Having had four years of experience trying to keep open -- and supported -- public spaces in Second Life, I can tell you boatloads of stuff about this. In a nutshell, it's this: there is not a huge demand for public spaces in SL. But...there's *enough* of a demand and *sufficient* support to make it worth it. Currently, we have about 100,000 meters of open public space at 37 locations in the SL Public Land Preserve. Despite all the expense and trouble of having to pay for the purchase of the land and some of the tier (I'm luck I have help on tier from generous colleagues like Clubside and Something Something), I continue to add spots from out of my own company's holding or I've bought new spots to add prims to existing locations, i.e. in Durango, where you now can find a snow cabin, a snow tree house, a tiny romantic ledge by the waterfalls, and a snow woods. Snow, snow, snow! They are among the popular locations -- it's a unique deep chasm sim with mountains and a Linden bridge. They don't make them like that anymore!
I've been pouring LOTS of effort into sprucing these places up now, making some new ones, adding content, fixing their problems, and working on the financial report (almost done!). At each site, I have a tip jar with the goal being the tier for that site. Half the tier is already covered by about a dozen of us (i.e. all the tier in the group called SL Public Land Preserve), but the point with the effort to collect tier in cash is for people to see what land costs (otherwise they tend to leave only $1) to keep open, and to keep experimenting to see if eventually, the general public wouldn't be able to sponsor more of this.
Currently, the tier donations only cover approximately 15 percent of the cost, so tier donors are still always needed. I have approximately half the tier covered by donors like Clubside, and for the other half, provided out of Ravenglass Rentals, I then have approximately the 15-20 percent. I also have the $50 membership fees and content sales which cover the 37 x $30 search fees each week and the occasional classified. So I have to kick in a certain amount of support each month myself and naturally, from time to time, I review whether this is worth it. I think it is -- but as I said, given that traffic is usually in the low four and three digits every day, I can't say this is a barn-storming operation. It's *just about* worth it. I need to work more at getting more support when I'm less busy.
The idea of serving the public, having public spaces, keeping open preserves -- these are old hippie ideas, of course. Nowadays, public spaces in RL are often kept open by corporations who use them merely as loss leaders. Like some big skyscraper belonging to some big company like a Sony or something in NYC will have an urban park with lunch tables on the first floor. Or they will make a donation to a public library or museum. Without business, though, government couldn't keep open public spaces, and without the public.
In SL, people have no objective need for public spaces. That's because they don't really want to be in public. They want to be in private. They want homes. Even when they want stores or clubs, they don't want EVERYBODY joining them, but just people they want to see. When logging on, most of the 82,000 people of Second Life do not chose to go to the Linden public spaces or other big public areas, or public sandboxes or our land preserve (perhaps a hundred or more a day do, judging from the small tips and purchases of content, especially the $0 content). Instead, they chose to go to their homes, clubs, stores. Malls probably have more "public space" function in SL than a park.
Of course the Lindens, being hippies (like me), want to have welcome areas, Linden sites (Anzere skiing, the Governor's Mansion in Clements), and of course infohubs, which I just blogged at length about. They want them because they are devoted to the idea of the masses, the poor people, the newbs, being taken care of in public. Public spaces are for the public -- but mainly the poor public. In RL, it's mainly kids of working single moms and the homeless who fill up the public libraries every day -- not rich people, who buy books on amazon.com. The people in the lunch spots are mainly old ladies and gents whose feet hurt (the homeless are kicked out) and the poorer office workers with bag lunches who can't go to a restaurant.
In SL, as in RL, public spaces tend to attract, well, the public. The masses. The masses are asses, some will tell you, and in SL, you can see this with all kinds of horrible stuff. Like a fat naked idiot in Ross today, who, when told to put on clothes, said "nothing fits" and put on a series of knives or parrots and a rock on his head. He kept dragging giant houses out of the library on to his head, and then barging around the hub with them. Over at a welcome area, was it Ahern, I'm told there's a woman who enacts a very vocal masturbatory scene on live voice, to the amusement of the odd assortiment of newbies and "regulars" assembled. The welcome areas are the worst, attracting loud, stupid, obnoxious and outright griefing assholes, many arriving with an expectation of either shooting or sex on demand.
I really don't know what the Lindens can do about this in the larger sense since they are so libertarian that they are reluctant to lay down the law and invoke disturbance of the peace to break up the scenes there. Judging from the very-buried police blotter, which is so invisible it has ZERO deterrent value, and no memory or reporting, the Lindens spend most of their time policing sandboxes and care more about alts who refused to provide their RL information, and newbs selling out of public sandboxes, than they do about gross behaviour in the hubs or WAs. Still, they take action sometimes, egged on by the Mentors and Volunteers who AR the scenes.
In RL, the city fathers have tried methods like blaring classical music in Penn Station to force the homeless to leave or at least sit more quietly. It seems to work. For a time, it got so bad at Port Authority that trying to get on the bus in the morning, or off the train, you had to trip over homeless people spread out on carboard boxes and blankets everywhere eating garbage-picked fast food leftovers and drinking bottles of Wild Turkey. I'll never forget this letter to the editor by this irate commuter from New Jersey. "You know, I'd like to spread a picnic blanket out every day and sit and drink bourbon all day, but you know, I have to go to work and pay my bills. Why do these people get to do this?" Indeed.
Eventually, various police actions and housing actions coordinated to get rid of the visible homeless, although they are always at the edges. The poor ye always have with you.
Of course, in Second Life, a fat man who puts a house on his head and tells you he has no clothes or a woman screeching fake orgasms on voice --- they may be poor in spirit, but they aren't poor. After all, they have DSL lines, high-end computers with great graphics card, and disposable time where they don't have to work all day. Perhaps they are like those bourbon-drinking picnickers that so angered the NJ commuter -- but in Africa, they'd be forced to glean crops or sell bricks to eat.
In any event, in SL, I think, with all my hippie 1960s and 1970s ideals, that it's worth keeping public spaces open.
Beyers Sellers can never understand my particular brand of liberalism which eschews communism but is critical of the most rapacious forms of oligarchic capitalism as well. The public sector needs support. The arts. The poor. Public spaces. I'm not a technolibertarian that says, on the one hand, the public be damned if their houses had to be foreclosed on, they were just stupid, but on the other hand, puts its hand out to get free broadband for hawking its Google search/ad sense, etc. Hypocrites. Kind of like the Intlibber types of SL that are so excessively libertarian that they won't open up even 16 m2 of passage way on waterfront to the public to pass a boat, yet run to the Lindens with their hands out to get the newbie stream -- to get customers that they can't attract on their own merits, or by advertising (like the rest of us must do).
I think that people coming into Second Life shouldn't have to be *forced* into commercial experiences, where they only have the choice of landing in a land baron's lap to learn orientation.
On the other hand, I think that commerce should be allowed, and that people should be able to advertise in welcome areas and on the splash screen so that the public has a *choice*. This can be regulated, and need not be hideous. It's normal. Everybody wins if the Lindens get paid, and we get paid.
What's happening now, however, is that those lucky enough to be blessed as Community Gateways, after passing a strict grid of requirements that do not involve paying anything extra to the Lab, but simply involve showing the Lab that you have a lot of land and a lot of customers, and a growing list of them, are getting a public commodity: the newbie stream.
The newbie stream is indeed a public commodity, if you will. It represents -- eventually -- commerce prospects for all those grabbing at it -- and for some, ideological recruitment prospects, or reputation-enhancement and vanity-pumping prospects (Lyden Marikh).
That's why everybody grabs at it so hard. Everybody wants to fix retention, but hopefully retention on their own land, buying their own products.
With the shopping site takeover driving commerce in the direction away from the world, inworld commerce will take a hit, and the grabbing at the newbie stream will be even more intense.
Right now, in the councils of the House of Lind, it will really depend on whether the old ideology supporting public spaces prevails, or whether newer, more market-oriented oligarchic ideas prevail. Some Lindens, especially newer ones, might like to completely remove all the welcome areas, or at leats retire the newbie streams to them, because they are nothing but Governance Team headaches and they actively serve to disincentivize newbies from staying, and give the Lab an enormous lot of bad press (they will never undo that first impression from a Time magazine correspondent who landed and got whacked with a giant dick).
