10 ms·

What's Up with the NFT Hate?

51 points by jack1243star 5y ago

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
There is a comment inside that thread that sums up the problems really well: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/rho91b/whats_up_with_the_nft_hate/horr549/ https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/rho91b/whats_...
mwattsun 5y ago
user 'NoahDiesSlowly' seems to know it well enough to be making some money. I'm glad he outlined it for us. This is a great addition to the more theoretical posts.
weare138 5y ago
>but from my understanding they are a way to extend "ownership" for digital entities like you would do for phisical[sic] ones. But it doesn't. Unless that NFT includes a legal sales agreement or contract transferring ownership, you don't 'own' anything. If I'm an artist and sell you a NFT for a digital copy of my art I still 'own' that art. I am still the copyright holder. You are not legally entitled to anything and the NFT legally confers nothing to the buyer. You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation. You are buying something in that you will be able to sell it later, which I think is the main point.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    Yes, but what that something is is not what people think they own. They own a unique reference to an item, not the item itself.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Hmm, analogy I just came up. This would be same as buying piece of paper with name of the art work and then signature by artist(possibly fake). So some value, but on average not really. Unless artist was very popular and those signatures were exceedingly rare...
      - kgc 5y ago
        I'd argue it's more similar to buying a signed copy of a book by an author. It doesn't prevent them from printing more copies, but it is also worth more than an unsigned copy.
        Yizahi 5y ago
        More like a torn out page with signature, without the book. The book itself is nearby, but another person holds it in his hands and can open it for you when requested.
        Mystlix 5y ago
        the author's signature has value because the author has a very limited amount of time in his life to give out signatures. moreover not only it takes time to sign stuff but it also takes effort. these two combined, plus some subjective personal feelings about the author and their importance, give value to a physical signature. digital signatures on the other hand are effortless and automatic, the author doesn't have to do anything beyond generating a public key pair once
      - soylentbeige 5y ago
        Another analogy: you own the pointer not the value stored in memory.
      - formerly_proven 5y ago
        You're buying a receipt.
        senectus1 5y ago
- dashdot 5y ago
  You own the token. The NFT.
  - moooo99 5y ago
    But not the piece of art, as many people claim. Edit: Missed to not. I assume it still was clear
    - AreYouSirius 5y ago
      and that art is ON SERVER NOT ON BLOCKCHAIN, so how many times you had service go bust/eol and you lost your data in past on internet?
      - dorusr 5y ago
        Even worse, the blockchain can't really be accessed decentrally, at least not in most cases and this will possibly worsen as time goes on. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
        Ekaros 5y ago
        The decentralization is interesting question. How much resources you need to run fully qualified node. That is one that has full history, mempool and so on. And how many of the users actually do this anymore? And how long it takes to bootstrap for new user... And now multiply this for all the chains you want to use/support... And with BTC you aren't even paid for this service...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkou 5y ago
    Okay? I can sell you (and a dozen other people) a photo of the deed to my house, and it's very nice that you own this photo, but I don't understand why you would pay me real dollars to buy it. Unless your plan consists of selling it to a bigger fool.
- trollitarantula 5y ago
  Some tokens have license in their metadata allowing the token owner to monetise and redistribute the artwork. The original author still has author' rights.
  - Yizahi 5y ago
    Except most probably that license itself and rules regarding it's usage are stored in a centralized way somewhere. Simply because NFT can't store anything this big inside, not even a sufficiently long text only file. The tech doesn't allow this.
    - trollitarantula 5y ago
      The majority of NFTs store their metadata on IPFS
      - Yizahi 5y ago
        So? It is a system external to the blockchain with NFTs, that's the problem. One of the problems.
        trollitarantula 5y ago
        Because IPFS is decentralised permanent storage. Blockchain handles ownership, IPFS handles metadata, visual assets, etc. It's kinda how things work in real world with real estate, for example. There is a registry and there is physical property. Same here.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      The license and rights do not have to be centralised. The owner just has to hold on to some documentation showing they have ownership. If the original artist challenges it, you pull out the email/letter/receipt that shows you originally paid for it. Fraudulently inventing proof is a serious crime. None of this required any blockchains or decentralisation. In fact it was never centralised to begin with. NFTs serve absolutely no purpose that wasn’t already solved in better ways.
fbrncci 5y ago
I am flat out convinced that most people who buy into the NFT hype are gullibe at best, and a fraud at worst. If that offends anyone, I am sorry; it is probably going to take a while for the NFT madness to blow over and uncover the true nature. This is coming from someone who made thousands of (NF)T trades back in 2017-2018! (with some bias of not earning a single cent on NFT's in 2020/2021).
- cm2187 5y ago
  I don't disagree but can't you say the same thing about expensive art in general? I mean is any painting really worth $100m? At one point it's not about the painting, it's about being able to splash a lot of money at something expensive when you already own everything other expensive thing you could splash money at. That's why I always thought comparing crypto to currency, financial investments or gold is the wrong analogy. To me it is more akin to the art market.
  - emmo 5y ago
    But in this situation, you at least own a piece of art.
    - cm2187 5y ago
      Which value is in the eye of the beholder. Some people think they hold something valuable with a Klein Monochrome that my handyman could paint in a minute. Others enjoy the ownership of a few randomly generated bytes on a hard drive.
  - boppo1 5y ago
    Art can be really incredible to behold in person (modern & contemporary less so imo, but I digress). There is some value there over and above monkey jpegs.
    - cm2187 5y ago
      And I am not saying it has no value. Just that it doesn't have $100m worth of value.
alkonaut 5y ago
They are pyramid schemes - if they are being pushed. Because few people push anything NFT related for any other reason (as it turns out, there are few other reasons). So when we see people even slightly defend NFTs, one can assume it’s because they are invested at the bottom of a pyramid. It doesn’t help when people (still pyramid investors) sound like the worst software managers we ever had. We as technical people absolutely hate it when people misrepresent what’s technically possible. https://twitter.com/mikeshinoda/status/1479865779822551040 https://twitter.com/mikeshinoda/status/1479865779822551040
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  I have an nft - an ens domain name. Just because people have associated NFTs with the art / collectibles world (which lots of people don't get the value of even in the real world) doesn't mean those are the only use cases. And I would say that the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable - why would a company spend a bunch of money to make those skins work in their game if they aren't getting paid for it? It's possible to imagine incentive structures that could make it happen, but the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    > the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable If the business side was probable, why would you need NFTs to implement that?
    - kybernetikos 5y ago
      You certainly wouldn't need them, but there are benefits to secondary liquidity, compared to running some custom trading server - way more people will have ethereum wallets than an account on your server, the ethereum network will allow them to trade even if the amazon availability zone your server is on goes down, your NFTs can be included in baskets and traded transactionally with all kinds of other assets or listed on distributed exchanges without you having to build any of that stuff.
numlock86 5y ago
The real absurd thing about NFTs to me is that you don't have certified ownership over the art piece itself (which would be way to expensive to be included in the data chain), but just the URL redirecting to it. Oh boy, the implications of this ...
- teekert 5y ago
  Yeah, that also blew my mind when I read Moxie's blog that was on the HN frontpage some days back. [0] Apparently a real image on blockchain is too expensive... so suddenly I'm more on the right clickers side again. [0]: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
Yizahi 5y ago
If we are posting Reddit links, this one is better :) - https://old.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/qmgb0f/nft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/qmgb0f/nft/
dbavaria 5y ago
While the current hype around NFTs seems like a giant scam, it's interesting to note that there is VCs investment in the area. That is, VCs investing in the infrastructure to mint/sell NFTs.
- creato 5y ago
  VCs only care if NFTs have enough legs to make it to an exit. Just like everyone else in crypto, they think someone else will be holding the bag.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    You know there is something wrong with currency when people loan it to spend it... Same goes with NFTs that are bought to flip them... Ofc, in that market selling them initially by mass automatic generation makes sense. After all that non-fungible part is tad hard... But really doesn't matter once you automate generation.
invalidname 5y ago
What's up with the ponzi scheme hate? The people in the pyramid are making a lot of money... (sarcasm if it isn't clear).
Jenk 5y ago
