New World Notes

Since Second Life is So Difficult to Use, Linden Lab Should Pay New Users to Learn How to Use It (Comment of the Week)

Minecraft's simple building interface

Great long comment from Will Clip, who's developed popular games for both Second Life users and for other platforms, responding to the point that understanding Second Life's complexity has become a kind of game in itself:

In my opinion Linden Lab could do so much more helping to ease the 1st steps for new users to improve the user retention rate.

I am a content provider in SL myself. Whenever I find some time to create something new I try to come at it with understanding that for most of the people facing something new, something they are not used to is scary and frustrating.

Creators goal should be to make 1st steps for people when they are trying the new product as easy and fun as possible. Good user interface experience makes distinction between a good and bad product.

Often to the point that even if the product looks better looking, most users will prefer to use the product that is easier to use because using something that is easy to operate is already rewarding by itself.

In my opinion Linden Lab should maybe employ or temporary hire an user interface specialists that would look at SL as a whole and come out with some pointers about how to make SL more easy to use. LL should use the new knowledge to organize content developers, give materials (invest, market) and provide new and better tools for content creation in Second Life.

Will says he's seeing similar complexity in Sansar. But unlike most other virtual worlds and social VR platform, Linden Lab has a key advantage. Which leads Will to propose a novel idea: Pay Linden Dollars to new users to learn how to use Second Life. As he writes:

Second Life's Open-Ended User Interface as an MMO is So Complicated, Mastering the UI is How to Level Up

Pictured: Cassie demonstrating Lelutka's Axis HUD for customizing highly detailed SL Avatar expressions

Great conversation about the difficulty of customizing Second Life avatars, which now include countless user-made systems (like the one above) built on top of the default system, with reader "Scott" making this point:

While I don't disagree that creating a beautiful avi can be complex and difficult for new users, I don't agree with the implication this is a problem for Second Life. I remember the difficulties and frustrations of learning how some of this works. I still don't understand all of it, but it was (and still is) enjoyable to learn. I get a sense of accomplishment. The subtleties of second life avi construction become an "inside joke" with others who have had the same struggles. Not only do you get a sense of accomplishment, but you get the feeling of becoming a member of the "club" who have leveled-up and made a kick-ass avi.

This is very true -- while Second Life is not a traditional MMO, the very complexity of its user-experience has turned avatar customization into a kind of leveling mechanic. (Which is not too different from many traditional MMOs where you can immediately identify veteran players by the special details and features of their avatar.)

Seen this way, buying customization options from other users becomes a short-cut for leveling up:

Creative User Hacks to Second Life Appearance Make Avatar Customization Incredibly Difficult for New Users (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: User-Made Mesh Head Heads-Up Display (reviewed by Cassie here)

Commenting on the appearance of professional makeover agencies in Second Life, reader "Pulsar" points out this is partly the outcome of innovation among the user community, as users came up with creative ways to improve avatar appearance options beyond what the default viewer offered:

And to think that once you could create your own hair style straight from the viewer sliders, as well as everything else (you still can, but it's outdated).

Creative users took advantage of each update and new feature to improve their avatar looks, sometimes even with hacks like the "invisiprim". Avatars became prettier and prettier, even incomparably better, but on the other hand fashion became more and more complex.

Instead of sliders, you had to edit your prim or sculpt attachments, then you had to use alpha layers, then merchants would sell their rigged mesh without setting the attachment point, so you have to carefully "add" it (or add to another attachment point) instead of "wearing" it, in order to not end up naked, just because you grabbed an ice cream. Then appliers, various HUDs, then you have a bunch of products from different brands and that aren't compatible with each other, as well as legacy content, so you have to know what's compatible with.

