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Well, take Second Life, VR Chat, NeosVR, Resonite, etc. They all are pretty similar concept-wise. First thing you get is a login screen. You need an account. On

Well, take Second Life, VR Chat, NeosVR, Resonite, etc. They all are pretty similar concept-wise. First thing you get is a login screen. You need an account. On some, that account costs (or used to) cost money. The world is locked inside a walled garden. If you don't like SL's rules, you don't get to touch anything SL related. You can't talk to your SL friends without logging into SL. The server code is closed source. You must use the central infrastructure. In some cases, like SL, the client is open. They sell add-ons like storage space for your stuff, and things like avatars you can directly buy. Some have an internal economy, but eg, Second Life quickly moved to being the official owners of the internal marketplace, and tax transactions. If you want to have a permanent chunk of the world in SL, you pay for that, monthly. All pretty standard. Now compare High Fidelity. You install the client, open it, and instantly you show up in-world with no login screen required. For data storage the solution is to pay any random web provider, or use the free AWS S3 tier. Any asset is just an URL pointing to https://example.com/file.gltf https://example.com/file.gltf -- served from any random server, downloaded client-side, and outside HiFi's control. Okay, so you pay for hosting your own environment? Nope. You host it on any Windows or Linux host you like, or the installer will even automatically install a server locally, easily start it from a menu, and NAT hole punch so you can host stuff on your laptop if you want to. Tax Alice selling stuff to Bob? Well, the system is so open that anyone can set up their own shop if they want to. The source code for the shop is open, so is both the server and client. Since assets are hosted externally, nothing prevents Alice paying Bob with Paypal, emailing a file, and escaping any taxation. Excluding people who break the rules? No such thing, there's no "grid". You can only be banned from individual worlds, like HN blocking you off doesn't mean anything for Ars Technica. And all of that was Apache 2.0 licensed, so anybody who wanted could absolutely set up their own commercial operation and not share any of their own improvements. If it was me running it, I'd have put the AGPL on it to discourage competitors, and either focus completely on custom setups for whoever needs one, or try to run a very light operation subsisting from Patreon.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
My take would be that they set out to "minimise friction", build a user base and monetise that later, but having never seen the "Underpants Gnomes" episode of South Park. One could forgive that because the "build it first, squeeze it later" model /has/ worked for other tech businesses. Twitter comes to mind. One could build a "premium" closed ecosystem within an open ecosystem which inducts new customers in. I don't think the design was fundamentally structurally flawed, so much as they didn't follow up on the opportunities created by the initial phase. That said, I think it's a very hard transition, even if you did plan well in advance.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > One could forgive that because the "build it first, squeeze it later" model /has/ worked for other tech businesses. Twitter comes to mind. Twitter is a walled garden though. This is more like if Twitter built Mastodon, and nearly everyone ran their own server. So you what, sell ads? But everyone browses from their own install which doesn't serve any. Part of the squeezing strategy is that you have a captive audience that can be suddenly asked to pay, or watch ads and they don't want to lose their social network, so they do. But this model had no such thing. What I heard was that their intended model was "tax the economy", but besides being trivial to work around in the architecture, every content creator I met hated the completely wide open architecture. There's no way to protect content in the system. Not only it's trivial to grab somebody else's stuff, you can't be punished for doing so.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    To answer from a personal point of view, I'm very, very old fashioned. I believe that successful long term business only comes from providing compelling value to customers, building loyalty and getting them to willingly pay you for what you offer, not what you threaten to take away. Much of the "capture then exploit" thinking of the recent tech world, walled gardens and the like, is anathema to me. Once you antagonise your own customers it's a losing game. They will circumvent and subvert everything you do, and good on them for being smarter and more agile. In other words I think that whole mentality is wrong, and indeed immoral. OTOH, that isn't to say you can't build great business in other ways, and especially within interoperable, free and open systems which also add value to the whole world as well as bring you a profitable living. So for me, "squeezing" is about using the fertile ground you create through enabling freedom to grow something that's privately profitable. When you don't have to worry about "protecting content" and enforcing behaviour you can concentrate on creating value. Such businesses are not super scalable, and won't make you a billionaire, or satisfy investors. But they can make you a good living and are potentially stable and sustainable. I know it doesn't fit the cultural values of Silicon Valley, but to me that's the gold standard of business. Also my experience is that it isn't ones own customers, or peer competitors that we need protection from. It's the Microsoft, Google and Facebooks of the world who can steal your lunch with impunity, write laws, break laws... they'll steal or destroy whatever they like, so in many ways it pays to stay under their radar.
dwaite 3y ago
I would argue VR is not a neutral example. In the physical world, space is a limited resource that sells at a premium. You have benefit from things being in a reasonable distance for walking/traveling. Being near water has real-world benefits for transportation and trade as well as agriculture. A virtual world is still based on fundamental spatial concepts like needing to travel, having benefit of proximity/association, and so on. So there needs to be a specific set of decisions made on how to deal with spatial assumptions when they go counter to your design goals: - Games have instanced areas because otherwise there would be physically too many people to move, or allow you to walk through other people to get around. - A chat service might represent _your_ rooms off a hub, rather than a megaplex conference center of all rooms. - Individual zones might be represented as distinct 'worlds' with portal entrances, to allow for each to have its own spatial rules (and even physics), where each has its own sense of layout/locality. each of these has their own sets of trade-offs, but importantly you want consistency for users. That set of trade-offs literally lead to representing the world as a walled garden. That is before you get to business interests being first and foremost around succeeding with their own products, not interoperability with nonexistent or noncooperative competitors. The market has to hit a point where vendors agree that interoperability is important enough to accept the tradeoffs that come with it, before any technical effort there can succeed.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I wish this conversation could continue because the question of "what adds value in a digital space" is the big one. And, for me, ways to add value that are ethical and empowering are a subject of great interest. Anyway, happy and prosperous 2024 to both correspondents.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    A surprising value add I find is actually a walled garden. Many 3D/VR platforms rely on it. Eg, say you want to sell avatars. Well, an avatar is a big job which can easily cost $1K or more if it's made from scratch for you. So maybe you can make a design, have it in multiple colors, and sell for $10 a copy. But for that to work you need to work in a system that prevents duplication, and which punishes rule breaking. That's pretty much impossible to implement in a fully open system, and results in a weird situation where being open source and decentralized is actually seen as a downside by some users.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

