New World Notes

I Largely Left Second Life to Avoid the People of Second Life (Comment of the Week)

Discussing her reasons for minimizing her use of Second Life, reader Savoree LeDesir offered one I often hear from others: Exhaustion with the negative social experience in Second Life. Here's how she describes it:

"Part of the appeal of Second Life was that it promised to fulfill that lifelong dream of many - the ability to 'reinvent oneself,' and, at least for a moment, to escape reality and experience the fulfillment of one's ideal self. After several years of dealing with trying to deal with constant technical difficulties, in-world politics, relentless cyber-bullies (as it turns out, a lot of people reinvented themselves into the kids they hated in high school), and a 'community' of people who are all trying to be something other than who they really are, many have become disillusioned with the whole premise of this type of virtual experience...or perhaps they've simply outgrown it.

New Meme About SL Pet Peeves is a Meme Worth Spreading

Here's a new SL blog meme from SL bloggerista supreme Ms. Strawberry Singh, and I really like this one: Share your top 5 SL pet peeves. Ms. Singh starts with her own, and I relate with this one most:

People who don’t read profiles: I think SL would be a much better place if people just took two minutes to read someone’s profile before contacting them. This is especially geared towards those fashion bloggers that spam designers (and their managers) with lots of notecards begging them to send items to blog or sponsor them (unless it’s written in the designers profile that it’s ok to do that).

Or to take another example, when someone (by which I mean me) puts a note in their profile politely asking people not to send them notecards, and to send e-mail instead... getting notecard after notecard after notecard anyway. Which I consequently ignore, ignore, and ignore.

The Value of Raising Awareness of Real World Violence Against Women With a Virtual Dance Party (Guest Post)

Last week's One Billion Rising event in Second Life caused a fair amount of controversy, mainly because the dance party, an official part of a world-wide awareness-raising collective dance event against rape and other violence against women, seemed by many to be an ineffective response to such a deep and serious issue. Saffia Widdershins of the excellent SL blog Prim Perfect offers her answer as one of the event's lead organizers:

This event was planned and held within five weeks. The people behind it (and there were over a hundred and thirty people involved in the event) were experienced event organizers in Second Life (events including Second Life Birthdays, Relay for Life etc etc). This was short notice for a wholly new event, but a blog was set up, a Facebook page and a Twitter stream. It received publicity through the real world OBR event as well - and even featured on the Guardian newspaper's live blog of One Billion Rising!

There were four sims open for twenty-four hours, with people coming and going all day long. On average, I'd say there were 120 people at the event at any one time - attendance might have dropped to 80 at some points, and rose to nearly 200 at peak times - at which point the sims were really groaning. I would suspect that well over a thousand people visited the event in the course of the day - and more watched on Livestream - it was broadcast for the whole 24 hours.

And we got nearly five thousand hits on the OBR blog on the day itself - so maybe I'm being conservative with visitor numbers.

Can SL Secrets Stay 1 Month Drama-Free for a Good Cause?

The editors of Shopping Cart Disco's SL Secrets, a weekly blog post of anonymous secrets from the SL community which is largely a forum where "ugliness is catharsis and entertainment", has issued a challenge to readers who contribute these secrets:

If you people can go Four Weeks starting today without submitting one shitty mean spirited secret... [we] will donate $100 to a charity that you will select via a poll that will be put up later.

More about the challenge here. Basically, it's like the Prisoner's Dilemma, if the prisoners were SL fashionistas and Plurk users! Here's hoping the community of Secrets sharers can keep the meanness to a minimum for a good cause. Like I noted last year, the best way to do that is to follow the lead of Post Secret, and emphasize secrets mainly about oneself, not what one thinks about others.