In other words, with every creative workaround the Second Life community added, avatars became more and more difficult to customize -- and became near impossible for new users:

Cassie's Clips: How to Unbox Items to Use in Second Life -- A Common User Interface Confusion Among New SL Shoppers

Here's NWN video correspondent Cassie Middles with a helpful and very necessary tutorial for unboxing items in Second Life. It's necessary, because even though fashion and virtual shopping is essential to the Second Life economy, Linden Lab has allowed its user interface for owning and using items to remain incredibly counter-intuitive and user-unfriendly. Which is not only hurting the economy, it's frustrating newer users. As Cassie points out, many bad reviews in the SL Marketplace are actually about this confusion with the user interface:  

 

Inside Elysion: How Second Life Group Admission Fees & 18,000+ Members Help Subsidize Experiences Like Its Tribute to Stranger Things' Upside Down

When I wrote about the impressive Stranger Things tribute in Second Life last week, I should have been more precise about its "admission fee" of L$1000. It's not actually a fee to access The Upside Down, but a membership fee to join the private SL group Elysion (Flickr page here). I've since corrected the original posts, and in the process, found out there's an even more interesting story here. Elysion is a gargantuan group: As of last week, group founder and manager Syn Beresford tells me, it counts over 18,000 members, amassed since its founding in 2013.

That size, and the Elysion membership fee, does much to cover the costs of its Second Life sims, and the complex, temporary experiences they create, such as the Stranger tribute:

"My fee has increased over the years as more and more things have been added to Elysion," Syn tells me. "However, it is not a public sim; never has been, never will be. I do this because it affords the people who join a level of privacy (setting my land to group access). Land like everything else in SL in my view is not a entitlement. Most of that member base has grown simply because people come, they enjoy the sim, and they bring their friends, which to me speaks volumes." (She doesn't advertise her sims beyond her Flickr account and within the group message boards, she tells me.)

Perhaps thanks to that exclusivity, the Elysion community has thrived, and now owns six regions, with weekly DJs and live singers, performance art, a residential sim, and a diverse community, albeit with a decided gothic edge: 

Second Life Avatar Fashion So Confusing & Complicated There Are Professional Makeover Agencies

Before and after with the Makeover Agency

SL social media queen Ms. Strawberry Singh has a fascinating interview with the founder of The Makeover Agency, which is more or less an outgrowth of Second Life's option-laden, confusing, user-unfriendly fashion marketplace and user interface. As founder SarahBeths  explains:

Mysterious New Second Life Continent Takes on Seahorse Shape, Grid of Tracks, New Emoji Island

The vast continent which emerged from the waters last Summer to the far NorthEast beyond grid civilization (first spotted by Tyche Shepherd) has taken on more detail since then. Comprised of 384 sims -- in real world terms, about 16 square miles, i.e. about a third the size of San Francisco -- it now looks somewhat like a seahorse, nibbling on a blade of seaweed. (Is that even a thing? Work with me here.)

Also notable, it comes with a grid of earthen tracks (roads? paths?) and two massive gray rectangles (runways?), one of which is floating in an circular lake. And where, back in August, it included an island in the shape of an emoji saying "Hi!", a new island-based-emoji has taken its place -- now sending a perhaps more mysterious message:

Second Life Private Sim Growth Continues With New Discount -- But Virtual Economy Expert Suspects It Won't Last

Here's the latest Second Life grid report from Tyche Shepherd, a top statistician for a major multinational whose quirky hobby is tracking the evolution of virtual world land ownership on Grid Survey.  (Follow her on Twitter here.) Key takeaway from her report: Second Life is still seeing positive growth of private SL sims (Linden Lab's top revenue source), a trend which started last July:

A net increase of 6 regions this week with all the growth among Private Estates... Adult rated regions were up by 25 to 5889 (24.8% of the grid) while General Rated were down by 1 to 2908 (12.2%). Year to date net change in private estate numbers now stands at + 46 (0.3% growth).

This kind of steady positive growth hasn't happened since 2012 (though it was much more positive back then). Much of this growth is attributable to the sim tier price cuts that Linden Lab announced last June.

"There has been a run of net private sim growth since the last couple of weeks of July," Tyche tells me. "A handful of individual weeks have shown very small losses but the overall trend has been positive."

