Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse

[Lindal Kidd]

Son of a gun. I agree with both Animats and Prok, at least to a significant extent.

So now what do I do?

[animats]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Son of a gun. I agree with both Animats and Prok, at least to a significant extent.

So now what do I do?

I dunno. I gather that some others have significantly more problems with other residents than I do. My contacts with LL Governance have been along the lines of "at this location, this object is partly blocking a road" or "giant griefing object is taking out 9 sims near me." I sometimes report excessively large, rotating, floating, glowing FOR RENT signs. (The biggest landlords seem to have the smallest signs. That may say something.) That's about it.

I have a moderate sized non-adult business in Zindra, and most of the parcels are open rez with a 20 minute timeout. I don't have much trouble. I have NPCs running around, and they find visitors and say hello. This gives the impression that someone is watching. Under certain circumstances the NPCs will notify me, but that almost never happens. I have a few NPCs at some GTFO hubs, where they perform much the same function. A light touch is effective.

I don't see much need for iron-fisted governance. There are occasional serious problems, and that's what LL's governance unit is for. It's good that they don't get involved with the little stuff.

I'd like to see LL offer to move content off mainland to isolated regions made to proprietors of mainland skyboxes. But this should be done by persuasion and incentives if at all possible, rather than by order.

[Coffee Pancake]

Likewise, I've been setting public access land to allow rezzing with an absurdly long autoreturn and not had problems in years.

A little manual clean up once in a blue moon and a friendly IM to check the lost and found folder takes seconds, it's mostly just been newbies, although I did have one guy toss out a whole skybox fungeon once, which was hilarious.

If I tend to report anything it's encroachment, big flashy rotating signs or the occasional "seruis biznessman' trying to get away with a huge temp rezzor.

 

[Sammy Huntsman]

Also wanted to add, SL is not a Meta Verse, it is a virtual world.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

46 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Also wanted to add, SL is not a Meta Verse, it is a virtual world.

Well, and that's one of the central issues at stake, right? Will the metaverse be, as techno-utopians would like, a free-wheeling, open-access, decentralized network, much like the internet? In which case, governance becomes very difficult indeed, but the whole thing is much more "democratic."

Or, does it mean what Meta and Microsoft (and probably also Apple and Amazon) would prefer, which is a huge walled garden run on, and ultimately controlled by one or more corporations? Which is, of course, also what SL is, in essence. In this case, governance will become not merely possible but necessary, because the controlling corporations will be held liable for content and online behaviours.

The latter seems to me a lot more likely than the former, because the conditions that saw the birth of the internet no longer apply. The internet developed more-or-less organically with very little centralized control. I don't think that the metaverse will be permitted that luxury.

And if not, will it really be a "metaverse"? Or just a  3D Facebook?

Edited November 12, 2021 by Scylla Rhiadra
Question marks!?!?!?

[Coffee Pancake]

Corporate take over of the internet has crushed all of the founding principals, markets have exploded in size yet choice of services is controlled by a handful of companies who are now too big to hold to account.

The window of opportunity for a true open metaverse is rapidly closing and may already be impossible.

Snowcrash made another bolder prediction besides the metaverse that we are sleep walking into reality. Corporate fiefdoms in which the state is just a bit player.

Edited November 12, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Nick0678]

[Scylla Rhiadra]

This is interesting and relevant:

"At the same time, [Meta CTO Andrew] Bosworth said policing user behavior “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.” FT reporter Hannah Murphy later tweeted that Bosworth was citing Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: a maxim, coined by Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, that says “content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.” (Masnick’s writing notes that this isn’t an argument against pushing for better moderation, but large systems will “always end up frustrating very large segments of the population.”)."

And this (emphasis mine):

"While the full memo isn’t publicly available, Bosworth posted a blog entry alluding to it later in the day. The post, titled “Keeping people safe in VR and beyond,” references several of Meta’s existing VR moderation tools. That includes letting people block other users in VR, as well as an extensive Horizon surveillance system for monitoring and reporting bad behavior. Meta has also pledged $50 million for research into practical and ethical issues around its metaverse plans."

Sounds like a good time.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22779006/meta-facebook-cto-andrew-bosworth-memo-metaverse-disney-safety-content-moderation-scale

[Ardy Lay]

On 11/2/2021 at 4:59 AM, Maryanne Solo said:

https://community.zed.run/2021/10/28/melbourne-cup-carnival-enters-the-metaverse/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=melbourne-cup-carnival-enters-the-metaverse

Fascineighting!

The video presentation on that web site is terrifying

[Prokofy Neva]

21 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

It's worth noting, failures of moderation in Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter are leading to real world violence and riots. These platforms are enabling a rise in extremist views across the boards.

When SL fails to moderate the consequences are far less severe than angry mobs storming government buildings.

It's a cross section with some very connected and important people in it among the Lindens and among the residents. The Lindens have come from every major IT company in the world and represent a wealth of networks; residents have networks that are important too. It cannot be looked at as mere numbers or mere tech. It is a very special and rich kind of human capital.

But in some ways it is at a very perilous moment, when the critics important to its early years are almost all gone and when it is becoming more conformist and authoritarian and creating a kind of Trumansville. 

[Prokofy Neva]

9 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

This is interesting and relevant:

"At the same time, [Meta CTO Andrew] Bosworth said policing user behavior “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.” FT reporter Hannah Murphy later tweeted that Bosworth was citing Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: a maxim, coined by Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, that says “content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.” (Masnick’s writing notes that this isn’t an argument against pushing for better moderation, but large systems will “always end up frustrating very large segments of the population.”)."

And this (emphasis mine):

"While the full memo isn’t publicly available, Bosworth posted a blog entry alluding to it later in the day. The post, titled “Keeping people safe in VR and beyond,” references several of Meta’s existing VR moderation tools. That includes letting people block other users in VR, as well as an extensive Horizon surveillance system for monitoring and reporting bad behavior. Meta has also pledged $50 million for research into practical and ethical issues around its metaverse plans."

Sounds like a good time.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22779006/meta-facebook-cto-andrew-bosworth-memo-metaverse-disney-safety-content-moderation-scale

I have nothing but condemnation for Mike Masnick who for years and years has advocated the crime of breaking copyright in the belief that this will make a better world. It most demonstrably has not done that, while he and his coders' sect have destroyed media, music, social life, civic, and government institutions.

It's all predicated on this idiotic mantra about the "analogue hole" -- as if in the analogue world, content isn't moderated and protected. It's all premised on the wilfully ignorant notion of 0/99, that unless you have near-perfect compliance than anything less is not worth doing. But it is. Any livelihoods you protect, any privacy or literal personal safety you protect, is of course worth doing!

The Lindens have extensive surveillance systems, too, of course, but are selective about using them.

[Qie Niangao]

7 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

The video presentation on that web site is terrifying

Antidote:

 

[Qie Niangao]

11 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

"[...] Meta has also pledged $50 million for research into practical and ethical issues around its metaverse plans."

Yeah, cuz a trillion dollar company addresses an "existential threat" with fifty million "for research." 

It is an existential threat, and not only because CDA Section 230 may get a bit more than the light touch-up Meta's pretend pro-regulation advertising suggests. There really is no existence proof of a responsibly moderated social network at scale, let alone one that's profitable.

If anything, the cost of content moderation is supra-linear in the number of contributors, meaning the bigger the social network, the more expensive it is per contributor.

Considering the "network effect" of user conflict, it's what one would expect. Throwing a little lame AI at the problem, as Facebook and others have tried, has so far demonstrated zero benefit and may even have made things worse, leaving no known course of improvement other than hiring millions more of the miserable human moderators who burn out in a few months.

And yet investors still buy the stock and advertisers still pay to be presented to the collectively delusional victims.

[Katherine Heartsong]

On 11/12/2021 at 6:54 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

A really large scale metaverse is simply going to have to do better, or it will be legislated to do so by real world governments.

That, to me, sounds like you are thinking that this metaverse is a single entity.

I don't see the metaverse being a single entity more than I see the WWW being a single website.

The metaverse is going to be, for better or worse, hundreds of millions of individual places to go, virtual worlds, much like privately owned sims here in SL. The glue that is the "metaverse" will be a standardized set of technology that govern how you move from place to place and display those places to whatever viewer technology a user is employing (think HTML). And yes, this will lead to a slightly tangled mess of viewers not always rendering content correctly.

Each place in this metaverse will be governed by it's own set of rules, with most likely some government regulation about content based on the physical location of the server the world lives on, or the location of that world's owner.

