New World Notes

Monday Memory: How the Metaverse Illustrates the Limits of Libertarianism

With a certain tech billionaire currently railing against companies including Apple withdrawing their ads from Twitter, it's a good time to remember a fairly related story from 2007-2008 -- when Linden Lab began to pivot away from its libertarian approach to governing Second Life content:

In 2006, for example, Philip Rosedale refused to intercede against Ginko, the SL bank with a high rate of return, which many Residents accused of being a Ponzi scheme.  That same year, in response to Residents protests against age play (i.e. simulated avatar-based pedophilia), Robin Linden said it would be forbidden "[i]f this activity were in public areas"-- implying that it was still permissible in private.  Casinos and other gambling institutions, of course, were rampant over the land.

The reversals started last year, continuing into this one: 

Monday Memory: Greenies Showed How to Do Metaverse Marketing Right -- With Community Creator Participation & Genuine Delight (2007)

I recently mentioned how IBM's presence in Second Life led to an unexpected backlash, so here's a classic example of metaverse-based marketing done right -- "Greenies", an SL sim rendered in a giant-sized apartment users could explore like tiny ants:

[Greenies is] from a small British development company called Rezzable, which plans to use it for retail and events.  But where SL sites for large corporations like Dell, Sun, and Reebok attract but a few hundred visitors, Greenies is, with little official promotion, already bringing in several thousand visits per week. 

To make it a true Second Life experience, you need to bring your own sense of manic fun: explore the place with two Transformers, say, then a dancing fly and a silent crow on a WWII fighter plane, then maybe later on a flying hotdog, with reggae music streaming around you all the while.

But make no mistake, Greenies is still part of a company project-- just a rare one where the company's marketing demands don't choke out any possibility of genuine delight. 

Greenies was the site of a successful L'Oreal campaign, with giant-sized renditions of the real life product situated in the apartment. (Pictured at right.)

Two other things that made Greenies notable as a case study:

It hired creators from within the Second Life community, people who knew the tools best and how to make experiences that were maximally delightful.

And it also incorporated other real life brands into the experience in an organic way: 

Meta Employee Survey: 82% of Staffers Believe More Could Have Been Done to Prevent Current Layoffs

We saw Twitter employees' opinion of the company in the Elon Musk era last week, now here's a survey of Meta employees taken as the social media giant started laying off thousands of its own staff. Courtesy of Blind, the anonymous messaging app, this survey reflects the opinion of 1,179 verified Meta professionals in the U.S., and was taken between November 10 to 11, with a reported 4% margin of error.

The most striking answer is above: 82% of Meta staffers believe more could have been done last year to avoid the layoffs rolling out now. The way the question is phrased, this probably reflects at least some Meta employees blaming the company for spending many billions on making its metaverse platform. We saw a similar sentiment in anonymous Blind comments by Meta employees recently reported by Business Insider:

"The Metaverse will be our slow death," one user, who called themselves a senior software developer, posted on Wednesday. They added: "Mark Zuckerberg will single-handedly kill a company with the meta-verse." 

Zuckerberg apologized to staff for the need to cut 11,000 jobs, admitting that he "got this wrong".

In fairness, Meta's recent woes are more directly attributable to Apple's recent policy shifts which hurt advertising revenue collected via Facebook's iPhone, but Meta spending some $36 billion on metaverse-related technology is still a massive opportunity cost. 

Related to that, compare and contrast Meta employees' opinion of the company, versus Twitter employees:

Top Second Life Fashion Brand Opens Up a Shop in Zepeto; Truth Hawks Compares & Contrasts the Platforms

Happy Halloween! 🎃 SL fam have you ever tried @zepeto_official ? I was recently invited as an official creator and my little concept brand Super Fun reached Hot Creator status 🙌 Here's our @wednesdayaddams inspired outfit 🐈‍⬛🖤 pic.twitter.com/Q0dsLyrfuI

— Truth Hawks (@TruthHairSL) October 31, 2022

Truth Hawks, one of Second Life's most well-known and popular fashion brands, recently opened a shop in Zepeto, a quickly growing metaverse platform from South Korea. Truth was actually recruited by Zepeto the company to do so, Truth told me, but through his non-SL design services studio.

"I much prefer the standardized avatar to create from [in Zepeto]," says Truth, when asked to compare the two platforms.  "I think that's become a bit of a barrier to entry for SL creation-wise." 

That barrier is a whole other post in itself! But for this post I'll just highlight Truth's thoughts on Zepeto as a secondary market for other SL brands:

"If you're already creating 3D content in SL then the transition to Zepeto should be fairly easy. Most Zepetors only upload 1 or 2 variations of a creation, and as you only have to rig one shape, it could be a fun way to expand your brand with minimal time investment.

"Zepeto claims to have 15-20 million monthly users so I can see the potential, but I've just started out, so it's something you have to build up with inventory. SL is definitely more lucrative and I think always will be.

"I've read some [Zepeto] creators are making 6 figures and with it's large user base it seems possible. I'm not sure what the actual % split is, the currency is ZEMs and you can cash out a minimum of $103USD per 5000 ZEMs."

More from Truth on getting started with Zepeto:

Second Life User Creators Were Paid Out $86 Million in 2021! That's Decent Growth & Compares Well To Metaverse Leader Roblox

When I blogged about J.P. Morgan investing in Linden Lab payments spinoff Tilia last week, I missed this point from Forbes columnist and longtime Metaverse expert Charlie Fink:

Tilia is easy for developers to implement, and it’s simple and convenient for their customers to use. Transactions are instant and cost pennies, some of which go into the developer’s pocket. At Second Life, those pennies amounted to $86M last year.

Emphasis mine, because wow. I checked this with company spokesman Brett Linden who clarified that this $86 million is "the amount that was paid out to creators in 2021."

Yes: Second Life's content creator community earned $86 million from their virtual content last year.

This is notable for at least a couple reasons:

Metaverse Platforms Infographic: Now Well Over Half a Billion Monthly Users!

Update, 10/26: Nic just confirmed to me that his official total is now 505 million monthly active users across all the metaverse platforms he's tracking. 

Here's a core slice of the Metaverse Universe chart just updated for Q4 2022, from longtime virtual world analyst Nic Mitham. (Click here for the full version from his analyst firm, Metaversed.) When I blogged his Q1 2022 chart, the total number of monthly active users (based on publicly available data) was just under 500 million. Now, counting  platforms which roughly fit the classic Snow Crash definition, it's over 505 million monthly active users. Those include:

Monday Memory: How Suzanne Vega Singing in Second Life in 2006 Helped Shaped the Virtual World's Culture

When Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic asked how much Taylor Swift is like the Metaverse, the question seemed pretty bizarre at first -- but then got us talking about Suzanne Vega performing in Second Life, the first platinum-selling artist to do so in any metaverse platform. While's Vega's appearance did help inspire a rush of other real world brands appearing in SL, it also helped shape Second Life's culture going forward, cultivating it as a virtual world popular with women and indy creators. I have to think if another, very different artist had performed in 2006, Second Life would have evolved in another direction. 

Relatedly, Taylor Swift's massively massive fanbase (229 million followers on Instagram alone) has many tens of millions of gamers/metaverse users. Which is why I said:

The Atlantic Asks Me How Much Taylor Swift is Like the Metaverse -- Spoiler: More Than You Might Think!

Above: SL Cosplay Taylor Tribute by Kylie Quinn

"Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse" is a totally random interview with Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic I just did, and it starts with a left field premise that winds up with some fairly interesting ways of thinking about the topic. Some favorite excerpts:

Nyce: How important is VR in this? Is that “and”—as in “VR and other devices”—really operative there?

Au: No, no, no. That’s another thing that drives me crazy: the assumption that it has to be in VR. In the book, Stephenson even mentions that it’s mostly just the wealthy who use VR headsets, and regular folks just use a regular computer.

Metaverse platforms exist. The biggest one is Roblox, followed by Fortnite. To be a true Metaverse with a capital M, you would need, like, 15 million people or more in the same virtual world at the same time. And we’re not there yet. We’re close.

This is something that's not discussed much, but think it's worth keeping in mind: In Neal Stephenson's original vision of the Metaverse, the Metaverse has an average concurrency twice the population of New York -- i.e. about 15 million people. We're close to that now. (Stephenson himself was surprised when I pointed that out.)

Then I get to compare Taylor Swift's progress on the Metaverse against what Mark Zuckerberg is doing:

What Went Wrong With Decentraland? Expert Game Analyst on The Blockchain-Based Metaverse Platform With High Ideals, Few Users

You might have seen recent claims that Decentraland, the metaverse platform which raised USD $25 million in Ethereum sales of virtual land to fund its development, only has active users in the dozens. That’s not quite true, game industry analyst and designer Lars Doucet tells me, citing his recent report for research firm Naavik -- as of yesterday, for instance, Decentraland has about 7000 daily active users. 

Which is still not very much! (And tracks with my own data from last Summer.) 

“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” Lars tells me. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects -- like people turn the [project’s] Discord into a meetup place for poker games. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”

You can see that in this Decentraland metrics tracker, with “ICE Poker” as the most visited location by far. It’s quite a fall from boom times (by which I mean last year) when huge firms like J.P. Morgan were touting their official “headquarters” in Decentraland. 

And there’s some tragedy, too -- I’ve been following the platform since 2017, when the founders raised $25 million in Ethereum to fund it, and tried to keep true to its original, democratic-seeming vision.

“Decentraland is one of the few crypto metaverse/virtual real estate games to take its commitment to decentralization seriously,” as Lars tells me. “Like they seem to actually drink their own kool aid rather than using it as a cynical layer of paper thin marketing material like the other ones. To wit; their infrastructure is actually pretty decentralized!”

Then again, that’s also been one of Decentraland’s challenges.

Here’s why, according to a recent conversation I had with Lars, compressed for length  -- with his own advice on how Decentraland might revive itself:

Listen: Part 4 Of The WSJ's Podcast, "How To Build A Metaverse", On the Dwight Schrute Fallacy & Why Second Life Really Matters

"Second Life's vision of the Metaverse has endured..." Listen to the latest and final episode in the Wall Street Journal's episode on the rise and fall (and rise) of Second Life:

• Stream on Spotify here
• Get it on Apple Podcasts here
• Stream on the web and read the transcript here
• Links to Part 3 here

Telling the story of Linden Lab's disastrous attempt to turn Second Life into a space for corporate meetings and my post-mortem for that, the episode (and series) somewhat ends on a rather abbreviated and ambiguous note, with Philip Rosedale acknowledging the real world as being more irreplaceable than he originally suggested, and host Annie Minoff finding value in its power for people to explore their identity and alternate lives. That last point is true (and moving), but I do think it misses the many other applications of the metaverse beyond "having a second life".  (Again, the name Second Life itself continues to frame things that can be more limiting than enlightening.)

Many of the episode's highlights were featured in New World Notes stories over years; here's some resources for more reading: