7 ms·

What is ‘right-clicker mentality’?

55 points by nickcotter 5y ago

notacoward 5y ago
NFT ownership is only exclusive within the community of people who take NFTs seriously. Kind of like one guy in an insane asylum claiming a particular chair. Maybe that's a big deal to other inmates, but none of them should mistake their environment for the real world where the claim doesn't matter.
kibwen 5y ago
It says a lot about human society that as soon as we manage to abolish scarcity for a particular class of goods, people who are forced to reckon with the concept of infinite abundance lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible.
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  From article: > In this term we have a microcosm of the entire philosophical debate surrounding NFTs we'll come up with any reason that lets us shoot the sht about it endlessly :)
- gruez 5y ago
  but no, not really? you could duplicate media since the days of the compact cassette, but we had several decades where people weren't losing their minds and creating music NFTs. The craze over scarcity for digital media was entirely a phenomena that appeared in the past few years.
  - mcintyre1994 5y ago
    How does DRM fit into this? Isn't that kind of an attempt to make digital media scarce? It's just that NFTs are using technology that wasn't available when Sony had to install rootkits to try to achieve something like the same thing.
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      No. DRM is literally the attempt to block right-clicking. NFTs don't try to block it.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >How does DRM fit into this? Isn't that kind of an attempt to make digital media scarce? Not really? There's a song on itunes for $0.99. No matter how many copies you buy, there's still going to be the song available. They're definitely restricting access, but it's an entirely different dynamic from limited edition trading cards, or signed vinyl records. That's why an vintage record can fetch hundreds of dollars on the secondary market, but good luck selling that mp3 you got from itunes in the early 2000s.
  - bhaak 5y ago
    Compact cassettes were not a lossless medium. The DAT cassette was fought against with tooth and nail. The CD was okay as a read only medium. Look how long it took for the music industry to accept DRM free audio formats. Without Apple's dominance we probably wouldn't still have them now. The web had from the beginning the problem of monetizing digital content that you just could right-click and download.
    - gruez 5y ago
      > Compact cassettes were not a lossless medium. The DAT cassette was fought against with tooth and nail. The CD was okay as a read only medium. even if we accept that, that still means we had more than 3 decades of limitless duplication, yet people aren't "lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible". >Look how long it took for the music industry to accept DRM free audio formats. Without Apple's dominance we probably wouldn't still have them now. 1. DRM realistically wasn't an issue due to pirates (remember naptster?) 2. games have DRM that are sometimes unbroken for years. Yet nothing noticeable changes when the DRM is finally broken. there's also DRM-free games, that people aren't clamoring for scarcity over. therefore I doubt something being DRM protected or not has any effect on its scarcity value.
      - bhaak 5y ago
        We didn't have 30 years of limitless duplication. You're overestimating how many people were online in the 90s. Look at the graphs from this article: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/visualizing-40-years-of-music-industry-sales/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/visualizing-40-years-... I'm actually surprised that the music industry revenue went down that fast in the 2000s. I would have guessed it took a little bit longer. So going by those figures, we had 20 years of limitless duplication and it utterly destroyed the revenue of the music industry. Exactly what they feared would happen if there was ever a digital writable medium to play music from. NFTs are not DRM. They produce scarcity in a different way than DRM does. They don't encrypt digital content, they sign it. Without additional support from websites or physical venues this doesn't do anything. This could e.g. be something like a Twitter checkmark for a NFT profile or being allowed to a special club only if you own a certain kind of NFT.
- jerf 5y ago
  I think that's the most interesting take on the whole NFT phenomenon I've seen. Is the whole thing a real-world manifestation of a large group of people's inability to subconsciously accept infinite abundance of digital goods? I don't know if that's true, but it's interesting.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    ... There’s a thing called “conspicuous consumption”, and it’s apparently old as the hills (are there any pol sci people here who actually know this stuff and can tell me I got everything backwards?). That NFTs are indeed it is a good point and I appreciate the insight, but in view of the aforementioned hills the remaining commentary about modern first-world humans seems unfounded.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thorstein-veblen/the-theory-of-the-leisure-class https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thorstein-veblen/the-theor... Book that introduced the phrase.
    - killtimeatwork 5y ago
      I'm not sure it's conspicuous consumption. Cases of recent pure conspicuous consumption in the tech world, such as the "diamond app" (an iOS app that displays a diamond and costs couple thousand dollars) didn't really catch on that much. I think what's really driving NFTs is: 1. Speculation. People just see it as another asset class that can be blown up and sold to the greater fool. 2. Artists trying to monetize their digital work this way. Up until NFTs arrived, digital art had very little market value (due to ability to make indistinguishable copies of the original at zero cost). Some artists hope that the NFTs will be the vehicle which allows them to cash on their digital work. 3. Money laundering and similar usual suspects.
    - jerf 5y ago
