 "Virtual real estate platform Decentraland, once valued at $1 billion, is now in free fall. Revenues have absolutely cratered over the last year, The Block reports, with only a handful of users actually trading virtual real estate [...] The numbers are absolutely brutal. According to the report, only between 20 and 30 people are actually buying and selling property on a weekly basis, amounting to roughly $50,000." https://futurism.com/the-byte/virtual-metaverse-real-estate-trouble 27 comments
@coilysiren @darius I have million blades of grass in my yard. I pay myself thousand dollars for one of them. My yard has a billion dollar valuation. @darius "virtual real estate" and "valued at $1 billion" should never appear in the same sentence  @darius you mean I can't just make a nonsense video game and try to sell fake things in it to people? I need to talk to my broker and pull my Linden Dollars out of Second Life!   @darius I never understood taking the unlimited potential of the digital realm and trying to create artificial scarcity. Why isn’t there infinite “land” in the metaverse?  @michaelgemar @darius AFAIU, the actual limitation is there’s a finite amount of resources available in terms of processing power and bandwidth. No one system could handle that sort of processing for an infinite number of users. Thus the scarcity. What could work, perhaps, is smaller instances of virtual spaces, that can communicate with each other. This you’d have “neighborhoods” that one could communicate or “travel” between. Now there’s an idea for a cool federated network. :) @cautionwip @darius No, not literally “infinite”, but the scarcity of current virtual spaces is definitely artificially imposed. @michaelgemar @darius Oh for sure, sorry if it came across as suggesting they aren’t using scarcity as a way of justifying the pricing. Definitely not my intention. I’m just saying there are technical limitations for any of those services that mean their own “metaverse” can’t be considered an infinite resource. @cautionwip @darius I like your notion of bringing the federation model to the metaverse — let each person run their own space, interoperable with everyone else’s. @michaelgemar @darius It’s honestly going back to basics. The web used to be made up of tens of thousands of sites with a variety of services, content, pricing models, etc… Big Tech has consolidated everything into a few sites that try to do everything and limit personal expression in service to supposed convenience and false economies of scale. I’m hopeful that the slow but steady adoption of ActivityPub will have a positive effect on this trend. I’m probably naïve, but so be it. :)  The metaverse(s) arrived 25 years after its time. Paying a high hardware entry fee to rake cat turds out of some billionaire's sandbox just doesn't have the appeal that futurists imagined it would in the 90s. It's not that VR doesn't have potential, but rather that over-immersion is unnecessary and mission defeating in that it distracts from the compulsive behaviors that drove the social media business model last decade.  @darius this recent folding ideas video on decentraland is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q  @darius When I had fun money I bought $10 of their cryptocurrency when NFTs were becoming hyped, waited for it to double, and sold $10 of it: Looks like the $10 worth I had left is now worth about 59 cents, lol. So, like the rest of us normal people already knew, the Metaverse and NFTs are all scams.  @darius the sooner all of these “crypto NFT metaverse companies” can die off and unwater down the term “Metaverse” the better. Listen I just want good protocols for letting me do seamless interop between applications and digital experiences, none of that needs to be “on the blockchain” @darius from a virtual world into a literal toilet. On the other hand, how does an enterprise like this one get valued at a billion dollars? Well, not really very surprised... What is surprising is that people still invest their time in writing these articles... probably #LLM 🤔  @darius There’s nothing different between virtual real estate and name-a-star scams. |
Gregory's Server
@darius I'm more surprised by the valuation than the lack of users
Although I figure that's going to be how most people outside the VC echo chamber feel