Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse

It was an example for me of what is possible if you have people from different lived experiences and you give them the tools to build things. What happens will surprise you.

Warzel: I love the way you put that, that the virtual-world experience is tightly integrated with real life. I feel like it’s also a poignant reminder of what you said earlier, that these worlds aren’t antisocial or necessarily escapes from “the real world.” They’re just a different part of the real world.

People focusing on the ways to turn a quick buck will miss the opportunity.

social-media platforms now create this real distance, in part by being text-heavy. And that distance can lead you to say things or do things you’d never do in the physical world. It also lowers the bar for engagement, which means that firing off a shitty tweet is easy and people do it without thinking. But there’s so much engagement and visibility ... See more

Au: I think this is what Mark Zuckerberg and other would-be Metaverse builders right now are missing. It’s not the platform that matters as much as the community that is built around it. Rarely do communities have extreme loyalty to these platforms. If they don’t feel they’re being engaged with on a fair level, they take their friends and they get ... See more

these worlds aren’t antisocial or necessarily escapes from “the real world.” They’re just a different part of the real world.

the community is treated as some technicality on the way to platform adoption, as opposed to a new society and a new social context. There’s no small-town feel with Horizon, like there was when people were first coming into Second Life.

Something I’ve found kind of crushing is the lack of imagination from companies and actors in this space. You can literally build any possible vision of the future you want, detached from the laws of physics and reality, and you have Meta and others saying, Let’s do virtual meetings! You have people focused on trying to parcel up metaverse land and... See more

What Gen Z is doing in metaverse spaces is what the early Second Life users [were] doing, but on a far, far more massive scale. They don’t consider re-creating the real-life tropes to be as meaningful as adults and brands do.