Top 50 Second Life Sims for April 2012, Excluding Porn... But Should I Exclude Porn from These Lists?

Courtesy Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, a Second Life/OpenSim analytics company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data for its clients, here's the top 50 most popular General and Moderate rated sims (i.e. excluding Adult-rated porn sims) in Second Life for April 2012  listed according to their average visitor count at any given period:

Click here to use SL's map function on the web to search and directly teleport to any of these sims.

Question for readers before checking out 26-50: Do you prefer to see the absolute most popular Top 50, including the porn sims, or do you prefer listings this way? All or almost all of top Adult-rated sims seem to be strictly virtual porn/prostitution/BDSM-themed, so I don't know how interesting they are to a general readership. If even some of the big Adult-rated sites were, say, roleplaying regions which include graphic sexual and violent content, but were not necessarily their main purpose (like the ambitious and story-heavy Midian), that would be different. But I don't know how many NWN readers wake up wondering, "Gosh how popular is Bukkake Bliss Island nowadays?" Mabye I'm wrong there.

Let me know your thoughts in Comments, because NWN is here for you, whether I come bearing Bukkake, or I'm Bukkake-free.

Top 26-50 sims after the break:

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Comments

[Adeon Writer]

I'm not interested in porn sims, and I'm not interested in being interested in them.
I skipped these posts until you started offering lists excluding Adult sims.
But I'm going to wager that's not the majority's opinion.

One thing though: The official terms are General / Moderate / Adult. (PG makes General sims sound so childish, and Mature is a misleading word.)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I feel the same way I did the last time this question came up: without the Adult regions, you're presenting an incomplete picture.

But I wouldn't object if each region type had its own chart, or the combined chart was "under the fold".

[Corcosman Voom]

Not really interested in a list that is mostly porn sims.

[Adeon Writer]

No harm in offering both of course.

[Hamlet Au]

"The official terms are General / Moderate / Adult."

Yeah, Louis has been compiling these since before the terms were changed to that, hence the old school categories. Checking if we can easily tweak that.

[shockwave yareach]

Show them both; a porn free list AND the porn included list.

[val kendal]

"Let me know your thoughts in Comments, because NWN is here for you, whether I come bearing Bukkake, or I'm Bukkake-free."

- funniest line in reading NWN for 5 years

I'm interested in both, but I'm more interested in non-Adult first, so I would suggest a non-Adult list above the fold, as you did here, but with the full list available too

[Canoro Philipp]

the purpose of these lists are to give knowledge of which are the most popular sims in SL.

if you claim that this list is of the top25 or top50 most visited sims and you exclude the adult places, the list gives out incomplete information, therefore it doesnt really do its purpose, if you start excluding sims for personal ideology, like the ones who accept furries or sell skins of a certain race, the list is gonna be useless to have an idea of the preferences of the users.

[Stone Semyorka]

Hamlet,
It's much more useful if you stick to General and Mature and leave out the adult. If need be, maybe you could publish a separate list of the top 25 adult sims, not part of the G and M list.

I think an interesting article for your blog would report in some depth how these 50 G and M sims make it to the top. I'm an active reader of much SL info on the web and in-world plus a longtime daily-active resident and many of these places never have come to my attention. That makes me very curious about this and so my question is how do they advertise themselves so they get these very high ratings.

[Uccello]

Either list is of dubious value as each merely measures the presence of avatars, not the (obviously debatable) value and quality of what occurs in any given region. And one would also have to determine why a given traffic figure is such. You can assume at first blush that porn sims are valuable to people or the traffic would suffer. On the other hand, if a region is popular because they use landmark-giving Bots to funnel in new Residents but has little enough utility that would make a visitor stay or return, should it be on the list?

Simply publishing the list is interesting, but it reminds me that "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics" (Mark Twain).

[Pussycat Catnap]

Include it all.

Excluding the pron just makes things look other than they are.

People should know what SL -is- used for, now what they wish it was used for; if they're to know anything at all.

[David Cartier]

I once would have said that as Linden Lab 'supposedly' segregates the adult content into its own area, the best thing would be to have an adult list, but there is no point to worrying about image. Second Life is indelibly marked as a wasteland of outre sexual deviance.
We can find many reasons why virtually all of the business and educational applications have failed in SL, but the fact is that maintaining a business location for any but the absolutely vaguest purposes of information and maybe EGO, is like opening a Christian Science Reading Room in a whorehouse. Our friends might themselves be logged into Cam4.com all day long, but to them WE are the strange ones, no matter what we may be doing in SL. That doesn't happen - yet - if you tell them that you are in OpenSim, which alone makes it a lot more appealing than SL has become.

[Ziki Questi]

Excluding the adult sims doesn't really provide a complete picture of where residents are spending their time (is there something "wrong" with those residents who chose to visit adult sims such that they shouldn't be counted in statistics?). I have to agree with Canoro there.

"All or almost all of top Adult-rated sims seem to be strictly virtual porn/prostitution/BDSM-themed, so I don't know how interesting they are to a general readership." Since they're so popular, what makes you assume that your "general readership" isn't among those visiting them? ^^

[jo yardley]

How about 3 lists, one showing PG, one for mature and one for adult.
Personally I don't care about the porn sims but would love to know how the other sims are doing.

[Nalates Urriah]

Jo's suggest for 3 lists may be the most useful to the majority.

As your feed provides only an excerpt people have to visit the site to see the list. With each list in an article you would see which is the most visited...

[elizabeth (16)]

4 lists

1 for each and 1 combined

+

if you make a 5 list for free pron instead of pron free then will like triple your clicks q;

[Hamlet Au]

Unfortunately, that's a bit too time-consuming for a post that doesn't interest a ton of readers (judging by my pageviews.) I'm leaning toward Arcadia's idea of putting the non-pr0n list on top, the with-pr0n list below the fold.

[Connie Arida]

How about an "adult", "Moderate" "Safe" list and a merged one. So we can avert our eyes if we want to :)

[Canoro Philipp]

how about having just the PG list on the front page and the complete list below the fold?

surely the people that own mature sims and the people that go to those places must be doing "not family friendly" activities in there, therefore it may hurt some people sensibilities.

[Dave Bell]

Leaving the Adult sims out entirely is destroying the context.

If the all-comers #1 sim is Adult, you ought to say so.

It might be useful to list the General/Moderate sims only, but include their ranking in the all-sims list.

[Mourn Orsini]

I agree with Dave Bell. Why not make two different lists? One including adult content, and one not including them.

[Dizzy Banjo]

I think it would definitely be useful to see the 'default' view of content, which new users would have access to with their starting settings - I guess this would be G and M

but also one which has G M A so we can really see what the primary use cases are for SL.

It would be great to see accumulated traffic through categories of areas / use cases, preferably discounting bots somehow.

To be honest I would have absolutely no problem if this illustrated a heavy bias towards adult use of SL. It's personally of no interest to me but it just illustrates things which SL is good at - immersion, sense of connectivity, creativity and imagination etc. These actually apply in many use cases of course.

[Valentina Kendal]

Ziki makes a very good point about your readership Hamlet. I've been, and go to, places on both sets of lists. Other than strictly RPing sims (and I don;t think there are any of those on the top 50, but I could be wrong?), almost all of those places, Adult and non-Adult, are where people hang out to meet other people and socialize - some involve slow dancing, some involve bukkake - truth be told in most of them, most people are just standing around chatting or observing.

/me shrugs

[Neferon]

The mature region "Sexy Nude Beach" is more "adult" than a lot of adult sims - which have shopping, public areas, and various other not so adult features to explore, same as the rest of SL.

I vote that it doesn't tell the story if adult sims are excluded. If including adults sims means either mature or general aren't fully represented for those most interested in those types of areas - the idea of versions of the list "with" and "without" make sense.

[foneco zuzu]

Life is a eternal fight between the search for pleasure and the struggle to avoid pain!
Why SL should be different then RL?

[Melancholy Lemon]

I presume the current list (despite billed as 'excluding porn') is actually just a list of PG/Mature regions, then?

i.e. you don't actually research whether any adult sims that might otherwise appear are used for 'porn' (which you don't define), nor whether any of the mature sims you do list are used for 'porn'?

If you continue the list in the current form, I'd certainly like to see it accurately described. But, personally, I think I'd prefer a complete, uncensored list.

Oh, and am I the only one reading this who finds equating BDSM with porn offensive?

mel

[Lawrence Taylor]

Your equating Adult with Porn has doomed one third of SL from being presented on this list.

[Flashing Merlin]

I vote with those who suggest showing both list, with the one including Adult regions after the fold.

My gallery is in a general region. My home is in a FurNation SIM, which is Adult but nothing overtly pornographic goes on there. `One reason I prefer to live in an Adult region is to avoid getting involved with minors.

I don't visit porn SIMs, but still I'd like to know what the actual numbers are when all regions are included. I wonder if all top Adult regions are porn, or are some like the one I live in, and have traffic only because people going there want to socialize with adults?

Would be interesting if you could note which Adult regions actually were porn.

[Ajax Manatiso]

Thanks god the adult sims were excluded. Newbie magnets for looky-loos -- nobody goes there because they actually frequent those places. And YAY! Krymov! No nudity -- romance and not porn!!! Romance is still alive in SL.

[Nightbird Glineux]

I too agree with Arcadia Codesmith.