Second Life Ironically Declared to Be "Dying" By... Digg (Seriously)

Say you're a freelance writer who decides to write a story about Second Life as a "dying" Internet site:

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:

You're declaring Second Life is dying on a site which used to be a top content recommendation portal until it was obsoleted by Reddit and currently has 3.4 million monthly visits LESS than Second Life's official website. https://t.co/KVJWHBEgQE https://t.co/Y8c3CUNMVu

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) June 5, 2018

Say you might want to reconsider your approach to studying Internet cultures and how they change (and remain stable) over time. But that's just me saying that.

Comments

[pixels sideways]

There are a lot of peeps in my friend list who are no longer active or rarely active in SL.

Conversely, every day in SL I encounter new peeps.

Like any environment, SL evolves.

Meanwhile, Tuna Oddfellow is back in SL and hosting his fab and fun musical and visual feast, The Odd Ball.

[Nalates Urriah]

The blogger pretty much represents the state of mainstream media...

[R. Crap Mariner]

... you're just annoyed he came to me before you.
And I figured him for the assclown he is, and said no.

-ls/cm

[R. Crap Mariner]

BTW, I did recommend that he talk to some good guides:

Hey!

I’m a writer working on a piece for Digg exploring Second Life, with a particular focus on how digital spaces grow / decay.

I was curious if you’d be willing to give me a tour at some point of Second Life?

It’s my hope that this piece can ultimately explore not only what these spaces signified in a utopian sense, but also what they can tell us about contemporary digital networks.

Let me know if you're interested!

Best,
Joe
R. Crap Mariner
Hi Joe, I'm not really the tour guide type, and I don't do interviews. I'd recommend getting in touch with Marianne McCann or Saffia Widdershins. Inara Pey of Living in a Modem World is also reliable, but often busy, but she may point you to a trusted and reliable guide. I would not recommend contacting James Wagner/Hamlet Au of New World Notes. ty
Joe Veix
awesome — thank you so much for the recommendations. i really appreciate it. have a great week!

https://gyazo.com/63f5a7d535262f1a6bc7cc32e3b174f1

But, once again, assclown.

-ls/cm

[irihapeti]

burn! that Joe dude :D

cracks me up this article does

good on you Hamlet :) And good on you too on CM, you are so right to recommend the people you did :)

[HS]

SL has always been vast acres of sparsely populated land. Obviously the writer has been spending far too much time in RL.

[Jane]

Good on you, Hamlet, well said.

[Pane]

Seems pretty populated to me in my community lol I think he's been in the wrong places.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

Something funny just happened while I was looking over the Joe Veix article we're panning like a river in a Gold Rush. ^^;

2006. Freshman at a college. logged in because I was hearing about Second Life and was curious. A friend had gushed about it briefly while discussing his experiences with virtual worlds as an elective. I was standing outside an old 60s-era Telstra local comms interchange near a tiny lane named Ruth Street. Two hours later, I was parked on a milk crate in front of a larger stack of milk crates next to a shitty Dell, a poorly served ADSL line (the copper was already rusting to bits, but we were all hoping for this newfangled thing called the NBN to come online), and three months supply of heavily salted ramen and canned chickpeas, staring at the eponymous dull green eyehand that was SL's logo at the time. I signed up, picked a surname ("Woollahra sounds like a nice name"), and jumped wide in. I remember it was 8.32pm on 31st October 2006 when I accidentally landed on top of an winged alabaster techie volunteering at the Orientation Islands.

2016. Still here. Never truly left, even as I shuttered the business that funded my heydays back during SL's boomtimes.

In those ten years, I've done some mildly crazy shit. I'm no Starax Statosky, I'm no Prokofy. I'm not even a shortwave Radio, let alone AM Radio. I'm just the only Blue Woollahra Wildcat on Second Life (even if it has been ages since I snapped into that avatar). Things like:

• Being inducted into minor mentoring roles in New Citizens Incorporated and the LL-run Volunteer Corps.
• Spending an entire month logging in for classes on SL on everything from LL-sponsored prim torture to creating a signboard that read notecards and barfed out inworld "XYText"
• Bought a pair of ski shoes only 456 people have ever owned. #SkoopfsRAwesum
• Experimented with full body replacement back when only invisiprins and sculpties were the available body replacement tech.
• contributed to at least three SLxB birthday parties from when it was mostly a closely knit community fun event.
• Fallen in love three times with people of both main virtual genders (RL A/S/L/Pref unknown, not bothered with)
• Memorised the entire LSL wiki (before XMLRPC, Mono and all these newfangled functions were added)
• switched my main allegiance across four different subcultures (furry -> anime -> puzzle-gaming -> scifi RP)
• Run a L$2500/week business, then run it into the ground.

