A Manifesto for the Metaverse | Hacker News Reader

A Manifesto for the Metaverse

tiltingatwindmills.dev

30 pointsimgabe13 comments

A disappointing article that’s not a manifesto in any sense. The author doesn’t seem interested in exploring prior art at all, and there’s plenty starting from VRML which was briefly the hype around 1996.

Crypto claims are repeated without criticism. For example:

“With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have access to.”

How do you know address 0x381638eef881 is the Jane Doe who went to your high school? It’s not intrinsically a better identifier than janedoe31@gmail.com.

You can’t expect people to have a single wallet address all their lives — keys get lost, etc. And if you need a third party to provide an identity layer, well, that’s just another Facebook. (Which of course the VCs hope that they’ll be the ones to fund.)

Yes, it takes a remarkable amount of mental gymnastics to reconcile decentralized transparent information and the Facebook corporation.

I’m saying the existence of crypto wallets does nothing to prevent another Facebook (or indeed the same one), just like the existence of PGP did nothing to prevent Facebook.

The metaverse identity problem is the same as the web identity problem, and it is in no way solved by yet another identifier just because you can attach a pointer to a monkey JPEG to it.

You inspired me to go have a look at VRML. With all respect to the work that has been done, its so incomprehensible to anybody outside the field. And it seems the modern version of it (X3D) is more focused on specifying individual scenes and behaviours, where what we need for the metaverse is the magic sauce that lets people build separate worlds independently and join them together through links. What does a link look like in such a world? is it a door I walk through? a button I press?

We need something radically clearer and simpler to make it successful. I wish I could believe Zuckerberg really wants to build it but it is so hard to see him have the kind of altruism necessary to build any kind of open platform.

Feels like it misses the point. The "openness" of the web meant that anyone that could use a text editor could have a website and everybody could access it (and most of it worked perfectly if users accessed it asynchronously). The barriers to having your own coherent shared 3D experience a lot higher (and the entities that do it well aren't particularly interested in opening it up to everybody else)

And of course the blockchain still feels like a solution in search of a problem. A blockchain isn't a solution to the problem of "anyone can design their avatar to look like anything they want" because the blockchain isn't a design restriction, and if you've got entities deciding that only the owner of a particular token can have a particular style of costume, that looks quite a lot like centralisation.

This reminds me of https://janusvr.com/ , a way of creating 3D spaces using a markup language and collaboratively browsing an immersive internet

> With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which nobody else would have access to.

This can be done with boring old encryption keys and signatures, not stupid blockchain needed. Even then it doesn't solve the avatar problem. If I make an avatar that looks just like someone else (or their avatar) it doesn't matter if people can verify someone's identity. I can effectively impersonate anyone I want if I can freely adjust an avatar. Unless you can manage to create a truly effective "avatar hash" there's no way to keep me from using someone else's model.

You barely need crypto. Ticket authentication would be enough.

> there's no way to keep me from using someone else's model

Indeed it seems to me desirable that I could use someone else's model. The obvious solution to spoofing identity is "press a button to view metadata of what I'm looking at"; the apparent visual world is hardly the only layer of reality we need to experience in VR.

Avatar hashing is basically impossible. The uniqueness of avatars isn’t the same as distinctiveness. Your avatar with a single hair removed looks exactly the same but has a different hash.

The first lines of the article actually tell most of the story:

> What is the Metaverse? Wired tried to figure it out recently and the results were inconclusive. Where is the metaverse? How do we log in to it? Nobody knows!

I read the article and only came away with 'we don't know anything, we use buzzwords to imagine solutions for problems that could be solved without buzzword tech, and call for let's build it'.

To me metaverse sounds like a bubble of hot marketing and PR air.

Metaverse is a collective delusion of Facebook execs who got high on their own supply. Metaverse is meant to be an aquarium where users are fish trapped within the glass walls, and advertisers are customers, watching the fish in its natural habitat and placing bids to show ads to the most colorful species.

The manifesto for the metaverse may be found by consulting my HN profile.

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