Second Life didn't have to suck

The problems that SL has been having lately has me thinking. I'm not wholly sure how I'm thinking or if this makes sense, I'm just thinking...

Second Life feels like it was meant to be small. A central asset server, a single login gateway, teleports designed for small areas, etc.; it all feels like it was meant to be a small world of maybe ten sims at a time. It worked back then, it scaled back when it was <100 sims. Now that it's >200, it's flaking out.

It makes me think of MySQL a few years ago. It was small. It worked for personal webpages. It worked for blogs, small companies, etc. However, if you needed something big and important stored, you used MS-SQL or Oracle. MySQL was too small for that. However, time passed, MySQL integrated itself better into the Internet community, and because of interest and integration, MySQL flourished into a database suite that either rivals Oracle or soon will.

The MySQL developers didn't push people or tell them how to use MySQL or what it was for; they sat back and developed the software. Second Life seems to foster community and economy more than they develop software, the fact that there seem to be more community liasons and Vice President's of community welfare than there are developers seems indicative that they put more thought into making Second Life big than actually making a big Second Life work.

Looking at the software over the last year and a half, it really hasn't changed much; looking at the residents and community, the social-scape of Second Life has. I get the feeling that at some point, possibly before I joined, the corporate culture at Linden Lab switched from, "Let's make a cool, 3D world," to something more like, "Let's build a world!"

Philip said in that C|Net interview that SL's ulti ate goal was to be a desktop application, linked P2P. He said that back in late-2003/early-2004 in his white paper about SL's grid structure. However, between that paper and the C|Net interview, almost everything I've heard out of Philip's mouth (or fingers) has been about an unsharded world, run by Linden Lab, a better world, etc. It's been about GOM/IGE, dwell statistics, metaverse, etc.

Like I said, I'm not sure what I'm thinking, a lot of this is just kind of frothed to the surface this morning. However, if I had to pick a central theme to my jumbled thoughts, I'd pick this: Linden Lab used to be about the software, sometime in there it became about the community, and now that loss of sight is hurting Second Life badly.

I wouldn't say SL sucks myself, so maybe this isn't precisely on topic. But I was just thinking this morning about how an aspect of SL's original design is continuing to cause problems, and your post reminded of it.

What I was thinking about specifically is how many issues are related to the unlimited use of resources. Prims, scripts, inventory, e-mail, particles, attachments, event listings... and probably some more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. There's clearly a pattern. It's interesting that they didn't aniticipate it. I don't mean that as a criticism; I bet there was some specific combination of factors that made them do things the way they did. I'd be very curious to hear the Lindens talk about it. Obviously they didn't anticipate prim hoarding. Philip just mentioned they didn't anticipate inventories growing so large. It seems reasonable to assume they didn't aniticpate people running massive amounts of scripts or polling for e-mail so much. And one aspect of this problem being in the orginal design is that now they've implicitly taught thousands of existing users to expect unlimited use of resources as part of what they pay for. That makes it more complicated to change. I'm curious if the Lindens have started to think about this as something they need to address as a pattern and not as a series of isolated problems, and as something they need to think about as they introduce new features. Heck, I'd be curious if the Lindens think I'm plain wrong

You raise many good points here... but I've seen what happens when the company just develops and has nothing to do with the community.

Lame, boring spaces like Worlds.net and ActiveWorlds. Without a community, its just zeros and ones to me.

That being said, maybe LL could reign it in a little bit and focus on coding again.

Regards,

-Flip

Are you suggesting that SL should just stay a Feted Inner Core? That is shouldn't grow beyond the FIC?

Naaah...you couldn't mean that, could you?

People have used words like "San Francisco" or "California" or "socialist" or "hippie" to explain that sense of unlimited Westward expansion, unlimited space, unlimited sea and sand, unlimited fun Mom and Dad pay for, unlimited world at collective disposal in the commune....

All those terms are thought of as "perjorative" or "nut-job" or "conspiracy-minded" or "narrow-minded". But for many people, saying "commune" and "San Francisco" and "California" open up entire vistas of associations going back to the 1800s.

You could just say "that great expansiveness of American pioneer spirit" etc.

I think Feted Inner Core is also still the key concept to understand a lot of problematic behaviour in the game. For example, all of us are part of the Feted Inner Core of unlimited texture uploads for only $10 and unlimited texture storage -- and object storage to boot. We're all part of the Feted Inner Core of unlimited inventory size.

