I think the risk of a VR monopoly is probably low. A metaverse is just an office-compatible VRChat with external app screensharing, and portals. Lots of people are capable of making those. It’s also not apparent to me that Meta are dangerously better at making the hardware than anyone else (apple, HTC and varjo are all stern competitors. Even HP are in the game. Also, by the way, you personally would probably be interested in SimulaVR, they’re about to start making the first portable, self-contained VR workstation computer, and it runs NixOS. It is going to be so so much cooler and better than a laptop. I don’t think I’ll be buying it, it’s only 30 pixels per degree, the maximum perceptible, 60, is right around the corner. But I really hope they stay in business).
I don’t see any routes to lock people into only using a single service for VR socialization either. You’re concerned about exclusivity with user avatars, having to pay for virtual objects or access to locations, but all of those things make the platform shittier and less useful, if they do that they’ll get outcompeted, there’s nothing they can currently do/are doing to prevent others from competing with them in that way.
There’s just way too much competition and incentive for collaboration on standards here. It was heartening to me to read Unreal’s arguments on this. I’d guess that game engines have a big role to play here, and the engines are getting pretty girthy at this point, substituting Unreal out for something made in house is not really going to be feasible for Meta, but Unreal has no interest in aiding the formation of a hardware platform monopoly, so Meta is going to be strongly encouraged to support Unreal’s open standards work.
I think your political thinking is pretty vague. Democratization and addiction/misuse/inhumane tech also have very little to do with each other, if anything they’re aligned. The more democratized the system is, the more addictive systems pop up and compete within it, and the faster their victims find their way to them, one barrier removed.
Platform monopolies don’t have a greater incentive to promote addiction than an open market already has, and in practice, platforms are usually not the drivers of addiction within their walls. Twitter is a good counter-example, it emerged on the open web, it consisted of some ridiculously crude, barely designed mechanics that worked for reasons nobody understood, and then Twitter went on to become the dominant platform for global discourse, causing a huge amount of damage to the world. The web platform didn’t do that. The openness of the platform didn’t prevent it. Twitter wasn’t addictive because it was carefully designed to be, it just was addictive. And twitter isn’t a monopolistic platform either! It has a simple business model and no lock-in. Your data on twitter is all public. Anyone could take it and make another twitter. You can take it and leave. Sometimes people do leave, but many of them go to mastodon, which is exactly the same, and has the same discourse-political problems.
The inhumane pattern of twitter persists because addiction is driven by voluntary choices. You can’t solve that sort of problem by adding more liberalization.
You could only improve the situation by creating platforms that are more engaging, but don’t cause the same harms.
You need a constructive vision! Give people something better!
The root cause of the problems are badly designed systems, or an absence of any good designs. People don’t want to design bad systems. They just do whatever pops into their heads.
I don’t particularly like facebook, but I don’t think they want to destroy democracy or create an unlivable world. No one has those values. I think we need to take care not to get too cynical. Cynicism is a terrible vice. It doesn’t just help you to identify your enemies, it creates enmity and it keeps the rift from ever healing.
But given the opportunity to lobby Meta, I wouldn’t know what to say to them, yet. Systems determine outcomes but no one is offering a theory of VR hangout and networking systems in relation to how people get information, or have political conversations, or find work, or find love. There are lots of great challenges in designing humane online systems. It’s not obvious that any of the big steps we need to take have much to do with VR. Probably some of them do, but I don’t know what that looks like.
I am responsible for some visions in social computing (linked: A technology for larger yet more focused communities). Even though they can’t obviously be situated in VR, I’ll mention them just in case they spark any ideas with others.
Most of my hopes are with venues like Roamresearch, places where it’s as frictionless and accessible as possible to edit linked, structured information collaboratively. Instead of promoting ephemeral, viral content, it promotes longer, continuously evolving content maintained by passionate, curious research and curation communities.
There’s a parallel question there, should we promoting, or, hell, funding, Athensresearch, the open source alternative to Roam? It’s possible that we should! Roam currently doesn’t seem to have plans to support forum and chat primitives, while with Athens it seems like those things can already be added, by anyone, it could end up catering to a much broader, more globally impactful usecase. However, there are some big technical challenges that need to be solved for supporting globally connected versions of these systems, and I don’t really see either project engaging with them yet.
There’s a parallel question there, should we promoting, or, hell, funding, Athensresearch, the open source alternative to Roam?
I wouldn’t call it ‘the’ open source alternative to Roam, since the wording suggests it is the only such alternative. I personally use and recommend org-roam.
Thanks for sharing your insights Mako! After reading your response and the IEEE Spectrum article you mentioned, I am much more optimistic that the metaverse can/will move in the right direction. Is there anything that could be done (by governments, companies, NGOs, the general public, or whatever player) to make this even more likely?
