Residents and businesses began fleeing for more popular social networks long ago. Vast acres of land are abandoned or sparsely populated by the few remaining diehard users. Its developer's VR follow-up, Sansar, is currently in beta.
Say you don't bother noticing that Second Life usage actually hasn't measurably dropped in well over a decade, and that Sansar usage is a tiny fraction in comparison. Say you go through your old contacts list and wonder where everyone went without looking much more beyond that list -- or look much further beyond old, defunct sites which never had many visitors to begin with:
After that encounter on the boardwalk with the creepy ghost girl, I decided to find the old John Edwards SL headquarters. It was created in 2007 to promote the former Senator's presidential campaign. This was before he lost the primary, and it was revealed that he had had an ongoing affair while his wife was dying... I couldn't find the Edwards HQ, or [MTV's] Laguna Beach. Nothing showed up in the game's search engine. I tried asking around. I visited an '80s-themed night club and asked anyone if they knew where Laguna Beach was. I was immediately warped to a dance podium, where I started dancing, against my will.
Say you don't ponder if the user community has evolved and changed, and how. Say you don't notice someone like, say, Strawberry Singh, even though she has more YouTube subscribers to her SL content than you have Twitter followers.
And finally, say this half-hearted, half-assed article is published on Digg, which was once a content recommendation portal with hundreds of millions of visits until it was made defunct by Reddit. (And was then rejiggered as a half-hearted, half-assed content site.) So say you miss the final irony of declaring one Internet property "dying" from another one that's actually dying faster:
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