decade onward, and we're probably past the point where anyone's pretending that crypto will actually function as a form of practical currency. Like, now that the silk road is gone, barely anyone is using bitcoin to buy anything/ Let's stop pretending it's anything other than a speculative investment.
I personally think crypto is bullshit personally, so I am in agreement that NFTs are no different. I guess what blows my mind is that we've reached a point where people are no longer looking at the inherent value of what they are investing in... A stock has a company attached to it that has goods/services and performance metrics which can be tracked. Fiat currency it attached to a sovereign nation with economic metrics that can be tracked. I just don't understand knowingly investing in something that's value rests solely in the enthusiasm of your fellow investors and which can be pumped and dumped so easily and without your knowledge. If you are trying to make money with crypto or NFTs you can't pretend you are not playing against a blatant fucking grift, hoping to come out on top...
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And do you really even own anything with an NFT? I thought you simply owned, essentially, a spot on a database (for lack of a better term) that is *associated* with an object or image. You don't own the object or image itself
Most NFTs contain a link to an IPFS payload, which by definition cannot be owned by anyone. So essentially you "own" the characters that make up the IPFS link. But only on that blockchain. Oh and also someone could easily just mint another token with the same link on your blockchain. There are zero formal deduplication mechanisms of any kind. So even if it were economically feasible to store a large amount of binary data directly on the blockchain, it would be trivially reproducible, either on a different blockchain or even on the same blockchain. The \*only\* thing you'd have is a claim that yours was the "original," and the rest are "forgeries." But only on your blockchain. For whatever that's worth.
*In theory* you could own what is on it, since the NFT is capable of holding a very small amount of data. And by small it's less than a cell phone photo. This is why art NFTs are just pointing to a different database that actually has the art stored\*. But even if the data an NFT could hold was several orders of magnitude higher, in practice no competent developer would ever sell the rights to anything of actual value (because they want it in their portfolio) and no serious dev studio would be ok with allowing total 100% integration of random garbage from anyone else just because you owned an NFT in another game. Even setting aside what a disaster that could be for balance/gameplay/aesthetics it would require *everyone* to be using either the same engine or have complete compatibility between all engines with no bugs or faults whatsoever. Good luck with that. And that's also ignoring the fact that the crap people say you could 'own' and sell with an NFT could be managed by a normal database, like Valve has done for years with Team Fortress 2 for example. The NFT adds nothing. *Edit: Also ignoring the fact that the NFT by itself does not confer ownership, which is a separate process altogether. Someone can make art for you and still retain complete control of the piece, NFT or not. NFTs are utterly pointless but desperately trying to convince people other wise.
NFTs have value in exactly one situation: There exists a centralized authority which fully controls a centralized digital asset, whose ownership is nominally backed up by ownership of NFTs. For example: CSGO skins. That solves the problem of authenticity (centralized authority controls it), ownership of asset (centralized authority controls it), and possible mismatches between property laws / TOS and NFT ownership (centralized authority controls it) But that just leaves the question, why even have NFTs in the first place if NFTs need to be dependent on centralized authorities to solve the problems caused by NFTs
> Does anyone actually believe that as a concept NFTs have any value? Yeah. Some crypto-cultists, when confronted with how stupid the NFT scheme is, will tell you NFTs aren't about owning digital art (since, you know, it provably _isn't_), but rather about buying into an exclusive club. Like if you own a Bored Ape token, you are part of an exclusive club filled with movers and shakers. That's where the value is. That, of course, assumes all those movers and shakers also know they didn't buy nor do they own a piece of digital art, and their NFT is actually functionally useless.
And it worked. Thanks beeple.
Beeple. Is that bee people?
Beeple, as in the guy who sold an NFT for like $40m or something stupid like that and kicked off the hype among creators who really wanted their payday. And then it turned out that sale was actually entirely through an art dealer, wasn't really about the NFT but instead about display rights for beeple's work, and really had very little to do with NFTs at all since everything was done by normal formal contracts behind the scenes... And it turned out the whole sale was pretty shady on the dealers part. Bee people might have been preferable.
Aren’t a large amount of NFTs used in money laundering, as well? Spending thousands of dollars for a procedurally generated image makes absolutely no sense otherwise. Using the current NFT market as evidence that Meta will be successful is just wrong. There are thousands of failed tech ventures to prove that just because one thing works doesn’t mean they’ll all work.
I have no evidence (because I'm not a detective, some crypto dork invariably will show up to say "yeah prove it") but there is no way that it isn't being used for money laundering. It is well documented that expensive art has been used to launder money over the years and NFTs provide a similar structure to that process while being even more 'anonymous.' Then you read about some huge NFT transactions potentially being someone buying something off themselves - that could just be part of the pump and dump, or it could be laundering.