Tyche believes this trend will help with Second Life user retention in the short term -- however, she thinks it won't last:

With 900,000+ Monthly Visits, Seraphim SL is the Most-Visited, User-Run Second Life Site (Probably)

Lots of discussion over last week's post on SL Secrets and its impact on the Second Life community. I made the mistake of describing SL Secrets as "Second Life’s largest blog", because as reader Chuck points out, depending on how you define "blog", that's arguably not true:

Have you heard of Seraphim? SL Secrets is not the most visited blog dedicated to Second Life content. I would agree that most people do not admit they check the SL Secrets website, but clearly do, or they would not have such high statistics. SL Secrets is most likely the most visited blog dedicated to negative Second Life content.

Seraphim SL, devoted to in-world sales and events announcements, has been getting 900,000+ monthly visits throughout 2018, according to SimilarWeb, and even crossed the 1 million monthly visit mark in March. Which suggests seriously impressive growth over the last few years, and makes it many times larger than SL Secrets, or for that matter, any other SL-centric blog that I'm aware of. So to Chuck's point, SL Secrets is probably* the largest SL news/opinion/gossip blog, but not the most visited overall.

Inside Secrets: Did Linden Lab Ban the Owners of Second Life’s Largest Blog to “Protect” the Virtual Community?

Virtual world gossip leads to death threats, doxxing, and a suicide hotline

Update, 9/24: While SL Secrets is currently among the very most visited user-run SL blogs, it's not necessarily the largest sites -- see this correction post.

If you want to know the current state of Second Life, the virtual world that turned 15 years old this year, consider [one of] its most visited user-run blogs: It’s not about virtual fashion, or in-game events, or roleplay. No: The most popular Second Life blog by far is SL Secrets. According to Similar Web, the site attracted 140,000 visits last month, slightly down from a peak of 170,000 visits, last May -- which very roughly translates to about 20,000-40,000 monthly readers, a significant segment of SL’s total active population of some 500,000.

Launched about a decade ago and loosely inspired by the popular PostSecret blog, SL Secrets operates on a similar premise, publishing anonymously submitted confessions every Sunday -- except with SL Secrets, they’re confessions about life in the virtual world. And where Post Secret entries tend be unspoken revelations about the sender, SL Secrets largely traffics in Second Life-based gossip, virtual drama, and scandalous avatar-to-avatar accusations -- in other words, less like found diary entries from random nameless souls, than a slam book composed during a high school reunion by bitter attendees high on Jack Daniels and amyl nitrate.  

If you want to know the current state of Second Life, consider what just happened to the co-founders of SL Secrets, Lourdes Denimore and Kesseret Steeplechase: For reasons that aren’t completely clear, Linden Lab has blocked both from using Second Life. This week, Kesseret’s SL account was put “on hold” (she sent me a screen grab indicating as much), while last May, Lourdes’ account was “terminated”. (Copied here, the e-mail Linden Lab sent her.)

“I had to call them in order to get that e-mail,” Lourdes Denimore tells me. It explains the ban for repeated violations of Linden Lab’s Terms of Service, specifically pointing to sections 2.7, 5.2, 5.3, and 6.1. Lourdes flatly denies she has done such a thing: “No I did not violate the Terms of Second Life in Second Life.”

However, 5.3 of the ToS includes this highly broad, nuclear option clause:

"We may terminate your Account if we determine in our discretion that such action is necessary or advisable to comply with legal requirements or protect the rights or interests of Linden Lab, the Service community or any third party."

And since both women describe themselves as not currently active in the virtual world, a consensus among many in the SL community has emerged: Lourdes and Kesseret were banned not for anything they did in Second Life, but for what they did on the web, with SL Secrets.

“Banning people for only hosting gossip memes created by others is unfair and ridiculous,” as Cajsa Lilliehook, a longtime SLer, well-known community figure, and occasional New World Notes contributor, puts its. “People should be banned for violations in-world.”

For the record, I asked Linden Lab about the official reasons for Lourdes and Kesseret’s banning, but seeing as the company doesn’t publicly comment on policy enforcement, it’s unlikely they’ll reply. However, the invocation of 5.3 strongly suggests the company sees SL Secrets as a threat to “the rights or interests of Linden Lab [and] the Service community.”

Is SL Secrets a threat to the user community and the company that depends on it? Speaking on condition of anonymity, several well-known SL content creators emphatically say yes -- or at best, characterize it as highly corrosive: