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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That's famous. I knew those guys.

What amazed me is that they were able to cram a graphical client into a Commodore 64. Now that was a cram job. I could see doing the world on minicomputer servers, but the client!

Those early 2D metaverses not only predate the consumer Internet, they predate AOL. They were all superseded by things that looked more like the early web.

Round 2 of that was when 3D Second Life was overtaken by mostly-text Facebook.

Recently we had the Web 3 "metaverse" debacle. You can build it, but will they come?

These things are fun, but they're a niche, like games.

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Stewart Butterfield developed a 2d massively multi player game called "Game Neverending":

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending

It let users create and upload content like text and pictures, so it had a nice image uploader component and content management system.

That didn't work out, so they took the image uploader and cms and pivoted to making an app called "Flickr", which Yahoo bought.

Later on he redeveloped a new version of GNE in Flash called "Glitch", that was a whole lot like Habitat, in that it had these long horizontal areas you could walk left and right around, and chat with other people with avatars, and do fun stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)

That didn't work out either, so he took the rooms based chat messaging back-end, and pivoted to an app named "Slack".

My company makes us use slack - started during lockdown - as an electron app. I don't know it's history or its user culture, but for me it has been a wretched experience all around and I wish we'd have just stuck with email, or jabber or whatever. Slack has a faux corporate friendliness that makes me feel like I'm in some corporate "we're having fun and a potentially pizza" dental appointment with a therac-25 rigged to make X-rays on flayed kittens. I don't ever want my software to say "oops" and I certainly don't want my business software to offer more ways to "engage" with irrelevant content.

Glitch was really fun! My wife and I still joke about "Yellow Crumbs" every so often. I'm really pleased to see our profiles are still hosted on the website[0] in perpetuity. Was nice to see all my shared screenshots are still up on there... awesome :)

[0] http://www.glitchthegame.com/

Flickr came out of an internal photo-sharing app, I believe. For a long time many Flickr URLs ended in .gne .

Did not know that. Such a progression is not unexpected, though.

“You can build it, but will hundreds of millions of users come instantaneously in desired markets and earn billions in high margin ways with minimal support costs and in a way that is preferred by the majority shareholder?”

Success exists outside the success criteria of Google and Meta.

I've been told that they even had a garbage collector on the Commodore 64 client.

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