If the Welcome Areas were deleted tomorrow, only about 100-600 regulars might miss them and complain. They'd be forced to sandboxes, clubs, malls, other areas where they'd likely encounter owners who would flick them off the server if they behaved like they do on the infohubs. A fat man walking around with a giant house on his head will simply be ejected by a club owner without even a discussion.
But how to winnow through the firehose, and pick up the prospects for retention? The reality is that apparently most people, when they come to the sign-up page, don't understand enough about their options, unless they see their native language on something like Sera Korea, to pick.
That's why I think on Help Island, they need to have billboards with the 50 odd places you can pick to go to. Is that too many? No, you can arrange it tastefully or rotate it and put builds around to suggest themes. Imagine if the Woods Between the Worlds had pop-up thumbnails -- you'd never drop into Charn, would you!
Someday, the technology may be such that a live cam of the action on that site will show on a portal window and you can click to jump into it. Is this the Croquet portal all over again? Well, portals have their place when you are at a way station, a landing, a Woods Between the Worlds. It's having only them, or having them all over, that becomes annoying and disruptive to geographical contiguity.
For now, a board with a picture would do wonders.
If, after all that, people didn't chose by flying around looking at boards (and here's where I think some of them should be bought as ads), perhaps there could be one last option to randomly be dumped to a welcome area -- but then, you need a strategy for how to deal with the public.
Dealing with the public -- the customer service state -- in an online context is HARD WORK. No one does it well. The landing areas have everybody from professors trying to find their university islands to Time correspondents to 15 year old girls and boys whose mom couldn't drive them to the mall that day, so they tried Second Life. It's not even that "one size fits all" doesn't fit for this diversity; it's that you really have to bite the bullet and say "I will not serve X and Y at all, and let them get removed by non-retention".
The Lindens long ago made that decision, to let 9 out of every 10 drop out, with the simple grid of: "are they geeks or creators who want to make or script stuff or hang out and experiment in sandboxes, or other people? If other people, let them fend for themselves and hopefully they will go away."
Now, the Lindens want a few more out of that 9. Perhaps, oh, 4 more. 4 more who will buy, explore, go to events, etc. But not LOTS more because they can't scale them in or care for them. But about, oh, 4.
To retain 4 more, they don't need public places. Or do they?
Today, standing in the infohub and helping the most recent dozen that came through, here's what I found:
o one guy seemed very educated and intelligent and wanted to learn to build. Unfortunately, we simply cannot have a sandbox on the infohub on Linden Land, or one nearby -- they just get endlessly griefed and trashed. So I gave him landmarks to some of the quieter sandboxes like Obscure, and he came back soon and said it was awfully hard and he needed a book. I told him about the Ivory Tower of Prims, and also suggested taking stuff out of the inventory and taking it apart and familiarizing himself with how the editing tools worked. He was interested -- but hearing that it really required a huge amount of skill to do something like photoshop and texture and put together the sort of build Jessica has made in Ross, he was somewhat discouraged. I told him not to be, that he could build small things and have fun, I did, and he could buy prefabs. I started trying to hand him the "100 building components" freebie folder, but got a message that folders with more than 42 things in them cannot be transferred. Is that new?
o there was that idiot fat naked dude I tried to move along
o there was a girl who kept saying "Get out! get away!" In my experience, this is usually somebody young and unschooled in worlds who thinks she has landed on a space that is her own personal starting pad with a house there waiting for her, and she is mad that other people have invaded it -- you'd be surprised how often that happens LOL.
o another woman dressed up like a tart was waiting for somebody, a date or something, didn't need help
o a few men wandered around, clicking on the tutorials, reading them, collecting freebies, not asking any questions
o a few asked "where are all the people" and "where could they find people to talk to" after seeing the bots staring vacantly (there are usually 4-6 bots clumped in the corner whose owners can't be bothered to fetch them, or script them properly so that they log off and return to home base instead of landing on hubs).
o somebody asked if I spoke French, I gave them some French sim landmarks
o yet another person wanted to know what there was to do -- and upon being told that she would have to look for what interested her with a Google-like search, and being given landmarks and suggestions, logged off; another person like this seemed bewildered and desperately needing lots of help, but as often happens, when various people started trying to help, she simply TP'd away somewhere -- people often don't really want THAT much help, like a clerk in a store who hovers too much
o a couple of the "regular" infestation arrived to spam the bulletin board with inane messages and heckle me
o a few people got the random compasses to explore with
Were any of these people served? (except for the griefers, whom I don't worry about). Do they get anything out of this experience? Could they "stick" better if they were immediately delivered into some more mildly structured experience, perhaps a dance floor in a bar with live music, or a lecture with some Answer Man randomly answering questions? (he could be a bot perhaps).