      I think you're right that that is a related concept, but I don't think it makes this uninteresting, I think it is perhaps exactly why it's interesting. It is precisely that it isn't "conspicuous consumption"... it's conspicuous, but it isn't consumption. The NFT "owners" are bothered because they've engaged in this conspicuous consumption, but then aren't reaping the benefits they expected because the thing wasn't consumed. They consumed the thing, but what's this, so are other people! That's not part of the deal! I think you've sharpened the interestingness, not removed it.
- acdha 5y ago
  I see it more as another instance of the rent-seeking instinct. There’s a ton of capital seeking reliable returns and most of the blockchain buzz has been based on the idea that people with lots of capital can buy in early so everyone else will be forced to pay them an ever-increasing premium just to be able to make transactions. NFTs are a way to generate the demand they’re counting on — scarcity is part of the sales pitch to keep buyers from asking whether they’re actually getting much for their money.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >most of the blockchain buzz has been based on the idea that people with lots of capital can buy in early so everyone else will be forced to pay them an ever-increasing premium just to be able to make transactions So you think NFTs are a plot by people to drive up ETH gas fees?
    - acdha 5y ago
      I think there are a ton of people who see a huge amount of money piled into cryptocurrencies which have not seen much adoption and are trying to come up with things which could give normal people a need to start using it. NFTs are just part of the larger frenzy trying to be the one who finds a winning combination. If you recall, that first big NFT sale was when a major Ethereum holder paid a lot of money for an NFT but not the rights to one of Beeple’s paintings. That lead to a ton of free advertising, and since this was all paper money based on a fraction of their total Ethereum holdings I’m sure they were expecting the cost to be outweighed by the increased demand for their remaining tokens.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Is there a readable summary of this NFT thing. I was only vaguely following it but assumed it was some way to support artists, kind of like rich people getting a hospital wing named after your family trust fund. Not great, as you don't want to rely on philanthropy of the super rich, but probably better than many of the alternatives. But is the idea to generate a secondary market for this stuff and sell it on at higher prices?
  - zrobotics 5y ago
    The second option, unfortunately. Most people on art communities are pissed off at the whole NFT thing, it really doesn't help artists much. First, anyone can generate a NFT, so there's no guarantee that the artist is even involved with the token. Second, creating a NFT costs ethereum, so it's totally possible to spend money creating one that turns out to be worthless. Third, most of the 'art' associated with the valuable NFTs is procedurally generated crap, so it's fairly obvious that the buyers are mostly interested in speculation.
zwieback 5y ago
I've got a variant of this disease called "Shift-F10" mentality so I don't have to move my hand to the mouse.
api 5y ago
> “This is a great example of right-clicker mentality,” Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. “Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant. The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you. Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.” Get me off this planet.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  conspicuous consumption is not even close to new. phlegmatic take: hey, at least we’ve improved a little; the conspicuity is now primarily about location of where the meat is eaten, not whether or not you’re permitted to eat at all!
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Turns out that space travel is one of the latest and greatest flexes you can make.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Presumably he meant without returning.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Second only to being effortlessly popular, happy, relaxed, content, and balanced, without even being rich!
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      If someone flexes alone in the forest is it really a flex?
      - coldtea 5y ago
        Flex can be in the eyes of the beeholder. If someone flexing to prop up themselves with BS, meets such a person they will be stung with the existential dread of 10,000 flexes!
trasz 5y ago
So the "right-clicker mentality" essentially means not being technically illiterate?
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  Not really, it assumes we all know how to right click, but only the gauche would actually right click rather than buy an NFT (and presumably right click on the image brought up by the resulting URL ...).
- OJFord 5y ago
  No, it means not being 'NFT literate' (to put it generously) or sceptical/not buying in (literally) to the idea of NFTs: 'I can just right-click and save the image, I don't need to pay for the NFT.'
  - trasz 5y ago
    It's the other side of the same coin, isn't it?
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Well I don't think so, unless you're saying 'disagreeing with NFT value' is 'technically illiterate'? I thought you were sort of remarking that NFT proponents are the ones not technically literate (paying for NFTs rather than being aware of right-click>save) so I just meant that no, it's being used the other way around, by the proponents, derogatorily about the people who would rather right-click>save an image than 'invest' in an NFT. Perhaps you realise that, and I just misunderstood your comment.
      - mdoms 5y ago
        > I thought you were sort of remarking that NFT proponents are the ones not technically literate (paying for NFTs rather than being aware of right-click>save) Well yes.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
bryanlarsen 5y ago
I've never seen such an obvious target for reappropriation[1]. This will probably be reappropriated before it even has time to be commonly established as an insult. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  By this stage it's almost like re-reappropriation.
- hiccuphippo 5y ago
  According to the article, it already has.
olalonde 5y ago
The problem with the analogies used is that NFTs do not even confer ownership of the underlying art.
samhw 5y ago
The 'right-clicker mentality' seems to be effectively another word for hacker culture, no?
- jtbayly 5y ago
  Nah. It's another term for common sense. Nobody with common sense goes to the trouble of buying something that is easier to get for free.
bmitc 5y ago
People really need to just go outside.
easton 5y ago
There's utility in buying the steak at the restaurant though. Maybe not enough for most to buy it, but there is some utility in having someone else make a meal that you might screw up if you do it yourself. There isn't a lot of utility in an NFT as compared to a normal JPEG except as a store of value, which nobody really wanted to use JPEGs for until this year.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > There's utility in buying the steak at the restaurant though. Exactly. No one would pay $1500 for a bottle of vodka at a liquor store, but the same bottle in the VIP section of some celeb filled club is a different experience. (I still wouldn’t pay it, but I get the difference.)
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
As they used to (almost) say: NFTs want to be free!
vsareto 5y ago
All my NFT owner homies don't even use mice any more. We have VR workstations now. You right-click to save images? I save entire 3D models. /lazy-sarcasm
- coldtea 5y ago
  Emm, NFT-ownership is about NOT saving, but having BS exclusive rights to. So, to get the sarcasm right, the NFT-onwer shouldn't brag about how he "saves" (even if he saves something more "special" like 3D models over plain images). In the context of the "right-click mentality joke" (and in reality probably) NFT-owners are anti-saving.
  - vsareto 5y ago
    Are you ADHD or autistic at all?
    - coldtea 5y ago
      It's Hacker News, not Normie news. And judging from the question, you don't seem high on Emotional Intelligence yourself :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Weirdly, I feel like I entirely agree with that Twitter post, but take the exact opposite lesson from it. So, this steak that they are imitating. It's not a good steak. As the tweet suggests, its sole purpose for existing is conspicous consumption. You can't steal/copy/right-click that, and you shouldn't want to. Hopefully the person doing the at home imitation is at least in part trying to deflate and ridicule the whole idea.
- fullshark 5y ago
  The twitter post is right, if your goal is to impress strangers on the internet obsessed with fame/status instead of to eat a good steak.
mhb 5y ago
It's also hilarious that the right clickers are recreating the steak with gold for $90 instead of a plain steak for $20.
- gruez 5y ago
  Yeah, gold literally doesn't have any flavor (it's inert so there's nothing for your taste buds to react to), so putting it on the steak is also "all about the flex".
- ginko 5y ago
  According to the base article[1] the plain steak was about £33 or ~$45 not $20 which seems about right for a nicer cut of beef in the UK. Still a lot of extra money for the gold(£28). I do think you can get a few sheets of gold leaf for quite a bit for cheaper than that if you shop around though. [1] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/man-recreates-salt-baes-1500-21958035 https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-...
JackFr 5y ago
Still a firm believer that the NFTs are simply an instrument for money laundering and other criminal enterprises. Those transactions which aren’t simply provide cover (possibly unwittingly) for those that are.
pezzana 5y ago
For years economists debated the things that are now being worked out experimentally. And it turns out the economists were dead wrong about a lot of it, as this article demonstrates.
h2odragon 5y ago
If everybody believes in Unicorns, and no one ever mentions that they don't exists, then we can all ride Unicorns around all day! "Right clickers" are people who not only do not believe, but insist on ruining everyone else's ride by continuing not to believe. If only we could eliminate these Faithless ones, think of all the problems we could solve!
- mdoms 5y ago
  I've been saving images for much longer than you've been trading for magic beans, I assure you.
lelanthran 5y ago
> Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. Wait, is that a real name? Were his parents too afraid too name him "halfwit" and too honest to name him anything else?
- hiccuphippo 5y ago
  Twitter doesn't have a real name policy like other social networks do.
boramalper 5y ago
You wouldn't download an NFT. /s
johnofdoom 5y ago
It's notable how this attitude can only exist in a scenario where the art itself has no real-world value and the stakes don't matter. It's easy to dismiss "right-clickers" if you aren't losing any money from them. But anyone who owns digital media that _is_ valuable doesn't think like this at all. For example, consider a musician losing their income because their fans are pirating their mp3s. The musician would never dismiss that by saying, "those right-clickers will never have the satisfaction that I do of owning the original copyright!" As we all know from the past twenty years, they take the exact opposite approach. When you have something actually valuable, then owning it in a legal sense doesn't mean much if anyone can just copy it.
dafoex 5y ago
The most useful NFT I've seen so far is Decentraland's LAND token, which behaves much like a deed to a plot of virtual land. Its something you could theoretically download free gratis, but as LAND is linked to a finite space in a living virtual world, you'll never own it in its entirety by just screenshoting it because your copy is desyncronised from the original. A photograph, or even a 3D scan of the Eiffel tower does not mean you own it or infringe on the owner's or designer's perceived rights, and likewise a copy of the land isolated from the Decentraland grid does not mean you own the LAND. Tl;dr, I think NFTs need to focus on being a record or something - anything! Rather than being the new way to buy art, sell the technology as the new way to do deeds, licences, certificates, etc.

