Where do humans hang out?

I've moved my discussion to yet another SL blog, here...

http://greendots.typepad.com/

The objective is to find out what people are actually doing in SL, and determine how many of them are actually at their keyboard. I don't expect it will be exciting reading, but perhaps I'll find some gems. I have other plans afoot for automatically monitoring and reporting on the grid, which I started months ago, but realistically not the time to execute.

I'll announce the blog more prominently once I get more random visits done.

When I first joined SL I quickly realised that most of the places with high concentrations of green dots were casinos or sex clubs, neither of which I was interested in (well okay maybe the sex clubs, but not straight ones). So I stopped looking for clusters of green dots and instead followed the Events listings. I did a lot of searches for gay places and found just one that tended to have a steady stream of real people any time of day. Two years and a couple of location-changes later, that place is still one of my favourite SL hangouts.

I think the number of humans is shrinking. And I think the ones here are all spread out too far.

And I agree, the Lindens don't count the bots right. I believe they said it was 10 percent (or was it 20?)* But I figure it must be 40 percent, maybe approaching half.

Of course, that is based on exactly nothing scientific. Just my instinctive impression.

coco

Edit: It was 15, according to an earlier post.

I also pretty much agree with this. It's an odd thing. But even two-three years ago, I ran into this sort of unfriendliness a lot. Enough to stop exploring around and talking to people, which is kind of a shame.

(And I'm just talking about talking to someone on a public street, or in a store somewhere, not barging into their homes or anything like that.)

The default now often seems to be pretty much people don't talk to strangers.

I've come to think of the whole phenonenon as a sort of a generalized SL Road Rage; peculiar to SL and characterizing much of the SL existance.

Used to be, for instance, I would have to go to public sandboxes occasionally, and that would make me nervous, because people would be very territorial and growling guard-dog like about pieces of a sandbox they didn't even own. So you would feel like you practically had to ask PERMISSION to rez something in a corner somewhere, and then apologize for being there at all.

I think a lot of that was due to fear of griefing, which put everyone on edge, and not just at sandboxes, but anywhere public.

But a lot of the basic unfriendliness in general can't be chalked up to griefing, and I think is largely due to, as VonG said, people just generally mistreating others to the point where they stop even trying to be friendly.

And I agree about all the ban lines and ejection orbs with miserable "get out!" messages. It just isn't conducive to having a very friendly place. Everyone very defensive, very walled off.

Anyway, all this is mellowing out some now, I think. I believe people are gradually becoming friendlier, and happier to find other people to talk to who aren't bots. I think people appreciate other actual people more, because of all the bots masquerading as people. And everyone in general is more relaxed because the griefer problem has abated.

So that eventually, we could end up with a friendlier place!

coco

My console chat is full of group chat.

The chat history window blocks the view of the world.

It would be much nicer to me if there were toggles for whether group IMs and personal IMs appeared in the console chat.

This would make it much more pleasant to me to go to a place where people are chatting. It would be like when I started, when there was practically no one here, and I wasn't in a bunch of groups, and there weren't many people in the groups I was in.

I personally think that the issue is too many places in SL that are not integrated. What i mean is that one small plot is private next to a large club that is totally unrelated etc. There are only a few places in SL that i know of where the intent actually is for people to build community and know each other, speak while passing on the street, etc. In those places i think you will always come across someone who is willing to chat because the venue is made for that and people who go there are into connecting with others. We have two sims where part of our mission is actually to BUILD a community of friendly people who chat, interact, work and play together. Folks who like isolation dont tend to hang out in the spots on our sims that are gathering spaces, but will go to the top of the mountain, to a hammock on the beach, etc to enjoy the natural space and some peace. I guess what im saying is that without intentional community building as part of the package...most places dont really care if you interact or not, so are not built or configured to promote it. We actually ban flying because as we say...flying is a solitary activitiy...not too many "flocks" of av's flying about chatting. LOL

I've never, ever gone to the Open Latte in Mill Pond and found it empty. Never. Nice place, Micala did a great job. And for a quieter, similar venue, try Orb Thursday's coffee shop "Minor Fall" in Hallelujah Blue. Lovely place, beautifully done, less active.

While making random visits to determine the bot population I found a bot merchant selling his wares

http://greendots.typepad.com/green_dots/2008/07/the-bot-merchan.html