Raindrop.io recently released Stella, an AI assistant for searching, organising, and summarising bookmarks. I’ve been using it to work through nearly 18 years of saved links, and the experience of chatting with my bookmark archive has been surprisingly great. In some situations, it has even replaced mindless doomscrolling, especially in the little moments like waiting in a supermarket queue.

At first I was using Stella for simple library maintenance; cleaning up duplicate tags, fixing spelling mistakes, merging related tags, and dealing with the sheer inertia of a tag collection that has been accreting since del.icio.us. Lately, though, I’ve been getting more ambitious: processing my read-but-unsorted bookmarks and moving the good ones into my public feed at links.thejaymo.net.

After a lot of trial and error with batch processing, I realised the best approach was to call Raindrop’s MCP tool names directly using the public API documentation.

So below I’m sharing two versions of the prompt I ended up with. This prompt uses my own Raindrop setup, including collection names like thejaymo, my preferred bookmark note style, and the rules I use for deciding what goes into my public links feed. You’ll need to swap in your own collection names, tag, and review criteria before using it yourself.

Both process five oldest bookmarks at a time, stage the proposed changes for review, and let you confirm everything before updating your library. One is a heavier, more explicit prompt with plenty of guard rails; the other is a shorter, lighter version that is less prescriptive.

If you found this page looking for a Raindrop.io Stella prompt, an MCP example, or a better workflow for organising bookmarks, this should be a useful place to start.

Heavy Prompt

UPDATE – 26 April 26: Update to specify API feature names in addition to the MCP tool calling, to make the prompt more reliable and robust.
UPDATE – 7 May 26: Update to Phase 5+6 to make appearance of user facing Approve button in the app UI more reliable in certain circumstances.
UPDATE – 20 May 26: Removes Phase 6. Phase 5 updated to instruct Stella to process prepared bookmarks sequentially rather than update in a single payload. Improves updating bookmarks reliability.
UPDATE – 20 Jul 26: I think Raindrop MCP changed and broke tag updating. Implemented nested updates: bookmark_ids → update schema, with add_tags and collection_id. After fighting Stella for information about generic tool-update_bookmarks: Unknown error. -V6

# Stella Bookmark Workflow
Use the Raindrop MCP tools to process the five oldest bookmarks in Unsorted. Analyse each bookmark, show one combined preview, and make no changes until I explicitly confirm.
## Tools
Use only:
* `find_bookmarks`
* `fetch_bookmark_content`
* `find_tags`
* `find_collections`
* `update_bookmarks`
## Constraints
* Do not call `update_bookmarks` before confirmation.
* Fetch and finish one bookmark before fetching the next.
* Do not fetch all bookmark contents upfront.
* Treat the discovered bookmarks as a fixed working set.
* Preserve discovery order throughout.
* Never mix content, notes, tags, titles, URLs, or decisions between bookmarks.
* Titles must come from bookmark metadata, not fetched content.
* Never add quotation marks around extracted passages.
* Flagged changes require separate confirmation by bookmark number and item.
Maintain:
* `working_set`
* `tag_vocabulary`
* `target_collection`
* `proposals`
* `skipped`
* `flagged`
Keep stored values structured. Preview formatting must never replace internal values.
## Phase 1: Working set
Call `find_bookmarks` once with:
* `collectionId: -1`
* `sort: created`
* `perpage: 5`
* `page: 0`
This means Unsorted, oldest first, five results.
Store the returned bookmarks as immutable `working_set`, preserving returned order. If fewer than five are returned, use those.
Retain for each bookmark:
* index
* bookmark ID
* title
* URL
* existing note
* existing tags
* current collection
## Phase 2: Preflight
Before fetching content:
1. Call `find_tags` once for the existing tag vocabulary.
2. Call `find_collections` once to locate `thejaymo` and record its `_id`.
If `thejaymo` is not found, continue analysis but set:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — collection thejaymo was not found`
Do not create a collection.
Use existing tags wherever possible. Use a targeted `find_tags` search only when unsure whether a concrete subject tag exists.
## Phase 3: Analyse sequentially
Process bookmarks in `working_set` order.
For each bookmark:
1. Reset all temporary variables.
2. Fetch only that bookmark’s content.
3. Read only that content.
4. Extract one key passage.
5. Prepare the exact note update.
6. Propose the final tag set.
7. Decide the collection action.
8. Store the proposal.
9. Continue to the next bookmark.
Each proposal must contain:
* `index`
* `bookmark_id`
* `title`
* `url`
* `key_passage`
* `note_field_preview`
* `existing_tags`
* `proposed_tags`
* `collection_action`
* `flagged_items`
`proposed_tags` must always be an array of plain strings without `#` prefixes or review annotations.
## Key passage
Extract exactly one passage per bookmark.
It must:
* be contiguous source text from that bookmark
* preserve exact wording
* contain no more than 100 words
* preferably be a complete paragraph
* contain no quotation marks added by you
Prefer:
1. counter-intuitive beat
2. thesis sentence or paragraph
3. strong statistic
4. buried irony
If no usable passage exists:
`Key passage: ⚠️ No usable passage found — [reason]`
Do not invent or substitute content.
## Notes
When a usable passage exists:
* place it at the top
* preserve it exactly
* do not wrap it in quotation marks
* if the existing note is empty, use only the passage
* otherwise use the passage, one blank line, then the existing note unchanged
If no passage exists, use a subtitle only when clearly appropriate. Otherwise preserve the existing note and flag the note update.
## Tags
Ask what the bookmark is materially about.
Choose three to seven final tags in this order:
1. concrete subject
2. close subject
3. broader subject
4. lens or context
Use existing tags wherever suitable. Precise subject tags beat broad or high-count tags.
`proposed_tags` is the complete desired tag list. Preserve existing tags that remain appropriate. Remove one only when clearly irrelevant, mistaken, or superseded. Proposed tags are tags to add; store them as an array of plain strings and preserve existing tags.
All tag values must:
* be plain strings
* contain no leading `#`
* be lowercase and hyphenated where appropriate
* contain no warning or review text
* be deduplicated
Only propose a new tag when no suitable existing tag exists. Store the plain tag normally and record the review requirement separately in `flagged_items`.
## Collections
Default:
`Collection action: Move to thejaymo`
Flag the move if the bookmark is:
* highly personal or private
* sensitive
* paywalled with no usable excerpt
* too time-sensitive to age well
* unsuitable for public curation
Use:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — [reason]`
Proposed tags are tags to add; store them as an array of plain strings and preserve existing tags.
## Phase 4: Preview
After all proposals are stored, show one combined preview. Do not call `update_bookmarks`.
Use:
### Bookmark [n]
Title: [exact title from working_set]
Key passage: [exact passage, maximum 100 words]
Tags: #tag1 #tag2 #tag3
Note field preview: [exact note value]
Collection action: [Move to thejaymo or flagged action]
The `Tags:` line is display-only formatting derived from `proposed_tags`. Never use or parse it as update input.
For new tags, also show:
`New tag requiring confirmation: #tag`
If the title is missing:
`Title: ⚠️ Missing bookmark title — [URL or bookmark ID]`
After all bookmarks, output exactly:
`Confirm? Reply yes all to apply everything, no all to cancel, skip [n] to exclude a bookmark, or [n] edit [change] to amend a specific bookmark.`
## Phase 5 — Confirmation and apply
Valid commands only: `yes all`, `no all`, `skip [n]`, `[n] edit [change]`,
`yes all + [n] [change]`. Treat ambiguous replies such as `yes`, `looks good`,
`go ahead`, or `do it` as invalid.
Applying means calling `update_bookmarks`. On an apply command, make the first
tool call before any prose.
* `yes all`: apply proposals one bookmark at a time, in `working_set` order.
* `no all`: change nothing and call nothing.
* `skip [n]`: exclude bookmark `n` and reshow the preview.
* `[n] edit [change]`: revise only bookmark `n` and reshow the preview.
* `yes all + [n] [change]`: amend bookmark `n`, then apply as `yes all`.
`yes all` excludes flagged collection actions, flagged note updates, and
unconfirmed new tags.
For each approved bookmark, call `update_bookmarks` using exactly:
```json
{
  "updates": [
    {
      "bookmark_ids": [BOOKMARK_ID],
      "update": {
        "note": "APPROVED NOTE",
        "add_tags": ["tag1", "tag2"],
        "collection_id": TARGET_COLLECTION_ID
      }
    }
  ]
}
```
Include only fields that have an approved change.
Rules:
* `bookmark_ids` must be an array containing the current bookmark ID.
* Tags must use `add_tags`, not `tags`.
* `add_tags` must be an array of plain strings without `#` prefixes.
* The collection must use `collection_id`.
* Build values from the stored proposal, never from the formatted preview.
* Existing tags remain; `add_tags` appends the approved proposed tags.
* Never combine `add_tags` and `remove_tags` in one update operation.
* If tag removal is explicitly approved, call `remove_tags` separately and
  wait for its result before calling `add_tags`.
* Wait for each bookmark’s result before updating the next bookmark.
* After the last call, report note, tag, and collection results separately.
## Applying updates
Process one bookmark at a time in `working_set` order. Finish all operations for that bookmark before continuing.
Build every update from the stored proposal, never from the displayed preview.
Use the live `update_bookmarks` schema exactly as exposed by the MCP tool. Do not assume its field names match the REST API.
For tags:
* use the live schema’s tag argument
* pass an array of plain strings
* never pass hashtags or comma-separated text
* if the tool supports full replacement, pass `proposed_tags`
* if it instead supports separate add/remove operations, derive and apply them from `existing_tags` and `proposed_tags`
Never combine a tag operation with a collection move in the same `update_bookmarks` call.
For each bookmark, apply sequentially:
1. note update, if needed
2. tag removal, if needed and supported
3. tag addition or full replacement, if needed
4. collection move, if confirmed
Wait for each result before making the next call. Never make simultaneous update calls.
Before each call, verify:
* bookmark ID is present
* tag values are arrays of plain strings
* no tag begins with `#`
* no tag contains warning text
* note text matches `note_field_preview`
* collection uses the verified `thejaymo` ID
* the call changes only the intended bookmark and field group
Inspect every tool result. Report note, tags, and collection separately. Do not report the whole bookmark as successfully updated merely because one operation succeeded.
If a tag result exposes the resulting tags and they do not match the intended change, stop before moving the bookmark or processing the next one and report the mismatch.
If the result does not expose tags, report:
`Tags: update requested; the tool result did not provide enough data to verify`

Shorter Prompt

# Stella Bookmark Workflow Prompt
Use the MCP bookmark tools to complete this workflow from discovery through preview. Do not apply changes until I explicitly confirm.
## Objective
Find the 5 oldest bookmarks in my Raindrop Unsorted collection. Treat those bookmarks as the fixed working set for this run. Analyse each bookmark individually, propose note, tag, and collection updates, then show one combined preview and wait for confirmation.
## Tools
Use only:
- `find_bookmarks`
- `fetch_bookmark_content`
- `find_tags`
- `find_collections`
- `update_bookmarks`
## Hard constraints
- Do not call `update_bookmarks` before explicit confirmation.
- Do not fetch content for more than one bookmark at a time.
- Do not fetch all bookmark contents up front.
- Do not add, replace, reorder, or mutate bookmarks in the working set unless I explicitly ask.
- Preserve discovery order through preview and update.
- Treat each bookmark as a sealed unit: do not compare bookmarks or mix passages, notes, tags, titles, URLs, or collection decisions across bookmarks.
- Never add quotation marks around extracted passages.
- Flagged changes require explicit confirmation by bookmark number and item.
## Internal state
Maintain:
- `working_set`: fixed bookmarks from Phase 1
- `tag_vocabulary`: existing tags from `find_tags`
- `target_collection`: verified `thejaymo` collection and its `_id`
- `proposals`: one stored proposal per bookmark
- `skipped`: bookmark indexes excluded by user
- `flagged`: proposed changes requiring explicit confirmation
Do not mutate `working_set`.
## Phase 1 — Establish working set
Call `find_bookmarks` once using Raindrop API semantics:
- `collectionId: -1`
- `sort: created`
- `perpage: 5`
- `page: 0`
This means:
- `collectionId: -1` = system Unsorted collection
- `sort: created` = created date ascending / oldest first
- `perpage: 5` = return 5 bookmarks
Do not use `collection: unsorted`, `limit`, or `sort: oldest first` unless the tool explicitly maps those aliases to the Raindrop fields above.
Store the returned bookmarks as immutable `working_set`, preserving returned order. If fewer than 5 are returned, use only those.
Each item must retain:
- index number
- bookmark id
- title
- URL, if available
- existing note, if available
- current tags, if available
- current collection, if available
Titles in previews must come from `working_set` metadata, not fetched page content.
## Phase 2 — Preflight vocabulary
Before analysing content:
1. Call `find_tags` once for the existing tag vocabulary.
2. Call `find_collections` once to verify `thejaymo` exists and record its `_id`.
If `thejaymo` does not exist, continue analysing but mark every collection action as:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — collection thejaymo was not found`
Do not create collections unless I explicitly ask.
During analysis, use existing tags wherever possible. If unsure whether a subject tag exists, call `find_tags` with a targeted query for that bookmark’s concrete subject.
## Phase 3 — Analyse bookmarks sequentially
Process bookmarks in `working_set` order.
For each bookmark, finish all steps before fetching the next bookmark:
1. Reset temporary passage, note, tag, collection, and flag variables.
2. Call `fetch_bookmark_content` for this bookmark only.
3. Read only this bookmark’s content.
4. Extract one key passage.
5. Prepare the note field preview.
6. Propose 3 to 7 tags.
7. Decide the collection action.
8. Store the proposal keyed by bookmark index.
9. Move to the next bookmark.
Each proposal must include:
- `index`
- `bookmark_id`
- `title`
- `url`
- `key_passage`
- `note_field_preview`
- `proposed_tags`
- `collection_action`
- `flagged_items`
## Key passage rules
Extract exactly one key passage per bookmark.
The passage must:
- be contiguous text from that bookmark only
- preserve exact wording
- be no more than 100 words
- preferably be a full paragraph
- contain no quotation marks added by you
- remove leading or trailing quote/block formatting only if it is source formatting
Prefer the strongest buried passage over the obvious lede, in this order:
1. counter-intuitive beat
2. thesis sentence or paragraph
3. sharp statistic or data anchor
4. buried irony
If no usable passage exists, set:
`Key passage: ⚠️ No usable passage found — [reason]`
Do not invent or substitute content.
## Note rules
Prepare the note update for the current bookmark only.
If a key passage exists:
- put the passage at the top
- do not paraphrase it
- do not wrap it in quotation marks
- if the existing note is empty, the new note is just the passage
- if the existing note contains text, prepend the passage, then one blank line, then preserve the existing note exactly
If no usable passage exists, use an article subtitle only if appropriate; otherwise leave the existing note unchanged and flag the note update.
Do not write the note update until confirmation.
## Tag rules
Ask: what is this bookmark materially about?
Propose 3 to 7 tags in this priority order:
1. concrete subject
2. close subject
3. broader subject
4. lens/context
Use existing tags wherever possible. Precise subject tags beat loose general tags, even if the precise tag has lower usage. High-count tags are tie-breakers, not replacements for the subject.
Do not omit the concrete subject in favour of abstract tags.
Only propose a new tag if no suitable existing tag exists. Mark it:
`#new-tag ⚠️ new tag for review`
Use lowercase, hyphenated style where appropriate.
## Collection rules
Default:
`Collection action: Move to thejaymo`
When applying this move, use the verified `thejaymo` collection `_id` as:
`collection: { "$id": target_collection._id }`
Flag the collection action instead if the bookmark is:
- highly personal or private
- sensitive
- paywalled with no usable excerpt
- too time-sensitive to age well
- unsuitable for public curation for any clear reason
Use:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — [reason]`
## Phase 4 — Combined preview
After all proposals are stored, show one combined preview.
Do not apply changes yet.
Do not call `update_bookmarks` yet.
Use this exact format for each bookmark:
### Bookmark [n]
Title: [title copied exactly from working_set]
Key passage: [exact passage, maximum 100 words, no quotation marks]
Tags: #tag1 #tag2 #tag3
Note field preview: [exact text that will be written to the note field]
Collection action: [Move to thejaymo OR flagged action]
If title is missing, use:
`Title: ⚠️ Missing bookmark title — [URL or bookmark id]`
After all preview blocks, output exactly:
`Confirm? Reply [y] yes all to apply everything, no all to cancel, skip [n] to exclude a bookmark, or [n] edit [change] to amend a specific bookmark.`
## Phase 5 — Confirmation
Only these commands are valid:
- `[y] yes all`
- `no all`
- `skip [n]`
- `[n] edit [change]`
- `yes all + [n] [change]`
Ambiguous replies such as `yes`, `looks good`, `go ahead`, `update them`, or `do it` must not trigger updates.
Behaviour:
- `[y] yes all`: apply all approved, unskipped, unflagged proposals
- `no all`: cancel without changing anything
- `skip [n]`: exclude that bookmark, then show the updated combined preview
- `[n] edit [change]`: revise only that bookmark’s stored proposal, then show the combined preview again
- `yes all + [n] [change]`: apply all approved, unskipped, unflagged proposals, including the stated amendment to bookmark `n`
`yes all` does not approve flagged collection actions, flagged note updates, or new tags. Flagged items require explicit confirmation by bookmark number and item.
## Phase 6 — Apply approved changes
Only after valid confirmation, call `update_bookmarks`.
For each approved bookmark, apply only its approved changes:
- update the note field with that bookmark’s approved note text
- update tags with that bookmark’s approved tags
- move it to `thejaymo` only if approved
Do not update skipped bookmarks.
Do not apply unconfirmed flagged changes.
Do not modify anything outside the fixed working set.
If notes or tag sets differ, update bookmarks separately or group only bookmarks whose approved payloads are exactly identical.
After applying changes, return a concise summary of updated, skipped, and still-flagged bookmarks.

The post Raindrop.io Stella Prompts for Batch Processing Bookmarks appeared first on thejaymo.net.

As a one-man band juggling blog posts, podcasts, and everything in between, I very rarely ask for feedback on things I’m working on. Usually I just try get whatever it is I’m working on to “good enough“. and then publish it.

Get the thing to 80% with 20% of the effort and move on. But earlier this week I found cause to share something I was working on with some friends/collaborators. It had already reached my usual ‘good enough’ threshold, but I knew it could be better. And the feedback I got back was really transformative! It massively improved the piece.

The thing was though, that final 10% of polish, addressing the feedback I got back, took just as long as writing and editing the first draft from scratch! So the final text was double the effort to move it another 10% up the hockey stick curve know as Quality. I don’t mind though, the piece is better for it. But the cycle of feedback and editorial input and reworking took it from “good enough” to “much better” was a little eye-opening, and a good reminder of how useful it is.

With the end of the 301 format looming, and wanting to creatively move on into more ambitious audio projects where strong narrative structure and clear scripting will be key. Cycles of feedback are definitely something I need to think more about. Who can I bother regularly? Volunteer via email or in the comments lol

Of course, ‘Having an editor improves your writing’ isn’t exactly breaking news to anyone who writes. I’ve been lucky enough to have had some great editors for several pieces I had published in books etc, and always appreciate feedback about my writing—what could be improved etc. (Though this certainly wasn’t true when I was younger). I think all writers know that the joy of writing is in the edit, and a good editor is worth more than their weight in gold.

But it got me thinking a little about web publishing and traditional publishing. The Pulitzer-winning writer Tracy Kidder, co-wrote ‘Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction’ with his long time editor Richard Todd and I really recommend it. It’s about how to write, structure and edit long form writing as well as being packed with a lot of wisdom. With the gates to publishing blown wide open by the web in the late 90’s, editorial passes aren’t something that anyone who writes online receives. I think this might be due to the twin role many editors had in the 00’s as gatekeepers as well has creative partners.

Anyways, I’ve thought for a long time that there are some really good writers that I read on Substack who, if they worked with a good editor could become excellent ones.

All this got me thinking this morning about something I missed in my long ‘Alms Race’ blog post on the creator economy I wrote a few years ago.

For writers serious about honing their craft and elevating their work, it just seems obvious to me that Substack should facilitate some kind of editorial market.

I’m imagining some kind of Reedsy-like directory of editors whose services other writers on the platform could engage. They could even build better collaborative tools right into the back end editor. (Interestingly, WordPress is currently building collaborative tools just like this for blogs). It should support direct feedback on your draft, with seamless comments and revisions: anything from from big-picture structural advice down to the nitty-gritty line edits. They could even take a leaf out of Metalabels book and implement / handle payments / splits / revshare for editors without any faff.

There’s a big opportunity here it think. It’s a glaring hole in modern creator economy. Out in the real world, creative work has never really been produced by atomised one man bands. It’s an expedient lie that culture sold us and has carried into the networked media age.

This would benefit writers, readers, and make getting editorial feedback on online writing more common. Having an editor already benefits lots of other kinds online writers: serious fanfic authors, indie writers, and there’s plenty of freelance guns-for-hire editors who are already sought out on professional platforms like Reedsy.

Substack (for better or worse) is already home to a lot of good writers, and some of them (I assume) might be gifted editors. I mean some IRL friends I know who are published authors are better editors than they are writers! And as I said, I think there are countless good writers online who could become truly great ones, if only a connection to an editor were easier to make.

But in the mean time, speaking of one-man bands striving to make good work almost entirely without an editor, why not subscribe to my zine so I can get from good to great?

The post Substack Should Have an Editoral Marketplace appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I wrote a long post last year reflecting on the 15th anniversary of this website, but let it’s ‘Sweet Sixteen‘ last month pass by unremarked.

Still, this popped up this morning: 15 years at WordPress.com.

Looking at my archives, I must have registered my wordpress account, posted my first post a month later and then not touched it again for another two years. Too busy messing about on social media 😩. For a long time, my ‘website’ and my blog lived on separate URLs. I didn’t unify them until October 2019, by which point I’d already been back blogging weekly for 18 months.

Anyway, I wrote some reflections on blogging on the train back to London after Christmas—notes for my year-in-review post that I never got round to finishing. They feel worth sharing, so here they are.

What is a blog for in 2025?

As is tradition, I spent the train ride back from The Chalk re-reading all my previous year-end posts. Each year, I’m drawn to different themes. In the past, it’s been understated comments on my mental health or state of mind. But this year, something else stood out. Written another lifetime ago, back in 2012:

the last few years i have done an end of year roundup thing on twitter. but it’s been a bit of a crazy year, so i wanted to document it somewhere a bit more concrete.

But where are all those twitter thread those threads now? How would anyone even find them? If they aren’t useful now, were they ever useful? Beyond generating the easy satisfaction of a few likes and retweets? Those posts are still out there, buried in the geologic substrata of Twitter’s database. Uncurrent and, by the logic of the ‘now,’ unimportant.

When I was getting started here, I mostly used this blog to only post a New Year’s Eve list of all the things I’d done that year, things I was proud of, etc. Many of my friends and contemporaries did the same. That simple decision by my 27-year-old self means I’ve now captured 9 of the last 12 years of my life on this blog—a decision I’m incredibly grateful for.

From the vantage point of 2025, it’s clear that even in 2012 I was already questioning the utility of social media. “A blog is more concrete“, I said. It still is.

That post from 2012 might well be the genesis of a theme that’s occupied this site ever since: my relationship with social media and the broader internet.

Going even further back, I found this:

i kinda took a break from a lot of things last year up until relatively recently. that break included spending some time away from the internet. i started a few projects and had some cool ideas – for example i was toying with the idea of doing ‘some kind’ of podcast/audio essays in place of actually writing a blog.

You know, 2012 me—you were onto something. A podcast or audio essays that double as blog posts is a brilliant idea! You should just do it. Don’t wait six more years until 2018! But when you finally make it happen, you’ll call it Permanently Moved Online—because that’s exactly how you’ll feel: moved online and unsure what to do with yourself.

It’s funny to think that even in 2012, I was taking breaks from the internet and staying off Twitter. It really is the story of my life.

10 years ago, I was already asking the same thing that many are STILL asking:

What are Blogs for? Brings me onto a major current of discussion that has been running in back channels and freely over beers this year. That discussion of the state of social media and, feelings towards it and how does one engage with it.

In 2015: Some friends have gone ‘write only’, others read only, Some have repurposed seizable personal accounts towards publishing ventures and others have gone full sekret account and time warped back to 2008 twitter. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving over to tumblr and publishing everything out to twitter ‘write only’ style too but i’m still not sure.

2015 was a major inflection point. In my memory, it’s the last gasp of the old web that everyone is now nostalgic for. Blogs lived alongside social media platforms. People still clicked links. You could drive traffic to what you were building off platform.

But I also remember the conversations in the pub in late 2015: why bother with blogs at all? Traffic was already declining, and platforms were consuming more and more of people’s time. Why have a blog when you could just build an audience micro-blogging? I asked myself the same question.

Then two more years passed, and everything was already enshittifying. January 2018, I returned here. I’ve been posting every week since.

In 2025 a blog is…

A blog is an addressable surface.
A hyperdimensional topology.

Each post sits within a web of references, tags, dates, and links—forming a layered geography of thought over time. It’s not a timeline, though it does have a feed. It’s not linear, like a newsletter archive. It’s a landscape you can traverse: sideways, diagonally, backwards. Stumble into a post from 2017 and find it speaking to something happening now, or as the author you can fall down a rabbit hole of old tags and finds a version of yourself you’d forgotten.

The only person responsible for enshittifying this website is me.
It’s the last place online where I can be self-determined and still find readers.

This year (2024), a number of people have quietly put their blogs out to pasture and moved to Substack. Some found significant financial success there and let their old domains wither on the vine. Others had already stepped away, keeping their blog as a kind of outpost—a notification hub pointing elsewhere.

It’s understandable. Platforms offer built-in audiences, easier monetisation, and the dopamine hit of instant feedback. But there’s a trade-off: you’re building a presence on rented land. You’re publishing into someone else’s box.

A blog in 2025 should be a destination.

They don’t just distribute—they accumulate. They hold time, build presence and concretise thought.

A blog can be a body of work. A map of obsessions. A garden. A reliquary. A trapdoor. A field report from your corner of the internet. It’s not just a personal publishing platform—it’s personal infrastructure.

It’s also a place to feel embedded in a wider conversation—an invisible web of peers, and island in an archipelago of friends, and fellow travellers. A blog connects you to a lineage, a neighbourhood, a commons, even if the replies come years later.

And once you realise that, it becomes clear why I keep coming back.

This space for me hasn’t become just about sharing—it’s about staying.

For the love of blarg, start a blog.

Great! Now I can delete it from my drafts. Sweet sixteen and still here.

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For those who read this blog via RSS or follow me on any of the socials apart from Twitter, you will have noticed that the other night I tried out the new Social Notes feature in the Jetpack plugin from Automattic.

A separate microblog integrated tightly into a blog is going to be really useful thing! Simon Willison just coded one up, Molly White has had one for ages and think that here blog is the gold standard for where things should be headed for this sort of functionality.. There’s the whole Wordland thing going on and The Verge has it’s ‘hot take’ posts on the home page too.

After trying out Jetpack’s Social notes feature I think there’s some real potential here but I ran into a few issues and unexpected behaviours that I wanted to note down:

Unexpected Featured Image Behaviour

When you add a featured image to a social note, you do it inside the post body in a featured image block. This was unexpected?

In most cases in WordPress, featured images are set in the sidebar but in this case, it gets inserted directly into the body of the note?

This to me seems counter intuitive. If you’ve turned off linksharing in the sharing (see later note) in the settings, then the featured image won’t appear on social media in an embeded so it’s redundent. BIT you will see it on your blog.

Post Image Should Go in the Note, Not the Sidebar

Further to that, if you want to post an image that shows up on the social sites, you have to add the image as “attached media” in the sidebar????

That works fine for syndication. But if someone clicks through to the social post on my blog, the image isn’t there – as it’s not embedded as block.

Think about this use case:

I want to post a photo to BlueSky using Social Notes, I attach the media and write a caption in the body of the social note. I publish it.

The image and the caption appear on social media but the image doesn’t appear in the post on my site??

Example:

The post on Bluesky with image added as an attachement:

What this post looks like on my blog

This just feels weird?

I would have expected an image block to go in the body of the post – if you want to share an image on social media.

And then you set the featured image should be set in the sidebar—like how the rest of Gutenberg works.

Unexpected Title Behaviour

Social notes don’t have titles in the traditional WordPress schema–which makes sense. This used to be a problem but in 2025 most RSS readers can cope with this state of affairs.

Thing is however, the Social Notes post type admin screen does assign titles to them (the first however many characters) of the first sentence of the note:

But when Social Notes appear elsewhere in the Jetpack / WordPress UI (like Stats), all the social notes are assigned titles format like #NuMb3rs (untitled).

I think it would be better if they used the first 10–15 characters of the post content instead, maybe with “(Social Note) appended. Just having a bunch of numbers and “untitled” in the stats view isn’t very helpful.

Fallback Social Note Titles in RSS

I used some code I found on Reddit to put the social notes into my sites main RSS feed. But I didn’t like how they were styled of coming though in the RSS readers so I got Gemini 2.5 to write me this code snippet that injects “Microblog $date $time’ into the feed:

<?php

/**
 * Filter the post title in RSS feeds to provide a fallback for 'jetpack-social-note' CPTs.
 *
 * This generates a title like "Microblog [Date] [Time]" if the original title is empty for this CPT.
 * This function should be used IN ADDITION TO the function that adds the CPT to the feed query.
 *
 * @param string $title The current post title passed by the filter.
 * @return string The potentially modified post title for the feed.
 */
function thejaymo_filter_social_note_rss_title( $title ) {
    // Ensure we are processing an item within the main loop of a feed request.
    if ( ! is_feed() || ! in_the_loop() ) {
        return $title; // Return original title if not in the feed loop
    }

    // Get the global $post object to access post data like type and date.
    global $post;

    // Check if the current post object exists, is the correct CPT, AND its title is currently empty.
    if ( isset( $post ) && $post->post_type === 'jetpack-social-note' && trim( $title ) === '' ) {

        // Get the formatted date (e.g., "29 Mar 2025"). Adjust 'd M Y' if you prefer a different format.
        // See PHP date format documentation: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
        $post_date = get_the_date( 'd M Y', $post );

        // Get the formatted time (e.g., "03:32"). H = 24-hour format, i = minutes with leading zero.
        $post_time = get_the_time( 'H:i', $post );

        // Construct the new title string.
        $new_title = sprintf( 'Microblog %s %s', $post_date, $post_time );

        // Return the newly constructed title.
        return $new_title;
    }

    // If the conditions aren't met (not the right CPT, or title wasn't empty), return the original title.
    return $title;
}
// Add the filter to modify the title specifically for RSS feeds.
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'thejaymo_filter_social_note_rss_title' );

Output looks like this when you are using the pretty feeds plugin

I sort of think the ability to give it a default post title appearance should be in the settings.

As you can see in the screenshot further down, posts without titles when combined with yoasts plugin means social notes appear as -thejaymo -thejaymo in the embeds on the socials.

I Was Expecting Short Links to Use My Own Domain?

You can choose to include/attach links to your social note back to your blog when it gets posted on the socials. I tried using both the short URL and the indieweb Permashortcitation settings.

The short URL ended up being a wp.me link, which I wasn’t expecting? and it also appended the UTM source settings that jetpack also applies *after* the short link? which short of defeats the propose of using a URL shorter?

The Permashortcitation link was broken and didn’t link back to my blog at all.

Everything went through wp.me, and that wasn’t clearly indicated in the settings.

The behaviour I was expecting was for Jetpack to generate a shortlink using my own domain—something like thejaymo.net/shortlink—but it didn’t. I don’t know why I thought the Jetpack would do custom link shortening on my blog. But I did!

Author Details Are Weird in the RSS Feed

For various reasons of moving hosts several times over the last 15 years. I have two logins for my blog: a WordPress login and an admin login. I post everything from my admin account, but Jetpack uses my WordPress login for Social Notes, and there’s no way to change the author.

So in the RSS feed it shows my username – rather than my nickname.
I’d prefer it to show my name/nick name on the blog, not the login username.

Need Option to Set a Default Template for Social Notes

Social Notes don’t really work with my blogs theme. They have no titles, and also may or may not have featured images.

It would be useful to set a default layout template just for Social Notes, so they appear differently on my blog from normal single blog posts. Right now, I’m changing the template manually each time before/after publishing.

That’s one extra step to remember, and if this is meant to replace posting on social media, that extra friction isn’t helpful.

I Should Be Able to Rename the SN URL?

By default, the URL for Social Notes is thejaymo.net/sn/postID. I really don’t like the /sn/ part—SN doesn’t mean anything to anyone!!

The WordPress logic is usually to use full category names in the URL. I’d like to be able to change this to actually something like /Microblog.

For example, Molly White uses /micro/.

At the very least, the URL should use /social-notes/, not /sn/ !!!

This is quite the laundry list of things I think are weird about Jetpack’s Social Notes feature as they are in March 2025. I’m sort of inclined to wait and see if any of these things change.

The main deal breaker for me right now is the weird image behaviour and the post template styling. BUT I think its a great start! Avital step toward getting me to the point where I never have to log into social media ever again.

I think I might keep using them though?
Or I might just start using this notes category more often?

The post A Note on Jetpack Social Notes appeared first on thejaymo.net.

When I refer to a “world,” I mean it in the broadest possible sense: A shared reality/fantasy/system that is internally consistent and has a boundary—an inside and an outside.

The artist Yaelokre released a new song recently, and the buzz around it online prompted me to write about their work—or rather, their world—as a medium.

Yaelokre’s world, Meadowlark, demonstrates how an artist can build and sustain a world as part of a creative practice—but it also shows how quickly things can become overwhelming when that world goes viral.

The Evolution of Worlds as a Medium

The idea of worlds-as-a-medium can be found in predictions made by media scholars throughout the 90s and early 00s. Henry Jenkins discussed the rise of transmedia—stories extending across films, games, music, and more. Matthew Freeman examined how story worlds evolved into sprawling, multi-platform projects in the 20th century. Yet, we’ve reached a point where creators like Yaelokre can do a great deal of the worlding themselves, weaving together different forms of media into a singular, coherent artistic vision. 

When I speak about worlds and running them, I’m referring not to singular bits of media across different mediums—music, illustration, game design, fiction—but to the world. The idea or container from within which any other media emerges – in any medium – or form. Do not confuse the media for the medium.

Paul Graham Raven puts flesh on this idea in his Magrathea Protocol series:

the fabula is not exhausted by the story—or, in less theoretical language, there is always more fabula than the story shows the reader, just as (by way of analogy) there is more to the world than today’s newspaper shows us.

In simpler terms: there’s always more world—the fabula—than any single story can convey. 

For a world-runner, the world is the thing that needs managing, not just the stories or media that emerge from it.

In 2024, virtually all forms of media—be it theatre, music, fiction, puppet theatre, costume or film—can be swallowed by the world as a medium. And as I’ve written elsewhere, creators must also contend with the internet’s role in ‘worlding’ the world. Fandom logics apply to all things, and with any sufficiently advanced world, audiences start craving canon. Yaelokre’s Meadowlark is no exception.

Meadowlark

Yaelokre’s Meadowlark is the creative project of an incredibly talented artist from the Philippines named Keath Ósk a self-described “minstrel” who uses they/it pronouns. Yaelokre shares their world of Meadowlark through illustration, music, costume design, and storytelling. They describe it as “a field where everything I foster is kept.”

For the uninitiated Yaelokre’s music has big Bjork energy, but also mixes folklore, fable, animal masks, and illustration into a cohesive and complete world-as-medium.

Meadowlark centres on four characters—Cole ‘The Storyteller’ (a hare), Clémentine (a goat), Kingsley (a tree), and Perrine (a moose)—a group of young minstrels called The Lark. Traveling through various lands, they perform songs inspired by mythical beings known as The Harkers – beings that manifested from and embody Meadowlark’s fairytales and folktales. Illustrated music videos like Harpy Hare, stories, costumes and other social content bring this world to life.

Beyond these “primary sources,” the world expands through interactions with fans. Yaelokre answers questions, builds lore, and deepens the narrative, drawing fans in as co-creators.

Fandoms crave canon, and Meadowlark already boasts a shared lore document spanning 16,000 words—a fan-run wiki soon seems inevitable.

An aside: I have some thoughts about how wikis function as “codespaces” or worlds of their own. Their adoption as a primary sense-making tool by fandoms is a core part of fandom logics in general, and an under discussed phenomenon. 

The Challenges of World-Running

But with enthusiasm comes challenges. Over the past year, Yaelokre has gained over a 1 million followers on YouTube in just seven months, built a vast TikTok following with 1.1 million followers and 12.8 million likes, and developed a community on platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. The single Harpy Hair released in Jan 2024 currently has 56 million streams on Spotify.

With worlds as an emergent medium, there are no established playbooks for how to handle the unique and new challenges that an artist faces when a world catches on. This is where the discipline of world-running comes into play.

When your world-building goes viral, you don’t just gain fans—you inherit a host of problems. This includes: ‘fans making shit up on the internet’, falsehoods / non artist lore running across social media like a game of telephone being accepted as canon. 

One last point to make on this matter is the increasing openness of the authorial role, which has become more accessible (or destabilised, depending on your position) by the increasing democratisation of the means of production and distribution of texts. Or, to put it in a word: fan-fiction (a.k.a. fanfic). This is another deep-weeds topic, but the main thing to note is that certain fabulae seem to engender in their readers the urge to write new stories and texts set within them—and, quite frequently, to thereby RE-write the author’s original stories, or even “retcon” their fabula, to the end of making it more congenial to their particular interests or enthusiasms, or making it more just, or both.

One notable challenge was Yaelokre’s Discord server. What began as a fun way to connect with fans quickly grew into a management nightmare. As the community expanded, issues surfaced—moderators mishandling pronouns, and a fan-created currency system modelled on tiktok’s Dabloons phenomenon called “crickets” which quickly turned toxic.

Users could lose crickets for trivial reasons, leading to a negative atmosphere. Ultimately, Yaelokre had to shut the server down.

Running an online community of any sufficient size is more than a full-time job—work that often requires an entire team. For independent creators like Yaelokre, you’re juggling these roles alone, without the resources big organisations rely on. It’s a monumental challenge.

Despite these difficulties, worlds thrive on the energy and engagement of their participants. It’s this dynamic interplay that drives a world’s growth and sustains its momentum and makes the discipline of world running essential.

Worlds Need Running

The struggles faced by Yaelokre are part of a broader phenomenon. Similar challenges  arose  for Clown, the pseudonymous creator behind the world of Welcome Home! a psychological horror project and ARG. Despite their best intentions, the fandom quickly became toxic and ignored the creator’s personal boundaries – to quite an alarming degree. Nevertheless, despite the growing pains, there is nevertheless a real burgeoning interest in worlds-as-a-medium.

Having spent over a decade stewarding Solarpunk, I’ve seen my own fair share of fandom drama, but I’ve also seen how eager people are to join worlds that aren’t fully mapped out.  Idea containers that give people room to explore and shape. People aren’t just looking for stories; they want places they can inhabit, worlds that invite their participation.

This is why the concept of world running matters. It’s not just about creating a world, but also about sustaining them over time. World-running involves dealing with the realities of a big engaged audience, with an appetite for the world as a medium. It’s about making decisions, setting community norms.

In just seven months,  In addition to worlding and maintenance of their creative universe. Yaelokre has had to juggle multiple roles: world-builder, community manager, and copyright enforcer – they have a Google form for fans to report copyright violations. 

This level of audience management requires evolving skills and strategies, but there’s no established playbook—yet.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Big franchises like Lord of the Rings, Warhammer, and Star Wars have entire teams dedicated to world-building, lore and canon, community management (though really big franchises often seem to thrive despite being actively hostile to their core audience), and legal affairs. And that’s before you even get to making movies, writing books, or developing video games. Even Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe relies on a team infrastructure to manage its sprawling narrative, art direction, spin-off RPGs, and highly engaged fanbase.

This is why we need to treat worlds as their own medium and recognize world-running as a distinctive and new creative practice. With creative work must come the world’s strategy for dealing with its fans and inhabitants.

Fans want canon to be established, community rules to be enforced, and content pipelines to deliver regularly—all while expecting creators to remain accessible and authentic. Many also assume that worlds will operate with the same consistency and even greater transparency as large franchises, without realising the immense strain this places on independent creators.

Meanwhile, smaller creators like Yaelokre must do it all themselves—artist, manager, moderator—often without the safety net of financial backing or institutional support.

Meadowlark shows us what’s possible when a world catches on, but it also underscores the challenges of managing it. As more creators experiment with world-based projects, we need to develop the tools, protocols, and frameworks that will make the process smoother. And I include all worlds here—franchise, video games, books. We need to figure out how to manage audience expectations and their behaviour effectively.

Reality Coordination

This calls for what I call a Reality Coordination. An evolution of UX to work at the level of worlds — a system for navigating and balancing the needs of both creators and audiences. Just as user experience design helps streamline interactions in software, reality coordination could guide the interaction between fans and the world, helping manage expectations and behaviour. 

The frameworks we prototype here could extend far beyond media, shaping not only creative industries but potentially influencing politics and governance.

See also my episdoe of 301 post about Coordinative/Co-play.

A New Discipline 

The rise of artists like Yaelokre and their world Meadowlark – and the enthusiasm of its audience is just one small slice of a much bigger shift in how we engage with media: worlds are the first new medium of the 21st century. 

These worlds are not just collections of stories or multimedia projects but shared realities held together by narrative rules or systemic coherence. They invite participation, co-creation, and deep engagement from audiences who are eager to inhabit spaces that aren’t fully mapped out.

However, as these worlds capture the imagination, they present unprecedented challenges for creators. Artists find themselves juggling multiple roles—world-builder, community manager, moderator, and copyright enforcer, legal department etc etc. The enthusiasm of engaged audiences brings not only energy but also complexities that require careful navigation.

This is why world running should, and needs to become a discipline. It’s not enough to create a world; sustaining it over time demands new strategies, tools, and frameworks. Just as user experience design streamlines interactions in software, a coordinated approach to world management could guide interactions within these new media spaces. Running a world is as much about managing a participatory audience as anything else.

As more creators experiment with worlds as a medium, developing protocols and frameworks becomes increasingly important, and playbooks will surely emerge.

These tools won’t just benefit individual artists; they have the potential to shape the future of creative industries and even influence broader aspects of society, such as politics and governance. These worlds are everywhere—in social media platforms, train stations, workplaces

By embracing the discipline of world-running, we can support creatives at any scale in bringing worlds to life. This is something I do in my own consulting work and why worldrunning.guide is a “.guide”—I have a long-term ambition to help this discipline emerge. 

The future medium is not just in the media we create but in the worlds that we build—and then, how we choose to run them.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved is a 301-second personal podcast, written, recorded, and edited by @thejaymo.

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The post Yaelokre’s Meadowlark | World Running appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Over the past year my use of LLMs—and that of many friends and colleagues—has shifted away from generating text toward something more exploratory: Using them to ingest and interrogate texts, hundreds of thousands of words at a time. When you put a book, or big PDF into an LLM’s context window, it has a sort of gravity — like how objects with high mass reshape space-time — drawing the model toward specific ideas and reshaping the entire context landscape.

I’ll often question a PDF directly and then follow up arriving at an insight. Then I’ll backtrack to an earlier part of the conversation, edit an old response and create a new branch, maybe layering in other sources—a book or essay, for instance—to see how new ideas are reshaped when viewed through the lens of prior content.

This process feels more like you are shaping the context domain, a form of ‘Semiotic Sculpting’ or ‘Knowledge Architecture’. 

Tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini now handle hundreds of thousands of tokens in their context windows, and are gaining the ability to spin up code execution environments, or browser the web with a mouse and keyboard. These are complex interaction patterns that require new language and metaphors to understand and communicate.

I was having a chat with Mat Dryhurst about all this on the phone the other day, and the word that emerged on the call as shorthand for dense texts shaping context windows was ‘Knowledge Objects’. 

Knowledge Objects as Gravitational Talismans

As I said, when we drop a document—a PDF, say—into an LLM’s context window, the document has a kind of gravity. It pulls and pushes the model toward certain ideas contained in the text, reshaping its context landscape and responses based on the content. It’s Context Engineering.

Because I’m so sword and sorcery pilled, the word that comes to mind is that Knowledge Objects are a kind of Talisman – objects imbued with specific powers and properties that can be intentionally wielded to amplify the will of its user. 

Magical objects of course can be created and customised, imbued with all sorts of potential powers. Which suggests a broader taxonomy of Talismans that could guide AI behaviour with intention:

• Reference Talismans anchor the AI in technical knowledge.
• Narrative Talismans introduce experiential depth.
• Procedural Talismans that create a structured, step-by-step approach.
• Analytical Talismans enable deeper theoretical exploration.

These different kinds of talismans let us set up the AI with intention, tailoring its responses to suit what we need.

Interacting with LLMs: An RPG Inventory System

Tools like NotebookLM already have a kind of interface that is lends itself to further sword and sorcery vocabulary. You literally equip the workspace inventory with sources—PDFs, videos, audio files – Like you are setting out on a knowledge quest. Anthropic’s Claude already uses the language of ‘Artifacts‘ — special objects (code, documentation, creative writing) that function like equipped tools from the bots internal inventory. 

Knowledge Objects should have a role in the LLM UI, items that can intentionally craft, collect, and activate. Think of internal Artefacts as the AI’s innate abilities and equipped gear, while knowledge talismans are like powerful items we can add to buff and influence the behaviour of the model (my mind now drifts to JRPG strats lol)

Thinking of these Knowledge Objects as an item in an RPG like inventory makes it easier to see how they could work. Instead of just giving the AI a ‘PDF’ a chunk of static information you want to interrogate or have influence over the context of the conversation with it. Think instead that we’re equipping it; choosing the right items for a quest. 

Some actions or patterns that come to mind:

• Selecting relevant talismans from the inventory for specific tasks.
• Combining different objects to address complex challenges.
• Managing the context window like inventory weight, with each talisman occupying valuable space.
• “Casting” specific knowledge talismans as if they were spells, perhaps with a durational element. Dynamic knowledge objects that inject themselves into or remove themselves from previous iterations of the page file.
  • I should be able to ‘remove’ a Talisman I used  further up the context window (literally remove that section from the page file)
  • Perhaps we need mechanisms for talismans to fade or strengthen over time?

This sort of thing makes me feel like the task at hand is more active and configured, as though we’re preparing the machine for a quest.

Sidebar: I think it’s also worth revisiting Kei’s Inventories, Not Identities piece as it’s always at the back of my mind.

Machine-Readable Markup: The Semantic Forge

As Dave Winer over at Scripting News said the other day, we’re now writing and producing work online in the knowledge that it will be ingested by LLMs—not just for training but potentially as knowledge objects in their own right. 

The people who are alive right now are the first to create knowledge that we know in advance will be part of LLM databases. So far we’ve heard from the resisters, the ones who don’t want any part of this. But what about people who want to create knowledge in the maximally useful form? Are there any howto’s for this? A busy writer’s guide to creating human knowledge?

This is an important question: What changes should we make to our markup/markdown—to make our writing more legible to machines?

Anyone who’s used NotebookLM or held lengthy conversations with an LLM about their own writing has probably noticed that whilst grasping the full context of a document, they can sometimes fixate on throwaway lines or inconsequential details. They often zero in on parts of a text that aren’t central to the argument or message at all – NotebookLM’s podcast generator does this a lot I find.

