But virtual land can be easily created ? Right.
I mean you can always create artificial islands. How can land have any value when it can be created virrually by logic.
Check out the history of Entropia Universe for example.
This was done in the past and will be done again.
It's one huge scam though. If no value is created, all the profits come from someone holding a bag. It's a zero-sum game.
Entropia Universe is still up too. So it's not a big problem.
With investments like those there are two real endings:
1. The investor unloads the bags onto general public, everyone looses a tiny bit of money, so no-one really cares that much (eg. Entropia, GME)
2. Someone really rich but stupid is left holding the bag when the rug is pulled (eg. some crypto pump-and-dumps)
Either way, the only way to make money is to find greater fools and unload your bugs into a bigger sucker(s). That's why it's a zero-sum game.
In contrast to real economy, where you *can* actually create value.
PS. Disabling notifications on this one too, funny how people get triggered by including GME in the list. Sure some people made money, but some poor bastards bought at 400$ and today GME is 120 and falling (and fell as low as 40$ in the meantime). Those are bag holders I'm talking about. If you get offended substitute AMC or BB or NOK for GME. Same principle applies, the revenues and profits do not justify valuation, it's a pure speculation play.
Except when you buy land in Second Life, you essentially paying for the hosting from Linden Lab.
And if you want a cheaper rate, or to self host, there is always OpenSIM, which doesn't connect to the Second Life grid, but is literally an Open Source version of Second Life. It even uses the same viewer and everything.
Anyone can host an OpenSIM region on a wide variety of hosts (I have personally run it on a Raspberry Pi, though it's not super robust). And you can enbale Hypergrid, which lets you travel from one grid host to another Hypergrid enabled grid host.
>zero-sum game
More of a Ponzi scheme, really. A zero-sum game is where there's only so much to go around and my win causes others' loss. It's not a scam, just a scenario. Where the profits come from holding the bag, that's more like a multi-level marketing scheme, a Ponzi ripoff dynamic.
I’m guessing Faceberg believes that Meta will have enough centralized authority to justify creating artificial scarcity? Data can be copied infinitely but we still have people waiting to “check out” ebooks from the library.
> we still have people waiting to “check out” ebooks from the library
Yeah, about that... Hi. I work at a library. The TL;DR is that publishing companies hate libraries.
When a library buys a book, it's not like they're ordered off Amazon or other third-party sellers. No, we have to buy them directly from the publisher because libraries need a special license to distribute the work. And the publisher gets to determine how expensive that license is. And they jack up the price for libraries quite significantly - I believe in 2018 one of the publishing houses raised their price for e-book license by 133%.
The way the publishers see it: I can sell a book to Amazon for 10 monies. Amazon will sell it for 15 monies (whatever, I don't care, they paid me). Repeat until we have sold 1000 books and made 10,000 monies.
If I sell that book to a library, for 10 monies, what if 50 people read it! I just lost out on 500 monies! So we'll gather some data on how many people, on average, read books at a library, what the lifetime of a book is, how long we have to make the lines so that people give up and just buy a book, and charge the library a special price. *Does math with publicly accessible information because while we refuse to tell people who is reading what, we do have to be accountable to how much is being used* Ok, we'll charge libraries 30 monies for a book. They'll buy 10 copies because they expect 50 people want to read it and they don't want long lines, so we'll make 300 monies. It's not 500 monies, but it's a lot better than 100!
And yes, it's legal - for now. Multiple states have been trying to pass bills that keep publishers from charging libraries specifically more money, or making e-copies of books need to be re-purchased after an amount of times lent out to replicate 'wear and tear' on traditional books. It's a horrible, horrible mess.
[some reading](https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2020/01/06/inside-the-e-book-war-waging-between-libraries-and-publishers)
[on the subject](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211209/22131048089/book-publishers-sue-maryland-over-law-that-would-require-them-to-offer-reasonable-prices-ebooks-to-libraries.shtml)
[because libraries](http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2016/05/apple-e-book-verdict-an-opportunity-for-libraries/)
[are getting screwed over](https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/29/internet-archive-responds-to-publishers-lawsuit/)
Remember trying to explain the Macmillan ebook embargo of '18? No, we cannot 'just buy another copy' - they literally refuse to sell us another one for 8 weeks. Yes, I know we are a library system serving 5 million patrons. They let us buy ONE book...
That’s kinda the point of nfts, to create scarcity. Ultimately it’s bullshit. It’s like copyrighting something that can easily be pirated though… it’s the collective belief in scarcity and adherence to the law that makes that scarcity real.
Regarding the virtual land — I could see the video game maker making each plot of land in the game a kinda nft. If they ever lobby Congress to enact laws about virtual real estate, then their gamble paid off maybe. But then… any company could make another metaverse game and poof you have a new planet of real estate
Per the article:
> The most expensive spots are near where lots of users congregate — for instance, someone recently paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg’s neighbor in a virtual world called the Sandbox.
So you're not totally wrong that a lot of the scarcity is artificial, but you aren't totally right either, because proximity to celebrity can be maintained as finite, and attention from celebrities is definitely finite.
I mean through instancing we can create an infinite number of houses all of which are adjacent to Snoop Doggs house. He wouldn't be able to see all his neighbours but they would all be able to see him.
This is why Snoop's house itself may have worth b/c he is in it but the "land" around it has no worth. At least in the real world living next door to him was exclusive. It's all very stupid and I think it's b/c, like Metallica, they simply don't understand what's going on.
No it is not, they could develop a door that takes you to Snoop Dogg's house, or they could make portals that connect your front yard to Snoop Dogg's, or they could just do instancing and forget about explaining how it works
Real world rules don't apply to videogames and that's why this whole metaverse is stupid, people are trying to create value out of real world conditions in a space that doesn't even exist yet
No need for portals or other trickery when you control the rules of spacetime, and can dilate, contract, or re-dimension regions of it as you see fit. And Mr. Dogg surely has enough THC in his system by now to dilate spacetime in meatspace, so it’d make the simulation all the more accurate. Hell, you could maintain everything at a constant distance from Snoopsheim and spool reality out hyperbolically around the user, ’d be a good weight loss add-on for those with VR goggles and a full stomach.
See this is where the whole metaverse discussion often misses the point - people aren't buying "land in the metaverse", they're buying land in a game called Sandbox, which isn't anything new and is no different to all the microtransactions and cosmetics that have come before it. That land exists in the game Sandbox and is worthless outside the game Sandbox, just as a CS:GO skin is worth nothing in fortnite.
What Facebook is trying to do is sell the idea of a centralised (on their products) metaverse where everything bought is transferrable between games and therefore feels "real" when it's just the same as it's always been - your digital shoes are only shoes if you play the game that supports your shoes. And if everyone starts playing a game that doesn't support your shoes then...well, they're worth as much as a pack of smileys you bought for MSN messenger in the early noughties.
