[TrevorAustin]

Everything about NFTs is irritating. They're pure positional goods, with no real utility beyond signaling social status. They're subject to intense, irrational financial speculation. They attract insiders, hypesters, and scam artists. Their fans are prone to wildly overstating their capabilities and importance. The pieces of art they point to very often demonstrate almost no technical skill. They're built on technology with objectively terrible performance characteristics.

But I've thought Facebook was stupid since 2004. Experience has taught me that I'm a weirdo and my aesthetic objections are usually anti-correlated with a project's success. I am the George Costanza of social media. If you're reading about Non-Fungible Tokens on Hacker News, I suspect you are too. These things are here to stay.

[mecha_ghidorah]

> Experience has taught me that I'm a weirdo and my aesthetic objections are usually anti-correlated with a project's success. I am the George Costanza of social media.

Oh god this describes me.

I was about 14-15 when MySpace started catching on and I didn't like the idea of it then, but I did at least see people having fun making their own pages and stuff. A bunch of people I knew played around with themes and such. Not for me, actually it irritated me, but hey people were having fun.

Then FaceBook came and it seemed a lot like MySpace but with less user control. Again core functionality doesn't appeal to me at all.

Twitter came along and I thought it was weird to make a service where people could basically write a public SMS, but thought "hey this kind of makes sense for like businesses and governments such to write announcement type messages that get pushed - "Hey we're doing XX see LINK" type stuff. But people insist on using it and worse on having complicated or long discourse on it. The number of twitter threads I've seen which is a person replying to themselves to get around the character count is huge and I don't even have a twitter account. Simply baffling, and yet it is a huge success. I legitimately can't even comprehend why people use it.

[Guessnotgauss]

Can I say both your comment and the parents are cathardic to me. I just dont see the appeal of social media anymore. Living through transition from people being in the moment to now everyone documenting everything so they can brag about it online is odd to me. Early on it was a great tool to reconnect people. When it started becoming integrated into daily life things got messy.

People can now advertise themselves, and present a highly constrcted image of how they want to be seen. The lack of authenticity apparently not problematic, or is a blind spot as they complain about the fakeness in social media on the same platform.

It's the race to the bottom for your attention. Low quality references and expressions, a recursive meme. A new slang for thoughts that have no depth.

Perhaps I just never understood it, and I am the weirdo. Thats what people tell me.

The silver lining, maybe this social platform, HN, has made me feel like Im not the only one. Perhaps thats what this whole thing is about.

[TrevorAustin]

Ha, just as a small example, this post as typed concluded with a single U+1F61D: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f61d

Hacker News is the kind of place that strips emoji from your posts, because they're kind of frivolous. I love that. Because I am a weirdo.

[afiori]

are there HN comments with emoji from before the filter? or was it applied retroactively?

[hakfoo]

It's the MMO version of "I Am Rich". Demonstrate your social position, now with themed factions and skins!

[1cvmask]

Isn't most real world art buying also about social signaling and the scarcity and uniqueness associated with it?

[zepto]

I’m not so sure it’s ‘just’ signalling.

If I was a billionaire, I would definitely own some $100K watches and probably have some million dollar artwork.

Why? Because some expensive watches are really nice, and so are some expensive paintings, and why wouldn’t I buy them if I could easily afford them?

[detritus]

I'd like to think I wouldn't, were I in that lucky position. Genuinely-made art, perhaps I might have some time and cash for, but expensive wrist baubles that exist solely for the purpose of extracting money from rich people to salve their ego? No.

I'd hope I'd consider it for barely a half second then elect instead to give that money to charity instead.

I'm regularly in this mind, walking as I do around London and seeing the sheer array of useless crap that monied people spend money on to advertise the fact they have money. Instead, I wonder at how many people's lives could have been eased if instead of that expensive car, they'd bought a car actually suited to this city.

.

As an aside to this, I spent a week working at the house of a Rothschild a few years back. His admittedly fancy pad was utterly laden with artworks. His car, on the other hand, was a crappy small Japanese thing and he dressed about as scrappily as I do. I had a lot of respect for that chap.

[zepto]

> expensive wrist baubles that exist solely for the purpose of extracting money from rich people to salve their ego?

Why not just say you are an inverse snob?

[detritus]

Why must I when someone as helpful as you can come along and do it for me?

Enjoy your watch or whatever other pointless tat it is that you value.

[zepto]

I guess my point is that you don’t seem to know much about watches, and are basing your view on a caricature of ‘rich people’. To my eye, some watches certainly do look like silly baubles, but that is a question of taste.

For me, personally I look at the life of someone like Roger Smith, and envy his craftsmanship and dedication to mastery. I see a great deal of similarity between him, and say John Carmack - as dedicated masters of their medium.

I would like to own a Roger Smith watch, partly because it’s beautiful, and partly because I would like to live in a world where more people get to develop their skills, and where skills are passed on, and artistry is encouraged.

Of course it’s terrible that more people don’t have the opportunity to do this, but that doesn’t have anything to do with watches.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_W._Smith

Yes, it’s easier for the rich to possess art than the poor, of course. No, that doesn’t mean art is only about the rich.

[TrevorAustin]

For fine art, maybe? For music, writing, theater, film and television, video games: seems like it's mostly about the enjoyment the patron gets from interacting with the art. The social signaling part strikes me as kind of squicky.

Maybe NFTs turn out to be a way to redirect that gross status-seeking impulse, to turn it into incentives to create art and income for artists without copyright, DRM, and associated ugliness. That would be a pretty cool hack! There's a decent chance it works.

[kranke155]

This is exactly what's happening. As a part of the NFT community/digital artist, I've never seen artists happier.

[zepto]

What artists? All the NFT art I’ve seen has been either generative cartoons or internet memes.

[kranke155]

The ETH scene is sociopathic/absurd/ridiculous. Most non shit art is on Tezos, where indie artists from all over the world are killing it.

https://hicetnunc.art/

And a more organised storefront at https://objkt.com/

https://www.fxhash.xyz/ is doing generative art straight on the blockchain.

I have an account on Twitter as @CryptoAntonioni and I share decent art, avoid the trash.

[zepto]

Interesting - very good to know about the Tezos scene.

As for fxhash, I don’t see that being much more than a ‘because we can’. Nothing on there strikes me as worth money, since there is an infinite supply of art like that and there is no distinguishing character to it. The point of a Non-Fungible token goes away if the art itself is fungible.

[mikepurvis]

At the higher levels, yes. At the low/local level I think it really is mostly about aesthetic appreciation and patronage— visit hipster cafe, see attractive piece on display, contact artist and negotiate price, display piece in your own home.

[kelseyfrog]

And in today's world, right click, save as.

[mikepurvis]

I don't think anyone talking seriously about "real world art buying" is referring to the digital representation of .... oh damn, this is a discussion about NFTs, isn't it.

[kranke155]

This is a great take.

I'd recommend you read this text, or skim it, to see what happened with NFTs https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Basically sociopaths have taken over the space and they are promoting absolute crap.

BUT There is real art and artists in the space if you take your time to look for it.

Look at - https://www.fxhash.xyz/ - you'll see a remarkable thing: real innovation, Generative Art being placed right onto the blockchain. Something that would be very hard to monetize only 2 years ago is now a liquid permissionless marketplace for Generative Artists to experiment. It's like shadertoy has become an art market. You can now spend your days experimenting with shader art and make real money. That's incredible to me.

[brandall10]

Right there with you… but these types of observations seem to hold in crypto vs fiat currency, no? I feel that’s the vibe the op is getting at.