While reading Veix's article, I am struck by two things - how similar our beginnings were, and how wildly our paths have veered.

Like many sensationalists who have written about SL all these years, Veix seems to be strangely obsessed with the concept of SL as a failure of sorts (all emphasis is my own)

"It provides a digital escapist fantasy, supposedly allowing users to be and do whatever they want, unbound by the restrictions of the "real" world. They can create custom avatars. They can use the game's official currency (Linden Dollars) to purchase and sell in-game items, including land, which they can build houses on. They can fly. They can make friends, and have sex with them."

After ten years, sex with people I loved has made up, at best, a fraction of a smidgen of the time I've spent in SL. I have been busy doing a tonne of other things: exploring. building, scripting, talking to people, accessorising to look as best as I can with the available options of the micro-era without unduly burdening the server or other residents with scripts or prim overuse or bling... SL is a creative megacommunity first and foremost, any other communities you see in it are an expression and subtype of a massively overwide category. Without creativity, all you have in SL is a bunch of ugly-looking misshapen people standing on Linden grass (or within Linden waters) in fugly solid-colored texture clothing looking ubergeneric. Mr Veix, what I find puzzling is your obsesssion with an activity that (for me, and for the majority of the folks I know) is barely even contemplated, let alone acted upon in most cases.

"The limitless freedom attracted furries, government spies, sex freaks, and (disturbingly) pedophiles. "

LOLWUT. no mention of:

• the fashionistas?
• Photographers run amok with the freedom to design the set, props, people, and lights?
• Builders who lived and breathed Lego bricks for far longer than most
• kids are reasonably expected to or allowed to?
• People who have been denied some form or other of sense or motion by infirmities of all sorts, propped up partially or totally by how SL tries not to let those limitations carry over past the login screen?
• coding fanatics eager to put 2 and 2 together in a state machine and somehow get a shopping cart loved by thousands of shoppers and merchants? (Shoutouts to Casper Warden and DavidThomas Scorbal!)
• The gardeners who made places like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?
• AI experimentalists building remote islands where virtual life finds a way every waking moment the grid has? #svargaRepresent
• Musicians and poets loitering in quiet small clubs and tiny hole-in-the-wall dives singing and rhyming for mainly the love of it?

But sure, let's rudely insult two communities whose worst shared habit is visiting reprisals that could be mistaken for karma upon those who wrong them, by placing them in the same mention as actual sex offenders.

"After capping the size/detail of models, he became disillusioned with the nature of his gig and quit. I haven't been able to confirm any of this (yet...), but the fact that any of it is even remotely credible says a lot about "Second Life."

While Lindens have the capability to alter limited aspects of an object, the use of this power to any degree is heavily restricted and logged. The effort required to access Linden powers and personal arts skills in order to tamp down a gigantic dong that is not owned by them far exceeds the easier act of simply forcing a return, and getting Governance to suspend or bar the owner in question. Mr Veix, what you have written here is scuttlebutt unless you can confirm it with independent sources and verifiable evidence. Journalists do NOT engage in publishing the unverified as if it was the truth. Your claim does not say a lot about Second Life - it says a lot about the luggage you brought in with you!

"When my partner purchased a house to display her students' work, it was in the middle of an empty suburb, surrounded by homes abandoned long ago, waiting for owners who would likely never return."

SL Residents blanket most of the globe, albeit lightly given the active population we speak of. A wide variance in daily regimens means that one cannot expect consistent in-world presence by many barring select developers. the absence of owners cannot necessarily be easily determined by observation. As Mr Veix has so clearly mentioned in your article, the signs of neglect are harder to visit on virtual buildings and edifice, to the point that when such signs of neglect are part of a build, they are more likely to be the result of deliberate planning and grunging of uploaded mesh and textures. Empty houses without a presence are still paid for by their owners, as keeping items rezzed in world requires someone to pay upkeep fees for the land under them. That implies a level of investment in the world, and an interest to eventually come back, however distant the possibility.

