MetaNews: concerns "about the expansion of scope"

From @pethā€™s comment on Discord, I understood that the conclusions form the MetaNews discussions havenā€™t been properly communicated. Hence, I am writing this brick-of-a-text to clear things up.

Were people expecting a last weekā€™s news? Should the video content of MetaNews be weekly or bi-weekly? And if the frequency is that small, what is it going to cover? Thinking about these things is what led us to a discussion about the format, the scope and the content of MetaNews.

The expansion of the scope is not to overpromise on new stuff on top of what is already there but is directly relevant to solving issues that came up. The ā€œexpansion of scopeā€ is basicaly about designing a more standard and better quality template for future episodes that is relevant both inside and outside MG.
Simply put, MetaNews rests on the premise that there is noteworthy News out there to be presented. But then the issue is: what news are to be presented and how? The moment I saw @Gnomeskiā€™s newsletter I could have immediately started filming another episode like the previous one but I realized that:

  1. There was not much new ground to cover since the previous episode.
  2. The presentation of this bi-weekly update which is based on ā€œwho dunnnitā€ is not proper for a video presentation.
  3. These bi-weekly updates might not need a video to be presented. What Gnomeski does works perfectly as textual format but not as video.

Iā€™ve talked with Gnomeski and others who joined the 2 calls weā€™ve made.
The main issue expressed is for MetaNews to not be something self-indulgent or something that is just nice to have. It should adress a real need and the talks weā€™ve had about it were just about that. Since MetaNews is something that is posted on our socials and Youtube it should be relevant outside the confines of the core of this community. Public-facing content should adress the public.

What is more, as the team responsible for the filming and posting of MetaNews, we have stumbled upon various issues:

  1. The problems with the quality of preview in Twitter raised the urgent issue of determining platform-suitability.
  2. Production an MN video is challenging. Editing is time-consuming. I have no studio. We have no definite template. Newsrooms consist of a whole team. Frequency of content canā€™t be promised if these fundamentals arenā€™t set.

We have addressed issues of urgency and how fast news move, considering that we are not a professional studio. @_Anna had the wonderful idea of taking some specific news and tracking their progress so as for the news to not get stale. Such are the solutions we need right now.
We are essentially on the design stage and any ideas or proposals are welcome. If people just need news about MetaGame FAST then we could have something like this. We spoke with @_Anna about having a TikTok and having a flash news segment for happenings that are urgent. Not everybody was on board and we must reach a consensus first for such ideas to get going.
But people seemed to like the pilot episode format and want more of this stuff. But this takes time and is not suitable for flash news. For this reason, I and @b0gie decided that itā€™d be better if the episodes are monthly. That way we can make sure that a substantial amount of news has already been gathered and that we can also have the time to edit and make them more aesthetically appealing.

The broadening of MetaNews is not just outwards, it is also inwards. In an important sense, I view the newsletter on Substack as being part of MetaNews only in textual form. Approached in this way, the newsletter works well in the medium. It is not difficult to parse, nor to access and so having video content where the sole source of content is the newsletter is a bit redundant. The concern about different modes of learning and saving time is valid. This is why the newsletter must be covered. But there must be other stuff too. A MetaNews video takes a lot of time to produce and upload so it is better for the filming to be done once substantial amount of news has already been gathered.

The proposed format for these monthly episodes is a hybrid mix between the presentation style I used in the pilot video (with my face in a frame) and the MetaStudio VR background that @b0gie has built. This will make things easier as less editing will be needed and will also be a novel format that can gather a lot of attention. It also provides new ways of creative freedom. Once the setup is fixed and works, then maybe the video can come up at a higher frequency.

Other video content in the intersection of MetaNews and MetaMedia is also on the table such as a Season Close Special which will essentially be the next artifact to be uploaded by MetaNews. This is being actively worked on and will need some broader participation (season report writing, shilling, hoping on cryptovoxels or NEOS on Sunday Funday to gather some video footage).

One a final note is that this raises the need for a way to gather news from all over the place. For this reason I have make a dump for fresh info from all around, The Bucket:

Be free to fill it up!

Having more sources of news will make the content more relevant to the periphery of MetaGame. But this info must be parsed, tracked and written on. This means that new roles will be needed. A journalist is the first priority and can be taken on by somebody from the writerā€™s guild. To make their job easier various tools have been proposed (for scrapping, tracking etc.). This is still an open issue and input is welcome.

All in all, the point is for News to matter and for us to have better content, both in terms of usefulness and in terms of aesthetics.

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Agreed. This medium has a different purpose, thus a different way of communicating.

Agreed. Otherwise would be just another format of communicating to the internal community and not to the crowd.

Sounds very cool. Am starting one for the Crypt-commons.org. It is totally VR-based, guests will be humans interviewed, but am going to be an Avatar :octopus:

Seems you have it under control. Looking forward to see it in action!

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When choosing whether to report on anything we can ask ā€˜Why this and not something else?ā€™ I mean, there is certainly no end to what can be shared with the World.
Due to this we can ask?

What is the purpose of branch X of MetaGame News and who are the target audience?

In communicating specific things are there political or ideological tones being communicated (openly or by association/style) and is this intentional/desirable-alignedā€¦ ?

Do we need to specify what constitutes our own alignment/identity more concretely so we can decide what we are seeking to transmit on that basis?

After doing all this I think we can be pretty confident in knowing what, how, where, when and why to make this happen.

I say all this as there is a pressure in the Legacy systems/culture for people with ā€˜assertive egosā€™ to be rewarded with validation etc This leads to people running their mouths for the sake of it a lot of the time. :face_vomiting:
Opinions are what people have in the absence of knowledgeā€¦ kind of thing. Belief is contra-intuitive stupidity. I do not think we need add to this putrid miasma! :rofl:
Similarly this kind of pressure can play out in an org such as this and we should catch it at work on us! Basically, communication for the sake of it creates more noise, when what the world really wants are clear signals.

What is MetaGame signalling? :thinking: :earth_africa: :satellite: :love_letter:

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Yes, 100%. I think this is a critical issue here in Metagame. There is an overall ā€œambienceā€ of values here which is what makes the coordination and communication between us players possible in the first place. But maybe these have to be specified more concretely becauseā€¦

ā€¦ this is the issue. Is there a political basis on what we are doing here and in how we speak about it? Is it GameB, anarcho-syndicalism, accelerationism or are we LARPing? We do not need to abide by certain political or ideological labels, we might as well be part of something completely novel, but if we are politically agnostic or not, is something we have to specify too.

This is very true and unfortunately it can happen involuntarily for some. Being a reasonably charismatic speaker I sometimes try to catch myself from going there. It is a very enticing trap that we can all fall into and I am glad you brought this up (If I ever do this donā€™t be afraid to tell me).

Absolutely and this is made worse by the design of social media with quantified affirmation systems such as likes, retweets, views etc. Although Iā€™d say that we can never be sure of certain knowledge.
But what I think youā€™re getting at isā€¦

ā€¦patience. Web3 is super fast-paced, news is also fast-paced and combining these you can have a break-neck speed that can lead straight to a wall. Having some time for contemplation is always better than thoughtless action.

Hell of quote lad! A much better motto than ā€œWtf is Metagameā€ tbh. This should be what our collective new yearā€™s resolution should be about.

Youā€™ve raised some good points gnome! I think itā€™s time for retrospection and deliberation.

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Haha no worries and please do the same for me! This was by no means whatsoever meant to be aimed at anyone, let alone your good self PVF! Hope you get that it is a very generalised statement. :pray:
Indeed because we also exploit similar styles of reward systems to those used in Social Media here, yet with the added element of money to up the potency, we are operating in that psychology to a degree as explored here.https://www.sourcecredjunkies.info/edu-doc

So we can easily fall foul of spamming the World if we are not carefulā€¦ :joy:

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No worries man, I understood that this was a general statement. I just had a moment of realization thatā€™s all!

Sounds great!

I started writing the ā€œmetaallianceā€ section of the newsletter (adding news from the ā€œexternalā€ guilds) & been talking to @Pronoia42 who seems interested in helping with the wider web3.

Unexpectedly, the bigger problem now is video editing :sweat_smile:
I pushed out a call for a videos champion in the newsletter & hopefully weā€™ll get it tweeted soon as well (@_Anna?)

What did you think about the whole idea of merging newsletter & metanews channels on discord since theyā€™re fundamentally about the same thing?
How could we make this go without much editing?
Have you considered maybe doing a live commentary on it with someone?
Maybe we could have a few players gather every friday after the newsletter is released & just comment through it? Maybe we could have you interview people from the Elders Ring (moar soon) on their comments about it?