55 points by nickcotter 5y ago

NFT ownership is only exclusive within the community of people who take NFTs seriously. Kind of like one guy in an insane asylum claiming a particular chair. Maybe that's a big deal to other inmates, but none of them should mistake their environment for the real world where the claim doesn't matter.

kibwen 5y ago

It says a lot about human society that as soon as we manage to abolish scarcity for a particular class of goods, people who are forced to reckon with the concept of infinite abundance lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible.

jareklupinski 5y ago
From article: > In this term we have a microcosm of the entire philosophical debate surrounding NFTs we'll come up with any reason that lets us shoot the sht about it endlessly :)
gruez 5y ago
but no, not really? you could duplicate media since the days of the compact cassette, but we had several decades where people weren't losing their minds and creating music NFTs. The craze over scarcity for digital media was entirely a phenomena that appeared in the past few years.
- mcintyre1994 5y ago
  How does DRM fit into this? Isn't that kind of an attempt to make digital media scarce? It's just that NFTs are using technology that wasn't available when Sony had to install rootkits to try to achieve something like the same thing.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    No. DRM is literally the attempt to block right-clicking. NFTs don't try to block it.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >How does DRM fit into this? Isn't that kind of an attempt to make digital media scarce? Not really? There's a song on itunes for $0.99. No matter how many copies you buy, there's still going to be the song available. They're definitely restricting access, but it's an entirely different dynamic from limited edition trading cards, or signed vinyl records. That's why an vintage record can fetch hundreds of dollars on the secondary market, but good luck selling that mp3 you got from itunes in the early 2000s.
- bhaak 5y ago
  Compact cassettes were not a lossless medium. The DAT cassette was fought against with tooth and nail. The CD was okay as a read only medium. Look how long it took for the music industry to accept DRM free audio formats. Without Apple's dominance we probably wouldn't still have them now. The web had from the beginning the problem of monetizing digital content that you just could right-click and download.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > Compact cassettes were not a lossless medium. The DAT cassette was fought against with tooth and nail. The CD was okay as a read only medium. even if we accept that, that still means we had more than 3 decades of limitless duplication, yet people aren't "lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible". >Look how long it took for the music industry to accept DRM free audio formats. Without Apple's dominance we probably wouldn't still have them now. 1. DRM realistically wasn't an issue due to pirates (remember naptster?) 2. games have DRM that are sometimes unbroken for years. Yet nothing noticeable changes when the DRM is finally broken. there's also DRM-free games, that people aren't clamoring for scarcity over. therefore I doubt something being DRM protected or not has any effect on its scarcity value.
    - bhaak 5y ago
      We didn't have 30 years of limitless duplication. You're overestimating how many people were online in the 90s. Look at the graphs from this article: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/visualizing-40-years-of-music-industry-sales/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/visualizing-40-years-... I'm actually surprised that the music industry revenue went down that fast in the 2000s. I would have guessed it took a little bit longer. So going by those figures, we had 20 years of limitless duplication and it utterly destroyed the revenue of the music industry. Exactly what they feared would happen if there was ever a digital writable medium to play music from. NFTs are not DRM. They produce scarcity in a different way than DRM does. They don't encrypt digital content, they sign it. Without additional support from websites or physical venues this doesn't do anything. This could e.g. be something like a Twitter checkmark for a NFT profile or being allowed to a special club only if you own a certain kind of NFT.
jerf 5y ago
