The Pros & Cons of Telehubs & Taxing Point-to-Point Teleportation in Second Life (Comment of the Week #2)

Telehub image by Ciaran Laval

How do you make Second Life feel more like a serendipitous social space? Expanding off some good points raised by EmptyEyes, I suggested this:

Add a small L$ charge to teleporting, and bring back free-to-use telehubs that are available across the mainland, and an option for sim owners. That would subtly encourage players to walk/fly/ride in vehicles and socialize more.  

Lots of interesting reader comments (and guffaws) around my idea, especially this from Sue R.:

If Linden Lab had created towns, each with a community center or square, instead of an amorphous, giant expanse of Linden houses... maybe. Telehubs were an interesting compromise, but they had their cons too.

Charging for teleports isn't entirely absurd, there are MMORPGs that do something like that. In Ragnarok Online you had (still have?) to spend a gem to open a warp portal.

However:

- SL was still very social after teleports were introduced. [In the mid 2000s - WJA]. So I don't think teleport affected socialization so much.
- Other virtual words, like VRChat and Roblox, are basically a portal to different words/experiences/rooms and are more social than SL.
- Since the SL viewer mimics a web browser, teleporting is like changing web page. Can you imagine paying to change/open a webpage?
- If traveling around is so important, then I'd rather improve and encourage that and vehicle driving/piloting, which is rather poor in SL - and despite that, the Drivers of SL [group] is fun, isn't it? Imagine if SL worked better and there were better travel games/experiences - instead of discouraging and nerfing a very common, well-established and useful functionality.
- Without teleport, I doubt people would go to a nearby community anyway: most people don't wander, barely look around without any incentive to do so.

All very valid points! To discus them one by one:

Other virtual words, like VRChat and Roblox, are basically a portal to different words/experiences/rooms and are more social than SL.

This is true. However, neither VRChat and Roblox are single-shard virtual worlds, which is one of the key, unique aspects of Second Life. It is one of SL's few remaining differentiators in comparison to VRChat, Roblox, etc. -- that you can in theory walk/drive/fly/etc. from one end of SL to the other without any load screen, relatively seamlessly, and randomly meet all kinds of people along the way. But this incredible feature been made effectively irrelevant by free and easy point-to-point teleportation.

Since the SL viewer mimics a web browser, teleporting is like changing web page. Can you imagine paying to change/open a webpage?'

This is actually an early mistake I pointed out In The Book -- confusion over whether Second Life is primarily an immersive world or a 3D content browser.  But the latter category, from Croquet to Mozilla Hubs, has met an untimely death. Without the frame of an immersive world, mere browsable 3D content lacking broader context, narrative, or above all, an active community, quickly loses its appeal. 

If traveling around is so important, then I'd rather improve and encourage that and vehicle driving/piloting, which is rather poor in SL - and despite that, the Drivers of SL [group] is fun, isn't it? Imagine if SL worked better and there were better travel games/experiences - instead of discouraging and nerfing a very common, well-established and useful functionality.

Passionate agreement with the first point! But I'd also say the opposite observation applies: Point-to-point teleportation quickly nerfed the need for vehicles and made it an increasingly niche activity. By adding a small cost to teleporting (beyond telehubs), you gently encourage much more vehicular use.

Without teleport, I doubt people would go to a nearby community anyway: most people don't wander, barely look around without any incentive to do so... SL was still very social after teleports were introduced. [In the mid 2000s - WJA]. So I don't think teleport affected socialization so much.

This brings us to the crux of the issue:

If Second Life were growing and thriving in its current condition, we'd be in a "If it ain't broken..." situation.

But as Brad Oberwager just acknowledged, Second Life has in recent years dropped in monthly usage from 600,000 MAU to around 500,000 MAU. Concurrency is also steadily declining. 

It's time to start experimenting with ways to bring back the world, bring the people in it together -- and set it on a better course with a growing community.

Then again, Sue may very well be right, and I'm open to other ideas. We definitely need them!

Comments

[Glizzy_rizzler]

A lot of commerce and socialization in SL is driven by teleporting around to many sims, commonly called crawls and hunts. If residents had to pay a tax to teleport to sims just to participate in a normally entirely free experience where users discover new places, often are given gifts or linden prizes for attending, this would greatly discourage collaborative efforts like these.

This would also discourage weekend sales events, since they are mostly, if not exclusively a shop and hop experience, where a notecard is given out weekly for residents to hop from sim to sim to find the sale offerings. Adding a tax to teleporting would greatly discourage people from actually shopping these sales, which you could argue is a good thing, but I think consumers would disagree. People love their weekend sales, and get very upset when a sim is full and they cannot enter, imagine that anger amplified if they even had to pay 1L just to attempt to get to the store they want to go to.

I think more than anything, users like platform dwelling with a few close friends. Since most users I know use Discord, barely anyone leaves a platform or home location to go meet new people and speak on voice or chat. They would rather gather in a discord server or call and commune on someones private land. You may or may not make a new friend this way.

Many clubs and DJ sets turn voice off in-world in order to bolster and make the DJ the main focus of the club, which I agree that respect should be given to the DJ or musical performer. However I don't use text chat, as I like to work on something while I am logged in on SL. Without being able to communicate with other patrons of a club and listen to the music at the same time, it makes a lot of clubs look like an anti social wasteland. You get a few gesture spammers, but if you look at the local chat, no one is actually having a conversation - because of what I said before - Discord killed in-world communication, just like Skype was a major alternative to voicing in SL 10+ years ago.

I agree with Sue R on a lot of their points. Making SL a more functional platform could encourage more use. Updating the scripting language so we can do MORE adventurous things with scripted objects would greatly improve user experience. I know that games and experience creators (MADPEA as an example) would love an update to scripting languages beyond LUA. A lot of things that other 3D platforms can do that encourage play and interactivity just cannot be done in LSL or LUA either.

LL Needs to directly compete with other attractive Virtual Experiences - PBR was a great step in that direction for some, but we are still a limited platform in comparison to others. I will say that places like VR chat have scooped up a couple long time SL resident friends of mine because of how much more they can do there.

I personally cant do VR because it makes me motion sick. Second Life has my heart because I have the freedom to move and travel at a drop of a hat. I am often needing to be in multiple places at once; my store sim, my event sim, friends store sims, mainland home parcel, RP community home parcel on private connected islands, clubs, voice hang outs, etc. I teleport maybe 30-40 times a day if I really think about it. Always socializing no matter where I go. I don't think that bringing back HUBs will solve the lack of socializing issue - I think it runs way deeper than LL realizes and they need to invest in research into what makes people leave SL for another virtual experience IE: VR Chat, Once Human, Inzoi, The Sims, Roblox, Final Fantasy XIV to name a few.

[Sue R.]

I agree with Grizzly.
Part of my comment, omitted in Wagner's post, pertained to actual key factors behind the decline in in-world interaction, rather than teleportation, including chatting shifted to Discord, and the migration of various activities to third-party software. And I could add taking pictures to interact with Flickr, instead of the people there in-world. And I agree about clubs. Additionally, the necessity for many users to hide other avatars during social events to prevent crashes doesn't help.

Point-to-point teleportation, instead, introduced with Viewer 1.8 in December 2005, did not halt the growth of Second Life's population, which continued to grow, I'd say booming, until around March 2009. And it was still very social. The subsequent steady decline was driven by a series of other factors and events happened at that point.
So I'd rather focus on those other aspects.
In this year other things also happened.

Teleportation actually fosters socialization. When you invite a friend to an event or any location, to share the experience with them, teleportation allows you to be with your friend instantly, rather than waiting for them taking two hours to reach you by car. Or you and them taking so much to reach the event, that at that point it's ended or you have to go. I can't count the many times teleportation helped.
Not only discouraging teleportation doesn't seem to correlate with SL growth, but could have the opposite effect by reducing socialization opportunities.

I love SL being single shard and I always tell "look at the map". It's amazing.
While direct teleportation didn't encourage driving (back in the telehub days, I think to remember there was an attempt to create a primitive taxi service), personally, I prefer the carrot over the stick approach. As the Drivers of SL group demonstrates (and a little the SL game GTFO), driving, sailing, traveling by train does occur when there are good incentives, despite the technical issues. I'd incentivize these activities, rather to discourage an useful functionality. In turn, that also made the mainland roads less abandoned, as some people built gas stations etc.
Other people meet to ride horses in group. And you know what? These travel meetings wouldn't be as successful without teleportation. Another example is the Passengers of SL group: a flight is announced, members teleport to the airport, and then board a plane, with someone roleplaying the airline.

[Josh]

Agree strongly with both Glizzy and Sue R.

[Iggy 1.0]

Adding any new fees to SL would only further erode the user-base.

Teleports let me meet friends quickly. That includes bringing in sailors to compete in naval fights at Pirate sims. I'll add that sailing works well now and sim-crossings are more likely to be "rough sea" instead of "sea monster" events.

Want to grow the world again? Cut tier drastically and advertise SL (maybe under a new name).

Then folks like me would build more games-within-the-world experience and link our sims to like-minded users.