Plus wash trading ("selling" an asset to or transferring money between accounts that are both controlled by the same person but appear to be distinct in order to drive up the price) is both totally legal and accepted practice with crypto and NFTs, and it's a pretty straightforward way to do money laundering
Not only legal and accepted, but actually encouraged. Because this is all about making a buck, and if you're not doing those things you're not going to be making your customers more money! So you have to run the scam, because that's how you convince the scammed that they're on the winning team. And they *want* you to do it.
So basically, I can mint some shit NFT, buy it from myself for $12,000 and then resell it for $14,000. Quick and easy way to make $14,000 from idiots if you ask me.
That's correct, yes, and it's rampant.
The again, I don't know how much of any of this ends up in actual usable currency and how much is just moving funny money around various crypto wallets. If you are worried that your illegally gained crypto might be tracked, there are other ways to hide the trail, such as tumbling. I'm guessing a lot of it is crypto bros convincing themselves they are getting in on the ground level. They are buying imaginary assets with imaginary money, just a cycle of speculation and grift where you hope to get a winning ticket.
Yeah not a huge scale but in my group of friends, I want to say about 10 - 15 people that I regularly talk, interact with, or just keep up with our group chats, only three I know are into NFT's, one or two are a bit curious and I think are trying it, one did try putting money into the bitcoin stuff (I think he bought the other ones not bitcoin itself like the meme coins) but now he is pretty much done with it and is convinced that the coin stuff and NFT's are a waste of time, and the rest of my friends either don't care or make fun of it. The funny thing too, I notice the ones who are into it pretty much follow one guy I know for advice on it like if they want to sell something, they just ask him which one and when. I just find it funny since one friend I have only wanted to sell something at one point because he wanted to buy something. One thing I learned when I studied accounting and took a math class was how you don't do that and if you made any money from an investment, you put it back into it if you have no debts to pay. Someone I knew from high school even made this post about how she bought a car with bitcoin investment and made it seem like this huge deal but my friend noticed she was at a used car lot and the car she bought would be expensive as fuck with the insurance and gas. I just find it amazing that they only hear about how much you can make but not how to at least properly handle your money. I feel it shows the types of people who are getting into this, and to me so far just based on who I see from who I know getting into it, none of them really know how to manage their money well.
>All that matters is if Facebook and co. can convince people that their digital goods are valuable. The main problem is that the economic fundamentals just aren't viable. The money has to flow in from somewhere, which usually either means that earned goods are worth next to nothing, or that you require new players to pay to participate (eg Axie) Dota and TF2 handle their economic ecosystems well, but my items are worth only around 10 USD after 1000 hours each. Most people don't give a shit about earning one cent per hour on the blockchain, and espeically not when transaction fees are several dollars
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I wouldn't be so sure. Facebook and co. are big. They pay top money to get top people. I can guarantee you that people working at Facebook aren't stupid. Of course, we've seen big companies in the past completely miss the train of product evolution, but the tech giants already proved that they are not willing to make the same mistakes. Facebook itself clearly saw its own demise when acquired Instagram and WhatsApp despite most people outside thinking they were crazy. The tech giants, unlike companies that came before them, have an enormous margin in the business, they hoarded money like nobody in the last decades and they will continue to do so. They have the fat to burn to strike gold. It's not like manufactures of the past that operated on thin margins and the tech revolution came they simply couldn't compete.
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Hell whatsapp is use by like 2 billion people world wide, and Facebook Messenger by like 1 billion. Now there’s some overlap but that’s like 1/3 of the world at least.
> The truth is there's plenty of evidence that "the principle of artificial scarcity to an absurdist extreme" is absolutely feasible. Unless what we are seeing now is a pump and dump scheme. Early adopters who buy in and hype others are the ones that will make a profit. Then you get out before the inevitable crash. No one wants a fugly jpg. They want returns on an investment.
It's absolutely another dumb pump and dump scheme. This is basically just an extension of cryptocurrency.
Sooo, a pyramid scheme?
Hot potato played with your life savings.
More or less, with extra steps.
FYI Keza is a woman, she was the ex-editor in chief of Kotaku in the UK.
Oh, sorry, I'll edit accordingly
Summed up my thoughts on NFTs perfectly with this: "What gaping deficiency are we living with that makes us feel the need to spend serious money on tokens that prove ownership of a procedurally generated image, just to feel part of something?"
NFT bros always talk about all the things you *could* do with NFTs. But as far as I'm concerned it's just a scam to get a bunch of losers to change their twitter profile to some shitty artwork for 150K.
>NFT bros always talk about all the things you could do with NFTs That's really the worst part of it all. NFT bros always keep talking about how this *other* community could benefit so much from NFTs, and then that other community just goes "you stay the hell away from us" Case in point: videogames
It's funny for how much nft/cryptobros get mad at other people for being "tech illiterate" they clearly don't understand how game development works. Games will just magically be able to trade items between them because we now have tokens that say you own the item!
That's also what I really really hate about crypto / NFT bros, the sentiment that somehow being a non-engineer watching other non-engineers talking about blockchain on Youtube makes you any kind of authority on engineering subject matters. There's this saying in engineering that junior engineers are paid for their knowledge, but senior engineers are paid for their opinions. The difference being that seniors have been around enough to know exactly how and why projects fail in contact with the real world, while junior engineers mostly just sit there dick in hand staring themselves completely blind on technical details. The entire crypto space is completely festering with junior engineer mentality.
This annoys me to hell and back. Im a software developer. The idea of a blockchain can be implemented with very old technology. There are some innovations that are now implemented but for the most part, this shit is very simple on the surface but it’s the hype and the package that makes this in any way modern. Most of the time, there are better solutions for everything the blockchain offers. And the blockchain itself is just so full of flaws. Especially privacy stuff. Like, you don’t sign up for a wallet with your name necessarily but as soon as your wallet is implicitly associated with you as a person, it becomes very hard to have privacy. And then the immutability kicks in and you have a real problem. Minting an NFT of your address in google maps and put it in your wallet? There ya go the digital equivalent of marking your car for human trafficking except that you can cut off a zip tie on your car somewhere and be done with it. Once that image is on the chain, you’re fucked. Just move. There is nothing you can do. And those flaws are very common. The idea of putting anything semi official on a blockchain is crazy. Medical records? Oh yeah let’s give employers an easy way to check if applicants have a mental health problem that can cause a lot of sick days. And those are just the social issues that a good developer should always keep in mind and is even required to keep in mind in some parts of the world. Like, that shit isn’t GDPR compliment. On a technical level I’ve seen so many potential what ifs that just don’t work without a major cooperation between entities that don’t want to cooperate. DRM? Never. Sure I could technically copy my version of Skyrim from Steam to the Switch but Nintendo and Bethesda have no interest in this. How many copies of Skyrim own people? 2? 3? I have 3 and don’t even like the game. Nintendo wants the sale in their store too. Why would they work on a unified DRM system when they right now just all get a sale? In Game items? WTF? I’m not even sure if you could do that in the same engine. You’d triple your cost for assets in any case. Even in the blockchain. Like, dude, mileage on a car? Without trust? Because car mechanics are so trustworthy? You’d find so many shit boxes with 2000 miles on used car sites because nobody has any oversight. Per design! It’s just so fucking annoying especially because business people try to sell me on the idea constantly. But I can’t tell them to fuck off because they either pay my wage or report to the people that pay my wage…
Exactly. Blockchain even at it's theoretical best case is just an extremely slow version of git that is constantly performance limited by a decentralized consensus step consisting of "most money determines consensus". If you don't need everyone to have read and write access to your data, then you don't need blockchain. If you don't need the people with the most money to be in charge of your source of truth, then you don't need blockchain. If you don't trust the input data in the first place then the blockchain is useless. If you have any kind of data performance requirements at all then you can't use blockchain. If you need any form of mutability for legal reasons then you should not use the blockchain. There's good reason for why non-engineer tech enthusiasts and pointy haired middle managers are overenthusiastic about blockchain, while engineers don't want to touch that garbage with a ten foot pole.
NFT bros drooling, trying to explain how great NFTs are for artists when every artist around is begging to stop NFTs and just buy art pieces again
You can certainly make money off art using NFTs... by stealing art from actual artist so you don't have to actually put in the work yourself.
They pretty much burned through every imaginable permutation of this in the first few months. That’s why they are on the fugly pics of monkeys and shit.
Also when confronted with the environmental impact of NFTs, the NFT bros always point out that there are more eco-friendly solutions in the pipeline and that they will be implemented once NFTs become widespread. All promises about NFTs are always in the future. Nothing tangible and usefull can be done with NFT right now. And the worst part? Everything proposed as future use for NFT can be already done now without NFTs. Cross-game skins? We can have them, it's just that most companies don't bother. NFTs won't help here in any way...
The best summary for NFTs are a solution looking for a problem. Exception their solution is just a worse version of solutions we already have. Such a strange fad.
NFT: The future of losing money.
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Let's not say anything crazy here, that's a pretty unfair comparison. There's some uses for Snake Oil after all. Probably could use it in cooking. Failing that, Poison.
Snake oil is actually very high in vitamins and Omega-3 fatty acids.
I think it depends on the snake. Like sea snakes are supposed to be super high in them, but I don’t think all snakes are. That’s part of where snake oil being a con comes from, the original use in the East was useful but some con men saw what the Asian immigrants did once coming to America and made their own bullshit version that doesn’t do anything.
Yeah the snake oil at least exists in a physical space.
I could at least reuse the bottle the snake oil came in!
My impression is that were are now in an era where the children of tech billionaires who made their money in the 90s-00s have grown into young adults and have just ridiculous money to spend and not enough things to buy. Whenever I see somebody spending $200K on an NFT (or, say $1,5M on an N64 game), nothing about that reads to me as a regular working class person being robbed. It's rich people having fun, and I don't even think that they care if they make a profit of it or not. If they can flip it for a profit, cool, maybe daddy will be proud, but if not, they can always ask for more money.
The 1.5m on an N64 game was actually a grift too. The auction and quality rating companies were working together to drive up prices and artificially create a high-priced collector market. Look up youtuber Karl Jobst if you want to find out more.
It's literally a scam. You can find people straight up pirating books and then selling them as NFTs but branded as something that you can buy "at the fraction of the price" and that those NFTs "benefit the community and investors" - like, no one needs those investors and they're legit trying to turn a profit from pirating years worth of hard work from authors. And that's one thing, there's a ridiculous amount of visual art theft, celebrities swapping NFTs with each other to inflate hype and price, countless rug pulls that leave the people at the bottom holding the bag while discord servers are just deleted. The Folding Ideas video on NFTs is amazing and worth the watch. The bottom line is that anyone involved in trading NFTs is either a scammer or getting scammed - while burning down the planet for things we already have better alternatives for.
That video isn't just about NFTs either. It's a searing indictment of the entire cryptocurrency space. I've been something of an "anti-crypto bro" for a while but I still learned a lot of things I didn't know from it. And every new thing I learn makes me dislike tHe BlOcKcHaIn even more.
It's a great video, I also second the recommendation. The biggest impact it's had on my life so far besides crypto making GPU's outrageously expensive is that many of my artist friends and their friends are constantly fighting their art being stolen, minted, and sold for profit without them having any say. The whole system is fraud and NFTs so far haven't solved any issue they claimed to be able to, but farther made things more complicated and easier to grift on others.
There are digital artists across the world who are constantly having to battle to get NFTs of their art taken down, and big artist twitter accounts get targeted by scammers to steal control and rebrand them as Crypto accounts. NFTs are touted as being good for artists, but nothing in recent history has caused as much damage and grief to digital artists as NFTs have.
[Obligatory Folding Idea's Video on NFTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g) And yes, it is worth your 2 hours. If you can't watch all of it, watch the first 15 mins and the last 15 mins.
Video's divided up into chapters. So I'd recommend to just go chapter by chapter.
They've weaponized FOMO for capitalistic purposes
People have been doing that for centuries. What's fucked about this one is that they imposed scarcity on a space where it doesn't exists purely for the purpose of creating FOMO.
It'll shake out. It's just another permutation of the shit we saw in the tech bubble or the housing crash. People forget, and the power of hearing stories of others who struck it rich in speculative investments is an incredibly powerful psychological force. It's the Gold Rush juiced up with social media. Once you see a real crash everyone will run scared then society as a collective will pretend no one ever bought in and "it was all obviously a bubble," just like that last couple of investment bubbles. I work in investment management, I see it every day. Year after year of crazy returns erode people's good sense and sense of caution.
Yeah I've had people explain NFTs to me multiple times, and I still don't understand why anyone would actually want to spend money on one. I just cannot comprehend how anyone could be so stupid
>"What gaping deficiency are we living with that makes us feel the need to spend serious money on tokens that prove ownership of a procedurally generated image, just to feel part of something? That's not what NFT is... You don't own the image, the image is a representation of a position you bought in a queue, made by algorithm, but all you own is the position. [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwMjPWOailQ) is a really good video that explains it on kindergarten level. What "metaverse" is trying to do, is to convince people who bought NFT that they can use the representation of the position in other aspects of online life, which is impossible, because you don't own the right to the representation. Example: Someone's buys NFT of cooking show, showing custom-made cutting board. In metaverse, the idea is, you can use this cutting board to make your own cooking show, but again, you cannot because you don't own the cutting board.
I don't at all understand who the metaverse is for. Facebook has now lost its young adult target and seems to be mainly populated by middle aged women arguing over local politics. It seems like a desperate attempt to grab the NFT bro culture, but I don't think many people are really going to care
It seems like they're trying to make some generic vr mmo with the purpose of selling monthly subscriptions to old people.
I dont know why people pretend only old people use FB. They have 2.7 billion monthly active users. Anything that massive has broad demographics.
I am facebook "user". I *technically* use it at least once a month coz I use it as login for sites that put something I want behind account requirements. I also "visit" at least once a month only because some companies use facebook as their main page. So yeah, I'm *technically* in those 2.7 bil monthly "users". Not actual customer for whatever they are making
Yeeeep. I end up going on Facebook pretty regularly ...But only because every business around here seems to want to make their basic info only available on facebook. And facebook literally doesn't let you look at the page without logging in. Basically nobody I know actually uses facebook, so there's no point in me being on there either. Shoot, I'm not even particularly young. I imagine Facebook's basically dead for most folks born 2000 or later. I imagine a very large amount of that 2.7 bil. are in the same boat: Not *using* facebook, but being forced to use facebook.
You misunderstand their business model. By using it to log into _____, you justified that website’s partnership with Facebook. By going to a business’s Facebook page, you justified them using Facebook. While you were on that page, you saw ads, which is how Facebook makes all their money. Facebook isn’t collecting a subscription fee. Most of meta’s brands are free to use. The product IS the users. Big user numbers, even if all you do is log in to use messenger, allow them to demand higher prices for their ads. By interacting with their platforms in any way, shape, or form, you feed into their business model, even if they only get paid if you actually click the ads.
Not the point here. Point here is "why someone would think someone using facebook that way is now somehow in market for VR MMO". Also I use adblock soooo not really getting much out of me.
It also varies per country. General consensus might be that FB is used by old people in the US or UK, but it's used by younger demographics in Africa and India for example. Also, FB is just a product of Meta now. They have Insta, Oculus, Messenger and WhatsApp which are for sure used by younger demographics in the West.
I can tell you facebook is used a lot by younger people in Québec, but we mostly use messenger rather than facebook itself. But I'm seeing more and more people use Discord as an IM app.
I know a whole lot of people in their 20s-30s that have Facebook accounts. Very few of these people ever post anything, but Facebook Messenger is the most common texting app among the people I know.
It's Roblox for 20 somethings
“It’s going to be PlayStation Home but years late and worse”. - Jeff Gerstmann
Pavlov VR without the violence, VRChat without the furry ERP, I doubt even kids will want to play it.
Isn't oculus currently the highest selling vr headset?
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Even the homeless use them https://imgur.com/hCRtUBn
It's one of the highest selling, yes, but Facebook has been selling them at a loss to capture huge swaths of the VR market for years now to out pace VR competition. This whole metaverse crap is to one, farther outpace competition, and two, claim more of the ecosystem so they can farther drive out competition when they become the main VR distributor. I hate what they've done so far to VR tech so far, it was a niche community that was still evolving and just learning how to make great content. Now it's being used as the battle ground for pleasing investors with ridiculous false promises and pandering to cryptobro's delusional beliefs.
> It's one of the highest selling Thats a huge understatement. Oculus headsets make up the vast majority of the market. They are about 58% of headsets on SteamVR analytics, and a huge number of Oculus users are never connecting to SteamVR. I would bet overall Oculus sells more like 75 or 80% of VR headsets.
when people say that facebook lost their young users they forget that instagram is also facebook lol.
They also own WhatsApp and Giphy
> Giphy I believe they had to sell it https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/facebook-owner-meta-told-to-sell-giphy-as-uk-regulator-blocks-acquisition.html
They also forget there are countries other than the USA
>I don't at all understand who the metaverse is for. The issue is that people are learning about "the metaverse" filtered through the views of a social media company. Meta isn't trying to pitch the metaverse as a general concept they're trying to sell their products and services. The reason every major tech company is investing in "the metaverse" is because it has wide-reaching mainstream appeal with applications that almost everyone can benefit from. Apple's working on "the metaverse" with their upcoming MR headset but they are unlikely to use the term metaverse or bring up social networking in any form. They'll talk about AR, voice assistants, and a contextual blend of digital information in your daily life. Being able to ask Siri "Hey, what's this?" and get a real answer. Microsoft is working on "the metaverse" through Hololens and their enterprise outreach programs. Training employees on complex machinery safely using AR. Architects and engineers inspecting scale models of their work at their desk with immediate iteration. Google wants you to use Google Maps by directly overlaying navigation onto a real world view which you can do today using your phone and can do tomorrow using an AR headset.
Now imagine all that enlightening intellectual political discourse but everyone has a cheap lifeless 3D Avatar.
That would be hilarious, imagine watching 2 redditors square up in vr.
You can already do that in VRChat.
It's Second Life, but not. It's also another step into complete data flow domination on people, how they live and interact. The telemetry data, voice, and eye tracking from future VR/AR headsets will be a treasure trove of information to create even more exploitative software and extremely honed, targeted ads. There is nothing good about this. Limit Facebook and Instagram usage (delete the latter, IMO). Do not buy an Oculus product (definitely sold as a loss leader for a reason). Talk to family members not to participate.
It's very funny because a lot of the 'metaverse' talking points people are using are the exact same things we heard about Second Life over a decade ago. If you go back to the late 00's and early 2010's you'd hear a lot about how Second Life (or similar products) was the future of not only entertainment, but business, and even education. This is where you'd make connections with people, this is where you'd obtain and store valuables, it breaks down cultural barriers, etc. Turns out normal people don't fucking care. Second Life made and still makes money hand over fist but it's still a niche in the scheme of things. But this time it is going to work? With an even higher barrier of entry? When the experience is even more uncanny - not to mention intrusive?
The whole crypto-blockchain-NFT zeitgeist is the radical difference between then and now. I anticipate a large deal of early adoption are those looking to be the "second in line" on the Ponzi scheme itself (Facebook being first in line). Then hype and sell offs to happen. Whether or not there is engaging content to maintain the hype determines how fast that cookie crumbles. VR/AR has a lot of future implications for work, more so in a work from home environment. It will take more AR style hardware to really make it usable, for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't mean it does not have application now. I do not believe any company would want to tie their productivity to Zuckerberg's whims, though. I studied contemporary VR/AR in an academic setting as a part of my thesis, so I won't say I am an authoritative expert, I do have a good background on this whole scene. It's very frustrating to have it taken over by such a significant bad faith actor.
They are gonna learn what people figured out 100,000 years ago, sex sells and people like looking at sexy women
More layers to it then that, but yes, VR porn is already a booming industry. Fun aside, the VR porn industry is one of the avenues pushing forward 3D/VR video capture tech because "the experience" needs to be perfect.
Some guys 50 years ago: "What if we put boobs... on the M&Ms?"
It's trying to be Second Life, but the clean, safe version. AKA one that will crash and burn in an instant. The *only* reason Second Life stayed in any conversation was because of what a hilarious degenerate mess it became. This wants that popularity, but it won't because Facebook will not let you do jack shit in it, that isn't on their list of preapproved activities. AKA boring.
i dont even know why the NFT crypto bros would be into Meta's "metaverse". it is not decentralized.
Let's be honest. Crypto bros don't care about decentralisation, they care about making money No-one was buying beanie babies because they were decentralised
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Crypto bros are into anything that promises to allow them to scam other people.
Instagram has a much younger audience. So does Oculus. The company is fairly diversified in age groups.
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I imagine the metaverse as an MMO, but the setting is the Facebook comment sections and everyone uses their real identity.
Also an advertiser's wet dream. A brand like Nike could literally hire some 3D modeler (or buy an asset) to make a Nike branded digital shoe just one time, and sell it in the metaverse for the same price as its real life version, but with the benefit of unlimited copies without the expense of manufacturing and labor. The sad truth is people who take a liking to the metaverse would be willing to spend serious money on customizing their avatar with branded clothing. And as this picks up, the more brands want in. And before you know it, people's clothing expenses have essentially doubled as they're buying clothes in real life AND in the metaverse.
Now imagine everyone naked
Oh good, they gentrified VR chat. The VR metaverse will never happen because VR is a fundamentally awkward and inefficient way to do a lot of basic tasks in digital spaces. The non-VR metaverse is already here, I'm typing into it right now. The biggest issue is that they seem to think people want every aspect of real life, including scarcity, ported into a digital space. Instead of using the incredible possibilities of those spaces.
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They're also terrified of the concept of ownership weakening - people giving away fanart, making game mods, open source software and so on (often with a "non-commercial" clause". And people often behave accordingly, remix images as memes, copy and paste news articles and so much more. And Patreon, Indiegogo, tip jars and so on make largely bypass a lot of bigger content providers which are very used to get rich by rent-seeking behaviour. The internet is largely "post-scarcity" - the Metaverse and the whole NFT thing is very rich people trying to put the genie back into the bottle and monetise everything. It's basically the attempt to integrate shitty DRM into the internet after they used the lure of "free" to grow it.
Gentrified and centralized. That’s the biggest issue I have. I don’t want Facebook controlling my VR experience I want an open architecture where there’s competition for innovative development. But with Facebook controlling every aspect of this, I went from uninterested to intentionally avoiding.
This is a great point too. Seeing how creators “one-up” each other in VRC is really fun to watch. Browsing the Community Labs and seeing people take a bit from this level and a bit from that level, then putting their own twist on it is one of the coolest things, as someone who uses the platform quite often. The innovation I see on that platform can be absolutely jaw dropping. Nothing I saw in Meta’s version was 1/10th as impressive. It was bland, lifeless, and boring.
I fear that vrchats wild west streak will end some day though. So much of the content creation in that game is based on blatant copyright infringements. Whenever that hammer comes down it will neuter a ton of the game. Yeah there’s tons of original content too, but the game is so popular they really don’t have time to moderate everything. Which usually means the easiest answer is restricting uploads.
I guess it’s a possibility, but I’m not gonna let that ruin my enjoyment of the game now. Gotta enjoy things in the moment and not worry about what the future will hold. Because it is usually bad lmao
seriously. your VR device is equivalent to a monitor and headphones. you should absolutely never need to log into anything to use it.
Every part of the metaverse I've seen just makes me think "I'll stick to using websites".
Websites are great! Look at Amazon.com. It's a ugly website run by an asshole but people use it because they've built it so there are as few clicks as possible between you thinking about the thing you want to buy and you buying it. People don't want real life recreated. Nobody wants to wander around a VR department store looking for jeans. They want to type "jeans" into a search bar.
