All around me are familiar faces... worn out places... worn out faces...

The Metaverse is just IMVU for people with a superiority complex. It's just SecondLife for people who got into the internet late. It's VR Chat with targeted ads. And it's going to do all of that while forcing you to buy into the corporate equivalent of company scrip to play. No one needs a Discord metaverse, and nobody outside of the crypto-cultists want it, either. The current NFT boom is so reminiscent of the dot-com bubble that it would be funny if it wasn't such a gigantic waste of everyone's time, resources, and patience. 

Everyone's trying to make Ready Player One a reality, but anyone who's been on the internet for long enough can see the writing on the wall for how this will play out. I've been around since the internet was the Internet and internet communities were local and required use of a landline telephone. I've always been excited to embrace emergent technology and try something new- and indeed, cryptocurrency isn't unfamiliar to me, I've been using it for various purposes for quite a few years now.

But they've just morphed into yet another hollow, arbitrary thing, haven't they? NFTs in particular are just adoptables for people who never played a virtual pet site, and most of them look like something you could make in a Newgrounds dress-up game -- but I've grown just as weary of cryptocurrency as a whole.

The problems with society -- and with the internet as it stands today -- are deeply intertwined, and a new currency is a band-aid on a gunshot wound for all the good it will do to solve either one of those things. Having watched the development of the internet over all these years, I don't possess the conviction many cryptobros seem to carry that this is the grand panacea for all our online issues; those problems were born of society itself, and until we fix the model that puts advertiser interests over the well-being of people and communities, that won't change no matter how many different currencies people come up with. If every mainstream platform and their mother jumping onto the gravy train right now doesn't tell you that, you're willfully choosing not to see it. 

So count me down as another person who wants no part in this. Discord might benefit in the short term from chasing the pixel whale, but that boon will quickly dry up when the crypto-community moves on to Meta-Messenger and their original userbase has dried up and moved on to greener pastures. 

And to those swooping in to 'defend' the use of Ethereum on discord I simply say this: it is possible for someone to hold all the same facts you do, and be just as informed as you are, and still come to a different decision than you personally have. Condescending to those around you will not help your cause.