> This is just a normal usage of imprecise language, not very different than saying you own a house when technically you have a mortgage

Lol, this is a joke? You have the rights to live in your house even if you have a mortgage, the house isn't going anywhere, it is a contract with lots of meaning. NFT's on the other hand doesn't mean anything at all.

Here is a link to a house: https://www.google.com/maps/place/California,+USA/@37.455368...

This is backed up by the ycombinator server, and as the owner of this link I can change the data etc.

Does this mean that I own that house? No. Do I own the picture of the house? Still no. Do I own that link? No, not even that. I just own this post that is stored on the HN server. That is how NFT ownership works.

Do you want to pay me $100 for this post? It means you can own this post which links to a house, cool huh?

You're mistaken on the basic mechanics of how NFTs work.

The only difference is that the post would live on a blockchain instead of a company server.

If you are talking about all the surrounding infrastructure, then that has nothing to do with NFT's. An NFT provides exactly the same value as a forum post. Someone can build a service which scrapes my forum posts and uses that to put links on another website based on some ownership details, so you can look at your owned posts there. You could make a whole game with assets based on forum post data etc, sounds exciting right!

Edit: Oh I forgot the other big difference. NFT's are crypto and therefore people pay insane amounts of money for it! Nobody would pay money for a forum post, that is just silly, but slap crypto on a forum post and wow, now we are talking!

Could you elaborate what the poster was a mistaken on?

Well, owning an NFT is absolutely nothing like posting a link to a Google Maps view of a house on Hacker News. It’s hard to go into detail on why those things are not alike without having more information about where this misconception is coming from.

Minting an NFT is exactly like posting a forum post. It looks like this, even has the same interface. Then people can buy this forum post from you.

https://downloads.intercomcdn.com/i/o/336157696/3a04454c884a...

Have you seen anyone talk about “right-clicker mentality”? There are a ton of people who are surprised that NFTs have no claim on ownership or access restriction because everyone's talking about it as if they're something other than a vanity URL.

I'm no expert on how that phrase is used, but it seems to me to be a pejorative aimed at people who claim (or act as if) a digital copy of a piece of artwork attached to an NFT is the same thing as the NFT, which is not the case. In other words, the people being accused of having "right-clicker mentality" are the people confused about what the NFT is, not the people making the accusations.