NFT and the Future of Digital Content
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I don't see why this would be deleted. There are several sites where PAs can sell Daz-compatible products, some more reputable than others. I'm surprised how many sites are out there. Some people even sell products as premium downloads through DA. But there are legitimate reasons why PAs flock to Daz; and I hope this weirdness does not hurt tham.
+11 AllenArt
Daz 3D (and Tafi) — please stick with long-term responsibility over short-term profit.
Im down!
No more purchases at Daz3d for me until this NFT and Shudu nonsense is out of my hobby store.
Vendors, pick a side.
Once again, people need to speak with their money.
That is the only language DAZ 3D decision-makers understand in the end.
I will not spend one more cent here while DAZ 3D/Tafi pursue this course.
On my phone, the main daz page is overwritten by ads for joining and NFTS.
I get what your saying and mostly agree. I think the difference is you're describing their ideological intentions, and I'm talking about the practical functionality as it is implemented in the real world. To me, outside of philosophical discussions, ideological intent is irrelevant if the system doesn't function either as intended, or at least beneficially in unintended ways. In practice, this system has proven to be brittle and prone to failure, and offers an actual consumer little practical advantage over traditional digital marketplaces, unless the thrill of speculative trading is enough. The creator (and/or art theives selling NFTs of works they don't own) may benefit if their NFT sells, but any claims their work is in anyway secured or protected is demonstrably false, and a crypto ebay or crypto gumroad would offer the same end result (crypto cash payment) though there'd be less hype unless someone figured out how to market it as cool and innovative like they did with NFTs.
Someone elsewhere described NFTs as an expensive cutting-edge solution trying to invent a problem to solve, and so far they haven't found it. Ultimately, NFT sellers are not universally agreeing to abide by each other's personal property. Any system that relies on universal consensual compliance to secure data in any way fails to secure anything, and it boggles my mind that anyone else in tech could fail to see that just because a fancy tech has a lot of hype.
(Edit: "anyone else in tech" is aimed at the tech bros hyping NFTs, not you of course).
I don't want to put anyone in this position. Some people earn their entire income selling here, and can't make comparable money on other sites. I've seen a few PAs mention they stopped selling at another site because of its business practices. And I haven't seen other sites come out against NFTs, so the two sides here are "for it" and "who knows?"
Real Velvet Buzzsaw vibes, IMO. But even though not destroying the planet is a net gain, as long as folks who can afford to express themselves by entombing dead tiger sharks think crypto is good, I'm going to have to assume its maximum badness potential is something like "People slurry! But 99% sustainable and proceeds to charity.
"
My new barometer is going to be that if this guy starts thinking NFTs suck, I'll give 'em another look.
It's a catch 22 situation... stop putting money into Daz 3D, and then watch Tafi have to come up with even more egregious means of making money.
I will not be putting one cent into cryptocurrency or NFTs — the whole system is flawed, not sustainable, and is right on the edge of being an international scam of epic proportions.
Looking through their site, there's a bunch of stuff with Tafi that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, not just the NFT nonsense. With DAZ as a subsidiary of them ... I have stuff to think about.
Other sites have come out against NFTs after user backlash with valid concerns — Artstation in particular comes to mind... https://magazine.artstation.com/2021/03/a-statement-from-artstation/
I think its great that people are thinking of ways to help living artists make a living and prosper, doing what they love to do.
But NFTs as they currently stand, are implemented in a very flawed manner that is not "equitable" or "ecologically sound".
This article from The Atlantic was super eye-opening — "NFTs Weren't Supposed to End Like This"...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/
+12 AllenArt
To clarify, "other sites" in this context refers to alternative Daz model marketplaces.
You mean like Artstation Marketplace?
I dont want to put anyone in this position either. Yet here we are, the customer, discussing what many of us consider an extremely irresponsible direction in the daz business model. We certainly didnt want to be put in this position.
Arguably, one could say that by continuing to do business on daz3d as a vendor, that vendor condones the actions of daz3d in all of its business decisions, good or bad.
The vendors do need to speak out on this, even if its only to daz management.
I'm in way too deep into the Daz 3D ecosystem to back out at this point (1,284 orders since 2004... nearly $90 K in assets, full price value of $393,184 according to Daz-Deals plugin),
but I'm going to do all I can to avoid NFTs and this cryptocurrency mess from any marketplace, especially this one.
I agree with you that NFTs are utterly useless and have no practical functionality whatsoever.
But I think analyzing the ideologies and idelogues at play behind movements like this is much more helpful than just listing all the reasons they're wrong. A predictable idiot is better than an unpredictable one. If you write them off, they'll just blindside you when they do it again, but worse somehow.
You can't bully someone into changing their mind when there's no alternatives to what they provide. Daz Studio has built its own ecosystem.
If you don't like NFTs, why can't you just ignore it?
Just ignoring things hasn't gone well, throughout all of history.
I won't hold the PAs responsible for a choice Daz made and I think it's unreasonable to decide they condone anything based on the company's actions. I have no idea how the majority of them feel about this, but a person would have to do a whole lot of egregious harm for me to blame them for keeping an income stream right now.