Much more highly-paid minds than mine have been grappling with these things at the Lab and we'll see what they come up with.
Meanwhile, I hope the public spaces won't be closed or nerfed out of business. I went to Ahern, risking a voice turn-off, and was pleasantly surprised to find a group of a dozen young people from all around the world -- India, Brazil, Scotland, the U.S., the UK, Portugal, Spain -- all helping someone learn how to use voice and walk around, and also to learn how to speak English more correctly. This has potential, it seems to me.
I remember as a newbie Plum was my welcome area of choice, or rather i was put there and educated by the residents which used the space.
Now it's a sandbox, the rest says it's retired, not a hangout anymore little by way of help for newbies though i imagine many pass through.
One thing has puzzled me greatly since my newbie days and even now - the vehicles sandbox ran by the lindens. There's no rezzing allowed. So umm where do you test your vehicles??? If there's a rez point i guess I don't see it as i teleport in!
I wish they'd look after and keep public spaces relevant and useful to the residents of SL
Posted by: Porky | 01/28/2009 at 05:56 AM
Thanks to some adjacent land in the next region and some nice neighbors agreeing to a swap I now own all of Oswald, my "Fantasy Forest". The region is designed to both show that the Mainland is full of wonderful places and to serve as a public meeting place for people to hold events. I have clusters throughout the region that can handle seating for four or forty and every size in between. It's also designed to show off creations from a variety of Second Life builders to serve as inspiration for people to shop and explore.
Getting people interested in using the area is the problem (and maybe I'm naive in thinking there are groups of non-land-owners who wish to hold events), one I never faced with my sandbox back in 2006. Is it my wording for Search Places? Do I have to pay for Classifieds to attract people to a public place? I have the same problem in Bella where I own the access routes to the inner Atoll waterways and have enough free prims to let people rez their boats to go off and explore. While not the big open water of the new sea regions, the river inside the Atoll offers sights to see while boating (and unfortunately some treacherous obstacles as the Lindens allow ban lines and security orbs to overlap the public waterway).
I agree, however, and support public places and think they are important. I experienced in my sandbox enough people who wanted a place to hang out, who even created groups to keep in contact, to create a feeling that these places were needed. The problem today then is how to let people know. Do I need to try to get in the Showcase? How much more effort do I need to expend beyond the cost of creating and maintaining these spaces? I may not have the potential to dump the kind of cash into the Linden coffers as home page links to a shopping site can, but aren't those of us providing these places adding to the overall image which helps the Lindens? Shouldn't they care about public places and without eating us find a way to let the residents and potential residents find us, to get back to encouraging the exploration they so highly touted back when I joined?
Posted by: Clubside Granville | 01/28/2009 at 07:50 AM
I'm not in-world now, but I'm hoping a simple search of "Oswold" and "Durango" will lead me to these places. I look forward to checking them out. I wish you all the best with donations, I know I will donate. And I'll pass the word.
Posted by: Krissy Muggleston | 01/28/2009 at 11:25 AM
*Oswald
Proper spelling is key. :)
Posted by: Krissy Muggleston | 01/28/2009 at 11:26 AM
Perhaps a look at Fermi and Little Blue Sandboxes may provide some answers. Both are privately owned. Both attract genuine traffic of 30k-40k a day and an daily average of 500 visitors. At most times there are around 40 residents enjoying the facilities. These sandboxes provide a wide range of activities, are well policed and far more popular than the Linden Sandboxes. And each has very active groups.
Posted by: Paddy Wright | 01/28/2009 at 12:48 PM
Thanks for your support, Krissy. You can search under SL Public Land Preserve or Durango. Not sure what the "Oswald" is from?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/28/2009 at 09:19 PM
Oswald is Clubside's region, and I didn't find it in search. I did find Durango, which I enjoyed and will return to soon.
Posted by: Krissy Muggleston | 01/29/2009 at 08:10 AM
You seem talk often about brazilians in your posts Profoky, are we in a grater number than i think of? :)
Posted by: Clow Hesse | 01/29/2009 at 09:39 AM
Yes, you are greater in number than you realize.
Brazil is overrepresented in SL, as you can see here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxbDc4B2FH957sq1J6R7bRQ&gid=1
i.e. it has a greater presence in SL than it has numerically in RL.
But there are all sorts of reasons for that. It's a big burgeoning country. It took over Orkut this way, too.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/29/2009 at 10:17 AM
Desmond, unlike you, I'm not interested in using the great state capitalist socialist powers of the Lab to funnel customers to my doors artificially. It's just more interesting to me to see if they get there by more organic means. Maybe that's proof that I'm not really a true good little bidness avatar like yourself, I don't know.
Having seen the list of criteria to get into the gateway, I simply couldn't clear all those hurdles anyway.
The infohub battle is about getting the Lindens to establish the rule of law. They have begin to do this more (ad farms, land cutting) and have begun cooperating with residents even though it's more like cooptation (Blake Sea) so there is a faint hope that perhaps they might become civilized.
Our job in Second Life is to help civilize the Lindens and make them fit for the broader role of guiding policy in the Metaverse.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/29/2009 at 10:23 AM
Yes i think you are right, since i joined SL in 2006 where the brazilian community was just an little flying island somewhere called vila brasil the presence became huge with the Secondlife BOOM.
There was something about SL in TV Magazines and finnaly some company brought it here and the population and business became very big.
If SL didnt had the Machine requirement it has now, a lot more brazilians would join it but hardly would be like orkut .
Thanks to share the spreadsheet good info there.
Posted by: Clow Hesse | 01/29/2009 at 10:52 AM
For future reference I presume the above comment was in regards to my comment here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/01/so-nunue.html#comment-6a00d83451cfe069e2010536f7f543970b
I see distinct issues here, even if they overlap quite a bit.
One, your infohub battle and rule of law there. Far as I can tell that's an issue you could take up with the manager of the Mainland - now just one of many estates on the grid.
Two, the issue of who shines at doing what - and I agree, if there is a bit of specialisation we can all benefit. Service providers can shine by being just that - in fact we all shine brightest in our core specialties.
Third, the new resident gateways and participation. I think the key with these is not some strict adherence to criteria (though some basics are important) - but a 'win win' for everyone involved. New residents, the grid, the people doing the gateway. That 'win win' is the very basis of civil society in the first place.
Think of gateways as a mechanism from the service provider, to allow them *to* specialise in what they do.
Of course there are criteria, there always are. It costs $L 100 to form a group, $L 10 to upload a texture. At some point, using a tool like groups or land or gateways is not 'using the great state capitalist socialist powers' ... and just using the mechanism as it was meant to be used.
It's perfectly reasonable to have criteria for gateways - otherwise 4chan and somethingawful goons would easily redefine the grid with hellish gateways of their own, drawing off the young legions only out for mayhem and lulz. I see a bit of responsibility being exercised so that does not happen, and that's a good thing.
Think of it this way, Prok - you spend hours and hours helping residents, and could stand shoulder to shoulder with others that have gateways already.
Give it a shot, and that way the Company does what it does best, and you do what you do best. Seems that supports your plan, to me.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | 01/29/2009 at 11:20 AM
Um, the Estate Manager of the Mainland, whom you imagine so haughtily as merely "one of many estate managers on the grid" is in fact YOUR big estate manager in the sky, TOO, dude. That's why you can't be afford to be so arrogant and smug about all this, and think the mainland is something you can squint at from afar through your Victorian spyglass.
The basis of civil society is not established by having one company make this ridiculously hard hoop for people to jump through -- and frankly you know full well that people have been awarded this dedicated sign-up page newbie stream without even half of the criteria met and without even a tenth of the interesting content you have in Caledon. So it's all bullshit.
The Lindens should have a range of partnerships. Anyone willing to stand on their own defended land, or on very poorly defended Linden land, and greet and help people coming into SL should be encouraged unless they are outright idiots.
The best way to encourage this is through a free market of advertising of services to newbies. The Lindens refuse to enable within their own world the same free market they so aggressively take advantage of in the real world.
But they can be pressured to open up the space somewhat.
No, Gateway is exactly what the name says on the can: Gateway. Those who are either rising on their own through the Social Darwinism of the Grid to come to the attention of the Lab, like NCI or Caledon, or those whom the Lab choses as it casts its eye about for prestigious partners who bring them cash, are the ones they want to funnel their customers too.
The problem is that these "customers" in this "funnel" are people who make up the public of the world. The world. Not the product. But the world.
4chan already redefines the grid, Desmonds. You are fucking clueless.
I have no interest in jumping through these considerable number of hoopes to become a "Gateway". Hiring 24/7 staff -- with what? My meager profits? Are you kidding?!
I have no interest in forcibly having to show "growth". Where? How? As I said, that model doesn't apply to an infohub, where the "growth" comes from LL's signups, not from me and my existing business. They are separate things.
And so on.
I don't care to be co-opted like you are, Desmond. What I want the Lab to do is not punish and obstruct people who do rise to the occasion and help newbies. And for this, I need them simply to step up on a few simple ideas. Like making it a policy not to allow bots in infohub sims because they take up space needed for real people. Like not allowing mega prims because they blight the view and lag the sim. That's all. Nothing earth-shattering here.
I also want them to give a big nod to these 14 hubs, each of which has many days 20,000 traffic on it from natural causes, not camping! and help these people fulfill their mission and not neglect or kill them.
To do so, they need to figure out how to solve the griefing problem -- and I've suggested that making a group and enabling residents to eject griefers would be a start.
In fact, this power cannot be effectively used as YOU would use it on your land. If you had a gaggle of 6 ugly avatars deliberately making themselves ugly in ridiculous get-ups, putting rocks on their head, playing sound clips and gabblign tag-lines, making suggestion or even harassing comments to newbies -- and flying under the TOS radar -- you'd make short work of them.
Such people would never get to the cell-splitting stage in Caledon. They wouldn't because anyone with private property near the infohub would eject them immediately just because they were annoying nits. You as the governor might pause for a minute and think what rule you could invoke to get rid of 6 sim-clogging idiots hobbling your mission, but in the end, you'd say "Disturbing the peace" and stop the liberal hand-wringing.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/29/2009 at 11:36 AM
>>And for this, I need them simply to step up on a few simple ideas. Like making it a policy not to allow bots in infohub sims because they take up space needed for real people. Like not allowing mega prims because they blight the view and lag the sim. That's all. Nothing earth-shattering here.
Both of these are in service terms already, effectively. 24/7 bots - or anything staying online defeating the natural logout mechanisms was against service terms the last time I read them through, though, admittedly that was a while ago.
Megaprims also, as I understand it, aren't yet allowed on the mainland due to the potential parcel overlap and griefing problems they can create. Tacitly, smaller megaprims aren't worried about I believe, but last I heard they were only formally allowed on private isles.
It's not service terms issues, it's enforcement issues that you are facing. I too would like to see 24/7 bots gone from the grid, especially during peak hours when the average joe can't log in or function to save his life. Even if the bots are 2% of the problem, that's 2% that should be reserved for real human beings.
>>I also want them to give a big nod to these 14 hubs, each of which has many days 20,000 traffic on it from natural causes, not camping! and help these people fulfill their mission and not neglect or kill them.
Agreed, I'm amazed that any people are still struggling at helping out around them for all this time.
>>To do so, they need to figure out how to solve the griefing problem -- and I've suggested that making a group and enabling residents to eject griefers would be a start.
Well, this is a tough one coming from you, Prok. You were horrifically negative about the sailing regions getting resident control over public land, yet in mere weeks you are wanting to play ball.
And that's fine, if that's truly your philosophy, but I see some principles being surrendered here. I think you would be a great infohub manager. But at the same time, read back through your criticism of same.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | 01/29/2009 at 06:23 PM