The metaverse is not bullshit | Hacker News Reader

The metaverse is not bullshit

primoh.net

105 pointsrealprimoh62 comments

I get what they are saying but the b.s. part is how it is framed as an evolution of the internet. It is and will be yet another technology available to those who want to use it. Email is not an evolution of papermail, the internet is not an evolution of the telephone. It adds value, it does not displace the internet.

I would never want to use VR/AR. I like invisible tech not immersive tech. For example, I would prefer holographs to AR/VR if the tech was ready. I want tech that is just there and just works. When I browse an item at a store, I don't want AR to tell me info or let me interact with content about that item, I want the store itself to support displays/screens and gesture based interaction. I want less tech attached and connected to me. I don't like video calls or voice calls, just not comfortable with it even with telephones. I like text.

My point is, AR/VR and the tech describe by "metaverse" will exist but it will itself become obsoleted by better tech by the time it can entirely replace the internet.

Webgl has been around for a while and it hardly replaced regular html sites. PWAs are here and they will hardly do the same either.

Both authors are arguing a false dichotomy. It is and is not bullshit (schrodinger's bullshit?)

> It is and will be yet another technology available to those who want to use it. Email is not an evolution of papermail, the internet is not an evolution of the telephone. It adds value, it does not displace the internet.

I disagree. The only thing most people get via papermail is important government/bank communications and bills. Lots of people forgo the use of a telephone and communicate exclusively via internet chat/calls.

There is a reason to be worried. Like those older technologies, VR/”metaverse" may render more classical paradigms of computing, communication and interaction obsolete - meaning, leave them either for legacy uses only, or make them only useful within a smaller circle of friends or family where the use of such classical methods can be pre-agreed and enforced.

> Email is not an evolution of papermail

It definitely is! So many people get so many things exclusively by email that they would otherwise get by mail.

> the internet is not an evolution of the telephone

Weren't dial-up and then DSL quite literally evolution of the telephone connections? And aren't VoIP and other internet communication platforms displacing a large use case for the telephone?

I wouldn't call them an evolution of POTS so much as an overlay. Dial-up standards were a form of encoding that allowed a digital payload to be delivered over lines intended for analog signals. DSL is more or less a purified version of that.

What would constitute an evolution? Would voice calls gaining video capability count...? Mail that can include digital attachments...?

I was just quoting these sentences from the parent comment.

People use email but they also use papermail. No one writes a love letter or send a regular message over paper mail but plenty of correspondence still happens by paper mail. Email itself is becoming obsoleted now bu newer message protocols but papermail will be around. Being used less does not mean displaced. Papermail lost the popularity contest but is still alive and kicking because the infrastructure is still very useful. You wouldn't vote by email but you would via papermail. And to your point, there is a reason paper mail is used for official purposes. It is the only way to deliver a message to the person residing at a fixed physical address.

Yes, plenty of correspondence still happens, but it's usually a receive-only basis limited to, again, legacy applications.

You wouldn't vote via email, but you can definitely vote online in multiple countries. And again, that's a legacy application for interfacing with an "important" entity (the government).

> It is the only way to deliver a message to the person residing at a fixed physical address.

Fixed physical addresses are overrated, and they change (tenants, recent home buyers). If you want to ensure you can deliver a message, you need to know how to contact them in other ways too.

I think the reason the Metaverse feels like bullshit to me is because:

—a lot of its marketing, perhaps inadvertently, positions it as a replacement for the web rather than evolution or extension.

—it's pushed by a company that has operates multiple walled gardens.

—as far as I know, there's no real technical details about how the interoperability would work.

I think my and others' reactions would be much different if, for example, a browser vendor had proposed a standard way for linking to AR environments. While a tiny step, it could lead to a gradual but ultimately substantial shift in the web (similar to the way video became ubiquitous over the past decade) and is more in line with the author's vision of media evolution than the Metaverse's marketing seems to suggest it will be. (Edited to add:) I'm not saying this approach is the best way of moving forward or would be a brilliant success or anything; I just mention it to illustrate a more plausible way of developing and integrating VR.

