Rosedale back as "strategic advisor"

[Free]

Last time I saw him in-world, he looked like this at a Future of the Metaverse event:

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Gear]

That's more like it.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Sid]

So he starts phishing for free ideas.

 

[Free]

So he start phishing for free ideas.

How else do you expect rich people to get richer?

 

[Sid]

How else do you expect rich people to get richer?

Wasn't his LoveMachine based on that idea too?

 

[Free]

Second Life’s founder doesn’t believe in VR

Philip Rosedale on what’s next for the platform, and why VR isn’t ready for mainstream adoption.

www.protocol.com

The takeaway is that the metaverse or VR or whatever you want to call online environments like Second Life is that they just aren't ready for grownups, i.e. you can't really take it to work. Because apparently all life is business. Same old same old.

 

[bubblesort]

I just listened to two podcasts, and taken together, they kind of put the current VR hype cycle, and SL's place within it, in context.

The first is Rosedale and Hamlet. It was published on Jan 20, 2022, and titled "Philip Rosedale & Wagner James Au On The Future Of Second Life & The Metaverse." They are talking like this is the first in what will be a series of podcasts.

Then I listened to a Philosophy Talk podcast from December 12, 2021, and titled, "What Can VR (Actually) Do?" It's a philosophy professor and a literature professor who is into philosophy talking about stuff. In this episode they talk to a Stanford VR researcher. Also, at the end they have a guy basically doing a quick 5 minute think piece on VR and multiverses in entertainment, and it's actually really cool, even if he talks too fast.

I will skip the standard selling points of VR that we've all heard a million times before and skip to the good stuff:

These two podcasts, taken together, kind of give some contours of a vision that Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are responding to when they make moves with regard to VR. In other words, I think these are the big ideas driving the current hype cycle:

1. Revenue: SecondLife has roughly the same revenue per user as google. Roblox is way bigger than SL, but if we define success as people who make more than $10k a year, then SL has slightly more successful people in it than Roblox. The numbers given were from 2021: 1,050 successful people in Roblox, vs 1,600 successful people in SL. Most of this is because Roblox takes a much larger percentage of profits from their creators than SL does. This situation makes me worry that the Linden Lab money people will see Roblox as a model to emulate. If they do, they may try to squeeze more revenue out of us.

2. Pro-Social: "Pro-social" is a repeating buzz word. To be pro-social is to have a platform that encourages users to not be dicks to each other, while also keeping them happy. Rosedale said at one point that he would see people post complaints and flame and troll about certain company policies in the SL forums, but then he would ask them about the issue in question in SL, and they would be a lot nicer to him about it than they were in the traditional world wide web forum (try to ignore that it's kinda creepy for a CEO to track down people from the forum in SL, in order to argue with them in SL). The Stanford researcher says that people are almost always more nice to each other in VR than they are on the WWW, because VR is so immersive. Nobody wants to be mean in such an immersive space, right? It's hard to tell on a podcast, but I think he said this with a straight face.

2a. Pro-social is throwing shade: As a little addendum to point 2, I want to note that when they say pro-social, they are almost explicitly using the term to throw shade at social media companies. Social media companies generate revenue by showing content that maximizes engagement. Maximizing engagement means pissing you off. Pissing you off means, as Hamlet put it, "burning down the capitol" (referencing Jan 6, 2020). VR companies are not going to make you burn the capitol down, because VR is pro-social. Social media companies like Facebook must be anti-social then, I guess? Nobody ever explicitly called FB anti-social, in either podcast, but it's the elephant in the room, so I'll say it.

3. Marketing / Privacy: It is extremely difficult to market to people in VR, however, VR makes up for that in raw biometrics. My Oculus Quest is covered in cameras and sensors. It records all kinds of video and audio of any room I happen to be in when I use it, and I think it's safe to assume that Facebook owns that video, which they will use to do god knows what with. Aside from the creepy NSA uses for that information, I think General Mills and Coca Cola might be very interested to see how their products are used in my home. Also, when using a VR headset, your motions can identify you much easier than, say, photographs of your face. If you walk across the room, you can be identified by your gait. If you move around, AI can detect your mood. If we can not be marketed to in VR, then VR companies will simply market us (or our data, to be precise).

4. New User Experience / Retention: Old users move off into their own private areas, while new users are dumped into a hostile environment, where the only experienced users around are usually there to grief them. This has always been a problem with virtual worlds, more than it's been a problem in traditional WWW spaces, IMHO. I think VR Chat has a big problem with nobody knowing how to find good stuff, but SL also has a problem of having lots of old users and no new blood coming in. This problem will be solved with VR companies being more 'pro-social', I guess? Rosedale and Hamlet discussed ratings system ideas to address this, but it was basically Rosedale describing social credit, while reassuring us that this time it's a good thing. I think the Stanford researcher wants to rely on people's propensity to be nice in VR to solve this issue. Nobody really knows how to solve this. Maybe the creepy biometrics collection from point 3 will give us a solution some day.

So that's the general contour of the new hype cycle: VR is profitable, and people will like VR, because VR is so pro-social, it makes everybody super nice! Nobody is ever a jerk in VR... unless you are a noob. Noobs are lame.

 

[Free]

If you want to watch almost 10 minutes of "tech pundits" talking over each other and getting so much wrong, this is the video for you.



The only part I think is on point is Esqueda talking about how we'll never see a singular framework for a future metaverse that everyone connects to through the various services, because CAPITALISM. This is why we're lucky in how the internet was built. Socialist DARPA!

 

[Sid]

There is of course the possibility that the Real Metaverse™ will be set up by companies that gasp the idea, that working together can be more profitable in the end than working against each other, most likely from outside the USA (where capitalism is the only lifeform allowed).

 

[Clara D.]

If you want to watch almost 10 minutes of "tech pundits" talking over each other and getting so much wrong, this is the video for you.



The only part I think is on point is Esqueda talking about how we'll never see a singular framework for a future metaverse that everyone connects to through the various services, because CAPITALISM. This is why we're lucky in how the internet was built. Socialist DARPA!

"Comments are turned off." Lol.

 

[Madi Perth]

SLB07

Oh God Please No!

 

[bubblesort]

There is of course the possibility that the Real Metaverse™ will be set up by companies that gasp the idea, that working together can be more profitable in the end than working against each other, most likely from outside the USA (where capitalism is the only lifeform allowed).

I think real innovation that invents things like the internet and velcro follows the scientific community around. America was the center for scientific advancement in the 20th century, but in the 21st century, I think Europe overtook us. Even in the 90s, Europe was already ahead of us. Tim Berners-Lee is an Englishman who built the WWW for CERN, not for IBM. America just took the idea and ran with it faster than most parts of the world. If the metaverse happens in the next couple of decades, I expect some nordic country to do it.

 

[Sean Gorham]

If you want to watch almost 10 minutes of "tech pundits" talking over each other and getting so much wrong, this is the video for you.

"Nude suits." And we're all guys over 40...

 

[Anya Ristow]

1. Revenue: SecondLife has roughly the same revenue per user as google. Roblox is way bigger than SL, but if we define success as people who make more than $10k a year, then SL has slightly more successful people in it than Roblox. The numbers given were from 2021: 1,050 successful people in Roblox, vs 1,600 successful people in SL. Most of this is because Roblox takes a much larger percentage of profits from their creators than SL does. This situation makes me worry that the Linden Lab money people will see Roblox as a model to emulate. If they do, they may try to squeeze more revenue out of us.

If these numbers came from LL, they are bunk. The thing that always bothered me about LL's economic metrics were that they omitted the two largest expenses SL content creators had: tier and classified advertising. LL may only take 3.5% for money transfer, and token fees for other things, but tier is real world money that isn't disclosed, and classified advertising, if it still works like it used to, can be spendy if you let it, and also isn't disclosed. These are ways LL "squeezes revenue out of us" that don't show in the metrics.

Not that these fees are unreasonable. Just that the whole "make money in SL" never accounted for these, so you'd have people talking like they were running businesses, when what they actually meant by "successful" is that they were almost making tier. That is, playing the game for free.

As far as I know, we never got a measure of how many people were using SL revenue to keep a roof over their head in real life. I suspect it was vanishingly small, even at its peak.

 

[Govi]

Hello (Again) to Second Life Founder Philip Rosedale

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

All Metaverse efforts have at the moment one simple problem: high GPU prices for strange reasons. Nvidia even stopped to pretend that they want to decrease prices, instead increased their recommended prices a lot.

And the latest GPU released by AMD, normally a basic entry level GPU around 100 $, is sold around 300$ at minimum.

 

[Essence Lumin]

All Metaverse efforts have at the moment one simple problem: high GPU prices for strange reasons. Nvidia even stopped to pretend that they want to decrease prices, instead increased their recommended prices a lot.

And the latest GPU released by AMD, normally a basic entry level GPU around 100 $, is sold around 300$ at minimum.

If crypto currency values keep dropping that might change.

 

[Free]

Hey everyone, Wired magazine is still a thing.

How to Build a Better Metaverse

Second Life creator Philip Rosedale wants to prevent the Facebook-ization of virtual reality.

www.wired.com

THE METAVERSE, YOU may have heard, is the next big thing: an ever-present social cyberspace in which people—or their digital avatars—will work, hang out, and shop.

As it happens, this was also the next big thing in 2003. That’s when Philip Rosedale and his then-company Linden Lab launched Second Life, an immersive digital platform in which users can build worlds, create art, and buy and sell digital goods. After a spike of interest, Second Life faded into the background of internet culture, but it has maintained a loyal following of people who for whatever reason prefer its virtual reality to their own meatspace.

In many ways, the metaverse being pitched by Facebook—er, Meta—and other companies isn’t so different from Second Life. And yet Rosedale’s creation never came close to reaching the world-conquering scale that gets the likes of Mark Zuckerberg out of bed in the morning. What could make this time different?

Doing it the Not Facebook Way. But you know, probably likely a lot similar to the Facebook Way. But with no ads. But you know, probably with ads.