NFTs remind me of those websites that let you "buy a piece of the moon." Sure, you just spent $x on a certificate that says you "own" a grid reference on the moon, but don't for one second think you actually own that piece of the moon.
throwawayay02 5y ago
I think most people missed the point of the question on reddit. It isn't why NFTs are a bad idea. Let's be honest, a lot of collecting is a bad idea. Financially, ecologically. OP's point is that everyone, collectively, started having a deep hatred of them overnight. And I'd attribute it to a few articles and to Twitter groupthink now saying NFTs are the approved thing to hate on. Then all the cool kids must hate on NFTs, regardless if they use less energy than Magic the Gathering cards or trade for less money than any other collectible junk.
- zwirbl 5y ago
  I don't think that people "started having a deep hatred of them overnight", but it has a lot to do with not getting the point of NFT. I certainly don't get why/how it is a good idea, same with lots of different blockchain projects (earth2 anyone?)
- dutchCourage 5y ago
  > OP's point is that everyone, collectively, started having a deep hatred of them overnight. I think the hate carried over from crypto currencies and other blockchain projects. The top reply mentions: > NFTs are driven by hype, making NFT investers/scammers super outspoken and obnoxious. This is why the tone of the conversation around NFTs is so resentful of them, people are sick of being forced to interact with NFT hypebeasts. I think this is what makes blockchain projects so polarized. I've yet to see something interesting come out from blockchain technologies. If those projects exist, they're drowned in the middle of people and companies who have no clue what they're talking about and are trying to bank on the hype.
bidder33 5y ago
nft financial speculation is not the problem, it is a symptom. you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under. the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi. "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
caskstrength 5y ago
I'm not an "active" NFT hater (this is the first time I comment on this topic on internet), but my reasoning for disliking the NFT craze is following: We already experience popular backlash on tech, which is arguably justified, although from my point of view it is over the top (you can just delete your FB account, you know?). Now, no matter your opinion regarding behavior of "big tech" companies, it is undeniable that they employ significant amount of engineers on exceptionally good terms and they contribute a lot to the wider ecosystem (via open source, conference support, etc.). In contrast, NFT ecosystem seems to be small group of opportunistic unethical people who intend reap all the benefits for themselves and at the end whole tech community will have to endure the backlash. PS just yesterday I witnessed a discussion on the topic in chat of unrelated Twitch channel and someone characterized NFT as "bunch of smart techies scamming clueless rich people". I don't want to be held responsible for this when the bubble bursts, even indirectly.
- iSnow 5y ago
  >you can just delete your FB account, you know? And FB will continue to spy on you and create shadow accounts for you in case you should sign on again. Big tech has become a loose cannon and needs to be reined in. Hard.
  - caskstrength 5y ago
    Well, the most popular complain is that FB will "radicalize" you by their psy-ops algorithms based on your profile. If you don't read news on FB, then they can't show you antivax/trump-supporter/whatever posts, right? Besides, I always get a feeling of hypocrisy when this is being discussed because the argument people make is that FB is scum of the earth that will destroy democracy and society but the same people wouldn't delete their account because then they will miss the posts of their knitting group or something. So for me it seems that either people who are making the argument actually don't consider FB as much of a threat, or they value democracy and civic society less then their knitting group. Anyway, let's not derail NFT discussion into typical HN big-tech-hate flamewar. Sorry I brought up the subject.
surcap526 5y ago
solarkraft 5y ago
I don't hate NFTs, but I appreciate the backlash because people who like NFTs seem to misunderstand them MASSIVELY. Some NFT haters also seem to misunderstand them, however, so let me throw yet another explanation attempt into the ring. Anyone can make an NFT for anything. I can make an NFT for the Mona Lisa or whatever the hell I want. What do you get when you buy it? Absolutely nothing. I can make infinitely many too. NFTs get all of their value from where they come from, a bit like autograph cards. One from some rando on the web? Worthless. One from Eminem? Hmmm, maybe more interesting. I do think NFTs can have some value for artists and art collectors. But always remember that an NFT's value comes from its creator and what they do, say and commit to. One possible option would be that an NFT entitles you to listen to ("own") a piece of music (my favorite use case because I love buying things on Bandcamp, but would like to be able to resell stuff at some point). That's an interesting use case, but nothing close to what NFT zealots dream of.

