Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse

Since Facebook rebranded as Meta, the idea of the metaverse has been consumed by a kind of ahistorical hype cycle. Brands are flooding into the space and people are issuing broad proclamations about what a virtual world is supposed to look like. There are also plenty who are dismissing the metaverse as “something nobody asked for,” but as Au’s expe... See more

Au: Two big things. First, 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. In terms of the culture of a metaverse environment and the community’s experiences in a place like Second Life, that’s remained true since 2003.

With the Web3 would-be metaverses, I think they put the cart before the horse. If you put out a speculative offering, like a new coin that gains people entry into a digital world, people might show up, but I don’t know why they’d necessarily keep coming back. On a basic philosophical, human level, a thing is only valuable if a group decides it is. ... See more

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Philip Rosedale supposedly had the vision of Second Life while at the Burning Man festival and one of the first events they had in the game was a Burning Man recreation in 2003, and that helped set the pace and tone of what the community would be like. There was a heavy emphasis on serendipity and free-form engagement in the world. That might sound... See more