Future of the metaverse, and all that

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 8/25/2022 at 2:00 AM, Harloxzz said:

I think Metaverse will be the future it will be the best creation in the history of mankind but we will see what Metaverse world will be the dominant in the future SL or Facebook Meta? or maybe we will see many popular Metaverses competing with each other? i think the VR technology will play an important role for the Metaverses.of the future i think it will take a long time to see the true evolution of the Metaverses maybe we will see their true potential in 30 or 40 years maybe for 2060

2060? I'd be 101. 🤣 🤐

[Rat Luv]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Fogbound looks less busy than it usually is.

I've never been there! Is that SL's rowdiest pub? 👊😲

[Scylla Rhiadra]

18 minutes ago, Rat Luv said:

I've never been there! Is that SL's rowdiest pub? 👊😲

No, not really. Actually, I stopped going there because it was too often like a graveyard, filled with zombie-like beings engaged in IMs with prospective zombie-mates.

But it does look somewhat like the place in the video.

Wanna meet there and start a brawl?

[Coffee Pancake]

10 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

No, not really. Actually, I stopped going there because it was too often like a graveyard, filled with zombie-like beings engaged in IMs with prospective zombie-mates.

That's a function of the platform. SL doesn't do fine movement or locality very well. This is why newbies crash into everything till they learn to stop trying.

Lose the local interactivity and ... what are we gonna go, chat like it's 80s IRC or try and peel people off so we can go somewhere less crowded.

 

[Rat Luv]

On 10/1/2022 at 8:19 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

 

Wanna meet there and start a brawl?

OK 😎

[bigmoe Whitfield]

On 10/1/2022 at 12:58 AM, Silent Mistwalker said:

2060? I'd be 101.  🤣  🤐

81 here.  I'm not sure at 81, I'm gonna be able to see well enough to use VR or even SL lol.  I already have vision problems.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

81 here.  I'm not sure at 81, I'm gonna be able to see well enough to use VR or even SL lol.  I already have vision problems.

By then, they'll use direct brain stimulation of the visual cortex!

Edited October 3, 2022 by Love Zhaoying

[Gabriele Graves]

Came across this article by chance: https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2022/10/07/its-lonely-in-the-metaverse-decentralands-38-daily-active-users-in-a-13b-ecosystem/

SL's usage numbers don't look bad at all by comparison:

Decentraland: 38 users in a 24 hour period
The Sandbox: 522 users in the same 24 hour period

Would be interesting to see what Meta's numbers are.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

8 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Would be interesting to see what Meta's numbers are.

Apparently not that great since (according to leaked memos) they're now attempting to force their own employees to use the platform "at least once a week".

[Love Zhaoying]

Unless they live under a rock, you know these other companies have to be jealous of SL even while they look down on SL from their tinyverses.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

12 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Unless they live under a rock, you know these other companies have to be jealous of SL even while they look down on SL from their tinyverses.

For sure!

Whenever SL gets mentioned there's always a lot of dismissive hand waving and waffling about blockchains and VR and other overhyped "advances" but you can bet that behind the scenes they're all scratching their heads trying to work out how SL has kept going for two decades when they can't even attract enough users to sustain their platform for a couple of years.

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

you can bet that behind the scenes they're all scratching their heads trying to work out how SL has kept going for two decades when they can't even attract enough users to sustain their platform for a couple of years.

That's easy enough to explain. Second Life arrived when computer technology was interesting among people at large, when virtual worlds were a novel and enticing concept, when the world economy was booming and people were looking for excuses to spend money on cool hardware.

That time will never come again.

Edited October 11, 2022 by ChinRey

[Brightstar7777]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That's easy enough to explain. Second Life arrived when computer technology was interesting among people at large, when virtual worlds were a novel and enticing concept, when the world economy was booming and people were looking for excuses to spend money on cool hardware.

That time will never come again.

I don't think people will get tired of immersion in other worlds, nor lose their fascination with becoming new things. People haven't lost interest in socializing, travelling, and doing things together in spite of the things that have made this far less accessible than it was a few years ago. The pattern is always the same, something shifts and opens up new and exciting recreational, cultural, artistic, and existential possibilities. People respond to that because we're hardwired to explore and because of millennia of established patterns still tug at us from the meta.

That time is always here in some form, hiding in open view right in front of us!

