Whenever the #
Metaverse is being talked about, #
SecondLife, which was launched as early as 2003, either remains completely unmentioned or only pops up in comments and even then sometimes only as a thing of the past. I'll tell you why.
One key reason is because the big mass media hype about Second Life died down in late 2008.
The #
GenerationZ is too young to even be aware of it, as are many #
Millennials. If they do know #
VirtualWorlds, they believe the concept was invented by #
Roblox, #
Minecraft or #
VRChat.
Especially older people don't care for the entire concept. Many consider themselves too old for that Internet stuff and new developments there. They basically ignored Second Life back in the day because they felt "too old for computer games" back then already. Also, they've yet to understand what the Metaverse is supposed to be.
People in-between, and this includes many reporters and journalists, are more likely to have heard of Second Life or even remember the big hype in the second half of the 2000s. But since the massive media coverage and the big hype have stopped in late 2008, they are certain to know that Second Life was shut down in late 2008 or early 2009. Many others used to be aware of it, but have forgotten about it because they, too, believe it's gone. None of them can be bothered to do a
reality check.
Even if they do find out that it's actually still alive, they can't imagine that an almost two-decades-old platform has evolved in such ways that
the blocky objects, the simple avatars with painted-on clothes and stiff movements and the simple shader are all a thing of the distant past. They think it's old and not worth mentioning.
All this applies to those who are working on new virtual worlds as well. They all want to start from scratch. Nobody wants to learn from the experiences Second Life has made over almost two decades because it's "old" and "a thing of the past" even if they happen to remember it. Some worlds actually have former Lindens on their teams, but even their advices coming from experiences with Second Life are ignored, and these worlds are bound to make the same mistakes as Second Life all over again, along with all-new mistakes.
For what else they ignore completely is what made Second Life so popular. Modern virtual worlds are cash grabs first and foremost, brought to life as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible in order to be ahead of the competition and rake in the money before the competition does. The ones created by start-ups are just too obvious crypto-scams, but the ones created by big tech or media corporations aren't that much better. Their makers believe that they can simply launch a platform, sell land to other corporations or celebrities or whoever is sufficiently wealthy and needs the publicity, and then the users will come running. Especially the latter all aim to be "#
TheMetaverse", i.e. the biggest player on the field with hundreds of millions of users for many many years to come.
They're all likely to fail, to waste billions of money or lose even more in crypto-crashes. Second Life tried to do what they did 19 years earlier. Second Life failed at that, too, when the hype ended in late 2008. But it survived to this day with a rather stable user base regardless of all criticism such as the rampant hyper-monetisation.
And that's because, at the end of the day, Second Life is not about sucking real money out of people first and foremost, disregarding everything else. As greedy as Linden Lab is, it does do one thing right: It takes care of communities and user creativity. All these new worlds don't show a smidge of a sense of community, and some make it hard for users to build things. They want avatars to go to parties and concerts in order to see celebrities' avatars, gawk at expensive mansions and advertising billboards, visit big corporations' virtual HQs and spend their money on #
NFTs.
But this is not what people would want to buy VR goggles and join virtual worlds for. Lindens could tell them. Second Life users could tell them. But they don't want any advice coming from something allegedly long gone or at least outdated.