So it's possible the author might be right in the end, but there are a lot of red flags.

The main thing that needs decoupling for me is the idea of _a_ Metaverse, which is what the author focuses on as the evolution of the internet, and Facebook's efforts to be a leading player in the space and define what the Metaverse is.

As much as I would love to believe that there is a benevolent future where Meta only owns part of the decentralized Metaverse, I'm not sure I believe that now. Facebook is a profit making organization that has worked hard to be _the_ place to go to online, and it fights hard to keep that status. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp. It's working hard to compete with TikTok. A Facebook account is required to use an Oculus Quest 2. I don't see it quietly accepting a part of the decentralized pie. I see the company working hard to both lead and define the space, because that's where it sees the growth and the money.

Maybe the Metaverse isn't bullshit, but what Facebook is trying to create probably is.

Don't forget they want their own cryptocurrency!

> The main thing that needs decoupling for me is the idea of _a_ Metaverse which is what the author focuses on as the evolution of the internet, and Facebook's efforts to be a leading player in the space and define what the Metaverse is.

Well the idea of a metaverse is politically and socially dangerous in ways that have been described in the original attack article (i can expand on that). OTOH facebooks effort to define it is an aggressive move by on of the most powerful groups on the internet. Both are dangerous in their one way. Calling BS is a way to get attention, the things don't completely lack coherence.

As an old timer, it's always a bit tough to read takes like this from folks who missed the early days of the web. Obviously nobody's age is their fault, and new perspectives will own the future. But, as we said back then, your radical ideas have occurred to others [0].

Since everyone was fresh off Snow Crash, the early web was full of protocol drafts like VRML that were aimed at bringing about an immersive version of the decentralized creator space that was already blowing our minds. Since all that content was too fragmented to make the experience immersive, people built MUDs and early MMOs like Second Life to concentrate a critical mass of content. So why didn't this come to define the web? IMO:

- Nobody cracked how to jumpstart a real creator economy. Protocols only survive if people have incentives to participate, which is why the web ended up growing around frustratingly centralized pillar services with nefarious network effects.

- In a world of freely connected experiences, "immersive" isn't all that attractive. I let individual websites define how they present themselves to me, but only begrudgingly. Who would I give permission to organize that info into a physical metaphor, and why? This is especially true in a mobile first world, where my ability to shove a web based experience into my pocket is really valuable. Virtual reality is a constraint, not a new medium.

If "this time is different" it's probably because of the first bullet above. There is a generation of digital creators that is much more prepared to create immersive content than 20 years ago. And the biggest social media clearly believe they've learned how to organize them into an economy.

But it won't succeed because it's a new idea, or because we have better VR headsets. There needs to be a better argument about why it is more compelling than the freeform web.

[0] https://everything2.com/title/Your+radical+ideas+about...oh%...

I also don’t think the technology is affordable enough. I had a couple of friends who were big into second life and always tried to get me to join in and I did but my machine was so sloooooooow and my connection was so choppy that it wasn’t fun. Now mind you I had the same experience with Napster - it took me 4 hours to download one song and I said to myself man this stuff will neeeeeever take off and I was so wrong about that it’s almost funny. But millions of people having access to high end equipment to go online and socialize just seems so far from realistic to me. But as I mentioned in another comment on this thread I was wrong about basically everything with regard to the modern internet so there’s a strong chance I’ll be wrong on that too!

To me the metaverse in general is approaching bullshit for the same reasons 3D TVs largely failed: Not everyone's going to want to use it. It doesn't create new novel things you couldn't do before, it just makes existing things much less convenient. It doesn't solve a real problem.

Why on earth would I want to have a meeting as my 3D avatar? Meetings are broken in a lot of ways but having to strap on a headset is not the solution to any of those issues.

And no matter how cool you make doing eCommerce in the meta verse, a majority of people are going to want to do it via a web browser. Why? A web browser requires a fraction of my attention, I can keep it open on the side, I can quickly switch tabs. Webpages are very information dense. Commerce in the meta verse has most of the disadvantages of shopping in a brick and mortar store with only a few of the advantages and very few unique advantages.

The metaverse creates more immersive experiences but except in games it does it for things no one wants to be more immersive. I'm betting no one has ever asked: I wish I could have a more immersive at home shopping experience. They already had a perfect high definition immersive experience in retail stores and chose the Internet instead of it.

The only legitimate problem it seems to solve is a bunch of nerds (not using as a negative, I myself am a nerd!) read Snow crash, Ready Player 1, Nueromancer... heck, even Tom Clancy's Net Force... and thought: this sounds cool.

What they miss is that in a majority of those books, the metaverse is a way for corporations to create a world in which they have all the control and human live in squaller and no longer interact with each other in the real world. For the most part they were distopias not utopias.

Edit: Seem to have a fun little up down voting war going on that is keeping me around +1 which means about half of you agree and half disagree... maybe if you disagree you can try saying why in a reply instead of downvoting? I would legitimate love to hear your reasons why I'm wrong. I'm open minded.

> Let’s take off our cynic hat and put on our optimism hat with some kiddish imagination mixed in.

> We watch movies right now on a screen, in front of us. Surround sound takes us a step closer to feeling like we’re in the movie. Some theaters have gusts of air or water droplets during certain parts of the movie to increase immersion. Now, imagine watching a movie around you, instead of in front of you. It’s the same reason the Harry Potter rides at Universal Studios are so popular. The feeling of a Quidditch ball racing at your face while you barely dodge it is just thrilling. Now imagine you’re able to experience this with your mom, who lives across the world, and you guys are able to share awesome experiences like these together. FaceTime has taken a huge step forward in connecting people and the next logical step is something like VR. (Teleportation is the end-goal, I guess)

This can be built right now, no need to invoke the metaverse as a requirement.

I do think the deep interoperability side of the whole metaverse schtick needs some more thought though. Like why doesn't it exist for the web today despite attempts like Gravatar? Or why doesn't it exist for games? Interoperability isn't just hard because we need common standards but because it doesn't fit the aesthetic and/or money making ambitions of the companies who would support it.

Then on standards it just ends up laughably naive, we will build common standards together but Meta should do it? Has anyone looked at the web standards lately!?

A non-corporately owned Metaverse won't happen for the same reason we couldn't build the Internet again today. All the power is concentrated into a few companies and they're not going to share it out of the kindness of their hearts.

The Internet / Web was an evolving ecosystem of enthusiasts and companies, with academic roots, standards, and years of evolution.

Metaverse is a gimmick, just like Web3 and Second Life, and Microsoft Bob, etc...

Grumble grumble...

I would say that the Metaverse also has an evolving ecosystem - the crypto space, VR/AR space, and other communities also have academic roots, years of progress, and budding companies. The argument you made could’ve been made for the Internet back in 1990 IMO.

No, it is not the same. There is no 'there' there when it comes to the so-called metaverse. VR is constantly in a state of iterative failure: it solves problems no one has and does so rather poorly. The only thing that is different now is that there will be a big company throwing its money into the metaverse bonfire of value, but if there is one company I want to see pissing away time and money chasing a delusion it is Facebook.

Back in the pre-dot-com era I worked at a company that provided Neal with a lot of his background info on how a metaverse might work and many of the plans and guides this company developed remain relevant and interesting. We are still a decade or more away from hitting any of them on the technical side and the open social questions that we were able to wave our hands over at the time are now much more important to the conversation. Unfortunately these discussions would raise uncomfortable questions for both Facebook and most of the proponents of this new metaverse.

I think you need to re-watch the announcement. Maybe you missed the part where they threw in NFTs for some reason (lol)

I don’t have a problem with the concept of “the metaverse”.

I have a problem with Facebook’s vision of the metaverse.