I also liked your example of Twitter, where addictiveness was not designed into the system, but happened accidentally. Accidents usually prompt investigations to improve regulations, for instance in the aircraft industry. Do you think there are any concrete key learnings from the case Twitter how to prevent similar accidents in the future of the internet or metaverse? If so, could or should some of these be baked into better designs, and are current incentives aligned with this or would it require some governmental regulations (since you are worried about liberalisation)?
I still believe that Meta is a major player on the market. And while I do agree that they have no direct interest in destroying democracy or creating an unliveable world, I think they act in line of Milton Friedman and would do just try to maximise their profits. I am not sure if there is anything wrong with that in principle, as long as the rules of the game ensure that maximizing profits aligns well with overall utility. In the past, I don’t think the rules of the social media game aligned well with overall utility. And I am not sure that the need for and support of open standard by players like Meta alone is sufficient to align profit maximization with overall utility in the metaverse. If this assessment is correct, it would make sense to brainstorm ideas for such an alignment as the metaverse develops.
Btw. thanks also for sharing your LW article on Webs of Trust (on my reading list) and your thoughts on RoamResearch (pm’d you with a question on Roam vs. Obsidian).
Is there anything that could be done (by governments, companies, NGOs, the general public, or whatever player) to make this even more likely?
Fair prompt. I get the impression that the most impactful thing you can do is to make sure that the people leading the standards dialog have strong technical vision and good taste. That’ll also make it more likely to even succeed at establishing a standard. I guess that’s something that EA (with so much software engineering acumen) could probably do better than most NGOs! But yeah, it looks like that might already be the case, I’m not sure.
Do you think there are any concrete key learnings from the case Twitter how to prevent similar accidents in the future of the internet or metaverse?
I don’t know what the addictive social media systems of VR will look like. It might just be twitter again, but with bigger text.
Hmm… I guess VR social systems might orient around VR’s adaptation to voice chats, ubiquity of mics, support for body language (filtered through an avatar, which will often make people more comfortable) and a more natural sense of presence.
I find it difficult to imagine many novel systems about that, because it seems like it’s constrained to the sorts of arrangements that’re already pretty natural for humans. People walking around in a room and making sounds at each other. If you’re rude, people remember, and you don’t get invited next time. It doesn’t seem obvious that the information or the social bonds can be structured in any alarmingly novel ways. Well, I guess one big difference is that the social cliques can end up a lot more globe-sprawling and specific and extreme. But I’m not sure. There will still be lots of cross-linking. You’ll tend to meet your friends’ friends.
Maybe systems will end up being.. less about structuring information, and more about structuring relationships, controlling group matchmaking or timetabling.
I think the risk of a VR monopoly is probably low. A metaverse is just an office-compatible VRChat with external app screensharing, and portals. Lots of people are capable of making those. It’s also not apparent to me that Meta are dangerously better at making the hardware than anyone else (apple, HTC and varjo are all stern competitors. Even HP are in the game. Also, by the way, you personally would probably be interested in SimulaVR, they’re about to start making the first portable, self-contained VR workstation computer, and it runs NixOS. It is going to be so so much cooler and better than a laptop. I don’t think I’ll be buying it, it’s only 30 pixels per degree, the maximum perceptible, 60, is right around the corner. But I really hope they stay in business).
I don’t see any routes to lock people into only using a single service for VR socialization either. You’re concerned about exclusivity with user avatars, having to pay for virtual objects or access to locations, but all of those things make the platform shittier and less useful, if they do that they’ll get outcompeted, there’s nothing they can currently do/are doing to prevent others from competing with them in that way.
There’s just way too much competition and incentive for collaboration on standards here. It was heartening to me to read Unreal’s arguments on this. I’d guess that game engines have a big role to play here, and the engines are getting pretty girthy at this point, substituting Unreal out for something made in house is not really going to be feasible for Meta, but Unreal has no interest in aiding the formation of a hardware platform monopoly, so Meta is going to be strongly encouraged to support Unreal’s open standards work.
I think your political thinking is pretty vague. Democratization and addiction/misuse/inhumane tech also have very little to do with each other, if anything they’re aligned. The more democratized the system is, the more addictive systems pop up and compete within it, and the faster their victims find their way to them, one barrier removed.
Platform monopolies don’t have a greater incentive to promote addiction than an open market already has, and in practice, platforms are usually not the drivers of addiction within their walls. Twitter is a good counter-example, it emerged on the open web, it consisted of some ridiculously crude, barely designed mechanics that worked for reasons nobody understood, and then Twitter went on to become the dominant platform for global discourse, causing a huge amount of damage to the world. The web platform didn’t do that. The openness of the platform didn’t prevent it. Twitter wasn’t addictive because it was carefully designed to be, it just was addictive. And twitter isn’t a monopolistic platform either! It has a simple business model and no lock-in. Your data on twitter is all public. Anyone could take it and make another twitter. You can take it and leave. Sometimes people do leave, but many of them go to mastodon, which is exactly the same, and has the same discourse-political problems.