And as to why your requests to multiple residents for a tour guide were ignored, Mr Veix...Recall the tale of the town of Asbestos, an actual town in Quebec.

Used to be a great town, just like SL. It was in particular special because it was a hotspot for mining the miracle mineral asbestos out of the soil, useful for insulating so many things... Until one day, we worked out that it was farking our lungs up, and asbestos became a dirty word.
The townspeople of Asbestos have grown tired after years, of all the sensationalism surrounding reports about their town remaining the way it is, down to the name, long after asbestos stopped leaving their soil. People coming just to gawk, to mock, to slur the town into a byword for perversity. Like it was F--king in Austria. Or Intercourse.

Well, Mr Veix, I just want you to realise that we in Second Life are similarly tired of this bullroar when it is visited upon Agni Grid. We have seen it all, enough to know when we're being led out to dance and when we're being led out for a bullfight instead.

I understand briefly from Draxtor, Crap, Inara and Marianne that you have not been entirely forthcoming about your true intentions in writing what you have written about us. I think I shall let them describe in detail what is exactly the problem they have with you if they're open to doing so, but to briefly summarise them for you:

you have not been unfairly maligned, or shunned, by the Residents you claim to have contacted. You have merely been returned the same level of engagement that you offered: cursory, faked, not one bit genuinely curious or trying to comprehend about what you ostensibly wish for in terms of interaction.

I understand that yes, this is your word against theirs, but who do you think I trust more? a hack I have never met, or four Residents whom I've also never personnally met outside of SL, but whose fruits cover much of the breadth of Second Life and whom I have sampled and found, at worst, a genuine engagement of what it means to be one of the digital natives that we are in SL?

Start treating Residents as fellow humans (regardless of apparent avatar shape and design, I mean) , and start being seriously interested in working out the nuances of why things are the way they are in Second Life. Until then, get off my goddamn lawn, get your dong off, and get on a pair of decent trousers. That would be a very good start in approaching the matter of trying to be at least tolerable in Second Life!

Peace out,
camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli.Woollahra

P.S. The human brain is still the best sex organ ever. Everyone allegedly has one, and all you need is an understanding of a shared language and /me. Trust me, the Demo Dick is a Pointless Thing.
P.P.S. and for the last time people, Crap Mariner is NOT mainly an erotic photographer, dammit!

[Clara Seller]

Imagine finding "decay" in your 2018 search for decade-old remnants of John Edwards failed primary campaign. Groundbreaking.

Sadly, this half-baked Digg article likely has more influence on LL perception of their SL product than the actual happenings inside the world itself.

Second Lifers ain't got love, but we still got money. The pigs will return to our trough for dinner.

[TyrehlByk]

Yeah, well I guess I’m Interested in somewhat less words these days. And, (for those that know my name), YES, I’m just recently BACK in SL. The both of us…NOT dead, and still aging rather nicely I think. Sort of like a fine wine. Watch what happens next!

[Jacques Mesrine]

"With my new Demo Dick, it seemed appropriate to visit a nude beach. We spotted a couple making love on an outdoor bed. We watched.
Maybe it was our eyeball avatars, which perhaps suggested a level of voyeurism too extreme even for "Second Life," but users were pretty uptight about it."

A Cyclop equipped with a Freenis? I'd have blocked & muted that type immediately

[Pussycat Catnap]

Wait... this homeboy thinks SL is dead because the HQ of a political campaign that ended in 2007 is gone?

/fail

[Pussycat Catnap]

"It’s my hope that this piece can ultimately explore not only what these spaces signified in a utopian sense, but also what they can tell us about contemporary digital networks."

Homies still out there looking for 'utopias'? No wonder we live in a dystopia...

SL signifies a lot of things. But utopia ain't one of them.

[camilia fidelis nee patchouli woollahra]

I don't want to live in an Utopia. Utopia means there's nothing left to improve, theoretically. and that way leads to stagnation.