Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse

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.

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.

if you give a user community powerful enough creator tools, what they create in these worlds will be far more interesting than anything a major company can officially create.

More people actually own content in Second Life than own an NFT—vastly more. And these NFT-connected metaverses like Decentraland have very tiny user bases mostly populated by people who’ve invested in it. If you buy land in Decentraland, you have an incentive to have people come in.

And human engagement through virtual avatars is quite interesting. For some people it is an optimal way to engage—you have the familiarity of a non-text-based human interaction, but you also have just enough distance to be able to express yourself any way you see fit. It’s why some people feel they can be more themselves in a virtual world than in ... 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

People talk a lot about how these worlds allow you to be freer than in the physical world but there’s a flipside where people can sometimes be worse in these spaces because people feel freer to be assholes. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing necessarily—these are simply just challenges that exist in these virtual worlds.

Wagner James Au: In terms of users, Second Life is still vibrant. There are about 600,000 monthly active users and about 200,000 daily active users after almost 20 years. One reason I keep writing about it is that there’s so much there. And so much interest from people who’re involved in these worlds.

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