51 points by jack1243star 5y ago

There is a comment inside that thread that sums up the problems really well: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/rho91b/whats_up_with_the_nft_hate/horr549/ https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/rho91b/whats_...

mwattsun 5y ago

user 'NoahDiesSlowly' seems to know it well enough to be making some money. I'm glad he outlined it for us. This is a great addition to the more theoretical posts.

weare138 5y ago

>but from my understanding they are a way to extend "ownership" for digital entities like you would do for phisical[sic] ones. But it doesn't. Unless that NFT includes a legal sales agreement or contract transferring ownership, you don't 'own' anything. If I'm an artist and sell you a NFT for a digital copy of my art I still 'own' that art. I am still the copyright holder. You are not legally entitled to anything and the NFT legally confers nothing to the buyer. You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation.

Zababa 5y ago
> You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation. You are buying something in that you will be able to sell it later, which I think is the main point.
- dagmx 5y ago
  Yes, but what that something is is not what people think they own. They own a unique reference to an item, not the item itself.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Hmm, analogy I just came up. This would be same as buying piece of paper with name of the art work and then signature by artist(possibly fake). So some value, but on average not really. Unless artist was very popular and those signatures were exceedingly rare...
    - kgc 5y ago
      I'd argue it's more similar to buying a signed copy of a book by an author. It doesn't prevent them from printing more copies, but it is also worth more than an unsigned copy.
      - Yizahi 5y ago
        More like a torn out page with signature, without the book. The book itself is nearby, but another person holds it in his hands and can open it for you when requested.
      - Mystlix 5y ago
        the author's signature has value because the author has a very limited amount of time in his life to give out signatures. moreover not only it takes time to sign stuff but it also takes effort. these two combined, plus some subjective personal feelings about the author and their importance, give value to a physical signature. digital signatures on the other hand are effortless and automatic, the author doesn't have to do anything beyond generating a public key pair once
    - soylentbeige 5y ago
      Another analogy: you own the pointer not the value stored in memory.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      You're buying a receipt.
      - senectus1 5y ago
dashdot 5y ago
You own the token. The NFT.
- moooo99 5y ago
  But not the piece of art, as many people claim. Edit: Missed to not. I assume it still was clear
  - AreYouSirius 5y ago
    and that art is ON SERVER NOT ON BLOCKCHAIN, so how many times you had service go bust/eol and you lost your data in past on internet?
    - dorusr 5y ago
      Even worse, the blockchain can't really be accessed decentrally, at least not in most cases and this will possibly worsen as time goes on. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        The decentralization is interesting question. How much resources you need to run fully qualified node. That is one that has full history, mempool and so on. And how many of the users actually do this anymore? And how long it takes to bootstrap for new user... And now multiply this for all the chains you want to use/support... And with BTC you aren't even paid for this service...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 5y ago
  Okay? I can sell you (and a dozen other people) a photo of the deed to my house, and it's very nice that you own this photo, but I don't understand why you would pay me real dollars to buy it. Unless your plan consists of selling it to a bigger fool.
trollitarantula 5y ago
Some tokens have license in their metadata allowing the token owner to monetise and redistribute the artwork. The original author still has author' rights.
- Yizahi 5y ago
  Except most probably that license itself and rules regarding it's usage are stored in a centralized way somewhere. Simply because NFT can't store anything this big inside, not even a sufficiently long text only file. The tech doesn't allow this.
  - trollitarantula 5y ago
    The majority of NFTs store their metadata on IPFS
    - Yizahi 5y ago
      So? It is a system external to the blockchain with NFTs, that's the problem. One of the problems.
      - trollitarantula 5y ago
        Because IPFS is decentralised permanent storage. Blockchain handles ownership, IPFS handles metadata, visual assets, etc. It's kinda how things work in real world with real estate, for example. There is a registry and there is physical property. Same here.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    The license and rights do not have to be centralised. The owner just has to hold on to some documentation showing they have ownership. If the original artist challenges it, you pull out the email/letter/receipt that shows you originally paid for it. Fraudulently inventing proof is a serious crime. None of this required any blockchains or decentralisation. In fact it was never centralised to begin with. NFTs serve absolutely no purpose that wasn’t already solved in better ways.

fbrncci 5y ago

I am flat out convinced that most people who buy into the NFT hype are gullibe at best, and a fraud at worst. If that offends anyone, I am sorry; it is probably going to take a while for the NFT madness to blow over and uncover the true nature. This is coming from someone who made thousands of (NF)T trades back in 2017-2018! (with some bias of not earning a single cent on NFT's in 2020/2021).

cm2187 5y ago
I don't disagree but can't you say the same thing about expensive art in general? I mean is any painting really worth $100m? At one point it's not about the painting, it's about being able to splash a lot of money at something expensive when you already own everything other expensive thing you could splash money at. That's why I always thought comparing crypto to currency, financial investments or gold is the wrong analogy. To me it is more akin to the art market.
- emmo 5y ago
  But in this situation, you at least own a piece of art.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    Which value is in the eye of the beholder. Some people think they hold something valuable with a Klein Monochrome that my handyman could paint in a minute. Others enjoy the ownership of a few randomly generated bytes on a hard drive.
- boppo1 5y ago
  Art can be really incredible to behold in person (modern & contemporary less so imo, but I digress). There is some value there over and above monkey jpegs.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    And I am not saying it has no value. Just that it doesn't have $100m worth of value.

alkonaut 5y ago

They are pyramid schemes - if they are being pushed. Because few people push anything NFT related for any other reason (as it turns out, there are few other reasons). So when we see people even slightly defend NFTs, one can assume it’s because they are invested at the bottom of a pyramid. It doesn’t help when people (still pyramid investors) sound like the worst software managers we ever had. We as technical people absolutely hate it when people misrepresent what’s technically possible. https://twitter.com/mikeshinoda/status/1479865779822551040 https://twitter.com/mikeshinoda/status/1479865779822551040

kybernetikos 5y ago
I have an nft - an ens domain name. Just because people have associated NFTs with the art / collectibles world (which lots of people don't get the value of even in the real world) doesn't mean those are the only use cases. And I would say that the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable - why would a company spend a bunch of money to make those skins work in their game if they aren't getting paid for it? It's possible to imagine incentive structures that could make it happen, but the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
- egeozcan 5y ago
  > the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable If the business side was probable, why would you need NFTs to implement that?
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    You certainly wouldn't need them, but there are benefits to secondary liquidity, compared to running some custom trading server - way more people will have ethereum wallets than an account on your server, the ethereum network will allow them to trade even if the amazon availability zone your server is on goes down, your NFTs can be included in baskets and traded transactionally with all kinds of other assets or listed on distributed exchanges without you having to build any of that stuff.

numlock86 5y ago

The real absurd thing about NFTs to me is that you don't have certified ownership over the art piece itself (which would be way to expensive to be included in the data chain), but just the URL redirecting to it. Oh boy, the implications of this ...

teekert 5y ago
Yeah, that also blew my mind when I read Moxie's blog that was on the HN frontpage some days back. [0] Apparently a real image on blockchain is too expensive... so suddenly I'm more on the right clickers side again. [0]: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Yizahi 5y ago

If we are posting Reddit links, this one is better :) - https://old.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/qmgb0f/nft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/qmgb0f/nft/

dbavaria 5y ago

While the current hype around NFTs seems like a giant scam, it's interesting to note that there is VCs investment in the area. That is, VCs investing in the infrastructure to mint/sell NFTs.

creato 5y ago
VCs only care if NFTs have enough legs to make it to an exit. Just like everyone else in crypto, they think someone else will be holding the bag.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  You know there is something wrong with currency when people loan it to spend it... Same goes with NFTs that are bought to flip them... Ofc, in that market selling them initially by mass automatic generation makes sense. After all that non-fungible part is tad hard... But really doesn't matter once you automate generation.

invalidname 5y ago

What's up with the ponzi scheme hate? The people in the pyramid are making a lot of money... (sarcasm if it isn't clear).

Jenk 5y ago

NFTs remind me of those websites that let you "buy a piece of the moon." Sure, you just spent $x on a certificate that says you "own" a grid reference on the moon, but don't for one second think you actually own that piece of the moon.

throwawayay02 5y ago

I think most people missed the point of the question on reddit. It isn't why NFTs are a bad idea. Let's be honest, a lot of collecting is a bad idea. Financially, ecologically. OP's point is that everyone, collectively, started having a deep hatred of them overnight. And I'd attribute it to a few articles and to Twitter groupthink now saying NFTs are the approved thing to hate on. Then all the cool kids must hate on NFTs, regardless if they use less energy than Magic the Gathering cards or trade for less money than any other collectible junk.

zwirbl 5y ago
I don't think that people "started having a deep hatred of them overnight", but it has a lot to do with not getting the point of NFT. I certainly don't get why/how it is a good idea, same with lots of different blockchain projects (earth2 anyone?)
dutchCourage 5y ago
> OP's point is that everyone, collectively, started having a deep hatred of them overnight. I think the hate carried over from crypto currencies and other blockchain projects. The top reply mentions: > NFTs are driven by hype, making NFT investers/scammers super outspoken and obnoxious. This is why the tone of the conversation around NFTs is so resentful of them, people are sick of being forced to interact with NFT hypebeasts. I think this is what makes blockchain projects so polarized. I've yet to see something interesting come out from blockchain technologies. If those projects exist, they're drowned in the middle of people and companies who have no clue what they're talking about and are trying to bank on the hype.

bidder33 5y ago

nft financial speculation is not the problem, it is a symptom. you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under. the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi. "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

caskstrength 5y ago

I'm not an "active" NFT hater (this is the first time I comment on this topic on internet), but my reasoning for disliking the NFT craze is following: We already experience popular backlash on tech, which is arguably justified, although from my point of view it is over the top (you can just delete your FB account, you know?). Now, no matter your opinion regarding behavior of "big tech" companies, it is undeniable that they employ significant amount of engineers on exceptionally good terms and they contribute a lot to the wider ecosystem (via open source, conference support, etc.). In contrast, NFT ecosystem seems to be small group of opportunistic unethical people who intend reap all the benefits for themselves and at the end whole tech community will have to endure the backlash. PS just yesterday I witnessed a discussion on the topic in chat of unrelated Twitch channel and someone characterized NFT as "bunch of smart techies scamming clueless rich people". I don't want to be held responsible for this when the bubble bursts, even indirectly.

iSnow 5y ago
>you can just delete your FB account, you know? And FB will continue to spy on you and create shadow accounts for you in case you should sign on again. Big tech has become a loose cannon and needs to be reined in. Hard.
- caskstrength 5y ago
  Well, the most popular complain is that FB will "radicalize" you by their psy-ops algorithms based on your profile. If you don't read news on FB, then they can't show you antivax/trump-supporter/whatever posts, right? Besides, I always get a feeling of hypocrisy when this is being discussed because the argument people make is that FB is scum of the earth that will destroy democracy and society but the same people wouldn't delete their account because then they will miss the posts of their knitting group or something. So for me it seems that either people who are making the argument actually don't consider FB as much of a threat, or they value democracy and civic society less then their knitting group. Anyway, let's not derail NFT discussion into typical HN big-tech-hate flamewar. Sorry I brought up the subject.

surcap526 5y ago

solarkraft 5y ago

I don't hate NFTs, but I appreciate the backlash because people who like NFTs seem to misunderstand them MASSIVELY. Some NFT haters also seem to misunderstand them, however, so let me throw yet another explanation attempt into the ring. Anyone can make an NFT for anything. I can make an NFT for the Mona Lisa or whatever the hell I want. What do you get when you buy it? Absolutely nothing. I can make infinitely many too. NFTs get all of their value from where they come from, a bit like autograph cards. One from some rando on the web? Worthless. One from Eminem? Hmmm, maybe more interesting. I do think NFTs can have some value for artists and art collectors. But always remember that an NFT's value comes from its creator and what they do, say and commit to. One possible option would be that an NFT entitles you to listen to ("own") a piece of music (my favorite use case because I love buying things on Bandcamp, but would like to be able to resell stuff at some point). That's an interesting use case, but nothing close to what NFT zealots dream of.