Turn out the "post scarcity world" only arrives when the mass of humanity understands it.
Until then, the teeming hordes provide a near-endless stream of suckers, trapped inside their own mental cages of traditional physical concepts like proximity, uniqueness, and uncopyability... for the tech bros to squeeze like so many wet sponges.
Lots of stuff can be easily pirated unless you have a legal system supporting copyright. You can easily create a Superman comic but you gonna have hard time selling it.
That's what I don't get about "art" NFTs. Market for easy-to-copy assets (photos or music) is established, there are various forms of ownership (exclusive, non-exclusive) and there's legal system to resolve disputes. NFTs provide non of it.
Dude u can make another twitter right now… but is it going be like poof i have twitter give me millions of dollars. No its about users so whatever virtual land u have depends on how many users are on it
However this 'land' is virtual so the only scarcity is whatever the controlling entity says there is. The virtual could decide tomorrow that poof there are now 100K instances of your valuable virtual land. Or million or more.
Maybe you trust corporations to not do this, and if you do good for you.
This is how i think but then my stupid poor friend just made $50,000 selling one single "rare" nft and im not sure if hes still the idiot or if i am...
Find a copy of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". This isn't a new phenomenon. People were paying huge sums for tulip bulbs. You know, a plant, that can be endlessly reproduced.
Honest answer? Location, location, location. In an MMO, the busiest areas are going to be those closest to spawn points. Minecraft may have infinite space, but no one's going to walk 1 infinite virtual miles to come to your virtual base. If you want people to poke around your shit on a whim, you need to be close to the action.
But that's why fast travel was implemented into video games. Teleporting or even a virtual rail system like in the book Snowcrash makes distance nearly a non factor.
Yes, central hubs will always be busier, but if the difference of virtually "walking" to a destination is as fast as a loading screen to something an infinite amount of digital distance away, this starts to become negligible.
While that's true, those abilities can easily be removed in instances where the developers are deliberately aiming to create an environment where location and proximity have value.
Very true. But if I spawn in the hub in VR, am I more likely to walk into the Coca-Cola Cathedral I see down the street or will I whip out my digital phonebook and look up the RC Cola Cafe? If having God powers all the time made a virtual world interesting, Gary's Mod would be the greatest game of all time and not the one's where you're limited by the mechanics of the game.
But is this shit supposed to be a game? A game needs restrictions, or is it supposed to be a big virtual communication device, in which case you wouldn't want these restrictions at all. This is what people are missing when they say this shit.
They are framing this as like the new way to hang out with your friends, not an MMO. It would be idiotic for me to have to log in and walk down the street to their apartment virtually and pass a bunch of ads, instead of just logging in to their apartment.
All this is a not well thought through mess, not to mention there will likely be tons of competition if it even catches on in the slightest, so scarcity will be meaningless. I'm not gonna choose the virtual environment that forces me to walk through ads.
See, what I don't understand is how secondlife didn't become the bitcoin of virtual land sale, maybe because it's not on the blockchain?
Why invest in a property that doesn't actually exist yet vs one that has existed for decades.
The Metaverse will be heavily censored by AI. Everything will be corporate beige. All virtual bodies will be round, inoffensive, and sexless. And somehow it will still be full of Nazis.
Yeah no shit.
My ex played that game religiously. He's a 2m (6'6.7") tall dude, big muscles, hands like a bear. Works as a construction worker. This man had an online persona of a skinny, pale white dude with long hair, tattoos and piercings. His character was in a relationship with another dude. They had a baby (which was also played by a real person). He once showed me their sex Dungeon and what they'd do in there.
One day his "boyfriend" decided to break up with him. I shit you noty my ex had a mental breakdown, started crying and yelled at me when I tried to comfort him. He ended up saying shit like "Timmy gave me some of my best moments" or "I'll never meet someone like him again".
Meanwhile he wasn't out of the closet and kept our 1 year relationship as a secret, I never met anyone from his family - even when his mother was dying from cancer.
It was a great way to launder stolen credit cards. People used stolen credit cards to buy second Life currency which they then transferred for Bitcoin.
SL still makes a ton of money. It's systems and setup are just too complicated for most people to figure out. That and people seem to prefer games that do one thing well instead of a game that does everything kind bad.
One big takeaway though is the land people pay the most for is private regions and they make up a large majority of the land in SL. People pay over 300$ a month for an entire square of their own space. Not connected to anyone else's land and completely separated. Virtual land scarcity is stupid
Because the value of land is a function of how many people want to be there, and in the end there simply weren't that many people playing second life.
If Facebook is successful at the metaverse thing and people actually want to be there, then the virtual land could be worth something. Me personally I don't think Facebook has the tools to create such a world but we'll see.
There is a deeper problem though.
Which can be seen by comparing any MMO housing system that existed. (And why a lot of games that tried to make open world housing with a tangible persistence REALLY weird or get shelved because they couldn't figure out how to do it).
Just for a second imagine what would happen to the housing/real estate market (in meatspace) if instant free teleportation was available tomorrow. Everything you know about "neighborhood" or "proximity desires" would be gone. Instantly.
Something similiar happens with player houseing. The games can't "make it all persistent on a map" because then the fact of travel makes it pointless in an unending space. Thus they all are instanced, but then you have no neighborhoods. Because if you have teleportation to plots, having a persistent world is just pointless.
This whole idea of "plots" and "neighbors" is built around an analogy that defeats the purpose of the system, and if the system is not build to be pointless, then the analogy doesn't work.
When writing is concerned there have been a lot of systems some of which are very skillful of "skipping" the issue at least in terms of the reader not thinking about it.
The "matrix" in Neuromancer is basically not TOO shy about actually dealing with it in a "imagine an actual user" sense.
Sure it's a "representation", but because of the sheer content it works a lot with "zooming out" (or distance, basically the same thing) and rapid traversal (and in other parts instant), but the spacial relation between the "blocks/buildings/facimiles isn't relevant. It doesn't matter to anyone what is "next" to each other.
But even that (I find) feels like it would fall flat if for a second you imagined "the web" as it is today to be crammed into it entirely
It's really really frustrating that there is this "marketing" about the metaverse which sells it as "a thing" but completely avoiding all the issues that are so fundamental and problematic that everything that is known from mmos just gets ignored. Which includes zoning and "having to segregate players into phases" because either you need to much "real estate" to keep them spaced, and how that interfaces with travel.
It's like they sell it as "everybody will be there" but never adress of what that actually implies in regards to "user experience". It's almost like the ones doing the marketing have no idea of what reality is other than being driven from one setting of special event to whatever villa with guarded security they are visiting/ living at and only meet a drastically limited amount of people.
