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Exploring The Digital Ruins Of 'Second Life'


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Where to start - well, echo 'Digg is still around?'. After that a mash up of bits of articles I have seen before done by others , badly written* (the digital ruin is a giveaway but easy enough to find whole chunks). The list of attempted contacts... But the big eye ball head avatar because he was a resident... Resident geddit? You young people might have to look that up. Retro mining, ain't it grand.

*not as bad as what if I had donded it but I don't get paid for it.

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4 hours ago, Fionalein said:

So you wrote all this blog entry because you didn't get enough feedback from trolling? Poor millenials, cannot get out of their skins can't they?

I don't think it's the OP's blog post, I checked the blog writer's twitter and he posted a screenshot of his SL "Journalism" there and his avatar's name isn't Jazzimus. I wish he had done a proper fact-checking before posting that article, as in no way that's an opinion piece and unfortunately for him he had knowingly or unknowingly publish lies.

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I came here partly as a weird internet tourist and lemme say this guy sounds like a lazy normie.  He wasn't looking to learn about SL, he wanted to get some tour guides to take him to see the weird stuff.  There's so many weirder things to look at here than 'I went to a nude beach and nobody wanted to talk to me.'  The problem is you have to actually participate to see the truly odd SL culture at work.

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Hamlet Au posted on his blog about this. Hamlet can be a bit hard on Linden Lab sometimes, but he does try to give credit to the facts most times. The funniest part was he mentioned that Strawberry Singh has more followers on her SL content youtube than Digg has Twitter followers :D

 

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9 hours ago, Jazzimus Maxwell said:

A sad millennial writers perspective of Second Life dated June 5, 2018

http://digg.com/2018/second-life-in-2018

What I thought was funny about this guy is that he got all sarcastic and indignant about this supposed incident involving the creation and rezzing of a giant...thing...but then what was the first thing HE did? Go and do virtually the same thing, put on a...thing...and go to beaches and freak people out. Same mentality.

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I saw this across the street and figured I'd share my thoughts here, too.

Regardless of what you think of the author, his perception of Second Life, and his apparent inability to engage with the community or even master the UI, I would argue that this attitude isn't limited to Digg writers. SL is not easy for new and more casual users to get into. Most of the features many of us take for granted aren't explained very well or at all through SL's normal documentation and tutorials. Hell, in another thread I saw someone who has been in SL for like 9-10 years learn for the first time about steering an avatar with the mouse, something I've been doing since...I can't even remember. I believe a friend must have shown me how back when I first joined.

I've met plenty of SL users, regular users who've been here for years, who never learned how to use alt+cam. It would not shock me to learn that many SL users don't know how to chat in local. Notice how in the article the author talks about trying to chat with someone they found in SL. They don't indicate whether it's local or IM, but the response is clearly someone who has to deal with unsolicited IMs regularly (that is to say, anyone with a woman avatar). I can just imagine someone installing SL, not knowing how to bring up the Communicate window, so while trying to figure out how to talk to someone the first thing they find is the IM option when right clicking the other avatar.

SL is not easy to use. Nothing about it's user interface is at all intuitive or friendly. We're used to it, so we manage, but new users are utterly lost and few ever really discover more than some basics. (We're so used to the bad UI, in fact, that even good changes are enough to cause an angry outcry from the userbase.)

These are all things LL needs to address if they want to pull SL out of its nose dive, or have any hope of creating a new platform people will actually want to use. They have to make SL fun and intuitive. They have to give it a level of polish that makes it easy to use. There needs to be some sort of flow that takes people from being a new user, fresh off orientation island, to using SL like a seasoned veteran, without requiring that person to already have a friend on the inside available to show them the ropes.

If they won't do that, then articles like the one linked in the OP will continue to reflect the outsider's view of Second Life.

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Well he didn't write about how he got banned with his avatar... so either withholding some truth or the whole story is made up...  what he wrote about the waterhorse demos makes me lean towards made up however...

Edited by Fionalein
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6 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

I saw this across the street and figured I'd share my thoughts here, too.

Regardless of what you think of the author, his perception of Second Life, and his apparent inability to engage with the community or even master the UI, I would argue that this attitude isn't limited to Digg writers. SL is not easy for new and more casual users to get into. Most of the features many of us take for granted aren't explained very well or at all through SL's normal documentation and tutorials. Hell, in another thread I saw someone who has been in SL for like 9-10 years learn for the first time about steering an avatar with the mouse, something I've been doing since...I can't even remember. I believe a friend must have shown me how back when I first joined.

 

Regardless of whether or not Linden Lab should be the one to provide the training as opposed to the residents of the world, this particular straw man happened to have been on Second Life multiple times and much of what he wrote about apparently took place in 2014.

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1) Too clueless not to walk around wearing a d*ck.

2) Referred to the "Ivory Tower of Prim" as the "Ivory Tower Library". (I had heard news of the creator's passing so assume that is the reference.)

3) Perhaps the entire boring story was an excuse to make the accompanying art.

4) Absolutely no effort was made in exploring, apparently.

5) The entire story could be describing events that happened over the course of a couple hours.

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I wrote this spoof piece a few years ago just for fun.  I think I posted it on the old forums.  It seems relevant to this thread !!!

FALLING AT THE FIRST FENCE
by Conifer Dada 

A confrontation had been brewing over the proposed felling of a row of oak trees. I had been scheduled to cover the predicted battle between demonstrators and contractors on the afternoon the trees were to be felled. However the contractors had turned up overnight and by dawn the trees were gone and the story had been covered by another journalist. That lunchtime the editor came in and suggested that, since I was at a loose end that afternoon, I could investigate this virtual cyber-sex playground that he’d heard about called Second Life, and then write a piece about it. This sounded intriguing so I found the Second Life website. Before long I’d created an account and downloaded something or other that actually lets you play the game. You get a choice of about eight avatars. None of them looked much like me so I chose one completely at random.  It was a slightly goofy looking guy with a white T-shirt and jeans who I called ggg999 Dingbat.  Dingbat was a surname on a list you had to choose one from.

Logging in to Second Life was fairly straight forward and I was quite surprised to find that ggg999 actually appeared standing in a roped-off area on a grassy hilltop. There were a few other people there, who were grey at first, then they appeared in their true colours. Two others were identical to me but what surprised me was that there were avatars that didn’t look like the ones they gave me to choose from. Presumably you win those when you get to a higher level. I tried walking and set off down a path of stepping stones until I came to a large red parrot on a perch that asked me to kiss it. By the perch was a nice looking woman who said ‘hello’. I asked her where she lived and whether she’s a woman in reality but she wouldn’t tell me. I was somewhat puzzled about what you’re actually meant do in Second Life, it all seemed rather aimless. 

The editor kept popping in to look over my shoulder to see how I was getting on. He thought it didn’t look much like a sex game and took over the controls from me. As I watched he found the same woman I’d spoken to and asked whether she wanted sex. She said no so he asked where he could find sex and she told him to get lost. The editor was finding the whole thing rather amusing and we wondered what sort of people actually enjoyed this stuff. He handed the controls back to me and I decided to explore, since there didn’t seem to be much else to do. Then the game crashed. I thought I’d give it one more go so I logged in again and continued wandering round this place, silent apart from a faint sound of wind blowing and an annoying keyboard typing sound whenever somebody typed a message. Second Life is basically an island you can walk round in about five minutes. I discovered you can fly too – now, that is quite fun. Supposedly you’re able to build stuff but wherever I tried nothing happened.

So, I have to conclude that Second Life is much over-rated. I didn’t see any sex, all it seems to consist of is a little island with a big parrot and a few people wandering about aimlessly, typing messages to other aimless wanderers. 

PS - you can see how long ago I wrote this because they were still using surnames.

Edited by Conifer Dada
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12 hours ago, Fionalein said:

Well he didn't write about how he got banned with his avatar... so either withholding some truth or the whole story is made up...  what he wrote about the waterhorse demos makes me lean towards made up however...

Just yesterday I saw one of the staff from Oxbridge Caledon with one of the Water Horse horses. They're a real product on Marketplace, and quite good.

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36 minutes ago, animats said:

He's not wrong.

Is his "not wrong" the same kind of "not wrong" as your "not wrong" when you stated that the ENTIRE population of Zindra were "dummy avatars and npc's" because when you randomly IM'd people and demanded they talk to you (as he did), they didn't bother to reply, but simply muted you?

The "article" is a classic example of what happens when pseudo-intellectual graduates in worthless liberal arts faculty pseudo-subjects (combined degrees in Sociology & Comic Appreciation with one module each of Debate-101 and Philoso-Failure for example) are allowed to use a computer, instead of being confined in Forced Labour Nudist Camps north of the Arctic Circle.

42 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

and many old-time users are in denial about it.

This may come as a shock to you, but many of us do not define a "perfect SL day" as sharing a shabby urban prim build with 50 members of the Kama City chapter of the "Sons of Stupidity Outlaw MC" all screaming because their motor cycles wont cross the sim border, because the damn sim has lagged to death under the load of 50 idiots trying for Mach 2 speed on a prim-bike...

49 minutes ago, animats said:

SL is very empty

Quite apart from the fact that we do not all want to be constantly surrounded by 50 other avatars, but prefer smaller groupings, is the fact that people cannot be AT home, AND in a club, AND on a sex beach, AND on an immersive urban thugplay sim, with the same account at the same time...

People move around, choose where they want to be.

Your biggest problem is you constantly FAIL to accept that where you choose to be is NOT where most of SL chooses to be.


 


 

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1 hour ago, animats said:

Just yesterday I saw one of the staff from Oxbridge Caledon with one of the Water Horse horses. They're a real product on Marketplace, and quite good.

Reading isn't your strong suit, is it? The trollenial was taking about limited time trial demo horses - which don't exist of that product you can use the horse rezzers inworld to rez one for trial but not take it away. Hence my guess on the "made up" part.

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