New World Notes

How Feedback Loops & Interest Algorithms Hurt Metaverse Platforms (Comment of the Week)

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:

Metaverse Artist AM Radio on Second Life as the First "Giga-Artwork"

Image via AM Radio's Flickr

Jeff "AM Radio" Berg was watching my recent interview with Philip Rosedale, and AM Radio being AM Radio, sent me this pretty profound thought:

I wonder if what he created, when considered as a whole, is the first giga-artwork. An artwork so large it has an economy. An artwork as a grand experiment on the nature of our existence, as evolving typologies of identity and taxonomies of spaces, and communication. As if it was an innate instinct in each of us to reject randomness, a clamoring for order when we recognize something like Second Life as a well structured lattice designed to catch up with the unfolding entropy of the universe, find new ways of being, classify each discovery, expand our perceptions, and add it to our phylum of ways of being alive.

He's saying "giga-artwork" as a play on "Gigafactory", a facility which manufactures electric engines. (Or more broadly, a factory which makes other factories.) Adding:

Why couldn’t a whole meta world be a unique artwork, the artist as world builder. Maybe there is a specific set of qualifiers to define something as a giga-artwork? But qualifiers might get lost in semantics. So maybe a giga-artwork needs just one, and Second Life is the first one I’ve seen capable of it. Think of it as a sort of analog to Turing completeness, call it meta-complete, when a world is capable of spawning child worlds capable of emulating other worlds.

Here's what he means, in terms of Second Life's architecture:

How To Create a Reddit-Style Upvote/Downvote Karma System for Virtual Worlds That Can't Be Abused (Too Much)

Writing about Second Life-based drama last week, many readers didn't like my suggestion that a Reddit-like upvote/downvote-driven Karma system would work relatively well to improve the user community. Sample:

The karma system would literally be used as a tool to create an even more toxic locale on any type of forums, Reddit or non-Reddit and would be akin to the old IGN Vault Boards as there would be Nazi Moderators and their favorites; as well as those who would get banned from there just because they said one thing wrong or didn't kiss anyone's ass...

The hive-mind would dominate a Reddit-like karma system, as far as governance goes... Imagine, how banal events such as "crappy lil club drama" would play out if there were a Reddit-like karma system. You would see everyday disputes devolve into disciplinary action.

And maybe that's all true, but let's start with a salient point:

Reddit's karma system works. Yes it's often abused (as is any social system), but it remains utterly instrumental to making Reddit one of the most popular sites on the Internet.

The other point: There are relatively simple ways to minimize abuse of a karma system while rewarding great content and users and encouraging them to keep coming back to the world.

Here's how:

Humans Want Struggle, Not Perfection: What The Matrix's Agent Smith Teaches Us About Creating Successful Virtual Worlds

If you want to know why some virtual worlds like Minecraft are huge, while others like Second Life remain a relative niche, watch this scene from The Matrix, which is actually about creating the virtual world of the Matrix itself. Agent Smith reveals that the AIs first tried to create a perfect virtual world for its human users, but the humans rejected it. For Will Burns, Vice-Chair for IEEE's Virtual Worlds Standard Group, this is the key challenge virtual world developers face:

"When you build a perfect world without needs or wants, it inevitably is rejected," as he puts it. "Because that's not how humanity works. Humanity thrives in the pursuit of progress and something to work toward.

"So when you introduce those needs, those imperfections and whatnot, suddenly humanity thrives, rises to the occasion. When you stop giving them everything and their entire existence is no longer on a whim of wants, but no needs... something fundamentally changes in how that society works. They strive and overcome. You give them challenges, limits to face and overcome. That way, you no longer end up with 'Bored God Syndrome'. People logging in and saying 'What's the purpose here?'.

"If everything is a matter of want but not need, then it's boring. If nothing really serves a need, people get bored. Introduce those limits to overcome, those challenges, and they come together not just for want, but for necessity. And that's how civilizations arise in their complexity. And by no means should you give them that pre-defined complexity prebuilt. You just hand them the system that lets them do it themselves and ultimately requires it."

 The challenges define and shape how the virtual community evolves:

"In this manner, airports means something when built. It's not a joyride (though you could have tours). But it serves a real purpose of faster travel. Highways, sea ports, etc. They serve a bigger purpose. And they are created with the intention of solving a problem. That's the big take away. What does such a thing solve in a virtual society? Does it have a purpose other than superficial? In that moment, you realize the secret to a successful Metaverse. Is it superficial only? Then you have Bored God Syndrome and it gets rejected. Just like the first Matrix."

That changes if the developer imposes struggles and challenges: 

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:

Among the virtual worlds I know, Second Life is still the closest to a single instanced and contiguous world. Other platforms are closer to a 3D chatroom instead, where at most you would teleport from a "room" to another one ([whether] they are called "rooms", "experiences", "spaces", "worlds" or whatever). In SL, instead of teleporting, you can travel, you can explore the world by driving a car, flying a copter or on a train or sailing... for hours. In Second Life, there are even organized grid flights, social cruises, drives, with dozen of people traveling together. Sometimes you can also meet someone and make a new friend while you are traveling by yourself. Thanks to the progressive loading and some client-side interpolation between regions, traveling in SL feels like a single experience, apart only the infamous region crossings disturbing it. However, sailing on the Blake Sea with an optimized boat, you would barely see it.

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:

Is Dual Universe Closest to Being a True "Metaverse"? Virtual World Expert Who Helped Define the Term Says So -- And Not Sansar, High Fidelity, Etc.