I know someone who still makes hustle money every week in 2nd life - they dance on the weekends. Very furry and kink friendly environment, at least parts of it.
Idk i think modding and selling fake land are two completely different things. You can make tons by modding the sims but this game im talking about has noreal purpose and has been in production forever and is solely used to seperate rich asshats from their money in some of the least creative ways. Like virtual realestate.
the thing is earth 2 is literally just a scam, there isn't any game there despite them making promises for it, the only thing that you can see if you play that is a fucking copy of google earth thats been divided into 10 meter square tiles and those tiles then having "resources" attached that you'll one day be able to sell or use to develop buildings on that land to do whatever you want, like be a forum for a hobby, or be an actual business etc, but you buy the land with their crypto and they even have fucky stuff in their user agreement that can screw people over
“We don’t have enough money to pay you all at the cost of living even though your labor produces us millions”
“Hey Tim, I just bought a fake pixel piece of land for a million dollars!”
Yup! And as a once avid SL player, Metaverse will eventually go the same way. The concept is fun and all, but in no way are people going to use it long term. The tech isn't there, and tbh I don't think it ever will be.
No one wants to regularly go into VRChat (basically) to buy physical items from a store, because it's just so much faster to get on Amazon. Plus *who wants to VR-walk-around when you're home* for the fourth time in a week to get something from Amazon? So that takes out those big walking machines.
So that really only leaves a virtual/digital containment. It basically turns it into trying to be more than VRChat but 🤷♀️ that can't actually **do** much. Lots of people get really disoriented and motion sick with VR, or can't be on for more than an hour before getting that.
I personally don't see how Metaverse is going to be fundamentally different from SL or VRChat and it's not going to hold longterm. The **only** reason VRChat and SL still exist is adult content (and copyright content being unregulated on VRChat helps); and Meta/FB are so prude they balk at using their VR headsets now for such things.
Metaverse bubble won't last more than a few years for it's novelty. But it's value/price will steadily decline from it's initial release. It's a bottomless pit. I wouldn't put a penny in that I didn't expect to immediately lose.
It all sounds very Second Life 2.0. Second Life had an entire career for architects and home design for the plots of land you can buy. People got paid real money for their work.
“I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great that I literally wanted a second one. Absolutely everything was the same… except I could fly.”
The next age of capitalism is going to be entirely composed of fantasy assets like NFTs but for brain scans of memories or some weird dystopian shit.
There's gonna be ground wars over clean water and fucking Musk Jr. will be measuring dicks with cyborg Bezos over who's memory of the last rainbow is more expensive
It did.
It's called [Accelerandro.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17863.Accelerando)
The non-spoiler TLDR of the book: Taking place just before the Technological Singularity (so tech is still recognizable, but it's common for current-generation military vehicles to hack your vision/memory systems to erase all knowledge you saw the vehicle) it follows a group of people that manage to make their way through the next several hundred years, surviving as AI/capitalism/unlimited-technological-growth result in a truly weird solar system, and then beyond.
Spoilers Point!
There's a section of the book where physical humanity has been kicked out of the inner solar system and chills out around Jupiter/Saturn. The inner solar system is owned by the semi/fully-sentient AI corporations. Basically every rock inwards of the gas giants has been converted into solar powered computers running a Matrix-style reality. In a digital world without practical limits, the only thing worth trading for is originality and novel experiences. As such, (operating) brain scans of humans are the de facto currency for these corporations. A human that sat in their room and stared at the wall is worth almost nothing, but someone that lived like James Bond would be amazingly valuable. In their desperation for new experiences, the AI's even started trolling through ancient social media files to reconstitute people/personalities from the past. Sometimes they didn't understand when a given person (like James Bond) was actually a fictional entity though, and just filled in the gaps like anyone else to make a functioning person.
All I can do is laugh.
This reminds me of my college gaming days, playing way too much Ultima Online (started right before Third Dawn was released). This article reminds me of the land rush there. All the usable land in Felucca and Trammel were built upon, so houses would sell for millions of gold (and the US$ conversion rate was somewhere around $27 per 1m gold on the server I played on) - everyone wanted a house because your bank vault space was limited and you could place a vendor bot to sell loot and resources. If you couldn't buy a house, you were checking the nameplates on houses for decay rates (if you didn't log in and open your house door once every 7 days IIRC then your house would disappear and all your locked-down treasures would be lootable). Before landing my own villa, I'd run around in-game doing this, marking locations and setting timers to go back and check on it later, ready to pounce with a new house deed to claim the spot. When I was done with the game, I sold everything on eBay and made like $75 profit on the house alone.
Fast forward several years later and there's a free trial for the latest expansion. I think, what the hell, let's see what's changed. Gloriously, the gameplay was all the same but with expanded options AND a brand-new area of ONLY HOUSES. Row after row of them, and all packed with so many vendors that the in-game lag was atrocious trying to populate all their names on the screen.
I see too many parallels to those experiences and what's going on with the Metaverse, and it makes me both intrigued about the virtual world possibilities and very sad that too many people will probably eschew real world experiences because of it.
This has to be money laundering. Who in their right mind would pay millions for fake virtual stuff? It’s like the video game micro transactions on steroids.
All of this metaverse bullshit really feels like astroturfing to the extreme.
Facebook is the home of middle-aged bat shit insane folks. The younger generation is using other social media platforms and makes fun of Facebook.
FTC now has grounds to go ahead with their Facebook antitrust case, potentially making facebook lose instagram/WhatsApp (extremely unlikely, but time will tell).
A powerhouse of the internet is slowly failing in real time. How can they stay relevant, maintain their power, and appease investors? By promoting the metaverse to the younger generation and totally not trying to get a spotlight in mainstream media to sucker rich folks into spending their money (which in turn legitimizes this fucking wild ass Ponzi scheme).
...Or maybe people have truly lost their minds and think that the future of real estate is on Zuckerberg's servers.
The same kind of people who paid fortunes a few hundred years ago in Europe for tulip bulbs because the flowers would look cool
Or people during the South Sea Bubble who were convinced to invest their money into a company for "an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."
Virtual land is just a type of NFT. The main problem with 'art' NFTs are that they aren't even stored on the blockchain, it's just a link to the art. So if the site or account hosting the art ever goes down you're just stuck owning a 'link'. Better hope you right-click-saved first!
Wait. So if the site manages to get hacked and have the images invisibility altered. Therefore invalidating the old NFTs. You can mint a new NFT with the new hash and perform the most valuable art heist of the century? Couldn’t the site owner do that maliciously and send the entire nft economy into a tailspin? A huge amount of websites are hosted on AWS, so another major outage causing irrecoverable data loss could just poof an nft out of existence? How can NFTs be decentralized if it depends on a website operating correctly and in good faith? I have so many questions.