The inhumane pattern of twitter persists because addiction is driven by voluntary choices. You can’t solve that sort of problem by adding more liberalization.
You could only improve the situation by creating platforms that are more engaging, but don’t cause the same harms.
You need a constructive vision! Give people something better!
The root cause of the problems are badly designed systems, or an absence of any good designs. People don’t want to design bad systems. They just do whatever pops into their heads.
I don’t particularly like facebook, but I don’t think they want to destroy democracy or create an unlivable world. No one has those values. I think we need to take care not to get too cynical. Cynicism is a terrible vice. It doesn’t just help you to identify your enemies, it creates enmity and it keeps the rift from ever healing.
But given the opportunity to lobby Meta, I wouldn’t know what to say to them, yet. Systems determine outcomes but no one is offering a theory of VR hangout and networking systems in relation to how people get information, or have political conversations, or find work, or find love. There are lots of great challenges in designing humane online systems. It’s not obvious that any of the big steps we need to take have much to do with VR. Probably some of them do, but I don’t know what that looks like.
I am responsible for some visions in social computing (linked: A technology for larger yet more focused communities). Even though they can’t obviously be situated in VR, I’ll mention them just in case they spark any ideas with others.
Most of my hopes are with venues like Roamresearch, places where it’s as frictionless and accessible as possible to edit linked, structured information collaboratively. Instead of promoting ephemeral, viral content, it promotes longer, continuously evolving content maintained by passionate, curious research and curation communities.
I think these things could easily evolve into general purpose social network infrastructures too.
There’s a parallel question there, should we promoting, or, hell, funding, Athensresearch, the open source alternative to Roam? It’s possible that we should! Roam currently doesn’t seem to have plans to support forum and chat primitives, while with Athens it seems like those things can already be added, by anyone, it could end up catering to a much broader, more globally impactful usecase. However, there are some big technical challenges that need to be solved for supporting globally connected versions of these systems, and I don’t really see either project engaging with them yet.
I wouldn’t call it ‘the’ open source alternative to Roam, since the wording suggests it is the only such alternative. I personally use and recommend org-roam.
org-roam doesn’t appear to be multi user
Wonderful comment.
Nice
Thanks for sharing your insights Mako! After reading your response and the IEEE Spectrum article you mentioned, I am much more optimistic that the metaverse can/will move in the right direction. Is there anything that could be done (by governments, companies, NGOs, the general public, or whatever player) to make this even more likely?
I also liked your example of Twitter, where addictiveness was not designed into the system, but happened accidentally. Accidents usually prompt investigations to improve regulations, for instance in the aircraft industry. Do you think there are any concrete key learnings from the case Twitter how to prevent similar accidents in the future of the internet or metaverse? If so, could or should some of these be baked into better designs, and are current incentives aligned with this or would it require some governmental regulations (since you are worried about liberalisation)?
I still believe that Meta is a major player on the market. And while I do agree that they have no direct interest in destroying democracy or creating an unliveable world, I think they act in line of Milton Friedman and would do just try to maximise their profits. I am not sure if there is anything wrong with that in principle, as long as the rules of the game ensure that maximizing profits aligns well with overall utility. In the past, I don’t think the rules of the social media game aligned well with overall utility. And I am not sure that the need for and support of open standard by players like Meta alone is sufficient to align profit maximization with overall utility in the metaverse. If this assessment is correct, it would make sense to brainstorm ideas for such an alignment as the metaverse develops.
Btw. thanks also for sharing your LW article on Webs of Trust (on my reading list) and your thoughts on RoamResearch (pm’d you with a question on Roam vs. Obsidian).
Fair prompt. I get the impression that the most impactful thing you can do is to make sure that the people leading the standards dialog have strong technical vision and good taste. That’ll also make it more likely to even succeed at establishing a standard. I guess that’s something that EA (with so much software engineering acumen) could probably do better than most NGOs! But yeah, it looks like that might already be the case, I’m not sure.
I don’t know what the addictive social media systems of VR will look like. It might just be twitter again, but with bigger text.
Hmm… I guess VR social systems might orient around VR’s adaptation to voice chats, ubiquity of mics, support for body language (filtered through an avatar, which will often make people more comfortable) and a more natural sense of presence.
I find it difficult to imagine many novel systems about that, because it seems like it’s constrained to the sorts of arrangements that’re already pretty natural for humans. People walking around in a room and making sounds at each other. If you’re rude, people remember, and you don’t get invited next time. It doesn’t seem obvious that the information or the social bonds can be structured in any alarmingly novel ways. Well, I guess one big difference is that the social cliques can end up a lot more globe-sprawling and specific and extreme. But I’m not sure. There will still be lots of cross-linking. You’ll tend to meet your friends’ friends.
Maybe systems will end up being.. less about structuring information, and more about structuring relationships, controlling group matchmaking or timetabling.