Silicon Valley doesn't understand the concept of fun | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley doesn't understand the concept of fun

fastcompany.com

297 pointsmariuz213 comments

Silicon valley has a history of producing things that initially don't have a lot of restrictions that get a lot of traction that then turn all corporate and sterile as soon as big money gets involved.

Lack of fun is one reason. User generated content is risky. It needs moderation. Somebody might express themselves in ways that are inappropriate for the widest possible meaning of that word. And that might lead to legal consequences. Which adds cost. Fun and edgy things are typically bordering on inappropriate; or flat out inappropriate if you have no sense of humor. The difference is not relevant. If somebody might get offended, it's risky. Which makes the lawyers nervous.

Another reason is the obsession with building walled gardens and claiming full ownership of everything inside those walls. It leads to locked down experiences where creativity is basically not welcome unless sanctioned from the top down. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. used to have APIs and an ecosystem of people building stuff on top of that. As they grew, all of that went away.

Facebook is a good example as something that started out to enable some wildly inappropriate and immature behavior. Mark Zuckerberg actually started out building a platform for rating girls called facemash. Controversial, even at the time and it got him in trouble. Facebook is what he did next.

The first point isn’t an argument for fun but for individualism, almost to an extremist extent. If you want to publish your thoughts for others to see you’re going to have to accept the fact that some people are just going to take it differently because it human experiences are diverse, and you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say. It’s people’s problem that they see conflict with others as an inherent negative when the disagreement with others is what itself brews creativity, because it challenges your point of view.

People criticize the media for being “biased” but then crave echo chambers of their own.

The medium is the message. We are no longer in the literary age. The power is in the hands of the mob. You can make some carefully thought out post and try to be accountable for what you say. I can show up in your comment forum, shit all over everything and leave.

In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum.

You're talking about old ideas from a more civilized age. Tribalism is back and in charge. The internet isn't here so that we can all get along and better understand one another's point of view. It's here so that we can take turns bashing one another.

> In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum.

Ha, if only. If you take a look at the actual history, people often were outraged about books and would destroy or burn them - and that's in the happy case when they weren't explicitly censored by the government. Even as we speak there are people banning books from school libraries and pressure businesses not to carry them.

There are many historical cases of actual mobs forming to protest the presence of a book in a library, or even about a ship known to bring some particularly hated book from overseas!

Not to mention, try to run a book shop even today in a more conservative corner of the USA without carrying the Bible at all, see how long it takes until people start complaining to you.

I wonder if the "banned books" line is earnestly trying to fool anybody. Is it just for internal self-deception? Shibboleth? Mood affiliation?

Maybe it can be said it succeeded in changing the topic from "What's in those books, exactly, and who puts them within kids reach, exactly, and why, exactly?" to arguing about their being or not banned. Was that the play?

That wasn't ever the topic to begin with, but good job proving the point that books aren't immune from righteous vitriol, now or then.

One other thing common between now and then is the pulpit beating about public decency and protecting the children.

Children will discover truths whether you try in vain to shield them or not. It's the duty of parents and communities to guide and teach children throughout that growth process, not to be lazy and bully other parents and communities into sharing and enforcing all their same values in depth.

And don't forget resolving differences with duels! Typing on the Internet pales in comparison.

There have always been books that are inappropriate for school libraries because they are patronized by children, not the general population. Many adults, often those who are not in the process of raising children, seem to forget that. Instead of allowing children to have room to master foundational knowledge it seems people with a particular agenda are more concerned with distracting children and pushing wildly inappropriate content into educational spaces.

> In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out

In the old days, there was also strong tradition of people putting out their own pamphlets, newsletters, indie comics, etc. You didn't have to publish a book to get your message out. The early days of the web largely modeled that sort of activity.

Pretty much, we got from network of blogs and forums to all-encompassing massive social networks that impose same rules and sensibilities on everyone regardless of sense and reason, regardless of local culture or really anything else.

Like recently here in Poland we had cause of someone's motorization-related facebook page (basically diary of him building his tuned car) got banned after he posted a poll that dared to contain the word "czarny" (black).. someone else got banned for posting pic of their kids on vacation etc.

Are you saying that that’s a problem with people nowadays? How do we know for a fact that you’re not complaining about human nature as it has always been, say, even during the time of Socrates? How do we know that people are actually being too easily offended, or that it is you who’s being offended by people disagreeing with what you say?

I'm saying what Marshall McLuhan said: the medium is the message.

If you put human nature in one kind of medium it will react one way, and in other mediums people will react a different way. We tend to not be aware of how the media we are immersed in affects us. It takes a deliberate, contrived effort to notice such a thing.

McLuhan was extraordinarily prescient:

> McLuhan: The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each together….The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

He said that in 1977!

https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2017/02/16/marshall-mclu...

That’s not been my experience on HN, out of thousands of comments and interactions with hundreds of different users, maybe a total of a dozen turned out to be random ‘bashers’.

That's because if you fall too far out of line you get !Banged by !Dang.

HN is a heavily moderated forum. And I don't mind that one bit.

I think this holds even on places with much less moderation, even if you write a lot of controversial opinions, even if your a fairly well known figure.

Take PG's X/twitter posts for example, I would estimate not even 50% of the replies count as 'bashers'.

That's how you know you're in an echo chamber. We're all here to pretend like it's still the early days of the internet, before it had come into it's own as a medium, when it was still a skeuomorphic throwback to the literary era.

> That's how you know you're in an echo chamber.

No, how you know you're in an echo chamber is that you rarely hear any opinions that you disagree with. The absence of bashing doesn't mean you're in an echo chamber, it means there's a pleasant lack of assholes.

I hear opinions I disagree with every time I come to HN, so it doesn't seem like a total echo chamber to me. HN does serve a particular subculture, though, and in that broad sense is a bubble -- but there's still a huge variety of differing opinions on any topic.

I completely disagree with your comment but I have no need to bash you.

Why is the positive experience the echo chamber but the negative experience is a result of the inherent nature of the medium?

Because we are inherently tribal. We like being with our tribe. We are suspicious and wary of other tribes.

I know I'm weird, but I get very suspicious and wary of expressions/demonstrations of tribalism itself. It's the main reason why I have a strong dislike of sports, for instance.

Einstein didn’t seem particularly tribal, not about being a physicist, speaking German, being jewish, being smart, etc…

If your talking about the median human then sure, they’re more likely to be tribal.

>Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries see the scientist musing on his travels, science, philosophy and art. In China, the man who famously once described racism as “a disease of white people” describes the “industrious, filthy, obtuse people” he observes. He notes how the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.” After earlier writing of the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he goes on to say: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/...

Did you quote the wrong section? How are opinions on the living conditions and dispositions of peasants in rural China circa 1922-1923 relevant?

yah, Einstein would have the same assessment of you

Huh, looks like my other comment disappeared, anyways that seems remarkably unlikely, at least compared to random 'bashers'.

What does this comment mean? The internet is a commodity (well strictly speaking, it's not, but people agree that it _should_ be one), of course we're talking about the median person.

The median person doesn't post on HN?

I think it's a bit defeatist to think that the current vitriolic state of the internet is as sweeping and undefeatable as a "new age" when almost all of that vitriol can be traced to a few engagement-maximizing algorithms, held in place by a handful of megacorporations. Even a little antitrust enforcement and legislation would cut it down massively.

On Twitter it's not merely that you get a "different" interpretation, you have to deal with the most hostile interpretation possible of both your words and what you "didn't say". A little bit of disagreement is interesting; constant spurious repetitive negativity is exhausting and un-fun. Which is why people are leaving Twitter.

It’s rather remarkable how strong of a tendency Twitter replies have to find something to be angry about once a tweet gets big. The original message can be something as neutral and innocuous as possible and it’ll still receive inflammatory responses.

As you say, disagreement isn’t the issue, it’s a lack of basic civility and anybody who isn’t addicted to flameposting will get worn down by it quickly.

It's not even lack of basic civility - it's also a complete lack of intellectual honesty and utter disregard for truth. Civility and intellectual honesty are correlated; being just rude doesn't get you anywhere near the level of typical Twitter outrage bait.

> you have to deal with the most hostile interpretation possible of both your words and what you "didn't say".

Not just on Twitter, or even on the internet. I see this happen all the time in real life. It's perhaps the primary reason why substantive discussions have become rare: they're often impossible because you can't have real communication when everyone is misinterpreting everyone else.

Those are not very clear parameters as to what is allowable disagreement and what is not, and easily lends to supporting echo chambers.

Echo chambers are unavoidable.

The particular problem the internet has (though other mediums quite often have also) is people arguing in bad faith. Lets say I'm against X which could be any number of things (religion, race, politics, sexual orientation, etc). Actually, lets say I hate any one of the people involved in the aforementioned categories, not just against. Do you think I'm going to have a rational disagreement on this in a manner where my mind could be changed by new information? Doesn't seem likely. Is my constant stream of bad faith arguments going to ruin the experience for everyone else? Seems very likely.

This falls under the paradox of tolerance. Let the intolerant take over and you'll push out the tolerant that don't want to put up with their shit.

The hard part, no I say the impossible part, is the demarcation between figuring out who is there just to be an asshole against the group and who is really having a discussion. Every person in the group will have a different definition and tolerance level.

> The hard part, no I say the impossible part, is the demarcation between figuring out who is there just to be an asshole against the group and who is really having a discussion. E

This is an illusion. All are there to have discussions. They, like you, have some expectations about how the conversation will go, and like you, they preemptively position themselves to avoid being humiliated with the fallacies the other will undoubtedly attack with.

Someone from either side could break the cycle. But an outsider doing that only does so that he might be inducted into the group (he doesn't want this though, already has one), and an insider doing so would be a traitor to the group.

Thus no one can speak honestly. But both engage, at least initially, in the hopes that something will happen to break the cycle for them, and become frustrated when the miracle doesn't occur.

> All are there to have discussions.

I get what you're saying and I don't completely disagree, but I also don't think everyone is there to have discussions. A discussion is a mutual attempt at understanding each other.

Some people are there to try to change minds and opinions. That's evangelism, which is a very different thing from having a discussion.

This is such a naive take that I'm pretty flabbergasted by it.

In an individual conversation most of what you way is true, you can at least expect to have a somewhat honest back and forth, and shut down the conversation cordially if its not going anywhere.

Group dynamics do not allow this. If, for example, your groups decides to be an asshole about it, there isn't shit my group can do about it other than submit to your crap flood. Moreso, if I'm a 'true believer' it's commonly an "acceptable" practice to poison the well and make any discussion online completely toxic in order to keep reasonable conversation from occurring.

If I choose violence then you have the option of choosing counter violence (defense), running away (shutting down ones forum), or death (letting the forum turn into a toxic brew).

> Group dynamics do not allow this. If, for example, your groups decides to be an asshole about it, t

Look at what you just wrote here. Somehow, you've decided that we're a hivemind and telepathically colluding to "collectively be an asshole". Or maybe, you imagine that we do it the old-fashioned way with some side-channel communication.

You don't believe this about your own group though. And it's obvious why... because you know you're not a telepath, and that there's no side-channel communication going on where you all decide to collectively be assholes. When someone from your side is an asshole (are you willing to admit it happens once in awhile), it's just because that one guy is an asshole, and you probably don't even know him. He just showed up.

Your beliefs are driven by an information disparity here, and some natural biases. Because they're all mostly pseudonymous, it's easy to not look closely and see that it's only one being an asshole, rather than the whole group. You're also biasing them up nicely, the non-assholes already anticipate being treated that way, so they lean into it. The same is happening on your side too, you're just oblivious to it, and there's no reason to explore this... what would you do with it anyway? Bringing it up would make you seem like a group traitor, and mulling it over yourself just makes you feel bad. You can't defect, you're on the good side after all.

They're seeing the same as you from the other side. Thus each side believes the other to be disingenuous, but know that they themselves are just victims of the disingenuity.

> Moreso, if I'm a 'true believer' it's commonly an "acceptable" practice to poison the well and make any discussion online completely toxic in order to keep reasonable conversation from occurring.

From the other side, of course. Your side never does this. You're the good guys. Only the bad guys do that.

Of course, if your side did do it, it would only be for the best reasons. And only the other people in your group would do it, you never do that yourself.

The issue here, as it always is when censors argue that their methods are simply the will of the masses, is that individuals aren't being given the freedom to decide for themselves if they like content or not. It's always the censor that determines what content others are allowed to see. The censor makes the decision on behalf of everyone else and claims their views represent everyone's views and their tastes represent everyone's tastes.

> you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say

OP isn't talking about personal accountability but about platforms being afraid to lose advertising dollars or being sued and thus restricting the platforms.

You’d lose advertising dollars just the same by establishing an ill reputation because of what you say, even without getting and losing a lawsuit.

Yik Yak was one of the funnest things to come out in the last decade but it was too wild and dangerous to be allowed to thrive.

Damn, that's a memory unlocked there. I forgot it existed completely. It was huge during my university days, and led to some very entertaining posts about things happening around the campus.

In hindsight though, a huge amount of the posts on there were misogynistic. I keenly remember "slut-spotting" being a trend, with people commenting on girls walking home still dressed up from the night before, telling people to look out for them. Led to a lot of jeering out of windows and the like. Plenty of racist threads also. Targeted cyberbullying too; calling out various people by name and publicly insulting them under anonymity. I distinctly remember having to console a friend who was in hysterics because someone posted a thread about something relatively harmless that she had done, and she was publicly shamed.

It was an entertaining way to spend a few minutes at it's best, but at it's worst was a social weapon for a lot of people who shouldn't have had that level of reach nor anonymity.

Yep, that about sums up my experience with the app too. You could also remove any post automatically once it hit -5 points, so me and some friends got together and downvoted every new yak off the platform. People were big mad.

So was Facebook Live. I had so much fun just perusing around the globe, seeing events play out in real time. But too many crimes were committed live, including a mass shooting in New Zealand. I get why it couldn't continue, but it was one of the only genuinely cool things Facebook has ever built.

I'm confused by this comment - Facebook Live still exists, doesn't it? If I open Facebook and click "What's on your mind?" I can choose "Live video."

There used to be a globe-type UI that made it really easy to see what's happening live across the world. I'm not sure what Live offers today, but I imagine it's more restrictive. Here's an article about it:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/facebook-qui...

I see, thanks. I never saw that UI, but it sounds really cool. I have similarly had fun bouncing around the "Snap Map" in Snapchat before.

Yik Yak was too good and pure for this world. Or maybe too bad and degenerate. Either way I guess.

But the reboot was just sad! Who in their right mind thought they would be able to revive that cultural moment and moderate the shit out of it?

Oh holy shit, I forgot about that.

I work in higher education. You cannot genuinely imagine the heartburn that app gave college administrators across the country. It was amazing. Like a wave of anxiety washed across the country as Deans and Vp's all saw the statistics for bullying and suicide wash across their consciousness.

You just reminded me of the time my house party made it onto Yik Yak in college. That was a wild night.

An European clone called Jodel is very popular here and hasn't had such a negative reception.

