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echelon

If Linden launched now instead of 20 years ago, they'd have tons of funding and almost certainly be a unicorn.

Compare

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/secondlife

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vrchat

They were well ahead of their time. Or even if they weren't, the market simply wasn't ready for them.

As an aside, I have a few anecdotes about Second Life:

- I remember IBM paying money for virtual real estate in second life. They set up a marketing presence, too. It seemed like such an IBM thing to do.

- My university was giving class credit to a grad student for building a virtual mock up of our campus in Second Life. It was a thesis project, I think. I remember thinking he was rather late to the game, as Second Life had already dropped in popularity versus MMOs such as WoW.

I wonder what those events would have been like today, with VRChat and the emergence of the "metaverse". Everything old is new again.

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I think the biggest issue was that bandwidth wasn't ready for them, and their hype came early because it was one of the first instances of people profiting from, well, the equivalent of NFTs with the real estate land rush. By the time bandwidth caught up, that was old hat and they had a rep for largely being a place for "alternative communities" to meet up.

I was a super early adopter of things like virtual communities and MMOs, myself (and a huge Neal Stephenson fan to boot, so immediately recognized that they were using the Metaverse as their inspiration) and Second Life held very little attraction to me because of the performance. I tried it a few times, but there wasn't much immersion happening at the standard 1.5Mbps DSL speed, never mind modem.

If they'd come out at a point where the asset streaming worked smoothly for most customers, and the hype came after that--and especially if they'd come out after things like Dreams or even Little Big Planet or Mario Maker had prepped people for the idea of crowdsourced assets--I think they'd have absolutely smashed the market.

I tried it a few times, but there wasn't much immersion happening at the standard 1.5Mbps DSL speed, never mind modem.

It needs about 50Mb/s and a GTX 1060 or better to work well. With gigabit networking and a GTX 3070, it's pretty good. Now once the viewer becomes multi-threaded...

Anyone remember VirWoX?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/VirWoX

Before the era of MtGox, you would buy Linden dollars for SecondLife, and then trade them for bitcoin on VirWoX.

SecondLife was well positioned to become a gateway into the world of cryptocurrency back in 2010, but instead they decided to start banning people doing anything Bitcoin related, and everyone had to move to MtGox.

Pretty sure Linden had FINCEN people breathing down their collective necks. The threat of federal prosecution for enabling money laundering tends to tamp down your excitement for crypto.

SecondLife is a cautionary tale for anybody wanting to start a "metaverse" type project. If you give your users unlimited freedom and allow people to make money you end up with endless strip malls full of Cybersex attachments for avatars. Anybody who tries to do "legit" events is in danger of being spammed by helicopter penises.

If you want anything else you need to incorporate and enforce standards and practices right from the start, but then you'll be perceived as corporate and lame.

You say "in danger of being spammed by helicopter penises" like it's a bad thing.

Vladislav Surkov doesn't work for Putin anymore, so the likelihood he'll be griefing Kasparov with flying penises is pretty low.

But you make a very valid point, some online experiences are probably better when restraint can be enforced.

The irony is that complete freedom ends up being quite limiting. You can't do kids events or anything where you expect the major press to show up. Sponsored events end up being pretty hard to do. Your platform won't even be available in many countries due to restrictive laws regarding pornography, including highly populous countries like China.

I'm an ex-Linden employee that now runs a cybersex attachment startup (https://buttplug.io).

What exactly are we warning people about?

hmm... you say "flying penis" and it only takes 40 minutes for QDot to show up. I think that means the internet is still working.

30 minutes or less, or your next flying penis is free!

This would've been funnier if it weren't 11 hours later.

but we're all getting older, so a flying penis in 30 minutes might just be too soon.

Your platform becoming a joke and the only people using it being furries and other such weirdos.

If this is what you want then that's fine, but it doesn't mesh with "The Metaverse" as it is typically envisioned.

Maybe before saying furries are "jokes" and "weirdos" you should talk to a furry.

Calling people names says a lot more about you than it does about furries and "weirdos." I am happy you are in no way responsible for defining what the metaverse is or isn't.

> furries and other such weirdos

They're people just like you. They also run the internet. [1]

[1] https://thespinoff.co.nz/irl/11-01-2022/who-runs-the-interne...

> They're people just like you.

So are serial killers. If people can't judge you by what you say and do, it really limits the range of human interaction.

dude. no one uses ReiserFS anymore. get over it.

You have to judge people, but if you make all of your judgements on the basis of who's gay or furry or whatever you won't be making your judgements on the basis of stuff that actually matters. You can only have one set of criteria and every item competes with the others for weight.

Ahhhhhhhhahahahaha I've been a furry for 27 years so you picked the wrong place to go off about this.

That happens very rarely in Second Life. Being a jerk in Second Life has an annoyance radius of about 100 meters. The world is the size of Los Angeles or Greater London. This gives the system considerable resistance to annoyances. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. Unlike the 2D web, there's not much ability to annoy large numbers of people. There's no way to broadcast spam. There are no "retweets".

If you hold an event on your own land, you can block people, or require they be in a your group just to get in. You can prevent objects owned by others from entering. You can kick people out and send them to their home location. You can even use weapons they can't use on your property to apply large physical forces to their avatar and kick them up a few thousand meters. That's usually considered overkill. Property owners have more than enough tools to deal with problems. This is why Second Life needs only a tiny "governance" unit.

I have a virtual motorcycle shop in an adult area of Second Life and I'm not seeing annoyances like that. All the action is in nightclubs and people's own houses, just like real life.

This is exactly the corporate kiss of death I've seen over and over. If I can't use your product/community/whatever without being assaulted by the sexual fetishes of others, then it's just ultimately chase away customers who don't subscribe to those fetishes. Now your growth and future outlook is just much less than a competitor.

A common con in capitalism is to sell people on "free-speech" and "anti-corporate" agendas in your capitalist corporate product. I think most sensible people see through this, but there's a segment who just take to it pretty well and they tend to have marginalized and very questionable ideas about politics, race, religion, age of consent, boundaries, and justifiable terrorism.

Every "free speech" equivalent to the big players has failed and badly. Voat can't touch reddit. Parlour can't touch twitter, etc.

The real problem with these companies is that ultimately they want growth and profitability, thus when they try to expand out you now have the "Nazi Bar" problem, where the marginalized end up owning the establishment and chasing away everyone else.

Good moderation, protection of minorities, protection of LGBTQ people, protection of women, curtailing all hate speech, strict penalties, etc is the formula for success whether the tech libertarian crowd likes it or not. This is why your company has HR policies like this too. Once you let in the first Nazi into your bar, its over.

I suspect the protocols defined in the link provided do not require protocol users to be assaulted by the sexual fetishes of others. If you don't want to be assaulted by the content on Porn Hub, don't go to Porn Hub.

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