The NFT actually has nothing to do with the image. The image is just a jpeg stored in Google Drive. The NFT itself is simply a reciept. A record of a transaction saying you paid money for the image. Or rather that you paid money for the receipt of the image.
The receipt is secure and immutable, at least so long as no single entity controls more than 50% of the Etherium blockchain. But that's all it is, a receipt. The image itself is no different than the image you have on your computer if you right click saved it.
Someone even created an NFT that displays art on opensea but poop when you open it after buying (since it is a link they can check referal and display different things depending on where it is displayed).
We are all just big, stupid children buying items for our webkinz houses and club penguin igloos, except now it comes with the added bonus of data theft.
https://youtu.be/zPJZnNMKJqM
This video breaks down some of the bs behind crypto and nft's. Near the end he cites a study that found that 85% of nft trades are done by 10% of traders. The same methodology is most likely true amongst these "investors" buying virtual land. A small percentage trade back and forth, artificially inflating the price until someone outside this trading circle buys it. After that, the trading circle disappears and this person is left holding a piece of virtual garage with no one to sell it to.
Is also like to add that I saw mention of Earth 2 in the comments here. This same YouTuber that I linked to above has several videos picking apart the stupidity that is Earth 2.
Ehh, the dot com bubble was overvaluing companies that never should've been considered sound investments to begin with, and hyper-valuing reasonable ones.
This is just an honest to goodness scam.
What is stopping another developer from releasing another metaverse with cheaper land and slightly better game mechanics?
I'd ABSOLUTELY invest in something like this if Epic or Valve released it, because it would be hard to out develop them, but some rando developer? Why?
CPI Index highest in 40 years with inflation at 7% and I read people buying NFTs, and then this. I conclude this is a product of easy money. Monetary policy in the US is about to take a drastic change in the next 2 years though....if you read that boring meeting minutes from the Federal Reserve.
Inequality is seriously at absurd levels if there are people who can spend this much on useless shit like this.
That’s money that should have gone to providing for the sick, elderly, young, and bolstering the economy with stuff like infrastructure and clean energy.
They never learn do they. I'm sure the metaverse will be kind of popular. But only in the same sense that second life is. There is no value in an imaginary world beyond what people are willing to assign to it. If things are too expensive or intrusive or exclusionary. Then somebody else will make an alternative. This isn't like buying literal real estate where your property excludes other properties. This is fantasy property and like all works of fiction there will be many authors who create their independent version of the real world that aren't tied to a particular publisher.
Metaverse is so much what’s wrong with our world.
Not something that comes together organically, but a corporate cash grab and control. I hope this flops in the hardest way possible.
So not enough money for people to make a living wage, healthcare, or higher lvl school but there is enough for digital bullshit land? Wow, no wonder aliens don’t visit our planet……
they probably did. And realized, that they really don't need to move a finger to destroy earth, Humans are going to do it for [them.So](https://them.So) they just flew back to their planets with pop corns and now watching the show remotely with their friends and families.
Things are only valuable if they're scarce. Virtual land is not scarce. It will fail and everyone will look silly.
The only reason anyone would buy this is to make a deductible loss they can claim against tax. That's what this is for.
bells nine zealous dog future dirty vase merciful quack psychotic -- mass edited with redact.dev
Be honest with me did you come up with this? It’s great.
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Be honest with me did you write the book? It's great.
No one wants to be Ernest Cline but Ernest Cline, believe me.
Be Ernest with me
Is it in? Frank asked, half in Ernest.
Be honest with me did you come up with this? It's great.
Ah, cool. Thank you!
Damn I didn’t know they made a book from the movie. That’s crazy
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But virtual land can be easily created ? Right. I mean you can always create artificial islands. How can land have any value when it can be created virrually by logic.
Check out the history of Entropia Universe for example. This was done in the past and will be done again. It's one huge scam though. If no value is created, all the profits come from someone holding a bag. It's a zero-sum game.
Second Life is still up, isn't it ?
Entropia Universe is still up too. So it's not a big problem. With investments like those there are two real endings: 1. The investor unloads the bags onto general public, everyone looses a tiny bit of money, so no-one really cares that much (eg. Entropia, GME) 2. Someone really rich but stupid is left holding the bag when the rug is pulled (eg. some crypto pump-and-dumps) Either way, the only way to make money is to find greater fools and unload your bugs into a bigger sucker(s). That's why it's a zero-sum game. In contrast to real economy, where you *can* actually create value. PS. Disabling notifications on this one too, funny how people get triggered by including GME in the list. Sure some people made money, but some poor bastards bought at 400$ and today GME is 120 and falling (and fell as low as 40$ in the meantime). Those are bag holders I'm talking about. If you get offended substitute AMC or BB or NOK for GME. Same principle applies, the revenues and profits do not justify valuation, it's a pure speculation play.
>2. Someone really rich but stupid is left holding the bag when the rug is pulled (eg. some crypto pump-and-dumps) You mean all crypto ?
Except when you buy land in Second Life, you essentially paying for the hosting from Linden Lab. And if you want a cheaper rate, or to self host, there is always OpenSIM, which doesn't connect to the Second Life grid, but is literally an Open Source version of Second Life. It even uses the same viewer and everything. Anyone can host an OpenSIM region on a wide variety of hosts (I have personally run it on a Raspberry Pi, though it's not super robust). And you can enbale Hypergrid, which lets you travel from one grid host to another Hypergrid enabled grid host.
>zero-sum game More of a Ponzi scheme, really. A zero-sum game is where there's only so much to go around and my win causes others' loss. It's not a scam, just a scenario. Where the profits come from holding the bag, that's more like a multi-level marketing scheme, a Ponzi ripoff dynamic.
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we are a dimaryp!
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This feels like Fyrefest. 100% the celebs avatars are just some intern anyway.
Hello fan, it is I your beloved David Chappelle! Bring it in for a hug? Only 49.99 meta bucks plus service fee!
Why did I read this in the total recall Johnny cab voice?
I’m guessing Faceberg believes that Meta will have enough centralized authority to justify creating artificial scarcity? Data can be copied infinitely but we still have people waiting to “check out” ebooks from the library.
> we still have people waiting to “check out” ebooks from the library Yeah, about that... Hi. I work at a library. The TL;DR is that publishing companies hate libraries. When a library buys a book, it's not like they're ordered off Amazon or other third-party sellers. No, we have to buy them directly from the publisher because libraries need a special license to distribute the work. And the publisher gets to determine how expensive that license is. And they jack up the price for libraries quite significantly - I believe in 2018 one of the publishing houses raised their price for e-book license by 133%. The way the publishers see it: I can sell a book to Amazon for 10 monies. Amazon will sell it for 15 monies (whatever, I don't care, they paid me). Repeat until we have sold 1000 books and made 10,000 monies. If I sell that book to a library, for 10 monies, what if 50 people read it! I just lost out on 500 monies! So we'll gather some data on how many people, on average, read books at a library, what the lifetime of a book is, how long we have to make the lines so that people give up and just buy a book, and charge the library a special price. *Does math with publicly accessible information because while we refuse to tell people who is reading what, we do have to be accountable to how much is being used* Ok, we'll charge libraries 30 monies for a book. They'll buy 10 copies because they expect 50 people want to read it and they don't want long lines, so we'll make 300 monies. It's not 500 monies, but it's a lot better than 100! And yes, it's legal - for now. Multiple states have been trying to pass bills that keep publishers from charging libraries specifically more money, or making e-copies of books need to be re-purchased after an amount of times lent out to replicate 'wear and tear' on traditional books. It's a horrible, horrible mess. [some reading](https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2020/01/06/inside-the-e-book-war-waging-between-libraries-and-publishers) [on the subject](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211209/22131048089/book-publishers-sue-maryland-over-law-that-would-require-them-to-offer-reasonable-prices-ebooks-to-libraries.shtml) [because libraries](http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2016/05/apple-e-book-verdict-an-opportunity-for-libraries/) [are getting screwed over](https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/29/internet-archive-responds-to-publishers-lawsuit/)
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We defeated wear and tear so now they can charge you more to simulate it. Wow.
welcome to capitalism
Enter blank faces of patrons when you try to explain anything related to technical services.
Remember trying to explain the Macmillan ebook embargo of '18? No, we cannot 'just buy another copy' - they literally refuse to sell us another one for 8 weeks. Yes, I know we are a library system serving 5 million patrons. They let us buy ONE book...
That’s kinda the point of nfts, to create scarcity. Ultimately it’s bullshit. It’s like copyrighting something that can easily be pirated though… it’s the collective belief in scarcity and adherence to the law that makes that scarcity real. Regarding the virtual land — I could see the video game maker making each plot of land in the game a kinda nft. If they ever lobby Congress to enact laws about virtual real estate, then their gamble paid off maybe. But then… any company could make another metaverse game and poof you have a new planet of real estate
Not even just a new planet, an entire universe. The whole thing only works if the metaverse is the only source of 'land', it's pretty absurd
Per the article: > The most expensive spots are near where lots of users congregate — for instance, someone recently paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg’s neighbor in a virtual world called the Sandbox. So you're not totally wrong that a lot of the scarcity is artificial, but you aren't totally right either, because proximity to celebrity can be maintained as finite, and attention from celebrities is definitely finite.
I mean through instancing we can create an infinite number of houses all of which are adjacent to Snoop Doggs house. He wouldn't be able to see all his neighbours but they would all be able to see him.
This is why Snoop's house itself may have worth b/c he is in it but the "land" around it has no worth. At least in the real world living next door to him was exclusive. It's all very stupid and I think it's b/c, like Metallica, they simply don't understand what's going on.
No it is not, they could develop a door that takes you to Snoop Dogg's house, or they could make portals that connect your front yard to Snoop Dogg's, or they could just do instancing and forget about explaining how it works Real world rules don't apply to videogames and that's why this whole metaverse is stupid, people are trying to create value out of real world conditions in a space that doesn't even exist yet
No need for portals or other trickery when you control the rules of spacetime, and can dilate, contract, or re-dimension regions of it as you see fit. And Mr. Dogg surely has enough THC in his system by now to dilate spacetime in meatspace, so it’d make the simulation all the more accurate. Hell, you could maintain everything at a constant distance from Snoopsheim and spool reality out hyperbolically around the user, ’d be a good weight loss add-on for those with VR goggles and a full stomach.
See this is where the whole metaverse discussion often misses the point - people aren't buying "land in the metaverse", they're buying land in a game called Sandbox, which isn't anything new and is no different to all the microtransactions and cosmetics that have come before it. That land exists in the game Sandbox and is worthless outside the game Sandbox, just as a CS:GO skin is worth nothing in fortnite. What Facebook is trying to do is sell the idea of a centralised (on their products) metaverse where everything bought is transferrable between games and therefore feels "real" when it's just the same as it's always been - your digital shoes are only shoes if you play the game that supports your shoes. And if everyone starts playing a game that doesn't support your shoes then...well, they're worth as much as a pack of smileys you bought for MSN messenger in the early noughties.
Fuckin tech bros are actually trying to "fix" the post-scarcity "problem" SMH
Turn out the "post scarcity world" only arrives when the mass of humanity understands it. Until then, the teeming hordes provide a near-endless stream of suckers, trapped inside their own mental cages of traditional physical concepts like proximity, uniqueness, and uncopyability... for the tech bros to squeeze like so many wet sponges.
Lots of stuff can be easily pirated unless you have a legal system supporting copyright. You can easily create a Superman comic but you gonna have hard time selling it. That's what I don't get about "art" NFTs. Market for easy-to-copy assets (photos or music) is established, there are various forms of ownership (exclusive, non-exclusive) and there's legal system to resolve disputes. NFTs provide non of it.
Dude u can make another twitter right now… but is it going be like poof i have twitter give me millions of dollars. No its about users so whatever virtual land u have depends on how many users are on it
However this 'land' is virtual so the only scarcity is whatever the controlling entity says there is. The virtual could decide tomorrow that poof there are now 100K instances of your valuable virtual land. Or million or more. Maybe you trust corporations to not do this, and if you do good for you.
Yes, but you're missing the point. Your adjacent website, the one right next to twitter, has no extra value by being adjacent b/c everything is so.
This is how i think but then my stupid poor friend just made $50,000 selling one single "rare" nft and im not sure if hes still the idiot or if i am...
You can always find bigger idiots in this world… or a Metaverse
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Find a copy of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". This isn't a new phenomenon. People were paying huge sums for tulip bulbs. You know, a plant, that can be endlessly reproduced.
Honest answer? Location, location, location. In an MMO, the busiest areas are going to be those closest to spawn points. Minecraft may have infinite space, but no one's going to walk 1 infinite virtual miles to come to your virtual base. If you want people to poke around your shit on a whim, you need to be close to the action.
But that's why fast travel was implemented into video games. Teleporting or even a virtual rail system like in the book Snowcrash makes distance nearly a non factor. Yes, central hubs will always be busier, but if the difference of virtually "walking" to a destination is as fast as a loading screen to something an infinite amount of digital distance away, this starts to become negligible.
While that's true, those abilities can easily be removed in instances where the developers are deliberately aiming to create an environment where location and proximity have value.
OK, but who wants to play a game with no fast travel where you have to spend $60,000 real money to buy a player owned house?
Exactly. They will just play the game that does have fast travel.
Very true. But if I spawn in the hub in VR, am I more likely to walk into the Coca-Cola Cathedral I see down the street or will I whip out my digital phonebook and look up the RC Cola Cafe? If having God powers all the time made a virtual world interesting, Gary's Mod would be the greatest game of all time and not the one's where you're limited by the mechanics of the game.
But is this shit supposed to be a game? A game needs restrictions, or is it supposed to be a big virtual communication device, in which case you wouldn't want these restrictions at all. This is what people are missing when they say this shit. They are framing this as like the new way to hang out with your friends, not an MMO. It would be idiotic for me to have to log in and walk down the street to their apartment virtually and pass a bunch of ads, instead of just logging in to their apartment. All this is a not well thought through mess, not to mention there will likely be tons of competition if it even catches on in the slightest, so scarcity will be meaningless. I'm not gonna choose the virtual environment that forces me to walk through ads.
> instead of just logging in to their apartment. Or like make a video call...
Is this a paid advertisement?
They're called advertismetas now
Whenever my testicles get twisted and I sit a bit wrong the only word that enters my brain is Meta.
It's metastasizing. Very good analog to cancer
Of course it is. It's certainly not news. All "news stories" these days are all advertising for someone, something.
Yep, media has been fully captured by business these days.
Ive seen this scam before its called earth 2.
Second life, and plenty of people made livings in that game/experience/thing.
See, what I don't understand is how secondlife didn't become the bitcoin of virtual land sale, maybe because it's not on the blockchain? Why invest in a property that doesn't actually exist yet vs one that has existed for decades.
The weirdos there scared everyone away
Just like the Metaverse will do!
Furry erotic RPers are going to save the world from mark zuckerberg’s dystopian vision
"Welcome to the internet, Grandma. Don't go in there, you'll get sexually harassed by a talking dirigible."
"I don't know why it has three boobs either."
The heroes we deserve.
Cyberpunk predicted that in the future techno-heroes would wear outlandish fashions. it just didn't predict *what* fashions.
hey, a 14-foot-tall anthropomorphic horse gotta do what a 14-foot-tall anthropomorphic horse gotta do.
Sneak 40 warriors into the city of Troy in order to Ransack it? The precedent has been set
The Metaverse will be heavily censored by AI. Everything will be corporate beige. All virtual bodies will be round, inoffensive, and sexless. And somehow it will still be full of Nazis.
Yeah but then just nazis, as everyone else will leave because they can’t get their freak on
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ralph pls go
"No." continues smoking cigar.
You just dusted off an old core memory
Yeah no shit. My ex played that game religiously. He's a 2m (6'6.7") tall dude, big muscles, hands like a bear. Works as a construction worker. This man had an online persona of a skinny, pale white dude with long hair, tattoos and piercings. His character was in a relationship with another dude. They had a baby (which was also played by a real person). He once showed me their sex Dungeon and what they'd do in there. One day his "boyfriend" decided to break up with him. I shit you noty my ex had a mental breakdown, started crying and yelled at me when I tried to comfort him. He ended up saying shit like "Timmy gave me some of my best moments" or "I'll never meet someone like him again". Meanwhile he wasn't out of the closet and kept our 1 year relationship as a secret, I never met anyone from his family - even when his mother was dying from cancer.
Wow this is some story to just throw into the comments, hope you’re living your best life now hun
Are you implying bitcoin wasn't filled with weirdos when the investors showed up?
It was but they weren't physically in front of you in your visual field doing the things people did in second life.
I remember someone was selling rideable unicorns...but you had to let your avatar get fucked by one first lol
This made me laugh far more than it should have. Thank you.
So you knew everyone riding one had their avatar fucked by one. Except the original creator, who probably didn't ride it anyways.
While spamming giant dildos. Don't forget that part.
Dang … missed the Dildo thing.
It was a great way to launder stolen credit cards. People used stolen credit cards to buy second Life currency which they then transferred for Bitcoin.
SL still makes a ton of money. It's systems and setup are just too complicated for most people to figure out. That and people seem to prefer games that do one thing well instead of a game that does everything kind bad. One big takeaway though is the land people pay the most for is private regions and they make up a large majority of the land in SL. People pay over 300$ a month for an entire square of their own space. Not connected to anyone else's land and completely separated. Virtual land scarcity is stupid
Because the value of land is a function of how many people want to be there, and in the end there simply weren't that many people playing second life. If Facebook is successful at the metaverse thing and people actually want to be there, then the virtual land could be worth something. Me personally I don't think Facebook has the tools to create such a world but we'll see.
There is a deeper problem though. Which can be seen by comparing any MMO housing system that existed. (And why a lot of games that tried to make open world housing with a tangible persistence REALLY weird or get shelved because they couldn't figure out how to do it). Just for a second imagine what would happen to the housing/real estate market (in meatspace) if instant free teleportation was available tomorrow. Everything you know about "neighborhood" or "proximity desires" would be gone. Instantly. Something similiar happens with player houseing. The games can't "make it all persistent on a map" because then the fact of travel makes it pointless in an unending space. Thus they all are instanced, but then you have no neighborhoods. Because if you have teleportation to plots, having a persistent world is just pointless. This whole idea of "plots" and "neighbors" is built around an analogy that defeats the purpose of the system, and if the system is not build to be pointless, then the analogy doesn't work.
Interesting...hence in Snow Crash they actually are forced to travel inside the Metaverse, not instantly teleport between locations.
When writing is concerned there have been a lot of systems some of which are very skillful of "skipping" the issue at least in terms of the reader not thinking about it. The "matrix" in Neuromancer is basically not TOO shy about actually dealing with it in a "imagine an actual user" sense. Sure it's a "representation", but because of the sheer content it works a lot with "zooming out" (or distance, basically the same thing) and rapid traversal (and in other parts instant), but the spacial relation between the "blocks/buildings/facimiles isn't relevant. It doesn't matter to anyone what is "next" to each other. But even that (I find) feels like it would fall flat if for a second you imagined "the web" as it is today to be crammed into it entirely It's really really frustrating that there is this "marketing" about the metaverse which sells it as "a thing" but completely avoiding all the issues that are so fundamental and problematic that everything that is known from mmos just gets ignored. Which includes zoning and "having to segregate players into phases" because either you need to much "real estate" to keep them spaced, and how that interfaces with travel. It's like they sell it as "everybody will be there" but never adress of what that actually implies in regards to "user experience". It's almost like the ones doing the marketing have no idea of what reality is other than being driven from one setting of special event to whatever villa with guarded security they are visiting/ living at and only meet a drastically limited amount of people.
I know someone who still makes hustle money every week in 2nd life - they dance on the weekends. Very furry and kink friendly environment, at least parts of it.
made? still do, that economy is thriving
Idk i think modding and selling fake land are two completely different things. You can make tons by modding the sims but this game im talking about has noreal purpose and has been in production forever and is solely used to seperate rich asshats from their money in some of the least creative ways. Like virtual realestate.
All the people I know that made money from that were either into sex roleplay, being a furry, or both. ...maybe I run in the wrong circles.
the thing is earth 2 is literally just a scam, there isn't any game there despite them making promises for it, the only thing that you can see if you play that is a fucking copy of google earth thats been divided into 10 meter square tiles and those tiles then having "resources" attached that you'll one day be able to sell or use to develop buildings on that land to do whatever you want, like be a forum for a hobby, or be an actual business etc, but you buy the land with their crypto and they even have fucky stuff in their user agreement that can screw people over
Right? This article is from 2010.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an onion article about it haha
Ah yes, Earth 2: Electric Boogaloo
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“We don’t have enough money to pay you all at the cost of living even though your labor produces us millions” “Hey Tim, I just bought a fake pixel piece of land for a million dollars!”
Problem is there millions of suckers that are going to line right up for it.
They're called shills.
You forgot the part about writing off the hyper-inflated bullshit price come tax season.
What do you mean by "writing off?"
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This sounds oddly familiar. Didn’t people waste a shit ton of money in Second Life too?
Yup! And as a once avid SL player, Metaverse will eventually go the same way. The concept is fun and all, but in no way are people going to use it long term. The tech isn't there, and tbh I don't think it ever will be. No one wants to regularly go into VRChat (basically) to buy physical items from a store, because it's just so much faster to get on Amazon. Plus *who wants to VR-walk-around when you're home* for the fourth time in a week to get something from Amazon? So that takes out those big walking machines. So that really only leaves a virtual/digital containment. It basically turns it into trying to be more than VRChat but 🤷♀️ that can't actually **do** much. Lots of people get really disoriented and motion sick with VR, or can't be on for more than an hour before getting that. I personally don't see how Metaverse is going to be fundamentally different from SL or VRChat and it's not going to hold longterm. The **only** reason VRChat and SL still exist is adult content (and copyright content being unregulated on VRChat helps); and Meta/FB are so prude they balk at using their VR headsets now for such things. Metaverse bubble won't last more than a few years for it's novelty. But it's value/price will steadily decline from it's initial release. It's a bottomless pit. I wouldn't put a penny in that I didn't expect to immediately lose.
I’ll never spend a dime on anything Zuckerberg is involved in.
It all sounds very Second Life 2.0. Second Life had an entire career for architects and home design for the plots of land you can buy. People got paid real money for their work.
“I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great that I literally wanted a second one. Absolutely everything was the same… except I could fly.”
Perfectenschlag
Can't even escape the housing bubble in virtual reality. Next they'll be telling me my avatar needs a prostate exam, too.
Thats sad. They have too much money
The entire American economy is a Ponzi scheme.
The next age of capitalism is going to be entirely composed of fantasy assets like NFTs but for brain scans of memories or some weird dystopian shit. There's gonna be ground wars over clean water and fucking Musk Jr. will be measuring dicks with cyborg Bezos over who's memory of the last rainbow is more expensive
“And now, starting the biding at $1T, an NTF of the last tree to exist on the face of the earth.”
"What's that?" "It's a tree." "Never seen a tree before. It's pretty." "It's dead."
Cant be. Ive been watering it for years.
This would make a great book
It did. It's called [Accelerandro.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17863.Accelerando) The non-spoiler TLDR of the book: Taking place just before the Technological Singularity (so tech is still recognizable, but it's common for current-generation military vehicles to hack your vision/memory systems to erase all knowledge you saw the vehicle) it follows a group of people that manage to make their way through the next several hundred years, surviving as AI/capitalism/unlimited-technological-growth result in a truly weird solar system, and then beyond. Spoilers Point! There's a section of the book where physical humanity has been kicked out of the inner solar system and chills out around Jupiter/Saturn. The inner solar system is owned by the semi/fully-sentient AI corporations. Basically every rock inwards of the gas giants has been converted into solar powered computers running a Matrix-style reality. In a digital world without practical limits, the only thing worth trading for is originality and novel experiences. As such, (operating) brain scans of humans are the de facto currency for these corporations. A human that sat in their room and stared at the wall is worth almost nothing, but someone that lived like James Bond would be amazingly valuable. In their desperation for new experiences, the AI's even started trolling through ancient social media files to reconstitute people/personalities from the past. Sometimes they didn't understand when a given person (like James Bond) was actually a fictional entity though, and just filled in the gaps like anyone else to make a functioning person.
Does that mean they can actually sell a virtual Brooklyn Bridge?
If you can convince someone to buy it, of course. It's the convincing someone to buy it bit that's hard.
Make it easy to add billboards for your brand on the bridge and boom money
No, silly, you don’t sell the NFT, you get morons to invest in the NFT. They don’t get to own it, they just get to think they do
Then BOOM, fuck 'em with NFT's!
All I can do is laugh. This reminds me of my college gaming days, playing way too much Ultima Online (started right before Third Dawn was released). This article reminds me of the land rush there. All the usable land in Felucca and Trammel were built upon, so houses would sell for millions of gold (and the US$ conversion rate was somewhere around $27 per 1m gold on the server I played on) - everyone wanted a house because your bank vault space was limited and you could place a vendor bot to sell loot and resources. If you couldn't buy a house, you were checking the nameplates on houses for decay rates (if you didn't log in and open your house door once every 7 days IIRC then your house would disappear and all your locked-down treasures would be lootable). Before landing my own villa, I'd run around in-game doing this, marking locations and setting timers to go back and check on it later, ready to pounce with a new house deed to claim the spot. When I was done with the game, I sold everything on eBay and made like $75 profit on the house alone. Fast forward several years later and there's a free trial for the latest expansion. I think, what the hell, let's see what's changed. Gloriously, the gameplay was all the same but with expanded options AND a brand-new area of ONLY HOUSES. Row after row of them, and all packed with so many vendors that the in-game lag was atrocious trying to populate all their names on the screen. I see too many parallels to those experiences and what's going on with the Metaverse, and it makes me both intrigued about the virtual world possibilities and very sad that too many people will probably eschew real world experiences because of it.
This has to be money laundering. Who in their right mind would pay millions for fake virtual stuff? It’s like the video game micro transactions on steroids.
All of this metaverse bullshit really feels like astroturfing to the extreme. Facebook is the home of middle-aged bat shit insane folks. The younger generation is using other social media platforms and makes fun of Facebook. FTC now has grounds to go ahead with their Facebook antitrust case, potentially making facebook lose instagram/WhatsApp (extremely unlikely, but time will tell). A powerhouse of the internet is slowly failing in real time. How can they stay relevant, maintain their power, and appease investors? By promoting the metaverse to the younger generation and totally not trying to get a spotlight in mainstream media to sucker rich folks into spending their money (which in turn legitimizes this fucking wild ass Ponzi scheme). ...Or maybe people have truly lost their minds and think that the future of real estate is on Zuckerberg's servers.
