The Clay Shirky Uproar
There has been lately and continues to be a huge amount of hoopla over the number of residents in secondlife. Most of which seem to stem from questions asked by Clay Shirky’s Questioning the numbers cooked up by Linden Lab.
Let me take a moment here to explain that I am neither a fan of Clay’s nor am I against Clay. In fact I have only recently been introduced to the writings of Clay. I know, shame on me.
This big hoopla seems to stem from the thought that Clay is attacking Secondlife with an early article Second Life: A story too good to check Many want to take that personally as a negative attack on our beloved Secondlife, even though we all know the number released by Seconlife are not realistic. Thank Goodness those numbers are not accurate. With all the trouble LL (Linden Lab) is having now with the asset servers not being able to be scaled; can you imagine if there really were 2+ Million users … What would the secondlife world be going through?
Personally I think Clay’s question is a legitimate question…. What is the churn rate? (the number of people that sign up and don’t stick around to actually participate in the community) Which is impossible to answer without considerably more honest number being released by LL.
I have read articles which have had well over 100 comments left with most trying to snipe at Clay, yet almost all of the authors of the comments dance around an understanding of Clays question; saying everything from Secondlife should be measured by Gross national product not the number of users down to even more absurd responses.
I could go on for pages about this hoopla, but basically I just want to state to Clay and any of the other that happen to read this …. Clay, I for one am with you. I think I understand that all you want to do is accurately compare Secondlife to other forms of entertainment to see a percentage of its sucess rate…. and in my opinion there is nothing wrong with that. Linden Lab…. Lets get real with the numbers… if for no other reason… if you continue to cook up those kind of numbers, knowing they really aren’t an accurate picture of Secondlife…. How can we as residents of Secondlife truly have faith in anything else you say or release?
January 3rd, 2007 • 
Weirdharold • 
comment | January 3, 2007 at 21:05 | individual comment-link
Vallewag (where Shirky is writing now) has had a lot of anti-SL press. It might be interesting to go back through their archives and pull out every anti-SL post and mark the frequency. Either Denton (publisher) has an axe to grind with Linden Labs or legitimately smells something fishy with the over flowery praise of Second Life in the mainstream media.
comment | January 3, 2007 at 22:25 | individual comment-link
Clay, I for one am with you. I think I understand that all you want to do is accurately compare Secondlife to other forms of entertainment to see a percentage of its success rate
Thanks for this, and let me know if you get any numbers that seem more accurate than the Residents figures. (You’ve got my email in my comment submission.)
comment | January 3, 2007 at 22:30 | individual comment-link
TD, I’m also writing on my own blog on social software, Many-to-Many. (http://many.corante.com) Nick is re-publishing some of my stuff on Valleywag, but since the questions I’m asking are both numerical and knowable, questions of Denton’s outlook don’t really matter.
Here are the three questions I’m asking:
1. How many people (not Residents) have created an avatar in Second Life?
2. Of that number, how many have returned 30 or more days later?
3. How fast is that latter figure growing?
The wildest fan and the most ardent skeptic of Second Life could agree on these questions, and could agree that their answers are free of interpretive bias.
comment | January 4, 2007 at 00:24 | individual comment-link
Hi Clay -
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I agree those questions are important and fair but as for the bias part I must disagree based solely on where the piece is being published and the timing. I believe where your material is being published as well as the time does have some bearing on reader interpretation of bias, hence my first comment above. I didn’t say you personally have a bias, but wonder if Nick is a little too happy to have anybody with name recognition write a piece questioning Second Life’s numbers.
BTW, I do think you are right to question the numbers and agree with most everything Harold wrote in the post.
Let’s be real about Valleywag. The same Valleywag that was posting on the bathroom habits of Google execs for pete’s sake. I don’t take much seen there as serious and it’s problematic when they do try and break news because most of their content is rumor-laden and seems like sensationalism purely for the sake of entertainment. Hey, I can get with that format and have enjoyed the site, but not without some amount of suspicion as to motives.
