Griefing is typically achieved by placing garbage objects (if permissions allow building) or making hideous, obnoxious, obscene, and/or performance tanking avatars and ruining the look of a space.
It’s only a matter of time before he starts making content in the Metaverse.
(What? You’re telling me that the decades-old Second Life and Garry’s Mod are still more compelling than Horizon Worlds? But I thought they spent millions?)
If I’d have been in Zucks shoes I would have Skunkworked Horizon, don’t let any of it touch the rest of meta till it’s successful and hire the entire dev and design team from ModDB, GarysMod community, Roblox game makers, VRChat community and 4chan.
Because those are the places where the massively multiplayer extremely social experiences that captivate for decades are born, not the metrics driven social media timeline optimization set.
(I also recommend Stimpee who is clearly influence by dnsl)
Asking this because I can't find any other explanation for people paying millions for absolutely nothing
I did own some land in SL at one time. Why? Because building stuff in there was fun, and purchasing your own land was the only way to build permanent stuff and be assured others couldn't (easily) mess with it.
People pay money for software, and cpu time, and storage space. That's what SL payments get you.
People give you money for your time, also intangible.
Of course, then you won't be tied into the Secondlife ecosystem. All depends on your goals there.
I'm not sure why I haven't canceled it. It might be a combination of sunk costs (spent a lot of time working on some scripts/objects) and the fact that I am not sure I remember how to log in to cancel anymore.
SL for a hot minute was the Next Big Thing. Everyone was going to have work meetings there, and have virtual homes and participate in the virtual economy. To be honest, they were more successful than I ever thought they'd be.
Even Roblox loses money. IPO at $70, today $39. They spent too much buying market share.
The Roblox CEO is a physicist. I met him in the 1990s when he had a tiny startup in an alley off 8th St. in SF selling a physics engine called "Working Model". It took a long time for Roblox to slowly grow. It's not a make-money-fast business.
It's hard to be sure what you're referring to. By some definitions it includes Roblox (and Fortnite and Second Life). There's certainly no single "capital-M metaverse".
Maybe you mean "Multiplayer, persistent, VR"? VR Chat and Rec Room are doing pretty well.
Or maybe you mean web3 crypto stuff? Not doing so well.
Or maybe you mean "that thing that Meta built"?
Hard to know without you being specific
All I've heard of it is from YouTube videos my kid watches, and I'd love to know more :)
Yet, it gets hyped again and people go there and it's a fricken ghost-town. There is no there there. It's just a whole lot of nothing. Since it's inception, I've tried and tried and tried to see what it's about, and there's nothing there except built-then-abandoned things, tons of advertising, and no people.
Now, admittedly I've seen much of the same thing achieved with an IRC channel, as the graphics didn't necessarily do a ton of heavy lifting, but it was still a fun ambience. Which is really what Secondlife was always good at -- making some atmosphere for your online chat groups. There's the ability to pull in streaming video or audio as well, to tie it all together.
But yes, it's just a framework. It's what you make of it.
It affects other subjects too. I know people who've done a PhD "in" Harry Potter or Sherlock fan-fiction, but it's not about Harry Potter or Sherlock. After all, there's not that much to say about it, but they both started from some "theoretical" point of view, and then just wrapped those ideas around whatever observations they can make up about the subject.
AI seems difficult in that respect. It would need actual understanding. Without that, you can't really make observations about it the way you can make them about some book or a game. Otherwise, it stays restricted to checking a few dialogs with ChatGPT and commenting on that.
Here's an example from someone who did a PhD on second life about ... the MetaVerse. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-betterverse-note-div...
I got 2003
My best line ever was when they said they were looking for a technology "evangelist". I replied: I built a church, I'm your guy! Of course I meant that I built the replica of the Church of Saint Francis in Assisi inside Second Life.
It was incredible back then. Now we're talking about the Metaverse again, but in 2007, 16 years ago, it was so early days.
Another fun facts: Amazon's PR was... annoyed at my blog post, because it didn't meet the company's guidelines. I can easily guess that at least tens, if not hundreds, of people, applied for a job at Amazon because of that blog post. I left Amazon in 2014, and now I can safely say that Amazon PR was a nightmare, and one of the main reasons why I left. I wasn't perfect, of course, but still...
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
He's doing a new thing to simulate effects of economies, especially around inequality, and trying to create a model system which would support UBI: https://www.fairshare.social/
