When Second Life Went from a World to a 3D Web

I told you a bit about how my ex-Linden colleague Reuben Steiger helped drive the hype wave around Second Life, and now he has a Medium post explaining much more of those behind-the-scenes details:

An Internet Without Islands

An underlying theme involves the moves Linden Lab made when the company still saw Second Life as a virtual world, with its own rules and internal logic, and when it started adopting the logic and expectations of the web. Here's one key point there, back from a time when SL users could not teleport directly from point A to point B, but instead, would have to travel (by foot or flying) to a given destination from a "telehub" station that could be as far as 500 meters away:

You see while the whole society ran on code, the metaphor of simulated reality made us ask hard questions in setting big policies, especially ones related to land, location and commerce. For example, the locations of “Welcome Areas” where new users landed, was a huge issue to residents since being close to these could mean more sales of virtual dresses and such.

In the early days, users happily explored by walking or flying both of which worked nicely when the world was still small. By the time we had 30K users people a debate broke out over “Public Telehubs” — a sort of informational terminal with directions to useful places. If you clicked one, you magically reappeared at the destination. As a relative newcomer, this seemed to me like a debate about favoritism — where would these “utilities” be placed and who would decide which businesses were closest to them?

I remember talking with our CEO/Founder Philip Rosedale about this and asking him, “When do you think we’ll have the technology to let people teleport directly to anywhere they want”?

“Oh it’s built” he said. “We could turn it on right now if we wanted”. 

Philip had a very interesting reason for resisting point-to-point teleporting at first:

Seeing my baffled expression he explained, saying “We think there’s a magic to the chaos that happens when you walk down a street, when you serendipitously discover things and meet people”. He mentioned the work of urban theoristJane Jacobs who famously battled Robert Moses as he tried to reshape New York with master planning. From the chaos of Greenwich Village, Jacobs prevailed in winning a variety of battles for local neighborhoods and looser structures. She was a hero.

Jacobs’ work had a massive impact urban design and economics but her critics argue her theories don’t work when a city grows from one to ten million (as has happened many times in the Third World). The same may be true online. By the end of 2005, people were pouring into Second Life and things began to break. As we closed in on the 1,000,000 resident mark, the advertisers showed up.

In retrospect, I'd argue that removing telehubs was a mistake. In point of fact, most of those million "residents" actually quit Second Life after their first try, and one of the many reasons they quit was a perceived lack of active users to interact with -- which in turn, was partly due to the removal of telehubs. When they existed, telehubs were popular hang-out places where newbies could easily meet and interact with oldbies. With the telehubs gone, oldbies would just teleport directly to their favorite places, which made it less and less likely that most of them would even interact with newbies. Anyway, much more from Reuben worth reading here.

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Comments

[reuben steiger]

Thanks Hamlet - it's so weird to reflect on those times but I'm also loving it - one of the consolations of aging is that we've got (hopefully) a little wisdom and perspective. At very least the stories are good. Hope all's well with you my friend.

[Iggy]

I rezzed when the telehubs were still around but the gatherings of avatars had moved to the trollish WAs.

This post makes me nostalgic for what I missed in SL. It was an invented world full of occasional magic (Svarga, Chebi Mosque, Bogon Flux, and Calleta Hobo camp spring to mind).

Now one can just TP from one experience to another, and not be forced to interact much with the broader virtual public, even in stores if one chooses Marketplace for shopping.

As much as I've attacked Philip Rosedale's desires to have us emigrate to a virtual world at the expense of the real, I did like that utopian vision of a place you could dip into to visit. Despite all the fancier-looking avatars and content made with programs that I don't care to learn, it's not the same.

I don't feel that magic in SL these days.

[Carlos Loff]

I think that even if the Telehubs were still around people would start using more and more the Search engine and LMs, so it was an inevitavle evolution that would occur anyhow

[A.J.]

Reuben Steiger's Medium post was an enjoyable read.

I agree with Iggy's feelings about Rosedale. I think that Philip was important to SL and that a lot was lost when to both when he left.

[Concerned Resident]

Linden Lab calls the customers whackadoodles.

Rosedale is also a bit of a whackadoodle himself so that went well.

When Rosedale made mistakes he made up by grandfathering stuff. Second Life used to be fun then and it did grow fast because Residents could be actual residents in the world. Now residents can play dress-up.

There used to be a vibrant eco-system but Linden just destroyed all that. They bought out Xstreetsl, put newbies in Linden home ghettos, killed the third party currency providers, gave secret tier discounts to certain people.

I did visit the mainland this week, I found several places where I could not see a single home or building anywhere as far as I could look. I even found places where governor Linden already removed roads from the sims so that tells a lot.

The funny thing is that Second Life could be doing really really well if Linden Lab would allow.

In opensim people can host a sim with 15000 prims for 10$ a month. What if every single premium in Second Life would receive a homestead sim. Things like that would have made a massive impact on Second Life because everybody would be able to participate.

You are premium for 15$ a month you get an entire mainland sim to build on. The grid would explode and Linden would be making money

Of course they prefer to screw people instead of doing the work. Why slave behind server machines when you can manipulate and play with dogs for the remaining office hours.

[irihapeti]

@Concerned

why would the same person you think will come, pay $15 a month for 3,750 prims when they can get 15,000 prims for $10 a month

how many people are there now paying $10 a month for 15,000 prims on a OpenSim grid ?

is not 100s of 1000s of them. is only 100s

[irihapeti]

the article by Reuben Steiger was pretty good I thought

[Shockwave Yareach]

It was the time when LL stopped thinking about this as a virtual world that everything went to pot.

It can be partially salvaged, with effort and an acceptance that what they have is Not just another product in a can. They need to think like they own a planet and are selling bits of it to settlers. And what they do on their own fleck of the planet is nobody's business but the settlers. That was what started the meteoric growth; that and the way to make money I world. When LL stopped thinking of the virtual world as a virtual world, and just another floor wax, is when the ruinous mismanagement started.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

If people could teleport in RL, they would.

It's true that slower means of transportation have their good points, but almost all of us have limited time, especially for recreation. I suspect that most people resent the time they have to take commuting. How much more would they resent being constrained in VR, where such constraints aren't necessary, and where they don't or shouldn't have to put up with it as they do in RL, and when will they decide they don't have to put up with it and seek entertainment elsewhere?

[Ivanova Shostakovich]

When telehubs existed, and were the only way to teleport, there were boondocks. In the same way merchants and advertisers could be close to the action, people who wanted their privacy, without encountering visitors and explorers, could find unfrequented corners of the grid to inhabit.