I think that's the most interesting take on the whole NFT phenomenon I've seen. Is the whole thing a real-world manifestation of a large group of people's inability to subconsciously accept infinite abundance of digital goods? I don't know if that's true, but it's interesting.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  ... There’s a thing called “conspicuous consumption”, and it’s apparently old as the hills (are there any pol sci people here who actually know this stuff and can tell me I got everything backwards?). That NFTs are indeed it is a good point and I appreciate the insight, but in view of the aforementioned hills the remaining commentary about modern first-world humans seems unfounded.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thorstein-veblen/the-theory-of-the-leisure-class https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thorstein-veblen/the-theor... Book that introduced the phrase.
  - killtimeatwork 5y ago
    I'm not sure it's conspicuous consumption. Cases of recent pure conspicuous consumption in the tech world, such as the "diamond app" (an iOS app that displays a diamond and costs couple thousand dollars) didn't really catch on that much. I think what's really driving NFTs is: 1. Speculation. People just see it as another asset class that can be blown up and sold to the greater fool. 2. Artists trying to monetize their digital work this way. Up until NFTs arrived, digital art had very little market value (due to ability to make indistinguishable copies of the original at zero cost). Some artists hope that the NFTs will be the vehicle which allows them to cash on their digital work. 3. Money laundering and similar usual suspects.
  - jerf 5y ago
    I think you're right that that is a related concept, but I don't think it makes this uninteresting, I think it is perhaps exactly why it's interesting. It is precisely that it isn't "conspicuous consumption"... it's conspicuous, but it isn't consumption. The NFT "owners" are bothered because they've engaged in this conspicuous consumption, but then aren't reaping the benefits they expected because the thing wasn't consumed. They consumed the thing, but what's this, so are other people! That's not part of the deal! I think you've sharpened the interestingness, not removed it.
acdha 5y ago
I see it more as another instance of the rent-seeking instinct. There’s a ton of capital seeking reliable returns and most of the blockchain buzz has been based on the idea that people with lots of capital can buy in early so everyone else will be forced to pay them an ever-increasing premium just to be able to make transactions. NFTs are a way to generate the demand they’re counting on — scarcity is part of the sales pitch to keep buyers from asking whether they’re actually getting much for their money.
- gruez 5y ago
  >most of the blockchain buzz has been based on the idea that people with lots of capital can buy in early so everyone else will be forced to pay them an ever-increasing premium just to be able to make transactions So you think NFTs are a plot by people to drive up ETH gas fees?
  - acdha 5y ago
    I think there are a ton of people who see a huge amount of money piled into cryptocurrencies which have not seen much adoption and are trying to come up with things which could give normal people a need to start using it. NFTs are just part of the larger frenzy trying to be the one who finds a winning combination. If you recall, that first big NFT sale was when a major Ethereum holder paid a lot of money for an NFT but not the rights to one of Beeple’s paintings. That lead to a ton of free advertising, and since this was all paper money based on a fraction of their total Ethereum holdings I’m sure they were expecting the cost to be outweighed by the increased demand for their remaining tokens.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Is there a readable summary of this NFT thing. I was only vaguely following it but assumed it was some way to support artists, kind of like rich people getting a hospital wing named after your family trust fund. Not great, as you don't want to rely on philanthropy of the super rich, but probably better than many of the alternatives. But is the idea to generate a secondary market for this stuff and sell it on at higher prices?
- zrobotics 5y ago
  The second option, unfortunately. Most people on art communities are pissed off at the whole NFT thing, it really doesn't help artists much. First, anyone can generate a NFT, so there's no guarantee that the artist is even involved with the token. Second, creating a NFT costs ethereum, so it's totally possible to spend money creating one that turns out to be worthless. Third, most of the 'art' associated with the valuable NFTs is procedurally generated crap, so it's fairly obvious that the buyers are mostly interested in speculation.

