Second Life’s Web-Based Marketplace Hurt Second Life’s Community Like Amazon Hurt Small Town Stores (Comment of the Week)

March 8, 2021

What went wrong with Second Life? Bryan Ogden has an intriguing take in that post of the same name last week:

The thing that killed SL IMHO wasn't a specific technical feature… It was web-based shopping for stuff. And point-to-point teleportation. It was an attempt to make SL convenient and consumer friendly.

Why? When I first got to SL it was mostly new adopters and mall-based shopping – in order to find new content you had to move an avatar in the world.

I built a theme-based store and a community formed around the items I sold. For a time I was in the top sales categories. I advertised using the in-world ad system.

But then the entire ecosystem and economics changed from immersive in-world participation — to buying stuff on the web devoid of community, or an engagement with creators.

Bryan relates what happened next to what's happened when small local businesses in the real world were forced to compete with Internet-based retail giants:

The same problem we are facing with Amazon and other massive online retailers [IRL], we faced in SL and it didn't go well.

Small creators who gave great service and friendships and immersion were wiped out by commercial designers (and real life brands) who were skilled at moving inventory at volume – and presented the same products and services you could find at major brands.

This is why SL got reduced to lowest common denominator – and why there was a brain drain.

SL was a small town place of fantastic creativity – that got run over by marketing people and venture capital – who drove governance and meta world issues for a grab at maximum profit. These people killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

I don't quite follow how real life brands hurt the SL economy. Back in the golden age for RL marketing in SL, I never tired of pointing out that SL-based brands performed better than RL-based ones. (How many people even remember Armani's failed attempt to launch its brand in Second Life?)

That to one side, I think there's something valid to this Amazon-versus-small town stores analogy. At minimum, removing the sense of immersion and the thrill of immersive exploration certainly hurt Second Life's sense of community engagement. To the point where it now feels mostly like an online shopping mall combined with fashion photos mostly meant to encourage… more online shopping.

Posted in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL

13 responses to “Second Life’s Web-Based Marketplace Hurt Second Life’s Community Like Amazon Hurt Small Town Stores (Comment of the Week)”

Nodoka Hanamura

March 8, 2021

I’ll admit I’m a wee bit conflicted. The marketplace is nice and helps people get exposed to the public, but at the same time, events like Collabor88, Uber, Kinky Event and the sort all do that. That and I’ve felt that point to point teleportation has been a bigger issue beyond just selling products. It’s hurt the mainland in a way, a vast, beautiful land that while it has its’ flaws, has gems hidden in the rough that deserve more attention, love and care. But no, we have people hiding away in skyboxes and regions far from the mainland, isolated from the rest of the grid to play dress up and use it more as barbie dressup than a place where they can express themselves, connect and make memories like the ones I and countless other residents have.
If I had a say in things at LL, I’d try to get a test group of regular residents together to see about a hybrid system between point to point and the old telehub system – where you can teleport within and adjacent to the region you’re in with a 30 second cooldown, but to go off
mainland you have to go to a telehub, and from there you can pretty much teleport a select limited amount of times before you have to head back and select a new location, tweak it a bit and try implementing it publicly for a while to see what effect it has. It’s a bit wonky but I think it’d help get people to go explore more, instead of zipping all over the place.
It’s not perfect, but If it helps reinvigorate the social and exploratory experience of SL, then damn the convenience of teleportation.
I’d also consider cutting costs of tier on mainland. It needs to be done. It has to be done. That or Linden Lab has to increase Land Impact allotment across the board. Same with a viewer rendering pipeline rewrite for Vulkan, policy changes, among other things.
SL is full of potential and is hampered by a company that while I have respect for it and its’ employees (for the most part) – Is unable to understand the gravity of the problem with the SL experience as it is right now. The cloud uplift alleviated some of these issues, such as with sim crossings, but that’s only one part of a bigger problem.
Onboarding new residents is a hassle, take it from someone who has brought people into SL before – and Welcome Island doesn’t do much to help them.
The Viewer’s performance is atrocious and it’s the fault of both Linden Lab and content creators who cannot be arsed to optimize their mesh and textures.
At least if there was a renderer rewrite to take advantage of modern hardware (Multi-core processing and shifting the rendering pipeline to be more GPU-intensive than CPU), it could be remedied to some extent, at least on higher end PCs – I should not be getting 30 frames per second on moderate to high settings with my Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 1060 – in a relatively low impact area like my house, at 32m draw distance.
I know Linden Lab just got done with one helluva capital expenditure with the cloud transition, but fuck me if I feel we deserved a viewer rewrite more than we needed to be moved to AWS.
I would have willingly put up with bad sim crossings and worse network performance for 1-2 more years if it meant that I’d at least have superior client-side performance compared to what we have now.

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seph

March 8, 2021

Bit of a false dichotomy to me.
Marketplace is an augment for in-world business. You’ll have a hard time finding a store owner saying they feel oppressed or destroyed by Marketplace in the way Amazon effects small business.
A better parallel is your local bakery and the farmers market. Marketplace is the farmers market. Its good for however its used; as an addition or alternative or nothing at all.
Also I think saying ‘Second Life community’ is akin to saying ‘Twitter community’ or ‘Facebook community’. While Second Life isn’t as big as those platforms obviously, its long since been big enough that it houses thousands of separate communities that have nothing to do with one another.
Stores, clubs, RP sims, residential sims and so on can singularly be large communities with thousands of group members by themselves. There’s no glue that holds a Bloodlines faction to a Belissera boating club for example. There’s no ‘Second Life community’ just like there’s no ‘YouTube community’.

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FlipperPA

March 8, 2021

Disclaimer: I was the founder and coder of SLBoutique.com, one of the original web-based SL marketplaces. I eventually sold it to an in-world company, that in turn, sold it to Linden Lab to become part of the current SL Marketplace.
Some of the impetus behind the original marketplaces (SLExchange, SecondServer, and SLBoutique) was to counteract the “scourge” of in-world malls. There were many complaints in the early days of SL about in-world shopping areas (and clubs) creating massive lag, being eye sores, and generally not being aesthetically pleasing.
Resources were especially precious back then, and malls with every box set to be a light source with scripts in them could bring a sim to a crawl. Someone with a 512 square meter plot could tank and entire sim – and not maliciously, just with a badly built shop.
I also wasn’t aware that anything had “killed” SL. I haven’t been an active resident in years, but it still seems to be quite a vibrant world to me, unlike Multiverse, Blue Mars, and Entropia. Second Life has succeeded where very few have: Second Life is coming up on being operational for TWO DECADES. That’s pretty incredible.

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sirhc desantis

March 9, 2021

Well now. Had a shop in a mall very early on and – it was a mall with all the drawbacks noted by Flipper above. Never got in to the magic box thing because – was off doing other stuff. Viewer managed MP came along and – gosh having a shop anywhere I want is suddenly fun again! Mine is a waste of space so don’t bother but group has a couple of nice ones. So nope, MP did not kill SL the same way TP or the loss of ‘reputaion’ scores or sculpts or flexi or (name whatever the personal bugbear of oldbies is) did.
BTW, Bryan Ogden might have a bit more weight if the org its name points to did not have “Even if you are already using a chat bot for customer engagement – and you should be” + more woo plastered on it. Small creators with friendly service my furry bottom.

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katrina lane

March 9, 2021

Market Place has introduced me to many new creators I was previously unaware of and their inworld stores. If you find something on MP that you like by a creator then generally you will head to their store and browse. At least that is what I and my friends like to do. I have seen things also at a place such as Cosmopolitan that I liked so have stopped and looked in the store.

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Carlos

March 10, 2021

Not true… First of all – if people is buying stuff on the website, it means they need stuff to use and spend time inworod, actually website market search and tools help people buy faster and buy more, promoting SL Economy…
Second – there is still the huge need for inworld shopping, who buys a house or clothes without checking it inworld first ??? We use the website for quick find and display but afterwards we go inworld for inspection and final decision…
Third – many users dont even buy stuff, they are in for the Social and is not the lack of inworld stores that make people go away if they really like SL…
WHAT kilked SL, I mean limited, cause is not dead at all, were 3 other major factors:
1 – Expensive tiers, just check Opensim prices that still make money for the companies at incredibly much lower rates (servers became cheap, LL is just being greedy), and the way those prices limited small creative projects… Developing a fine contributive project or business with land requires long time investment and development and tiers add up very quickly, choking the small fish, so only the same old big fish can thrive and even those end up closing…
2 – Non intuitive UI, SL does not take first time visitors or newbies by the hand, you need a University degree or very patient long tutoring just for the very basics
3 – Viewer and not browser – Most potential new users and fresh blood and fresh money, are kept away because the fact you need to install a viewer, it creates a huge barrier… If you could send ur friends and family a simple link on Facebook or Instagram and with a click they were Browser Inworld, oh boy, oh boyyyy…

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Carlos

March 10, 2021

The same week you take away or limit (COOLDOWNS) teleportation you loose half user base on the spit, forever, dont you even dare thinking about it… JUST DONT…
Go ahead and test it, spend 3h on SL without teleport or being able to teleport only each 15 mins, TRY and come back to comment…

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TaraLi Jie

March 10, 2021

Ok, I think Bryan is far from wrong, though perhaps incomplete. I agree that the web-based marketplaces are a major part of the problem through breaking immersion. I’m not so sure that having RL brands in world did that much harm, in part because many of the RL brands didn’t take the time to try things out and learn to do it right.
However, that was just part of the immersion breaking. Mesh came along, and completely ruined in-world building, because honestly, despite a number of tricks tried, you really can’t do in-world building of meshes. And that lead to the mass importation of external meshes, ones already created for other games, ones made for advertising, etc. There’s no way to script a mesh to change shape, other than some very ugly tricks involving downloading already bandwidth-heavy assets. This may have changed with animesh, but as I understand it, that’s strictly for avatars – if you wanted to create a sculpture for your garden, you’d have to create the mesh, a bot account (complete with floating name tag to Mar the setting), an animation to pose that mesh, and the only scripting you could do to have it respond to inputs would be to shift into one of a few predefined poses. Sucks.
Of course, this started way back, with textures and sounds – there never was, as far as I can tell, a way to paint your own textures, or record your own audio right in the client, though the addition of voice would have made that latter one almost trivial.
And there are other things that would have been nice. Randomize linden trees and grass – the parameters for these are stored clientside, and are easily replaced with and editor, but the actual data needed for them is fairly tiny – in fact it can be packed into the data structure for a particle system.
Editing sculpties in-world wouldn’t be too hard, either. Add nodes on the sculptie to grab and drag, while in edit mode only send updates to moved nodes to the server and from there to clients that can see that sculptie, and once out f edit mode, store the final result permanently back on the asset server.
Hell, scripting windlight settings would allow for some awesome effects – imagine days that get shorter and longer, or fog that arises at dawn, then fades as the day progresses?
So many missed opportunities. Edit mode to create poses and animations in-world. Constructive Solid Geometry to create meshes. Just – keep people in-world.
Oh, and Carlos – if you think framerates suck in Second Life now, a browser-based interface would make you choke. Aside from that, the basic versions of WebGL only came out in 2011, by which time there were avatars 8 years old.

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Tyler Ferland

March 10, 2021

I agree marketplace really drew from the entire secondlife experience and lost alot of the inworld creativity and growth we used to see.

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Tekinette

March 10, 2021

The marketplace is just more efficient, the main difference is that it’s a less adventurous way to shop.
I don’t think the marketplace killed small stores, it helped killed commercial store rental, that’s about it. And even then it’s not really dead, it’s been replaced by Sim hosting events, which is a better way to renew the place and keep the traffic high etc… I’m not sure I get the point of the article.
My main issue with SL is that Linden labs doesn’t seem to reward people that just want to make places that are fun to explore, which is what keep SL relevant, so you either need to pay every month to maintain a place for others to use or you make places with entry fees that turn away new people but help pay the bills, either way it’s not good.

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Lina Pussycat

March 10, 2021

This opinion is so far off base it seems to be written by someone with some grudge against marketplace sellers because they themselves were a bad creator or bad at the business side of thing and got angry when people could just look on the marketplace.
I’ve been in second life since 05 I was around when you had to teleport hub and even back then mall places were heavily frowned upon. Good shops had their own stores along the mainland from the teleport hub that you’d fly from the teleport hub.
This would be akin to saying giving the local mom and pop places to sell online with a marketplace centered around themselves largely and decided on by everyone what succeeds and what doesn’t is somehow relegated to being amazon and destroying those same small businesses.
Malls have not been popular in Second Life for about as long as I can remember. The big brands even back in the d ay had their own shops or they’d form a conglomeration of like 2 – 4 shops total like. The malls that were around were a laggy obnoxious mess (much like they are now) and almost no one bothered to go there unless that was the only place a store was.
I had a tattoo shop in a mall for a long ass time in the early days. My profile saying I did custom tattoo work and a forum post saying I did as well as teach people got me far far far more sales than a mall location ever did because again they simply were not popular.
I knew the big designers back then too. I was at one point a larger name in the club scene in second life. Let’s actually break down why Bryan is upset here. He’s upset that people don’t have to go through malls which were largely ignored even in the olden days to notice his store that was never really big to begin with (I’ve never heard of the guy at all).
This idea that the web creates a situation where you are devoid of contact with the creators is also freaking bullshit. If anything I’d say contact with creators has actually grown far more in recent years. SL was small back then much much smaller so your likelihood of actually personally knowing a creator might of been higher (I was friends with quite a few lindens as they frequented the club I used to own).
Having a theme based store and a lot of traffic also didn’t mean you sold a lot. Traffic for a long time was dubiously calculated. Also the notion of people moving volume is a big disingenuous as best. Everyone in second life can move volume as you are not confined by the amount of something you sell. You aren’t selling a one off product here and there or having to keep inventory of items thus needing to order stock.
This may come off as “rude”, but it sounds perhaps like Bryan didn’t want to actually invest his time and energy into new creations and making more products people wanted to buy which “shockingly” means you see very little sales volume and if you don’t adapt as things change in second life technology wise (sculpted prims to mesh and so on) you get left by the wayside and i’ve seen many a people whine and cry about other things in second life “killing it” when that is actually what they mean and they don’t actively try.
Let’s also get into this bullshit of “Small creators who gave great service and friendships and immersion were wiped out by commercial designers (and real life brands) who were skilled at moving inventory at volume – and presented the same products and services you could find at major brands.” This is entirely untrue. The idea that “major designers” are the big people in Second Life is ridiculous. Every single “big brand” that is majorly popular in second life at the moment is not some major designer or even someone backed by a major brand or designer and are those same small creators that actively have engaged in new products for people to actually buy.
Blueberry didn’t start off being the giant store that it is today. All the big creators now were all small at one point. I’ve given advice to some of the stores when they were new and I’ve seen them rise to prominence. You know why they succeeded? They made a good product, they interact either personally or with staff with their customers and offer good support and they also are trying all the time to make new products. If you sit there create like 3 products (that are not an ongoing service) and then hope you can make sales constantly you will basically get nowhere fast as you are sitting there waiting for growth of second life to make you sales instead of making sale to existing players by making something new.
No matter how interactive you are or the community that forms you are still going to run into a wall if you don’t keep up with the times and make new products and that is the driver for sales.
I perhaps have a unique perspective well beyond the “average” second lifer or even content creators. I was an official mentor (I was able to go to the locked help islands that only newcomers came to) I was also on the firestorm support team, I’ve created items for sale, helped do some of second life’s firsts, offered people advice, and have seen where problems rose up.
First and foremost here – one of the things that hurt second life massively was the new user experience. This slowly improved with the mentor program and hud tutorials, but M Linden cut a lot of stuff that was designed to help the new user experience Another thing that hurts Second Life is some people mystifying how things are actually done. Some people act like it is this big scary thing that you can’t easily learn the basics of and frankly that is not true in the least. What people that are new need are a small helping hand of things and they learn it well.
I do have to disagree with the comment saying installing a viewer is a problem. A web based interface would fair no better and would require far too much hardware per resident that it would not make any sense from any real point of view… Cloud computing also creates a larger amount of latency and if you aren’t thinking cloud computing and instead are thinking of running second life in a browser using a graphics API that would involved tweaking parts of the engine to actually work well in a browser. A browser based viewer has been tried many times and while some services have managed to do it a lot of the time it is meant to work with a bot system these days.
Overall though. The marketplace is not the reason second life hasn’t seen growth and a lot of this guys complaints are seemingly really unfounded and he sounds like someone that just couldn’t make it as stuff expanded beyond his comfort zone.
As far as mesh ruining in world building that was a given though particularly given that editing a mesh in real time would take a lot more computing power than you’d realize. Saying even sculpties wouldn’t be hard while accurate to an extent ignores a lot of things such as sculpts are using a map to approximate a shape, you’d have to create far more than just adding nodes, you’d have to add nodes and then have it be able to process to a new image constantly in real time and then approximating it which is way more complex than simply scaling something up on the x y and z axis. It is not really anywhere near that simple and there is a reason almost nothing allows for editing a mesh in real time. Hell to edit and render it out properly in real time is a lot more work than you’d think (this comes from someone that used to mentor game designers)

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Lina Pussycat

March 10, 2021

@Tekinette You could put up a donation box and that helps some. There is a reason that they no longer reward popular places people go and that is because people were abusing it.

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AndrAIa

March 11, 2021

What if Linden Lab offered a shop/commercial space for premium subscribers along with housing? I know we can’t have commercial space on our private land, but land tier is so high. I remember before Xstreet, there were a lot more “shopping mall” type of places, so yeah it made it super convenient and you don’t have to pay rent or tier to have a shopping space, even though I like seeing stuff in world before purchasing it.
I don’t have anything useful to add, but I thought maybe adding in a commercial space for subs would be a cool way to get people into creating and selling their work in world, instead of just hosting it on an online marketplace. It would be supplemental instead of a replacement.

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