Twitter announced the ability to connect NFTs to profile pictures for Twitter Blue users the other day. On the surface level, it seems incredible. Finally! NFTs are going mainstream! Woo! Everyone celebrate! Finally, it looks like NFTs are getting more significant adoption rates and support from mainstream social networks.
Except, it did the opposite.
For the uninformed general user, "NFT" means nothing more than an image on their screen. So that monkey in sunglasses as your profile picture may scream "NFT," but it's seen as "dumb digital art" to many. A simple search for "Twitter Hexagon" - the new shape of NFT profile photos - affirms this. Yikes.
Twitter makes a brief mention of "publicly stored on blockchain" in their info pop-up when you first see a hexagon avatar - but that's it. There are no links to learn more, no details, and nothing beyond just saying, "Hey, look at this image. This shape proves this person bought that. Cool, right?" This messaging doesn't give any more meeting to decentralized ownership to those not already familiar.
NFTs as tech is incredible. However, those that adopt them have a responsibility to make learning how they work accessible and understandable for everyone. If they don't, the general audience will never bother giving them more than a passing thought. Twitter isn't at fault here by themselves, though - OpenSea (the arguably largest NFT trading platform) also has a hand in it.
A few days ago, OpenSea went down completely. And when they did, their collection of thousands of NFTs stopped loading altogether. Why? Because it turns out what you buy on OpenSea isn't the image at all - you're buying ownership of a URL that POINTS to that image. So if OpenSea goes down, that file goes missing, or the URL stops resolving - you're out of luck. Twitter's new integration even stopped loading NFTs during this outage.
That doesn't seem so decentralized - further re-affirming to a general audience that they're just dumb images being traded for millions.
NFTs are proof of digital ownership. It's a public ledger that gives a way to show "hey, I own this!" and it goes FAR beyond images on a screen. NFTs could be concert tickets, music, and video game purchases -- even Real Estate.
That may seem loaded, but those markets effectively already work this way. TicketMaster issues concert Tickets. Video games by Steam and Microsoft. Real Estate by local government and a title company. NFTs in these situations effectively replace the single authority that says, "yep, they own that!"
If NFTs launched on platforms this way, I guarantee anybody with the perception of just "images on a screen" would see the bigger picture. But, that hasn't happened, and the integrations these major players build never address it. The problem is, by definition - this is an anti-business model for these companies. NFTs are open, and these closed systems make their millions by ensuring everything runs through their closed ecosystem. (TicketMaster giving up their crazy fees to support an open platform? Never!) These big players that'd have a genuine ability to sway the narrative would never make these integrations.
Because the general audience only sees NFTs as images, and those images can be frequently stolen from artists, touted as the future without explanation, or promote an elitist mindset of ownership, then of course. In that case, they're not going to support this. Twitter adding this in its current form perpetuates those beliefs.
And I'm not blind to the fact that they're a major environmental headache at the moment. The resources that trading and minting NFTs take right now are a little ridiculous. However, this is more to do with the current blockchain tech many of these trading platforms use rather than NFTs as a concept.
NFTs as images are a revolutionary proof of concept that shows what this tech is capable of, but only if the general audience sees it that way - and not with images being the end-all-be-all of them. To reach wider market interest and have support in integration in other places, there is still a lot of work to do.