Right or wrong, your material is subject of additional scrutiny for appearing in essentially the National Enquirer of tech. I can see wanting to get more exposure than you get in Many-to-Many, but since Denton took over the writing duties I think there has been a much higher percentage of anti-SL posts. That’s purely speculative on my part as I don’t have the exact figures, but as I mentioned to Harold above, it would be interesting to look at the data there and compare. I believe a graph would show a higher concentration of anti-SL posts at Valleywag.
Why the uptick in negative Valleywag coverage for SL under Nick’s writing watch (he’s always been the owner of course) if there is no bias? Did Valleywag just become interested in something that’s been around for 2+ years and been more active in 2006 than previously?
I wasn’t aware Nick was republishing your material. Though it’s none of my business I’m curious why in light of what I’ve laid out above and if you wanted to be taken in serious light you’d would want it republished on Valleywag? To cut to the chase, you’re doing Nick a bigger favor than he’s doing you.
And for the record if it matters, I consider myself cautiously optimistic to Second Life future. I think what they are doing for advancing public awareness of 3D virtual worlds for other than gaming (some reporters and journalists still wrongly refer to Second Life as a “game”) is noteworthy and deserving of attention, but their execution and platform itself is suspect to any person who spends more than a few days checking it out. Their biggest problem is reliability which any serious business must have. The reliability has gotten worse from what I’ve experienced and no matter how many new people/alts/avatars/residents they bring in that certainly isn’t an improving the problem.
comment | January 4, 2007 at 06:36 | individual comment-link
TD, if my material is subject to extra scrutiny for being re-published in Valleywag, it certainly deserves it. The question is “Does it stand up under that scrutiny?” If, as you say, the questions I’m asking are important, then the various outlets in which they appear won’t matter much.
If I was saying that the Lindens mulch their front lawn with ground-up baby kittens or some similarly scurrilous accusation, you could infer something from the source, but the questions I’m posing are actually pretty simple. I can’t see how the value of asking “How many users does Second Life actually have?” is much affected by the URL it appears under.
comment | January 4, 2007 at 08:13 | individual comment-link
Clay, Thanks for taking your time to stop by and leave a comment. I assure you IF I ever get any real numbers (very doubtful) I will happily pass them along.
Personally I think I understand how LL got itself into this situation way back in 2003 when first getting started… Their method of counting residents was not nearly so far off the mark, and as things progressed more and more people signed up and downloaded the software only to find their equipment would not handle Secondlife. Well the numbers kept looking better and better…until they reached a point where backtracking with more accurate figures just became a hard thing to do. Then the first mainstream press came along and those numbers were published and changing to more honest way of reporting number became even harder because their reputation wold be called into question.
I can understand how that may have happened…. It would be extremely hard to backtrack with out losing face. Kinda of like a snowball once it gets started rolling downhill.
What I think should be done is for LL to simply recognize is that they have forever changed the virtual world (for the better IMHO) and swallow their pride and lay out the true accurate numbers.
I understand there are many folks that don’t have any appreciation for secondlife… there is a huge learning curve to enter the world and not everyone is willing to invest their time to learn how to participate and reach a functional active role in the world. It has taken a year for me to learn enough to really begin to reap the benefits of Secondlife in a profitable way (admittedly I am a bit slow) and I am guessing this to be one of the reasons for a high churn rate.
I must admit that I am a FAN of Secondlife and it really wouldn’t matter if there were only a thousand people active… In fact considering all the server problems lately I think I would enjoy it more.
That said, I will do anything I might be able to do to persuade LL to bite the bullet and get more realistic with their figures.
Harold
pingback | January 5, 2007 at 20:10 | individual pingback-link
[...] This week fellow VTOR author Weirdharold posted an insightful piece about the uproar over the validity of Linden Labs reporting resident numbers. Check the comments section for writer Clay Shirky clarifying the three questions he’s most concerned about. [...]