My take would be that they set out to "minimise friction", build a user base and monetise that later, but having never seen the "Underpants Gnomes" episode of South Park. One could forgive that because the "build it first, squeeze it later" model /has/ worked for other tech businesses. Twitter comes to mind. One could build a "premium" closed ecosystem within an open ecosystem which inducts new customers in. I don't think the design was fundamentally structurally flawed, so much as they didn't follow up on the opportunities created by the initial phase. That said, I think it's a very hard transition, even if you did plan well in advance.

dale_glass 3y ago
> One could forgive that because the "build it first, squeeze it later" model /has/ worked for other tech businesses. Twitter comes to mind. Twitter is a walled garden though. This is more like if Twitter built Mastodon, and nearly everyone ran their own server. So you what, sell ads? But everyone browses from their own install which doesn't serve any. Part of the squeezing strategy is that you have a captive audience that can be suddenly asked to pay, or watch ads and they don't want to lose their social network, so they do. But this model had no such thing. What I heard was that their intended model was "tax the economy", but besides being trivial to work around in the architecture, every content creator I met hated the completely wide open architecture. There's no way to protect content in the system. Not only it's trivial to grab somebody else's stuff, you can't be punished for doing so.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  To answer from a personal point of view, I'm very, very old fashioned. I believe that successful long term business only comes from providing compelling value to customers, building loyalty and getting them to willingly pay you for what you offer, not what you threaten to take away. Much of the "capture then exploit" thinking of the recent tech world, walled gardens and the like, is anathema to me. Once you antagonise your own customers it's a losing game. They will circumvent and subvert everything you do, and good on them for being smarter and more agile. In other words I think that whole mentality is wrong, and indeed immoral. OTOH, that isn't to say you can't build great business in other ways, and especially within interoperable, free and open systems which also add value to the whole world as well as bring you a profitable living. So for me, "squeezing" is about using the fertile ground you create through enabling freedom to grow something that's privately profitable. When you don't have to worry about "protecting content" and enforcing behaviour you can concentrate on creating value. Such businesses are not super scalable, and won't make you a billionaire, or satisfy investors. But they can make you a good living and are potentially stable and sustainable. I know it doesn't fit the cultural values of Silicon Valley, but to me that's the gold standard of business. Also my experience is that it isn't ones own customers, or peer competitors that we need protection from. It's the Microsoft, Google and Facebooks of the world who can steal your lunch with impunity, write laws, break laws... they'll steal or destroy whatever they like, so in many ways it pays to stay under their radar.

dwaite 3y ago

I would argue VR is not a neutral example. In the physical world, space is a limited resource that sells at a premium. You have benefit from things being in a reasonable distance for walking/traveling. Being near water has real-world benefits for transportation and trade as well as agriculture. A virtual world is still based on fundamental spatial concepts like needing to travel, having benefit of proximity/association, and so on. So there needs to be a specific set of decisions made on how to deal with spatial assumptions when they go counter to your design goals: - Games have instanced areas because otherwise there would be physically too many people to move, or allow you to walk through other people to get around. - A chat service might represent _your_ rooms off a hub, rather than a megaplex conference center of all rooms. - Individual zones might be represented as distinct 'worlds' with portal entrances, to allow for each to have its own spatial rules (and even physics), where each has its own sense of layout/locality. each of these has their own sets of trade-offs, but importantly you want consistency for users. That set of trade-offs literally lead to representing the world as a walled garden. That is before you get to business interests being first and foremost around succeeding with their own products, not interoperability with nonexistent or noncooperative competitors. The market has to hit a point where vendors agree that interoperability is important enough to accept the tradeoffs that come with it, before any technical effort there can succeed.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
I wish this conversation could continue because the question of "what adds value in a digital space" is the big one. And, for me, ways to add value that are ethical and empowering are a subject of great interest. Anyway, happy and prosperous 2024 to both correspondents.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  A surprising value add I find is actually a walled garden. Many 3D/VR platforms rely on it. Eg, say you want to sell avatars. Well, an avatar is a big job which can easily cost $1K or more if it's made from scratch for you. So maybe you can make a design, have it in multiple colors, and sell for $10 a copy. But for that to work you need to work in a system that prevents duplication, and which punishes rule breaking. That's pretty much impossible to implement in a fully open system, and results in a weird situation where being open source and decentralized is actually seen as a downside by some users.