Imagine how much extra racist Yik Yak would have been during the summer of 2020 and today during the Gaza war

My only reaction is: so?

Silencing people isn't going to make them stop thinking things and preventing discussion won't make them Good(TM) people.

The entire internet doesn't need to be sanitized.

I agree with your concluding statement, but I don't think that the goal of moderating discussions is to get people to stop thinking particular things or to make them "good people."

The goal is to encourage actual communication.

I don't think you can pile everyone into a handful of platforms and get good communication. There's too many opposing viewpoints, too much crossover, and too much intermingling.

Forums didn't have the same issue because they were often single/few topic websites and you could just aggressively remove everything off topic.

Yes, I agree with that completely. Above a certain threshold, it all just becomes noise.

I really can't imagine how it could have been any worse than it was in its hayday. Having 4chan but I'm sure it's someone I probably know and not a distant internet stranger made it so much worse.

Ultimately, there are always a few assholes that will ruin it for everybody else. This is why we can not have nice things.

Every time there is a platform that touts its love of freedom and hatred of censorship it is flooded with neo-nazis and pedophiles.

It’s not that the nazis are some outside group “invading” the platform—they are the existing, initial audience.

Whenever someone decides they are tired of getting censored on Platform X and creates their own “Free speech alternative to Platform X”, who is the audience? Cast-offs from Platform X. In other words, everyone who got kicked off for being racist, sexist, homophonic nazis. These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list.

>These free speech alternatives will never have a wholesome membership list

Indeed, I’ve noticed with ‘rights’, that the very people fighting for them are invariably going to be on the side of some repugnant individuals.

After all, the boundary of your right to do/say X will never be touched by average and inoffensive people. They will not push the limits. The people that do push the limits will be pushed back on by society, and then they lawyer up and take the fight to the legal system, and ultimately a Supreme Court who judges that “yea/nay you have the right to do/say X, and here are the clear demarcations”

At the end of the day they all have a profit motive and the most profitable thing they have found is ads. The type of advertisers allowed to advertise on social media, aka to lots of children, don't want to be next to anything controversial.

But they have all done a terrible job of this, banning algorithmically people who have done nothing wrong (or in the case of X saying something that makes Elon mad) while allowing widespread truly harmful misinformation

I've worked at both and between both the games industry and SV. Given the presence of Roblox, EA and the Playstation unit in SV it is a bit odd to consider them such outsiders, but in a real sense they are.

Broadly though, the problem is SV in a business culture sense conflates fun with role playing, expressing yourself, generating and consuming UGC, and feeding the beast. Play in the sense of discovery without any external side effects confuses it. If you are in games you see more and more of this tendency infesting western games production too, and it's largely down to those versions of fun being far easier to monetize.

The blind spot of this article is a huge amount of the "productivity" users are larping as PMs and using Notion etc. in a manner completely consistent with their sense of play, while acting seriously about it in order to maintain their ludic circle. To say they are not gamers is false; their entire lifestyle is the game.

The huge reason the games industry hasn't been completely overwhelmed by SV types is it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies.

Before switching to big tech I worked 8y in video games - and agree.

Many practices of gamedevs - like designers literally just exploring stuff without any plan for years before commiting to any feature - would make SV directors and PMs (not to mention investors) scream. :) This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this aimless exploration is needed in pursuit of real fun (as opposed to compulsive loops of mobile games). On the other hand, this leads to crunch, games being buggy and always delayed, and how most fun games always had very troubled production and sometimes literally destroy the studios/teams.

More organized companies I worked at (Ubisoft) had less crunch but also less fun games (cookie cutter AC formula). The messy toxic crunch workplaces (CD Projekt Red) I was at produced amazingly fun cult games...

> Many practices of gamedevs - like designers literally just exploring stuff without any plan for years before commiting to any feature - would make SV directors and PMs (not to mention investors) scream. :) This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this aimless exploration is needed in pursuit of real fun (as opposed to compulsive loops of mobile games).

IMHO, that exploratory attitude is needed to make any innovation at all. Without it, you get a bunch of cookie-cutter junk aping something else.

Which unsurprisingly, is a lot of what silicon valley does. Years ago it was social, last couple years it was crypto, now it's generative AI, etc. Almost all the talk about innovation is just hype and marketing.

If you need solid estimates, you'll never stray too far off the path others have already blazed.

I find this interesting. in all the jobs I've had, accountability has always been key. folks above my paygrade have always tried to find ways to produce metrics for our work. I've never been at a shop where free reign to explore was deeply embedded in corporate culture.

From the end user perspective, as someone who's been gaming since 8-bit NES days, the Ezio trilogy was still up there in terms of some of the best story and gameplay I've seen packaged together. Then again, I'm also a huge history nerd, so the "what if all the conspiracy theories were true" premise was fun.

I do agree the bean counters at Ubisoft seem obsessed with the idea of running the franchise until the wheels fall off anymore.

I would imagine having experience at both ends of the spectrum has helped you come up with some sort of ideal balance between the two?

Like maybe being flexible on deadlines but strict on overall process, to-dos, and separation of work?

I know everyone looks for a perfect "process" - and hence all agiles, scrums, whatever, but I am a bit cynical (or naive? not sure which one haha) and don't think there is one, all are bs (and implemented in a toxic org stay toxic), and all that is needed is a great team. :)

Basically a mix of people with different attitudes, different seniority levels, working great together, being curious, exploratory, but also responsible and keeping deadlines when pushed. I worked on some teams like this - like Marc Levoy's HDR+ team at Google, it was amazing. We had unlimited freedom to explore, but the team had very senior, responsible, and accountable people and when a deadline was approaching (sometimes self-imposed) were becoming very disciplined.

But one thing I am sure - if your goal is something creative and delightful - never let the business side, VCs and other "money squeezers" decide your process, features, goals.

Why is everyone piling on CD Projekt, they just had a massive growth after W3 they didn't manage quite right, along with perhaps overcommitting to C2077. I'm allergic to it, is there any evidence of "messy toxic crunch" before or after the one bad (in large part because shitty consoles are a thing) launch? There are way more egregious US game companies but CD Projekt gets mentioned way too often. Cyberpunk is fixed and very good now BTW.

> is there any evidence of "messy toxic crunch" before or after the one bad (in large part because shitty consoles are a thing) launch?

"There was no crunch, as long as we don't count all that crunch before the launch, and all that crunch after the launch..."

There's no need to be so defensive. We can rightfully criticize any employer who mistreats their employees, without giving a free pass to ones that might mistreat their employees slightly less than others. There was exactly one pre-existing comment in this thread that mentioned CDPR at all; nobody is targeting them unfairly.

The evidence - people's statements and experiences.

I worked there for 3y and can give "on the record" statement that it was the most toxic company I ever worked for. 80h work weeks, management shouting at people and calling their work "shit", constant lies, firing people on the spot for minor disagreements and many many more.

That's... a really interesting thought. These mid-brained people that indulge in the endless productivity treadmill (the most appropriate word for it - working hard to end up where you started) are... actually role playing someone productive.

I love this idea.

This is the "bullshit jobs" thesis.

It's very common in rat races. You can find recognizable forms of it in the ancient history of Imperial China or Rome. Job #1 is producing the appearance of usefulness, importance and status. Job #2 is doing enough actually useful things that the appearance and system is maintained.

"All the world's a stage, all the men and women merely players", Shakespeare anyone?

"it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies."

This is so true and why video games are so special, its full of slightly insane guy that will endlessly tweak variable so that the explosions feels just right and satisfying, set jump speed so that it goes up and down at just the "right rate" (which means jumping again and again in the engine for hours sometimes).

