Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

It was exciting when I was a teenager but now I am a fifty year old lady who is just trying to use it to get paid for drawing stuff and I am really tired of fighting the social media corporations' constant decisions to de-emphasize posts with offsite links to places where I can get people to pay for my work. The thought of pivoting to making vertical videos because all the kids are on TikTok now feels incredibly exhausting, especially because I know it'll probably be replaced by yet another corporate-owned social site with its own bullshit in a year or two.

NFTs just seem to add an extra layer of bullshit where every transaction happens via a bunch of people wasting an absurd amount of energy to perform useless computation in hopes of being the one who wins the lottery for some cryptocurrency. Don't tell me your favorite crypto's moving off of PoW, it's wasting incredible amounts of energy right now and moving off of that relies on getting a consensus from people who are financially incentivized to stay on PoW.

(The most damning sentiment about NFTs I've seen is that there are two groups who are historically at the forefront of new ways to get paid on the internet: porn makers and furries. And neither of them is into NFTs.)

> I am really tired of fighting the social media corporations' constant decisions to de-emphasize posts with offsite links to places where I can get people to pay for my work.

I only just recently learned of this. Younger people are equally unexcited by that bullshit. I saw an artist, who's in her early 20s, always posting the link to her Twitch streams as reply to the Tweet where she'd announce that she's streaming. I asked her about it and she told me that links to other sites never make it into peoples' timelines. She and her boyfriend also write words like Patreon and commission in leetspeak to avoid any issues with those.

And you're absolutely right about NFTs. There is only hate for them among the furry artists that I follow (and there's a lot of them given that's all I'm on Twitter for). They hate the environmental impact. They hate the theft of artwork. They hate the scams. And they just think NFTs are overall pointless.

I'm so tired of seeing my friends tweet about their "p*treon" without even appending a link, it's such a horrible little hellworld detail. I don't bother with that but I sure have ended up with the habit of tweeting the art, then tweeting links to buy prints, support me on Patreon, and read more about how I did the piece on my blog, as a reply, in hopes that this will suppress the post less. I should probably try actually looking at Twitter's analytics to see this for sure but I find staring at that shit and trying to modify my behavior towards what Twitter likes to amplify to be pretty depressing and stressful.

You will probably be unsurprised to find that I am a furry artist. :)

I have to disagree with you about Web3 (Cryptocurrencies, NFT's, Blockchains, that whole space), I think this is the next frontier of the internet and it's an incredibly exciting time. NFT's and Crypocurrencies are just one of the earliest implementations of this new technology.

The first implementation of NFT's is for artwork but that's just one implementation. When you step back and look at the actual technology, it's introduced a paradigm shift for how we think of objects on the internet. Before NFT's, everything on the internet was fungible, if it existed on the internet, you could copy it. Sure there are things like DRM, but that is just an abstraction on top of a fungible thing that tries to make that thing non-fungible.

I don't know where the technology will take us, or what it will look like in 20, 30 or 40 years, but when you think about the idea that everything up until now on the internet has been copyable and we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership, that will change how we look at just about everything on the internet, from DRM to authentication and many other aspects. I think when I'm your age (mid 20's now), NFT's will be everywhere and "NFT Artwork" will be looked back on as the very first implementation of the technology, and likely with many jokes about how bad it all was.

I don’t think the vast majority of people care at all about “owning” a digital image or “verifying” it’s integrity.

Furries pay lots of money to have custom work done of their character. They don’t pay to “own” some random pre-existing art.

And basically everything that NFTs do, a database can do better.

Looks like OP's post is out of the homepage, so I can reply without downvote avalanche incoming.

I agree with your sentiment. It is probably the most exciting aspect of the internet, and digital ownership concept has a long and exciting road ahead.

I am also utterly baffled by how this sentiment is met on HN. Thoughtful responses are downvoted, cheap shots against this sentiment rise up. I no longer want to participate in discussions about anything crypto on HN, negativity is too strong.

And there is absolute irony that this is happening on a thread called "Jaded about the internet?".

I agree with both of you guys. It's clear to me that this sort of decentralization will prove to be revolutionary. People who immediately equate NFTs with JPEGs are idiots and don't get it. They won't get it until they're using them to buy and sell tickets to events, which is probably the next major use case.

>They won't get it until they're using them to buy and sell tickets to events

I'm not really pro or anti-NFT. But, I will say that people frequently champion them by stating potential future use cases. I think it's unfair to do that as a basis for claiming current detractors have it wrong.

Right now most enthusiasts are heavily promoting the primary use case as essentially digitized files (be it JPEG or whatever--but mainly art).

So, that's the current argument, as opposed to some future wherein they supplant x or do y.

I'm not saying that enthusiasts can't be idiots, too. But the naysayers arguing against strawmen enthusiasts is getting pretty annoying, and it's pretty clear most of those people don't even know the technical definition of an NFT. The parallels, here, with criticism of the early internet is so obvious.

>naysayers arguing against strawmen enthusiasts

I hear you, but not sure who the "strawmen enthusiasts" are. The plain case that's being made for the accessible value of NFTs right now revolves around ownership of digital assets, full-stop.

But, when detractors point out their critiques of this use case, some enthusiasts pivot to "well, that's not all an NFT can do or will ever be". It's kind of slippery, and seems to be the straw-manning here.

>it's pretty clear most of those people don't even know the technical definition of an NFT

It's fair enough to say that NFTs are in their infancy. But, enthusiasts are selling the current use case really, really hard. So, maybe they are undermining your arguments for the future use cases of NFTs more than anyone.

And, really, technical definitions of NFTs (or anything) don't matter WRT adoption. What matters is what's been actually implemented of real value. You can't really fault people for not buying into NFTs based on the present-state. But, if other valuable use cases come to fruition, they'll come running. Thing is, their behavior could be considered rational now and then.

Another thing that baffles me is the need to mention energy usage along with anything related to crypto. The complaint about energy usage is a normative claim that these technologies don’t deserve to use the energy they do, which is fine, but then it’s never backed up by an actual argument for why they don’t.

Additionally, this is a standard I don’t see applied to anything else that could be reasonably argued to be on the same level of “dumb” as anti-crypto people claim crypto is. Let’s see the same scrutiny of energy usage applied to every TikTok ever made. Let’s see it applied to the training of massive ML recommender systems that serve no purpose but to better target ads (this is one I have seen from some folks, but nowhere near as much as I’ve seen outrage over crypto energy usage). If someone says “well yeah, but at least those recommender systems have value, which crypto doesn’t!”, sorry, but value for whom? Certainly not users.

I’m disappointed that even on HN, there’s pushback against individual creators of digital content trying to capture some of the value they create. Individuals simply don’t have the resources to use the legal system to go after anonymous people online who steal their work, and they shouldn’t be expected to just give it away for free. So other solutions need to be tried, and NFTs are maybe one potential solution.

> I no longer want to participate in discussions about anything crypto on HN, negativity is too strong.

And this is how the negativity stays so strong on HN. I get it, I usually just say my opinion on crypto, accept it'll most likely be downvoted, and try not to engage in a back and forth too much, but it's tempting just to let things on here be and have those discussions elsewhere because it's relentless.

Which just makes me wonder what other tech trends people on HN are being intentionally obtuse about.

I don't even mind legit criticism (environmental concerns are worrying for example), it's people saying provably false crap like "it's only used for money laundering and crime" or "it's just the new beanie babies" one line dismissal of a $2 trillion dollar industry (and has a larger market cap than physical silver) that's annoying.

People have grown tired of crypto posts because we have been exposed to over a decade of marketing hype and still no concrete product or useful service has come out for the average person. Almost all of these crypto products die out after the hype, fail to deliver on their promises, or were outright scams.

I was personally interested in a bunch of them 5-7 years ago and feel burned when none of them have lived up to their promise and seem technologically impossible to fix.

The main winners of crypto hype have always been the ones selling something while the users get burned. I don't want to see any more crypto news until the focus shifts from making a quick profit to delivering useful services. All crypto news is focused on how you can get in now and profit later. NFTs are the latest part of this. I'd rather read an article on how the new postgres server lets you scale to more users or how UI research has helped accessibility.

> when you think about the idea that everything up until now on the internet has been copyable and we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership, that will change how we look at just about everything on the internet

That everything has been copyable is the accident that keeps giving. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Digital scarcity, albeit through a novel mechanism, seems antithetical. Very confusing.

>That everything has been copyable is the accident that keeps giving. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

This must be the hacker culture version of hippies watching their children grow up to be Young Republicans and yuppies.

> Sure there are things like DRM, but that is just an abstraction on top of a fungible thing that tries to make that thing non-fungible.

I'm not being deliberately obtuse, here, but how is that any different from NFTs?

It's weird because I understand the tech, but not what makes this application compelling.

> we are just starting to figure out how to actually give a digital thing ownership

Isn't copyright already doing that? Certainly the movie and music industries have a strong sense of digital ownership without NFTs.

NFTs so provide an easy path to transfer ownership, but that does nothing to keep the material from being copied any more than copyright does.

What am I missing?

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