After saying I was impressed by High Fidelity’s ability to get 350+ avatars in the same local metaverse space, a guy who actually helped define the metaverse told me that he wasn’t very impressed. Will Burns, Vice-Chair for IEEE's Virtual Worlds Standard Group, showed me this video from 2016, and told me to watch. It’s a tech demo of Dual Universe, an upcoming sci-fi MMO that's only been slightly on my radar up until now, and you should watch too:

“As you can see,” says Will, “they not only have 1200+ concurrency and able to scale, they also have a persistent universe with planets. I have to reiterate that last point -- an actual virtual universe that is persistent.” At least that’s what the developer, Novaquark, claims:

Dual Universe is the first game where potentially millions of players can interact together simultaneously, inside the same giant universe. We call it the continuous single shard. No multi-server player separation, instances or loading times, just one enormous persistent universe that never stops.

“Not that I want to disparage Philip Rosedale and his team, or even Ebbe Altberg and Linden Lab, whether this is Second Life, High Fidelity, etc,” Will went on. “But the honest truth is, 300 or 500+ concurrency isn't very impressive to me when I know what is possible, and generally how it is made possible two years ago. It's not very impressive when a hybrid decentralization method would ultimately shatter those paltry numbers.”

He brought that point up to Philip recently, who just suggested, Will says, that “I apply to work for High Fidelity." 

However: “[H]ere's the problem: that platform and others, who all call themselves a Metaverse, are all off on the wrong foot, and locked into their particular paradigms. Unless we're taking things like Dual Universe into account, it's just an echo chamber among the pretenders about their accomplishments and milestones. Lots of nice virtual worlds, but that's about it. While everyone else is waving around the ‘Metaverse’ title and debating who is better, or who is going to be the Metaverse, it's the shallow end of the kiddie pool by comparison to Dual Universe or even No Man's Sky.”

Will first helped craft a definition in 2008, inspired by Neal Stephenson’s original description in Snow Crash, which IEEE adapted in 2013. “Now, if you type the word Metaverse into Google, it pops up with that definition from Wikipedia, which in turn cites the IEEE Virtual Worlds Standard group for it.”

That started an interesting conversation worth discussing here -- and by the social VR industry as a whole -- but first, a caveat from Mr. Burns:

Watch: Two RL Artists Talk About SL & Sansar, Sex, Creativity, Choice, Etc.

On the face of it, this is a humanoid fox talking to a brunette babe with action movie inclinations. But the fox is Erik Mondrian, who in real life is currently completing his MFA at a top arts school (California Institute of the Arts), and the brunette is MangroveJane (IRL Alison James) an artist whose Second Life work was recently exhibited in a real life gallery. So it's a fun and thoughtful video podcast worth a listen. (With great screenshots interspersed throughout.)

"Some of my favorite sections from the episode," Erik tells me, "are when Groves talked about her first five days in SL, stubbornly learning to jump, and having her 'existential crisis' there [2:10],  when she brought up the idea of avatar prejudice [11:50], and the discussion about the differences between platforms like SL and Sansar, particularly when she talked about the idea of the 'map' (for something like the SL mainland) and its psychological effect on users vs. the isolated experiences of Sansar [17:50]."

One point that jumps out at me is at 4:00, where Erik talks about how Second Life has no set goals, which Jane relates to SL's media reputation for being a giant, pervy virtual sex hovel -- and then points out that, like a real life city, the red light district is only one of many options you can choose from. This is a common belief among the SL community, and while it's not wrong, I think it misses a larger point:

SL Veterans Wonder What Became of Their World When They Were Away

Interesting thread on /SecondLife featuring many oldbie veterans who've come back to the virtual world after an absence to find that much has changed:

I left for a year or two and poof everything seems gone! Where's the drama at Waterhead? [Above] At Korea1? Where's the crowds? Where are the good Metal Parties? Where's the good stores? Stores that are on the top list nowadays seem so created by noobish designers... And whats with the mesh bodies?

Lots of answers to that, mainly around the theme, "virtual communities evolve, and that's just how it goes". For that matter, I just visited my office in Waterhead after a week or two away to find it half underwater.

Anyway, your mileage may vary, but my strongest sense is that Second Life has largely become a social media-centric experience -- i.e., much of the activity in Second Life is no longer enjoyed an end in itself, but as fodder for the larger web; for screenshots posted to Flickr and Pinterest, videos published to YouTube, and, of course, drama ported to long, long, long Facebook threads and Wordpress blog commens. None of those platforms existed when Second Life launched in 2003, and as they came online, the virtual world experience became more and more integrated with them, to the point where the "world" aspect became less important.

Relax, Elon Musk, We're Not in a Virtual Simulation -- Watch This Video to Understand Why

Elon Musk raised eyebrows last June when he suggested reality itself is almost certainly a virtual simulation created by a powerful alien species and that "the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions". This video above, from Elliotte Lee's Click Philosophy channel, provides a helpful and reassuring argument for why this notion doesn't make much sense. Based on the writings of the great, recently deceased Hillary Putnam, who had the advantage of being both a philosopher and a computer scientist -- so he'd probably be less impressed by Elon's "we can already simulate a World of Warcraft in computers, so super-smart aliens could simulate an entire universe" argument -- Putnam's argument boils down to something like this:

Can Consciousness Be Simulated as Musk Must Assume?

Really great reader conversation about Elon Musk's belief that we're already in a simulated reality. Here's a smart point by longtime reader "Galatea", who pushes back at my skepticism that consciousness probably can't be simulated:

To make a convincing argument that you can't simulate consciousness, you must make a convincing argument that you can't simulate physics, or that consciousness arises some something other than the physical (e.g. a soul). If you're committed to materialism, your only course to save this argument you're making is to make a convincing argument that basic physics is impossible to simulate, because once you can simulate that, you can simulate anything and everything that exists in the material universe, with enough processing power.

Very valid point. I'd answer that from a slightly different direction, and say that it's likely that consciousness only arises from living creatures as an evolutionary adaptation. Or as philosopher Alva Noë puts it: