influencers

[missyrideout]

12 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I have a friend who has been in SL over a decade who is looking for a new mesh head, and who was unaware that LeLutka had a freebie one available before Christmas.

Interesting you would mention that because I feel that participants in large, active SL groups are a type of influencer.  I think Lelutka has left a void in-world by removing their chat and your friend not hearing about free head could be related to that. Large group chats can have 25k, 50k, even 80k members and the preferences and interests of the most active members and CSRs definitely has a ripple effect. If one of my products is mentioned in a group like that you can bet it's going to spike in sales.

Edited January 20, 2022 by missyrideout

[Prokofy Neva]

4 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

SL was made before social media took over the world. It lacks all the built-in features to allow for social networking.

It used to have very easy interface for sending a screenshot and a SLURL to Twitter, etc. Then Oz took those out because those companies keep changing the way you interact with them and the Lindens got tired of chasing it for the small percentage of bloggers like me who used it. Most people on Flickr are doing heavy post-processing so they don't need to instantly deliver a screenshot while flying around the world. People resist having their avatar put on Facebook which supposedly doesn't allow avatars (but has a lot). 

[Tama Suki]

21 minutes ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

No one is stalking you. This forum is a forum meant for discussion unlike Twitter where you just put random thoughts in. Perhaps that is why you are confused.  If you don't want people to discuss what you say, don't post.

I love your new bio Sam1 😂

[Tama Suki]

12 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It used to have very easy interface for sending a screenshot and a SLURL to Twitter, etc. Then Oz took those out because those companies keep changing the way you interact with them and the Lindens got tired of chasing it for the small percentage of bloggers like me who used it. Most people on Flickr are doing heavy post-processing so they don't need to instantly deliver a screenshot while flying around the world. People resist having their avatar put on Facebook which supposedly doesn't allow avatars (but has a lot). 

Yes, but the main function of creating an influencer is completely absent in SL, however.
Reputation in social networks is largely due to the fact that people can see how many followers an account has.
In SL all this does not exist, the reputation of an account is more similar to what happens in reality.
It must be concretely based on something tangent.
And I don't think being a famous blogger matters.

[Dyna Mole]

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

@Tama Suki -- this is your thread, isn't it?

In the excitement of a good discussion it's easy to forget that nobody owns a thread. Once anyone starts a thread, it becomes a public area for discussion. All participants share responsibility for staying on topic (hint, hint).

[Tama Suki]

43 minutes ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

others

The others who? 😂

[Prokofy Neva]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Actually, before it got derailed with a rather odd digression on GIFs and memes, this was a potentially sort of interesting discussion.

As someone above noted, SL was created before social media really took off, so it lacks tools that would be pretty much obligatory in any new social platform. Avatars United was an abortive attempt to rectify that, as was MySecondLife, both of which failed (although the latter had a brief time when it was used, and is still sort of active) because neither was properly integrated into our in-world experiences.

One of the results of that is that, yes, there really aren't many "influencers" in Second Life. There are some who achieved a degree of "celebrity," such as Torley and Strawberry Linden (nee Singh). And for a time, Prok's blog had a relatively important currency. But none of these, or any others, have the really broad reach and influence that a true social media "influencer" does. There really are no platforms or affordances to achieve that. These forums attract a tiny percentage of the in-world population: however well-known one is here, it really doesn't translate well into an in-world setting.

In one sense, it's a shame that we don't have tools to connect with and communicate to a really broad selection of SL's residents.

On the whole, though, this seems to me a good thing, and far more democratic (and less celebrity-driven) than other social platforms.

Seraphim has *millions of views*. MILLIONS. It's like a RL site in that sense. When I used to be active in blogging about SL and RL tech issues, perhaps I had *thousands* of visitors. But it's only about shopping. If Seraphim were to take a view on some issue of the day -- if its owners were to come in here and say, no, we need even more shopping events, there is a lot of pent-up talent and purchasing power out there -- it would convince many shoppers. It doesn't need to come on the forums, like most prosperous merchants -- they don't harm business by forums scraps and just do what they want, which in this case, is to proliferate events that help them and others make bank.

I don't know why you'd single out my blog when the Second Life Herald was the one with hundreds of thousands of views, although nothing like Seraphim. And there used to be blogs covering SL frequently by various professors that got a lot of attention. Not now.

SL is very, very niche. I don't know what its traffic was but it couldn't have been more than 100,000 using the very imperfect tool of Alexa. At the heydey of my blog, when it maybe was in the top 25 or something, I would make perhaps US $100 per month from Google ads which is hardly anything. Now I'm lucky to make US $30 or less every 3 months, which doesn't even cover the cost of the blogging platform. I ceased blogging when a) I took a job covering the war in Ukraine for 5 years b) my son was in a terrible motorcycle incident from which he eventually recovered. I might blog again but if anything, I'd rather blog about Kazakhstan. I do have a new, small inworld weekly newspaper that I don't put on the web deliberately so that people will read it and travel to the LM, etc. inworld. So much of SL is outside of it.

There really is a dearth of good political blogs, as there used to be with the Second Life Herald, now defunct. There's Inara Pey's blog and a few others that occasionally address political issues, but the overwhelming majority of them.

Of course there are influencers in SL, such as it is. The forums regulars, which include some of the old "forums cartel"; the FIC, new and old. At their zenith, influencers influenced the most important people -- the Lab and its management, and got them to change policies -- like the buyback of telehub land. None of them, high or low, could change the gatcha ban, however, which shows their waning power.

LL doesn't even have good tools to reach its own best customers, premium account holders in Bellisseria. E-mail is one way, but inworld, the mailbox system in Bellisseria doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of uptake. There are only groups in Bellisseria and it's easy to be expelled from them (that hasn't happened to me, but to others). 

I don't overly wish for a telegraph system in SL that reaches a wide public because then there'd inevitably be a Lenin who would take it over. No thank you. Civil society would have to become more diverse and robust for a telegraph system not to fall into the hands of authoritarians. In some ways it is advantageous to the platform providers to keep the population atomized and in silos.

[Yukiko Yeshto]

5 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

[...] There are no influencers here. It is precisely the mechanics of this metaverse that is totally disconnected from this thing.
What do you think about this thing?[...]

I think, that you didn't understand SL and how it works, or else this question would have never crossed your mind.

[Tama Suki]

6 minutes ago, Yukiko Yeshto said:

I think, that you didn't understand SL and how it works, or else this question would have never crossed your mind.

Please explain what you think I don't understand.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Dyna Mole said:

In the excitement of a good discussion it's easy to forget that nobody owns a thread. Once anyone starts a thread, it becomes a public area for discussion. All participants share responsibility for staying on topic (hint, hint).

Yes Mother.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, missyrideout said:

If one of my products is mentioned in a group like that you can bet it's going to spike in sales.

What an interesting thought!

I belong to a largish photography group -- not obviously as large as a group for a major brand, but still sizable. On the relatively rare occasions I post a link to one of my pics on Flickr -- and depending on the time of day, etc. -- it can result in a spike in "faves" and even "follows."

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Seraphim has *millions of views*. MILLIONS. It's like a RL site in that sense. When I used to be active in blogging about SL and RL tech issues, perhaps I had *thousands* of visitors. But it's only about shopping. If Seraphim were to take a view on some issue of the day -- if its owners were to come in here and say, no, we need even more shopping events, there is a lot of pent-up talent and purchasing power out there -- it would convince many shoppers. It doesn't need to come on the forums, like most prosperous merchants -- they don't harm business by forums scraps and just do what they want, which in this case, is to proliferate events that help them and others make bank.

There used to be some fashion blogs -- not as big certainly as Seraphim, but for their time, reasonably influential, that took "political" stands. JuicyBomb was one.

 

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't know why you'd single out my blog when the Second Life Herald was the one with hundreds of thousands of views, although nothing like Seraphim. And there used to be blogs covering SL frequently by various professors that got a lot of attention. Not now.

Oh, because why not? I used to read your blog.

And a fair number of the others -- Ciaran's, for instance. Inara's is the only one I pay a lot of attention to these days. They do not seem to have the reach they once did, and I'm not sure why not.

But even in their heyday, they did not penetrate much in-world.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

a) I took a job covering the war in Ukraine for 5 years b) my son was in a terrible motorcycle incident from which he eventually recovered.

a) you may find yourself busy again soon (I hope not)
b) that's horrible, but I'm glad to hear he's recovered

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There really is a dearth of good political blogs, as there used to be with the Second Life Herald, now defunct.

The Herald was utter trash. Surely no one took it seriously? It was a half step up from Virtual Secrets, and only because it occasionally employed full sentences.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The forums regulars, which include some of the old "forums cartel"; the FIC, new and old. At their zenith, influencers influenced the most important people -- the Lab and its management, and got them to change policies -- like the buyback of telehub land. None of them, high or low, could change the gatcha ban, however, which shows their waning power.

Here again, as before, I am going to push back on this notion that there is, or ever has been (at least in my time), an FIC here. The Forum Cartel was (and still notionally is) a social group and nothing more. And while a few individuals might have been noticed -- Desmond, perhaps -- LL paid zero attention to what was said here.

Remember when Rod Humble "introduced himself" to the SL community . . . by posting on SLU?

And again, the penetration in-world of the forums is negligible. I get recognized in-world as a forumite maybe two or three times a year? Tops.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

LL doesn't even have good tools to reach its own best customers, premium account holders in Bellisseria.

Yeah. This I don't get. The efficacy and reach of LL's communications with the population of residents as a whole, or of specific communities (Belli, SLB, etc.) is . . . awful. I get a brief, aesthetically dull, and mostly uninformative email newsletter once a month, I think -- and most people seem to opt out of that. You'd think they would want to fix that.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't overly wish for a telegraph system in SL that reaches a wide public because then there'd inevitably be a Lenin who would take it over. No thank you. Civil society would have to become more diverse and robust for a telegraph system not to fall into the hands of authoritarians. In some ways it is advantageous to the platform providers to keep the population atomized and in silos.

I generally agree -- as I've already said here, above -- that it's not a bad thing that we don't have "influencers" here, because they tend to be undemocratic, and kinda into mob rule. (Which is one the main raison d'etres of Twitter these days, it seems.)

But . . . your suggestion that keeping us "atomized" as advantageous to LL is probably true. And would seem to me one reason we might want a tool for collective action. LL can be "authoritarian" too.

Edited January 21, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Jordyn McGregor]

I hate that term..."influencers".

[Prokofy Neva]

34 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

There used to be some fashion blogs -- not as big certainly as Seraphim, but for their time, reasonably influential, that took "political" stands. JuicyBomb was one.

 

Oh, because why not? I used to read your blog.

And a fair number of the others -- Ciaran's, for instance. Inara's is the only one I pay a lot of attention to these days. They do not seem to have the reach they once did, and I'm not sure why not.

But even in their heyday, they did not penetrate much in-world.

a) you may find yourself busy again soon (I hope not)
b) that's horrible, but I'm glad to hear he's recovered

The Herald was utter trash. Surely no one took it seriously? It was a half step up from Virtual Secrets, and only because it occasionally employed full sentences.

Here again, as before, I am going to push back on this notion that there is, or ever has been (at least in my time), an FIC here. The Forum Cartel was (and still notionally is) a social group and nothing more. And while a few individuals might have been noticed -- Desmond, perhaps -- LL paid zero attention to what was said here.

Remember when Rod Humble "introduced himself" to the SL community . . . by posting on SLU?

And again, the penetration in-world of the forums is negligible. I get recognized in-world as a forumite maybe two or three times a year? Tops.

Yeah. This I don't get. The efficacy and reach of LL's communications with the population of residents as a whole, or of specific communities (Belli, SLB, etc.) is . . . awful. I get a brief, aesthetically dull, and mostly uninformative email newsletter once a month, I think -- and most people seem to opt out of that. You'd think they would want to fix that.

I generally agree -- as I've already said here, above -- that it's not a bad thing that we don't have "influencers" here, because they tend to be undemocratic, and kinda into mob rule. (Which is one the main raison d'etres of Twitter these days, it seems.)

But . . . your suggestion that keeping us "atomized" as advantageous to LL is probably true. And would seem to me one reason we might want a tool for collective action. LL can be "authoritarian" too.

I'm going to have to deal with all your misleading statements on my own blog, if I get to it. Meanwhile, I'll leave you to rule the roost in this increasingly shallow pond.

 

Edited January 21, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

I dealt with influencers coming into my bar. Wanting free drinks to promote the bar, etc.  I told them take a hike. They're shocked when we tell them we avoid social-media and such.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

28 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I'm going to have to deal with all your misleading statements on my own blog, if I get to it. Meanwhile, I'll leave you to rule the roost in this increasingly shallow pond.

 

ALL of them? You're going to be busy!

I'll have my PA shoot along a PR package: I want to be sure that the photo catches my good side.

Be a little careful, though: I have at least 5 or 6 followers on Twitter who can get very irate.

Not on my behalf, of course, as they barely know I exist. Just sort of generally irate about . . . well, pretty much everything.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Jordan Whitt said:

I hate that term..."influencers".

 

Is that.... Mr Bean? 🧐

[Jordyn McGregor]

4 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

Is that.... Mr Bean? 🧐

That's Ms Bean to you!

[LilNosferatu]

We might not really "follow" each other in the same way that we can follow each other on Instagram or Twitter, but we can basically follow brands/designers/communities by joining their groups.

I would argue that the popular brands in SL could be considered "influencers" -- if one of the top popular designers came out with a unique style of clothing, it has the potential to be popular, perhaps inspiring other brands to make their own versions or put their own twist on it, thus becoming an inworld fashion trend. We also might need to define exactly what we mean by "influencer", if we're trying to discuss whether or not it's a status one could attain within SL (speaking purely in-world, disregarding SL bloggers and other SL-related content creators whose platforms are built outside of SL itself).

People in general, no matter where they are, are always gonna congregate around someone and look to them for what's popular, trendy, etc. These trends don't have to include all of SL, they could just be smaller groups/communities as well; I'm sure the furry community has its own in-group of popular / well-known people who have more influence on the community than a random average user. They could be creators, group leaders, club owners, or anything really. If they're deemed popular by their community, and their opinions and style influence others, then is that enough to make them an "influencer"?

[Tama Suki]

4 minutes ago, LilNosferatu said:

that enough to make them an "influencer"?

No.

[LilNosferatu]

13 minutes ago, Tama Suki said:

No.

Eloquent and thoughtful as always. Good talk.

[Yukiko Yeshto]

10 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

Please explain what you think I don't understand.

I am afraid, the answer is:

2 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

No.

 

[Tama Suki]

5 minutes ago, Yukiko Yeshto said:

I am afraid, the answer is: "no"

In this case, I think I only have the option to go to the bathroom cabinet where I keep the antidepressants.

[Tama Suki]

Anyway.
Let's skip the fight between @Prokofy Neva and @Scylla Rhiadra Which I consider both to be intelligent people and who post interesting content almost always.
(Prokofy you should avoid writing such long posts, friend's advice.)

If in SL by opening an account profile you could see how many followers it has, hundreds of influencers would be born immediately.
90% of users don't care about blogs.
90% of users when they shut down SL turn off the computer.
The common pattern of existence in SL is much more spartan than you might imagine it would seem.
I saw a few years ago some accounts that could be defined influencers in the true sense of the term, but they did not last long because they gave up, probably because SL did not give them the adequate percentage of "energy" that they would rightly have demanded for their efforts. But in essence I think it is due to the fact that they were convinced that they were artists, they received attention and hype, but in the end they weren't really artists. They were people who imported ugly and rough meshes thinking that that was art. It really wasn't, in fact they failed.

[Myntz Mysterious]

4 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

90% of users don't care about blogs.
90% of users when they shut down SL turn off the computer.
 

Where did you get these numbers from?? 😮