The final impact of all of it is often hard to quantify and sometimes feels silly but to them its important and they will do it even if it means working overtime because it feels like the right thing to do.

The fish rots from the head, blame MBAs and Stanford GSB in particular. Google e.g. "Peter Thiel laughing" and click on Images to view a panoply of boundaries in executive humanity.

> a panoply of boundaries in executive humanity

Anyone else's brain kind of error out trying to parse this phrase?

I liked it. Poetic word use evokes mental imagery.

It means Peter Thiel's smile looks fake.

It's been a while and maybe things are different now, but I left the video games industry because it was easily the most awful and least fun segment of the software industry that I've been exposed to.

UGC ?

User generated content

First, the metaverse - Meta's "vision" is a bleak, dystopian colored world without much fun except a few mini-games.

It's core idea was/is implemented in way better ways - Dreams was a great step, Fortnite & Roblox are currently trying to do the same thing, and hell, even old GTA San Andreas and Garry's mod were more of a metaverse than Horizon Worlds ever came to be.

On the concept of fun - of course it doesn't understand it. The tech scene has move from the fun, hacker ways into the dark pit of standardisation, processes, bureaucracy and average. Creativity gets sapped out of it to conform to a kafkaesque mind of your average stakeholder. Designer's and developer's opinions get overridden by glorified paper pushers.

You can see it happen in every startup, and the valley is the same - to conform to the largest possible market, as it grows, everything has to be averaged out and greyed out - making stuff colorful might exclude a market and we don't want that. Especially if the market is a trillion dollar enterprise-ridden bureaucratic hellhole, since those hellholes are where the easy money is.

Second Life is probably the most successful metaverse to date. Probably in large part because people could do things like create flocks of flying dicks.

I was on SL for a while. Apart from the weird code, where prims would download and appear around you in a more or less random order, it was a dystopian nightmare of consumerised homogeneity and boredom. Mile after virtual mile of people "living" in prims they couldn't afford in real life - boats, fast cars, big houses, perfect clothes and bodies.

Flying dicks or no, it was a soul-destroyingly tedious hellscape of people acting out shallow lifestyle compulsions and grifting for lindens.

Fun was very much not part of the deal.

VRChat is a stronger contender for a non-commercialized virtual space. The most commercial aspect is people commissioning and buying avatars. Otherwise, it's mostly fun making and exploring worlds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpSEtKnU_vw

Or hosting entire conventions (furry conventions are non-profit): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKd1ZL4K5Q

https://www.youtube.com/@Furality

Second Life does have some oddball worlds, but they're mostly abandoned art projects that vanish when the owner's card finally declines.

I was blue and I made self replicating prims that could crash the server (not on purpose). And cool looking swords to wear. I had fun.

What’s a prim?

Short for "primitive", a building block. Can be a box, sphere, torus, etc. Comes with a bunch of parameters.

It results in very particular looks because prim counts are limited and the parameters are not flexible enough. So you get things that look like this:

https://www.s-config.com/core/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Rio...

The point of prims is that they're mathematically generated. You have something that says "Sphere of radius 5, colored green and squished by 20%". Then the client generates the geometry for that, and so it's very easy to vary the level of detail as needed.

The basic building block of Second Life before they moved to mesh-based models.

No, Roblox is by far the most successful metaverse along pretty much any reasonable metric.

If it doesn't conform to your ideas about what a metaverse is, or something that Vannevar Bush or Neal Stephenson pictured, that's a reflection on how your own prejudices don't match reality.

I keep waiting for the Meta-Roblox acquisition. For one, Roblox is the social network for the under 12 demographic, and two, batteries included metaverse.

I'll put money on the fact they're in talks of it, the IPO valuation and subsequent movement even shows that they're playing a public-buyout move.

I think the best thing Facebook has done for the world has been to not take over Second Life. It's a move that makes perfect business sense but it would destroy an interesting piece of culture.

It might make sense depending on how they structure it? For example, from what I understand when Walmart e-commerce bought jet, they actually gave meaningful autonomy to the acquired jet team.

I watched a talk by a guy who seemed genuinely enthusiastic about reading existing code and rewriting it for scalability. I guess my point is if Facebook could give second life money and not exert control / strangle second life people it might work but knowing facebook, that’s not possible.

VRChat is also still like this, people just creating stuff for no monetary gain, and you’ll see things created for shock value occasionally as well.

IMO one of the things that made second life great was exactly the monetary gain while doing fun things.

I literally bought my first Cryptocoins with linden dollars I earned trough reselling in second life. Great times :D

Minecraft is a strong contender, albeit not a single, unified experience.

Minecraft perhaps gives us an opportunity to adjust our experience of what a metaverse is, based on how it works and how it is used.

Unlike Second Life, everyone doesn't play in one single instance. But there are multiple different notions of replication and simultaneity between players. For example, there are lots of different servers, some with persistent universes, but many with unlimited replicable throwaway universes. Some shared universes are highly coordinated for specific purposes. People play using each other random seeds thereby using parallel universes with identical starting configurations.

Arguably this is simply how artificial experiences in information space should happen, and the notions of things like monolithic instances or scarcity of 'land' are simply carry-overs from physical space.

> notions of things like monolithic instances or scarcity of 'land' are simply carry-overs from physical space

Humanity has spent so long scrabbling for scarce resources that we have a hard time even conceiving of systems that are built around abundance. See also DRM and NFTs, which are shamefully evil attempts to re-impose scarcity on post-scarce resources.

This is why I think the broader landscape of multiplayer games and other game-like things is the actual metaverse and we’ve had it since early MUDs that predate Snow Crash. Everything else tends to be a platform and whilst platforms can be part of the metaverse they’ll (hopefully) never be the metaverse.

I think Roblox passed Second Life a while ago. Granted, it isn't targeted towards adults and has a level of moderation second life never had.

> First, the metaverse - Meta's "vision" is a bleak, dystopian colored world without much fun except a few mini-games.

Which always reminds me of the jobs where they use a foosball table or whatever as a selling point.

Old-time TV used to have ads for alcohol, cigarettes. Late-night shows, sometimes risky in europe (i.e. tits) had ads, lots of them. Google + Facebook, like the puritanest of the puritan americans have made that a no-go. It's not clear who decided it first, but basically anything that the local church might frown upon has become unmonetizable and unadvertisable. Of course you won't have fun things when you do that.

The article is not correct about metaverse. There 's still games like second-life and others (thousands of users roam in open and distributed worlds in opensimulator - see https://opensimworld.com) . Facebook's leg-less (convenient alias for genital-less) avatars are of course not fun. When you kill all that's fun about virtual worlds (the ability to transcend this world and let imagination be truly free) then what do you expect people to do? simulate the misery of the office in 3d form? I seriously would like to hear what they expected to have

The issue with the "metaverse" is that it's kind of horrifying and no company wants to build it.

I say that as somebody building something of the sort!

Second Life was the big one, and it was as I understand an accident. So it formed organically and became this weird mess of weird subcultures and porn.

Now some companies saw a lot of people logging in and wanted to replicate that, but they missed the very point of it. A sterile imitation of SL is pointless. Grandma doesn't want to put a VR headset or to navigate a 3D space to share cat photos with her friends. It's a lot of effort and nothing to gain.

Metaverses seem to mostly cater to unusual, fringe audiences. The furry fandom is a popular one for instance, because if you want to look like an anthro cat, well, in real life that's kind of difficult, and that's something that gives a reason to put up with the challenges. The people who are into this kind of thing tend to be not quite average in one way or another.

But this absolutely doesn't mix with the SV model of "let's get the entire planet in here". The general area is in my opinion inherently a niche.

"Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired."[1] -John Carmack in 1999 (!!) and it looks like programmers are still trying to do it.