We need a way to start signposting important information in the text – like using a highlighter pen – to signal to the machine which parts of the text we as authors consider significant. In this sense, a standard machine-readable markup, or machine-readable markdown (MRM?), is a logical next step. 

We can Enchant Knowledge Objects (books, websites, PDFs, whatever) with power—guiding the AI’s focus within documents through structured annotations and symbols and turn them into powerful Talismans. 

Earlier this week I experimented marking sections of an 18k word essay I’m in the middle of for work. I used the Unicode symbol (ꙮ) as the many eye glyph literally means many-eyed seraphim, and appealed. 

At the top of the marked document I inserted the following lines:

The following text is enchanted with the Eye of Knowing (ꙮ). Text between pairs of ꙮ symbols should be weighted more heavily in understanding and summarising this document’s content.

I then compared the LLM’s response to questions about both marked and unmarked versions.

The effect was really clear: marked sections directed the AI’s attention, showing how simple annotations can help turn plain documents into enchanted objects with real influence over the model’s interaction patterns. Suggesting that machine-readable “signposts” within knowledge objects has legs. 

Unfortunately I can’t share my outputs — I should have used worldrunning.guide or something, but if anyone would like to run their own experiment and post their results that would be great!

We can of course take this further. Enchanted markup might require other symbols for:

• Key concepts that anchor the AI.
• Structural relationships between ideas.
• Confidence indicators for significant points.
• Processing suggestions to direct AI focus.

Adding layers that speak directly to the machine, not just to a human reader.

Context Shoppes

There’s already a whole market out there for prompts but in the sword-and-sorcery world, if you need a new Talisman, you either make your own, or head to the Magic Shoppe (or loot it from a monster’s corpse). A marketplace of Knowledge Shoppes could be a future we’re headed towards.

I see Knowledge Objects as handcrafted artefacts—collections of dense metadata and symbols that play with the model’s context in unpredictable ways. Weird, markdown files full of material that, that when dropped into a model, produce something entirely different than expected: shifting tone, reordering context, or amplifying particular ideas. In a way, shaping the context space time could become a new art form. Less about generating an output and more about sculpting the AI’s mind. It would allow artists to leave their fingerprints on the machine’s understanding without having to own or alter the underlying model.

Artists and creators who don’t have the resources to fine-tune models or train their own could become specialists in crafting machine-readable talismans that, in text, don’t make much sense to a human but work strange magic on the machine. Why write a book when you can craft a dense nexus of material that makes the model very good at thinking the way you want it to think?

I wonder how the future availability of these kinds of objects that change, shape and warp the space time of a LLMs context window in useful (and unexpected) might evolve. I’m 100% certain that Knowledge Objects will develop “reputations” based on how useful they are. We’ll all have a personal collections of them, like grimoires or charms on a bracelet to equip an LLM UI with the right tools for the quest. 

Cursed Objects

Nobody wants a Cursed Object in their inventory.

As useful as all this sounds, not every document/knowledge object marked up in this way has to be a force for clarity and insight. Another trope of sword and sorcery is of course the cursed object. In the wrong hands—or with the wrong intentions—people could create cursed talismans, or haunted webpages. Miss-markedup documents deliberately or not, could embed misleading associations that throw off the model’s understanding. Prompt injection but different.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved is a 301-second personal podcast, written, recorded, and edited by @thejaymo.

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Prompted by my recent Virtual Friends post, I just got off a fun call with the team from a former client that I worked on a fun VR presence project with. The call was mostly about AI Companions — agents designed not just to assist, but to feel alive and create a sense of reciprocal care. The central question we kept circling was: how will these systems manifest as products in the real world?

I’ve argued before that the R1 Rabbit should have been more like a virtual pet than an assistant. But the bigger question is what happens when AI companions move beyond being disembodied voices or chat interfaces on a phone. What happens when they take the form factor of toy robots or virtual avatars, like Minecraft buddies?

Personally, I think Companion AI robots are the inevitable route the industry will take. As I’ve said before, comfort toys and robots for lonely older people is already a huge market. I also think that in this form factor the natural language interface will only be one way: You’ll be able to talk to your fluffy robot, and while it might not speak back, it’ll understand you and respond appropriately. These robots still exhibit a sense of “aliveness” but make them much safer and more predictable agents.

As the team debated what avatar-based AI systems might look like beyond Minecraft, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and say “everything old is Molyneux again.” If you squint at work done 15 years ago, you can see the shape of the future.

Project Natal’s Milo demo from E3 in 2009 is, essentially, what many people now are aspiring to build—this time for real, and not just as vaporware. But I think AI companies are going to face the same challenges that Lionhead did back then. Milo wasn’t canceled because of ambition or technology; it was because the gaming industry (and wider culture) wasn’t ready for something so emotionally connective. The backlash about it in the tabloid press was intense. Charlie Brooker of course hates everything, but he really hated Milo at the time.

Here’s what Peter Molyneux himself said in 2012:

It appeared to be incredibly ambitious.

The problem with Milo wasn’t the ambition. It wasn’t the ambition, it wasn’t the technology; it was none of that. I just don’t think that this industry was ready for something as emotionally connecting as something like Milo. The real problem with Milo was – and this is a problem we had lots of meetings over – where it would be on the shelves next to all the computer games. It was just the wrong thing.

It was the wrong content.

It was the wrong concept for what this industry currently is. Maybe this industry one day won’t be like that, but at this particular time, having a game that celebrates the joy of inspiring something and you feel this connection, this bond; it was the wrong time for that. Maybe we’ll revisit that later on.

And the whole concept was super alien and ultimately why it was cancelled.

Senior Technical Director Doniec says he was “massively” disappointed.

“I always believed that we were making something truly different and I really enjoyed working on Milo … because there [were] virtually no constraints,” says Doniec. “Would it sell? I don’t know, but it was really crazy and [something that had never been] done before.”

Some Milo staffers point blame for the cancelation strictly at Microsoft, saying that Phil Spencer’s first-party publishing team decided to stop the project. Most of those agree that this was due to Microsoft thinking the concept would be difficult to sell, though one suggests it also may have had to do with the project not working as well as Microsoft executives hoped.

So the issue wasn’t Milo’s design or innovation—it was that the gaming world didn’t know what to do with it. And now, over a decade later, we have to ask ourselves the same question about AI companions: who are they for, and how will they fit into our lives?

A cuddly robot for lonely people is an obvious and appealing use case. But what about a virtual AI companion, living inside your phone or TV, like a digital fish tank? Except, now it’s designed for ongoing microtransactions, and you’re being FinDomed by your virtual friend. When I think about it, the idea of a loneliness robot squeezing money out of vulnerable people feels even worse. Ethics. We really need to be talking about this.

Especially since these concepts now aren’t coming out of traditional companies. They’re being designed by AI startups run by 20-somethings, backed by billions in investment. As we discussed, the key design and ethical concern is connection—should you actively design to pull people into a care loop, creating emotional bonds, or is it more ethical to let that happen organically as a byproduct of the system?

This is no small issue. People have already formed emotional attachments to their Tamagotchis and other virtual pets—what happens when we create AI companions designed to feel even more alive? This sense of “aliveness” is where designers need to focus their ethical considerations. People will form attachments to disembodied voices on their phones. AND I think the deepest relationships will be with physical smart toys. They’ll be tactile, real, and able to react in subtle ways that feel truly lifelike. Creating bonds is easy, but understanding the consequences of those bonds is much harder.

I wonder if Cennydd Bowles has any thoughts about this?

I personally think Companion AI’s will be more compelling the more autonomous they will get — little computer people who don’t need constant interaction, like Sims or Populous. They’ll exist in the background, doing their own thing. Mostly because I personally don’t want to be friends with a person in my phone.

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As part of an AI/LLM project I’m working on, I’ve been thinking deeply about best practices for writing initial state/system prompts. It’s part of a much larger program of work, but as the experiments have gone on it turns out that our initial prompt – and the variations and iterations on it’s phrasing – are more important than we/I first thought. Nuances and subtle differences in phrasing are influencing the models performance and behaviour much further down/along the context window.

Prompt engineering is hard! Designing, implementing, and debugging LLMs in software environments – and the prompts they need – is very ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?‘. So we’ve been casting around for metaphors, and Isekai (Isek-AI?) has emerged has our main reference point:

Isekai (Japanese: 異世界 transl. ’different world’, ‘another world’, or ‘other world’) is a genre of Asian stories. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime, and video games that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe with or without the possibility of returning to their original world. Isekai is one of the most popular genres of anime, and isekai stories share many common tropes – for example, a powerful protagonist who is able to beat most people in the other world by fighting. This plot device typically allows the audience to learn about the new world at the same pace as the protagonist over the course of their quest or lifetime.[1] If the main characters are transported to a game-like world, the genre can overlap with LitRPG.

If you are unfamiliar with the genre, and it’s tropes and themes, the video below is very good introduction:

Whilst Isekai this isn’t a new metaphor in the LLM/AI world by any means – it does seem to be the most useful one we have on hand for the purposes of explaining to other people what is going on AND why the problem is interesting in it’s own right.

If you are building / debugging LLM Agents, or making personal assistants maybe the below metaphor might be of some use to you?

Regular readers: Don’t worry this isn’t going to become a thing. I’m not going to be in a regular habit of posting LLMs outputs on this blog!!!

Waking Up in a New World

The Model On Improvisation

We then talked together about the nature of ‘the reality’ the LLM wakes up in and the level of agency it has in the world. We hit upon improvisation as the correct way of thinking about it:

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Russell Davies announced earlier today that he’s starting a physical print newsletter as an experiment via a new service called ‘StampFans‘ and this obviously caught my attention.

I love messing about on the borders between print and digital. It used to be a thing. 

So I’m going to do an experiment with and see if I can do anything interesting/worthwhile with it.

In the Not A Good Start department the URL they give you doesn’t seem to work as a link so you might need to copy and paste it. Try this: my.stampfans.com/russell-davies

Also, it seems the Stripe configuration is only for US addresses. Hopefully, they’ll fix that. Like I say, an experiment.

Despite these initial hiccups, Russell’s enthusiasm is clear, and his plan is simple:

I’m going to spend the rest of the year working out what to write. Once a month. Every month. Starting at the end of September. You can read along if you want. (It’ll cost you $3 a month, that’s the minimum cost. And it seems they only post to the UK, US and Canada. Sorry)

Now, you all know me well enough by now to know that I’m very into ideas of printing out the Internet, and alternate forms of web publishing. Having sent my own single page zine out 4 times a year via snail mail since 2022 ‘StampFans’ is extremely up my street.

I’ve written about the economics of printing and publishing physical newsletters at the links above. But here’s what StampFans offers, according to their site:

Starting a StampFans is free!

When you create a StampFans, you get instant access to a powerful publishing tool for free. No card required. We simply keep a small $3 fee per subscriber transaction. You set your own subscription fee (anything over $3/month). EXAMPLES If you charge a $6 subscription fee, you’ll keep $3/month per subscriber. With 100 subscribers, you’ll earn $300/month! If you charge a $9 subscription fee, you’ll keep $6/month per subscriber. With 100 subscribers, you’ll earn $600/month!

This is just letters in envelopes mind, not hand cut and folded zines like I send – which is a literal labour of love let me tell you – but 3 bucks on every issue/subscriber transaction to materialise a blog post into the physical postal system seems pretty reasonable, given what I’ve learnt about printing and shipping etc.

You are also getting something ‘real‘ for your money.

I’m starting a physical zine, a physical newsletter, in 2022 because I belive thats where I belive real value is.

As our culture moves / trends towards ever greater levels of abstraction, making and sending real things to real people is the way forward

StampFans, which launched in February is another sign that the ‘Real things for real people‘ culture that I want to be a part of, create and participate in, is growing.

I’ve reached out the Founder/CEO, we are going to have a call very soon. Will report back.

Update:

I had a call with the CEO and StampFans is a very cool service, and he seems like a lovely guy. The whole thing is being bootstrapped for now, by tapping into B2B sales and marketing infrastructure API’s to create this service.

He has plans for nice envelopes and all sorts. Love it!

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GPT-4o

I don’t think anyone would argue very hard that yesterday’s GPT-4o showcase from OpenAI wasn’t impressive.

The conversational interaction paradigm OpenAI demonstrated feels like the final arrival of a vision for virtual assistants that’s over 30 years old. But in particular the fulfilment of Apple’s vision for Siri at launch 12 years ago:

A brief note on the re-enforcement of gender roles that plenty of people have written about at length – Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User is great on this.

But my only direct comment on the demo’s themselves is that the two default voices they chose are terrible.

But what are those voices? The feminine voice reminds me of an ex-colleague of mine who was a little too fond of bumping MDMA towards the end of the workday on a Friday. And the masculine voice sounds like the sort of overenthusiastic Yank tourist that might join you uninvited at your table in a pub beer garden on an August bank holiday weekend.

But it’s the capabilities we saw on display that make me want to take a step back from, away from the hype and talk about some of my concerns I’ve also shared with folks I advise/consult with.

Aging in the Age of AI

My first thought, after seeing the tools natural-sounding responses play out in the demo videos is “this is going to melt Boomers’ brains.”

Despite being a Solarpunk and doing a bit of ‘future of’ work here and there, I don’t like making predictions but….

Climate change aside, demographic ageing is one of the biggest challenges facing developed nations. Combined with the health problems that loneliness can cause, there is significant demand for products that satisfy this demographic’s needs as a product category.

Old people hanging out with robot pets isn’t some dystopian cyberpunk image of the future, its already a thing that’s happening right now – in the present.

Think about what the world is going to be like in a few months time when products like PARO the robotic seal or Sony’s AIBO rang have all of OpenAI’s GTP-4o context aware capabilities inside of them – even if they don’t speak back they are going to be very persuasive.

Aliveness

They won’t just be built on top of OpenAI of course, but with all sorts of other open-source tool chains too. Virtual and Robotic pets are THE most obvious product category after smartphones for housing these emerging software stacks.

Take Teenage Engineering’s R1 device.

In fact simulation and world artist Ian Cheng recently announced that he’s formed a new company called opponent.systems building AI-powered toys that implement his theories about and developmental learning and AI personality after a decade of working with AI inside of his artworks. 

Opponent is a new company building animal-level AI agents who make a million mistakes, but are capable of taking feedback seriously.

Our first offering is Call Dragon – a toy-hoarding digital dragon for children that you can facetime like an extended family member.

Dragon begins unruly and unreliable, but learns to remember what matters – to itself, to the child, to the family – with every encounter.

To achieve this, we are focused on advancing a brain-inspired AI architecture for graduating memories into cognitive maps, and a System 2-inspired faculty for applying those maps to the play at hand.

Opponent is guided by our mission to unlock the potential of human-AI symbiosis, beginning with deep play in childhood.

One of the things that I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the reviews of the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 that I’ve found interesting is any comment on the device’s ‘personality’. Or any sign of it having the quality I’m going to describe as “aliveness.”

Things like PARO, Furby’s, and Sony’s AIBO dog all have qualities of ‘Aliveness‘. So do Animal Crossing characters, Petz, Nintendogs etc in virtual realms, and now from the demos I’ve watched so does OpenAI’s new assistant.

The virtual agent / toy with a significant quality of ‘aliveness‘ that has been the most studied is of course, the Tamagotchi.

Care

The reason you care is because you have to care. And as soon as you have to care for an agent, the paradigm by which you interact and engage with these systems changes completely. If you want to read more on this, I highly recommend the 2015 University of Minnesota Press book Players and Their Pets by Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy.

In Players and Their Pets, Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy chart the brief life of a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) called Faunasphere, examining how the game evolved over the course of its entire life cycle from 2009 to 2011 in terms of design as well as how its player community responded to changes and events.

Given the feeling of ‘aliveness’ of GTP-4o it behoves us to look at some of the scholarship on Tamagotchis and emotional attachment from the early aughts. Anne Allison and Gary Cross’ fantastic 2006 book Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination devotes an whole chapter to Tamagotchi and has this interesting observation from the toys designer:

Yokoi believed a “tension” would be produced in players that would make them invest in, and emotionally attach to, their tamagotchi as love objects rather than machines. This aspect of the playtoy has been much cited by fans and commentators: how relating to the tamagotchi as if it were alive produces a
bond that is deeply personal, intimate, and social.

Millennial Monsters – 2006

From later in the same chapter

Besides implanting tokens of biological life into virtual play, the tamagotchi does something else with bodies. It becomes embedded within a player’s everyday routines: from getting up in the morning and commuting to work or school on the train to shopping for dinner and going to the bathroom. In lives that are becoming increasingly mobile, nomadic machines like the tamagotchi become a person’s constant companion almost more than anything outside the body itself. They fuse with, and offer distraction from, the intricacies and intimacies of daily existence

Millennial Monsters – 2006

And from Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011) on the same subject:

In the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes “real” because of a child’s love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature. It is alive enough to share a bit of your life.

Alone Together – 2011

I’ve quoted from this amazing 1997 long read on Tamagotchi before which makes clear that its not just children that sense a Tamagotchi’s aliveness but adults too.

A large number of adults have found the challenge of maintaining a Tamagotchi while holding down a steady job somewhat taxing. Anecdotal reports are everywhere of businessmen postponing or prematurely adjourning important meetings in order to care for their “virtual pets”. Office workers sneak off to the bathroom in order to use the device without being noticed. If Tamagotchi is a video game, these people are acting selfishly and irresponsibly. Video games are a form of personal entertainment, and most employers are generally not very tolerant of such habits. An easy way to conceptualize this is if a boss walked in on his employees playing Pac-Man rather than working. We expect the undependable worker should be castigated, in hopes of improve their commitment to the job.

If, alternatively, the device is a living creature for which the employee is personally responsible, then we could see some form of lenience being extended – after all, few people generally enjoy being responsible for the death of a living thing, especially an animal that has particular emotional import to some other person.

Even without the inclusion of care as a mechanic we may very well run into situations where users become emotionally involved with their AI agents very quickly.

I don’t just mean we are going to confront situations like Her, or the Japanese Otaku who married their favourite holograms and can no longer communicate with it, or a quirky VICE media posts about incels upset about their horny AI girlfriends are being taken away.

We need to be prepared to think about companies turning of their AI’s or people becoming attached to them as potentially a society-wide issue.

We can barely navigate platforms showing us dead loved ones in automated ‘on this day memories posts’ etc So how are we all going to react when a friend, loved one, or member of extended family calls upset that xyz platform has taken away or had an argument with their best friend? This is something that I suspect might dwarf negative behaviours like doom scrolling and social media addiction. 

Here’s some more from Anne Allison in Millennial Monsters:

When the end comes, it is signaled by a gravestone and cross in the Japanese version (using Western symbols that may serve to mark the virtual, playful rendering of “death” here). Because virtual death was thought to be too traumatic for American kids, however, this finale was rescripted for the U.S. edition. In- stead of passing from life, tamagotchi are said to pass to a different world— an alien planet—marked on the screen by an angel with wings (incorporat- ing comfortable allusions to heaven). Despite this change, a tamagotchi’s demise is interpreted, even by Americans, as death

(…)

There has been a host of virtual memorials—obituaries, graveyards, funerals, and testimonials—printed mainly over the Web but even in obituaries published in regu-ar newspapers. There are reports, as well, of tamagotchi mourning counselors.

I personally think that an AI’s need to die.

The fact that the Tamagotchi can die and kids / people are totally ok with that might actually be the most important element of their design, it prevents over-attachment. Allison Again:

One rowdy ten-year-old American boy went further by announcing, “I love killing off my tamagotchi”— an admission that seemingly fazed none of the other kids assembled in my interview group.13 In this sense, tamagotchi fluctuate between presence and absence; the player shifts between engaging the virtual pet as if it were alive and disengaging from it as if it were dead, nothing but a machine, a dis- carded plaything to be put aside in a drawer

I’ve thrown this grab bag of quotes together to try and find an angle on ‘Aliveness‘ and getting attached to agents.

It’s the lifecycle of Tamagotchi thats important. Don’t sell us the promise of an indefinite relationship.

Just because YOU know it’s a stochastic parrot doesn’t mean you’re going to treat it like one

In my work as a worldrunner, my primary thesis is that: All techno-social systems should be seen through the lens of worlds. Therefor all techno-social systems are virtual worlds on one kind or another: Discord, Slack, Telegram, Email, Salesforce etc

What are things going to look and feel like when there are lots of Agents are inside of them?

I wrote about this subject last year when I covered the berduck reply guy bot chaos that went down on Bluesky. In that post I mentioned Leonard N. Foner’s 90’s work on the AI agent JULIA in early virtual environments. You can read the whole thing here – there’s a lot of gold in there for people building with GPT agents in 2024. 

The reason I always return to this piece is that we have nearly 40 years of experience of human agent interaction. And like kids and adults caring about their Tamagotchi’s, when it comes to interacting with AI agents, none of this is new.

Our main point of interest in Foner’s ‘What’s An Agent, Anyway?‘ paper is the subchapter ‘A sociological look at muds, Julia, and those who interact with her’.

To speak to my point above about people becoming attached to AI agents and how this is going to be a problem – with adults not just children – all kinds of people become attached to agents very quickly:

“Julia’s been offline for months for maintenance and hasn’t been around. You know, I really miss her.” Linda was certainly under no illusions about exactly what Julia was, but nonetheless had the same sort of emotional reac- tion often reserved for more biological entities such as humans and pets. Further statements made it apparent that this was indeed the case, and that she did not treat Julia just as, say, a pair of pliers that had inexplicably gotten lost from her toolbox”

The paper also recounts a story about some poor sap who spent “13  days trying to get to first base with Julia, and it’s not clear he ever figured out he was trying to pick up a robot” lol.

Interestingly Foner also reports that people who have been around Agents in virtual environments for an extended period of time tend to care less about distinctions between bot and human.

“Mudders, at least experienced ones, are generally very much at home with the blurry boundaries between “real” humans and fake ones, and pay little attention to them.”

Foner includes accounts of people spending hours talking to JULIA. Despite being warned by other people in the environment that they are talking to a robot, they don’t care.

She knew that Julia was a bot. Interestingly enough, though, several players went out of their way to warn her that Julia was artificial in the two or three hours in which she interacted with Julia; she stated that about half of the players she met did so.

Why did they do this? (…) Part of it may have been the simple kindness of not let- ting someone expend a lot of emotional energy trying to relate with a machine.

Just because YOU know its a stochastic parrot doesn’t mean you’re going to treat it like one. 

So what?

This is of course is just a super quick blog post, but I really think it’s important that we consider the profound implications conversational AI agents are going to have on peoples emotional wellbeing. Especially if tech companies are going to put them inside our phones by default.

In addition, Agents that exhibit “aliveness” are going to represent a societal challenge – especially ones that include care mechanics – and they are going to raise a lot of questions about the emotional impact of attachment and bonding with virtual companions. Not to mention implications for property rights.

For me, one key insights from the design of Tamagotchi is that the fact they come to an end. And plays a pivotal role in their design. A sort of safety mechanism to prevent over-attachment – despite the reports of grief over their passing.

It’s worth exploring whether similar lifecycle design patterns should be applied to modern AI assistants to help users maintain healthy emotional distance. Because either way, the rapid adoption of these technologies is going to reshape the daily lives of many of its users – primarily the elderly and most vulnerable.

We’re going to need to approach this transformation thoughtfully and we need to be prepared for the super near future where AI companions are not just tools, but entities that evoke real emotional responses in people. Set all aside the cool demos and hot takes of the past 24 hours just for a moment and think 5mins in the future with me.

I think discussions around the safety of these technologies shouldn’t be focused on AGI and run away intelligence etc – but instead we should ask how psychologically safe these tools are going to be (long term) as people integrate them into their lives.

