Correct me if I'm wrong, but for the longest time, I believe the "E-mail me news about Second Life" option during the sign-up process was opt-in, and therefore not likely to collect many addresses. In fairness to Linden Lab, the company has made many efforts to improve the first-time user experience over the years, though none have helped much with retention.Īs for whether the company could send an e-mail to those 40 million registered users (99.9% of whom quit) in an attempt to bring them back - there I'm not sure that's even possible, or maybe not ethical. Still, at SL it seems something is really wrong. After almost twenty years of business, any regular business would do everything possible to make the first week of a new avatar really a terrific experience. I have this CEO, COO executive experience of nearly forty years in tech, and I don't understand what the thinking process with this Linden Research company is.
#Lsl wiki offline software#
I mean who has executive power in a nearly twenty year old software company that has let it bread and butter application languish for over a decade without trying to recapture some of those forty million registered uses? And what software executive in two decades does not entirely fix the new avatar on the grid situation so that they stick around? You've probably heard me say this before, I've owned three software companies, the last one over a thousand employees and it just seems to me that the board of directors of Linden Research is not typical. So I'm trying, but it very time-consuming and frustrating to see how unprepared the Lindens leave these new registrations when they land on day one on the grid. I mean, it's their first day in SL and guy avatars walking around hitting on girl avatars while the guy is naked with this huge dick sticking out is way more than an opening day person can understand. I sometimes send them to the big NCI school but so many people there speak and do nonsense so that can be tricky. I tell them it can be a social world, but they have to make that happen, it won't come to them. I even ask, "Are you here because you're actually lonely in real life" and almost everyone has said yes.
Most are women, a few men, and it's sad, it really is. I certainly haven't seen many (any?) recent ads for SL which promote prim-based creation, even though that's something that would immediately be appealing to tens of millions of former Minecraft players in search of a new game world to play in.Īgain this is anecdotal, but Luther's sense is that most new users aren't joining SL to create, but in search of something more essential: This is somewhat anecdotal, but it is also my impression that most first-time users don't know Second Life is a user-created world, or even know about prims. None of them, really none of them, know that everything they see except the sky and ground was made by SL Residents.Īnd every one of them will eventually ask this question "Is this worth it?" because they have never been told this is a do-it-yourself world with no support or help getting started and it just seems so impossible for them to understand what is going on.
#Lsl wiki offline how to#
None of them know how to rez a prim, or have ever heard of the SL Market where you can search for L$0 clothing, none of them know how to change clothes or why their feet stick out of their shoes, or part of their body is transparent or what a sandbox is or where to look if you give them something. It can be difficult getting started, is there anything I can do to help you?" I find them at Big Daddy's dance place wondering how to fit in and dance or in large retail stores, not really knowing how they got there or someone on the mainland just frozen, not knowing what to do or somehow on an island in the Blake Sea not understanding where they are.Īnd in all cases, I send an IM that says, "Hi, I see you're 1 day old, new to SL. So, during the last 8-9 months, I've been looking at the nearby avatar list wherever I go and finding lots of avatars that are one or two days old. Like many in SL over 16 years, there is nothing I have not done or tried. I started with my first avatar on January 1, 2004, while browsing the web waiting for the Rose Bowl to start on television.
Reader Luther Weymann, who describes himself as a tech industry veteran who last ran a company with 1000 employees, describes his experiences using Second Life during his retirement years - and his impression of new users, and what they have to cope with: The current SL account creation page with opt-out for e-mail updates
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