1: https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carma...

Yeah, why wouldn't we?

I don't think making virtual worlds is inherently a bad idea. It's just like a niche, like writing a chess engine. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be interested, it's the kind of software that's very interesting to a small segment of the population, while everyone else fails to get the point.

Which is why it's weird for somebody like Facebook to try to do it. I think chess is actually a pretty apt comparison. Imagine Facebook for some reason got this idea that everyone must play their chess game. I think obviously the end result would be bad, because they'd try to spice things up and water down the game to make it more palatable to a general audience. But the end result would be that the general audience quickly gets bored, and the actual purists don't find what they're looking for.

"Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus"

https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

Funny, but really, there's nothing that weird going on in virtual worlds. It's just a fancier way to socialize, not that fundamentally different from IRC or HN.

Virtual worlds have the potential to matrix the population. Even right now, many people look at screens for 14 out of the 16 hours they’re awake, completely enveloped in a reality fed by AI, other than the occasional shower or food they eat while watching YouTube/Netflix. Eve Online dynamics already illustrate the beginning of all-consuming virtual worlds and how they affect people in real life.

Nonsense.

I mean, I like the space, I work in it, and that's way, way more overblown than I'd ever say myself. We're nowhere near close to the Matrix. It's a 3D chat room with scripting capabilities. Yes, of course such spaces can be toxic, but so can be web forums.

And my experience is that so far the spaces that find users are those that give their users creative freedom. Spaces where you're restricted and fed corporate content don't go anywhere.

The metaverse part as a whole feels completely unneeded and misguided (spending so much time on declaring it dead, with 0 mention of VRChat or RecRooms is odd), but the dive on how much SV loves productivity apps was interesting.

This reminds me of Hello Internet (rest in hiatus) with the more US minded CGP Grey spending so much time on productivity tricks, to the point he's now part of a company making productivity goods.

And in contrast Brady getting bored to death by the productivity gurus, just delivering project after project without the weird and random systems, while enjoying resort beaches, also building legos, also going to parties etc. and just seemingly enjoying life so much more.

Productivity in that sense seems to be an outgrowth of "hustle" culture. It's something between a cargo cult and an MLM; people hope to make money by selling productivity apps to other people who want to be more productive in their productivity app startup.

At no point is anything of value produced, because the western US is already absurdly abundant in anything that can be "produced". What is left to produce? Only things that are "rival" (real estate), or public goods (addressing SF's crime and cleanliness problem would be great for its residents, but it's not possible to charge for it, so it's not going to be fixed).

People look at the app store and weep because there are no more worlds to conquer.

because of who is trying to start it, I can't think of any product that would be less successful except maybe "meta connected underwear"™.

The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in.

> The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in.

I remember when I first got into Android, the open handset alliance was such a big thing. The goal, at least what I thought was the goal, was to bring together all the manufacturers, software developers, telco operators, and users on a single platform so they could avoid duplicating effort. I think you’re right. The platform succeeded because google refused to suck up too much of the oxygen in the room in the project’s infancy.

Funny enough though as a user it was maddening to see basic apps that could get bug fixes and updates because they were part of aosp and couldn’t update from android market. I actually wanted those to be on an App Store because manufacturers didn’t have regular updates

As "metaverse" was not capitalized I assumed the generic term.

Otherwise I don't think Horizon getting sunset would mean Meta giving up, they've shown willingness to go down that road as far as they need to. That could include buying up any service that gets ahead in the Occulus ecosystem, though I'm definitely not thrilled by that perspective.

does anyone know what happened to Hello Internet? I kinda miss that podcast...

I don’t buy that the metaverse is a new invention. My brothers and I lived in one many years ago, it was called World of Warcraft around the Burning Crusade era and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. This was before Blizzard enabled cross server play and destroyed the socialization aspect of the game. Then you lived on one server and were forced to socialize with the same players every day and make a whole world and society that existed on that one server. You had cities and factions and your guild doing raids and recruiting new players and it was another life. It was wonderful and I’m sure it will happen again someday from some other company and in some other format.

I’m always amazed to look at the servers and imagine all the lives and stories that came from that one piece of hardware.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/97tudn/one_of_world...

The Metaverse concept has basically existed fully-formed, and even with that exact name, since at least Snow Crash (1992).

The wider idea was clearly floating around in the zeitgeist as the Red Dwarf episode where they get stuck in a game called Better Than Life aired in March that year, a few months before Snow Crash was published.

And don't forget Lawnmower Man in March 1992 [1] (Snow Crash was June 1992).

I think the "VR headsets" of the day were popular for a few years before both, driving said particular zeitgeist. As mentioned in a sibling, William Gibson { and probably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem } presaged all this stuff decade(s) earlier.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)

Or Neuromancer. (Any advance on Neuromancer?)

I think that Neuromancer was about as early as it went, fiction-wise.

But VR was about from the 70s (NASA's JPL had one), and the metaverse is basically VR + chatroom. Popularisation certainly happened by the early 80s, which is presumably where Neuromancer got it from.

Burning Chrome precedes Neuromancer by two years and first used "cyberspace" in the sense of a VR-like network.

True Names, 1981. Which, IMHO, is a far better story than Neuromancer, but also much less stylish, and hence less influential.

I enjoyed Jumpgate back in the day - a space sim MMORPG.

There was quite a funny effect that at a certain level, you tended not to leave the space stations at all. The world was dangerous and losing your ship was a pain in the butt so seasoned players rarely launched and instead socialised and played each other in the training simulation that was inside the game.

I felt the hint of a general principle: if you create a realistic world with risks, chores, costs etc. it has no value. It's not what people seek. People will need to create games within the virtual world to find leisure. The virtual world becomes an irrelevant shell of indirection you need to escape just as you want to escape the real world.

Isn't Eve Online a counterexample to this? From anyone I hear talking about it, it's the reality of it all that makes it compelling.

You could argue that Eve's attraction is the lack of regulation, the lack of protection from scams, the lack of a police force. All things you get in the real world, more or less.

Eve has just the right mix of reality and unreality to hook its audience.

How it is a counterexample? Doing anything fun in eve requires a group that talks through headsets. That's exactly the leisurely socialization aspect of it. I am hard of hearing and left eve because I can't do that. Playing torn.com[1] instead.

That unlike jumpgate you often leave space station (or safe space) is just a detail cuz death/loss of a ship isn't a big issue.

[1]https://www.torn.com/2658150

Reminds me a lot of BBSs. It's hard to develop lasting and deep relationships with random people on the Internet. Just as old WoW, many BBSs had a small group of people who hung out virtually together and you got to know them. It's the closest you can get to lifelong high school and college friendships after leaving school.

Funny enough, BBSs were the way many of the players on WoW servers pre-cross realm would communicate/flame each other outside the actual game.

When I started online gaming with an old multiplayer tank game called Tanarus, we used Usenet. With EverQuest we used EZBoard, then with WoW it was many times the server’s board on the official WoW forums.

While I’m sure there’s a bit of nostalgia shading the memories, I made a lot of friends and great memories!

I think we lost something with demise of BBSs that the Internet was never able to replace. It's one of those things where one technology is better in almost every way, but something gets permanently lost in the transition. One analogy would be the upgrade from vinyl to CD/Digital music.

Minor nitpick: while Usenet closely resembled the older BBS's, it wasn't an actual BBS per se. Ditto the other forum sites.

I guess I was more including Usenet as a part of the progression, not necessarily categorizing as a BBS.

Fair enough on the notice two, but I think people (or at least I) more generically use “BBS” to describe message boards/forums.

Anyways, appreciate the correction regardless, as after looking the actual definition, I was definitely wrong =)!