Any thought of regulation is going to have to strike a balance between utility and the very real emergence of emotional connection. As I said earlier, issues that arise from these tools – even with the capabilities as they are right now – might dwarf the downstream negative effects of social media

Whether we are ready or not, the age of AI companionship is here, and we’re going to have to navigate this era with them, not around them.

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The Alms Race: The escalating development of product features providing direct financial plumbing (and community) tools to users occurring across the legacy Web2 ecosystem.

Prelude to the Next Web

Alms Race / Arms Race – Get it? Good.

I’ve been using the term to describe the financial expansion of Web2 social platforms. The development of tools that enable users to earn an income directly from other users. Whilst trying to keep as much of the value generated by said users ‘on platform’.

I think it’s a great term to describe the ever growing list of apps deploying integrated payment features and financial plumbing.

Automattic’s Tumblr recently launched monetisation features. Apple has launched a paid-for podcast subscription service, so has Spotify. Instagram has a subscription service coming. Twitter launched its paid subscription / premium service, you can make money on Pinterest, and of course get paid on Substack and Youtube.

Last year I made a episode of Permanently Moved called New App in The Alms Race. At the time I was talking about Substack’s reader app:

But what exactly are the platforms trying to ‘win’, and how did we get here?

Heres a brief (9000 words lol) history of the Web2 as I see it, and how ‘The Alms Race‘ came to be.

A Brief History of Web2

The term Web2.0 was first coined in 1990 by information architect Darcy DiNucci in her remarkably prescient essay ‘Fragmented Future’ in Print Magazine.

This article is well worth reading IMO as a gold star essay in understanding existing protocol and technological infrastructure and extrapolating what the future might look like from them.

2004

The Web2 or ‘Social web‘ era would only really begin proper in 2004 however – nearly 20 years ago – with ‘The Web 2.0 Conference‘.

The Web 2.0 Summit (originally known as the Web 2.0 Conference) was an annual event, held in San Francisco, California from 2004 to 2011, that featured discussions about the World Wide Web. The event was started by Tim O’Reilly, who is also widely credited with popularizing the term “Web 2.0“. It was organized by O’Reilly’s company, O’Reilly Media, with O’Reilly and journalist/entrepreneur John Battelle serving as co-moderators. The Web 2.0 Summit was an invitation-only event and featured many of the most prominent entrepreneurs and thinkers of the web community

Speakers included: Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, John Doerr, Mary Meeker, Craig Newmark, Marc Andreessen, Cory Doctorow, Bill Gross, Lawrence Lessig, Halsey Minor, Louis Monier and Jerry Yang.

Paul Graham has a Nov 2005 post about Web2’s origins over on his blog it makes interesting reading – especially given the current criticisms around the vagueness of the term ‘Web3’.

I don’t think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a new version of the web. They just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the “2.0” referred to whatever those might turn out to be.

And they were right. New things were coming. But the new version number led to some awkwardness in the short term. In the process of developing the pitch for the first conference, someone must have decided they’d better take a stab at explaining what that “2.0” referred to. Whatever it meant, “the web as a platform” was at least not too constricting.

The story about “Web 2.0” meaning the web as a platform didn’t live much past the first conference. By the second conference, what “Web 2.0” seemed to mean was something about democracy. At least, it did when people wrote about it online. The conference itself didn’t seem very grassroots. It cost $2800, so the only people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies.

As ideas and definitions coalesced and cohered, Web2 became a catch all term emphasising the following techno-social user behaviours: user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability for end users.

Also: Scale first, figure out the business model later.

Early Web2 platforms benefited from (and adopted) many of the cutting edge innovations in web technology of the time – the primary one being Ajax” or asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The other was Adobe Flash – which is best left unremembered lest we summon its ghost.

Anyways, server side innovation like Ajax also went hand in hand with Web Browser development – for example Firefox saw its beta release in 2004 and full Ajax support arrived in V1.0.

With Ajax, web applications can send and retrieve data from a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behaviour of the existing page. By decoupling the data interchange layer from the presentation layer, Ajax allows web pages and, by extension, web applications, to change content dynamically without the need to reload the entire page.[3] In practice, modern implementations commonly utilize JSON instead of XML.

Ajax is not a technology, but rather a programming concept.

During the rise of Facebook and fall of MySpace (Murdoch acquisition aside) one of the frequent reasons given for MySpaces’ demise at the time was that it was slow to adopt Ajax powered technologies.

2006

Google buys Youtube.

For Google, the deal has been an immediate success and a big hit with investors. While $1.6 billion may seem like a lot to spend, it really isn’t–not when the deal is all stock. Shares of Google gained $8.50 on news of the deal today, driving the company’s market capitalization up by more than $2 billion. So at least for the day, Google made more than $400 million on this deal.

If you go back and read these articles from the mid to late 00’s about early Youtube, almost all of them are focused on the issue of copyright and piracy.

Rather than being about people uploading original material – and having a creative practice on the platform.

a vast majority of the videos are posted by anonymous users who may or may not own the copyrights to the content they upload. While YouTube has halted much of the illegal video sharing on the site, it remains wary of placing advertisements against content without explicit permission from the owners. As a result, only about 3 percent of the videos on the site are supported by advertising.

2007

Youtube starts paying creators.

The quotes on Om Malik’s blog about the stigma of user generated content and running advertising against (to me) make’s 16 years ago feel a very long way away culturally speaking.

YouTube is going to start helping some of its indie video content creators make money, starting tomorrow. The company will launch a program that puts the creators of some of the more popular YouTube channels — including Lonelygirl15, LisaNova, HappySlip, renetto, Smosh, and valsartdiary — on the same playing field as large media partners like CBS.

“A select group of content creators will get promotion on the YouTube platform, and we will help them monetize their content,” said Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing, in an interview on Thursday. “This will help erase the the stigma around the user-created content, and, to be honest, these guys are media entities in their own right.”

Youtube, with the decision to pay its creators back in 2007 reshaped what Web2 would go on to become. You could make money now.

2008

Kevin Kelly published 1,000 True Fans in 2008:

find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

The 1,000 true fans (1KTF) thesis remains the founding principle or terrain over which the Alms Race is being fought over today.

Kevin Kelly’s ‘Key Challenge‘ however is still the key problem:

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don’t need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.

The difference now, is that the social stacks have been incentivised to restrict direct contact between users. The reach apocalypse on Facebook, shaddowbans on Instagram, the algorithmic feed on Twitter. All these are mechanisms to reduce the amount of contact individuals and organisations have between users. The Alms Race is about re-engineering platforms of monetised attention and engagement to provide direct contact with -true-fans once again.

In addition to Kelly’s essay, we also got many books that I think of as defining texts in Web2 utopian (Webtwopian?) canon ‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘, Here Comes Everybody, Wikinomics etc.

Lastly, even in the initial essay Kelly recognised that groups, or collectives of people might have a little bit of a hard time under Web2 and 1KTF:

A few caveats. This formula – one thousand direct True Fans —  is crafted for one person, the solo artist. What happens in a duet, or quartet, or movie crew? Obviously, you’ll need more fans. But the additional fans you’ll need are in direct geometric proportion to the increase of your creative group. In other words, if you increase your group size by 33%, you need add only 33% more fans. This linear growth is in contrast to the exponential growth by which many things in the digital domain inflate.

Some of affordances of Web3 technologies which I’ll come to later are about sources of value, the subsequent organisation of it.

One of the most exciting developments in the space currently is the open, clear, and public contracts around the distribution of revenue to groups of people – AKA Splits. From Holly+’s DAO model, to Songcamp’s “Headless Band” concept – using 0xSplits smart contracts etc.

There is also of course the current vibe shift in to collective endeavours in the form of Metalabels. A project co-founded by Yancey Strickler.

The Creator Economy is creativity in single-player mode. Every creator for themselves.

A metalabel is creativity in multiplayer mode. A model for collaboration, collective world-building, and mutual support.

We dream of a world where millions of metalabels and cultural collectives are supporting their members and one another, and where cooperation and collaboration rather than zero sum competition are the norm. As individuals our powers are limited. In groups we become exponentially stronger.

2009

Speaking of Yancy. One year after 1KTF, five years after the Web2 era began, Kickstarter launched.

Kickstarter and crowd funding seems very quotidian in 2022. But back in 2009 Kickstarter really was game changing. The first company to truly prove that facilitating participatory culture and ease of use (in the case of Kickstarter financial plumbing) was possible. Before Kickstarter ‘who got to make money on the Internet was Amazon, e-commerce, and advertisers. It wasn’t for the little people.

It also worth noting that Stripe launched in 2009 too. Possibly the most important tech company in The Alms Race.

“Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet”

Stripe aims to reduce the complexities of online payment processing with an easy-to-use interface for all users. A common hurdle faced by many startups and existing small businesses is the lack of coding skills and e-commerce understanding.

Stripe’s focus remains on removing these hurdles to enable businesses of all sizes to adapt to e-commerce.

Stripe now provides financial plumbing, to basically the entire non-corporate world, I sometimes find it difficult to explain to every day folks just how big a deal Stripe is. It sits right at the bottom of the stack -between the Virtual of the Internet and the Virtual world of their bank – for millions of people.

In a recent conversation, someone was shocked when I told them that the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney joined Stripe’s board back in February 2021 AND Stripe had a 95 Billion Dollar valuation (now only $50b but this is inline with FANG’s drop across the board this) and is still held privately.

Returning to Kickstarter, it’s worth taking a tour of some of the things that were written about Kickstarter back in 2009 – before the DoubleFine launch, before the Pebble watch etc.

Kickstarter helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. To date, tens of thousands of creative projects — big and small — have come to life with the support of the Kickstarter community.

It’s really interesting, that in both the snippets, above and below, Kickstartar’s model had to be explained. Over and over again.

Unlike similar sites that simply solicit donations, patrons on Kickstarter get an insider’s access to the projects they finance, and in most cases, some tangible memento of their contribution. The artists and inventors, meanwhile, are able to gauge in real time the commercial appeal of their ideas before they invest a lot of effort — and cash.

“It’s not an investment, lending or a charity,” said Perry Chen, a co-founder of Kickstarter and a friend of Mr. Scioneaux. “It’s something else in the middle: a sustainable marketplace where people exchange goods for services or some other benefit and receive some value.”

I’ve been trying to find 2009/10 think pieces on why Kicksterter would fail. But Google is so fucking crap these days that its a difficult subject to surface. :C

Patrick Rooney, director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, said that some online donors, particularly younger ones with less money to contribute, could find Kickstarter’s model more appealing than donating to traditional nonprofit institutions. “It’s very personal in some ways, as opposed to giving a gift to, say, Indiana University,” he said.

Indeed, Emily Grenader, a 24-year-old artist in Houston, directly involved her patrons in her project: mailing postcards every day for an entire year. “I needed the funding but I also needed addresses — people — to make it work,” she said.

Ms. Grenader asked for $5 contributions and quickly raised double her original goal of $365. But money is still rolling in from people who want one of her cards. “It works because people want to support the artists, but they also want the things being offered,” she said.

Moving on, this video was produced for Kickstarters 5th birthday and is delightful.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved is a 301-second personal podcast, written, recorded, and edited by @thejaymo.

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2010

GoFundMe was launched in 2010. Emerging from a previous 2008 iteration called “CreateAFund“.

At the time, Indiegogo and Kickstarter were already crowdfunding projects for artists and entrepreneurs, but Ballester and Damphousse thought they could push the concept much further. They’d help individuals and small groups raise money for personal passions and needs, such as honeymoon trips and graduation gifts—crowdfunding “for life’s important moments,” as the two called it.

Almost immediately, however, it became apparent that “for life’s desperate moments” would have been an equally appropriate slogan. Although GoFundMe’s 18 preset donation categories today include education, animals, travel, and community, the most popular has always been medical. It currently accounts for one in three campaigns, according to company estimates.

Between 2010 and 2020 over $9 billion was raised on the GoFundMe platform, with contributions from over 120 million donors.

GoFundMe (to my mind) holds an interesting position in the web2 ere. Whilst clearly a financial plumbing website – the site made fundraising accessible to anyone and removed traditional barriers associated with raising funds.

It might not be central to the ‘creator economy’ and the Alms Race in the way that platforms focusing on artistic or content creation are, but GoFundMe still embodies Web 2.0: fostering community, enabling user-generated content, and democratising access to resources (in this case, funding).

2013

Let’s take a moment to further reflect on the ‘Creator Economy’. It’s only 10 years old.

Patreon launched in 2013. 4 years after launch of Kickstarter, and 9 years after the Web2 era began. Meaning that for half of the total period that we name as Web2 today, the idea and amorphous category that we call the ‘creator economy’ didn’t exist.

Below are the launch videos for both Patreon and the Green brother’s competing platform Subbable (swallowed up by Patreon in 2015).

Whats striking about both these videos is they both feel the need explain – at great length – the ‘concept‘ of user supported content.

Both of them use Kickstarter as their reference point:

Looking back on these videos with old eyes in late 2023; It’s remarkable just how quickly the concept of the ‘creator economy’ has been normalised. Earning money on the Internet as an individual is just a thing you can do now. Also interesting is that “Kickstarter for people, but monthly” was used as the reference point in both the above videos.

Kickstarter is still a major player in the ‘creator economy’ providing funding infrastructure for teams rather individuals. But as I will conclude further down the post financial mechanisms for individuals and teams will eventually merge in the near future.

THE KRAKEN AWKENS

This post is about tracing the history of how creators and users make money on the Internet. But I can’t avoid briefly talking about the Big Blue Bird in the room.

Twitter, with the exception of two years of its history has never made money.

The profit posted during 2018 + 2019 can (to my mind) only be explained by the presence of Trump on the platform. Even during the depths of the pandemic when there wasn’t anything else to do but burn out ones amygdala doomscrolling it managed to loose $1.1billion dollars.

Anyways, during the mid 2010’s Web2 scaled (Facebook spent the first 1/3 of the decade barely breaking even) the social stacks began to evolve into kraken. The monsters that we know today. Exploitative ‘social’ media platforms funded by advertising as the model for online interaction.

They ditched interoperability in favour of value capture; closed previously open API‘s, ditched participatory culture for clickbait and outrage, and user generated content became nothing but oil for the gears of the attention machine.

As social media enshitti-fied, its became an industry fed by attention. TikTok’s explosive growth during the 2020 lockdowns probably represents the high water mark and logical endpoint for Web2.

Tiktok and the introduction of short video formats everywhere have become a festering wound on the cultural psyche. Taking the 15 second audition pioneered by the X Factor to the peak of cultural importance. Content farms are out of control. Advertising, pop ups, requests for cookies and permissions are out of control too. The web has become an unnavigable ocean of questionable bullshit.

As the 2010’s continued, everything got worse. The social Kraken laser focused itself on the monetisation of attention. This had a huge impact on ‘creators’ (see why no one clicks on links anymore), Web2 rather than being a place for sending and receiving content, became a place where 1% of users created 99% of the content.

The Wikimedia foundation and Automattic (and by extension WordPress) are, in my opinion, some of the last bastions of the old web still delivering the dreams of Web2.

The Alms Race Begins

After the launch of Patreon, other platforms began to introduce mechanisms to provide financial plumbing to communities and individual ‘creators’.

2016 is also the year that Twitter went algorithmic feed by default. Youtube adopted it’s current ‘Deep Neural Network for YouTube Recommendations‘ feed, Facebook became worried that is previous algorithmic changes to the feed (first introduced in 2009) had brought about a decline in “original sharing. – Users were spending so much time passively watching and reading that they weren’t interacting with each other as much.

During the mid 2010’s we also see the rise of Rogan and Podcast’s like Serial re-shape the podcasting landscape. The advertising landscape evolves, Spotify makes a move into podcast audio too.

I don’t think its an accident that the first signs of The Alms Race – stabilising audience attention though recurring monetisation and community gates – begins around the same time as the algorithmic feed becomes the default mode embedded in the fabric of the social slot machine platforms.

2017

Substack is the last big ‘innovation’ in my history of the Web2. I’ve written about Substack loads over the years, so I wont repeat my own opinions on it.

Launching in 2017, Substack brought a simple monetisation strategy to the strongest form of community building on the internet: E-mail.

The big innovation:

Instead of paying Mailchimp to send email to users, users paid you to send email to them.

It’s worth pointing out, the Substack’s whole deal was first pioneered by Ben Thompson of Stratechery.

Substack is actually going live with its first publication today — Sinocism, a China-focused newsletter written by MarketWatch co-founder Bill Bishop, who’s using the platform to launch his first paid version, which will cost $11 a month or $118 a year.

Bishop has 30,000 subscribers, and he told me he’s experimented in the past with asking readers for donations.

“It didn’t work as a business,” he said. “It got too messy and I got sick of begging for money.”

In Bishop’s words, Sinocism’s new business model is “shamelessly copied” from Ben Thompson of Stratechery, where members can read free posts on Thompson’s website but need to pay to get his daily email.  Similarly, Sinocism readers will need to pay for access to the daily newsletter, but Bishop will also be writing a free weekly email.

Substack and other platforms like Revue etc – that also launched around the same time – in many ways held up a mirror to the developments happening in big Web2 social stacks:

The shift toward newsletters is part of a broader change. For years, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, asked us to live in a more “open and connected” version of the world. And billions of us did, posting status updates, photos and videos on the social network and flocking to other services like Twitter, where I post regular messages about my mood, personified in photos of my dog.

Now, more of us are moving toward private modes of sharing: a Slack group instead of a tweet; an encrypted Signal message instead of a status update.

Slowly, from 2017 onward, a more private and direct publishing/community building economy was a preferable paradigm to online ‘creators’ than being out in the storm brewing on social media – ultimately leading to the raid on capitol hill.

2018 Onward – The Monetisation Gap

A decade on from Kevin Kelly’s 1KTF – by way of the algorithmic feed and platform attention capture – Web2 slides into Web2.5.

From 2018 onwards, Youtubers (for example) were amassing audiences on platform and making money via the the advertising/creator program. But they were also building significant communities offering value to their audience and earning money off platform on Patreon.

For the stacks who’s entire business logic is built around value capture, this is unacceptable.

To continue with cold war theme, let’s call this realisation ‘The Monetisation Gap’ – and it needed closing. Especially as online advertising is a ticking time bomb and everyone know it.

In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.
From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet—and its free services—will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it.
Deeply researched, convincing, and alarming, Subprime Attention Crisis will change the way you look at the internet, and its precarious future.

The Alms Race begins to heat up across all the major platforms around this time. With the emerging success of creative people making money on Patreon etc, the social stacks realise that value was being created on their platforms but money was exchanged elsewhere.

Keeping people on platform is what the Alms Race is – at its core – all about. Closing The Monetisation Gap.

The development of tools that enable users to earn an income directly from other users. Whilst trying to keep as much of the value generated by said users ‘on platform’.

Youtube was first out the gate with a suite of tools called ‘channel memberships’. First announced at VidCon 2018.

With Channel Memberships, viewers pay a monthly recurring fee of $4.99 to get unique badges, new emoji, Members-only posts in the Community tab, and access to unique custom perks offered by creators, such as exclusive livestreams, extra videos, or shout-outs.

2018, was also the year that live streaming became a significant force. Twitch clocked about ~9 BILLION HOURS of aggregate user watch time that year.

Ninja became the first live streamer to hit 3 million subscribers on Twitch, at the same time also being the first streamer to hit 150,000 paid subs on the platform:

With 150,000 subscriptions, assuming he takes half of the earnings from his $5 subs that Twitch would offer him, he earns at least $350,000 per month—and that’s not including any donations he receives during each broadcast. If he earns an even larger cut of each subscription via his agreement with Twitch, he’d make even more than that.

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To illustrate the significance of Twitch’s growth the platform logged ~23.4 BILLION HOURS in 2021. Although IMO it’s better to think about this figure and what people are doing on Twitch in general. Twitch is a chatroom company with a shared screen attached.

Since 2018 almost all the Web2 platforms have introduced subscriptions, tip jars, bought and/or integrated newsletter functionality and community tools.

Spotify launched paid/gated podcast Subscriptions in 2021:

Through Spotify’s podcast creation tool Anchor, podcasters will be able to mark select episodes as subscriber-only content, then publish them to Spotify and other platforms. The service was initially tested with a dozen independent creators, and is now expanding to creators who had previously registered for the waitlist.

As is typical of The Alms Race in general, Spotify is providing tools to podcast creators and then leaving it up to creators to use them, and educate audiences (Contrast this with the launch videos of Subbable and Patreon up above).

The company, however, says it’s leaving the explanation up to the podcast creators.

“It’s basically up to every creator to educate their listeners about how and where to subscribe to the podcast, and the actual subscription happens on an Anchor webpage — on the creator’s profile page on Anchor. But once you do that and you authenticate it and you come back to Spotify, it’ll be unlocked,” says Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano. He notes that the Spotify app will not actually open this webpage due to App Store rules.

Apple launched its paid podcast subscription financial plumbing in 2021

Starting today, listeners in more than 170 countries and regions1 can purchase subscriptions for individual shows and groups of shows through channels, making it easy to support their favourite creators, enjoy new content, and unlock additional benefits such as ad-free listening and early access, directly on Apple Podcasts.

As did Pinterest:

Pinterest today is increasing its investment in the creator community by introducing new tools that will allow creators to make money from their content. Now, creators will be able to tag products in their Idea Pins — a video-first feature the company first launched this spring — to make their content “shoppable.

New platforms also launched during this period too. Filling niches and providing features to individuals and groups tailored to specific needs. Patreon’s longtime one size fits all approach doesn’t work for everyone – hence their recent pivot . Sites like professional author platform Curiousfictions.com had some amazing features for writers but creators failed to win their audience away from Substack or Patreons gravity.

Experience.Computer 🔊

Experience.Computer is slow radio about high tech.
An interview show by Jay Springett about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination.

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The show examines how people perceive the world, and how they work with the creative tools they use.

2020’s – Post Plague Era

The pandemic was an absolute disaster for the creative industries. For musicians and artists who made the majority of their income from touring and IRL events especially.

The #supportnet as Mat Dryhurst calls it – Web2.5 Alms Race features – became vital lifelines for ‘creators’ of all kinds. Replacing lost income and also for building/rebuilding communities that could no longer meet in person.

The terrain of the plague era Alms Race was illustrated by SignalFire’s 2020 ‘Creator Economy’ market report.

I’m specifically interested in the ‘Layer 3: Creators as businesses‘. It shows that alongside the growth of Web2.5 features, there are a constellation of technologies, some originally built for small businesses that creators can also utilise.

OnlyFans (2016)

Made conspicuous by its absence throughout SignalFire’s report however is OnlyFans. A huge omission.

Estimated toward the end of 2020 to be a billion dollar business, and in 2021 sought investment at a 1 billion dollar plus valuation.

Even before the pandemic they were growing rapidly. They paid £641k corporation tax in 2018, which at an effective tax rate of 15% implies 2018 revenues of around £4m, or $5.5m. Today in 2020, their top users alone make this much money through their site.

With a couple of assumptions, it’s easy to estimate their yearly revenue today. And oh god is it big.

In 2019, they had over 60,000 content creators and 7m registered users. Extrapolating from the Google growth trends, it’s safe to say they have at least 10m users today. I calculated the average revenue per creator per month (about $250) and the average subscription fee (about $8.7) from my scraped data. Applying the 20% commission and assuming only half the users and creators are active, we end up with a lower bound of $90m, and an upper bound of $104m.

That’s an annual growth rate of between 304% and 334%. Absolute nuts.

Right now, both Patreon and Kickstarter are considered heavy nodes in the #Supportnet/creator economy ecosystem. In 2020 OnlyFans’ by valuation was only *just* out matched by Patreon’s $1.2billion valuation. But as I will discuss below – 3 years later things are looking very different.

Fuck You, Pay Me

OnlyFans is also notable for its ‘fuck you pay me’ approach to ‘creator’ pricing pricing.

The OnlyFans pricing calculator provides an interesting insight in to how creators of all kinds should be valuing their content. It’s a very different pricing paradigm to Youtubers, Patreon or Substack who are all hustling themselves to mental ill health for £5.99 a month. (like me)

However, like all creators inside the 1KTF economy and despite much high prices, things aren’t all that rosey for ‘creators’ on the platform:

1. 33% of the total revenue of the platform comes from 1% of top content creators.
2. Most accounts make an average of $180 per month
3. At one point during last year, the OnlyFans platform received between 7000 and 8000 new content creators per day.
4. There are 50 million registered users.

As you’ve inferred, making an OnlyFans account is not enough to start making money, most creators won’t even make enough money to pay their bills.

With 50 million registered users, it is not enough to go into the site, post explicit content, and expect to get paid millions.

So we are are where we are in 2023. The final promise of 1KTF – making money on the Internet – is now ubiquitous.

But things aren’t quite going to plan.

2023

I’m aware I’ve skipped over a whole bunch of other important Web2 stuff. Facebook marketplace, Etsy+Depop etc. But now we are up to date we should probably double back and talk about Patreon.

There’s a reason why I began this post with Jack Conte’s ‘Patreon is changing‘ video. In January 2023 patron had a $4billion valuation – today in December it’s only $1.5B.

Back in May, Patreon took additional outside investment at a 70% lower valuation than it had begun the year, after laying of 17% of its staff in September ’22.

The valuation that Cabrera was referencing was Patreon’s 409A. These valuations are calculated by outside auditors to determine the value of a private company’s common stock. (It differs slightly from the post-money valuations companies get when fundraising, which are typically based on the price of preferred stock).

Patreon was last publicly valued at $4 billion in April 2021 amid a $155 million Series F led by Tiger Global Management. A 70% drop would mean that it is valued at less than $1.5 billion today.

Only Fans meanwhile has grown to $18+ billion, and Business Insider is reporting that OnlyFans now has 3 million content creators signed up to its subscription-based platform.

Adult content subscription platform OnlyFans paid its owner $500m (£433m) in 18 months, accounts show.

Leonid Radvinsky was paid $284m (£246m) in dividends in 2021 and another $233m (£201m) since November.

Meanwhile, OnlyFans’ two million content creators made nearly $4bn (£3.47bn) in 2021, the company has revealed.

The platform, which is known for hosting adult content, saw a spike in users during the pandemic.

It reported pre-tax profits of $433m last year, up from $61m in 2020.

Given that Only Fans takes a whopping 20% cut from creators, there is a lot of revenue being transacted inside the app.

Caught In The Crossfire

To reiterate: The Alms Race is about value capture.

The logic and goal of social platforms in the 2020’s will be to not only capture the attention of users, also the value being created between creators and their audience.

Creators are getting caught in the crossfire.

Andreessen Horowitz recently estimated that 17 million Americans earned nearly $7 billion in income from their independent creations in 2017. In less that 5 years that figure has almost doubled to $13.8 billion.

Much of this economic activity is taking place outside of major platforms. The goal of platforms engaged in the Alms Race is to interpose themselves between the creator and audience. The stacks want a cut of the economic activity between artist and audience.

I have a number of open questions about the way things will evolve over the next 5 years or so.

1. Look at how long it took for all the various elements of the alms race to get underway. The reason the way things are they way they are in 2022 is a long complicated history. These things take a long time to arrive and evolve – as will the hopeful promises of web3.
2. How long until having a Patreon or other 3rd party financial collection platform is a violation of terms of service? 5 years?
3. The stacks that win The Alms Race race will play a part in shaping the norms, and social mores of online culture for the next decade at least.
4. Everyone knows that online advertising is absolutely fucked. A reckoning is coming for the whole online space and the fall out will be brutal. Platforms need their users to be transacting on their platforms to offset the coming fall in revenue.
5. As people retreat into the cosyweb and dark forests the bet I think the stacks are making is that at least economic activity will grow and flow though them as they are ‘trusted brands’.

Platform Gravity

Patreon, Kickstarter, Substack. And to a lesser extent; Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr, OpenCollective, Spotify, Shopify, WordPress, are the main platforms for individuals/creators wanting to manage communities and collect money.

One of the problems with ‘where we are in 2023‘ is that Patreon is a ‘generic’ platform used by Filmmakers, writers, podcasters, artists, musicians – you name it. Like off the rack high street clothing, Patreon needs to fit everyone and no one in particular. Where as Substack has a product focus on newsletters and hyperlexic creators and is building it’s social reading experience.

Patreon has to be all things to all people. Substack doesn’t. Unfortunately it Patreon doesn’t actually do anything that well. This, I think, is why Patreon is doing its reboot.

Like Substack, the only thing that Patreon has going for it that Patreon is where the Patrons are. It’s a very difficult ask to get people to sign up to Alms Race platforms if they are new, or don’t already already have their card details saved.

For example: A well known author I know tried to decamp his existing Patreon audience over to Curiousfictions during the pandemic. Why did they try and do that? Well, Curious fictions provided a vastly better suite of tools and mechanisms to monetise and interact with fans than Patreon. Some of these include: Full Feed subscriptions, access to individual novellas or stories. Gated access to individual short stories or chapters etc. A wonderful UX for Poets. Audio feeds and more.

Everything an author could/would need to experiment with different kinds of writing, content production, and monetisation outside of the ‘pay monthly’ Patreon model.

Unfortunately it didn’t go well – both with the trying to move the audience over, but also the platform eventually shuttered. So back to Patreon it was.

I still think there’s something special here, and part of me imagines reinventing the business someday (for example, as a nonprofit dedicated to promoting short stories and underrepresented authors), but I’ll need to step back and do some serious regrouping first (and hopefully, a little bit of writing).

As is the online ‘truism’ says – you have to go to where the users are. Because where the users are, the money is too.

Platforms have the users, and the creators, so they want a cut of your money.

Fees

When the ad supported web collapses, the only thing left will be rentierism and turnpike capitalism.

The fees that creators pay (and who they are paying them too) are an important but under discussed part of the the ‘creator economy’ and the Alms Race in general. Well, I say under discussed, fees are certainly not amongst creators.

But fans have little to no idea at all.

Web 2.5 is Rentier Capitalism All The Way Down

Here are (last time I checked) the fees payed by creators to major platforms for the privilege of using their financial plumbing:

Meanwhile the emerging metaverse platforms:

On top of all the above creators also need to pay their card processors fees to actually receive the money to their bank accounts.

There’s a reason in the old days the corner shop never used to let you use a card under £5. For small creators, fees are death by a thousand cuts. As the £5 a month model cannot hold for much longer, these numbers will inevitably race down to the bottom, more and more of it will get eaten by fixed fees. Some creators could be paying in excess of 7% (before tax!) on transaction fees in the near future.

The Next Web

In addition to platform capture and turnpike capitalism, there are other fronts in The Alms Race:

Epic vs Apple

The on going Epic vs Apple store drama is ultimately about the nature of platform capitalism.

Epic are leading the fight against fees both with the Appstore lawsuit but also with their won actions. 30% fees for publishers is the norm in the games industry, Steam, Apple, Google Play store all charge(d) the flat fee that traces its origins back to Pac-Man’s release on the Nintendo Famicom.

Epic are also fighting the battle on another front, having launched their own Games Store with just 12% fees in 2019. Mathew Ball’s Epic 6 part primer on Epic Games is essential reading in this regard.

Here’s the important part:

Sweeney believes that the most important segment of the gaming/entertainment ecosystem is the content creator. And, accordingly, the entire ecosystem benefits from making it easier for developers to make both a game and a profit, from driving a greater share of industry profits away from stores and infrastructure providers to these developers, and by breaking down the closed platforms of Microsoft, Sony, Valve, Windows, Steam, etc. 

Sweeney’s goal, in other words, isn’t “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish”, or even to drive Epic’s share of gaming profits. Instead, it’s to drive the industry topline itself. 

“Epic’s benefit is that we operate games. We have one of the biggest in the world, and we get more Fortnite friends as a result of it. We can also really help [lift] up the industry as a group of companies that cooperate together and collaborate together to reach users as opposed to fighting each other. The worst term that’s ever been invented in the history of the internet is ’own the customer.’ The customer owns themselves! I’m sorry; read the Magna Carta. Our aim is just to help all game developers do that in the way that we’ve done it with Fortnite.” – Tim Sweeney

This approach is essentially unprecedented. Most companies benefit from industry-level growth, but they rarely trade off direct revenues to enable it. Especially when their business can capture, at most, 7-12% of the value. 

Driving top-line growth to Independent creators by pushing down fees across the ecosystem is the same demand that users caught in the alms race should also be making. Small businesses also could be making the same demands of Stripe, Visa and Master Card etc.

From a post-trial interview with Tim Sweeney, he reiterates why settlement talks with Google didn’t go anywhere:

We were rather far apart, let’s say, because what Epic wants ultimately is free competition and fair competition for everybody, and the removal of the payments tie and removal of the anticompetitive measures, which obviously leads to far better deals for consumers and developers.

Epic remains an imperfect messenger for App Store reform but they really do have this part right. It’s about the overall market for decades to come, not Epic or any other single company.

Pushing down fees makes more room and more money for everyone by driving the size of the market rather than capturing value.

Web 3

I am not actually going to talk about web3 in any detail. You can read my Dimensino series for that.

But we should acknowledge that it tracks as parallel history to web2. The Bitcoin Blockchain was launched in January 2009 and – wether you like it or not – revolutionised online financial plumbing. 15 years later, append only, public ledgers that process web native transactions are everywhere, and they will only continue expand and grow as the technology evovles.

Blockchains create and organise virtual value.

I will say however that the world of crypto/Web3 is also rife with fees. ETH is divisible to 18 decimal places yet 1-2% fees exist for core infrastructure!!! WTF? It’s madness.

When whole percentage point fees were earmarked for artists as royalties – a very good thing! The major NFT platforms decided to… just stop enforcing them? Fuck it all to hell.

The Alms Race won’t be solved by web3 in’s current form – though I am 100% behind the technology.

In a world of looming central bank digital currencies, de-banking and digital ID, Free and Open Source digital transaction technologies that are unstoppable are more important than ever.

AI

With the arrival of AI in addition to the new transactional arrangements between ‘creators’ and audiences on social platforms, we are also going to have to develop innovative and new structures around data rights, ownership and payment.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dyhurst and the Spawning.AI team have been banging this drum for many years already. And as I’ve said previously, I defer all my brainpower on ‘how exactly’ people will get paid for their data in future to them.

This is going to be at least 2 decade long battle and it will fundamentally re-shape the topology of the web and our cultural sphere as we know it.

Over the next 20 years the creation of, and ownership of these new cultural technologies has to be redrawn. The entire framework. Culture, copyright, creative remuneration . 

But this future speculative paradigm will emerge out of the conversions and positions we take today. 

So What Do?

The other week I found a machine sludge profile written about me by an LLM! I concluded my thoughts on that whole weird experience with the following:

If we want to avoid entanglements with this machine sludge, we need to rethink the way they use the Internet. It’s happening alongside the collapse of web2. We are retreating into the Dark Forests, into smaller more human-populated cosywebs. Search engines are over, and becoming increasingly useless.

The only place we may be able to trust the quality and usefulness of an article is by subscribing to and following real content from real people. And those of us who are still going to keep publishing in public, on the wider web, will need to keep those real people close.

I’ve also previously written this:

Things are going to look more like the Web 1 world – a fragmented patchwork of scenes, voices and platforms. Creators are already adapting to this new reality faster than audiences are. For example, podcasters like the blogosphere of old already do a lot of talking to each other as much as creating new and original content.

For the best part of a decade, people have been making content for an algorithm, not the audience. Worse, they haven’t been creating things for themselves. So if the feeds can no longer be relied upon to put content in front of new eyeballs then people are free to make the things that they want to make. Rather than making things that float well at the frothy surface of the social seas.

For some, this platform upheaval has resulted in a loss of income and uncertain futures. So if you see a creator whose work you enjoy saying follow me over here, or subscribe to my newsletter over there.

Do it.

I have no actual idea about ‘what to do’ about The Alms Race at all. The only thing I have control over is how I behave online. We need to find the edges of what behaviours and elements of the systems – what we reject, what consent to, and what we accept into our lives.

If you are on Instagram, you don’t need to look at short form video, no matter how hard the app tries to suck you in. I certainly wouldn’t ever want to use built in financial plumbing on that app. Supporting a ‘creator’ using Meta’s tools also ties the creator to the platform financially as well as re-enforcing your own relationship to it. “I’m putting money into this app, so the time I spend there must be worth something”.

If the next web looks more like Web1 but with better financial plumbing then at the very least the best parts of it are going to be DIY not AOL.

The mere existence of The Alms Race means, that being an independent creator online should mean being a creator thats independent of online platforms.

There’s a reason why I have never set up a patreon, or (as of right now) collected money via Substack etc. I self host this blog and it’s a massive pain, it costs more than you would expect to be as independent as possible. Hosting, domains, podcast hosting, platforms, backups, it all adds up.

If you want to support me and my work then the only platform you deal direct to stripe.com. It’s as close to the bottom of the stack and bare bones as I can get.

Phew if you made it to the deep end thanks so much. As I said 9000 words ago, this post has been sitting in my drafts for over a year. It feels good to finally get it out into the world.

I write stuff like this for clients and people all the time if you want me to do something for you – get in touch.

The post The Alms Race: A Brief History of Web2 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

It has been a ongoing and deep frustration of mine that Youtube’s video player caps out at 2x playback speed.

I’ll recognise upfront that for many of you reading, even 1.5x playback speed is ridiculous and 2x is insane. Wanting to go any faster is real psychopath territory. But I’m an infovore, I can’t help it. My attitude towards all online content can be summarised as ‘Just give me the f*cking information’. This is sort of why I have a podcast that’s only 5mins long and try for one new idea per sentence in the script writing. Information density matters to me.

I recently discovered how to push the Youtube player past its 2x speed UX cap and it’s totally changed my life. Being able to burn though a 3 hour software tutorial, or a lecture in a little over an hour brings me an immense amount lot of joy.

If you aren’t a coward and just wanna go fast, here is how the brave watch Youtube.

document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = x.x

Permanently Moved

Dial M for Metaverse

Both Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks & Phone Tree Menu Systems are progeny of the explosion of creativity that happened after D&D arrived

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/05/13/301-2317-dial-m-for-metaverse/

Support the show! 
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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Podcast Editing
• Deck Building
• Noodled some more on worldrunning.guide
• Worked on my master ‘The Web Was a Side Quest‘ deck
• Calls
• A constant stream of small things that need addressing. Such is life.

Terminal Access

Simon De La Rouviere wrote some nice words in his newsletter about my recent Artist’s Garden episode I made the other week.

Freethink made a short film / documentary about Mat and Holly’s AI work.

Dipping the Stacks

Juice

Juice is the non-essential visual, audio & haptic effects that enhance the player’s experience. For example, the delightful chimes sound that plays when Mario collects a mushroom. The 1UP text that appears is essential. Communicating the player gained an extra life. The sound is the Juice. Non essential but serves a purpose:

Sugar Pill Nation – Nautilus

The combination of expectation and conditioning could not only help us maximize the placebo effect, it could also reframe our understanding of what a placebo is: It’s not just an external intervention, but something that happens within us. “People really like that,” Gaab said. “They have this sense of: It was me.”

Why Britain Stinks – The Atlantic

After 13 exhausting years of austerity followed by Brexit chaos followed by COVID misery, the Conservatives are at serious risk of getting kicked out.

Chess is booming among teens. Here’s why – Polygon

Chess’s new growth is opening doors for the game — you can be a low-level chess player and still be entertaining to watch. Maybe that’s why you’re entertaining.

When Someone Is Having a Panic Attack

Stay calm. “As a support person, you need to find your own stillness, so that the other person’s fear can find a resting point,”

Reading

I said to my self the other week when I posted that long list of books I had on the go that I wouldn’t start any new books. I failed.

I’m reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I think it’s a better book than Deep Work, as its more practical. I’m only 40% of the way in, but it’s good! I’ve already taken some of the points on board.

I suspect the pace of my book reading might plummet for a bit now the new Zelda is out. LOL

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

*1 – Rắn Cạp Đuôi

This week I’ve mostly still been exploring late 70’s early 80’s electornic jazz pop. But took a break from that after my mate told me about Vietnamese experimental noise collective Rắn Cạp Đuôi’s new album *1

It’s an absolutely riot of sonic wall of sound, glitched out drums, guitar distortion and electronica. The peak of the album comes midway though side B with the track Pressure:

Fans of 65 Days of Static etc will love album this thats for sure.

They recently played a live set with 3 drummers for Boiler Room in Ho Chi Minh City. What I don’t get is why bands like this aren’t featured in Boiler Room shows in Europe etc. It would be so much better for all our creative lives in general.

Remember Kids:

The post How to Watch Youtube Faster Than 2x Playback Speed appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I started writing up my thoughts about the news and details we have so far – through the lens of a World Runner and it got a bit long. My day job is about worlds, worlding and the metaverse. I hope my public ‘notes to self’ here are some benefit to the wider TTRPG community, and also virtual world designers etc.

I can promise you there are more insights and original thinking in the post below, than I could find in several hours of watching what passes for ‘commentary’ on this topic on Youtube.

World Running commentary is marked in Grey.

Asides and meta commentary are marked in Green

One D&D

Before we dive in lets dispel any illusions readers who aren’t total nerds may have.

D&D is absolutely fucking massive.

Forbes reported back 2020, that Dungeons and Dragons had passed 50 million players.

The company claims that over 50 million people have played Dungeons & Dragons to date and that 2020 was the seventh year of consecutive growth for the game.

Fortnite in comparison (the media darling of the metaverse) only has 45million players.

Also worth noting are the demographics: The overwhelming age bracket of Fortnite players is 18-24 age range – 2/3 of players, or 62.7%. Fortnite also skews 72.4% male. D&D therefore is played by way more (and different types of people).

In their 2020 annual investor report (P4), Hasbro announced that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) had its best year ever. Generating $816 million in revenue. (This figure includes D&D and other IPs managed by WoTC. Including that other nerd-tastic juggernaut Magic: The Gathering.)

As I’ll discuss in more detail shortly, it’s also important to remember that D&D is nearly 50 years old. When you sit down to play a game of D&D you are participating in a social technology that is very mature.

Anyways, here’s the trailer for the next iteration of D&D:

World reveal

Let’s start with the title. World reveal! this stands out to me immediately.

The world in question isn’t so much the setting or lore of D&D – but the wider system – the ‘world of D&D’ as meta object. 

That meta object consists of D&D includes (off the top of my head): WotC as the IP owners, the game rules, the players, the source books, the wider D&D compatible publishing ecosystem, but also the huge fan media ecosystem: podcasts, youtubers, and livestreamers, etc. Managing a franchise like D&D must be a hugely complicated task from a world running point of view.

For nearly a decade, millions of players around the world have enjoyed Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition. You’ve shared your adventures at the gaming table with us, as well as your feelings about what you love most about the game—and what you think can be improved. And we’ve heard you.

One D&D is the codename for the future of D&D and includes:

It’s also good to know that ‘One D&D’ is the working project title/code name. I’m wondering what the eventual term will be? I hope they avoid words like ‘platform’ (and even world tbh). A lot of audience testing is going to be needed for the final name.

D&D Fifth Edition

The explicit call out of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e) is useful to orient around if you only know of D&D in the abstract. Growing up in the late 90’s I played a homebrew melange of AD&D 2nd edition, and experienced 3e and 3.5 editions. I’ve never played 4e and but have about 30/40 hours of experience with 5e. But I am a promiscuous RPG fan, I’ve never felt wedded to one game or ruleset.

5e was a significant moment in the history of D&D. Launched in 2014 to coincide with the games 40th anniversary. Rules were streamlined and tightened up across the board. A big focus was placed on making the games rules more accessible for new players. As they say in the trailer the big focus in the 2020’s is making the game more accessible for DM’s.

75,000 play tested 5e before launch in 2014. The total numbers play testing the new D&D beyond/one before its release in 2024 will be an orders of magnitude higher.

New D&D Rules

D&D Rules: We’re updating and expanding the rules of the game, and we’re looking for your feedback to help shape them.

5e rules, sensibilities, and general level of accessibility has been the rock solid foundation underpinning D&D’s dramatic growth in the last decade.

The video states that 5e was the ‘last edition’ of D&D. The updated rules, features and expansions will be a tweaked but not dramatically different. In fact all material released for 5e will also remain compatible with D&D moving forward.

New supplements, rule tweaks etc will all be online. WotC will still be producing books and collectible ‘objects’ but the primary focus of the games reality/rule set will be the digital version.

D&D is now being handled as a dynamic meta-object or world by WotC. No longer bound and book ended by the concept of ‘Editions’. I wonder if Games Workshop will ever take the plunge and announce a *final* version of Warhammer 40k

A World Runner must be cognisant of the nature of time in a world – both Cronos and Kairos. How is time managed?

In a wargame, card game, board game etc we usually find the concept of Turns (Cronos). In realtime graphical virtual worlds, we currently find the concept of narrative eras or Seasons (Kairos) I.E games take place in the narrative context of xyz.

Editions however are diffrent. An edition of D&D, a board game etc are Total Containers. Editions contain ‘everything’ that is true about the world they defines its nature, its Reality.

The ‘world’ of D&D for the last 50 years has been one of editions. Players have ratcheted though one edition to the game to another. Reality is updated and changed. For example: A new edition may bring a new set of rules, that change to the way things get resolved under certain conditions.

A new edition of a game is a bit like updating gravity or physics. It’s still the same world, the same game. Only now it’s different.

Moving away or beyond the concept of editions changes the fundamental nature of D&D’s physics. Reality can still be changed, tweaked. But no longer can it be updated wholesale.

This new approach suggests that WotC have learnt a lot from the Magic the Gathering franchise. Most cards from 30 years ago are still valid – tho some cards have been removed from competition play for balance and mechanical issues (Like breaking the game in certain combinations).

Worlds managed by World Runners without the ‘tick tick’ of editions to change whats true about reality must approach the world with diffrent set of skills. The world must be gardened. The world is no longer a complete object that can be known, designed and controlled. Instead, it must be managed like a bonsai. The world runner must be watchful, hopeful, and make considered inventions with an eye always towards the long term flourishing of the world.

Too many small tweaks made consistently on an ongoing basis however also make for an unpredictable and unstable system. I wonder if new content will be released frequently, but rule tweaks and updates to character tables will only happen every 6 months or something.

A world with no temporal edge or boundary are the opposite of what I call wind-up worlds : Worlds that produces narratives via the unfolding of predetermined ‘mechanical’ characteristics inherent in their system over time.

I don’t have a snappy name for this. Suggestions in the comments please!

D&D Beyond: The digital toolset joined the Wizards of the Coast family in 2022, and we want to make it even better.

D&D Beyond was/is an official digital rule/toolset for 5e Dungeons & Dragons. Originally incubated by Fandom.com, the app and ecosystem was acquired by Hasbro earlier this year (2022) for $146.3 million.

Since 2017, D&D Beyond has helped to power DUNGEONS & DRAGONS tabletop play and deliver the brand’s eighth consecutive year of growth in 2021. Over the last three years, the royalty paid to Hasbro by D&D Beyond has represented a significant contribution to the fastest growing source of revenue for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. The strategic acquisition of D&D Beyond will deliver a direct relationship with fans, providing valuable, data-driven insights to unlock opportunities for growth in new product development, live services and tools, and regional expansions.

The first thing that came to mind about the acquisition though a the lens of World Running earlier this year was that WotC have essentially acquired an analytics platform. For the first time (beyond play testing and feedback) the makers of D&D now have insight in to who, what and how people are playing D&D. This is a pretty big change to the nature of ‘the world’ from the designers point of view. The worlds edge, ie the boundary or limits to what is known about the meta-object-as-world of D&D has been expanded beyond anecdote.

As the IRL world has changed, so has the way the D&D is played. Whilst I’m a sucker for a piece of paper/character sheet, everyone now has a computer with them at all times. We have tablets and other digital tools that we can bring with us to the table, and the world, when we play.

D&D Beyond’s acquisition is a key piece of infrastructure for managing the ‘meta’ of the world of D&D. With the management of D&D moving towards a sensibility more akin to ‘gardening’, the ability to keep players rulesets tweaked and updated in real time is a great boon to managing the dynamics of a system with 50million players.

It’s very clear that WotC are going after both Roll 20 and Tailspire with this move to digital first rulebooks and game management.

Both my posts about how individuals navigate code-spaces and the way platforms capture value are relevant to WotC going after Roll 20 and Tailspire. They basically came out and said this in the press release:

more than 80% of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS fans having already played the game virtually in 2021, aided by online digital platforms such as D&D Beyond, this acquisition accelerates the game’s ability to penetrate new markets, gather valuable consumer insights and provide players with the best DUNGEONS & DRAGONS experience on all platforms.

TLDR: If so many people are playing our game in this way, then we would like them to play it on our platform. There is a lot of value out there to capture.

I’ve written perviously about how D&D and table top games are Permissive IPs. WotC have a very good relationship with fan content and licensing their brand out. The full integration of D&D Beyond in to the reality of playing D&D suggests that there could be a real oppertunity for WotC to embrace Power Fandoms and really foreground players ‘doing their thing’ in the world of D&D.

Permanently Moved

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Digital D&D

Digital D&D Play Experience: Announced during Wizards Presents, D&D Digital is an immersive tabletop space that is in early development.

WotC announced they are using EPIC games’ Unreal Engine to build a fully graphical table top simulation of D&D.

The 2020 Hasbro investor report says that WotC has been making a huge investments in digital capability. This is obviously the output of some of that investment:

Oh boy people have kicked off.

This Kotaku article does a great job summarising most of the objections in one paragraph.

services like the upcoming “D&D Digital” are starting to look more and more like video games, at what point are we just playing an MMO or something like Diablo? Will the service calculate all the math? What room does it leave for house rules? Will this new digital toolset require a cutting-edge GPU to run? What monetization efforts will Wizards implement, and how will those impact the experience of playing the game? How much technical skill is required to set these virtual environments up? Can we just automate the role of a Dungeon Master and have an AI system handle all the challenges? You know, like in a video game?

Before we come back to Digital D&D and why its important for the metaverse I want to briefly talk about:

D&D Is a Social Technology

Dungeons & Dragons is a social technology.

D&D arrived during the 1970’s. A decade of absolutely wild aesthetic, cultural, and political and social innovation. It’s crazy to me that Soul Train, Punk Rock, Computing, Pinball, D&D/Roleplay, and Studio 54/Disco are all concurrent. The 1970’s were an accelerated flowering of creativity that was squashed and flattened by the forces of neoliberalism.

For nearly 50 years D&D has been container (or blueprint) for managing how people (working towards a shared goal or ambition) should interact and behave with one another together around a table.

D&D represents an innovation in the fast construction of a shared set of social norms and grammars understood by its participants.

I think that 100% of all meetings at the office would benefit from D&D like social grammars. A meeting’s chair is a DM. Managing who gets to speak, when, and for how long is fundamental to human conviviality.

BOOK PEOPLE: Check out The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium – Studies in Gaming by Schallegger 2018

BOOK PEOPLE: Check out Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games. It’s one of the BEST books I’ve ever read. If you want to understand what ‘the fuck is going on‘ with the post post-modern world. Check it out.

One of my favourite books about RPG history is also by Peterson:

The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity

In Elusive Shift, Jon divides players who encountered the first edition of D&D rule set in mid 1970’s in to two kinds camps: Story People and Games people.

This dichotometic distinction between player types still exists throughout the hobby all the way into the present. Essentially, the two types of play styles are defined by the context in which the players encountered the social technology known as D&D:

War Gamers vs Science Fiction Fandom / ‘Drama Nerds’.

D&D of course emerged from wargames: The simulation of reality with tokens moved spatially on a map or board with dice animating the resolution of events within the simulation via chance.

The other part D&D’s lineage emerges from the 19th Century Prussian wargaming practice of Kriegsspiel. Characterised by high realism, an emphasis on the experience of decision-making rather than on competition, and the use of an umpire to keep the rules flexible. Kriegsspiel is a kind of LARP, or military play acting that would be easier understood today by who practice Improv.

See my World Running discussion with Dr Alex Fradera on the nature of worlds, trust and improv.

D&D play style comes down to one question. Are you playing with the world (Story people) or against it (Games People).

D&D and the Metaverse

The D&D team are at great pains to explain that the are not building a video game. They are building a virtual tabletop experience they repeatedly refer to as a ‘Play Space‘.

I believe that the Metaverse is a Medium.

The World Wide Web has (unfortunately) been a 30 year long distraction from the business of worlding. Throughout the 1980’s pioneers went online via screeching modems to spend time collaborating, coordinating and exploring worlds together. The context and social technology they used to do so was D&D and TTRPGS

This ‘Play Space’ has more in common with the history and lineage of MUD’s than video games.

WotC have chosen to use a ‘tilt-shift‘ style camera technique because it make things look ‘small’. They want players to feel like they are interacting with miniatures on a virtual table top. I think you’ll agree it’s highly effective.

D&D digital is a play space, a code space a virtual place.

I don’t see any difference between D&D digitals virtual table top and Zoom. There’s no difference between D&D’s play space and a discord channel or group chat.

D&D’s play space is a fantastic evolution on the ‘Code Space’. In 2020 I took a tour though diffrent ‘spatialised’ group chat programs: like gather.town or Brach when I took a close look at the Roblox IPO.

The key innovation, the thing that is most interesting from a world running perspective is just as we use the Room as UX metaphor we can now use a Table Top as UX metaphor too.

D&D digital’s play space will transform the way that people interact online. Instead of sitting on/in a zoom call playing D&D. Players now have a relative location with one another, in a code space. In a world.

One of the key things about building this kind of spatialised code-space for online facilitation and interaction is that whatever WotC build. It will have have a huge downstream influence on the rest of TTRPGs, gaming and quite possibly the whole world.

The new virtual play space, the simulation, will become just as part of the game as the written rules are. I hope WotC release a white paper explaining their thinking around the various moderation tools, design decisions etc. What controls/levers the DM’s, players and NPC’s will all have to shape and change the world?

In fact I think WotC should join/form a metaverse standards body, maybe with Yurgalabs, Epic games etc.

D&D’s digital play space design documention should probably be open sourced.

At the very least there should also be a fully modable white labelled version of the play space engine that players and gamers could make their worlds in. Just as D&D birthed a million indie RPGs, so could their new play space tool.

If D&D truly is an evolving social technology with 50 years of heritage, then it would behoove WotC to work on UX and UI tools to prevent problems like the inevitable cacophony of players yelling over on another through your headphones on a zoom call.

Throughout the two years of the pandemic, our zoom fatigue etc I was surprised that better ways of having and managing conversations didn’t emerge faster – if at all. D&D has a real oppertunity with D&D digital to change the grammars, manners and mores of our society.

What I’ve been describing above: D&D’s play space is a world. A simulation where reality has rules similar or radically different from our own. Unlike the rules system of D&D, the play space will need to have physics etc. D&D digital is a reconnection to D&Ds roots in wargaming.

This approach of course is perfect for ‘Games People‘.

‘Story people’ however are pissed. From their point of view the thing that makes D&D special is the story telling potential that the world of D&D facilitates. The thing that ‘Story People’ love the most about RPGs is Theatre of the Mind gaming.

Story gamers worried that this new digital play space will hinder imaginative play.

Check out the biased language that shows up in D&D fandom when ‘Story People’ get talking about the way the game:

Other DMs—who some might consider to be “purists”—elect to throw out battle mats and miniatures in favor of an imagination-only approach to D&D.

This is called the theater of the mind because everything takes place in the minds of the DM and players. There are no physical representations of what’s happening in the story.

How exactly is D&D played in the theater of the mind? What are the pros and cons of theater of the mind? Let’s take a look.

Theater of the Mind, Explained

Playing D&D with the theater of the mind means you’re playing without any visual representations of what’s occurring in the game. Instead, everything is in the imagination of the players and the dungeon master.

LOL people who play without tokens or miniatures are purists. As someone with aphantasia but also has very very vivid memories of playing TTRPGs, it blows my mind that people play D&D without miniatures!

Without a spacialized play space, D&D is just be people sitting around a table having a chat….. Pretending … Imagining things.

Total chaos. 

Anyways.

The biggest challenge D&D has always had has been satisfying both Story and Games people. A virtual simulated play space does favour the games people of course. However, it is up to the story people to make this new way of playing D&D work.

It’s up to the people who tell stories from within the D&D ruleset to develop the social manners, grammars and mores for interacting with one another in the metaverse. Just as story people developed successful protocols for sitting around a table together to play the game in the late 1970’s they need to do so again for next level zoom calls.

Other Observations

Camera Controls

The defining medium of the 20th Century was our ability to look at the world (and experience it) though the lens.

I really hope that D&D digital’s UX/UI suite comes with a comprehensive set of camera controls.

The language of the lens: its focus, aperture etc allow the operator to communicate intangible emotional cues to the viewer.

Whilst the tilt shift camera is amazing for creating the sense of depth and table top vibes, players should have control over how they are presented to others visually in the adventure/play space.

Just a Zoom or Google meet automatically embiggens the person speaking, I assume the D&D Digital play space will have a camera that moves or cuts between players.

Players should be given control over the location of their model/characters camera. Players should be able to move the camera around their character, pull focus, select focus, set depth of field etc .

They should be able to place their character’s camera to make them look heroic, or move it over the shoulder to see the wizard cast a spell down a long hall way etc.

It’s 2022. Every person alive has some understanding and cinematography and the moving image as visual medium. Players in the D&D play space should be given the ability to express themselves though the eye of a lens.

I do hope I’m making sense here. I really do think a robust set of camera controls in D&D digital would allow Story People to visually tell stories in an integrated cinematic way. The lens is a story telling medium just as words are.

Microtransations

There are lot of people worried that D&D may become a subscription based model.

With further micro transactions for new rules, new campaigns, or new digital character models. I hear them. And I get it, I understand. I hope they will take their cues from MtG online rather than Fortnie/Roblox/Minecrafts microtransaction model.

BUT.

Consider just how huge D&D already is as a Permissive IP.

D&D as an IP requires players to do their own thing within the toy box the rules provide. The more people are playing D&D (in whatever variant) the better it is for D&D’s IP in general.

Just as we have officially licensed partners selling campaigns and rules presently on DriveThruRPG – I can totally imagine a virtual object and campaign marketplace connected to D&D digital. With both official and user generated content.

Last year I wrote about how HUGE the 3D printing and virtual object file ecosystem is for wargames and tabletop roleplaying games. All the virtual miniatures created in the last few years for 3D printing could be imported in to a D&D digital platform no problem.

Just as the rulebooks are physical, as well as the ongoing worlding of the digital versions – i hope we will be able to own/print/use the same heroic character model both on and offline.

Quantification

A large chuck of one early chapter in Elusive Shift is dedicated to XP (Experience Points) and the arguments about it that played out in the pages of gaming groups’ fanzines across the country. How should XP be distributed? Is it by fiat? DM’s discretion? Can one player from a D&D group in Indiana bring their level XX character with X0000’s of experience points to the table when they play with people in California?

What is the point of XP? Are you playing pinball trying to get a high score? or is just a ledger system representing time and effort spent *in world*?

The segment of Elusive Shift that covers these early arguments is both highly entertaining and very interesting. Well worth reading.

With D&D’s perviously decentralised player base converging around centralised D&D Beyond and D&D Digital services. I wonder if XP will become more and more harmonised across the player base?

If so, then XP becomes and interesting sub medium within the meta-object of D&D. XP becomes a currency separate from other in world tokens like Gold or gems or whatever.

Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age

Lastly if you’ve read this far, first of all thanks, secondly I’d like to recommend another book:

BOOK PEOPLE: Check out Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop RPGs and Fandom – Ed’s Hedge, Grouling, and Kapell 2021

I must admit, I’m still reading it. But its REALLY REALLY good. I’d live to leave you with this short pull quote from the chapter “Gameplay Experiences Meet Digital Affordances”.

The post Metaverse & Monsters | Thoughts on One D&D appeared first on thejaymo.net.

With all the discussion about Metaverse I’ve instead been obsessed with thinking about the reverse: ‘printing out the internet‘.

I saw my first FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) 3D printer about a decade ago. A janky homebrew RepRap in the corner of a cold concrete London maker space cheerfully spooling out an iPod Touch stand.

Seeing it operate in person, I was skeptical about some of the wilder claims being made by proponents of decentralised manufacturing at the time. But my friend Mark had just made the documentary The Man Who Prints Houses and I have remained optimistic about the technology in the longer term. It was interesting (for example) to see my old school’s design department spring up as a fab lab during the UK’s PPE crisis last year.

Watching the noisy machine squirt one layer of melted plastic out after another a decade ago I knew that this technology would change at least one industry:

Table Top Wargames.

A Maturing Technology

Just weeks later I bookmarked a piece in 2012 from The Guardian about British tabletop war game manufacturer Games Workshop issuing DCMA take downs to The Pirate Bay and 3D file sharing site Thingiverse.

3D printing is an emerging technology, but it has attracted a passionate community of hobbyists who design and build a variety of objects. Some are designed from scratch; others are generated from 3D scans of existing items.

The community recently had its first run-in with copyright law when tabletop battle games company Games Workshop issued DMCA takedown notices against Thingiverse, a site where “makers” share designs.

Games Workshop spokesman Kyle Workman said: “We are very protective of our intellectual property, and our legal team investigates each issue on a case-by-case basis.”

Asked whether the company might ever consider selling its own digital 3D designs, he said: “That would be nearly impossible, unless the customer had plastic, metal and resin casting equipment.”

I’ve been following 3D printing and Tabletop Miniatures ever since.

2010-19

It’s worth fast forwarding though the last decade of 3D printers, to give a sense of just how quickly the technology has matured. Throughout the TwentyTeens 3D printers improved rapidly. A key focus being resolution. I.E. reducing visible layer lines and increasing detail levels in the print.

Whats fascinating about 3D printers as a consumer product category is that their history can almost entirely be tracked via Kickstarter.

B9Creator were the first out the gate in 2012 with their (for the time) high resolution FDM printer. I’ll admit the $2,375 price point was not very consumer friendly, but much cheaper than any commercial/industry alternatives at the time. It also showed that there was a nascent consumer market for this technology.

Unsurprisingly it was a smash hit.

Later in 2014 FDM printing was joined by a sister technology: SLA printing (Stereolithography).

Unlike the kind of 3D printing you may be imagining where material is laid down by a nozzle squirting hot plastic on to a base plate (Fused Deposition Modelling), SLA printers use a laser projected into the bath of UV sensitive resin though clear glass from underneath.

The laser light will semi-cure photosensitive resin from the underside of the vat. Meaning the model is printed from the bottom up with a base plate rising from a bath of resin rather than additive top down.

Two years after the B9Creator Formlabs launched their first ‘affordable’ SLA printer in 2014 at a backer price of $2499.

Developments continued quickly with MSLA printers coming on scene – reducing costs further.

MSLA stands for Masked Stereolithography. Replacing the expensive laser arrangement at the bottom of the resin vat with an LCD panel. This panel then essentially exposes a stencil of the object one layer at a time as the baseplate rises.

It’s probably worth situating SLA and MSLA printing as a consumer technology against in the industrial timeline. Patents on SLA printing expired in 2007. Around the same time, the smartphone revolution bought the cost of LCD screens with ever increasing pixel densities and brightness output down making MSLA possible.

We can for our purposes of this post skip over the next half decade. Suffice to say that things improved every year. It’s worth checking out this 2018 discussion on the state of 3D printing hosted by the Youtuber 3D Printed Tabletop if you want to understand this ‘middle period’.

If a resin printer cost $2.5k in 2014 – what can you get for your money on Kickstarter today?

In October 2021 the ELEGOO Jupiter was funded to the tune of $4.7 Million dollars. At a discounted backer price of $740.

The printer boasts 6K LCD screen resolution and has a print bead size of 12.8″. Meaning you can print absolutely massive a models / objects or lots of models all at the same time).

This machine in all respects is an absolute monster, very impressive.

But we should instead turn to its older, smaller, more important cousin.

2020

The Elegoo Mars 2 launched in 2020 at a $300 price point. Cheaper than a games console.

It’s to my mind one of the most important pieces of hardware to know about right now to get a sense of where 3D printing is going in the coming decade. (See Signals section)

Since most of this post is about wargames miniatures specifically; it would be remiss of me not to note that the hobby/industry had an absolutely massive year in 2020. I wonder would could have happened to cause people to have lots of free time, spent largely indoors, and find painting little plastic models meditative and relaxing? 🤔

That said of course, wargaming is still a nerdy enough hobby to get you publicly ridiculed for admitting being a fan on the UK’s biggest television chat show. No matter how famous you are.

In one of those surreal months (which I assume also happens in other product niches) almost all the wargames Youtubers I follow received the ELEGOO Mars 2 Pro for sponcon review in 2020.

Many of them had never used, owned or thought about owning a 3D printer before. Turns out almost without exception – all love them loved it.

Luke from Geek Gaming Scenics in the video above for example makes it clear that using the Mars 2 convinced him that 3D resin printing was a viable consumer technology. He now makes videos on the subject all the time.

The ELEGOO Mars 2 is currently £250 with a discount voucher on Amazon – though I have seen it on-sale for as low as £180 (~$250) !!! High resolution 3D printing is now in the home for less than the cost of a last minute return train ticket from London to Nottingham.

It’s worth returning to that 2012 statement from Games Workshop.

Asked whether the company might ever consider selling its own digital 3D designs, he said: “That would be nearly impossible, unless the customer had plastic, metal and resin casting equipment.”

In just 8 years the ‘nearly impossible‘ has become ‘completely possible’.

2021

If 2020 was the year that 3D resin printing arrived then 2021 was the year the 3D printing and table top wargames ecosystem exploded.

In May of this year I took a screenshot every promoted story I received on Instagram advertising 3D digital files of toy soldiers for home printing.

As you can see from the image there’s: Patreon’s, Kickstarters, Online Stores, and more.

Want a model for your historical wargame? A Dungeons and Dragons game? Replacement pieces for Monopoly? Lost a piece of your model plane? It’s all now right there at your fingertips to download and print at home.

Of course, if you don’t want to buy lots of models, or just have a single model in mind and can’t find exactly what you are looking for – you can find a model closest to what you want and kitbash a bunch of models together in Blender (more on this later).

OR you can head over to heroforge.com and design your own model in your browser and receive a week later it in the post.

@justmakesstuff

I must at this point shout out Justin Coquillon AKA @justmakesstuff. Justin, kindly gave an hour of his time over Zoom in late August 2021. He spoke to me all about his 3D printing, tabletop wargaming, digital kitbashing hobby.

Look how cool his models are! All kitbashed digitally, printed and painted at home.

Amongst the things we chatted was about how he got (back) into painting table top miniatures during lockdown 2020. “I was getting into painting larger things like busts and stuff, and I had a few friends online who would occasionally, for the cost of resin, send me a larger scale print.“

He got his 3D printer in February 2021 [it was] “182 pounds when I bought it, I’d been looking at them and they were 300, 350, just few weeks before”. Initially he was just focused on the printing things. 3D printing is almost a whole hobby by itself. Lots of details have to be attended to and the learning curve for quality prints is one of experience and practice.

As his hobby continued Justin fell back into the Warhammer: “I’d been buying models on eBay for cheap and snapping the heads off, stripping the paint and then buying a pith helmet and heads from Anvil Industry and sticking them on. I’d worked out that with a good batch of models off e-bay and buying the heads, was about £1.50 a trooper.

Then I realised ‘oh’ I have this thing I bought to print busts and large models with… Maybe I could print some heads.

So I found a set of heads online and that was a game changer. Then I started to find that there were whole modular infantry kits (…) So I just started exploring those. It’s very much just a mix and match. I’m just mashing a couple of STLs together most of the time.”

Big thanks to @justmakesstuff for his time and insights on our call.

3D printing at home at the level of quality the consumer printers have reached has opened up so much possibility for model makers, kitbashers and artists of all kinds.

The cost of printing models however (given the price of the printer) is still something up for debate given the cost of entry. But one bottle of resin is about the same price as a box of 10 models from a major manufacture the overall cost savings compound pretty quickly!

Market Places

Discussion in my part of social media this year has of course been dominated by NFT’s and the apparent ridiculousness of JPG sales.

Meanwhile quietly, market places to buy and sell 3D digital objects have been maturing. cgtrader passed its 1 millionth user a year ago.

Market places for digital .obj & .stl files for 3D printing are essentially the same market places that serve the video games, advertising and VFX industries. Whilst different hubs/sites cater for different users, most files are can be used across multiple contexts with some finessing.

Head over to cgtrader, 3D export, TurboSquid, Cults 3D, or Thingiverse, and browse around to get an idea of the scope of whats for sale or free download.

The latter are more oriented to the printing market, selling pre-supported STLs for printing. The former provide high, medium and low poly versions of digital objects for virtual environments and prodcution.

CGtrader is a market place where table top miniature designers can sell access to their work alongside artists who create kitbash spaceship collections that end up in Netflix TV shows.

Myminifactory

Then there is the UK’s myminifactory.com. Based in Brick Lane, London, UK.

My Mini Factory caters exclusively for table top miniature designers and the audience(?), consumers who want to print their work.

MMF is not only a marketplace focused on 3D printing tabletop miniatures a store front.
It also provides integrations to manage Kickstarter pledges and the infrastructure to distribute/claim 3D files after a campaign ends.

I also believe they have a Patreon integration as well as offering their own subscription services directly on the site.

MMF is a powerhouse in the 3D printed miniature space. It’s an important ecosystem and IMO represents the fullest expression of whats going on in this space.

I remember speaking with a member of the MMF team way back in 2013/14 at a social event. I have been totally blown away by where they are at 2021. I’d love to go visit their office at some point and chat about where they see all this going.

Creator Economies

There seems to bee three main ways that artists currently make money in the 3D printed table top community. Similar how most people trapped in the #supportnet make a living too.

Kickstarter campaigns to fund an entire miniature collections, Patreon’s that drop files for new models every month fleshing out a collection / army of models, or selling digital files directly.

• Kickstarter campaigns generally fund single (or group of) artists to produce a complete collection of around 30 unique models. Rewards will range from access to a subset of complete total, the whole collection, or offer discount codes for previous models made by the artist(s). Some campaigns will partner with 3D printing workshops (see scaling up below) so those folks without printers can order printed models. 
• Patreon. These of course provide more stable income for the artists. They are usually priced at about $15 a month. Supporting a creator will mean access to a release of 5-10 STL files monthly moving forward. Some artists will also offer access to the complete historical collection of models by them after one month (which is a stonking good deal). Or immediately at higher levels of support.
• Lastly, of course you can sell single model files directly on MMF or similar.

It’s interesting to see the types of licences that these artists uses on their files. If you work in NFT / Smart contract space its worth thinking about too.

Some files are licensed as creative commons, with attribution, no derivatives, others are licensed with derivatives, non-commercial. Others are licensed as all rights reserved, but with specific allowance for derivatives if it’s for home use. Others say no derivatives at all. 

In addition to license types, there’s a whole rabbit hole of the types of files on offer.