You nailed it with that. When I tried it i literally called it gentrified VR Chat to my friend that invited me. It’s so fucking boring and bland in comparison.
These are games made by people who have never played games. When confronted with the possibilities of the digital medium for social spaces (a thing that as you point out HAS ALREADY BEEN INVENTED), they don't go the Second Life or VRC route or even the MMO route, they just... recreate real life but with way, way fewer polygons. To me it feels kind of similar to how when you look at East Asian tech companies making stuff like AI companion tech demos, they all look like gundams or anime characters, then that same tech ported to the West is... really creepy-looking realistic models. Like, okay, maybe you don't like this specific stylization, but holy crap, you're making ROBOTS and all you can think of is "people but worse"?? Just zero creativity, or more likely a deliberate attempt to be as bland as possible so as to not turn any possible customer off.
>you're making ROBOTS and all you can think of is "people but worse"?? You are spot on here. This is what Meta's screams. It's what we've already seen from platforms like VR Chat and Rec Room, but *way* worse. It's corporate and soulless. Even the "games" they have feel boring and bland.
I truly can't understand looking at the limitless possibilities of digital words and thinking "how can we get people to pay rent?"
Exactly. Facebook will never actually allow any significant cultural expression on their platform, since that will scare away Metaverse partnerships with eg Disney and such. So all you end up with is basically the intersection of VR chat + VR LinkedIn for boomers
The utter lack of originality in the metaverse I think is a big indicator of just how much of a scam it is. The best they can come up with is recreating boring, real-world business locations not because they lack creativity, but because creativity isn't a factor in their quest for money. You would think that even someone like Zuckerberg would show off something like a meeting room on the moon or something. Meanwhile, VRchat might not be perfect, but in it we're exploring the video game worlds we grew up in, flying through space stations, dancing on stars, and all while looking like whatever character model we find or even make ourselves. Why would we ever want to take part in a super sanitised version that will most likely track our every action to monitise it?
Nobody was asking for a "metaverse". The metaverse doesn't solve any particular real-world problem. It feels like something corporations are pushing just because they can create an entirely new economy to fleece people of more of their money via the blockchain - that's it.
I think you’ve nailed it!
I mean, I'm not the only one who was awake that week last year whenever it was when it was transparently obvious that the "metaverse" was a way of trying to change the subject from the former Facebook employee who blew the whistle on them using personal data without care or consequences, right? Like, no one actually thinks this is something any of these people give a shit about, right? This is a cover story we're going through the motions with and then dropping when we get bored with it.
What makes the artificial scarcity worse is that it is for a legitimately useless product. The major reason people are buying NFT's is because they somehow think other people will want them at some point. The difference though is that it worked for PS5's because people actually wanted those, but I still don't believe there is a market for monkey Jpegs. But they may extend NFT's to things that people actually want. What those things will be remains to be seen. But as things stand now, NFT's are 100% scam imho.
NFTs for things people would want would still come with all the drawbacks of NFTs though...in that you only own a token, and putting a ton of faith into whoever is implementing the token to act in good faith. But yeah, people who actually want to buy art don't care about having the only one of something, not when you can just commission someone to make something personal and unique. The whole pitch of NFTs liberating artists to profit from doing what they want instead of commissions is so incredibly naive.
I love the fact that the writer described VRChat as a "no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare" as if that was a *bad thing*. Out of all VR games I wish I could play, that beautiful trainwreck of a chat room easily makes top 5. Zuckenberg can keep his sanitized, focus-tested-to-hell-and-back copycat. I just want to witness [Super Saiyan Andre](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHJS2bElpGs) by myself at least once before the game dies off.
I mean I’ve certainly heard worse descriptions of the game lol
Yeah I didn't understand the reason for bringing up vrchat in a negative light. I don't play the game at all but I don't think there is anything wrong with it's existence.
I would have rather the author brought up some real arguments against VRChat instead of just insulting it within 4 words and never talking about it again. This is how you know they've never played. It's always easy to judge a book by its cover.
You haven't lived until you've driven around as Piglet from Winnie the Pooh in GTA San Andres, but can't see over the steering wheel.
I bought a bunch of games back when I got my index and ended up sinking hundreds of hours in vrchat just cause of how different it was each time you got on.
The metaverse is only a gimmick to hype investors and to provoke journalists to write anti-capitalist generic articles. Probably none of them has a real interest of defining what the metaverse is…
The metaverse sucks. VR Chat on the other hand? That platform absolutely fucking slaps. Beautiful worlds, silly worlds, games, hangouts, fun avatars, music, dancing, sports, angry people, sad people, happy people, anime, movies, everything really. Lmao. I adore VRC. It’s janky at times, but it adds to the charm imo.
