New World Notes

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:

Signs of SL Recession: Despite 30K Users & $300K in Transactions, Second Life Shopping Delivery Service Pocket Gacha Closes

Pocket Gachas, a HUD-based remote delivery system for Second Life's hugely popular gachas, was attracting thousands of users immediately after its launch last year, but in a sign of a shaky or rapidly changing in-game economy, the service just announced its closure:

There is no doubt as well that SL commerce is changing. The boom-boom days are long in the past. While perhaps the top 1% of brands might still be doing fine (though I’m certain not selling what they once were) the new and emerging brands are finding it harder and harder to connect with shoppers. The drastic drop in new users in SL and an inability to retain these avatars has led all of us to this juncture. In some ways we have reached the point where we are just selling sneakers to each other. Or, to better quote the old adage, “delivering pizzas to each other.” Because, really, how many sofas can one own after years in SL? The people at Linden Lab are smart. I am sure they know this as well and are working on solutions. Let’s all hope.

The finale to this perfect storm is that the world of events is becoming saturated to the point of being destructive to one another along with the brands that try to balance doing them. While the old-line events may thrive to a point (I think, again, not like they once did) new ones arise it seems each and every day and SL is starting to feel like a town of 50K people that has built 50 shopping malls. It’s just too much for the current market.

This closure comes despite Pocket Gacha and a related HUD being used by a reported 30,000 unique users transacting over $300,000.00 "DOLLARS…not Linden!" across the service.  What Pocket Gacha lead developer Oobleck Allagash tells me suggests a larger economic trend I've also noted elsewhere -- less emphasis on virtual homemaking, and more on Second Life as a social media experience:

EU Regulators Preparing to Address Loot Boxes; SL Gachas Likely Affected

Pictured: Popular SL Gacha from 2014

If you're a developer or consumer of Second Life's incredibly popular gachas, keep your eye on this upcoming regulation:

15 gambling regulators from Europe and one from the US have together announced they will "address the risks created by the blurring of lines between gaming and gambling". The collaborative effort, organized at the 2018 Gambling Regulators European Forum, includes signatories from the UK, France, Ireland, Spain, and even the US (via the Washington State Gambling Commission). The key focus for the parties involved appears to be "tackling unlicensed third-party websites offering illegal gambling linked to popular video games"

As PC Gamer reported earlier this year, any regulation this forum proposes will likely impact SL gachas:

Linden Lab Secretly Building New SL Continent With Friendly Emoji Island

New analysis of the Second LIfe grid from expert Tyche Shepherd uncovers a secret new continent emerging from the digital waters:

A brand new 80 region terraformed continent appeared on the grid last week. Currently closed to the public it's composed of 80 moderate rated contiguous regions names SSP1 to SSP80, I'm assuming these are Lab owned (though it's nearest neighbours are Private Estates) and have marked them as Linden Lab owned.

For her Grid Survey analytics reports, Tyche has created a fleet of bots which scout the Second Life grid, looking for new sims and the disappearance of old ones. (Though thanks to the recent discount on sims, less are disappearing lately.) And since those bots are usually first to spot new land, the little emoji island seems to be a friendly trolling message directed specifically at Tyche: