Commenting on my post about the failure of Meta to grow Horizon Worlds, longtime reader/veteran technologist Martin K. offers a big picture view impacting multiple metaverse platforms, relating it to recent trends in US society. It helps explain, for example, why Second Life merchandise seems to be 80% fashion/home decor-related, and why VRChat seems largely to be comprised of furry/anime avatars:
Why does Horizon Worlds not succeed in the same way as Facebook did?
Why is Second Life not able to grow its user base?
Why do so many talented creators leave Rec Room?
Let me zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture.
Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, Second Life and other metaverse-apps with user-generated content are struggling with growing their user base.
One of my favorite concepts to think about some of these problems is laid out in the book The Big Sort by Bill Bishop published in 2008. One of its themes is political polarization of neighborhoods in the US. The idea is that there are several feedback loops at work that attract more politically aligned neighbors and push out people who don't "fit" into a neighborhood. This results in increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods.
My hypothesis is that there are analogous feedback loops in many UGC metaverse apps that lead to a rather homogeneous user base of each of these apps.
Typically it works like this:
Most Virtual Worlds "Going Backwards" from Second Life's Original Single Sharded Vision (Comment of the Week)
Second Life mainland map created by "Icarus Fallen" in 2011
Last week's post on Dual Universe and the quest to build the metaverse has inspired a very impressive comment thread which I'll be highlighting this week and possibly next. First up, here's longtime reader "Pulsar", who argues that most of the latest social VR/virtual worlds are much less ambitious than their predecessor:
Pulsar does see a glimmer of this single shard vision in High Fidelity, founded by SL co-founder Philip Rosedale -- but not in Linden Lab's official follow-up to SL, Sansar:
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Posted on Monday, September 17, 2018 at 04:06 PM in Comment of the Week, Deep Thoughts, New World Culture | Permalink | Comments (7)
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