So why did the author of "No, The Metaverse is Not Bullshit" choose to present his thesis using mostly text with a few images? Would not using three.js to create a rich web 3D experience have been a more compelling argument for the future growth of rich web 3D experiences?

https://threejs.org/examples/

Does that page display anything to you? It did not on my mobile device. It might not be the best choice over images/text for a general audience.

Hmm... great point. ;-)

I haven't read this article but I have read others about the pros and cons of Metaverse.

My take?

It's going to be another method for FB (and other "carefully curated partners") to assault your eyeballs with advertising so they can make bank.

The end.

This is the future of the metaverse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eix7fLsS058

Jokes aside: at some point, we all thought the future would mean transitioning from audio calls to video calls. But for a lot of people, it transitioned from phone calls to texts. I feel like metaverse is just the next video call -- a niche that isn't really gonna be mainstream. (Although who knows, when Covid-25 hits, maybe we'll all be happy to have metaverse instead of zoom.)

Metaverse concept in itself, as a utopian/distopian/whatever concept is not bullshit, since it's a concept.

Metaverse implementation under the auspices of Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook machinery, is going to be complete and utter bull/horse/pig/.../shit and going to do much more harm to society, if it picks up, than Facebook is ever capable of.

Just because some people dismissed the internet as a fad doesn't mean that everything that is dismissed as a fad is going to be the next internet.

Agreed, but I also think a big factor is that the things that make metaverse distinct from what we already have with VR are (to the best of my knowledge) entirely hypothetical.

As I understand it, and by the definition in the article, the core of the metaverse as a decentralized system implies that I'll be able to run a metaverse server that anyone can connect to from a client. Since “nobody owns the metaverse”, I suppose this would be a client that uses some sort of open standard (like HTML) rather than any one company's proprietary client.

Is anyone actually building towards that description of the metaverse? The biggest players (like Facebook) seem to be pursuing a vision where there might be some decentralization from the network but the client is still proprietary and owned by them.

There was VRML with some amazing worlds to explore. I imagine they’d probably start with that and extend it (creating an elevator in VRML was excruciating).

Metaverse is just a word. And what it will be used to describe is a VR game owned by Facebook. And it will be bullshit.

The internet will include VR/AR elements eventually, but it will not get a new name. It will still just be called The Internet by some and by most of those who are young now they’ll continue to call it what they are calling it now which is Wifi.

Seems a bit naive to me. OP seems intent that Facebook (or “Meta”) will play nice and remain decentralized and absolutely not “own the metaverse,” and uses Google as an example. Unfortunately, that very comment painting Google as an underdog says that it has become a company which “controls the web.” And saying that Facebook has developed some open source frameworks therefore it will continue to do so is just not holistic. FB developed React closed-source and for its own benefit. They didn’t sit down and look at the state of web development and say “hey, let’s create a framework for everybody.” They say down and said “we need a way to easily build UI components and systems that scale.” It just so happened that other people’s interests and needs aligned with FB in this particular instance. To say that this means FB is somehow inherently interested in being “compatible” is fallacious.

I do agree that comparisons with any old technology, positive or negative, are inherently slippery. So while I don’t much agree with the original article, I don’t agree with this either because how can you? This is simply pointing to a past event (the commercialization of the internet) and saying “this will happen again.” Maybe, maybe not, to quote a Chinese aesop.

But on a deeper level, it seems that the foolish Luddites OP is quoting against the internet were not opposed to the very nature of the web - a decentralized information system - but rather the technical development of it. This is different from the arguments against the metaverse, which are almost entirely inherent to its nature. I think everyone would accept some lacking VR technology or uncomfortable AR glasses, if they agreed on the final destination. Unfortunately, most of the criticism of the metaverse are against its very nature. There is not a market for the metaverse. Nobody seems happy or excited by the idea. And come on, really? Saying that VR is anything like really interacting with another person? This is like those million and one social media apps that are gonna “solve loneliness.” Maybe this comment will be quoted and flashed up on the Meta Headset 8 in a decade or two and everyone will have a good laugh at me and my foolish blindness, but I don’t see a genuine market demand for the metaverse and that’s my criticism for it.

Facebook missed the boat to from Web to Mobile. It's hoping to catch the boat to next step, first it was VR (Oculus acquisition) now it's 'Metaverse'. It also missed the move to voice (Siri, Alexa, OK Google).

I wouldn't have been able to predict the proliferation of iPhone or touchscreen which started the shift to mobile back in the 2000s, but the value proposition of Mobile is clear, do everything and get enabled by apps on your phone via touchscreen interface.

I don't see the value of shifting things to somewhere else like a metaverse especially if you have to put on a headset and linking things from different 'worlds' together. I can now use my phone for email, watch TV, pay my bill and transfer money. I suppose the next step would be a holographic AI assistant following me around the world doing the same. It would have to be ubiquitous.

When I look at NFTs being able to the portable between worlds I have no idea what I'd use that for. Maybe it's unspoken but Zuck has aspirations to eventually let everyone get a brain-implant to alter conciousness to plug into the Metaverse like the Matrix and no body is talking about it because of how ludicrous it sounds today, if this is eventually made possible no doubt that Zuck wants Meta to be the company who does it (CTRL Labs).

Increasingly I agree. It's the Byte Magazine 1981 cover where someone inserts an impossibly small floppy disk into an impossibly small wristwatch computer; Metaverse = VR world is not the literal message, it's placeholder marketing for a complex message. The actual things being built to create an interoperable metaverse are mostly mundane "gonna need one of these" core technologies. The stuff actually trying to directly achieve that immediate vision will falter on the technical and social limits of what people would actually agree is a good experience. (And to know where a lot of these proposals fail, you want the advice of anyone with experience in operating virtual worlds and online communities.)

Remember, the last "VR wave" hit not all that long ago. Many people can recite the limits of that particular tech reasonably well - cost, poor accessibility, space requirements, limits on viable "camera positions". The proposal of a metaverse is not really to double down on that particular bet, but to go back and integrate everything top-to-bottom in ways that weren't being done before. It will be half bullshit, but some of will stick.

> Remember, the last "VR wave" hit not all that long ago.

What are you referring to; Pokemon Go, or...?

At the end of the day the corporate branding and hype building is stupid and disingenuous, but people still enjoy interacting with 3d content call it what you want

Way way back I wrote a small script for my blackberry that updated a page on my university account with my rough location. My wife was like that’s so creepy no one will ever want that. Then four square happened. Then everything else happened. And a short while later a guy I knew showed up with his iPhone and was showing it to me. I was like wow what a dinky little device but hey at least it’s cool looking. Then iPhones became the thing to have. And also around that time I recall people talking about Facebook and I was like well MySpace is already a think who’s ever going to use this random site. And here we are today. So I’m most certainly not going to say meta verse won’t take off. I’ve been wrong about most things (bitcoin, I’m looking at you buddy).

I personally don’t see a benefit to it. I don’t want to have to wear AR goggles to attend a three hour meeting. And I don’t want to have to physically move to buy things on an online store other than just moving my mouse or scrolling.

But there’s a lot of potential there just from the gizmo aspect of it all. And I’m sure plenty of folks will see tons of value in it. If nothing else, pornhub will make a killing.

If you are using the term “metaverse” in casual conversation, you’ve already lost. Twitch, hololive, ar/vr, these are new outlets of the same old web. The thing is always evolving. At the core, it is still about communication and information.

I wonder to what extent the author's positioning as a "technology optimist" requires them to try to frame a positive take on the metaverse. I'm not questioning whether they believe their own essay or not, I'm just wondering if there is a formulation of the metaverse which they would not have found reason to be hopeful about, even when most people seem to be at least skeptical.

On the other hand, I'm more of a technology fatalist, and I have to constantly correct my impulse to think of developments like this as by definition another turn of the screw, since that's not always the case.

