Socially|Mundane

Pour a teaspoon of sugar into a thimble of water and you'll have an incredibly sweet drink. Pour the same teaspoon of sugar into a five-gallon bucket and it becomes engulfed, lost, overtaken by the water. Not only is it not sweet, you can't taste the sugar at all.

This is how I view the Second Life grid. Okay, not really, but a way to describe how I view the grid - with regard to the bigger picture.

I have been complaining (to myself and to you, through this blog) about how the grid becomes increasingly diluted and more uninteresting by the day. This has been on my mind for the last year or so, but considerably entering my thought more profoundly in the last few months.

When I first entered the grid in 2006, it was a wonderful new world. Certainly just the newness of it to me was exciting and it was a joy to explore and see things, being built by the other "residents" made it even more interesting. It was easy to find fascinating things to see and do, easy to find and meet new people, make new friends, socialize.

There was one mainland, then two and a smattering of privately maintained simulators (a.k.a. 'sims' or 'private islands"/Estates (though an estate can contain multiple sims)) and though there was a massive number of things to see and places to go, in comparison to today the entire grid was minuscule.

Now think of the virtual land in SL as water and the people on the grid as a grain of sugar each and the activities (meeting people, seeing awesome things, doing things, etc.) as the 'taste' of sugar-in-water.

Second Life has become incredibly diluted.

And this is the problem.

The grid is becoming so heavy with land and virtual space that it will slowly break-apart and float away. In 2006 it was a teaspoon of sugar in a thimble, then a shot-glass, in 2007 with virtual land appearing everywhere, the grid turned into a tumbler, then into a drinking-glass, and the grid grows still.

That's good for Linden Lab as every square meter of all this virtual land is potential legal tender income. However, the sugar becomes increasingly diluted. Add to that the new continent of Ursula/Zindra and the compelled move to it from all other points on the grid by all "adult" (formerly "Mature") rated activity.

Not only is another continent created, but in order to fill it, existing continents are drained and emptied. This creates a vast deficit in the 'people-to-space' ratio. Add to this, at least 30% and possibly as much or more than 50% of all agents (avatars) on the grid at any one time are automated robots (bots) or inactive "campers" or both and suddenly the concurrency number looks incredibly inflated with "air".

There is an insufficient number of often niggardly people to fill-out the virtual space, causing them to be spread far too 'thin' across the the Linden world. Too many bots, too many campers and too many alternate accounts means the deficit is considerably larger that what might appear at first blush.

However, Second Life is a social platform. It's useless to be in-world unless you actually have something to do, and 95% of all of that will include your being with other people and it is becoming increasingly harder to find them.

Linden Lab now corrals all those partaking in what is likely the most popular activities across the grid, what some might term "adult deviancy", into a single new continent. The up-side to this is that it brings all the people scattered all over the vast, gigantic grid into a more confined space.

Whether this is the intended side-effect of this move or not by Linden Lab, it is among the 'pluses'. I like the idea of segregating this content and activity. However, Linden Lab still has a long way to go as far as how the grid itself works. Too many 'threaten' (most are just hot-air) to leave the SL grid for an alternative because of the copybot issues, ripping-viewers, and even the new Adult-segregation policies.

And the new adult filtering doesn't even work very well. If you know how to fly in no-fly land, then you know how to defeat the 'adult-rated access' restrictions whether your are a verified adult or not, the same technique to fly in no-fly land apparently also turns-on the "adult" search results option.

As I was contemplating how to approach this blog article (thinking on it for the last month or so), Kirsten Winkler made a blog post of her own expressing her view regarding the state of Second Life where she concludes:

[T]he problems SL has are not related to bad graphics, bad usability or connection problems. The problem is the athmosphere [sic] and there [Linden Lab] did everything wrong it could possibly do. Maybe they over estimated the creativity of the community or the fact that humans still act like humans no matter if they are online or in the real world.

I am not so great a writer or orator. I ramble-on as is evident in this and most of my other posts. So, when someone else says what I am thinking in a far more eloquent and meaningful pithy way, I would rather quote them on the subject. For instance, what I have often tried to describe over the last year or more and in this specific post is this, as conveyed by Kirsten:

[Linden Lab relies] on the community, no borders, too big.

Second Life is based on the idea that the community will build the
world. That is not a bad idea in itself but the problem is that
everyone wants to be his own boss. So instead of working together and
building one giant world people buy thousands of little islands to
become “king” there.

Therefore the world is constantly growing leaving the handful of people back in more and more space.

Basically, Second Life becomes less and less 'sweet' by the day. How long before it goes from sweetness to 'bitter', as no doubt it already has for many people?

Kirsten's full commentary here: Some thoughts on Second Life | Kirsten Winkler
art via RoofTopKitchen