Why do I choose Second Life over Meta?

[Heathcliff Harbrough]

27 minutes ago, Tama Suki said:

Friend from today you and I can consider ourselves influencers and opinion leaders! 😂

🤣

[Coffee Pancake]

...

Edited January 8, 2022 by Coffee Pancake
dupe

[Coffee Pancake]

14 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

And yet, concerts with RL performers have been hugely popular in Fortnite. So maybe "If you build it, they will come" is not true.

It's never been true in virtual space, SL is littered with dreams of wonderful things that failed to gain any interest, and their creator was too invested to pull the build down and try something else.

Fortnite manages it  for a couple of reasons, they have an always on tap player base and hype. They host the events, they can create hype and can dump players directly to them.

Events elsewhere have to compete for an audience and don't have the captive player base who were logging in to play a game anyway.

 

14 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I don't think the limiting aspects of SL are ideological, but rather they're mostly technical. Meta (aka Facebook) is limited by the greed and power-hunger of it's creator, so it will likely never be able to create a virtual space that many people want to inhabit for long periods of time. Flat Facebook is bad enough, but people using it can turn their eyes away if they wish and can filter their experience to some small extent.

Facebook is habit forming, if not straight up addictive, but manages to balance that by tailoring the content specifically to the predispositions of the user.

This can't work in a 3D virtual space,  and devoid of purpose, it's going to hit all the same road blocks as SL does. Some people are fine with making their own fun, but most just aren't.

Fortnite has a game on the side and that is an end in itself, getting SL into the kind of shape needed to make games would be a big step up in terms of the reach we would have, and the sticking power of users.

 

Our biggest problem has always been answering the basic question " What do I do now? ", offering up a dozen " SL activities " someone " could " go do is not sufficient and misses the underlying question. It's not " What do I do now? " we should be trying to answer, rather " Why am I here ? "

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

On 1/8/2022 at 9:08 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Fortnite has a game on the side and that is an end in itself, getting SL into the kind of shape needed to make games would be a big step up in terms of the reach we would have, and the sticking power of users.

 

While I have zero objections to making SL a better platform for games, I do worry, again, that the danger is that this would entail a radical reorientation that would so change the culture here that it would essentially kill what we are trying to preserve.

[Sammy Huntsman]

On 12/30/2021 at 1:56 PM, Yuki Suki said:

I left Facebook for a reason and I wont go back if it changes the name a hundred times. Kinda like your Ex is your Ex for a reason.

"Meta is cartoon, SL is real!"

SL isn't real, it is far from real. Real is Real, SL is a game.

[Marigold Devin]

3 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

SL isn't real, it is far from real. Real is Real, SL is a game.

Facebook/Meta is surreal

Second Life is suREALer

[Heathcliff Harbrough]

3 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

SL isn't real, it is far from real. Real is Real, SL is a game.

Yes and no,

Second Life does not have a designated objective, nor traditional game play mechanics or rules, SL is not a game. Linden Lab, the company that created Second Life, is emphatic that their creation is not a game. “There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective,” says spokesperson Catherine Smith. “It's an entirely open-ended experience.”

[Lucia Nightfire]

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

While I have zero objections to making SL a better platform for games, I do worry, again, that the danger is that this would entail a radical reorientation that would so change the culture here that it would essentially kill what we are trying to preserve.

Offering better content creation tools, particularly better scripting capabilities won't make/designate SL as an FPS/PvP or any other platform type it wasn't to begin with. It will simply lead to more things for users to do and/or spend money on.

SL will never "turn into" another platform from the addition of features. There is too wide a spectrum of use case here.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

15 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Offering better content creation tools, particularly better scripting capabilities won't make/designate SL as an FPS/PvP or any other platform type it wasn't to begin with. It will simply lead to more things for users to do and/or spend money on.

SL will never "turn into" another platform from the addition of features. There is too wide a spectrum of use case here.

I don't think it's going to turn SL into a dedicated FPS, but . . . it's naive to imagine that the introduction of new affordances isn't going to impact upon the broader culture here.

The introduction of mesh, and the shift from in-world creation to Blender and other external mesh creation programs HAS had a pretty profound effect on SL, albeit one that took a few years to develop. SL is much more about "consumption" now than "creation." Consumerism was, of course, always important here, but shopping has become possibly the single most important and common activity in-world.

I have no idea what kind of changes might be wrought by the kinds of tools that we're talking about it, but changes there will be.

[Lucia Nightfire]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I don't think it's going to turn SL into a dedicated FPS, but . . . it's naive to imagine that the introduction of new affordances isn't going to impact upon the broader culture here.

The introduction of mesh, and the shift from in-world creation to Blender and other external mesh creation programs HAS had a pretty profound effect on SL, albeit one that took a few years to develop. SL is much more about "consumption" now than "creation." Consumerism was, of course, always important here, but shopping has become possibly the single most important and common activity in-world.

I have no idea what kind of changes might be wrought by the kinds of tools that we're talking about it, but changes there will be.

Yes, the once common social building aspect has long been been lost to the current dominant trend that is fashion.

I personally would like to see some new commerce/trend rivaling it someday soon.

That requires change.😉

[Scylla Rhiadra]

12 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Yes, the once common social building aspect has long been been lost to the current dominant trend that is fashion.

I personally would like to see some new commerce/trend rivaling it someday soon.

That requires change.😉

I'm not at all opposed to change. Indeed, if SL is to survive, yet alone prosper, change is absolutely required. I just think the implications -- particularly if they involve trying to attract a largely new demographic to the platform -- need to be considered carefully.

[Lucia Nightfire]

28 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I'm not at all opposed to change. Indeed, if SL is to survive, yet alone prosper, change is absolutely required. I just think the implications -- particularly if they involve trying to attract a largely new demographic to the platform -- need to be considered carefully.

I don't see LL implementing any feature that directly caters to any one particular demographic or "age group" 😉.

[Maryanne Solo]

I posted this about 5 years ago but I'll chuck it in here too

I do recall when my brother, (following my eldest Siss and I), into the new fangled world of computers and games, bought "Trainz" in 2001? I think it was. 
That was the Train simulator that ran Microsoft Train Simulator off the rails. (made in Queensland. Australia).
It came with G-Max, a "lite" version of 3dsMax, specifically for making Trainsy stuffs then importing it into the world of Trainz. 
I remember it clear as day because I used to have a go at making things.
All I made were flat/single sided people and signs/billboards. It was great fun though.

That's what we need LL to do.

[Yuki Suki]

On 1/10/2022 at 9:35 AM, Sammy Huntsman said:

SL isn't real, it is far from real. Real is Real, SL is a game.

🤭 /whooooosh

Also, just because it is digitally rendered like how games do it (with similar graphic rendering technology and movement controls), does it make it a 'game'? 🤔 nvm, I digress, wrong topic.

Edited January 16, 2022 by Yuki Suki

[Heathcliff Harbrough]

I read a headline and I had to share this in my post about Meta 🤣 "The Metaverse Is Dead. ChatGPT Killed Zuckerberg's Obsession".

So basically, this article discusses the rise and fall of the Metaverse, a technology that promised to create a virtual world where people could interact seamlessly with each other using digital avatars. The hype surrounding the Metaverse was fueled by Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, who claimed it would be the future of the internet. Despite much media attention and Wall Street investors' interest, the Metaverse failed to deliver on its promises and struggled to gain users. The lack of a coherent vision and business proposition ultimately led to the Metaverse's downfall, and the tech industry has since moved on to other more promising trends such as generative AI. The article argues that the Metaverse's short life and ignominious death are a glaring indictment of the tech industry, and Mark Zuckerberg's quixotic obsession with it has burned billions of dollars, misled everyone, and overseen the layoffs of tens of thousands of people.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 12/30/2021 at 7:18 PM, Heathcliff Harbrough said:

What does Linden Lab think about Meta?

I can't read minds and I'd be surptised if LL is going to answer your question in this forum, but I'm pretty sure that they don't think Meta (Horizon?) is wonderful and swell and great. Seems kinda obvious, from a competitor's standpoint. I'm also confident that LL is as baffled as I am in how Zuckerberg is able to throw billions into it and nothing comes out. It's either the biggest show of incompetence or a scam, or both.

[Richardus Raymaker]

Well, why you choice secondlife.