It's just another interface. It's simply moving from 2D to 3D. The innovation/revolution will be federating the system and tools, but since that hasn't effectively happened for the 2D/social networks yet, it's just compounding a corporate evil (again) for the time being. The Social Network could have been created in a way that empowers and enables the individual rather than exploit them. It didn't. Until corporations start paying you to view their ads instead of paying Google or Facebook, users are just being farmed.

It’s actually an alternate model, not an interface. Models are picked up and loaded by the brain, substituting the ‘normal’ model we run when conscious. Eyes, ears and spatial orientation feed the normal model. Faking these inputs allow for building alternative models, but neither is an ‘interface’.

Not disagreeing with your main point of evil possibilities, however. Any model that diverges from ‘hardened reality’ will have accelerated means of propagation of evil.

People need to work and raise family. I don't see how I can change my babies diapers in the metaverse. Also, I doubt the food in there are consumable.

They won't/can't fix Facebook, but somehow they won't have any of the same problems if we all just put on mind-reading headsets. Riiiiight.

My main issue with all the metaverse talk (from whomever might be peddling whatever version): the kinds of thing that change the world are rarely, if ever, the result of someone with a massive vested interest in the past claiming “this is what the future will look like”.

Did everyone forget about Second Life? That had the exact same premise and it ended up exactly like most of us are predicting for Meta.

we're there already, they are proposing another window onto it, not my favourite window, but just another window

The author is confusing many things. If the metaverse is interconnected spaces, it requires federated protocols. The Internet relies on BGP and TCP/IP for that, with strong decentralized governance (via LIRs and RIRs and the IETF).

The author claims Minecraft is an interoperable protocol, which is false: you can only run Minecraft where Microsoft distributes it (unless you crack/RE it) and you can certainly not expand the protocol. Minecraft is a very good example of vendor lock-in restricting user freedom.

> FaceTime has taken a huge step forward in connecting people

How so? What did it invent? Everything we do on computers today has been there since at least 1968's "Mother of all demos". If anything, FaceTime and iMessage and such have restricted people connections. We had standard protocols for IM (IRC/XMPP) and they deliberately broke away from the federation so that they could capture and control users.

> This is not a winner-take-all, zero-sum environment. Video, text, images and other forms of media will not die as a result

They may not die, but there's concerns to be raised. About accessibility first and foremost: text may not be accessible to blind people, but screen readers and braille screens make it so. Audio/Video can use transcripts and captions to be accessible. What about VR? Does VR care for disabilities?

If VR tech becomes successful, there will be huge incentives for the usual evil corps to move everything there to appear modern and to better control our attention span. More immersion means more addiction, means more exposure to advertisement and more susceptibility to various "mind control" techniques.

> But the metaverse actually (theoretically) allows for more fairness due to the decentralized nature of it.

How is it decentralized? You make this argument over and over again yet all corporations pushing for the metaverse have never promoted a decentralized standard so far.

> YouTube and TikTok have enabled people from unprivileged backgrounds to make money from providing value

That's true for some people, but that's the exception and not the norm. Most people who make money don't make interesting content (just sponsored shit), and most people who make interesting content will be censored due to alleged copyright violation of ToS abuse. Youtube and Tiktok are two very good examples of everything that's wrong with the Internet as we know it. You may or may not agree with Youtube's political censorship, but you will certainly agree that TikTok's censorship is going really far. [0]

> My conclusion and refutation of this point is that cross-compatibility is not bullshit. (...) We still text today, but we still video call too!

The word you're looking for may be interoperability. And interoperability goes against the laws of capitalism. People use many different protocols and most are centralized proprietary protocols we have zero control over. I really recommend you check out Cory Doctorow's talks on interop and monopolies.

> So yes, progress is a good thing, first of all.

Depends how you measure progress. Is it financial? Scientific? Based on happiness? Equal access to resources? According to most metrics (except economic development) humanity has been going backwards for decades, destroying everything it touches.

> technophobia and pessimism of technology

I'm neither technophobic nor a pessimist. I'm a realist: i know humanity is capable of the best and the worst depending on the circumstances and incentives. There's a lot that's deeply broken about our society as it is, and i see the "metaverse" being pushed by the most evil actors out there. It cannot be for the betterment of humankind because the incentives are wrong to start with.

If you're looking for a metaverse project that's not a complete dystopian nightmare, it appears Spritely Goblins [1] is the only one worth considering, because it aims to be federated and standardized, and based on capabilities.

[0] https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-... [1] https://gitlab.com/spritely/goblins

> ...is THE only one worth considering, because it aims to be federated and standardized, and based on capabilities.

So you're saying THIS is our ONLY hope competing against Meta? After looking at the proposals, I really hope it isn't the only one. We need more.

Either way, the metaverse has multiple winners.

> So you're saying THIS is our ONLY hope competing against Meta?

Not really. I'm saying VR is mostly a waste of resources, and that competing against big corp is useless because the system is rigged in their favor. We need to change the system, otherwise we're all doomed (see also End:Civ).

Specifically about online VR (what people call the metaverse for some reason that eludes me), i'm saying that Spritely Goblins is the only project i've read about that is not explicitly designed to abuse/exploit people. There may be others, but i'm not aware of them. Of course that doesn't mean that Spritely protocol can't be abused (like WWW), but it's to my knowledge the only protocol that fits the author's vision of what the metaverse should be (federated and extensible).

> Specifically about online VR (what people call the metaverse for some reason that eludes me)

Because that is what Neal Stephenson called it in _Snow Crash_, which, though perhaps not the very first, was at least the first widely-popularized description of such a system. I recommend reading the book and comparing it to what we actually have. What we actually have comes up pretty short.

I'm a huge fan of Stephenson, but: William Gibson's Neuromancer (trilogy) is probably more deserving of credit for initially popularizing the idea of a virtual shared environment. Wikipedia gives credit to Vinge's 1981 "True Names", but Neuromancer alone has sold more copies than that book and all of Stephenson's novels combined, not to mention that it won the Hugo and Nebula.

Hmm... it's been a long time since I read Gibson, but wasn't his cyberworld mainly populated by hackers?

What made Stephenson's Metaverse different was that it was the kind of place where (e.g.) high schoolers would go on dates. Gibson's cyberspace was dark, dark, dark.

> Hmm... it's been a long time since I read Gibson, but wasn't his cyberworld mainly populated by hackers?

AFAICR: Hackers, the corporations they prey on, and the employees and consultants employed by the corporations.

One would think, also the clients paying the corporations for the stuff the employees/consultants produce, but I honestly can't recall; they probably featured very little in the plot, and it's been if not over then very close to thirty years since I read it.

Thanks for the comment. I wish I could upvote you more.

FaceTime definitely hasn't connected me to anyone even once. I've never owned an Apple device and never plan to do so (unless as a curiosity). FaceTime doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned. We need more interoperability, not less.

I should’ve said video calling in general.

Wow! I’m the author and this is a really good response. I really appreciate the detail you’ve gone into here.

I’m really thankful to hear your different viewpoints in a respectful manner.

Re: Minecraft. I realize that Minecraft is just an analogy and rather links is a better example of the “decentralized” nature of the metaverse. But I’ll definitely check out Cory’s talks about interop as I admittedly can learn a lot more there.

Minecraft may actually be closer to the metaverse than commonly believed:

Since the introduction of BungeeCord in 2012 (and then Waterfall and Paracord), it has become increasingly popular to link together multiple servers to act as a gateway to different virtual worlds on different servers. Most of the top popular "servers" are in actuality multiple servers joined together, somewhat decentralized, though still centrally managed.

Even before Bungee, the reign of Bukkit (2010-2014) introduced a plugin API system allowing for managing multiple worlds. To this day the "Multiverse" plugin remains among the top plugins. The multiverse, not the metaverse, but a related concept.

It wouldn't be too far of a leap to link together unrelated Minecraft servers.

Regarding "you can certainly not expand the protocol -southerntofu" - the Minecraft protocol is commonly expanded by modders. In fact, it is specifically designed to be expanded, since the introduction of Plugin Channels in Minecraft 1.1: https://wiki.vg/Plugin_channels. Forge modders frequently enhance the protocol to support new functionality far beyond what was possible in the original game.

"new media forms and new mediums of access (web, mobile, PCs, AR, etc.)" vs "you can only run Minecraft where Microsoft distributes it (unless you crack/RE it)" - granted, but there are multiple unofficial efforts to develop new ways to access Minecraft servers, including through the web. My humble attempt at building such a client: https://github.com/voxel/voxelmetaverse

Not coincidentally, I called it "Voxel Metaverse", thinking along the same lines as you were, and had high aspirations. It did not pan out, though we had some cool features including connecting to Minecraft servers, embedding web page content in a 3D space (including interactivity with voxel-webview, still working in the demo: https://voxel.github.io/voxelmetaverse/) and I wrote a retrospective about its successes and failures earlier this year: https://medium.com/@deathcap1/6-years-after-6-months-of-voxe... but it showed a lot of promise in what could be done to build a decentralized distributed malleable virtual world. Voxels are particularly attractive in my opinion due to the ease of content creation.

Other more recent efforts to build web-based Minecraft clients include https://github.com/PrismarineJS/prismarine-web-client and https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/websandboxmc.39415/, both are currently quite limited, but its only a matter of time/effort to complete the implementation and not a fundamental technology limitation. There are dozens of unofficial Minecraft-compatible clients, in various degrees of completeness: https://wiki.vg/Client_List

Vivecraft started in 2013 to allow a VR experience in Minecraft, and there is now an official Minecraft VR port though Vivecraft still has its fans. There's official mobile and console clients (Bedrock Edition), and although not officially interoperable with PC servers, there are also 3rd party solutions to bridge the two, including Dragonet DragonProxy and GeyserMC.

Will Minecraft blaze the way forward into what becomes The Metaverse? Honestly, maybe not. Mojang may not see the same potential in Minecraft as I do, but I feel the modding community is onto something developing projects on the edges of a hypothetical Minecraft Metaverse. If it isn't Minecraft itself, I am convinced a similar game will play a fundamental role in the development of what we come to know as the metaverse.

> Forge modders frequently enhance the protocol to support new functionality far beyond what was possible in the original game.

Thanks for the correction. I was not aware this became a thing (last time i played minecraft was pre-1.0).

> multiple unofficial efforts to develop new ways to access Minecraft servers

Sure, but isn't that a bit sad you have to reverse-engineer a proprietary protocol for that? Making a client for Veloren or Minetest is arguably much easier in this regard. Still, as much as i hate client-side scripting on the web, i think a web client for minecraft is pretty cool :)

> Will Minecraft blaze the way forward into what becomes The Metaverse?

I don't know and honestly i don't really care. First because i don't see any actual problem that the metaverse is solving. Second because i once trusted mojang with my bucks because they were in alpha and needed money and said they considered open source everything later on but needed money first, and they betrayed our trust, just like any other soulless corp.

Now, not only is Minecraft not free software, but it's even owned by the devil itself (Microsoft). I really can't have any form of respect for people who derive all their wealth from modders working for free.

Thanks! I was not expecting you to read it, or i may have sugarcoated it some more ;)

Have you checked out the free federated secondlife-like projects posted on the homepage in the past days? Do they fit your bill? I'll wait for the follow-up post :)

this point you make about interoperability being fundamentally opposed to capitalism is _really_ quite key. and this isn't a fruitful balancing act like many dichotomies.

the internet is interoperability. and commercial attempts to defeat it are weakening the infrastructure as well as the technical culture required to evolve it.

the community gave the world a truly marvelous thing, and not only did they use it primarily to sell trash, they took the keys too.

lol so zuckerbook does rebranding with its annual color theme change (while it's bleeding users like there's no tomorrow) and people call BS? how strange

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