I'm incline to belive that the handing over of "unlimited use of resources" was not conscious evil.

Personally....yeah! Let's make it JUST FIC! That wouldn't blow things out of proportion! There would be no war or hunger, and the sun would shine every day and the sea would be in a constant state of placid calm and nobody would ever REALLY die and....


nevermind.

\

YUP...dats da ticket..MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

You bring up a good point here. I suppose Perl and MySQL and PHP wouldn't be what they are if not for having communities. Linden Lab needs to sponsor/foster some community, they can't completely disregard it. That's true.

That's exactly what I'm saying. SL should have stopped at about twenty or so sims of hard-core builders. Then Linden Lab should have launched another grid for hard-core clubbers. Then another for Furries. Then another for malls. Then another for teens. Then another... And another... Etc.

I think you're exactly right to suggest Second Life never should have grown past the FIC. Thank you, Prokofy, for putting it in the right words. I endorse your suggestion.

I agree that the thread title and the initial posting are out of sync. The content really defines LL more than SL. Correct me if I misinterpret your thinking Jarod; but it seems to me that you're seeing the whole Second Life project as a platform test gone wild because somebody said "community," "world" and "economy" in a meeting one day. Perhaps they did mean to develop and license useful software in the beginning.

If that's true, I wonder if it was the lure of money or if the ideals of "one world, one community, one economy, one grid" are truly embedded in LL's corporate psychology. The former at least provides the opportunity to refocus on the software development beyond the myth of The Grid all hail the centralized Grid praise to the contiguous World...

Yes, SL should've been restricted to techiwiki testing and development types. Viewed from the other side of the coin, SL should've never been put into production as a single world with prim limits as the only limitation and an expectation that the whole thing wouldn't crash and burn after a few thousand accounts were opened. Good call Prok.

I realize that this dream of multihosted 3D grids, serving various purposes and user bases, that could effectively grow into a 3D Internet service comparable to the 2D WWW we have now is not popular at LL or in these forums. But a sprite can dream. I can't imagine the kind of money LL would make licensing such software to anybody and everybody that wanted to host a grid for whatever audience they could garner for whatever use they could imagine. But that would ruin the immersion eh, the concept of ONE WORLD, the toy economy...a sprite can also cry.

Great rhetorical move, hunnybunch. You've now expanded the definition of your vaccuous "FIC" to include everyone.

Clue: a categorization for which all members of the universe can be said to have property X is no categorization at all. Before you bother, yes, I am well aware that logic doesn't apply to *you*.

Y'all are talking about two different types of communities.

I want to do WHATEVER I WANT, and I want to do it FLAWLESSLY, and if I can't GET MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE, or if ANYTHING GOES WRONG, EVER, it's EVERYONE'S FAULT BUT MINE!

Jarod,

I don't always agree with you, and sometimes disagree quite strongly, but I have to say, your original post is incredibly well written and accurate. I have nothing to add to it.

A key difference between those projects and Second Life is their open/free nature. If someone wants to find out why a particular Perl bug happens, they can pull apart the code and get to the root of the problem. With open source projects, a larger community means more people who can help improve the project. With Second Life, a larger community means more demands of common resources. I don't mean to suggest opening SL's source as a panacea (or even an option), just to point out how SL can't benefit from community as other projects can.

I wonder if SL's growth issues would be as bad if there were no one-time-$10 accounts. Almost certainly not, but the underlying issues would have revealed themselves eventually. It may even be better that they come up sooner rather than later.

Yes they would've appeared if the development community, code named techiwiki, had ever topped twenty-thousand. Considering that the hundreds of thousands of users of SL software would be spread over several dozen grids, each configured to accomodate that communities requirements, the package would be allowed limitations because you could always fork another grid for any given group or purpose.

Personally, I believe Linden Lab stood to collect astronomically more recurring income licensing such software than they did selling a few thousand basic accounts. The only reasons I've heard for taking the route they have are wanting to foster a economy and wanting to build one massive community. I suppose those things seem too innovative and cutting edge to resist. It's too bad that the software development can't keep up.

The question now is whether or not the royal Lindens will understand that the tech will never match that kind of community growth on a centralized system and dare to change their course before it really is too late.