4 ms·

Everything about NFTs is irritating. They're pure positional goods, with no real utility beyond signaling social status. They're subject to intense, irrational

Everything about NFTs is irritating. They're pure positional goods, with no real utility beyond signaling social status. They're subject to intense, irrational financial speculation. They attract insiders, hypesters, and scam artists. Their fans are prone to wildly overstating their capabilities and importance. The pieces of art they point to very often demonstrate almost no technical skill. They're built on technology with objectively terrible performance characteristics. But I've thought Facebook was stupid since 2004. Experience has taught me that I'm a weirdo and my aesthetic objections are usually anti-correlated with a project's success. I am the George Costanza of social media. If you're reading about Non-Fungible Tokens on Hacker News, I suspect you are too. These things are here to stay.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brandall10 5y ago
Right there with you… but these types of observations seem to hold in crypto vs fiat currency, no? I feel that’s the vibe the op is getting at.
kranke155 5y ago
This is a great take. I'd recommend you read this text, or skim it, to see what happened with NFTs https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Basically sociopaths have taken over the space and they are promoting absolute crap. BUT There is real art and artists in the space if you take your time to look for it. Look at - https://www.fxhash.xyz/ https://www.fxhash.xyz/ - you'll see a remarkable thing: real innovation, Generative Art being placed right onto the blockchain. Something that would be very hard to monetize only 2 years ago is now a liquid permissionless marketplace for Generative Artists to experiment. It's like shadertoy has become an art market. You can now spend your days experimenting with shader art and make real money. That's incredible to me.
1cvmask 5y ago
Isn't most real world art buying also about social signaling and the scarcity and uniqueness associated with it?
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  At the higher levels, yes. At the low/local level I think it really is mostly about aesthetic appreciation and patronage— visit hipster cafe, see attractive piece on display, contact artist and negotiate price, display piece in your own home.
  - kelseyfrog 5y ago
    And in today's world, right click, save as.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      I don't think anyone talking seriously about "real world art buying" is referring to the digital representation of .... oh damn, this is a discussion about NFTs, isn't it.
- TrevorAustin 5y ago
  For fine art, maybe? For music, writing, theater, film and television, video games: seems like it's mostly about the enjoyment the patron gets from interacting with the art. The social signaling part strikes me as kind of squicky. Maybe NFTs turn out to be a way to redirect that gross status-seeking impulse, to turn it into incentives to create art and income for artists without copyright, DRM, and associated ugliness. That would be a pretty cool hack! There's a decent chance it works.
  - kranke155 5y ago
    This is exactly what's happening. As a part of the NFT community/digital artist, I've never seen artists happier.
TrevorAustin 5y ago
Ha, just as a small example, this post as typed concluded with a single U+1F61D: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f61d https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f61d Hacker News is the kind of place that strips emoji from your posts, because they're kind of frivolous. I love that. Because I am a weirdo.
- afiori 5y ago
  are there HN comments with emoji from before the filter? or was it applied retroactively?
hakfoo 5y ago
It's the MMO version of "I Am Rich". Demonstrate your social position, now with themed factions and skins!
mecha_ghidorah 5y ago
> Experience has taught me that I'm a weirdo and my aesthetic objections are usually anti-correlated with a project's success. I am the George Costanza of social media. Oh god this describes me. I was about 14-15 when MySpace started catching on and I didn't like the idea of it then, but I did at least see people having fun making their own pages and stuff. A bunch of people I knew played around with themes and such. Not for me, actually it irritated me, but hey people were having fun. Then FaceBook came and it seemed a lot like MySpace but with less user control. Again core functionality doesn't appeal to me at all. Twitter came along and I thought it was weird to make a service where people could basically write a public SMS, but thought "hey this kind of makes sense for like businesses and governments such to write announcement type messages that get pushed - "Hey we're doing XX see LINK" type stuff. But people insist on using it and worse on having complicated or long discourse on it. The number of twitter threads I've seen which is a person replying to themselves to get around the character count is huge and I don't even have a twitter account. Simply baffling, and yet it is a huge success. I legitimately can't even comprehend why people use it.
- Guessnotgauss 5y ago
  Can I say both your comment and the parents are cathardic to me. I just dont see the appeal of social media anymore. Living through transition from people being in the moment to now everyone documenting everything so they can brag about it online is odd to me. Early on it was a great tool to reconnect people. When it started becoming integrated into daily life things got messy. People can now advertise themselves, and present a highly constrcted image of how they want to be seen. The lack of authenticity apparently not problematic, or is a blind spot as they complain about the fakeness in social media on the same platform. It's the race to the bottom for your attention. Low quality references and expressions, a recursive meme. A new slang for thoughts that have no depth. Perhaps I just never understood it, and I am the weirdo. Thats what people tell me. The silver lining, maybe this social platform, HN, has made me feel like Im not the only one. Perhaps thats what this whole thing is about.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brandall10 5y ago

