10 ms·
Second Life by Linden Lab, the company I've worked for since 2004, turn 20 today [video]
- unixhero 3y ago"Second Life is a social experience", A dude infiltrating a biker gang in Second Life, this is top notch Internet humor for me, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaTYFs380rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaTYFs380rI
- bigyikes 3y agoCan also recommend, Daniel is my guilty pleasure. It’s only a matter of time before he starts making content in the Metaverse. (What? You’re telling me that the decades-old Second Life and Garry’s Mod are still more compelling than Horizon Worlds? But I thought they spent millions?)
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago>decades-old Second Life and Garry’s Mod are still more compelling than Horizon Worlds If I’d have been in Zucks shoes I would have Skunkworked Horizon, don’t let any of it touch the rest of meta till it’s successful and hire the entire dev and design team from ModDB, GarysMod community, Roblox game makers, VRChat community and 4chan. Because those are the places where the massively multiplayer extremely social experiences that captivate for decades are born, not the metrics driven social media timeline optimization set.
- Lacerda69 3y agoDon't forget players from anarchy minecraft servers. Most metaverse place right now IMO.
- imtringued 3y agoHe could have literally funded a competition and made 100 games and then do a closed or open beta and let the audience choose with the budget he allocated to the metaverse.
- ilaksh 3y agoI would argue that Second Life is, and has been, a type of Metaverse. People can even use VR headsets these days.
- cubefox 3y agoThe original thing called "Metaverse", in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash from 1992, described users buying virtual land from a finite area and populating it with their own buildings, and creating their own Avatars. I'm pretty sure Second Life was directly inspired by the Metaverse.
- goostavos 3y agoBowmaster Daniel [0] is probably the hardest I've ever laughed at any internet video. Like, all the way to tears during the "intruder" climax. That poor kid was so earnest, and it's so mean, but... damn if it isn't hilarious. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssr1PMSNvwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssr1PMSNvwk
- UberFly 3y agoWow. Thank you for this. My daughter and I just laughed like lunatics.
- seydor 3y agoThe metaverse is in the brain
- silisili 3y agoThis is so hilariously bizarre to me. Does Second Life have no concept of attacking? So basically all one can do is stand around making verbal threats at little cartoon characters?
- greesil 3y agoYou can also threaten to make a flying dong.
- Scaevolus 3y agoThe avatars don't have health points and the simulation lacks death mechanics like a traditional MMO. Griefing is typically achieved by placing garbage objects (if permissions allow building) or making hideous, obnoxious, obscene, and/or performance tanking avatars and ruining the look of a space.
- Animats 3y agoAvatars do have health points, and it's possible to get killed, but only in combat areas. Those exist, as games within Second Life. But ordinary residential, retail, and display areas have that feature turned off. One of the better weapons.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxHXUHA7osc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxHXUHA7osc
- carbocation 3y agoI am entertained at how elaborate the detail of the weapon is, and yet the avatar is gripping the mag instead of the handguard.
- solardev 3y agoI don't get it. He snuck into some guildhouse and... stood there? Why couldn't they just lock him out and ignore him?
- mcpackieh 3y agoBecause roleplay.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoI wasn't expecting to see Daniel(s) on here. A truly masterful troll. (I also recommend Stimpee who is clearly influence by dnsl)
- kramerger 3y agoWas Second Life partially a money laundering scheme? Asking this because I can't find any other explanation for people paying millions for absolutely nothing
- sieabahlpark 3y ago[dead]
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoThere is a ton of money in virtual goods in games. Of course second life isn’t exactly a game.
- RajT88 3y agoSony briefly tinkered with a SL clone with the PS3. Some sort of customizable social space where you could buy virtual furniture and stuff. I forget what it was called. It was a neat tech demo, but of course I would never have paid real money for anything. SL for a hot minute was the Next Big Thing. Everyone was going to have work meetings there, and have virtual homes and participate in the virtual economy. To be honest, they were more successful than I ever thought they'd be.
- sp332 3y agoPlayStation Home. It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t anything close to SL.
- RajT88 3y agoThank you. Yes, it had more graphical polish, but far less extensibility. This many years later, it's become clear what sort of crazy next-gen platform will become our "second life". It's not something with a high barrier to entry like Second Life, or VRChat. It's the ones with the least barrier to entry. Like Facebook or Twitter.
- worrycue 3y ago
- jslakro 3y agoI bought my first graphic card only for playing SL
- thinkingemote 3y agoMany PhDs were written about second life a decade ago. Wonder what the researchers are doing now. To me it hasn't changed in a decade.
- AraceliHarker 3y agoBeing faddists, they're probably doing something about AI at the moment, aren't they?
- djbusby 3y agoJust after finishing their crypto bender
- TX81Z 3y agoIt’s often only obvious some new technologies are a fad in retrospect. It’s hard to tell how they will be adopted, Second Life had a very enviable early growth curve.