If Daz moves forward with NFTs I'll lose a huge chunk of my life. It's not even about taking a moral stand, although I have the leeway to do that; I sell art commissions and I write about Daz and I've been very open about how much I love this program and how everyone should try it. I talk about it all the time. I can't continue, because everyone who's ever interested in my art or my rambling refuses to have anything to do with NFTs.
But it's not my primary source of income. It's something I can afford to lose, as much as this has been a lifeline for me. This was a corporate choice and I want corporate accountability.
(Made bold for emphasis)
And I'm CERTAIN that that is happening as sure as I'm sitting here :). A couple are even brave enough to voice their displeasure in this thread, bless em. I hate like hell to punish a vendor for the sake of the broker, but unfortunately there's just no other way to protest except with our wallets. As long as the vendors make money, so does Daz. It's a very, very unfortunate situation that Daz has put them in. :(
If it did we would never had this....
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/70624/you-ve-been-heard-response-re-4-9-and-encryption/p1
I don't want to put anyone in this position either, but we have been put in this position.
Unfortunately, I don't have the choice to support the PAs without supporting Daz in this policy, and I can only hope that Daz adjust their position before it actually causes PAs problems.
There's a big alternative: Many users already have a large library of content, and it is for them a luxury hobby.
If I just went and used all the assets that I once bought as "maybe it'll come in handy one day" and then completely forgot about, I wouldn't run out for months.
If you don't like arsonists burning down your house, why can't you just ignore it?
This is a completely different matter to not liking pistachio ice cream or mountain biking; NFTs and cryptocurrency are things that will affect us even if we ignore them. So many people here haven't been able to get a graphics card as a result of the inflation in the NFT market, and everything that inflates that market more only makes it worse.
Hey guys!
Cameron here, the creator of Shudu and The Diigitals (although admitting that here might get me flamed)!
I really didn't think this would be so polarising, NFTs are super new, and most of the artists I've spoken to have really embraced selling their digital art this way. I know several people who have shifted their focus onto this business model and digital artists can find it hard to get paid the true value of their work in comparison to traditional artists.
Is there a way for someone to summarise why exploring this new area is such a bad thing?
I'm really not for or against here, just curious and open minded. Obviously this is an area that I'm exploring and want to be as well informed as possible.
I don't intend to flame anyone, but here's my list since you asked:
Bitcoin and anything associated with it (including all the variations thereof) are exceptionally horrible for the planet.
Because the artwork someone produces is such an emotional and personal thing (usually), saying that selling it thru NFT is about as valid as me asking myself if I'm going to have chicken or beef for dinner. Because the art is NOT the focus of NFT's (only its existence, but not the subject of the work), it's like empty calories. People that sell their art want it to be SEEN, not sitting on a server somewhere.
There is an implied shadiness associated with all of bitcoin mining before I even mention the fact that they're making it impossible for normal people like us to get decent video cards at a decent price. You and Daz are supporting the very thing that keeps some of us from this hobby - prices and availability. The fact that it's unregulated makes it a haven for the mafia and terroists...yeah, we need more of those, don't we.
I don't have the stamina right now to go into much more of it, but I have serious problems with all of it, the fact that I have no intentions of ever buying any notwithstanding and I don't think that this is the site for it. In fact, I think this is probably the WORST place for it since it's obvious that a whole lot of people feel exactly the way I do.
.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/
"The idea behind NFTs was, and is, profound. Technology should be enabling artists to exercise control over their work, to more easily sell it, to more strongly protect against others appropriating it without permission. By devising the technology specifically for artistic use, McCoy and I hoped we might prevent it from becoming yet another method of exploiting creative professionals. But nothing went the way it was supposed to. Our dream of empowering artists hasn’t yet come true, but it has yielded a lot of commercially exploitable hype."
...
"But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image, or perhaps a mathematical compression of the work, and use it to reference the artwork elsewhere.
"We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?"
...
"But the situation gets worse. Over the past decade, the blockchain has become a refuge for people who need another place to rest their assets. For global tycoons, it’s just an alternative to parking their money in some real estate they would never visit. They can leave money in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies instead, which appreciate in value as long as people buy up bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and the like faster than the overall supply increases. "
+13 AllenArt
Thank you for taking the time to explain it, it actually makes a lot of sense. Again, I'm not here to argue for or against. I'm here to learn and listen.
The fact that this is impacting the price of graphics cards and inflating them is worrying. It takes this from being just a cool collaboration, to having a very real impact on the day to day business of other 3D artists. I want to help keep this industry as accessible as possible.
I will of course endeavour to do my own research, but this thread is extremely important.
Perhaps some of the issues is not the NFT itself, but what we're selling. What's being sold sounds like it's not that suitable for the Market right now. Pieces of art locked away and not being seen only traded.
Thanks again!
I believe @BlueFingers alreay posted this article to the thread, but I suck at trying to quote more than one person in a post.
https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3
Also, NFTs are not "super new". The tech has been here since the mid-2010's but became a thing in 2017 with CryptoKitties.