The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse

What Hacker News said

Strong rec MilStdJunkie · 2023-05 · on “Hold the postmortem: The metaverse was never alive in the first place”

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]

Strong rec foobiekr · 2024-01 · on “GameStop Ends NFT Marketplace, Is This Beginning of the End?”

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.

Strong rec AlexandrB · 2025-03 · on “What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Ex-Meta dev shares insider insights”

> 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

Recommends Shared404 · 2023-04 · on “Court Ruling Could Affect the Future Direction of DAOs”

Slightly off topic, but I quite like this video over Decentraland/the metaverse: [this video] It's an in depth look/critique.

Recommends LapsangGuzzler · 2023-04 · on “Mark Zuckerberg abandons metaverse as shiny new toy appears”

> 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

Recommends well_actulily · 2024-04 · on “Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made”

Highlights include: - "In Search of a Flat Earth" (2020): [LINK] - "Line Goes Up" (2022): [LINK] - "The Future is a Dead Mall" (2023): [this video]

Cites PaulHoule · 2023-03 · on “Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy?”

It's worse than it was. Here are some trends. (1) Big Tech in the U.S. is like the way the car industry was in the 1970s in the U.S. Still thinking it is the best of the world and many onlookers agreeing but deeply rotten inside. Facebook and Google, for instance, are still riding high on monopolies in two sided markets. Advertisers have nowhere to go because the audience is there, but without revenue from advertisers, new publishers and social media can't fund efforts that would get them an audience. Amazon, Netflix, and Uber on the other hand look "successful" because they are overcapitalized and able to lose money on all or some of their product lines. You'd have an easy time selling half

Cites AlexandrB · 2024-01 · on “Apple Vision Pro review”

Underlying a lot of these discussions is the assumption that there is a future where this is an actually useful, mass-market device. I'm still not convinced this is true. For example, "killer apps/content" never arrived for 3D TVs and they have largely disappeared from the market. Same with various "waggling" input technologies like the Wiimote and Kinect. There were some compelling uses, like Wii Sports, but these were pretty limited and many other uses of these in games was a case of Nintendo shoehorning the technology into the game. I think the best pessimist argument is the one offered by Folding Ideas in his metaverse video[1]: Text is really, really useful, and a virtual 3D space is no