Folding Ideas
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2023–2025
1:49:22 · 8.2M views · Mar 26, 2023
Dan Olson of Folding Ideas spends months in the virtual world Decentraland and delivers a long critique of the metaverse, NFTs and DAOs, and why virtual worlds fail as places.
Regarded as the definitive takedown of the metaverse hype and the Decentraland ecosystem.
10 comments from Hacker News
> I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the metaverse concept... If they had, is there even a compelling product there? For me, the definitive analysis here is Dan Olson's[1] (though in the context of decentraland). Doing a metaverse in VR is contradictory to having users walk from place to place (because a huge chunk of your users will get motion sick). Having a metaverse where you have to walk from place to place is contradictory to metaverse as a productivity tool (because walking from place to place is a lot slower than clicking a button). VR has some compelling standalone experiences, but the user is generally constrained to staying still or moving around a small, fixed area. Maybe a VR meeting is more compelling than Zoom, but is it worth the extra cost and effort of donning a VR headset? Likewise a large open world where you can, potentially, do anything is compelling (see Minecraft), but is it a space where you would want to do something productive? In Minecraft the inefficiency of walking around and working with individual blocks is half the point - it's what makes it fun - but it's not an efficient way to build or design or shop or even consume "content" if you value your time. So what's left? The metaverse itself as entertainment ? Maybe. But it's not going to be the next iPhone. At best you're aiming for the ubiquity of World of Warcraft. [1] this video
Dan Olson covers NFTs very solidly in "Decentraland is a dead mall" ( this video ) and "Line Goes Up" ( [LINK] ). Both as well worth watching. Since this is also about GameStop specifically, his "This is financial advice" video addresses the GameStop cult, and to a lesser extent the bizarre cult around GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, really well: [LINK] Also, cue some apes/NFT investors coming in to ask "why do you care about my money?" and other oft-repeated talking points.
Folding Ideas (Dan Olson) did a pretty fantastic takedown of the Metaverse/Decentra failure nexus a little while ago, "The Future is a Dead Mall: Decentraland and the Metaverse". Like all things Dan, long as hell be he makes it very much worth it. this video
> It’s just too versatile, ambient computing around you all the time, anywhere from a single button to a virtual interactive world. I just watched Dan Harmon's new doc on Decentraland[0] and he raises some really good points about the functional impedance that exists in virtual worlds alongside of all of the grifting that currently exists. Grifting aside, so many applications of VR just don't make sense as a direct virtual representation of the world, at that starts with our inner ear our ability to process visual motion without actually moving. He shows how these virtual storefronts that your character can walk through are much less efficient at actually allowing you to transact as opposed to a search page on an e-commerce site. I think it's easy to have romantic visions of how a VR world will look in the future. But if it's driven primarily by profit, as all of the most mainstream attempts have so far, it's going to be an empty crypto hell. 0: this video
Highlights include: - "In Search of a Flat Earth" (2020): [LINK] - "Line Goes Up" (2022): [LINK] - "The Future is a Dead Mall" (2023): this video