Has SL lost its way?

Okay, been here 6 years and have seen SL evolve. It started as a tight-knit community, grew, expanded, improved, little by little...with LL working on the back-end and the residents working on the front-end. Creativity blossomed.

Nowadays, I'm disheartened by what I see in SL. I goto large gatherings of groups or talks hosted by Linden Lab: but find that they are merely places were avatars go to hook into a RL audio or video feed. There is no SL-only interaction, when talking about the SL virtual world, no use of the SL world as it was intended. I see the mentors group disbanding, a group of SL residents dedicated to improving the community of SL by helping the new to learn about our wonderful world...replaced by RL online resources. I see commerce in SL shifting to RL online shopping, anti-competitive practices taking away from user-created content and services. What gives?

What happened to SL being a new world, a new community, the next big thing?

What happened?

"M. Linden" happened.

It sold out to externally-hired Corporate execs who don't care at all about the Residents or the Customers or how we actually USE their creations, but only care about the bottom line and their own paychecks.

I think it would be more correct if she said: "M. Linden hired a bunch of corporate execs who don't care at all about the Residents or the Customers or how we actually USE their creations, but only care about the bottom line and their own paychecks."

It decided it wanted to be the next Big Business thing.

Sorry if i get annoying but...

"M. Linden decided it wanted to be the next Big Business thing."

Not even that really they are killing off the long term sl HAD.. now it has no legs and wont be fixed.. egos have gotten in the way and SL is dead by 1,000 cuts.

It hasn't lost it's way at all. It is just headed in an entirely different direction. LL is gutting the SL many of us enjoy,torching it in some cases to get the current crop of users out. It is gentrification. They new SL will be a very clean, neat and orderly place where only certain people will do ceratin things. It will be very serene, everyone will wear beige or pinstripes and conformity and sameness will be the rule. Mundane makes money.

/me slaps Briana with a wet sheep.

I just found out who this "M. Linden" guy was...and was browsing some of his artwork...

...is it just me...or do the repetitive drawings of "interconnected and overlapping grids of squares" remind you of the SL map? Why does it eerily remind me of those psychotic serial-killers in the movies where they draw and draw and draw symbols all over the walls...and the detective finds it near the climax of the movie...and everyone is shocked?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlinden/page2

This guy fancied himself an artist...and he had a "Roadmap", too.

If I had $L5 for every thread I've come across since joining these forums about SL loosing it's way, flushing itself down the toilet or going to hell in a hand basket I could buy myself something really nice (maybe even that Starax Wand)......or cash out and get a tank of gasoline. It's the same old tired doomesday chit chat by a lot of the same old chit chatters. SL has not changed it's direction drastically (maybe not even one iota) at all.........it's always been headed in the direction of reinventing the internet. That was Phillip Rosedale's goal and M. Linden is following in his foot steps.

I would think the "residents" as old as I am or older would surely know this by now. Same song, different singer is all that is new in this story. Five years from now SL will probably still be chugging along pissing it's residents off, stirring controversy leading to more doomesday threads. Will it be as it is today? Probably not......it ain't the same as it was 4 years ago so there's no reason to believe it will be the same as today.

I made a decision about 3 1/2 years ago (that now famous 06-06-06 date in SL history) that I had a threshold that I could tolerate. If (or when) that threshold is crossed I'm gone.......it's that easy for me. Until that time I intend to have fun while participating in SL. It's that decision that probably more than anything else has prevented me from getting involved in any SL business. I feel for the folks who have invested large sums of real money in SL for their uncertainity when LL does some of it's strange stuff they have a habit of doing..........but, surely, you went into that business with your eyes wide open didn't you?

So with that usless tid bit of information from me.......carry on.

It doesn't surprise me that Linden Lab would want to use means of conveying information other than SL; SL isn't a very efficient means of conveying information. When I was mentoring inworld a great deal, people were asking me questions inworld, true, but the way that I got answers that weren't in my memory already was to look on the web for the answers, either in this forum, the wiki's, the sluniverse forums, or when worse came to worse, Googling the web at large. Static, searchable text is an efficient way to distribute information.

One problem that LL has is that it's never solved the basics of the SL concept: the grid still doesn't work well. Border crossings don't work well. Teleports aren't reliable. Textures don't load quickly. Inventory loss still occurs. Inventories don't load properly, or take real long to load. Unable to make the grid system work properly, LL is at a loss for what to do.

There's been no real significant improvement in SL as a means for people to interact with each other in the SL virtual world following the introduction of customizable gestures. The most pleasant improvements I suppose were music and video streams, things that let you hear music and watch videos created outside of SL.

This!!!

You're the only one mentioning doomsday, Peggy.

Peggy - the people who are having FUN....are not here. We will not hear from them. They have no reason to come into forum. And there are tons of them. Alive and well, and bustling about SL, as we speak....having a blast.

As I said in another thread:

/me whips off her skirt and waves it in salute.

Oh...........this is defining glorious days ahead I suppose




Let's call it "lost it's way" instead, then.

It's also "losing it's way" by losing some of the people whose brains held "the way" inside. When's the brains go, "the way" goes away with them. Cory and Robin.

I wonder how LL expects to get the desired million concurrent users without first solving the basics of sim crossing, making the world appear instantly so that it maintains the illusion of being in a persistent virtual world instead of constantly reminding you that you aren't, having your stuff accessible instantly, and so on. They are unable to make much headway with only 60,000 concurrent users. Presumably the apparently already unsolvable problem will get much worse if concurrency increases as LL desires.

This isn't so much a thread about commerce, it was about SL as a medium by itself. That SL should be the world with which we "live", and links to the outside are secondary...not the primary means for us to interact. When I say "SL has lost it's way" it is losing it's sense of community, it's sense that it is a new world as opposed to a glorified additional protocol to slap into a web browser.

I think that is a big part of the problem. SL as a platform as stagnated, and "outworld" solutions are brought in or used instead due to the inadequacies of the SL world/interface/techology. We shouldn't need to use "outworld" technologies to do what we want in SL. We shouldn't need to use a voice stream to hold a meeting, or give out links to goto an outside website to login and watch a video-stream of an event going "on inside SL".

Things like slexchange were created because the inworld shopping experience was, well, sucked. Inworld conferences are held outside in the RL world because, well, we can't reliably have hundreds of people chatting away via text (or reluctantly IHMO with SL Voice) in the same area.

It never was anything but a browser.......and as it stands now it never will be either. The sense of imagination was what got most here in the first place. It certainly did me. However, a vocal minority decided that the imagination part should somehow become somthing more real...........a place to "live".

It's a glorified game for heaven's sake.

SL was never a game, and has never just been just a browser or a glorified chat room. It is much more than that, more a combination of all of those...a platform...a virtual world. To call it a game (some pre-canned story with tasks) or a browser (a way to display text and multimedia images, though SL is closer to this than a game) would be limiting what it's potential is.

Take the fictional "Matrix" from the movies or the world in Snowcrash. Is that a game? Is that a web browser? Is that a chat room? No...they are much, much, much more! I'd call SL more along the lines of the Matrix or the world of Snowcrash.

The Matrix, a mediocre movie...Snowcrash, a boring book. Yup, that sums it up nicely.