It absolutely isn't a new invention. The only thing new that everybody completely latched onto was that Facebook changed its name to Meta. People thought that meant the beginning of something new, and Meta themselves certainly didn't want to disprove that notion.

I know multiple people who have long-lasting IRL relationships because of Asheron's Call, preceding WoW by a few years. Same stuff... Get-togethers, group quests, level-up ceremonies, taking care of each other's characters and stuff (until houses came along)

Yeah; the innovative bit in the recent 'metaverse' bubble was getting VCs to shovel money in, not the actual concept.

I had a similar experience on a Minecraft server circa 2011-2015. Most fun I've ever had online, it was magical.

I mean, you are essentially playing small village in those games.

I believe there is something fundamentally perverse about neighbourhood "attrition" for the human mind. Like, you want to know people and have some sameness in your neighborhood. Nowadays people move so much. Especially in big cities.

Such experience still exists in Tibia, 1997 MMORPG.

The difference between say, VRChat (but also non-VR equivalents like second life, MUDs and certain MMOs) and whatever the Silicon Valley metaverse thing was very much visible in how they envisioned it. Silicon Valleys approach was literally "put a bunch of 3D models that are meant to look like you + things you know from the real world and then transport as many real world bureaucracies and ideas as possible into it" (and throw making money on top because that's clearly what people want to do more than anything else[0]). It was doomed from the outset because it fundamentally restricted user creativity and expression as much as possible to try and mimic the real world.

VRChat from what I can tell instead stapled a basic interface together for making a "metaverse" (map, player objects and basic scripting) and then set players loose on the field with all the creation tools to customize it (iirc the only hardcap in VRChat is the polygon count on any individual model). The result is that VRChat is a. incomprehensible to outsiders and b. undeniably creative.

Most other examples don't offer the freedom VRChat does (closest to VRC is probably something like Garrys Mod? Second Life still tries to go for a realistic aesthetic, although it allows user creations), but if you place VRChat as one extreme and Facebooks anemic "metaverse" at the other, you'll find that most succesful metaverses lean closer to the VRChat degree of freedom than they do to Facebooks version of where creativity doesn't exist beyond what Facebook pre-approved of (and what a users wallet could afford, nothing for free, of course).

Or if you just want the crass answer: VRChat let weirdos be weird and express themselves however weird they wanted to be. Silicon Valley saw that weirdness as a problem to be solved away and tried to make everyone fit an "acceptable", pre-approved mold. The reality is that most people do not like being made to fit in existing molds, even if what they do fit into isn't too different from those molds in the first place.

[0]: I hope the sarcasm is obvious.

I think you really hit the nail on the head. How large of a role self-expression plays in the "fun" determines how important it is. VRChat, Minecraft, and GTA Online have been successful because the entire point is to let people be creative with very few guardrails.

The old days of Counter-strike were filled with people using shock photos as sprays. Yet when Valve nixed the ability to use custom sprays it didn't impact the popularity of the game at all because that isn't the point of the game.

Let's not call people weirdos. If normies entered vrchat they d become weirdos too, because they can. They are in a world with absolutely no judgement where everything is possible and life starts anew. Nobody wants to be normal in a virtual world because, that s what the real world is supposed to do.

Everyone is a bit of a weirdo. ;p

The term isn't intended to be derogatory or anything. If anything, it's a positive to me. Celebrate weirdness where you can find it because it, more than anything else imo is what unfiltered humanity looks like. Weirdos are just those who are openly willing to do so in greater quantities than the rest of us.

I'm just saying that VRC allows that weirdness to exist, while the SV tech demos didn't and weren't ever planned to without being attached to some harebrained moneymaking scheme that would benefit only the SV middlemen (and would be washed down and sanitized to the point of being boring).

Everyone is a weirdo, as near as I can tell. I think that if I ever met someone who was actually "normal" (hasn't happened yet), I'd consider them weird.

The mention of Decentraland in this article reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

The comment one viewer seems to sum it up:

They made a virtual world so boring that you can't even find weird perverts in it.

Whomsoever wins the furries will win the metaverse.

(But also, the furries are about the only people who _want_ a metaverse, as far as I can see. I'm fairly certain this is why Second Life still clings on stubbornly.)

Furries are the canaries of metaverses. As long as they are present, you can be sure corporates and HR haven't touched this world with their fingers of death

To be fair, furries are kinda the baseline of what you want to distinguish "the metaverse" from the real world. I can have meetings from home just as easily in the real world with a webcam and a Zoom call. The metaverse doesn't enhance that if all I'm doing is placing a 3D model that looks like me on a map and look at other 3D models of other people. (Plus, arguably strapping a VR brick to your face probably means it's worse than that Zoom call for physical health reasons.)

Otoh the premise of "you can use a furry avatar to represent yourself" isn't one that appeals to me, but it does show that the people making it are thinking of "how can we make this different from the real world" instead of the lazy "let's move this real world thing to digital and make it as boring as reality can be".

Oh, sure, but I suspect that furries (and a couple of other even smaller niche groups) are actually the _only_ obvious users for a full-immersion 'metaverse'-y thing (as opposed to games). As you say, no-one wants to role-play being in an office with a VR headset.

Weeb crowds are active in VR as well.

There's already a place for weird pervs and that's vr chat where there's no corporate overlords desperately trying to sanitize any weirdness out of their product.

Speaking of weird perverts, at least you can smoke in the Decentraland theater.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnpofBtijF8

Thanks for sharing that, interesting video!

I think the take out here is that different people find different things fun and SV has a very specific notion of that, which is incompatible with most of the world.

I see it in my circle of long-time friends, where one of them is left out of our gaming sessions because he's busy all the time - typically with his productivity app side project no less.

He did some amazing things in his youth, but I can't help but think it took a toll on him.

It's contagious and for a while I felt pressured to adopt the same lifestyle, but at one point I noticed that it's a way to fast track oneself to depression, since the productivity demon is never really satisfied.

> I think the take out here is that different people find different things fun and SV has a very specific notion of that, which is incompatible with most of the world.

I think it's good to always keep in mind that software engineers don't understand a great many things, and perhaps SV software engineers understand even less. That attitude at least partially counters that exceedingly biased bullshit that reckons software engineers are smarter and better than everyone else and will "fix" everything. They fix very little, it's just that some of them have figured out how to force their bullshit on everyone else.

SV's idea of fun is purely transactional - do this to get that.

The genius of GTA III was the open sandbox. You weren't required to progress in the story, you could do WTF you wanted, even (and most importantly) nothing!

I mean... yeah. Remember when microdosing on LSD to boost productivity became a thing in SV? I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley suffer from the "grind" mentality, which doesn't allow for fun. It should be optimized fun, like watching your films at 2.5 speed!

[1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lsd-microdosing-drugs-silico...

I'm glad the article mentions "Play to Earn" games, that's truly the only example needed to show how out of touch the average VC is. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the author is too generous in his interpretation of Ohanian's quotes.

> Ohanian makes the mistake of evaluating all activities through the lens of restricted economy, in which every activity serves some future utilitarian activity, ignoring the possibility that the value of games is precisely in their ability to be meaningfully, entertainingly useless.

Or maybe Ohanian is just another rich insider parroting the same nonsense as Andreessen and the others who've sunk money into these shams.

Introducing a profit motive is a powerful way to destroy fun.

Play to earn is straight up the initial twitch business model for streamers.

And it has been immensely fun for people who watch them.

Right, because it's the streamer's JOB to be an entertainer. There's no misaligned incentives here, it's just like how people playing pickup basketball aren't "playing to earn" and can still enjoy an NBA game.