Flatterbots Violate Second Life's Terms of Service, Argues Mr. Epsilon (Comment of the Week)

Controversy continues over the plague of "flatterbots" in Second Life, which are reportedly earning their owner $160 a day, and in the comments of our latest post, NWN reader "DBDigital Epsilon" makes the interesting case that Flatterbots violate SL's Terms of Service:

"For those that doubt is not against the Terms of Service: While there isn't directly anything saying 'begging' I would like to point to:

Flatterbot Owner Makes USD$160 a Day Begging SL Users Via a Network of Scripted Bots, According to Interview

Late last year you read our report about the invasion of flatterbots in Second Life - automated avatars programmed to beg SL users for Linden Dollars with a scripted dialog of flirtation and panhandling; now, it seems, we have an interview with the flatterbot owner. Blaise Joshua of Every Second Man tracked down the person behind the flatterbots, he tells me, and conducted a great and lengthy interview with her, which you should read here. According to their conversation, the flatterbot puppeteer is a young woman living in the US, who runs 10-15 bots at the same time, and makes about $160 -- that's US dollars -- from her operation, every day:

I make roughly $40,000L per day. [i.e. around USD$160] And consistently for three months. Everybody is exploiting everyone here.

To put that in more perspective, if she averaged this amount of money every day she put her flatterbots in the field, and worked over 300 days a year, she'd be grossing close to $50,000 annually.

I was a touch skeptical with this interview at first, but after talking with Blaise, a UK blogger with a background in psychology and sociology, I'm pretty convinced this is the person behind the flatterbots. Finding and interviewing her, Blaise tell me, wasn't easy:

Does SL Roleplay Lean Right Wing? (Comment of the Week)

New World Notes readers (and by extension, Second Life users in general) overwhelmingly support Obama, but during last week's post-election commentary, SLer PussyCat Catnap (who blogs here), had some very interesting and provocative insights on the prevalence of roleplay in Second Life which seems to be politically right wing in nature -- most especially, the very popular Gorean roleplayers of SL, whose activity is based on a fantasy book series that has an explicitly anti-feminist, anti-egalitarian ideology:

"Online gamers tend to be a rather conservative racist sexist bunch. One does not have to look far to see this.

"It's all over SL too.

"But it doesn't control everything here like it can in other online more gamer focused worlds.

"Here you just find the odd Dixie flag, or a 'black man on white women' XXX-sim, one or two racially charged biker groups (mixed in with others so its really hard to figure out which and who - and most are not).

"And then the whole Gorean/slave thing as sort of a 'virtual war on women' concept that baffles the heck out of me.

"These are all groups that lean heavy on conservative norms, though they come here for the things they can't express in open RL society...

SL Has a Thriving Community Who Roleplay 1920s Berlin

Berlin of the 1920s is famous for being full of vibrant and decadent fun (that is, before the Nazi darkness came), and if you've seen any version of Cabaret, you roughly know how and why; what might surprise you, however, is that Berlin of the 1920s is something else: The theme for a thriving Second Life roleplay community, who live in two sims made to look like that metropolis from that time: Click here for a direct teleport there.

The community even has its own homepage, it's own blog, and a Flickr stream, like social media echoes of another era. And while I've known about this community for awhile, I quite didn't get how thriving it was, until one of the owners explained as much:

SL Sweet Fridays are as Saccharine as SL Secrets are Savage

The latest Sweet Fridays is up, and if you're not a fan of Shopping Cart Disco's SL Secret (posted on Sunday) which tend toward cruelty, you may be a fan of Shopping Cart Disco's Sweet Fridays (posted, yes, on Friday), which are the direct opposite: Not anonymous SLers anonymously cutting into other anonymous SLers, but (mostly) named SLers praising other (mostly) named SLers. Taken together, they show the community at its best and worst. See the sweet side here.

Post Secret Secrets Versus Second Life Secret Secrets

I sometimes read SL Secret, the intriguing Shopping Cart Disco series inspired by Post Secret, the famed blog I also sometimes read, and though they're both published every Sunday and they both share the premise of anonymous people anonymously submitting secrets to a blog (the former about secrets from Second Life's user community), I noticed a pretty striking contrast between the two: