That said, they most likely aren't going away. It's just that we're probably done with the cycle of profile picture projects selling exclusivity and "utility roadmaps", then saying "thanks" and walking away when they instantly sell out.
I wouldn't expect them to be completely gone, but come back with a slightly clever disguise [read: mustache and a hat]
For example, gaming companies landed on both sides of it. One surely still has watery mouths, the other side has ruled it out [but may bend if the money looks good enough]
The more token (heh) efforts of pushing these has passed -- it didn't land well, but I fully expect it to continue when the 'real' economy is more certain or a marketable approach is found.
Most give the purchaser a physical bauble to go along with their status symbol, but at heart, the excess of trillions being slung around daily for the purpose of symbolic elitism is certainly nothing new created by NFTs.
They merely embody the concept in a new, ever-so-slightly more useless (than much of the world's spending) manner. But let's not pretend they're some grand new evil the likes of which we've never seen. Oh no. They are certainly not that.
And that is my answer. What happened to them? Nothing. Merely the inevitable, slow collective realisation that the status symbolism embodied by NFTs is actually a pedestrian, everyday concept, and thus perhaps not so special or innovative after all...
Articles about NFTs on HN are simply a waste of time: comments tend to not stay on topic and derail on whether NFTs make sense, blockchain makes sense, PoW makes sense, etc.
To give you a comparison, a few years ago we launched a Kickstarter for an open source security key, almost exclusively via HN.
I'm now working on a NFT project and never posted it here. The dynamic of the project is exactly the same: raising money from a crowd. Both projects imo have a pretty interesting tech component (FIDO2 back before it was cool, and cross-chain NFTs before it's cool), and both are fully open source.
Yet... it's simply not worth the time discuss a topic when the majority of the community doesn't appreciate it. Better to focus on Twitter and Discord.
Hope this helps.
When the cryptocurrency mania and hype is gone, things start slowly winding down and the media go in search for the next villain to get the hundreds of millions to click on their ads in fear and outrage.
Rinse and repeat.
> Is this just normal hype cycle cooling, or were they really the scam everyone was decrying and have already passed?
Both.
This promise always ends with a rug pull. [0] [1] All the time.