Not to mention the "Earning" medium is independent of the "Playing" medium. The conflicting incentives don't come into play (as much), i.e. the game can still actually be fun.

It's interesting how often the author mentions "wasting time" as in "The gamers assign meaning to wasted time by viewing it as an end in itself to which other means are directed..." Decades ago baseball was called America's favorite pastime. I think if you talk to a gamer, they wouldn't say they were wasting time but would agree to passing time. As a retiree that often just sits on the patio and watches the wildlife, I take some offense to the idea that I'm wasting time.

I agree, and I wonder if we all "wasted" more time, if we would be healthier and happier. Perhaps that would make us more productive during the time we weren't "wasting". Paradoxically, it might even be a net gain in aggregate productivity.

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,

Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.

They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;

They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,

Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

-- G.K. Chesterton

It is telling that all comments here are focused on the merits or faults of metaverse, instead of focusing on the actual message: Silicon Valley does not understand the concept of fun, games, and leisure time.

It can be seen everywhere.

Not really, I can't think of a better product to highlight everything that is no fun about Silicon Valley than the Metaverse.

The way desktop and other UIs are getting worse, I sometimes think SV also doesn't understand productivity. A lot of the productivity hype is just productivity theater, a mere illusion of productiveness.

Seen in this context, it all makes a lot of sense. This kind of productivity seems like a cult to me. Maybe those who don't understand recreation are doomed to also not understand why their productivity is not very efficient.

I always assumed the goal wasn't to minimize the time you spend in a UI but to find the maximum amount of time users will tolerate using a UI. At least for UIs that feature ads that is. The longer you're on the ad-spewing platform the more ads you're shown etc etc. Partly explains why Google search results are unnecessarily bad these days.

"The gamers assign meaning to wasted time by viewing it as an end in itself to which other means are directed, and naturally orienting all activities toward the maximization of that waste. The productivity app cohort forces itself into an infinite cycle of waste minimization, in which surplus time must be continuously reinvested for further saving, and the means become the ends themselves. The perfectly ordered Google calendar does not facilitate other goals — it is the goal."

This was what stuck out to me. Looking at my own goals, I can see the idea of using productivity tools to make my "productive time" more productive, so that I can have more free time (to "waste" on whatever hobby strikes my fancy). But it definitely is a slippery slope, especially in the hacker culture where everyone seems to be looking for small efficiencies through digitization.

Looking back over the last ten years I can see that there were times that I was in this trap: the period of time that I spent trying to use org-mode as a time-tracker/todo list/everything (your life in plain text) comes to mind. Now I just use it for note taking and general writing.

Additionally, I enjoy optimizing things. It was fun for a period of time. Eventually I just got exhausted. Indeed, I'm still exhausted, but I am spending less time at work than I used to, and I can feel OK taking a day where I don't have to rush,rush,rush and minimize downtime, but rather just say "This day is for whitewater paddling, and it's going to take all day, and a lot of that will just be driving, and that's fine. It will be fun."

Another idea is that you actually don't have to make all the money. Just some of the money is OK. Money becoming the end-goal is almost the same as this "productivity as end-goal" idea. Like the panda, how much excess can you reasonably make use of?

> I can see the idea of using productivity tools to make my "productive time" more productive, so that I can have more free time (to "waste" on whatever hobby strikes my fancy).

I actually view working to earn a living as "wasting time" and my "recreational" activities as my non-wasted time. Money is a tool I need in order to enable me to live a life I find fulfilling, and I have to work in order to have access to that tool.

The meaningful part of life is the part that I am working to enable, it's not the working in and of itself.

Work to live, don't live to work.

During philosophical moments, I like to ponder whether the meaning of life is about churning out as much entropy as we can over all time. Obviously, in that frame, environmentalism is important because if we all die off, the total entropy over all time is reduced.

Not really directly related to your post, but it got me thinking. It just struck me that efficiency needs a bigger context. Specifically, it makes us better at being inefficient.

Literally exactly this is what I keep trying to tell my (mostly former at this point) friends who are super into blockchain gaming. The fact that some silicon valley suit put $x million into a project doesn't mean that it has any viability to gamers, who are the most fun-seeking users in the universe. No one wants to "play to earn", no one wants to "invest in their game", they just want to play and have fun.

I think Decentraland is a great microcosm of this problem, as TFA states, but there are a thousand other examples of blockchain gaming where the blockchain integration is the main selling point, not the fun of the actual game. And when you talk to these weirdos, their understanding of gamers and the gaming industry is completely detached from reality. Most of the games in Decentraland are at best idle clickers that would have taken normal game developers a weekend of $SUBSTANCE-induced haze to develop, and yet they're getting millions of dollars of investment from two sources: ghoulish VCs who think that gamers can be reduced to skinner box robots, and crypto speculators who know equally little about gaming but a lot more about the human behavior of other crypto speculators. The whole thing just makes me sad, because gaming is a fascinating industry that I am privileged to be a part of, and I believe there is still a lot of innovation to be had in the space. But VC-driven nonsense like this is not it.

I think they underestimated the attachment of people to their bodies not misunderstood fun.

Most of people in Silicon Valley are in their heads. The rest of the people are busy living life with their bodiesnin real life. Instagram works because people can market their real faces and bodies, which is not the case for the metaverse.

It was not always like that. Atari was a Silicon Valley company, they practically invented the concept of fun workplace.

True, but that was a very different SV. It bears no resemblance to SV now.

I've read Atari was very different under Tramiel as well.

I'm much more concerned because they don't understand the concepts of privacy, ethics, freedom, openness...

Anyone else reminding the Men in Grey from Momo while reading the article? Only this time in hoodies…

I've had the opposite take. What's not fun? East coast nyc/CT financial tech. It's run top down like the GOP. Gotta be on the same talking points. The important aspects of creativity, honest criticism are avoided and tainted as immature or hostile. Silicon valley likes those aspects I think better.

I've done a couple of startups in silicon Valley and they were fun!! And money making and full of learning. Plus silicon valley has great toys: cnc machines, lasers, photo plotters, pick-n-place machine lines etc.

I had the good luck to spend my senior year of high school in Marin County. One day the chemistry teacher comes in says: field trip to Stanford SLAC! We all got on the yellow bus and headed down the 101. 80s rock was blasting all the way down. When we pulled up to the parking lot and I walked off the bus to Robert Palmer's refrain: "you might as well face it you're addicted to love" was echoing loudly off the bus walls.

The slac itself was cool as hell. We walked by the computer lab on the way to the detectors which was running a large job of some kind .. computers and printers were sucking 1000s of pages of 132 column green bar paper out of boxes printing something cool about mother nature.

The particle detectors were two stories tall to detect sub atomic particles.

For me that's silicon valley at its best.

Alas large human organizations eventually take the fun out but maybe we're all one startup or love song away from rejuvenation.

> Reddit cofounder, venture capitalist and play-to-earn evangelist Alexis Ohanian predicted that by 2027, “ninety percent of people will not play a game unless they are being valued properly for that time,” a position he restated in May of this year.

I've yet to hear something thoughtful or smart come from Ohanian's mouth.

I hate to say it, but I actually think that part of the statement is correct - just not in the way he wants people to imagine it.

To be clear, I'm not saying that people want to be paid to play games. That's an incredibly easily disproven notion. I'm talking about feeling like they're valued by a game. Games respecting the players' time in ways that don't equate to "here's stuff for playing our game" but are more "here's why you'll enjoy this game and why it's not crap"? Yeah, I can see that being a major factor in people playing them.

Did Ohanian mean that? Obviously not, and I hate that I have to deliberately misinterpret him in order to get something out of this. But the core idea as stated isn't wrong.

His statement really betrays the single-mindedness and inhumanity of wealth hoarders. Everything seen through the lens of profit-making, money as the only valid measure of value. What a desolate mindscape that must be.

Actually I imagine it's a wonderful relief and joy to have a life so simple you can characterize everything about yourself with a single dollar value figure of your net worth. These people gave themselves a score and are just racking it up.

Sure is a lot simpler than trying to be a well rounded human who is happy and fulfilled.

I just play idle games for that urge though.

To an extent that's right, although maybe not in the way it was intended. I've played and developed a hatred for games which are blatantly disrespectful of my time.

This isn't about some weird productivity thing, but more of adding large numbers of time-based barriers which give no benefits but have to be gotten through to access the "fun", i.e. grinding without a sufficient reward.

Games like that make me feel like they aren't valuing my time properly in the sense that it feels like they're taking their audience for granted and assuming that they'll always stick around regardless of what they do to the game.

I disagree. He named his VC firm, Das Kapital, thats very cute! http://daskapitalcapital.com/

What makes the "metaverse"'s failure particularly amusing to me is that it isn't even a matter of understanding fun. Yeah, SV doesn't 100% get that. It's not really their domain and it's not a surprise they don't get it very well. But the metaverse can be dismissed on grounds that SV and its investor class is supposed to be among the best at, which is, I've never heard a description of the metaverse that makes any business sense as a whole.

Yes, the metaverse as a business proposition made sense to Facebook specifically, but I've never heard a sensible, old-school SV-style "win-win" business analysis that gave an explanation for why anybody else would participate in Facebook's metaverse, and, in particular, why it wouldn't fragment into a whole bunch of irreconcilably different metaverses.

Then again, my objection is sort of a layer too high in the stack, as the metaverse as a concept never even got close to that being its biggest problem; its biggest problem was that in the end they couldn't even figure out why anyone would use it at all. Lacking fun is a 100% valid criticism but even more deeply it seems to have lacked any utility whatsoever, to anyone.

But even more generally, the whole Ready Player One vision is such an IP nightmare, such a compatibility nightmare, such a mismash of conflicting monetary interests that in the real world would never come to the table together. The only way to create such a thing would be to radically rewrite the legal system to enforce massive compatibility requirements, mandatory licensing, mandatory compatibility, and in the end there isn't anyone in the real world who is going to push for that. Company's natural inclinations are to demand more power to control when the only way to the metaverse is to strip them of it. And that's just not going to happen. You're never going to be able to buy a Mickey Mouse avatar and use it in WB's space. You're never going to be able to find a sword in Blizzard's World of Warcraft and use it in Super Mario RPG. (Such a thing is hardly even definable in terms of how that would work!)

In the end, the value proposition of "owning" the metaverse is clear, but I've never seen a clear, sensible value proposition for anyone being willing to jump into someone else's owned "metaverse" on their own terms. So the metaverse is a mirage. It turns out that science fiction is not obligated to be something that can be turned into a real thing.

(And it doesn't matter. Things will continue to proceed anyhow. The final result won't be "the metaverse" but it'll be its own thing and it'll happen anyhow.)

Let’s be honest, when it comes to fun and entertainment, Silicon Valley is the most boring place on Earth.

Yeah... lived in the Bay Area, it's almost like a giant suburb with some large industrial parks that just so happen to be tech companies. It's a bit better if you're in San Jose or San Francisco, but good lord living in Palo Alto/Mountain View is boring.

This video is literally 100% correct https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7KSTZttWXM, especially about downtown life

Love the video but it is 100% about life on the Peninsula. Dude clearly never made it to Oakland or he wouldn’t be talking about how clean the Bay Area is.

It's interesting that a lot of the posts in this thread focus on the product outcomes of the SV culture, but ignore the point of the article, how the endless quest to squeeze out the 1 % marginal productivity creates this kind of outcomes. I would bet most of HN subscribes to the same philosophy (and I can't help myself at times too).

> he considered the various ways that cultures have spent it throughout time, including on “games, spectacles, arts, and perverse [non-reproductive] sexual activity,”

I guess I'm a pervert. Is considering non-reproductive sexual activity to be perverted a common belief among economists?

I mean, for economists born in 1897, probably not unusual, yeah. For modern ones, a lot rarer, I would think.

Though:

> he often used pseudonyms to sign certain writings (such as erotic stories): Troppmann, Lord Auch, Pierre Angélique, Louis Trente and Dianus.

He apparently wasn't above a bit of the ol' perversion himself.

This is a well-written article, and I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. But when you compare how much $$$ mediocre but heavily marketed games, and "casino mechanics" games still make, it's hard to blame VCs and executives for it. I'd be very interested in learning how you could encourage people to become more discerning consumers.

Sooo silicon valley is a metaverse where the game is to create productivity apps.

"But its failure is more than the fin de siecle of one of the most rapid and spectacular hype eras in modern business history."

TL:DR: SV likes and loves "productivity" and games are kind of the opposite. Good for calendar or pomodoro apps that others will try to leverage to be more productive, not good for fun. The best games don't fit the SV model.

The best game is Silicon Valley itself. SV loves "productivity" like Mario loves gold coins – it's what is needed to further your score in the game.

Yes, I think about this all the time and try to make sure that I produce stuff that is fun, and not optimised for profit.

Silicon Valley doesn't understand The Story of the Eye.

Never thought I'd be reading Bataille quotes on HN before I had my coffee.

One of the reasons why I dislike going to SV is exactly this -- the place has a serious lack of the sense of fun.

The issue, I think is SV has lost touch with its inner kid. A few years back, before covid, I spend two weeks in SV. I saw one kid. And she was in a stroller that mom was pulling into a dispensary.

How so? Isn't this a city like any other with pubs and shows and town squares, etc.

This article praises the game community too much. A very good reason to avoid gave development is to avoid the gamers themselves. You really are taking a chance when you dump millions of dollars into a AAA title, just to have it shat-on by everyone, and forever tarnish your brand. Think, Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia, No Man’s Sky; now you may say, “but those all sucked, especially at release!” satisfied Mmm-Hmm

Meanwhile, tools like Jira or SAP may be equally hated or “suck”, but, there are not online magazines dedicated to rating, ranking, and criticizing tools like them… or at least not popular ones. And, Jira is going to be in use for years, where even a praised game, say Stray, isn’t nearly as long lived or profitable.

Also, it’s no secret that Horizons, Roblox, Fortnite is full of screaming 8-year-olds, CoD is a recruiting tool for Neo-Nazis, and online communities are generally awful. What reasonable adult wants to get into that cesspool?

I appreciate the point of the article, but I feel like it focuses too much on Productivity VS Fun… ignoring that video games may not actually be fun. That computers may be for productivity and that fun should happen outside of Big Tech corporate production software.

The hunt for and branding of toxic behavior in online communities has long since felt like the secular version of religious fundamentalists claiming games encourage youth to become Satanists and engage in violent behavior.

Many of those who hunt for online toxic behavior present day are not impartial observers and analysts. Similar to their evangelical counterparts from the 80's, 90's, and 00's, they have their own biases rooted in axioms that are not widely held in society.

So, the problem isn’t that people are toxic, it’s that people point it out?

Classic.

The problem is that the hecklers use self-defined criteria of toxicity that isn't representative of broader society's views on what is toxic.

Many assertions of toxicity in the modern era have as much relevance as assertions of Satanism did in decades past. The accusers define the criteria they then diagnose. What they diagnose often has little relevance to actual societal ills and oftentimes just serves to further stigmatize social outcasts to no productive end.

Well people prefer to live in natural world I guess.

Well, EA is in SV.

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