Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things
catvalente.substack.com
catvalente.substack.com
Virtual worlds can be fun. There are good ones that work. There are MMOs that have a virtual world on the side, such as Fortnite and Roblox, and pure social virtual worlds, such as VRchat and Second Life. The successful ones have few, if any, ads. They charge for land or usage or virtual objects, with a free tier. They're fun, profitable, and somewhat niche.
Then came Facebook, and the NFT crowd, and people talking loudly about "brands" and "engagement" and trillions of dollars in revenue.
But all that flopped. Just as in-game ads in games flopped, so did in-game ads in the Metaverse. Facebook has supposedly lost $26 billion. Metaverse EFTs have tanked. NFT land collapsed. That's a good thing.
We've been lucky. The ad people failed at the Metaverse.
It’s honestly shocking to me that 2-3 minutes of ads per 12 minutes of content has been the standard on TV for so long. It’s absolutely absurd, especially if you pay for access to the channel already via cable.
Becoming mainstream is usually a death sentence for any platform.
Anyone from the old school Internet knows that Twitter, Youtube, Reddit etc are just processed food. It's all heavily curated by some model that has been trained on keeping you there and adhering to a strict agenda.
You know what the real Internet is like, these platforms are not it.
They’re also aware, at least partially, that these products are not free to run. They’re run by people that moderate, write software and often buy and operate physical hardware. These people want to make money, sometimes a lot of money. Many times, the products would not exist at all without outside investment. The investment terms come with assumptions about growth and profitability.
Absent this money, the same products the author loves would not exist.
If the author wants little communities that make little things with only a little bit of profit, there is no better time than now to publish a self hosted web site or forum. It is easier now than ever.
Except they’re publishing their writing on Substack, yet another VC backed publishing product (that I like FWIW). Substack will go the exact same direction as twitter, if they’re fortunate enough to not die in 5 years.
Running software businesses is hard. Communities can and should self organize if they want to own their spaces online. Be the change you want to see, if you really do want it.
I find this funny, because leftist mini communities are so easy to find on Mastodon, you wouldn't be even need 5 minutes to find them!, in this regard it would be pretty much better than Twitter for the author.
If the government was captured and properly enforced antitrust measures, there would be many alternatives to prevent the corporate fascism we’re seeing everywhere today.
In the end, the fundamental division is the vote. There is one winner, and everybody else loses. I don't know any voting system that gets around that core issue.
If you want things done your way, you need to get 51% of the people to agree with you. That means making allies and trading votes. You can push around exactly what mechanism you use to make the allies and enforce your commitments to each other, but in the end there's a vote. Somebody wins; everyone else loses.
That is, I believe, the real source of the division. Some people want something (same-sex marriages, access to handguns, abortions) and other people very much want them not to have it. It would be great if we could compromise on that, but votes are the opposite of compromise, no matter how you arrange it. Votes are fundamentally divisive.
They have done nothing to address the 1 person might equal 100,000 bot accounts as they did in the FCC debacle that repealed net neutrality, nor punish those who blatantly did that.
Its despicable and evil beyond measure, that was one time where inaction constituted violating oaths they swore, but that's the world we live in because the actions taken to prevent it weren't taken at a time it would have mattered because they were all friends as Chappelle says. Its a good deal.
I've been reading Thomas Paine's writings recently on Common Sense, its suprising how the common issues today almost mirror many of the problem issues of his time.
Forums will have to become basically whitelist only to withstand the bots and require some sort of verified identity along with probably a dollar cost barrier maybe just one or the other. Kind of how the somethingawful.com forums used to have a one time $10 fee to make people consider if what they were posting was going to cost them $10 before hitting the submit button. (it cost $10 to reinstate your account if you were banned)
* pretty annoying
* seemingly inevitable
I think it is just that the basic functionality of “online community” is too easy to implement. It is like, at some point a platform will become popular enough that the cost can’t be ignored, and the quest to monetize will begin. But of course that just means the next free competition can get in line.
I’m curious how this will all shake out with Mastodon, since it seems like it ought to be immune to the whole “too popular, can’t write off hosting costs anymore” problem. Of course that could happen to a node, but that doesn’t take down the whole network…
The lack of self awareness is astounding.
I agree with some of it, but the more your read into it the more ridiculous it becomes.
Its a shame because I liked her writing style more than I expected.
Non or less commercial versions - diaryland, mastodon - will live on in relative obscurity since they prioritize users over growth, but maybe it's harder to find customers or patrons on those platforms.
And this seems to happen every time because people seem to be drawn to shiny things and 'ease of use' over longevity. They sign up for yet another platform or social network, only to see the same thing happen when it gets popular enough. Sometimes you dodge this via someone who doesn't care about the money and runs it for the sake of the community, but often it gets sold the minute the founders see dollar signs and want an out.
Federated and decentralised services mean there is no 'next' oasis needed, since no one can buy the network and everything on it.
Ah, a “consumer”