zwieback 5y ago

I've got a variant of this disease called "Shift-F10" mentality so I don't have to move my hand to the mouse.

api 5y ago

> “This is a great example of right-clicker mentality,” Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. “Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant. The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you. Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.” Get me off this planet.

hprotagonist 5y ago
conspicuous consumption is not even close to new. phlegmatic take: hey, at least we’ve improved a little; the conspicuity is now primarily about location of where the meat is eaten, not whether or not you’re permitted to eat at all!
chrisco255 5y ago
Turns out that space travel is one of the latest and greatest flexes you can make.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Presumably he meant without returning.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Second only to being effortlessly popular, happy, relaxed, content, and balanced, without even being rich!
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    If someone flexes alone in the forest is it really a flex?
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Flex can be in the eyes of the beeholder. If someone flexing to prop up themselves with BS, meets such a person they will be stung with the existential dread of 10,000 flexes!

trasz 5y ago

So the "right-clicker mentality" essentially means not being technically illiterate?

Ensorceled 5y ago
Not really, it assumes we all know how to right click, but only the gauche would actually right click rather than buy an NFT (and presumably right click on the image brought up by the resulting URL ...).
OJFord 5y ago
No, it means not being 'NFT literate' (to put it generously) or sceptical/not buying in (literally) to the idea of NFTs: 'I can just right-click and save the image, I don't need to pay for the NFT.'
- trasz 5y ago
  It's the other side of the same coin, isn't it?
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Well I don't think so, unless you're saying 'disagreeing with NFT value' is 'technically illiterate'? I thought you were sort of remarking that NFT proponents are the ones not technically literate (paying for NFTs rather than being aware of right-click>save) so I just meant that no, it's being used the other way around, by the proponents, derogatorily about the people who would rather right-click>save an image than 'invest' in an NFT. Perhaps you realise that, and I just misunderstood your comment.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      > I thought you were sort of remarking that NFT proponents are the ones not technically literate (paying for NFTs rather than being aware of right-click>save) Well yes.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

bryanlarsen 5y ago

I've never seen such an obvious target for reappropriation[1]. This will probably be reappropriated before it even has time to be commonly established as an insult. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

madeofpalk 5y ago
By this stage it's almost like re-reappropriation.
hiccuphippo 5y ago
According to the article, it already has.

olalonde 5y ago

The problem with the analogies used is that NFTs do not even confer ownership of the underlying art.

samhw 5y ago

The 'right-clicker mentality' seems to be effectively another word for hacker culture, no?

jtbayly 5y ago
Nah. It's another term for common sense. Nobody with common sense goes to the trouble of buying something that is easier to get for free.

bmitc 5y ago

People really need to just go outside.

easton 5y ago

There's utility in buying the steak at the restaurant though. Maybe not enough for most to buy it, but there is some utility in having someone else make a meal that you might screw up if you do it yourself. There isn't a lot of utility in an NFT as compared to a normal JPEG except as a store of value, which nobody really wanted to use JPEGs for until this year.

JackFr 5y ago
> There's utility in buying the steak at the restaurant though. Exactly. No one would pay $1500 for a bottle of vodka at a liquor store, but the same bottle in the VIP section of some celeb filled club is a different experience. (I still wouldn’t pay it, but I get the difference.)