Edited October 11, 2022 by Brightstar7777

[Arielle Popstar]

8 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Apparently not that great since (according to leaked memos) they're now attempting to force their own employees to use the platform "at least once a week".

Probably from a lack of R4pe Me signs. Bet it would be busier is there was sexual content. Sure works for S/L!

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Probably from a lack of R4pe Me signs. Bet it would be busier is there was sexual content. Sure works for S/L!

Is sarcasm? I'm getting better at detecting it!

[Katherine Heartsong]

And that right there will be an issue in these so-called metaverses.

If any company thinks adults are going to participate in some online metaverse in significant numbers, there will be a need for sexual content. And a wide range of it.

Close that part of human experience off by not allowing it, and you've already doomed yourself as a metaverse. And yet, there will still be meetings where some C-level alpha-type person is asking, "Why aren't we attracting older users?" and some horny junior-level gal/guy in a corner biting their knuckle wanting to scream out, "Sex, you moron!!! We want to get sexy!!!"

I'm convinced that this is a fable, this all-encompassing metaverse. There will be dozens of splintered platforms that offer niche experiences, maybe/hopefully places you can move between with all of your stuff, depending on what you want, but a single experience like SL is not going to get built again, at least not in the way SL has allowed the users to drive the direction/content.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[Brightstar7777]

1 hour ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

If any company thinks adults are going to participate in some online metaverse in significant numbers, there will be a need for sexual content. And a wide range of it...

...maybe/hopefully places you can move between with all of your stuff...

...not in the way SL has allowed the users to drive the direction/content.

This seems like a narrow view that excludes a lot of possibilities, as in the vast majority of them. There is more to life than limited virtual recreation of physical intimacy. What about energy and connection, or being in sync with larger things, or appreciating wonderful worlds and the new life and possibilities that they contain? Reducing it all to a nightclub, brothel, or suburb is so specific and strange because it's as if it seeks to exclude the magick that makes everything worthwhile. To us, it strands out as obviously incomplete even if you aren't ace, non-human, or determined to realize the potential of a limitless realm of imagination rather than digitally recreate a facsimile of older tropes. Why clip your own wings and tail and ignore the implications of our formlessness? Higher dimensional life is about so much more than virtualizing the same old tropes in degraded form. That's not visionary or compelling to the psyche. Beyond all this, wasn't Second Life always an allegory for something higher involving agents and avatars and worlds? Wasn't it in fact modelled after something? This is a big story, and this is one of the seeds or triggers and gateways to higher realization accessible to anyone, intrinsic to life in all forms.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Brightstar7777

[Istelathis]

Even the employees don't want to be in Horizon Worlds, and Meta is more or less forcing them to use it.

Quote

“Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

As someone who likes VR, I probably wouldn't like Meta for long periods of time either, especially when it becomes a chore and is driven mostly by having to go to meetings, and perform menial tasks, I would rather be elsewhere doing things I want to do.  Just as I feel in real life, I would rather not be going to meetings in real life, or performing menial tasks.  When I turn on my computer, it is mostly for entertainment.

Meta wants to streamline entertainment, they want to call all of the shots, they want the metaverse to be their vision, and that is why I think it will not go very far.  They do not provide what most people want, and if we want a metaverse which encompasses the globe which billions of people actually want to use every day much like the Internet, then it must be decentralized to allow for creative freedom for everyone.

When I think of meta, I think of all of the bland, generic, rubbish tech giants out there now that have stifled the web which was once something beautiful to behold, a maze of mystery, with creative talent spread amongst it.

If meta is the metaverse, then what a loss to humanity it will be.   A  bland and tasteless ad generating monopoly

Source:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/10/07/report-even-metas-employees-dont-want-to-go-its-own-metaverse/?sh=c1bf2d26fcf0

[Gabriele Graves]

The adult/non-adult aspect brings up an interesting question.  Who do we imagine using the metaverse?  Adults only or minors as well?

Adult only is far easier but I think the ship has sailed on not letting in minors to online environments already.  So it would seem a non-starter to discount them and who has been able to stop them gaining access anyway?.  If they are to be allowed in then adult content would have to be separated off and inaccessible to minors. A robust content rating system would have to be in place for that and that's something that social media clearly struggles with and gets raked over the coals over continually politically.

That makes having adult stuff really difficult.  You cannot just wave your hands and say "All content would be reviewed" because at that scale it just wouldn't be possible and doesn't even work well for just social media posts.  AI?  Perhaps one day but not anytime soon I think.

