Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse

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

One of the first people I met in Second Life was a woman who’d built this mansion by the ocean. We started talking and she casually mentioned that she was homeless in real life. She had built this Second Life home while squatting in an abandoned apartment in Vancouver. She had a background working with computers and had cobbled together an internet... See more

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

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.

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.

Meta is throwing money at the problem without throwing much wisdom at it.

The virtual-world experience is an interaction point, but it’s tightly integrated to real life. That’s what we’re going to see more with this metaverse generation, if we want to call it that. They are growing up with those experiences. They are the ones who’ll create whatever comes after traditional social media, not the brands.

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.

Warzel: 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 metav... See more