secondlife 2007-2018

[selly Aichi]

 

I'm registered on secondlife since 2007, I'm still active, but it's not the same thing. the new residents had so many ways to make money with camping chairs, dance pads, money tree, camp master, freeplay, contest, today voodoo sploders much more generous than. all money that allowed to circulate money more easily and invest to improve sl. the world of sl has been limited only to those who buy linden. There is little circle of money and investors are less and less. many came in to make money and as it was set up there were so many ways to do it. for me the collapse of sl came mainly for this. lands full of people no longer exist. sin

[Skell Dagger]

1 hour ago, selly Aichi said:

the new residents had so many ways to make money with camping chairs, dance pads, money tree, camp master, freeplay, contest, today voodoo sploders much more generous than. all money that allowed to circulate money more easily and invest to improve sl. the world of sl has been limited only to those who buy linden.

Q: Where do you think that money for new residents came from, and why do you think it was distributed in those ways in the first place?

A: 'Those who buy Linden' dollars made the money available for the new residents. They did so because traffic metrics were calculated differently back then. High traffic could get a location equally high in search results. And traffic could be bought, by means of camping chairs, dance pads, money trees, camp master, freeplay, contests, and sploders.

Traffic metrics are now calculated differently, so those old methods of getting people to visit a location regularly and/or stay in the location for a long time no longer put that location high in search results. Since 'those who buy Linden' dollars for that specific purpose no longer had a reason to spend them for that purpose once the traffic metrics were changed, those 'free money for newbies' options went away.

ETA: My very first L$2 in Second Life were earned by sitting on a deck lounger for 40 minutes back in June 2007. I camped for a few weeks in my early days, but soon realised that it wasn't giving me anywhere near the amount of money that I wanted. After eleven years in Second Life I have now invested (and yes, I regard it as an investment - specifically one for entertainment) tens of thousands of real life dollars in this virtual world, what with paying for tier on a whole region for many years, plus my inveterate shopping habit. More power to those who can get by without putting real life money into SL, but - unless they are running around the Linden Realms - all of the 'free money' currently earned by newbies using options like fishing or cones or gold hunting (or whatever is prevalent these days) still comes out of the pockets of other residents who have either purchased it from the LindeX or have earned it by their own creative endeavours (which still require money in the first place, for uploads, etc).

Edited August 23, 2018 by Skell Dagger
Typo

[ThorinII]

30 minutes ago, Skell Dagger said:

Q: Where do you think that money for new residents came from, and why do you think it was distributed in those ways in the first place?

Very much THIS. ↑

Way back in 2008, when I created my first account, I  also hopped on danced pads and sat on camping chairs for a few hours each day, for a week or three, in order to earn a few L$.

But then, I started to buy L$ myself (first via Virwox, then via the Lindex itself). I even became Premium back then, and had a money tree on my own land for a while, which was emptied each and every night.

But then, last year, I eventually couldn't afford the Premium fees anymore - and started anew with this account here.

[Phil Deakins]

3 hours ago, Skell Dagger said:

My very first L$2 in Second Life were earned by sitting on a deck lounger for 40 minutes back in June 2007.

You woz robbed! lol. Back then, the standard rate was L$2 per 10 minutes, and there were some L$3 per 10 minutes too.

I do understand what the OP posted though. SL has changed a huge amount over the years, and not only in the ways that s/he mentioned. My big gripe is moving pretty much all profitable creating out of SL altogether. SL just isn't as attractive as it once was.

[Akasha Sternberg]

3 hours ago, Skell Dagger said:

After eleven years in Second Life I have now invested (and yes, I regard it as an investment - specifically one for entertainment) tens of thousands of real life dollars in this virtual world, what with paying for tier on a whole region for many years, plus my inveterate shopping habit.

1

Same age and investment sum wise.... I could buy my car (2009 VW Polo) again ....easily... with the worth of my inventory. I don´t or can´t afford a full region but I had severe blogger craze, as in "uh I could use that for.... or if I get something like x I could use this to go with it..."  it was madness... I had a Virwox terminal in my house and it was "cash 50€ in, 5 mins on the MP, 50 boxes to unpack and broke again"... I sometimes repeated that on a daily basis... MADNESS I tell ya

 

But yeah SL has changed indeed...(and so has the quality of quite a lot of freebies ;P)  I never really camped though, back in the day dancing in clubs paid off well enough

[clivesteel]

OP's is an argument with which I am very familiar...one I have been making for eight years, to be exact.

Seems pretty indisputable that if LL had simply listened to me then, SL wouldn't be in the trough it is now.

The landowner/creator mafia groups will, one day, have to take responsibility for their actions. As will the racists and rape culture advocates who have warped SL into an unrecognisable MMORPG of sadness and depravity...

Should've listened when you had the chance?? Or was your precious mesh worth this ruin...

[Garnet Psaltery]

9 minutes ago, clivesteel said:

OP's is an argument with which I am very familiar...one I have been making for eight years, to be exact.

Seems pretty indisputable that if LL had simply listened to me then, SL wouldn't be in the trough it is now.

The landowner/creator mafia groups will, one day, have to take responsibility for their actions. As will the racists and rape culture advocates who have warped SL into an unrecognisable MMORPG of sadness and depravity...

Should've listened when you had the chance?? Or was your precious mesh worth this ruin...

My goodness, you have met some extraordinary people.  I don't believe I've met them.  Are they related to the Morporgs of Berkshire?

[Ceka Cianci]

20 hours ago, selly Aichi said:

 

I'm registered on secondlife since 2007, I'm still active, but it's not the same thing. the new residents had so many ways to make money with camping chairs, dance pads, money tree, camp master, freeplay, contest, today voodoo sploders much more generous than. all money that allowed to circulate money more easily and invest to improve sl. the world of sl has been limited only to those who buy linden. There is little circle of money and investors are less and less. many came in to make money and as it was set up there were so many ways to do it. for me the collapse of sl came mainly for this. lands full of people no longer exist. sin

Because all those people were each, one individual person logged in, rather than one guy with many bots logged taking up spaces or chasing sploder events, taking up space.

I couldn't drop a sploder without instant bots rezzing on the dancefloor..hehehehe

Those places were gaming traffic..2007 was bot house city..

A couple of the best things they came up with for that mirage was, changing the  way traffic was measured and the  scripted agent rule..

[Phil Deakins]

I want to say how silly it was of LL to ban the influencing of the search results through the gaming of traffic, but I can't because I don't remember when it happened and when LL started to use the GSA. If the GSA came first, then banning the gaming of traffic was a bit silly, because it already had only a small effect on the search results. Does anyone remember which way round it was - ban first and GSA later, or GSA first and ban later?

Edited August 24, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

51 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

A couple of the best things they came up with for that mirage was, changing the  way traffic was measured

They didn't change the way it was measured. They banned the gaming of it.

[Ceka Cianci]

3 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

They didn't change the way it was measured. They banned the gaming of it.

Oh they didn't change how much time you had to spend in a sim to count as traffic??

[Phil Deakins]

No. It stayed just as it was - 1 minute for 1 traffic point.

And I think it's still the same.

Edited August 24, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Ceka Cianci]

13 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

No. It stayed just as it was - 1 minute for 1 traffic point.

And I think it's still the same.

I believe you had to stay longer for it to count though.. you couldn't just pop in and get counted after a minute or five minutes or whatever it was,unless you stayed like so much time..

I remember something like that changing..

Edited August 24, 2018 by Ceka Cianci

[Phil Deakins]

If it did, I was never aware of it.

[Ceka Cianci]

12 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

If it did, I was never aware of it.

I'll remember what it was.. sooner or later  hehehehe

it's fifty linden Friday and  just too much great deals to be tapping so deep into my brain..

 

Edited August 24, 2018 by Ceka Cianci

[Phil Deakins]

If you can also remember when gaming traffic was banned, I'd appreciate it   I've now got the introduction of the GSA down to late in 2007, but I haven't made any headway with the ban. It was announced in an LL blog, and (I think) it was me who started a thread about it in RA.

[Ceka Cianci]

8 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

If you can also remember when gaming traffic was banned, I'd appreciate it   I've now got the introduction of the GSA down to late in 2007, but I haven't made any headway with the ban. It was announced in an LL blog, and (I think) it was me who started a thread about it in RA.

The thing I hate about their blog posts and other things from the past is ,they reuse links with new things and we lose the information..

The new KB has eaten a lot of old information..

if it's in the archives..omg that's a search and a half to find hehehe

i might actually find something in my old GOL notecards..If I didn't delete them all hehehe

Edited August 24, 2018 by Ceka Cianci

[Callum Meriman]

11 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

If you can also remember when gaming traffic was banned, I'd appreciate it   I've now got the introduction of the GSA down to late in 2007, but I haven't made any headway with the ban. It was announced in an LL blog, and (I think) it was me who started a thread about it in RA.

The ban was by Jack Linden in 2009. The wiki page on traffic mentions this

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/land/blog/2009/04/23/conclusion-to-the-blog-post-on-bots

But it's been redacted by the Lab.

[Phil Deakins]

Thanks Callum. I was in the process of adding an ETA to my previous post, but during it, Ceka quoted me and then you posted, so I'll make the ETA a seperate post. And here it is:-

Found it. Gaming traffic was banned in April 2009. That means it was a rather silly thing to do because the GSA had already been in use for some time, which meant that the effect of traffic in the search results was quite small.

Before the GSA, the amount of traffic a parcel got was the default measure for the search rankings, and it was the only measure. Parcels were ranked according to how much traffic they got. That was the reason why camping and such sprang up.

When the GSA came in, it all changed. Traffic was still counted as before, but the search results were ranked according to other factors. The GSA didn't take any account of traffic at all. What it did count highly were links to pages (parcels had their own html pages), so LL created links to the top 20 parcels in terms of traffic. The top one got 20 links, the next one got 19 links, and so on down to 1 link. Not being in the top 20 meant that traffic had no search ranking effect at all on the parcel. So only a few parcels in the whole of SL benefitted from traffic at the time that gaming it was banned. And that was at a time when SL was brimming over with stores, malls, and such, so a parcel that got any search ranking benefit from traffic was very rare.

It was banned because of it being gamed for higher search rankings, even though it made no difference whatsoever to pretty much all parcels. In banning it, the desirable things that the op mentioned - camping, money trees, etc. - went out of the window, and SL became significantly less than it had been.

More recently, the search results show traffic, and the search system is no longer the GSA. Traffic may actually be a factor in rankings now.

 

ETA: On reflection, the old grey cells not being quite what they used to be, I now think that it was the 50 or even top 100 parcels that got the 'engineered' links for the GSA, and not just the top 20. My reasoning is still very similar but not quite as strong as I'd written.

Edited August 24, 2018 by Phil Deakins
addition

[Coffee Pancake]

8 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

Because all those people were each, one individual person logged in, rather than one guy with many bots logged taking up spaces or chasing sploder events, taking up space.

I couldn't drop a sploder without instant bots rezzing on the dancefloor..hehehehe

This is why I got rid of my Money Tree ... I used them when I started for a little L$ and it made a huge difference .. once I got established, ran my own for years. Would run one now if it wasn't for bots and people making a dozen accounts. 

Pic is from 2006

[Theresa Tennyson]

On 8/23/2018 at 11:35 AM, clivesteel said:

OP's is an argument with which I am very familiar...one I have been making for eight years, to be exact.

Seems pretty indisputable that if LL had simply listened to me then, SL wouldn't be in the trough it is now.

The landowner/creator mafia groups will, one day, have to take responsibility for their actions. As will the racists and rape culture advocates who have warped SL into an unrecognisable MMORPG of sadness and depravity...

Should've listened when you had the chance?? Or was your precious mesh worth this ruin...

Was your plan for Linden Lab to have them sell user assets without permission?

[Rathgrith027]

On 8/23/2018 at 11:35 AM, clivesteel said:

OP's is an argument with which I am very familiar...one I have been making for eight years, to be exact.

Seems pretty indisputable that if LL had simply listened to me then, SL wouldn't be in the trough it is now.

The landowner/creator mafia groups will, one day, have to take responsibility for their actions. As will the racists and rape culture advocates who have warped SL into an unrecognisable MMORPG of sadness and depravity...

Should've listened when you had the chance?? Or was your precious mesh worth this ruin...

That moment when I see someone who I can't tell is on one or the other side of the nutjobs in the western world.
 

>Seems pretty indisputable that if LL had simply listen to me then
Oh yes, Nostradamus, please elaborate further.

>The landowner/creator mafia groups
Although I've heard rumors about Maitreya's inner workings over the years, I don't think that these "mafias" are as big a problem as you make them out to be. Sure, Land Barons are an issue, but they're an inevitable evil.

>As will the racists and rape culture advocates
Define racist, because in this day and age that comes down to if you do something that offends someone. SL is run by the lindens as a minarchy because they shouldn't be the arbiter of what is right and wrong, as long as it doesn't bring damage to the platform at large or violates the TOS. If your argument on this front is that SL should be a safe space, then you should go ahead and follow Selly out the door. The reason SL still thrives, even with your arguments based on conjecture (Look at the latest concurrency numbers) is because of the freedom to create is not inhibited or hindered by Linden Lab. If we were to follow your school of thought, these recently stabilized concurrency rates would be continuing on an inevitable decent.

Anyone who comes into the argument about SL's prior decline (emphasis on prior, as again, we've more or less reached a stable user concurrency around 40,000 users), and argues from a position of moral authority should not, for an iota of a second, be taken seriously.

As for "rape culture advocates", I'm not going to get into that basket of politics because I'm already probably going to get the lindens waggling fingers for me even responding in such a way, but all I will say is that the above paragraph regarding moral authority fits this argument as well.


As for Selly, at least she has somewhat of a valid argument. Yes, it's harder nowadays to get started in SL with little money, I know the feeling. When I started out, my cash was tight, and i was at least lucky to have others willing to gift me things or give me some money. I actually at one point relied on money I spent on SL premium to pay my in world rent. But sadly such is inevitable reality of both Terra Mater and Secundo Vitae. Money sadly makes the world go round and in this day and age, charitable actions are hard to come by in situations like this. It's a shame, but a inevitable reality as much as me, Selly and many others wish for it to be different. 

[Phil Deakins]

7 hours ago, Hoshi Kenin said:

As for mesh avatars

LL didn't envisage uers creating mesh avatars when they introduced mesh. That's not what they intended mesh for.

Just sayin'

[Theresa Tennyson]

9 hours ago, Hoshi Kenin said:

You make very good points.  However, as you may know...or have probably now realised...you are treading on the very fairy dust the 'Forumites' (sad sacks with posts numbering in the thousands, who spend more time on these forums than they do in SL)  need to survive and post the same old drivel here.

 

Yes, when someone posts the same thing over and over you have to ask yourself if they're really capable of independent thought.

https://community.secondlife.com/profile/877362-hoshi-kenin/

[Love Zhaoying]

9 hours ago, Hoshi Kenin said:

You make very good points.  However, as you may know...or have probably now realised...you are treading on the very fairy dust the 'Forumites' (sad sacks with posts numbering in the thousands, who spend more time on these forums than they do in SL)  need to survive and post the same old drivel here.