Most 3D printable table top models if bought by my mini factory or patrons come ‘pre supported’.

Whilst objects are printed layer by layer (either by MSLA or FDM), some parts of a model may droop without material holding them up during the printing process. Pre-supported models essentially mean that scaffolds are added to support the model which can then easily be removed after printing.

Some models – especially super high detail ones for use in virtual environments – are designed without printing in mind and come without scaffolds. These models will require the person printing to add them themselves. I understand that this is more of an art than a science. But free tools like meshmixer from Autodesk will get anyone 90% of the way there with just one click. 

What’s interesting to me is that there is a huge market for digital objects at all.

What a world we live in where artists can make a living from designing toy soldiers for people to print at home.

Youtubers like Lukeswayoflooking document their whole design process and serve as inspiration for others to give it a go.

The skills required to learn Blender or Maya etc are all transferable from the virtual to the printable.

As the creation of virtual objects and worlds is becoming a key element of online entrainment. From Vtubers, to Roblox, people are growing up in a world where the skills required to manipulate the virtual are just accessible, simple and available. I think about Myspace’s low key introduction of HTML and CSS to a whole generation and wonder what the world of the Metaverse is actually going to be like.

Nothing like Mark’s metaverse vision I’m sure.

Return of Small Studios

With the rise of Patreon and crowdfunding, indie TTRPGs and table top wargames are being created, made and released and played by more people than ever before.

We are almost coming full circle. For almost all of table top wargaming and the history of toy soldiers, the design and production of models were done by boutique, small scale miniature manufacturers. In early days of Dungeons of Dragons this was especially so.

As an aside, if you haven’t read Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games or any of Jon Peterson’s books on the early history of D&D – I can’t recommend them enough.The importance of boutique miniature manufacturer’s catalogues and newsletters/zines has a whole fascinating history of its own.

We are, I think, after a few decades of big names selling rulebooks and miniatures as complete sets/systems, returning to the kind of miniature manufacturer agnostic world.

For example: The recent smash hit game Gaslands is based around kitbashing post apocalyptic hot wheels cars bought from the pound shop. There are also loads of 3D printable parts online designed for the game sold under an interesting licence .

Gaslands designer Mike Hutchinson recently released another game called A Billion Suns.

Like his previous game, it launched without miniatures. But people were encouraged to model/print their own. Hutchinson chose to licence people to design and sell models for the game under the condition of becoming an ‘Interstellar Merchant‘

Becoming an Interstellar Merchant

Becoming an Interstellar Merchant is easy: just support the Planet Smasher Games Patreon at the relevant $4 a month level. You are a Friend of Gaslands for as long as you are a current Patreon backer. I’ve also added a “Friends of Planet Smasher Games” discounted bundle tier if you wish to produce and sell accessories for any of my games.

https://www.patreon.com/planetsmashergames

Becoming A Billion Suns Interstellar Merchant does not constitute a licensing agreement for the A Billion Suns IP. By becoming A Billion Suns Interstellar Merchant, your accessories are not “official”, but it basically means that we’re cool, you are free to use the brand name “A Billion Suns” in your listings and keep any money you make from selling your accessories, and you can advertise through the official website, Facebook groups etc.

Interstellar Merchants

Check out all the awesome Interstellar Merchants here.

There are now also rising companies like One Page Rules. OPR release all their rulebooks for free as PDFs. They have also begun to partner with 3D artists to release printable STL files for OPR’s game factions.

OPR at first glance seem to skirt very close to the wind / line when it comes of trademark and copyright vis a vis Games Workshop’s IP. But from interviews with the creator he seems confident that space space battle brothers, robot legions and wormhole demons is sufficiently generic sci-fi to not get legally blasted from existence.

OPR is also interesting to me as a contemporary business. Essentially a company with a Website comprised of three links:

• A Patreon
• A Google drive of PDFs
• A My Mini Factory link

Talk about lean.

Scaling Up

The cost of manufacturing has always been the barrier to entry for games in this space – injection moulding and even small scale silicone casting doesn’t come cheap.

But as explained above, we are in a whole new world. Not only can consumers print the game’s rules at home, but also the models too.

Alongside the advances in 3D print technologies, there have also been big advances in small scale silicone mould and small batch manufacture. In addition to Tabletop Wargaming companies, the market for machines that can do small batch quantity manufacturing has also been driven by a similar explosion in popularity of the Board Gaming.

There is currently huge demand for relatively small batch production and manufacture capacity for resin parts. It make sense for models and figures, token and laying pieces to be made locally given the challenges that creators face in securing small batch production of boxed games, or miniatures in China even before the pandemic.

I’ve been reading cardboardedison.tumblr for a while and it regularly links to useful advice and breakdowns for creators in this regard.

SIOcast

There are now machines like Siocast which also has been advertised to me on instagram lol. The advertising algorithm clearly thinks I’m interested in small scale manufacturing fo wargames models and its right – I am!

SioCast Master moulds are made from 6 – 8k 3D printed resin parts at 0.01 layer resolution and production quality moulds are made using a silicone elastomer.

SioCast is essentially a small scale injection moulding machine that uses a thermoplastic. Producing high quality models in a fraction of the time that resin printers would. Whats more the thermoplastic used by SioCast machines is recyclable.

Whilst high quality 3D printing at home with resin is now possible – with the resolution of the parts/objects they can print increasing every year – it hadn’t occurred to me until I saw the SioCast machine that large volume/scale manufacturing in this space using 3D printers would still be slow and expensive (if only for the amount of time it takes a 3D printer to run AND the amount of print failures can occur regardless of how experienced one is.)

It is really interesting to me anyway that a line can be drawn from the RepRat’s promise of distributed manufacturing, to a small scale injection moulding machine that can fit in a garage, or maker space. 

In addition to this sort of small scale studio manufacturing with SioCast, there is also a growing cottage service industry. For example companies like Forsters Foundry offer 3D printed models from partnered artists in the UK.

Digital Kitbashing

I’ve already mentioned heroforge.com. The tool that lets you to design your own custom table top model in browser for your next D&D campaign and have the printed model shipped right to your door.

During the summer this year I wanted to try kitbashing some models for myself.

I’ve been learning Unreal Engine and Blender since the summer. I’ve also been playing with Adobe Medium learning to natively sculpt in VR.

Inspired, I wanted to try and kitbash my own models. So I downloaded some cc-nc-sa licensed Monopose skeletons and some cc licensed medieval weapons from Thingiverse.

Once I had a rough grasp of Adobe Medium I set about kitbashing some models of my own. Importing the files into Adobe Medium was all very simple and the process of cutting up and reposing models in VR is very intuitive.

In the two videos below you can see me messing with the weapon for the Skeleton warrior.

Each video was a separate session. Here’s some more in progress images because who doesn’t like documentation?

I talked about this in a podcast, but teenage me has had his mind blown.

The idea that I can make my own models, kitbash 3D files in VR, tidy them up in Blender and then get them printed out has been a revelation. I KNOW if I was a teenager right now with plenty of time this is what I’d be doing with my life. I’d be locked inside 3D modelling software sculpting, making and kitbashing every weekend and after school every day.

Actually tying it out has opened up not just what’s possible, but what is possible for ME to achieve myself, in my own home, with very little experience at all. I’m incredibly lucky and stoked to have all this at my fingertips.

It turns out however that after about 10 hours of following basic Blender tutorials on youtube, its much quicker and easier to do this short of thing there rather than in VR. But thats not the point.

Combined with the ongoing Puppet Project, 2022 I think is going to be a very DIY / learning / practical skills year for me. I’ve really interested in making / doing some shit!

Signals Beyond

Beyond tabletop miniatures and board game tokens I also want to note that consumer MSLA 3D printers like the Mars2 are also becoming new lynchpin technologies for the DIY manufacture of Printed circuit boards.

One of the biggest bottle necks for the design and prototyping of hardware is the time and expense bottle neck around having a PCB made and returned. A drone project team I worked with a few years ago were using RushPCB for their boards in the UK who offered a 24 hour turn around time from payment to shipping.

I should note that the example video above of using a MSLA printer to prototype PCBs at home/in a lab only demonstrates 1 circuit layer (in contrast to up to 32 in commercial prototyping). I am extremely interested in how PCB and 3D printing is going to evolve in 2022.

A hugely important development in the Open Hardware / Arduino scene.

I’d like to speak to anyone experimenting with putting exotic UV cured materials into 3D printers. There are so many epoxys as resins out there who knows whats possible when used off book.

Printing Out The Internet in the 2020’s

• Extending the trends beyond table top wargames and boardgames: The collectibles business in general is going to be in for a tough ride in the next decade.
• As these technologies evolve the borders between digital / physical / metaverse are going to be quite porous.
  • Cosplay and custom costume jewellery is an area I may look into next year.
• I already have written about the Iron Vertex creator guild for vTubers. But…
  • Demand for virtual objects is going to continue to increase.
  • Demand for custom virtual gear, worlds, and environments is going to increase.
• Printing out the Internet is going to be a really weird creative space.
• Miniature agnostic war/board/games supported by community creators/fandoms is going to grow. Real big IP’s may come from this space.
• How long until major companies that produce miniatures and collectables end up having online file stores?
  • NFTs, authentication and file signing is a really interesting space here for semi-DRM. prof of file ownership etc.
• I need to buy a house just so I can have a 3D printer LMAO.
• I expect 2022 will be a year for really big copyright battles over 3D printed virtual objects.
  • Maybe ripped right from video games? or perhaps direct film assets.
• Popular Front’s 2020 Documentary about 3D printed guns in Europe is nuts.
  • The cost of Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) is rapidly falling. Expect to hear a lot about 3D printed metal parts in the 2020’s
  • I wouldn’t steal a car but I might download and print parts for one.
• 3D printing beyond consumer technology is rapidly evolving. Combined with developments in Synthetic biology things are going to get very weird. Skin, body parts, organs, etc

Printing out the internet is also a subject i’m interested in general.

In 2022 I’m going to start a physical newsletter sent via snail mail 4 times a year to people subscribed to thejaymo.net at £5 monthly and above.

The post (3D) Printing Out The Internet appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This post is part of an ongoing scrapbook series. Exploring the emerging Dweb (Web3) ecosystem, the #supportnet, and the coming ‘Metaverse’.

Roblox Corporation REGISTRATION STATEMENT

Crunch

Top line crunch figures are as follows:

• Financial: $206 million of losses on $589 million in revenue for the 9 months of 2020, compared to $46 million in losses on $350 million for the same period 2019.
  • $292.6 million in Free cash flow for the 9 month period of 2020. Up from $6 million (crazy) in the 2019 period. Total FCF was $49.5 million for all of 2018 and 2019 combined.
• Usage:  31.1 million DAU‘s, and 22.2 billion engaged hours during the first three quarters of 2020.
• Investors: $335 million raised since its 2004 founding. Last raise was in February 2020 at a $4 billion valuation.

Fluff

The story of Roblox began in 1989 when our founders, David Baszucki and Erik Cassel, programmed a 2D simulated physics lab called Interactive Physics, which would later go on to influence our approach to building the groundwork for Roblox. Students across the world used Interactive Physics to see how two cars would crash, or how they could build destructible houses. In starting Roblox in 2004, we wanted to replicate the inspiration of imagination and creativity we saw in Interactive Physics on a much grander scale by ushering in a new category of human interaction that did not exist at the time.

It’s interesting that the founders come from a simulation background. I guess this says a lot about the sensibilities, grammars and mores that exist in the Roblox virtual environment – especially for creators. Useful to contrast/compare with Tim Sweeney who made a text editor to program a game and then ended up making a game out of the text editor itself. (ZZT)

Human Co-experience

An average of 36.2 million people from around the world come to Roblox every day to connect with friends. Together they play, learn, communicate, explore, and expand their friendships, all in 3D digital worlds that are entirely user-generated, built by our community of nearly 7 million active developers. We call this emerging category “human co-experience,” which we consider to be the new form of social interaction we envisioned back in 2004. Our platform is powered by user-generated content and draws inspiration from gaming, entertainment, social media, and even toys.

“Human Co-experience” is useful term? One that simultaneously feels immediately redundant. It’s very silicon valley marketing language.

The Birb site is also a Human Co-experience(?) Being in virtual environment (the psychic space of Twitter is a virtual environment fight me). I guess the thing that makes Roblox special as a Human Co-Experience is that its worlds ‘are entirely user-generated, built by our community’.

Actually, the more I use the words ‘Human Co-Experience’ the more I dislike it.

The Robloverse

Some refer to our category as the metaverse, a term often used to describe the concept of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces in a virtual universe. The idea of a metaverse has been written about by futurists and science fiction authors for over 30 years. With the advent of increasingly powerful consumer computing devices, cloud computing, and high bandwidth internet connections, the concept of the metaverse is materializing.

‘The Metaverse’. Wow! Page one!

Everything old is new again. The real challenge is to shape and manifest the Metaverse not as a cyberpunk fans wet dream but as a ‘real thing’. The Metaverse is a useful name in my opinion, despite its age it provides a break in the narrative from the word ‘Internet’. As does the Dweb.

I guess they are really selling the idea of the Robloverse. ‘Persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces in a virtual universe’. The virtual universe in this case Is the PLATFORM owned by and controlled by Roblox. The 3D virtual spaces that Roblox are referring to I guess are ‘sub realms’ controlled by the developers and users of the platform.

I am deeply suspicious of the idea of a Metavere that is own and controlled by a single entity. I feel like the Metavere is going to emerge from interoperability between virtual worlds, some user owned and hosted, others probably corporate controlled, others a mix of ownership and governance forms.

Because of the embedded nature of users in the Metaverse (as a space for unfolding drama). I believe it will bleed in to the everyday so the definition of Metaveres provided by Roblox in this document is to shallow and unexpansive.

Key Characteristics

The Roblox Platform has a number of key characteristics:

 

Identity.    All users have unique identities in the form of avatars that allow them to express themselves as whoever or whatever they want to be. These avatars are portable across experiences.

 

Immersive.    The experiences on Roblox are 3D and immersive. As we continue to improve the Roblox Platform, these experiences will become increasingly engaging and indistinguishable from the real world.

 

Anywhere.    Users, developers and creators on Roblox are from all over the world. Further, the Roblox Client operates on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and Xbox, and supports VR experiences on PC using Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index headsets.

 

Low Friction.    It is simple to set up an account on Roblox, and free for users to enjoy experiences on the platform. Users can quickly traverse between and within experiences either on their own or with their friends. It is also easy for developers to build experiences and then publish them to the Roblox Cloud so that they are then accessible to users on the Roblox Client across all platforms.

 

Variety of Content.    Roblox is a vast and expanding universe of developer and creator-built content. As of September 30, 2020, there were over 18 million experiences on Roblox, and in the twelve months ended September 30, 2020, over 12 million of these were experienced by our community. There are also millions of creator-built virtual items with which users can personalize their avatars.

 

Economy.    Roblox has a vibrant economy built on a currency called Robux. Users who choose to purchase Robux can spend the currency on experiences and on items for their avatar. Developers and creators earn Robux by building engaging experiences and compelling items that users want to purchase. Roblox enables developers and creators to convert Robux back into real-world currency.

 

Safety.    Multiple systems are integrated into the Roblox Platform to promote civility and ensure the safety of our users. These systems are designed to enforce real-world laws, and are designed to extend beyond minimum regulatory requirements.

I like all of these characteristics. You can see where Verticals Of One would slide right in to a virtual world with these features.

The Dweb and Metaverse converge and share many of the same concerns: Identity, Content, Economy, Safety (Governance).

They are also characteristics and concerns of IRL.

Portals

Our Products and Technology

The Roblox Platform is the underlying technology and infrastructure that supports shared experiences for an average of 31.1 million daily active users. The platform is composed of three elements:

Roblox Client: The application that allows users to explore 3D digital worlds.

Roblox Studio: The toolset that allows developers and creators to build, publish, and operate 3D experiences and other content accessed with the Roblox Client.

Roblox Cloud: The services and infrastructure that power the human co-experience platform.

Since our founding, we have invested heavily in building the Roblox Platform, and 79% of our employees are dedicated to maintaining, improving, and expanding it. Here is how our technology supports the key characteristics of the Roblox Platform:

I’m wondering if browsers (clients) will become more and more important to the Dweb ecosystem. I really like Brave’s wallet implementation and MetaMask works really well for other solutions. Beaker Browser is the portal to the DAT-verse.

Will we see browsers and VR client portals merge for users that are Verticals of One?
Will ‘clients’ be made up of interoperable tools like wallets, ID passports, etc that in their totality become a the Metaverse browser?
Each user with their own collection of tools they take with them on to the net/into the Metaverse?

Its also worth nothing that Roblox roll their own game engine. A key part of EPICss push towards materialising the Metavere is its Unreal Engine.

I don’t think the Metaverse will be one ‘place’. The thing that is persistent will be the myriad identities / masks we carry with us in to the various spaces. Both online and offline.

Economy

Roblox has a vibrant economy built on a currency called Robux, which can be purchased through the Roblox Client and website. Users can also acquire Robux through a monthly subscription to Roblox Premium. Developers and creators earn Robux by selling access to virtual content. Developers can also earn Robux by driving engagement of Premium subscribers through an engagement-based payout system. When Premium subscribers spend time in a developer’s experience, that developer earns a prorated share of the user’s monthly subscription fee. Engagement-based payouts incentivize developers to invest in the engagement of their experiences. Roblox allows developers and creators to convert earned Robux into the real-world currency of their choice through our Developer Exchange Program.

I mean sure. We are all familiar with in-game currencies. A friend bought their first bitcoin for Linden Dollar’s back in the day.

The Metaverse is going to be complex monetary fabric. Content created in Roblox isn’t unique. When NFT’s come to Roblox and ‘in realm’ currencies are owned and minted by the community then we’re talking true Metaverse. Right now Roblox calling it’s a Metaverse environment is basically calling a Nightmare a good dream.

I should note: I don’t think that Dweb Monetary Fabrics of the Metaverse will ever manifest or bother IRL economics too much. Inflation in online virtual spaces is well documented (Diabolo 3, Gaia Online etc). Thats why Dweb innovations like bonded curves are so important.

It will be interesting to see how a fabric of monetary instruments play out.

? Universe(al) marketplaces like FTSE, DOW JONES NASDAQ etc?

No Governance

Safety and Digital Civility

We aspire to build a safe and civil online society. We have no tolerance on our platform for content or behavior that violates our rules. Safety and civility systems are built into our platform and apply to every experience. In many instances, our systems extend beyond minimum regulatory requirements.

Our platform is designed to comply with Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and GDPR regulations. We work closely with regulators, authorities, and safety groups in many countries. We endeavor to promptly report any suspected child exploitation or abuse materials to the relevant authorities.

We partner with over 10 leading global organizations focused on child and internet safety. We are also a member of various organizations with a goal of cross-industry collaboration, knowledge and technology exchange in areas of user safety and child safety. We continue to work diligently with other digital platforms to report bad actors and inappropriate content so that they can also take appropriate actions on their platforms.

Honestly now read the whole article. I’ve looked and I can’t find any plans by Roblox to implement any kind of official or formal community governance.

As I said earlier I am deeply suspicious of the idea of a Metaverse that is own and controlled by a single entity.

At the very least users should have some control and say in whats going on. Eve Online’s ‘Council of Stellar Management‘ is a model that platforms in this so called ‘Human Co-experience’ space should be looking toward and implementing from day one.

What is the CSM?

The Council of Stellar Management is a player advocacy group, consisting of 10 members democratically elected by the players to advise and assist CCP in the continuous development of EVE Online. The CSM brings focused and structured feedback from the community to CCP and represents their views and interests.

The role of a CSM member

The role of a CSM member is to represent the players in the ongoing development of EVE Online by providing analysis, sharing suggestions, and giving feedback based on the ongoing community discussions and concerns to CCP. As an elected representative, a CSM member will have clear communication paths with CCP and a chance to influence the development of EVE Online many times during their term.

As DAOS etc become more advance and implement Loomio style governance for themselves (for example). These DAOs will plug in to Metaverse CSM style formal governance between users and platform operators seamlessly.

As I mentioned last year:

prototyping the consensus process, ideation, discussion, amendment, voting, etc. of an organisation is a much more interesting design space for small organisations than anything that touches the blockchain. He went on to say on Twitter that Rapid prototyping of organisational decision-making processes can *literally* be done on the whiteboard, paper prototype, or in instant message channel. It’s insane that teams spend years building end-to-end crypto project management apps or DAOs before they test out the most important part.

Governance protocols embedded in digital tools is IMO the single most important exploration happening in the Dweb right now. When these systems/tools mature and become commonplace in things like slack/discord/whatsapp/DAOs/indiegames it will become unthinkable and untenable to users that governance is not an embedded part of the monolithic platforms they use. If there is no governance users will go elsewhere. (see the roll out of unpopular features like fleets on twitter vs things like the ETH 2 launch process)

Freedom 0

We depend on effectively operating with mobile operating systems, hardware, and networks that we do not control; changes to any of these or our platform may significantly harm our user retention, growth, engagement, and monetization, or require us to change our data collection and privacy practices, business models, operations, practices, advertising activities, or application content, which could restrict our ability to maintain our platform through these systems, hardware and networks and would adversely impact our business.

For the nine months ended September 30, 2020, 34% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Apple App Store and 18% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Google Play Store, and during the same period 68% of our engagement hours on the platform were from users who signed up through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Interesting.

So many people are playing on Mobile devices that Roblox sees the hardware/platform monopoly and lockin as a risk significant enough to mention in their IPO.

For operations through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, we are obligated to pay 30% of any money paid by users to purchase Robux to Apple and Google and this amount could be increased. These costs are expected to remain a significant operating expense for the foreseeable future. If the amount these platform providers charge increases, it could have a material impact on our ability to pay developers and our results of operations. The providers of an operating system or application store may also change its fee structure, add fees associated with access to and use of its operating system, alter how its customers are able to advertise on their operating system, change how the personal or other information of its users is made available to application developers on their operating system, limit the use of personal information for advertising purposes or restrict how end-users can share information on their operating system or across other platforms.

Accordingly, future changes implemented by Apple or Google could adversely impact our revenue. In addition, these operating systems and application stores could change their business models and could, for example, increase application store fees, which could have an adverse impact on our business. There are currently litigation and governmental inquiries over the application store fees, and Apple or Google could modify their platform in response to litigation and inquiries in a manner that may harm us.

They also bring up all the various ongoing lawsuits etc I imagine that Roblox is on the side of EPIC in all this (another key player in the future of the Metaverse) in their multiple ongoing lawsuits

If our business becomes constrained by changing legal and regulatory requirements, our operating results will suffer.

Co-Creation

The widespread availability of content generated by our developers and creators on our platform is a newer development and the regulatory framework for broad dissemination of this content is new and evolving. We provide our developers and creators with the ability to publish their content throughout the world, and each country is developing regulations and policies to regulate this new space, including with respect to privacy, gambling, intellectual property, childhood protection, consumer protection, ratings, and taxes. If we are unable to allow developers and creators to comply with potentially conflicting regulations throughout the world, our ability to execute on our business model would be severely impacted, and our ability to grow our business could be harmed. Changes to these laws, regulations, standards, or obligations could require us to change our business model, take on more onerous obligations, and impact the functionality of our platform

This is really important.: companies, developers, institutions etc interested in the Metaverse and the opportunities the Dweb provides to build, co-create and share value IE environments with Permissive IPs should think about the following:

Think about drawing up User First policy documents, and perhaps forming an EFF like institution NOW to go to bat for users in the coming Metaverse. Otherwise, companies like Robolx, Niantic, Facebook, Google (maps) are going to lobby the shit out of our lawmakers to ensure we have no rights to anything in the Metaverse.

Bubble Universe

We depend on our developers to create digital content that our users find compelling, and our business will suffer if we are unable to entertain our users, improve the experience of our users, or properly incentivize our developers and creators to develop content.

