Very interesting article about SL on The Guardian

[Moon Adamant]

... if a bit long!
Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life
Thanks to Sudane who pointed this

[Jerry McNally]

And here's another one from The Atlantic by Wagner James Au. I thought his comments linking diversity with exclusivity were interesting. That, and The Guardian's article make nice companions to Draxtor's documentary.

There Will Never Be Another Second Life
Still, despite this miraculous diversity—or perhaps because of it—mainstream adoption of Second Life remains elusive. The utopian ideals that contributed to Second Life’s longevity as an online community may also have relegated it to a niche platform. To encourage as much free-form user creativity as possible, Linden Lab adamantly refused to market Second Life as a game. That effectively made the virtual world uninviting to gamers (who subsequently moved on to Minecraft and other popular sandbox games), while leaving new users confused and adrift. At the same time, this lack of consumer categorization excited a disparate coterie of academics, artists, and other nonconformists who became regular denizens of Second Life—but who might have refused to join had it been positioned as a mere video game.