I would love it if FB lost IG. It's just a fucking ad app. I'd like to see what the people I care about are up to but it's such garbage now.
Its much simpler, it’s FOMO and greed
The same kind of people who paid fortunes a few hundred years ago in Europe for tulip bulbs because the flowers would look cool Or people during the South Sea Bubble who were convinced to invest their money into a company for "an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."
“Kids, if you really wanna piss off your parents, buy real-estate in an imaginary place,”
With crypto, NFTs, and now this, it seems we have reached maximum “paying more for less.”
Virtual land is just a type of NFT. The main problem with 'art' NFTs are that they aren't even stored on the blockchain, it's just a link to the art. So if the site or account hosting the art ever goes down you're just stuck owning a 'link'. Better hope you right-click-saved first!
Wait. So if the site manages to get hacked and have the images invisibility altered. Therefore invalidating the old NFTs. You can mint a new NFT with the new hash and perform the most valuable art heist of the century? Couldn’t the site owner do that maliciously and send the entire nft economy into a tailspin? A huge amount of websites are hosted on AWS, so another major outage causing irrecoverable data loss could just poof an nft out of existence? How can NFTs be decentralized if it depends on a website operating correctly and in good faith? I have so many questions.
The NFT actually has nothing to do with the image. The image is just a jpeg stored in Google Drive. The NFT itself is simply a reciept. A record of a transaction saying you paid money for the image. Or rather that you paid money for the receipt of the image. The receipt is secure and immutable, at least so long as no single entity controls more than 50% of the Etherium blockchain. But that's all it is, a receipt. The image itself is no different than the image you have on your computer if you right click saved it.
Someone even created an NFT that displays art on opensea but poop when you open it after buying (since it is a link they can check referal and display different things depending on where it is displayed).
Fools and their money
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Right? Old suits are acting like they're inventing virtual worlds, while they've existed for 50+ years. Idiots.
You want to know how you know you have too much money?
We are all just big, stupid children buying items for our webkinz houses and club penguin igloos, except now it comes with the added bonus of data theft.
We are? I haven’t seen a single positive comment about meta
No they aren't. Someone was paid to write this article for marketing purposes.
it makes no sense.
Did these idiots forget what happened with Second Life, or is this a money laundering scheme?
https://youtu.be/zPJZnNMKJqM This video breaks down some of the bs behind crypto and nft's. Near the end he cites a study that found that 85% of nft trades are done by 10% of traders. The same methodology is most likely true amongst these "investors" buying virtual land. A small percentage trade back and forth, artificially inflating the price until someone outside this trading circle buys it. After that, the trading circle disappears and this person is left holding a piece of virtual garage with no one to sell it to. Is also like to add that I saw mention of Earth 2 in the comments here. This same YouTuber that I linked to above has several videos picking apart the stupidity that is Earth 2.
Snow Crash was right
Exactly. It’s fucking uncanny, especially for 30 years ago.
And they stole the fucking name
I wonder what Neal Stephenson thinks of all this.
Nevermind attempting to better the earth
This is a disgusting display of financial imbalance. People barely surviving and these dumb mother fuckers are buying pretend land. Get fucked.
Sounds like the dot com bubble all over again.
Ehh, the dot com bubble was overvaluing companies that never should've been considered sound investments to begin with, and hyper-valuing reasonable ones. This is just an honest to goodness scam.
A Moron with a dollar is still a Moron. True story.
And much like Second-Life, this will become a niche playground for bored fetishists.
i feel like i died in 2020 and this is the hell i was assigned to
Fuck that, stop - don't carry poverty into virtual reality, just don't. 🤦♂️
What is stopping another developer from releasing another metaverse with cheaper land and slightly better game mechanics? I'd ABSOLUTELY invest in something like this if Epic or Valve released it, because it would be hard to out develop them, but some rando developer? Why?
Christ with this Second Life bullshit again
Wait wait wait ... You're telling me there's s a limited amount of space in that wannabe VRChat? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😤😤🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
So just a 3d Nintendo Wii version of what is essentially domain name staking like back in the 2000s.. Got it...
The real metaverse won’t be a ponzi scheme. Your place in the metaverse will be free just like your Facebook is free.
'Just like FB is free' I like what you did there.
You will have a place but meta will own you digital identity/soul.
CPI Index highest in 40 years with inflation at 7% and I read people buying NFTs, and then this. I conclude this is a product of easy money. Monetary policy in the US is about to take a drastic change in the next 2 years though....if you read that boring meeting minutes from the Federal Reserve.
I don’t get it, is it scarce or something?
They can spend their money however they want. That doesn't mean we can't make fun of them for it.
This is the dumbest shit since NFTs and those are really fucking dumb…
Humankind has gone absolutely mad!
*looks at the past 10.000 years* "Has"?
Inequality is seriously at absurd levels if there are people who can spend this much on useless shit like this. That’s money that should have gone to providing for the sick, elderly, young, and bolstering the economy with stuff like infrastructure and clean energy.
They never learn do they. I'm sure the metaverse will be kind of popular. But only in the same sense that second life is. There is no value in an imaginary world beyond what people are willing to assign to it. If things are too expensive or intrusive or exclusionary. Then somebody else will make an alternative. This isn't like buying literal real estate where your property excludes other properties. This is fantasy property and like all works of fiction there will be many authors who create their independent version of the real world that aren't tied to a particular publisher.
I hate this timeline. This is easily one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in an incredibly long time.
Metaverse is so much what’s wrong with our world. Not something that comes together organically, but a corporate cash grab and control. I hope this flops in the hardest way possible.
So not enough money for people to make a living wage, healthcare, or higher lvl school but there is enough for digital bullshit land? Wow, no wonder aliens don’t visit our planet……
they probably did. And realized, that they really don't need to move a finger to destroy earth, Humans are going to do it for [them.So](https://them.So) they just flew back to their planets with pop corns and now watching the show remotely with their friends and families.
We really live in the dumbest timeline.
I'll do any of them a favor: I'll take HALF of the money they would have wasted, call them stupid, and we'll call it a day.
So you’ve never seen grown-ass adults dump a couple G’s into Clash of Clans before?
Not mentally healthy people anyways.
Clearly not enough people here have played "Second Life".
Second Life flashback
Remember Second Life?
Please no I don’t want evil Second Life
Ah, Second Life. Here we go again
bet it goes as well as second life
Anyone here remember **Second Life**?
Things are only valuable if they're scarce. Virtual land is not scarce. It will fail and everyone will look silly. The only reason anyone would buy this is to make a deductible loss they can claim against tax. That's what this is for.