Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

The meta-lesson for anyone reading this, is that changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible. Bartle knew he was on a fools errand, and went into it with low expectations.

It's interesting to see exemplifiers of the kind of 'this contradicts my interior logic so I shall ignore it' behaviour from the participants. They look very plausible.

I think AGW denialism and pre-AGW fury, the people trying to deal with religious objections to evolution had this in spades: no amount of good logic and reasoning can overcome somebody who is determined to recast what "time" means to make the fossil record align with God's work over 6 days. (nobody ever asks what contract gave him a day off on the 7th)

The "we don't want to pay tax" movement, loves in-game NFT type value transfer precisely because they believe there cannot, will not be any intrusion of tax levying bodies into the space. Contrariwise, the people I know in the forensic accounting space say they really like the naievity of people who forget "the cloud" is shorthand for "somebody else's computer" which naturally, is subject to MLAP requirements these days.

Sharing your goods in runescape is not invisible transfer of wealth, and speaking to each other in runescape is not secret communication. 12 year olds know this. Maybe grown-ups need to remind themselves of it from time to time?

Maybe people need a reminder REAMDE is fiction? Plot devices don't always translate into real-world well.

I am also reminded of Varoufakis' work on in-game economics and inflation.

There is a variant on the halo effect which explains a lot of this.

We have a tendency to choose sides. Once we do, we easily remember the good things about our side, and have a hard time believing the bad things. This is exactly reversed for the other side. It takes active work to remain balanced.

So if you're on the side of technology, it is easy to talk about all the ways it improves our lives. And easy to discount the environmental impacts. Conversely if you're opposed to technology, you can easily quantify the harms. But will have an unduly rosy image of the benefits of natural things.

Likewise it is hard for those who have lined up with web3, crypto, and so on to even hear well-informed and reasoned skepticism.

> is that changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible.

If all you take are short-term measurements, then this would seem to be true. In my experience, the longer-term results are more achievable then popular thinking might suggest.

Death-bed conversions argue to your side of the deal, for sure. Richard Francis Burton was a disbeliever right up until he died in trieste, when his wife miraculously declared he'd changed his mind. hence, buried in hallowed ground.

Less facetiously, I do think de-radicalisation works, and so a long term commitment to listening, being accepting of difference but encouraging wider thinking might work to bring committed anti-vaxx and AGW denialists back into the fold, but it demands a patience I probably lack. A geologist friend said its a life burden to commit to trying to change people's minds in his field (paleo) few can endure. He'd rather talk to people he doesn't have to argue with.

I don't know Web 3.0/NFT proponents have the time free to engage in a long-term de-programming exercise. They'd be very busy actualising their net worth, one tik-tok at a time.

I dunno, the model is compelling from a business perspective because you don’t have to pay to make content up front. Instead, charge royalties on user-generated content revenue. Roblox already does this well. I wouldn’t dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

> the model is compelling from a business perspective

So is alchemy

Are you talking about the web3 platform, alchemy? https://www.alchemy.com/

It works for Roblox because the game is the content. Likewise for Mario Maker, or WC3 custom maps. It works because players evaluate the content based on how fun it is.

But if I'm building something like Diablo I'll have a carefully crafted progression system for my game. If the "content" is in-game items then the best items will be the most powerful - that is, the ones which let players skip to the end of the game. And if my game's progression system can be completely ignored because someone owns a space laser they bought in another game for money, it ruins the game for everyone.

- The art becomes a non-cohesive mess.

- The players who don't have a space laser feel like their in-game progression has suddenly become meaningless. Clearly the real progression is being able to afford items with real money out of the game - and they don't play diablo to feel poor.

- And the player who has the cool space laser has all the struggle and progress taken away from them. A sense of fulfillment is created by struggling at something then eventually succeeding. You can't feel fulfilled if you don't first struggle. (Thats what the middle of a game is for.) If you skip that by spending real money, its not fun. Even pay-to-win games have loot box mechanics and a money based progression system for the people who pay.