Edited November 13, 2021 by Katherine Heartsong

[Katherine Heartsong]

17 hours ago, Nick0678 said:

How I live my life (heads down to my studio now and works on an abstract landscape for my elderly parents).

[Katherine Heartsong]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah, cuz a trillion dollar company addresses an "existential threat" with fifty million "for research."

I always have a good chuckle when I hear things like that, too. The fifty million figure is a useful thing to dazzle the plebs with ... "OMG honey, did you hear that? Fifty MILLION!!!" .. because to many of us that amount of money is obscenely large. It's not.

That's not even pocket change to FB, Apple, Google, Amazon, and many individuals now. That's 5 in 100,000, or the equivalent of someone with $1000 giving 5 cents to charity. And for individuals, Bezos is worth so much the average US worker would need to work 4 million years to earn his amount of wealth. Million years.

Hell, my local school board's annual budget for a small city is nearly $650,000,000. Ten times what FB is thinking is neat to invest in research. It's a distraction. $50,000,00 means simply "We don't really give a *****."

Edited November 13, 2021 by Katherine Heartsong

[Scylla Rhiadra]

54 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

That, to me, sounds like you are thinking that this metaverse is a single entity.

I don't see the metaverse being a single entity more than I see the WWW being a single website.

The metaverse is going to be, for better or worse, hundreds of millions of individual places to go, virtual worlds, much like privately owned sims here in SL. The glue that is the "metaverse" will be a standardized set of technology that govern how you move from place to place and display those places to whatever viewer technology a user is employing (think HTML). And yes, this will lead to a slightly tangled mess of viewers not always rendering content correctly.

Each place in this metaverse will be governed by it's own set of rules, with most likely some government regulation about content based on the physical location of the server the world lives on, or the location of that world's owner.

Well, yes . . . and no.

The point that I was making in my subsequent posts -- and not a particularly novel one, god knows -- is that there is a tension between those, mostly techno-utopians, who see the metaverse as a sort of 3D web, and corporations who want to "own" it.

In the former instance, the metaverse, like the web now, becomes largely ungovernable, at least at the "meta" level. Interoperability and technical standards, of the sort established for the web by the W3C, aren't really about governance in the sense of controlling content.

In the latter instance, the metaverse will be controlled, and literally owned, by corporations, probably working in collaboration. Facebook sees the metaverse as their own walled garden; Microsoft (working with FB) wants to establish and control standards of interoperability, and, by implication, the connections that link different VR "bubbles." Disney just a couple of days ago spoke of what "their" metaverse would look like, without irony.

So, there is a bit of a battle on right now to define the metaverse -- whether it is to be free, open access, and open source -- in which case it will be ungovernable except within carefully controlled bubbles, more democratic, and probably toxic as hell -- or whether it is corporate controlled, in which case it will be both oppressive and ultimately ungovernable, because content control doesn't scale well.

My own sense is that it's the latter model that is going to prevail, which doesn't bode well for it as an enabling, democratizing technology -- but, ironically, may bring it closer to the dystopian, corporatist model imagined in Snow Crash.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I have nothing but condemnation for Mike Masnick who for years and years has advocated the crime of breaking copyright in the belief that this will make a better world. It most demonstrably has not done that, while he and his coders' sect have destroyed media, music, social life, civic, and government institutions.

It's all predicated on this idiotic mantra about the "analogue hole" -- as if in the analogue world, content isn't moderated and protected. It's all premised on the wilfully ignorant notion of 0/99, that unless you have near-perfect compliance than anything less is not worth doing. But it is. Any livelihoods you protect, any privacy or literal personal safety you protect, is of course worth doing!

The Lindens have extensive surveillance systems, too, of course, but are selective about using them.

The debate about copyright and IP -- and I rather suspect you and I are on different sides on this one -- while not entirely irrelevant, is a wee bit of a digressive avenue. What is very much at stake in the issue of governance is, in large measure, control of intellectual property rights. Disney's interest in the metaverse is almost certainly mostly about protecting (and of course finding new ways to monetize) their own IP.

The larger point that Masnick is making is not that governance is impossible, and so not worth pursuing, but that it is very very difficult, and will inevitably be very very imperfect. I think that is correct.

The issue of surveillance is, I think, huge. LL doesn't much use its systems (except when ARs are filed, I imagine) because they recognize that 1) it would have a freezing effect, and 2) they'd likely have to actually do something about the toxic crap spawning in-world if they detected it. And they don't want to do 2) because of 1). One of the reasons FB looks so very bad right now is that their platform was not merely hosting toxic content and misinformation -- it was actually being tacitly encouraged. I.e., they knew about it and either did nothing or else subtly enabled it. LL likely just doesn't want to know.

As AI gets better, surveillance will become more effective -- which may well have the effect of reducing toxic content. But it will also likely turn platforms, including new VR ones run by Meta, Amazon, and whoever -- into banal, sterile places. Creativity and free thought is going to be just as much a victim of surveillance as misinformation and toxic content.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

There really is no existence proof of a responsibly moderated social network at scale, let alone one that's profitable.

Yeah, this I think.

Which means it unlikely that they'll ever be a "responsibly moderated social network at scale." Nodes in the metaverse are either going be the Wild West, or fake "safe spaces" that manage to enable the worst of both worlds: uncontrollable garbage, and serious restrictions on freedom and creativity applied to those who do play by the rules.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yeah, this I think.

Which means it unlikely that they'll ever be a "responsibly moderated social network at scale." Nodes in the metaverse are either going be the Wild West, or fake "safe spaces" that manage to enable the worst of both worlds: uncontrollable garbage, and serious restrictions on freedom and creativity applied to those who do play by the rules.

That is probably a good thing considering that we all have differing opinions on what is "safe spaces" misinformation, garbage etc. Growth comes through being challenged so if everyone was the same, we wouldn't need to learn anything new and it would be boring as heck.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

8 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

That is probably a good thing considering that we all have differing opinions on what is "safe spaces" misinformation, garbage etc. Growth comes through being challenged so if everyone was the same, we wouldn't need to learn anything new and it would be boring as heck.

I don't disagree that the employment of "safe spaces" that merely shut down debate are a good thing.

But "safe spaces" that disable, oh, say, holocaust denial, p*rn featuring minors, incitements to violence, etc., are probably not a bad thing?

Almost no one I know disagrees that some form of censorship is necessary. Where we trip over each other is in deciding where to draw the line.

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The debate about copyright and IP -- and I rather suspect you and I are on different sides on this one -- while not entirely irrelevant, is a wee bit of a digressive avenue. What is very much at stake in the issue of governance is, in large measure, control of intellectual property rights. Disney's interest in the metaverse is almost certainly mostly about protecting (and of course finding new ways to monetize) their own IP.

The larger point that Masnick is making is not that governance is impossible, and so not worth pursuing, but that it is very very difficult, and will inevitably be very very imperfect. I think that is correct.

The issue of surveillance is, I think, huge. LL doesn't much use its systems (except when ARs are filed, I imagine) because they recognize that 1) it would have a freezing effect, and 2) they'd likely have to actually do something about the toxic crap spawning in-world if they detected it. And they don't want to do 2) because of 1). One of the reasons FB looks so very bad right now is that their platform was not merely hosting toxic content and misinformation -- it was actually being tacitly encouraged. I.e., they knew about it and either did nothing or else subtly enabled it. LL likely just doesn't want to know.

As AI gets better, surveillance will become more effective -- which may well have the effect of reducing toxic content. But it will also likely turn platforms, including new VR ones run by Meta, Amazon, and whoever -- into banal, sterile places. Creativity and free thought is going to be just as much a victim of surveillance as misinformation and toxic content.

I've often found that people actively promoting copyright breaking are on a slope that leads to disregard for privacy (privacy and private property and intellectual property are deeply connected), and then ultimately a disregard for personal safety. And yeah, there's a huge difference in scale and remedies between a gatcha rare copybotted in SL and incitement of massacres in RL via the Internet. 

But it's all of a piece. It's a mentality.  Nihilism has consequences in the RL. Masnick is not making any larger point as he doesn't run a world or even visit any worlds; he hammers on his own leftist agenda and always has, using these issues as megaphones.

As I've often pointed out about our four-year long struggle with Jack Linden to get the ad-farm policy in place, or as one could say about people who tried to bring attention to various atrocities like the Rwanda massacre, and yeah, they are wildly different, the operative principle is the same: not lack of information, not even agreement about the problem, but political will -- political will, at the mercy of various "stakeholders."

It is not hard to have a policy about ad farming once you really grasp that it harms your own bottom line as people cease buying your product or dump it. The foundational myths about freedom of expression and enabling people to do WTF they wanted on their land or even yours under the guise of "creativity" ran up against the harsh fact that when one avatar's "creativity" prevents the creativity of all others, you have a conflict that is worth making a ruling about. Finally the VP of Product who succeeded Jack, who had many great accomplishments in SL (and that policy was one of them) could pointedly ask these miscreants with their 16m micro-empires: "What are you doing on that 16m? Your knitting?"

It's not hard to police and can be done by both automatic and manual methods. It's not even a scaling problem; after all, you have flags in code that make it impossible to build on Governor Linden land; you can make it impossible to build on a parcel smaller than X, like 96m. If you make it impossible to put out pumpkins for Trick or Treat (or now mailboxes) designed only for use only in Bellisseria, you can do other things like that with certain obelisks or who knows what. Every object has a UUID and that enables pass/go.

But I think you're being unfair to the Lindens re: data harvesting and privacy. I think they have always been far better than their peers on this scale. Over the years, they might have had a few times when there was some kind of password hash thing but it was not serious. I've never heard of a public figure in RL being made an object of RL scandal because of chat or voice leaked from Second Life, either by his resident enemies or the Lab itself, you know? Partly that is due to SL being such small fry, but it was very much in the public eye in 2006-2007 and is now again to a small extent.

Everybody wants to make the electrons do the work of organic parents, schools, or community institutions, and these are battlefields now for good reason if you look at school board meetings in America and much else.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

11 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I don't disagree that the employment of "safe spaces" that merely shut down debate are a good thing.

But "safe spaces" that disable, oh, say, holocaust denial, p*rn featuring minors, incitements to violence, etc., are probably not a bad thing?

Almost no one I know disagrees that some form of censorship is necessary. Where we trip over each other is in deciding where to draw the line.

p*rn featuring minors is clearly against the law in most countries, what constitutes an incitement to riot is debatable and best left to the courts and afaik, having an opinion that there was no holocaust is not against any particular law is it? So only for one of the three would moderators have a clear guidance as to what to moderate, the other two would have to depend on the policy and curtailment of the freedom of expression within a particular social media?

[Prokofy Neva]

On 11/12/2021 at 8:14 AM, Mr Amore said:

It's worth noting, failures of moderation in Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter are leading to real world violence and riots. These platforms are enabling a rise in extremist views across the boards.

When SL fails to moderate the consequences are far less severe than angry mobs storming government buildings.

The person who founded Mt. Gox, the bitcoin capital, got her start in Second Life. She committed suicide in real life. Why do you think the Lindens put so much resources into fraud deterrence and control? Because while it seems pretty silly to use SL to launder money for, say, terrorism or even an influence op, it is still in some ways the perfect place for it. Remember how the buddies of the US Embassy staff person who played the E.V.E online game knew more than even the CIA about how the "police" (February 26th brigade) turned against the US Embassy in Benghazi?

Barret Brown, who assisted Anonymous in various crimes of theft of credit cards and such, was an SL griefer who would remind me of this fact when I blogged about his antics critically. There were other 4chan and related griefers who were part of a movement that brought us 8chan, which enabled the terrorism and killing of real people. I'd like to hope none of those script kiddies raining script particles of racist and sexist obscenities on my sims were among those who committed terrorism, but it's anonymous, right? You can't be sure.

Anonymous is still crazily celebrated by feminists for the Steubenville case yet few concede that it was Anonymous who outed her name and ruined the life of a coach with false claims, and that one of them went to jail and did hard time, and for good reason. 

You're absolutely sure that there isn't a single participant of January 6 in Second Life? I know for a fact that several people who were at least present at the rally are in SL. 

The blood/brain barrier of the Internet and real life was long ago crossed all over the world and even the actual blood/brain barrier has been crossed with sometimes disastrous results.

 

Edited November 13, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

On 11/12/2021 at 8:14 AM, Mr Amore said:

It's worth noting, failures of moderation in Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter are leading to real world violence and riots. These platforms are enabling a rise in extremist views across the boards.

When SL fails to moderate the consequences are far less severe than angry mobs storming government buildings.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.