- secondlife have legs

- secondlife is not from meta

- secondlife does not require real life names.

[Coffee Pancake]

Meta burnt most of the money on R&D. Even if their test platform metaverse is a flop (made to test much of the output of the R&D), they will be reaping benefits for the next decade. 

The crash of Meta's test platform is bad news for Second Life. To those outside we are no different. A rising tide raises all ships works both ways.

Our glorious leadership will be laying awake at night wondering how they can capitalize on AI.

Everything we have ever said and made in SL .. well that's now training data. Good job, we were so useful.

[Lindal Kidd]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Everything we have ever said and made in SL .. well that's now training data. Good job, we were so useful.

Good lord, she's right.

...immediately bundles up ALL her chat logs and copyrights them.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 12/31/2021 at 5:47 AM, Tama Suki said:

Sorry i don't understand this.

It is an American idiom. 'Source of eyeballs' means an audience source.

Marketers advertise on TV because people are watching the shows. A show with a large audience is said to pull more eyes and thus can charge more for their ad time.

[Arielle Popstar]

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Our glorious leadership will be laying awake at night wondering how they can capitalize on AI.

 

Or quaking at the possibility of being replaced by it.

[Love Zhaoying]

I thought Meta is going away, since the shiny is now AI. 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

It is an American idiom. 'Source of eyeballs' means an audience source.

Witches be like, "I'm fresh out of eyeballs for my cauldro..stew. For my eyeball stew."

[Nalates Urriah]

On 1/1/2022 at 7:59 AM, Tama Suki said:

Grazie @Silent Mistwalker.

I remember that to access you had to open a Facebook account.
However, I never liked it very much and I soon abandoned it.

Lots of things use a Facebook or Google login. Not because they are owned by either. Because those two offer to do all the complex login tracking, password security, and handling forgotten passwords. It helps with FB and Google's user tracking. So they offer these other games/apps a deal if they use their services.

On 1/3/2022 at 10:15 AM, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

Seriously? This looks like a video game for 4-12 year olds. Why in the world would anyone choose this over Second Life?

Marketing... or if one is being less generous, propaganda. Mental conditioning and information control. If one does not know what SL is and has never experienced it then they have no way to compare. They go with what they have been told. We see a lot of that these days.

--------------------------

It is all tied together…

Meta is a foundation block in the coming new green order of sustainable living where per the WEF director, Klaus Schwab, along with one of the contributors, Ida Auken, the idea we will own nothing and be happy (2016 WEF Davos) is promoted. It seems most here see Meta only in the context of a competing game or platform like the present Facebook or IMVU. But Meta is part of a bigger agenda. Zuckerberg is into politics and part of the Davos crowd.

I like Second Life because it provides levels of freedom and a free market that only exist in the game world in SL. The media is not interested in promoting freedom or the free market. Thus, we hear little about SL and a lot about FB/Meta because it supports the UN/WEF agendas.

In SL we get to vote with our talents and L$. The result is a much freer virtual world and more than 200 terabytes of game content with new content being uploaded every day. It appears Meta is planning for a similar creative environment. They will have some catching up to do. But it is hard to know now what creation in Meta will look like.

As corporations and government begin cooperating more tightly, we can expect more control to be exerted within FB/Meta just as the Twitter Files released by Musk show happened there and as Rogan/Zuckerberg interview revealed for the old FB.

I think SL is small enough the Lab will be ignored until the later part of the Great Reset. However, one could say SL is already cueing up by limiting what we can talk about on the forum. Is that part of a larger agenda? Something to make the moderator’s lives easier? I think most likely the latter.

For now, SL provides more opportunities.

 

[Heathcliff Harbrough]

3 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Because those two offer to do all the complex login tracking, password security

Facebook and security, nah, and here is why. My account was hacked (FB Isis Hack) on January 6, 2023. Using a unique long password I renew every month with 2FA enabled. I received strange activity notification by email and text message, meaning Facebook recognized it, the platform allowed the hacker to enter my account and try to financial destroy me.

Today, hacked FB pages are impersonating Meta and Facebook exploiting the Ad Network system to advertise scam links. Knowing that the hacked pages still have the blue verification badge.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Heathcliff Harbrough