You can make the art be cosmetic only, but that has its own set of problems. Fashion is valuable in part because of scarcity. Fortnite, Team Fortress and Dota2 create that scarcity by controlling what assets are included in the game. Scarcity is ruined if anyone can mint another NFT of the same jpeg with a single pixel changed. And you have the obvious problems of people drawing "adult content", and so on. It works for VRChat, but most of VRChat's content is off limits to most players (on devices like the Quest) because of how non-child friendly it can be. An in-house art team could easily be cheaper than the moderation team you'd need.

Virtual worlds with cryptocurrency derived items seems to be a lot of smoke and not a lot of fire. Given how many people are excited by the idea, and how much money there is to be made if someone gets it right, I find it telling that there still aren't any compelling games built on these concepts.

what does the acronym AGW stand for? Can't figure out if you mean global warming or the story of Genesis.

I figured it means Anti Global Warming

Anthropogenic Global Warming. Refers to the increased warming of the Earth's atmosphere due to human activity.

I'm not a denier of AGW.

However, I think you're wrong to lump all those people in with anti-Darwinists.

AGW comes freighted with Green baggage, and some of the people who reject it are largely rejecting the Green baggage. They suspect, not without good reason, that the "cures" for AGW are measures that Greens wanted anyway. And calling them "denialists" just insures that they'll never listen to you.

Some of them are, of course, religious objectors who think the world was created in 6 days. The task is to separate those people from the rest.

Some of the solutions are things the greens have largely rejected, like nuclear energy.

The largest rejectors of nuclear energy are the environmentalists, some of which are very anti-climate change.

I just want to point out that there are many shades of "Green" (though today, unlike in the 70s(?), perhaps none of them are critical of the AGW concept) :

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-09/what-shade-of-...

Yes. I would agree my pejorative language doesn't help. But if I can draw an analogy, this is also a function of polarised debate in the wider sense: it's impossible for anyone now to express views positive of Palestinian self-determination because the 'overton window' of tolerance for the idea, is consumed by the meme of 'you must be a self hating jew' for anyone who is jewish, and 'you must hate jews' for anyone else.

So, 'because you are green I oppose all the things you believe in because I hate the green/left agenda' is a form of denialism of the legitemacy of the underlying concern. Finding the bridge to "I agree it exists, I just disagree about solutions, like I want nuclear and you don't but we agree the problem exists' is now almost unsayable for some people.

An observation I've made to others is that old school feminism is really tainted now for a younger cohort. They reject all the achievements of their aunts, mothers, grandmothers, because of a disagreement over the non-binary status in gender/sex. The language used here is (to me at least) comparable to the language used in the 'hate the greens' thing.

Yeah. The objective in politics, though, is to divide the other side, not unite them. But of course, if their own side won't let them even try, most people won't bother.

> changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible

This applies to all the web2 naysayers as well

Happy to hear a rebuttal to the points in this article ...

Web2 had obvious applications that were working. Web3 has been talked about forever, and it's mostly just hype and scams.

To the point where if someone even says 'Web3' I assume it's rubbish, even though I accept there are some neat ideas there. NFTs - laughably ridiculous.

The funny money times are over, it didn't work, time for a new game, let's make it more practical.

No one was talking about Web 2.0 until it was already a popular thing. You can tell web3 is VC bullshit because no useful or popular product exists but billions of dollars were thrown at it.

Here, web4 is just everyone sending me 10 dollars. You wouldn’t want to be a Luddite now would you? Get on the bandwagon everyone

From what I can tell, Web 2.0 came to pass, whereas Web 3.0 has not, which rather changes the discussion around each of them.

Or am I wrong about what Web 3.0 is?

Well after "Web 2.0", there was a lot of talk about "Web 3.0", some fifteen years ago [1]. And then now the crypto people have created a term "Web3", ostensibly completely unaware of the use of the term "Web 3.0" from the past which meant something completely different. I assume these people were too young 15 years ago to remember.

But "Web3" means stuff with blockchain and similar.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Wait until you learn about an even older term, 5th gen computing. With all the hullabaloo about ML, I've been waiting for that one to make a comeback...

I'm still waiting for someone to give us the next generation beyond VLSI.

SDSI, for Super-Duper Scale Integration, maybe.

Anyway: Fourth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Lisp", Fifth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Prolog", so Sixth-Generation languages will be "Steal ideas from everyone the ML model was trained on". Github/Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this sort of thing, as usual.

The website you are currently using is a product of web 2.0 (Though maybe not "web2", the ahistorical term invented by crypto hucksters)

good point, it used to be called 2.0 (the "point o") was very important. Businesses were adding 2.0 to non-computer things to try to make them seem new and high tech

No, bog-standard forums were commonplace long before anyone heard of "web 2.0". And web 2.0 was just about the ability to use AJAX to create dynamic webpages, and HN is basically as static as it gets. I don't know where the perception that "web 2.0" means "social networking" is coming from, but it's ahistorical.

> HN is basically as static as it gets.

Functionally every single page request on HN is dynamically generated - I feel like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what "static" means in this context. A static site is where the web server is serving html files as they appear on disk - as opposed to a dynamic site, where LAMP-like stack dynamically generates html responses based on query and session.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page

Is it? This site feels very web 1.0.

This could be just me but in my mind web 2.0 is solving the problem of form submission/link clicking redirecting users away from the current page.

Thus web 1.0 are static sites where the only way to get new content is to manually refresh.

Web 2.0 was the application of AJAX and/or database back-ends to the already functional web. This had already started to happen by the time the "Web 2.0" moniker came to be. "You mean we can blog, or click-and-drag Google Maps? OK, great." Any naysaying was about the term "Web 2.0" - was this really a "second release" of the web? - and not about the technologies already in play.

Web3, on the other hand, appears to be a whole lot of horseshit that is going away now that it's no longer essentially free to borrow money.

Web 2.0 was the application of AJAX and/or database back-ends to the already functional web.

Ajax and database were commonplace before. The 2.0 moniker was about "social" (user generated content.)

Almost, "social" was generally after 2.0. An example of 2.0 was wikipedia. "social" was connecting with other people and content came after they needed to do something more than just poking them

Wikipedia itself defines 2.0 as social. What you call social is the commercialization of social (algorithmic social?), that might be how it's understood today, but then the main idea was user generated content, at least that's how they sold it. But yes, they also used "dynamic vs. static" that, like I wrote in the previous comment, was already in use... it's like they were conflating everything new and good vs. the old and bad. Actually it was very confusing, round corners... almost is right, no wonder they've chosen 3.0 to sell this new gold rush.

Edit: I'm afraid I'm taking for granted that people remembers this, but it's possible that a good portion of you weren't even born. Web 2.0 was something like "you should adopt the Web 2.0 ways in your web presence" being sold to all kind of companies. You have an online shop? You should include a support forum where users can share their experience with your products. In other words: a "web page" is not enough, you need the whole pack. Sometimes it made sense, sometimes it didn't. As with many of this trends, it used to sound a little cult-ish at times.

You're both wrong, Web 2.0 was about rounded corners. I know I was there!

Honestly that's more accurate and makes more sense than the explanations I remember from the era.

To be fair we did have rounded corners, but they were a bitch to make.

Possibly part of the reason that tables got well overused.

red-corner-tr.gif

web2 got it's name well after it was already common to have user content driven sites and/or ajax interactions.

web3 got it's name before... well it's not here yet so I can't tell what it is

We complained about web2.0 because it was a stupid buzzword that people used to describe something that was already happening and didn't need marketing because it was obviously hot tech that solved a problem: websites had been static, we made them dynamic, marketing took credit for web2.0, which was annoying. We weren't "naysayers," we were simply exhausted by the froth of buzzwords. Nobody ever thought it wouldn't have broad application.

Web3? It skipped straight to marketing, the tech is tedious, kludgy, and seems to make more problems than it solves. The space is saturated with cons and rubes. Outsiders are skeptical because it's apparently garbage, and gets worse any time I look closer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com