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> I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising company to be building "the metaverse". I hope all the

> I'm not sure I want Facebook to own it. I know I don't. It's a dystopian nightmare for an advertising company to be building "the metaverse". I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse. It's one use-case I can kind of see benefiting from blockchain protocols: enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse, by recording transfers of avatars and assets between the "metaworlds" making up the metaverse ("digital identity scarcity" is still an unsolved problem though, I think)

jrochkind1 5y ago
What are the motivations of the other players? > enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data are instead motivated by selling users things they don't need.
charcircuit 5y ago
>enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free.
cpeterso 5y ago
> I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse. Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/ https://hubs.mozilla.com/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
danShumway 5y ago
> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one? Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction. It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems. We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.
- potatolicious 5y ago
  Absolutely - this is what frustrates me most about the discourse around the metaverse - the insistence that a virtual world of limitless possibility be unnecessarily bound by the worst aspects of the real world. Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel the secondary market - from which creators see little to no gain. Surprise, Pablo Picasso (nor his estate) doesn't see a dime from the speculation on his art at high-society art auctions - the verifiability of art (i.e., NFTs) benefits overwhelmingly speculators, not creators. I watched the FB keynote today and some parts were just dystopian. Instead of street art being on a wall for everyone to look at, the VR "street art" expired after mere seconds, requiring you to "tip" the creator to simply keep looking at it? Can we not financialize every moment of existence? FB's vision for the metaverse feels a lot like being nickeled and dimed every 3 seconds for all eternity, where every interaction is commercialized. It's hard to imagine any kind of real shared human experience emerging from this. It feels like FB looked at the state of the real world - where commercial interests are grafted onto the human experience, and decided to just skip the human experience part and go straight to the commercialization part. Digital scarcity is just such a depressing failure of imagination - artists can produce copies of their art at literally zero marginal cost! Instead of producing art for one customer at a time, they can now produce art that can be sold en masse - so everyone can have access to the art they admire. Why does a pair of virtual metaverse sneakers need to be one-of-a-kind? Why can't we instead sell copies of the sneakers to everyone who wants it, and the price would be low because the marginal cost of production is zero? Why can't we revel in the widespread abundance - provided to both the community and the creator - rather than wallow in the artificially-induced scarcity?
  - nik5 5y ago
    Wasn't able to watch the complete video without logging in. These values are going to be inherited and become more pronounced in meta for sure.
    - slowmovintarget 5y ago
giantrobot 5y ago
> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory? One of the great things about digital worlds/goods is they exist in microscopic (nanoscopic now) electrical circuits. They use practically no resources and can be duplicated for next to nothing. They also take up very little physical space to store. They're free from or at least resistant to most natural phenomena that create scarcity.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  > Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Because as Second Life demonstrated we don't seem to have many good ideas for incentivising creation otherwise.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    Making a virtual world enforce some scarcity mechanism simply manifests real world problems in the virtual world. Any system implement artificial scarcity would be a DRM system. In order for you to able to "wear" virtual Nikes (because you paid for them) and me not be able to "wear" them (because I didn't) the metaverse could not be open and federated. In order for me to see your virtual Nikes I'd have to retrieve the mesh and texture files for them. My system would have to be locked down such that I couldn't pull those files out of my local cache. From your side of the issue, would you (the hypothetical royal you) pay for virtual Nikes if I could tell my client device to ignore remote resources? What good are your virtual Nikes if people can choose not to see them? Obviously replace Nike with any IP holder even down to the smallest of small time creators. A metaverse with artificial scarcity would be the walliest of walled gardens with a giant moat on the outside. The only way to make that work is to have a completely locked down and closed system.

jrochkind1 5y ago

What are the motivations of the other players? > enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Yeah, I'm not interested, actively anti-interested, in the "metaverse" we are going to get, at all. Any "players in this space" that aren't motivated by selling user's personal data are instead motivated by selling users things they don't need.

charcircuit 5y ago

>enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Until someone dumps it and reuploads whatever for free.

cpeterso 5y ago

> I hope all the other players in this space band together and form an open, federated metaverse. Seems unlikely. Google, Apple, and Microsoft would surely each want their own proprietary metaverses. Mozilla is experimenting in the metaverse space linking VR and web with Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/ https://hubs.mozilla.com/

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

danShumway 5y ago

> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one? Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction. It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems. We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.

potatolicious 5y ago
Absolutely - this is what frustrates me most about the discourse around the metaverse - the insistence that a virtual world of limitless possibility be unnecessarily bound by the worst aspects of the real world. Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel the secondary market - from which creators see little to no gain. Surprise, Pablo Picasso (nor his estate) doesn't see a dime from the speculation on his art at high-society art auctions - the verifiability of art (i.e., NFTs) benefits overwhelmingly speculators, not creators. I watched the FB keynote today and some parts were just dystopian. Instead of street art being on a wall for everyone to look at, the VR "street art" expired after mere seconds, requiring you to "tip" the creator to simply keep looking at it? Can we not financialize every moment of existence? FB's vision for the metaverse feels a lot like being nickeled and dimed every 3 seconds for all eternity, where every interaction is commercialized. It's hard to imagine any kind of real shared human experience emerging from this. It feels like FB looked at the state of the real world - where commercial interests are grafted onto the human experience, and decided to just skip the human experience part and go straight to the commercialization part. Digital scarcity is just such a depressing failure of imagination - artists can produce copies of their art at literally zero marginal cost! Instead of producing art for one customer at a time, they can now produce art that can be sold en masse - so everyone can have access to the art they admire. Why does a pair of virtual metaverse sneakers need to be one-of-a-kind? Why can't we instead sell copies of the sneakers to everyone who wants it, and the price would be low because the marginal cost of production is zero? Why can't we revel in the widespread abundance - provided to both the community and the creator - rather than wallow in the artificially-induced scarcity?
- nik5 5y ago
  Wasn't able to watch the complete video without logging in. These values are going to be inherited and become more pronounced in meta for sure.
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago

giantrobot 5y ago

> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Do we really need to make sure people in the metaverse are poor just like in the real world? If someone is going to shell out money for VR kit (and Internet access, etc) why should they have to pay more money for their avatar to have a particular set of clothes or accessory? One of the great things about digital worlds/goods is they exist in microscopic (nanoscopic now) electrical circuits. They use practically no resources and can be duplicated for next to nothing. They also take up very little physical space to store. They're free from or at least resistant to most natural phenomena that create scarcity.

Mindwipe 5y ago
> Why in the hell would I want to enforce digital scarcity in a metaverse? Because as Second Life demonstrated we don't seem to have many good ideas for incentivising creation otherwise.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Making a virtual world enforce some scarcity mechanism simply manifests real world problems in the virtual world. Any system implement artificial scarcity would be a DRM system. In order for you to able to "wear" virtual Nikes (because you paid for them) and me not be able to "wear" them (because I didn't) the metaverse could not be open and federated. In order for me to see your virtual Nikes I'd have to retrieve the mesh and texture files for them. My system would have to be locked down such that I couldn't pull those files out of my local cache. From your side of the issue, would you (the hypothetical royal you) pay for virtual Nikes if I could tell my client device to ignore remote resources? What good are your virtual Nikes if people can choose not to see them? Obviously replace Nike with any IP holder even down to the smallest of small time creators. A metaverse with artificial scarcity would be the walliest of walled gardens with a giant moat on the outside. The only way to make that work is to have a completely locked down and closed system.