Just some thoughts but yeah, would love to see this moving forwardā€¦

Great idea @peth! Pheww! This takes so much pressure off and can still be very entertaining.

Also yeah. We have talked about it before and I think we agreed so letā€™s do this.

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First of all thank you @Gnomeski for bringing up great issues and for sharing this:
https://www.sourcecredjunkies.info/edu-doc

After reading Prf. Albert Snitcher paper, which took me some time my attention spam is broken.
Maybe we can use this paper as a reference and a guide for our FOCUS

I have a question for all of us players, as a community, please be honest because we are all in the same page:

Do you have any of these symptoms described in the Pr. Snitcherā€™s paper?

Thereā€™s many things I would comment about it, but Iā€™ll keep the focus on this.
I identified the following symptons on myself:

Page 9:

  • Difficulty concentrating
  • Insomnia
  • Reduced self care - emotional, physical - escapism

Page 10:

  • Past history of anxiety or depression
  • Unresolved grief or trauma
  • Poor self esteem
  • Drug Addiction (I smoked a lot of weed, but not anymore, not sure if it applies)

Page 12:

  • You feel depressed, anxious, or angry after spending time online, mood swings
  • You sometimes have ā€˜phantom vibrationsā€™ in your pocket as if receivingnotifications on your phone

READ THE WHOLE DOCUMENT - kindly reply here if you do indentify with some symptoms if not most of them :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Iā€™ve Ecosied Albert Snitcher and couldnā€™t find out much about him, there was another one that died in the 1970ā€™s so I guess thatā€™s not himā€¦ Let me know if you find out whoā€™s this professor If you could tell us a bit the source of this paper @Gnomeski? He does seem like he knows what heā€™s talking about, thatā€™s for sure :rofl:

@P_V_F and @tommy btw, this seems like a great topic to start the meeting for the houseofwellbeing.

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I am glad you enjoyed the piece CrisLeash. :heart_eyes:
I do have a confession. Albert Snitcher was a construct of my imagination. The whole thing is an edu-punk fiction! Gyrus, thankfully was also not real. This may be why it is often only discussed in the darkest and shadiest back alleys of MetaGameā€¦ :male_detective:

Please do not be embarassed! It was designed to appear beleivable and many others were surprised that it was not true. This was like a personal psychodrama I guess between different parts of my self. The background science in that paper IS well founded and researched though.
However, in my defenseā€¦ :grimacing: The thinking was that if you could see the story as being believable, then there was likely an unconscious agreement/recognition of the issues the piece referencesā€¦ :man_shrugging: (there is a disclaimer at the very bottom of the home page of the Sourcecred Junkies website) The unconscious being so infinitely more resourced than the conscious mind is!

Back then MetaGame had a much looser cred system and it was being farmed and was even moar confusing than it is today.

This thread was begun by PVF to explore ideas around the expansion of the scope of our News transmissions.

The discussion as found in peths 2 Paths of Crypto piece explores the importance of philosophical and social alignment in Web3. This is an important thing because, in the Casinos of the Wild West, that is Crypto trading and DeFi, the culture is essentially degenerative. MetaGame wants to use the tech in a regenerative way that is inclusive and progressive, revolutionary even.

The Sourcecred Junkies piece essentially explore how FUD and FOMO can fuck us up mentally even with the dynamics of reactive emojification as an economic reward signal system. So it is all linked. Even within MetaGame the forces of degeneracy are after our souls and there can be some pretty ā€˜judgy feelingā€™ stuff said against that by The Great and The Good about intrinsic VS extrinsic motivations etc, which is very similar to (but not as accurate as) the Locus of Control model. :sweat_smile:

So yeah, then there is this feeling that Focus is somehow not compatible with Community Vibesā€¦ another mythical polarisation that has no meaning. So, for me i was wondering really if it is best in all things, to become clearer in our mission and identity before just ā€˜expandingā€™ for the sake of itā€¦ In my life I often find my best insights come after a ā€˜contractionā€™! Haha anyway I am waffling probably.

But, yeah i reckon the House of Wellbeing can definitely use some of the SCJ stuff as one very specific part. The potential dangers of reactive Crypto-emonomics.

Pweese donā€™t hate me for tricking you! :rofl: :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: :smiling_imp:

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No harm done @Gnomeski actually you helped out a lot in a way :smiley:

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