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

As they used to (almost) say: NFTs want to be free!

vsareto 5y ago

All my NFT owner homies don't even use mice any more. We have VR workstations now. You right-click to save images? I save entire 3D models. /lazy-sarcasm

coldtea 5y ago
Emm, NFT-ownership is about NOT saving, but having BS exclusive rights to. So, to get the sarcasm right, the NFT-onwer shouldn't brag about how he "saves" (even if he saves something more "special" like 3D models over plain images). In the context of the "right-click mentality joke" (and in reality probably) NFT-owners are anti-saving.
- vsareto 5y ago
  Are you ADHD or autistic at all?
  - coldtea 5y ago
    It's Hacker News, not Normie news. And judging from the question, you don't seem high on Emotional Intelligence yourself :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Weirdly, I feel like I entirely agree with that Twitter post, but take the exact opposite lesson from it. So, this steak that they are imitating. It's not a good steak. As the tweet suggests, its sole purpose for existing is conspicous consumption. You can't steal/copy/right-click that, and you shouldn't want to. Hopefully the person doing the at home imitation is at least in part trying to deflate and ridicule the whole idea.

fullshark 5y ago
The twitter post is right, if your goal is to impress strangers on the internet obsessed with fame/status instead of to eat a good steak.

mhb 5y ago

It's also hilarious that the right clickers are recreating the steak with gold for $90 instead of a plain steak for $20.

gruez 5y ago
Yeah, gold literally doesn't have any flavor (it's inert so there's nothing for your taste buds to react to), so putting it on the steak is also "all about the flex".
ginko 5y ago
According to the base article[1] the plain steak was about £33 or ~$45 not $20 which seems about right for a nicer cut of beef in the UK. Still a lot of extra money for the gold(£28). I do think you can get a few sheets of gold leaf for quite a bit for cheaper than that if you shop around though. [1] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/man-recreates-salt-baes-1500-21958035 https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-...

JackFr 5y ago

Still a firm believer that the NFTs are simply an instrument for money laundering and other criminal enterprises. Those transactions which aren’t simply provide cover (possibly unwittingly) for those that are.

pezzana 5y ago

For years economists debated the things that are now being worked out experimentally. And it turns out the economists were dead wrong about a lot of it, as this article demonstrates.

h2odragon 5y ago

If everybody believes in Unicorns, and no one ever mentions that they don't exists, then we can all ride Unicorns around all day! "Right clickers" are people who not only do not believe, but insist on ruining everyone else's ride by continuing not to believe. If only we could eliminate these Faithless ones, think of all the problems we could solve!

mdoms 5y ago
I've been saving images for much longer than you've been trading for magic beans, I assure you.

lelanthran 5y ago

> Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. Wait, is that a real name? Were his parents too afraid too name him "halfwit" and too honest to name him anything else?

hiccuphippo 5y ago
Twitter doesn't have a real name policy like other social networks do.

boramalper 5y ago

You wouldn't download an NFT. /s

johnofdoom 5y ago

It's notable how this attitude can only exist in a scenario where the art itself has no real-world value and the stakes don't matter. It's easy to dismiss "right-clickers" if you aren't losing any money from them. But anyone who owns digital media that _is_ valuable doesn't think like this at all. For example, consider a musician losing their income because their fans are pirating their mp3s. The musician would never dismiss that by saying, "those right-clickers will never have the satisfaction that I do of owning the original copyright!" As we all know from the past twenty years, they take the exact opposite approach. When you have something actually valuable, then owning it in a legal sense doesn't mean much if anyone can just copy it.

dafoex 5y ago

The most useful NFT I've seen so far is Decentraland's LAND token, which behaves much like a deed to a plot of virtual land. Its something you could theoretically download free gratis, but as LAND is linked to a finite space in a living virtual world, you'll never own it in its entirety by just screenshoting it because your copy is desyncronised from the original. A photograph, or even a 3D scan of the Eiffel tower does not mean you own it or infringe on the owner's or designer's perceived rights, and likewise a copy of the land isolated from the Decentraland grid does not mean you own the LAND. Tl;dr, I think NFTs need to focus on being a record or something - anything! Rather than being the new way to buy art, sell the technology as the new way to do deeds, licences, certificates, etc.