- tgv 3y agoPerhaps, but only if you can get the correct buzzwords in. Such "research" is rarely about the impact of the tech itself (although there are always people trying to actually apply it, e.g. as a teaching or therapy tool), but more a way to express some overall theory (or set of theories) in a different context, as if it were an observation that can validate the theory. So yes, they jump on fashions. It affects other subjects too. I know people who've done a PhD "in" Harry Potter or Sherlock fan-fiction, but it's not about Harry Potter or Sherlock. After all, there's not that much to say about it, but they both started from some "theoretical" point of view, and then just wrapped those ideas around whatever observations they can make up about the subject. AI seems difficult in that respect. It would need actual understanding. Without that, you can't really make observations about it the way you can make them about some book or a game. Otherwise, it stays restricted to checking a few dialogs with ChatGPT and commenting on that. Here's an example from someone who did a PhD on second life about ... the MetaVerse. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-betterverse-note-diversity-inclusion-amy-e-cross-phd?trk=public_profile_article_view https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-betterverse-note-div...
- Animats 3y agoUnlike almost everything else in the metaverse space, Second Life is profitable. One of the owners refers to it as a "cash machine". Even Roblox loses money. IPO at $70, today $39. They spent too much buying market share.
- carabiner 3y agoLinden Labs only has 300 employees and a mostly rudimentary tech stack. I got to a final stage interview with them as a dev, and got the impression they were very down to earth. No leetcode questions, but some frank discussion of gameplay issues, ux they were trying to improve. I was struck by how much they knew about the game as a part of people's lives. They talked about players with mobility limitations whose entire lives are the game, and how important it was to support them. They're building an online bank to handle the flourishing ingame economy. People have full incomes from the game. It's hard to see these players uprooting to move to another platform, as much as someone might move cities IRL, just because someone built a nicer one, and abandon all of their friends and maybe their job.
- julianeon 3y agoPerhaps but Roblox looks like Einstein level engineering & business development when compared to the Metaverse, which cost half as much for 0% of the impact/name recognition/revenue.
- Animats 3y agoThey do have some impressive technology. Roblox isn't just blocks any more. The Roblox CEO is a physicist. I met him in the 1990s when he had a tiny startup in an alley off 8th St. in SF selling a physics engine called "Working Model". It took a long time for Roblox to slowly grow. It's not a make-money-fast business.
- MikeTheGreat 3y agoCould you elaborate on the engineering / biz dev of Roblox? All I've heard of it is from YouTube videos my kid watches, and I'd love to know more :)
- coderintherye 3y agoCelebrated the birthday of Second Life with its founder Phillip Rosedale yesterday (pretty sure the 20th birthday was yesterday as that is what Phillip said). He's doing a new thing to simulate effects of economies, especially around inequality, and trying to create a model system which would support UBI: https://www.fairshare.social/ https://www.fairshare.social/
- aaomidi 3y agoAre y’all hiring
- saurik 3y agoI take it they actually started in 2003?
- qup 3y agoLet's math it: today, minus twenty years. I got 2003
- aodonnell2536 3y agoMight need to double check my math here but I came to the answer 2003
- saurik 3y ago(I somehow misread the title as "I've worked on"--implying a kind of ownership--not "I've worked for", and apologize for the mistake.)
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoI found my job at Amazon Web Services through Second Life, back in 2007/2008. This is a detailed blog post where I described the whole experience [0]. My best line ever was when they said they were looking for a technology "evangelist". I replied: I built a church, I'm your guy! Of course I meant that I built the replica of the Church of Saint Francis in Assisi inside Second Life. It was incredible back then. Now we're talking about the Metaverse again, but in 2007, 16 years ago, it was so early days. Another fun facts: Amazon's PR was... annoyed at my blog post, because it didn't meet the company's guidelines. I can easily guess that at least tens, if not hundreds, of people, applied for a job at Amazon because of that blog post. I left Amazon in 2014, and now I can safely say that Amazon PR was a nightmare, and one of the main reasons why I left. I wasn't perfect, of course, but still... [0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-314ee8634da9 https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
- GoofballJones 3y agoWhat is it about Second Life that keeps popping back up every couple of years with people writing stories about it. Yet, it gets hyped again and people go there and it's a fricken ghost-town. There is no there there. It's just a whole lot of nothing. Since it's inception, I've tried and tried and tried to see what it's about, and there's nothing there except built-then-abandoned things, tons of advertising, and no people.
- dec0dedab0de 3y agoA friend of mine was super into it for a while. All the people are hiding from new players. I had the same impression as you until my friend brought me to secret parties and stuff. But it has not kept my attention more than 8 hours in the last 20 years. I always wanted to like it, just didn't.
- cykros 3y agoMy favorite thing in SL years ago was probably the Rantmedia studio that was set up to do live radio shows (which were also of course distributed as podcasts). It tied in the live audience experience with the text chat, and made for some ability to directly interact with the hosts. Now, admittedly I've seen much of the same thing achieved with an IRC channel, as the graphics didn't necessarily do a ton of heavy lifting, but it was still a fun ambience. Which is really what Secondlife was always good at -- making some atmosphere for your online chat groups. There's the ability to pull in streaming video or audio as well, to tie it all together. But yes, it's just a framework. It's what you make of it.
- cianmm 3y agoIf all the people are hiding from new players, how do new people get onboarded into SL without just getting bored and leaving?
- stcroixx 3y agoMost do get bored and leave. It’s not for everyone. Most long time players would probably prefer no new players. It’s not anyone’s priority.
- patchtopic 3y agothe last time I looked at Second Life a year or two ago, there was still no 64 bit Linux client, trying to connect to my old account quickly turned into some crazy obsolete library hell.. a quick look around and it appears to be the same situation.
- circularfoyers 3y agoDoes anyone have any insight on how Second Life compares to VRChat? Seems to me that it's the modern day version of Second Life.