Wagner James Au / New World Notes

“Coming for the Content, Staying for the Community” Started With Video Games (Or Maybe Religion?) But Will Define Media This Decade [new blog post] https://t.co/cDfzgnidyc

— 👨🏻‍💻☕️ (@hunterwalk) October 19, 2020

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Here's a really interesting new blog post by founding Linden Lab team member Hunter Walk, who helped drive a lot of the early decisions around the launch of Second Life, including the very naming of Second Life. (More on that here.) After leaving the Lab, Hunter went on to become a bigwig at YouTube/Google and is now a renowned Silicon Valley VC. From the vantage of those experiences, he believes “Come for the content, stay for the community” is the principle that will drive successful online platforms.

But notably, he believes Second Life didn't get that sequencing right:

Working on the virtual world Second Life at the time I had the proverbial “front row seat” to what online interaction could look like down in the future. It was, or rather is, a fully user-constructed shared virtual world. Think Minecraft but like 100x less successful! Although to be fair, (i) Second Life is still around and profitable and (ii) many of the design choices we made were quite influential on later products. Anyhow, we over-indexed on the community and left the content largely up to the inhabitants which was only appealing to a limited number of passionate users (about half a million). I spent about three years as part of that team and the notion of “staying for the community” lodged itself deep in my cranial matter. 

In other words, Linden Lab should have created more content that would draw in a mass audience, rather than leaving that up to the SL creator community.

But what does he think SL's content focus should have been?

(more…)