SL probably only really gets away with the system we have and it's huge imperfections in this area because it is niche, if it was used by the masses it would be grossly inadequate.

As an adult, I wouldn't be interested in a place that was only minor-friendly even though my adult activities are extremely tame by most people's standards.

I don't have solutions, I think conceptually there should be a place for it all but I have no idea how the metaverse could be all inclusive from the minors level to adult.  I think this really needs to be figured out before we have more environments that cause harm to people.

 

[Brightstar7777]

25 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

The adult/non-adult aspect brings up an interesting question.  Who do we imagine using the metaverse?  Adults only or minors as well?

Who will protect the children from youtube, or libraries and bookstores, for that matter? Do we want it to be the taliban, or other variations flavors, and dialects of this, or do we choose to live free from fear and obsessive crucifixion of spiritual freedom.

It's only necessary to divide the world if you first accept the premise that some of it is somehow naturally unwholesome or deviant or corrupt, or that we need people to dominate the same life that they and their hidden agenda literally just degraded with obviously misanthropic premise. It's abusive "thought leadership."

It's not necessary to wage cultural war online or offline. Why not give it a rest? The only true obscenity is the historical levels of destruction, genocide, and misery that it has consistently authored throughout time in one form or another for at least two millennia. We have progressed beyond that, and yet some seem to feel a strange sentimental need to return to the dark ages.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Brightstar7777

[Gabriele Graves]

There are protections already in those things you mentioned.  In a 3D interactive environment it seems to me you would need those protections to be much better.

Your idealised view of the world isn't our current reality.  Unless the metaverse is something that will only happen after a huge social upheaval and change to what you are espousing then it will need to be acceptable to society we have today in order to work.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[animats]

11 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

SL probably only really gets away with the system we have and it's huge imperfections in this area because it is niche, if it was used by the masses it would be grossly inadequate.

That may be backwards. SL works because it tolerates adult activity but isn't centered around it. In this, it replicates real life, which is what SL is supposed to do.

SL has most of the problems of real life. Landlords, evictions, neighbor problems, encroachments, ugly builds running down a neighborhood, a public works department with limited resources - SL has all that. We even have roads with potholes, and if you complain enough they sometimes get fixed. Just like real life.

VRchat has come around to this position. Sex is OK in private spaces, but not in public. That makes VRChat similar to Moderate land in SL. Meta's Horizon does not allow sex at all, and they have more trouble with it because some of their users expect any attempt to have sex to be instantly stopped. Then some users complain when it isn't.

Realistically, either you allow some places for sex, or you need an army of moderators. The army of moderators usually ends up being outsourced to people in a call center somewhere. Facebook/Meta and Roblox do that. Now you have an army of anonymous minimum-wage workers armed with ban hammers and unaccountable for their actions. Then you have people screaming on social media that they were banned for an invalid reason.

[Coffee Pancake]

[Gabriele Graves]

Well, I didn't expect that to turn to insults so quickly.  Getting kinda sick of people who seem to think their "world views" are "better than mine" but they have to resort to insults to bolster them up.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Gabriele Graves]

16 minutes ago, animats said:

That may be backwards. SL works because it tolerates adult activity but isn't centered around it. In this, it replicates real life, which is what SL is supposed to do.

SL has most of the problems of real life. Landlords, evictions, neighbor problems, encroachments, ugly builds running down a neighborhood, a public works department with limited resources - SL has all that. We even have roads with potholes, and if you complain enough they sometimes get fixed. Just like real life.

VRchat has come around to this position. Sex is OK in private spaces, but not in public. That makes VRChat similar to Moderate land in SL. Meta's Horizon does not allow sex at all, and they have more trouble with it because some of their users expect any attempt to have sex to be instantly stopped. Then some users complain when it isn't.

Realistically, either you allow some places for sex, or you need an army of moderators. The army of moderators usually ends up being outsourced to people in a call center somewhere. Facebook/Meta and Roblox do that. Now you have an army of anonymous minimum-wage workers armed with ban hammers and unaccountable for their actions. Then you have people screaming on social media that they were banned for an invalid reason.

I'm hoping that not having places for sex wasn't coming through on my post.  I absolutely think there should be all parts of life represented in the metaverse but I'm not convinced the protections that we have in SL will be acceptable by today's society en masse.