Comment by ImportOllie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ImportOllie | Hacker News Reader

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Wear & Tear is a good point, along with the inconvenience of selling physical goods, and the burden of having too many physical goods.

As well as the applicability, the author raises another point which is when you're finished with your digital media, why hold onto it? Especially on the assumption you can just buy it back for what you sold it for or less.

I do wonder though whether all of this sits within a paradigm that needn't be the one that plays out.

I suppose my questions around the subject are... are we saying that a 2nd marketplace for digital media such as books, films and music shouldn't/won't exist because if it did, it would devastatingly disrupt digital capitalism? Could there be a paradigm where we can have a 2nd hand marketplace?

I'm particularly interested to observe how the digital fashion space evolves. Major fashion brands are engaging with NFTs and digital wardrobes. Which like digital art (and unlike books/films?) lend themselves well to being sold in limited runs, can be seasonal and could be useful... So I could see being a workable market for a digital 2nd hand market, outside the hyped up beanie-baby-esque investor marketplace that's dominating the nft landscape right now.

>Wear & Tear is a good point, along with the inconvenience of selling physical goods, and the burden of having too many physical goods.

These aren't inconveniences and burdens, it's part of our reality and we're wired to handle these things. We don't consider objects we value as burdens, for as long as their perceived value is considered "high", they're not burden/trash.

You can't forget that we use physical goods to help us define and signal who we are.

And some of that stuff works because of the properties of physical goods: wear & tear have stories attached to them. A scratched leather backpack has tales of backpacking traveling, just like a collection of MTG cards.

This isn't a property of digital assets. They are barren.

Trying to enforce artificial scarcity in a medium that tends to propagate and proliferate whatever it touches is going backwards once again, like enforcing something like copyrighted digital material in the world of torrents.

Second hand digital goods makes no sense, it would be an artificial construct for the sake of itself.

We're at the point of making up problems to shove NFT as a solution for it - just like what we're seeing with art and collectibles, they're tending to be automated and mediocre.

When it comes to content, Scarcity and Internet shouldn't be in the same sentence.

Now, can weapons in games start to acquire long term wear & tear, to be more personalized to each player. Sure! Does it need to be an NFT? No.

My point was, when you no longer want a physical good, it is an inconvenience and that also factors into it's value outside of physical goods degrading.

The way I see it, Second-hand digital goods only doesn't make sense if you view it in the spirit of something digital being 2nd hand. It's re-selling. Which I believe can make sense.

I think that, despite the ability to acquire digital goods through piracy there is still a digital market, there is scope for a reseller market. Unless we're dismantling the idea of digital ownership at all.

NFT's are in a hype right now, but does that mean they solve no problems?

> NFT's are in a hype right now, but does that mean they solve no problems?

No, the fact that the only problem they solve was invented, so they could have a problem to solve, means they solve no problems.

> Could there be a paradigm where we can have a 2nd hand marketplace?

For items that can be copied identically for basically nothing and never degrade? The only reason we even still have a first hand market for these things is that we want to compensate the producers of the work who still need to earn money to put food on the table. To do that we use the ridiculous concept of "intellectual property" to allow those producers to work within a system not designed for a post-scarcity space. I cannot conceive of a 'second hand' market ever making sense here without just piling on even more perverse concepts.

Thanks for your reply. If artificial scarcity is perverse, does that mean also mean things like limited art print runs are also perverse?

Because it seems to me an artist who has the potential to print there work unlimited times but chooses to set the price at X for N prints would fall into that. But then, either because it's been accepted as a thing or otherwise, it's a common practice and personally, i've not seen it as a negative.

> If artificial scarcity is perverse, does that mean also mean things like limited art print runs are also perverse?

Yes, especially if the prints are basically free to produce. Artificial scarcity is bullshit we only tolerate because our economic system is built on scarcity. It's a hack and I would rather not encourage it. What is the point in digital anything if we're just going to limit it like it were a physical good?

when you're finished with your digital media, why hold onto it?

Have you heard of this little site called Spotify? It streams music instead of selling it. It’s pretty obscure, but it’s got a few competitors. Something with the even more absurd name of Youtube Music? They run on a subscription basis, or just throw ads at you if you don’t wanna pay.

There’s a few sites like that for movies and TV shows, too.

Sure, why own anything digital when you can stream or pirate?

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