Who’s number is on the bathroom wall?

For some time a few of the Second Life™ related blogs have been on about Second Life’s reputation and whether it s a bad or good girl rep and if bad, what has to be done about it. But, Canary Beck posits Second Life has little if any reputation outside the user community.  Canary and I both recently looked at the search engines to see what they might show people searching for Second Life and I virtual worlds. The results are pretty much sexless. But, today Hamlet is still on about how bad the reputation is because of a post on Reddit… really!?!

Baby, when you finally get to love somebody, guess what, it's gonna be me..

Baby, when you finally get to love somebody, guess what, it’s gonna be me..

Admittedly Reddit gets a lot of use. But, what is a lot of use? How do we compare that to other services and social sites? First, there is a Redditmetrics.com that tells us something about which sub-reddits have the most subscribers.  There is a way to see how many of those subscribers are actually reading a Reddit page. (Traffic) One can also look to see how many are reading a given sub at the time you look. (Notice in the right column of a sub-reddit.) 

Hamlet found his example in the Today I Learned (TIL) sub-reddit. (example) His whole article is built on a single thread in TIL. So, let’s look at TIL. TIL has 8,849,002 subscribers and at 4PM PT there were 14,339 current users reading TIL. The traffic stats for TIL are not public, or at least they show as ‘forbidden’ when I try to access them. But, A similar sub AskReddit with 8+ million subscribers runs about 20 million unique users per month or 600+k per day.

I wonder how many days such a post would remain prominent? When I wrote this Hamlet’s post and, I assume the Reddit post, was 3 days old. I could not find the Reddit post. I had to use Hamlet’s link to get to it. I learned a lot about sorting and searching Reddit posts looking for it. Basically, I had to know the title to find the then 3 day old post. So, one doesn’t just stumble on it forever and ever.

However, if you know what you want to see is in TIL and related to Second Life, you can search that sub for Second Life and it is the first post to appear. But, how many looking for a virtual world, or even Second Life, will know to do that? I think it is a rather small number.

If you start to read the discussion, I think you’ll find it isn’t all that bad. One guy goes off at the start, but after that it is a fairly mellow discussion. It is mostly real. A few idiots comment, but there is no way to stop that. No matter what the Lab does or how SL or Sansar change, there will be people that bad mouth them and make stupid erroneous comments… essentially lie while talking about what they don’t know.

So, Hamlet is basing his whole opinion on one comment in Reddit that MAY BE a few hundred thousand saw and if they read the thread they would have gotten a bunch of offsetting positive information too. That isn’t really a problem.

Perspective

Hamlet opines on how marketing types tell us how hard it is to live a bad reputation down. There are examples to support that hypothesis. Think Enron (2001)… or if you are old enough to remember EXXON (1989). So when asking older friends about bad reps I got EXXON and the cliché ‘the sign of the double cross.’

There is no doubt that reputations known by a significant number of people will persist. But, the number of people that know about Enron and Second Life are incomparable. (Have you seen Mr. Robot? Did you notice it uses the Enron logo for Evil Corp?)

Hillary Clinton has numerous negative articles written about her. In the Nixon era both Franklin Polk and Jerry Zeifman, lawyers working on the Nixon impeachment with Hillary, called Clinton a “liar” and “an unethical, dishonest lawyer.” If she had submitted the brief she worked on to a judge they both believe she would have been disbarred. But, how many people know about her brief or understand what she did wrong? Few.

Currently about half of Americans still trust Hillary even after more and more revealed emails proves she has been consistently lying about email, her mail server, and most other things. My point being: bad press and bad reputation are not always a negative. Whether anything said about Hillary is true or false the negative comments are being made daily and in general her reputation is surviving. If a high profile reputation like Hillary’s is surviving it is really easy to see how a low profile reputation like Second Life’s has little to worry about.

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3 thoughts on “Who’s number is on the bathroom wall?

  1. Why does Hamlet deserve one second of reflection?

    Big deal he used to work for LL, hundreds have.

    Page clicks need to be earned .

    My current Hillary favorite is that she says she used \one device\ when she used more and that she implies over and over you can only use one email account per device.

    Even a 95 year old in a nursing home who had to get a new email when they were buried in Viagra ads knows that is a crock.

    • lol… I like your post…

      Hamlet is widely read. The counter to misinformation is accurate information. The counter to Chicken Little is rational reasoning. Ignoring either allows it to stand and spread.

      Today I saw he is still on about the sex post being at the top of TIL… I’ll ignore this one because today I still don’t see the post when I open TIL and select ANY of the sorting options.

      Hamlet is generally reasonable and I enjoy his blog. He is neither a Chicken Little or inaccurate. He has always been helpful to me and grateful when I have helped him. He and I do not always agree. Somethings we see things differently and that is a good thing. In this case it is a matter of degree. That SL has a bad rep and is linked to sex and perversion is true. Hamlet considers that a bigger problem than I do, but he has not gone into a sky is falling mode. He states an opinion. I have pointed to his sources showing I’m not seeing the same level of problem in them. Hopefully people will take what we both say, check it out at the sources, and make an informed decision of their own.

  2. Pingback: Second Life 2015 Review: July 2015 | Nalates' Things & StuffNalates' Things & Stuff

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