Right there with you… but these types of observations seem to hold in crypto vs fiat currency, no? I feel that’s the vibe the op is getting at.

kranke155 5y ago

This is a great take. I'd recommend you read this text, or skim it, to see what happened with NFTs https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Basically sociopaths have taken over the space and they are promoting absolute crap. BUT There is real art and artists in the space if you take your time to look for it. Look at - https://www.fxhash.xyz/ https://www.fxhash.xyz/ - you'll see a remarkable thing: real innovation, Generative Art being placed right onto the blockchain. Something that would be very hard to monetize only 2 years ago is now a liquid permissionless marketplace for Generative Artists to experiment. It's like shadertoy has become an art market. You can now spend your days experimenting with shader art and make real money. That's incredible to me.

1cvmask 5y ago

Isn't most real world art buying also about social signaling and the scarcity and uniqueness associated with it?

mikepurvis 5y ago
At the higher levels, yes. At the low/local level I think it really is mostly about aesthetic appreciation and patronage— visit hipster cafe, see attractive piece on display, contact artist and negotiate price, display piece in your own home.
- kelseyfrog 5y ago
  And in today's world, right click, save as.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    I don't think anyone talking seriously about "real world art buying" is referring to the digital representation of .... oh damn, this is a discussion about NFTs, isn't it.
TrevorAustin 5y ago
For fine art, maybe? For music, writing, theater, film and television, video games: seems like it's mostly about the enjoyment the patron gets from interacting with the art. The social signaling part strikes me as kind of squicky. Maybe NFTs turn out to be a way to redirect that gross status-seeking impulse, to turn it into incentives to create art and income for artists without copyright, DRM, and associated ugliness. That would be a pretty cool hack! There's a decent chance it works.
- kranke155 5y ago
  This is exactly what's happening. As a part of the NFT community/digital artist, I've never seen artists happier.

TrevorAustin 5y ago

Ha, just as a small example, this post as typed concluded with a single U+1F61D: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f61d https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f61d Hacker News is the kind of place that strips emoji from your posts, because they're kind of frivolous. I love that. Because I am a weirdo.

afiori 5y ago
are there HN comments with emoji from before the filter? or was it applied retroactively?

hakfoo 5y ago

It's the MMO version of "I Am Rich". Demonstrate your social position, now with themed factions and skins!

mecha_ghidorah 5y ago

> Experience has taught me that I'm a weirdo and my aesthetic objections are usually anti-correlated with a project's success. I am the George Costanza of social media. Oh god this describes me. I was about 14-15 when MySpace started catching on and I didn't like the idea of it then, but I did at least see people having fun making their own pages and stuff. A bunch of people I knew played around with themes and such. Not for me, actually it irritated me, but hey people were having fun. Then FaceBook came and it seemed a lot like MySpace but with less user control. Again core functionality doesn't appeal to me at all. Twitter came along and I thought it was weird to make a service where people could basically write a public SMS, but thought "hey this kind of makes sense for like businesses and governments such to write announcement type messages that get pushed - "Hey we're doing XX see LINK" type stuff. But people insist on using it and worse on having complicated or long discourse on it. The number of twitter threads I've seen which is a person replying to themselves to get around the character count is huge and I don't even have a twitter account. Simply baffling, and yet it is a huge success. I legitimately can't even comprehend why people use it.

Guessnotgauss 5y ago
Can I say both your comment and the parents are cathardic to me. I just dont see the appeal of social media anymore. Living through transition from people being in the moment to now everyone documenting everything so they can brag about it online is odd to me. Early on it was a great tool to reconnect people. When it started becoming integrated into daily life things got messy. People can now advertise themselves, and present a highly constrcted image of how they want to be seen. The lack of authenticity apparently not problematic, or is a blind spot as they complain about the fakeness in social media on the same platform. It's the race to the bottom for your attention. Low quality references and expressions, a recursive meme. A new slang for thoughts that have no depth. Perhaps I just never understood it, and I am the weirdo. Thats what people tell me. The silver lining, maybe this social platform, HN, has made me feel like Im not the only one. Perhaps thats what this whole thing is about.