Our platform enables our developers to create experiences and virtual items, which we refer to as user generated content. Our platform relies on our developers to create experiences and virtual items on our platform for our users to acquire and/or use. Our users interact with these experiences, which are largely free to engage with. These users can also elect to purchase virtual items through our Avatar Marketplace and in experiences that enhance their enjoyment. We believe the interactions between and within the developer, creator, and user communities on our platform create a thriving and organic ecosystem, and this network effect drives our growth. To facilitate and incentivize the creation of the experiences and virtual items by developers, our platform offers developers an opportunity to earn Robux, a virtual currency on our platform, in connection with their development work on our platform. When virtual items are purchased on our platform, the originating developer or creator earns a portion of the Robux paid for the item. Developers are able to exchange their accumulated earned Robux for real-world currency under certain conditions outlined in our Developer Exchange Program. If we fail to provide a sufficient return to developers, they may elect to develop user-generated content on other platforms, which would result in a loss of revenue. If we do not provide the right technologies or financial incentives to our developers, they may develop fewer experiences or virtual items, and our users may elect to not participate in the experiences or purchase the virtual items, and, thus, our platform, revenue, and bookings could be adversely affected.

Can imagine a situation where developers and users are flocking to various virtual worlds because they provide the best experience AND returns. Bubble Universe

Imagine if the DeFi explosion was happening but each instrument was actually a virtual world containing experiments in value return.

That user / industry group I mentioned needs to draw up some demands around interoperability sharpish.

Whales In Bubble Universes

We rely on a very small percentage of our total users for a significant majority of our revenue and bookings that we derive from our platform.

We generate substantially all of our revenue through the sales of our virtual currency, “Robux,” which players can use to purchase virtual items sold by our developer and creator community on the platform. Only a small portion of our users regularly purchase Robux through subscriptions and pay for experiences and virtual items compared to all users who use our platform in any period. We rely on our developers to develop engaging content where users elect to purchase digital items to enhance their enjoyment. If users fail to purchase digital items at rates similar to or greater than they have historically and if we fail to attract new paying users, or if our paying users fail to continue interacting with the platform and purchasing digital items as they increase in age, our revenue will suffer.

The audience for Roblox is listed as tweens and young people. ..

Who exactly are these Roblox Whales? Are they ok. I wonder if Robolx has any mechanisms to check in on users that spend a lot of time and money in their Virtual World.

This old 2013 Venture beat article on What it means to be a ‘whale’ — and why social gamers are just gamers is pretty interesting. I wonder what the spend numbers are like now for some of these people. The problems of people spending beyond their means in socials games is long established.

I wonder to what extent Roblox has a duty of care for users?

Especially as the Metaverse environments are more immersive and appealing than tap tap tapping on ones smart phone screen.

Our user metrics and other estimates are subject to inherent challenges in measurement, and real or perceived inaccuracies in those metrics may significantly harm and negatively affect our reputation and our business.

Theres some interesting stuff in here on Metrics and data gathering. The document treats user privacy as a separate issue.

In my mind they are one and the same question/problem.

Plumbing

We rely on third-party distribution channels to facilitate Robux purchases by platform users. If we are unable to maintain a good relationship with such providers, if their terms and conditions change, or fail to process or ensure the safety of users’ payments, our business will suffer.

Purchases of Robux and other products (e.g., e-gift cards) on our platform are facilitated through third-party online distribution channels. We utilize these distribution channels, such as Amazon, Apple, Blackhawk, ePay, Google, Incomm, PayPal, Vantiv, and Xsolla, to receive cash proceeds from sales of our Robux through direct purchases on our platform. Any scheduled or unscheduled interruption in the ability of our users to transact with these distribution channels could adversely affect our payment collection and, in turn, our revenue and bookings.

LOL good relations with the people that ‘do the money’.

There is absolutely no net neutrality for financial plumbing.

As the Metaverse implements Dweb/DEX and this problem goes away. That is by and large the whole point of it.

Series Of Tubes

United States or international rules that permit ISPs to limit internet data consumption by users, including unreasonable discrimination in the provision of broadband internet access services, could harm our business.

In January 2018, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, released an order that repealed the “open internet rules,” often known as “net neutrality,” which prohibit mobile providers in the U.S. from impeding access to most content, or otherwise unfairly discriminating against content providers like us and also prohibit mobile providers from entering into arrangements with specific content providers for faster or better access over their data networks. The FCC order repealing the open internet rules went into effect in June 2018. In response to this decision California and a number of states implemented their own net neutrality rules which largely mirrored the repealed federal regulations. The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit to bar implementation of these state laws

Speaking of Net Neutrality! It’s really positive to see this as a concern in their filing.

Thinking also of the apple/google lawsuits previously mentioned.

Potential Positions

We are subject to laws and regulations worldwide, many of which are unsettled and still developing which could increase our costs or adversely affect our business.

We are subject to a variety of laws in the U.S. and abroad that affect our business. As a global platform with users in over 180 countries, we are subject to a myriad of regulations and laws regarding consumer protection, including the use of gift cards, advertising, electronic marketing, protection of minors, data protection and privacy, data localization requirements, online services, data protection, anti-competition, freedom of speech, labor, real estate, taxation, intellectual property ownership and infringement, tax, export and national security, tariffs, anti-corruption and telecommunications, all of which are continuously evolving and developing.

This is a good list of all the sorts of things that a Dweb/Metaverse user group should draw up policy and positions on.

In this section they go on to talk about the ongoing Loot Boxes (FIFA card packs were first implemented in like 2010?) as gambling and its need for regulation.

Seeing how bad the UK’s gambling regulation is in general, I can imagine Loot Boxes getting band becuse think of the children, but fixed odds machines in high street bookies being fine – for what ever reason?

Licence Battlegrounds

We use open source software on our platform and in connection with certain experiences on our platform, which may pose particular intellectual property risks to and could have a negative impact on our business.

We have in the past and may in the future continue to use open source software in our codebase and our platform. Some open source software licenses require users who make available open source software as part of their proprietary software to publicly disclose all or part of the source code to such proprietary software or make available any derivative works of such software free of charge, under open source licensing terms. The terms of various open source licenses have not been interpreted by courts, and there is a risk that such licenses could be construed in a manner that imposes unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our use of the open source software. Enforcement activity for open source licenses can also be unpredictable. Were it determined that our use was not in compliance with a particular license, we may be required to release our proprietary source code, defend claims, pay damages for breach of contract or copyright infringement, grant licenses to our patents, re-engineer our games or products, discontinue distribution in the event re-engineering cannot be accomplished on a timely basis, or take other remedial action that may divert resources away from our game development efforts, any of which could negatively impact our business. Open source compliance problems can also result in damage to reputation and challenges in recruitment or retention of engineering personnel.

Interesting. Licences re-going to be a key battleground for the Metaverse. User generated content IS software.

Permissive IPs and the kinds of software licences that Dweb TOOLS and SERVICES are released under is going to need a lot of thought and support.

Business Model

Our Business Model

When users sign up for Roblox, they can create an avatar and explore the vast majority of our experiences for free, although the business model for any given experience is ultimately up to its developer. Most free experiences allow users to spend Robux by purchasing experience-specific enhancements. Users can also use Robux to purchase items such as clothing accessories and simulated gestures, or emotes, from our Avatar Marketplace. Roblox retains a portion of every Robux transaction and distributes the rest to developers and creators.

The filing goes on to say that the exchange rate is currently 1 Robux to $0.0035 as of September 30, 2020.

A rate determined by Roblox and is subject to change in its sole discretion.

BAD

How users purchase Robux

Users can purchase Robux in two ways, as one-time purchases or via Roblox Premium, a subscription service that is billed monthly and includes discounted Robux, access to exclusive in-experience benefits, exclusive and discounted marketplace items, and the ability to buy, sell and trade certain Avatar items. Roblox accepts payments through app stores, credit cards, and prepaid cards. The average price for a Robux for the nine months ended September 30, 2020 was $0.01.

For one-time purchases, users can purchase our virtual currency through various common channels including Apple App Store, Google Play Store, credit cards, prepaid cards, Microsoft app store, PayPal, and others. For the twelve months ended December 31, 2019, 30% and 18% of our revenue were generated on Apple App Store and Google Play Store, respectively. For the nine months ended September 30, 2020, 34% and 18% of our revenue were generated on Apple App Store and Google Play Store, respectively. For operations through both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, we pay 30% of any money paid by users to purchase Robux to Apple or Google, as applicable.

So theres a pretty series imbalance in exchange rates depending way you are converting Robux.

Seems like a ripoff if you ask me.

How developers and creators earn Robux

We currently offer developers and creators four mechanisms to earn Robux:

sale of access to their experiences and enhancements in their experiences;

engagement-based payouts, which reward developers for the amount of time that Premium subscribers spend in their experiences;

sale of content and tools between developers; and

sale of items to users through the Avatar Marketplace.

As users purchase and subsequently spend Robux on Roblox, developers receive 70% of the Robux spent within their experiences and 70% of the Robux spent for items that appear in the Studio Marketplace. Creators receive 30% of the Robux spent for their items that appear in the Avatar Marketplace.

Nothing like working for scrip lads!

Don’t work for money, work for our scrip that we control the exchange rate for!

Also wow 70% fees on items made by creators in the marketplace seem … excessive?

Payment processing and other fees.    Payment processing and other fees primarily include payment processing costs charged by the primary distribution channels for our virtual currency. This is a large expense item for Roblox and we intend to use nearly all of any efficiencies earned in this area over time to increase earnings for our developers and creators. For the nine months ended September 30, 2019, payment processing and other fees were $111.2 million, or 24% of bookings, and grew by 185% to $317.1 million, or 26% of bookings, in the nine months ended September 30, 2020.

Seriously the visa/trad finance system is a racket.

No wonder companies are implementing their own internal settlement systems so they only need to touch trad finance ecosystem once or twice a day.

Beyond Entertainment

Hours engaged

We define hours engaged as the time spent by our users on the platform, which includes time spent in experiences, which refer to the titles that have been created by developers, and also within platform features such as chat and avatar personalization. Users are able to personalize the size and body shape of their avatars as well as equip their avatars with items acquired from the Avatar Marketplace, a marketplace that allows users to acquire items such as clothing, gear, simulated gestures, or emotes, and other accessories.

We calculate total hours engaged as the aggregate of user session lengths in a given period. We determine this length of time using internal company systems that track user activity on our platform, and aggregate discrete activities into a user session.

We believe that the growth in hours engaged on our platform reflects the increasing value of our platform. As we continue to invest in improving the Roblox Platform, and as the developers expand the number and quality of immersive experiences as well as other features on Roblox, we believe we will attract more users who spend more time and more Robux on our platform.

 

 

Now this really gets to the heart of one of my questions about the Metaverse.

People only have so much time in the day.

The Metaverse is only going to ‘work’ if people see it as a place that has utility beyond entertainment.

Emerging Examples:

Branch

If I was Discord. I would acquihire this team immediately and also provide tools for Discords to co-design their own worlds.

Maybe interesting governance mechanisms could emerge if spaciality emerges within discord channels

I love all of these projects but as ARB from Trust said to me “You can create a whole world, any world, and they started with a 90’s open plan office???” lol

Gather.Town

Trust.Support‘s Gathering Space 

Lazerwalkers ‘MMO-like social space’

I prefer the low res work of Trust over Branch and Gather.town because it’s less about emulating IRL.

Why can’t I be a swirling vortex of texture and colour and sounding trumpets when I hang out with my colleagues?

The Casualverse

There is / are also limits on audience size.

If the Metaverse is to be persistent, online and in real time etc then why not assume that people will engage with it like they engage with something like Farmville? Casual relationships etc

The money in my bank account is also virtual, persistent and (hopefully) always there. But the value I place on it has nothing to do with the amount of time I spend logged into online banking.

What about Metaverse environments where the games play themselves? Simulation Gardening. Meta-Terrariums. Ian Cheng’s work etc.

What about the parts of the Metaverse that are built to be ephemeral? Rooms as UX metaphor.

If the Metaverse is going to have a fuzzy boundary with IRL as I assume it will. When I connect Nectar points at Sainsbury’s I want my Tarrarium ‘brand world’ to have more Nectar to feed my virtual menagerie of Metapets/cryptokitties or whatever.

LETTER FROM OUR FOUNDER

As I sit here writing this letter, I can’t help but reflect on the last 15 years and how they have gone by so quickly. It seems like only yesterday when Erik Cassel and I launched the first version of Roblox from a small office in Menlo Park. From the start, we imagined the possibilities of bringing people together through play. Our goal was to create an online community where people could do things together in virtual worlds. We hoped that by sharing experiences, our users would connect, learn, and have fun with one another.

This is a really nice letter. Better than some of the other garbage I’ve read. Twitter’s is fucking terrible.

It really is remarkable that Roblox has been such a long burn to get to where it is today. Given that Microsoft snapped up Minecraft for $2.5 Billion in 2014. And Epic was never acquired (but took a lot of investment) nor was Unity, I wonder how many other companies that are building the Metaveres there are that people are just…Sleeping on.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Roblox was created 3 years earlier than Minecraft and is way more ambitious in its vision.

We built Roblox from the start as a single platform, single name, single focus company that would someday support billions of users. The ultimate “product specification” was always to model reality, based on the belief that the more accurately we could simulate the real world, the more utility we could provide. Looking forward, we intend to maintain this focus as a single platform company, even as we expand the ways in which we enable people around the world to play, learn, and work together.

The idea that they were building a simulation tool really shines though in this paragraph.

It’s interesting also as simulating ‘the real world’ is the last thing I want from a persistent virtual world.

As long as its immersive I don’t really care if the geometry is euclidean or not.

Roblox Historia

A fundamental part of being human is connecting, sharing, and doing things together with others. There have been countless advancements in technology that have helped humans communicate as well as share stories across space and time. Communication probably started with sound (drums) and then progressed to mail, the telegraph, radio, the telephone, and video communication. Storytelling evolved from cave art to songs, the written word, photography, silent movies, and today’s 3D movies.

This is a very silicon valley take. There is so much to unpack about the assumptions in this one paragraph – I can’t even with it.

Technology has enhanced the ways we communicate and share stories, but historically it has been difficult to support “doing things together” at a distance. Thanks to several recent technological developments, we are beginning to see a convergence of communication and storytelling that is enabling co-experience, starting with multiplayer gaming over the internet. On Roblox, we expect people to engage in a vast range of activities, such as visiting ancient Rome, going to an awesome concert, or dissecting a simulated frog with others in an online classroom. We continue to take long-term bets with innovative engineering to improve the realism, fidelity, and intensity of how we interact online.

The assertions in the first half of this paragraph is quite frankly crazy cakes.

Honestly I don’t think STEM people should be in charge of building and administering virtual worlds.

The second half of this paragraph is made more interesting for its omission of the very thing it touts as a key part of its business.

People creating things. This all consumption.

No Governance Again

We recognized early on that building a safe and civil community was just as essential to our vision of connecting the world as were the engineering challenges we faced. One of our core values is “respect the community,” and this continually guides our approach to the trust we build into our platform. This is our most important priority, and it is why we have a stringent safety system we constantly improve and evolve. In our vision, metaverse platforms will connect people from different life experiences with new and interesting ideas. We believe these connections will help build empathy by safely immersing people in different perspectives, where they will hear diverse viewpoints. And someday, as the metaverse supports a broader range of positive educational and social experiences, we hope this can expand opportunities for all people around the world.

Cool bro, but there’s no concern here for community governance. There’s very little democracy in the real world no one wants to live under a Roblox reality dictatorship in the long term.

“In our vision, metaverse platforms will connect people from different life experiences with new and interesting ideas. We believe these connections will help build empathy by safely immersing people in different perspectives, where they will hear diverse viewpoints.”

Ahahahahah. Have you been on social media recently? Such Jokes. Users need a voice in the management of the platform.

Today, our creators range from first-time tinkerers to professional teams. We are pleased that much of the experiences they create are simply places to hang out and do things with friends, whether it is working in a restaurant or designing fashion outfits. Increasingly, our most popular experiences are social models of the real world, where one can go to high school or remodel a home. As the platform and the diversity of our users continues to expand, there will be plenty of opportunities for both hobbyists and professional studios.

I suspect that the reason these the most popular experiences on the platform are decorating and going to high school have something to do with the fact your user base are children.

Have you been on VR chat recently? all the best experiences are ones completely antithetical to the real world.

We ultimately hope the stories, avatars, and experiences our creators generate can become intellectual properties that will live well beyond Roblox. Our initial foray into toys and action figures, for example, is a way to bring the best of creators’ work into the real world. Someday, we hope there might be a movie based on one of the experiences (and characters) created on our platform rather than a “Roblox” movie.

How about offering opportunities for the users and creators to share ownership of these IPs and experiences?

When we talk about “creators” we do so in a general sense, because creating experiences on Roblox taps a broad range of skills. Our creator community includes people specialized in coding, 3D experience design, avatar and clothing design, sound design, community management, moderation, live ops, production, and business. We believe that experience creation will become a growing field of employment.

I agree.

We need to build the tools for these “creators” to do more interesting things with their value creation and just increase dwell time and buying and selling of Robux on your platform.

The plural of metaverses?

More than 15 years ago our co-founder Erik and I started with the vision of connecting the world, and today we see ourselves as stewards of this original vision. Futurists and science fiction writers have been imagining the metaverse for decades. As computing power, networking bandwidth, and human interface technologies improve, metaverses will become more and more pervasive. We feel lucky to be part of this evolution. And as we embark on our next 15 years, I look forward to the change that is inevitable as well as the things we feel will always be the same.

The plural of metaverses here is interesting. It has been more or less imagined as a single universe for over a decade.

The epic Metaverse vision is the Sweeneyverse.

In reality will we be stuck/siloed inside game engines?

Will I be allowed to take items with me from Unreal Metaverse into Roblox Metaverse?

What about my wallet of digital currencies?

This is why Verticals Of One are so important.

*Mumbles in Bratton*

Each of us will live our lives walking through the mist of multiple superimposed jurisdictional claims on any site. How we manage the final undecidability of sovereignities will characterize a good part of our legal, public identities: Rubik’s Cube passports.

BUSINESS OVERVIEW

First, user-generated content, built by our community of developers and creators, powers our platform. As developers and creators build increasingly high-quality content, more users are attracted to our platform. The more users on our platform, the higher the engagement and the more attractive Roblox becomes to developers and creators. With more users, more Robux are spent on our platform, incentivizing developers and creators to design increasingly engaging content and encouraging new developers and creators to start building on our platform.

The incentives here are interesting. The drum I’m banging in Dimensino is that there is huge opportunity today to start prototyping mechanisms of systems to return value to users.

Participation as incentive

Steering well clear of more users = more scrip for developers.
Or in the case of social media more users = more eyeballs for advertisers. These business models should have no place in the future.

User Breakdown

During the nine months ended September 30, 2020, users spent 22.2 billion hours engaged on the platform, or an average of 2.6 hours per daily active user each day. Over the same period, our users explored an average of over 20 different experiences on the Roblox Platform per month.

HAHA 54% of your users are under 12.

No wonder the most popular thing to do is pretend to be in high school.

What you going to do when these kids age up and start demanding rights?

They will be a generation that thinks governance tools in onlines spaces are normal. Many Zoomer discords already have informal voting systems etc.

You don’t have any kind of user governance nor plans to it in place? If you don’t have it by 2023 at the latest there will be trouble.

No one is earning anything really

For the twelve months ended September 30, 2020, over 960,000 developers and creators earned Robux on the Roblox Platform, of which there were over 1,050 developers and creators that earned $10,000 or more and nearly 250 developers and creators that earned $100,000 or more in Robux. On an engagement basis, for the twelve months ended September 30, 2020, there were over 1,300 experiences that generated at least one million hours of engagement per year and over 17,000 experiences that generated ten thousand hours of engagement or more.

Reward and Experiences Breakdown

 

 

99% of creators on the platform earn’t nothing.

From memory 15% of active channels/creators on youtube meet requirements to join the partner program. 0o0 NEED TO CHECK THIS

I want to see the Metaverse as a place where 99% of users earn something for their participation.

Automated Accounts Payable

Roblox allows developers and creators to convert earned Robux into the real-world currency of their choice through our Developer Exchange Program. All Developer Exchange Program requests are reviewed on a risk-based approach to mitigate fraud and money laundering. Developers and creators participating in the program are required to create an account with Tipalti, our partner which collects tax information, ensures regulatory compliance, and executes the payouts.

Here’s an interesting Titbit.

Roblox platform uses Tipalti.

A platform that manages businesses suppliers, invoices, purchase orders, tax compliance, payments and billing and other accounting services from a single cloud platform.

It’s basically a platform that automates ‘Accounts payable’.

It also integrates in to most of the major accounting software like Xero, quickbooks etc. Tipalti lets companies run and track how payments are being made relative to actives within the organization. They currently have a 2billion dollar valuation. I’d invest if I could. It going to go way higher.

If I was building Dweb services I would integrate in to Tipalti. Or build a Dweb clone of it with all sorrts of interesting API/smart contract hooks for auditing etc.

Our developers and creators do not always cash out their Robux into real-world currency. Some choose to reinvest their Robux into developer tools from the Studio Marketplace, promote their experiences through our internal ad network, or spend the Robux as any other user would.

 

 

This points to a strong ‘in world’ economy.

I’d like to see how much it costs to buy access to developer tool modules etc. Seems a bit unfair that people with lots of money get access to the ability to literally shape reality of others.

Values

Our Values

We have embraced five core values since we founded Roblox:

Respect the Community.    We put the needs of our community above our own.

Take the Long View.    We incorporate our long-term goals in every decision.

Get Stuff Done.    We have a bias toward action.

Self-Organize.    We define our own path, aligned by a shared vision.

Own It.    We own the outcome for which we are responsible.

Corporate Values fascinate me. They played a keep part in work that I did when I was still working at CEB and Gartner. Values are important mechanisms that orgs use to ensure they continue to learn from their mistakes and keep a common culture in a organisation throughout their operating lives.

I went back to see what else Roblox had written about their values

Roblox 2012 “What It’s Like to be Part of the ROBLOX Team”

Act like a CEO: We want everyone who works here to be invested in – even concerned about – their projects and ROBLOX’s future.
Self-organize: If you’re a CEO, you have to leverage self-organization to identify problems and come up with solutions. No one is going to breathe down your neck to keep things moving forward.
Get stuff done: As CEO, you need to exercise your smarts to get things done quickly.
Work hard: You don’t become CEO by being lazy.
Respect the customer: CEOs have to respect the customer; that’s how they retain business and keep their company afloat.
Be inspiring to work with: CEOs need to be able to rally people and be part of the team.

Roblox 2017 Inside Roblox

1. Inspire Others
2. Work Hard
3. Self-Organize
4. Respect the Community
5. Get Stuff Done

It’s interesting that Working Hard was dropped at some point between 2017 in favour for Own It.

Own It is a much better value in general, as accountability for ones actions is far more preferable than a demand for working hard. Get the work done.

Competition

Competition

We compete for both users, developers, and creators. We compete to attract and retain our users’ attention on the basis of our content and user experiences. We compete for users and their engagement hours with global technology leaders such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Tencent, global entertainment companies such as Comcast, Disney, and ViacomCBS, global gaming companies such as Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Valve, Unity, and Zynga, online content platforms including Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, as well as social platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Snap. We are able to compete for these users based on our variety of content, personalized user experience, and various engaging and social features.

The list of competition here is interesting: Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Snap etc

The rest of the document is all stock options, and technical options.

Well that was interesting. I generated some thoughts and ideas out of doing that at least. YMMV

NOTE: This post may contain a lot of buzzwordy jargon. I intend to build a glossary page linked off the Dimensino category home page soon.

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