I've been running a little store in Second Life for over ten years now. I built it up with zero knowledge of Blender, zBrush, and Marvelous Designer, and I learned those things. Forced myself to learn how to use these applications so that I could participate in a virtual economy and creator market. One that is slowly being erased by generative sludge, in Second Life, by people who don't learn things. By people uninterested in creation, or creativity, in an attempt to chase easy cash. And I'm done.
I've made the decision before to shut things down. I had a whole city that I turned on and off numerous times in an attempt to save money, or in an attempt to spend less. But it all resulted in the same outcome: I turned it off. The community isn't there, and it took a while to realize where the actual Second Life community is.
That place, is shopping events.
What I've written about before, the exploitative shopping events run by landlords making thousands of USD per week off the backs of both creatives, and their customers.
But it gets worse than that.
The marketplace itself is being flooded by slop, and flooded with advert cards run through generative algorithms in order to "improve" the look of an avatar and the products they're modeling.
Which, is high-key ridiculous.
If you can't make your avatar and your product look good without running it through an LLM, you suck at what you're doing.
This isn't to say that it's impossible to find genuine work anymore in Second Life. It's pretty easy. But, just that this is allowed to happen, and is all over the place, and people are doing it for money, that some of these so-called high profile events allow to be put on display ... is sickening.
I've talked before about my adventures in OpenSim, and it's true that the place is just kind of, like, this random mix of 2007 Second Life, and people pinning generative slop to their walls.
The difference, is that nobody in OpenSim is selling that stuff.
If I want to be part of a virtual world and talk to people in an online 3D environment, I'd rather do it in a place where people aren't making a profit off of mass-stolen work.
And you might say, "Hey, what about VRChat?!"
People in VRChat are, more often than not, way too invasive, and the place, despite having paid age verification, is filled with children. Children are annoying.
So, until further notice, or if Linden Labs takes a real stance against this trash, my store will no longer have an in-world location, and items I've made in the past will still be available on the marketplace website. I just don't think I'm going to financially support Linden Labs anymore ... which you have to do if you want to run a store in-world.
In a world dominated by the dollar, the only way to protest anything nowadays is to use your wallet. And I've given these people more money than they should probably have ever gotten from me.
Source: https://mkultra.monster/second-life/202 ... sa-closed/