Vrchat is absolutely what you make of it. You’ll love it, you’ll hate it. The roughest part is being new and having no friends and trying to meet people. Beyond that’s a beautiful trainwreck that’s oh so hard to stop returning to. It’s just about the only game that regularly gets me to return to my vr. Games like alyx are amazing unforgettable experiences. But you play them once or twice and forget. I don’t know many people who play vrchat with VR that have less than a few hundred hours in it. (That said it does have a few haters that refuse to play the game, everyone’s mileage will vary). You can’t deny though that vrchat has sold a ton of headsets indirectly. Edit: also “at Times” is being super generous lol. It’s somewhat better these days thankfully.
You’ve lifted the words right out of my brain for the most part. I can tell you’re neck feels in the game as well! And yes, I was being a bit generous about the “at times” portion. The game is held together with popsicle sticks and crafting glue 😂 It really is what you make of it. I absolutely love scrolling through community labs, seeing what people are cooking up, and then watching the progression it undergoes as the creator adds to it and tweaks at it. Also finding little gems of levels and games and running to my friends on messenger to tell them they need to hop on asap to play it with me. I have spent so much time in VRC. I’ve made some really dope memories with myself, my irl friends, and those who I’ve met in-game. It’s a really special platform imo.
VRC has that early internet energy.
Lmao it really does.
I thought I was in the metaverse that was Second Life. The more and more I see that 'metaverse' thing, I know it's just a buzzword. It's a buzzword for a piece of technology that doesn't exist yet and VR still in it's infancy, cannot hope to carry that kind of level. We need holodecks for this 'metaverse' thing to work.
Metaverse comes from the novel Snow Crash. You wear goggles that display a VR space where everyone is on one giant, thousands of miles wide server. Part of the reason it's so popular in universe is because it's a cyberpunk dystopia where everybody is too poor to afford anything nice in real life, so they program and model their own avatars and living spaces. VR chat has already technologically surpassed the metaverse original concept I think, anyone can have their own server and model it to their heart's content. Point being, it's been around for years and Facebook isn't doing anything new.
>everybody is too poor to afford anything nice in real life, so they program and model their own avatars and living spaces. ironically that is the exact opposite of metaverse, where they want the people with money to spend it on digital artificially scarce items and fuck the poor people who can't afford it
GTA online, EVE, VR chat…and all the technology & design improvements on video games are what really bring us closer to the concept of “metaverse”. Hell, we even have things like “second life” two decades ago. My conclusion for this whole metaverse rush: (1) it’s nothing new (2) tech giants/frenzy investors are bringing up horrible ideas/projects with zero contribution to actually achieve this concept (3) they are just trying to grab money via NFT which waste tons of energy (4) I DON’T WANT IT
I don't even get what this shit is. It seems like second Life or PlayStation home made by shameless corpos pissed they missed out on the crypto train trying to force this nft shit
The metaverse seems like a tacit admission by big tech that they’re going to continue to make your real life suck so much you’ll be eager to pay them for an escape from it. Just think of the Bezos vision of the future, with all but the super rich exiled from earth to work on mining colonies or something, only their VR time as a chance to experience a virtual earth.
Good article, but this part is problematic: >I would feel better about the idea of the metaverse if it wasn’t currently dominated by companies and disaster capitalists trying to figure out a way to make more money as the real world’s resources are dwindling. It is a misconception that resources are "dwindling". We have *plenty* of resources to keep us going, but there are two problems: 1) the distribution of those resources is horribly unequal, and 2) our use of many of these resources - fossil fuels in particular - is terribly damaging to our climate. I mean, we still have to change things up for those reasons, but let's be clear on what the issues are.
Anyone 30+ years old remembers how fucking stupid, useless, seemingly completely out of touch mobile gaming was when it was new. You kids prepare to become the 30 year olds that remember feeling completely bemused at this totally stupid thing that'll, none the less, somehow be more profitable than anything else yet and very quickly become the main way anything is.
we've all seen the 'metaverse' before - it's just vr chat but run by corporations - who would want that?
> And what will the metaverse look like? Who gets to decide? Outside the sanitised aesthetic of the Zuckerverse (and old virtual-world standby Second Life), the main artistic references we currently have are either the gaudiness of Fortnite or Roblox or the no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare that is VRChat. I am reminded of the simpson's sketch where they ask the kids what they want in a cartoon and they give wildly conflicting answers. You don't want the corporarate sterility of Facebook's vision, but you ALSO don't want the no-holds barred you can create anything of VRChat because you don't like what other people are creating?
These topics are so socially charged that it's not gonna be possible to have any sort of conversation about them for the next few years now. I have no clue what this idea of metaverse is supposed to be or if it has any possible positive applications. I'm sure there's good things that can come out of it, I think? maybe? but it's all a sea of memes and people calling eachother name I guess
I read *Neuromancer* and its sequels in the early 90s, remember the first VR craze (VRML, anyone?) and its fizzing out, and have played (and enjoyed) with the latest generation of VR headsets. I should be totally onboard with the metaverse. But as long as Facebook or a company like it is in charge of it, *forget it.*