I used SL for 11 years, using Voice chat almost entirely (with the rest being group chat, IM chat, or IM voice)
In my 11 years of SL, I’ve probably spent an accumulated time of less than 10 hours actually reading local chat texts.
Easily over 99% of all my SL interaction has been via local voice channel.
Whut? Is this a Furry community thing? Adeon, you're making my head do the scanners exploding head thing. Really, 11 years in SL and only read text for 10 hours? SL is FULL of text. my combined chat.txt logs from my years of logging local are 122MB. That's 122MB of pure text. Then there's the IM's and group chats. Do you not use group chat? I've been in SL since July 19th of 2006. I almost never use voice, in fact, there wasn't any voice chat when I joined. And I can't imagine using voice at various social venues, too many people, it would be chaotic beyond belief. The communities I've been involved with in SL don't use voice. And in general, while I do leave voice enabled, I almost never use it. I have to have some serious trust in people to use it. Also one can't log voice and my logs have saved my bacon
I’ve never felt any sort of strong connection to someone only talk to via text. It feels so emotionless.
You're making my head explode again. Text is full of emotion. Right now, my text I am writing here is conveying my "Whut?" I've formed many an emotional attachment over text in SL, and in IRC before SL. To me, SL has always been "IRC, but with avatars, shopping and things to do with other avatars"
That said, I use voice chat in private groups.
How did your private groups handle large numbers of people?
I feel like you may be too late late. Once Discord came around, the good aspects of voice chat - private communities, with strong, real connections between people, moved to discord.
Discord is propietary IRC with voice added in, I don't understand the appeal of it when IRC and decent IRC clients already exist. To me, it's just a propietary re-invention of the wheel used by people who don't know IRC already existed.
This meant they no longer needed to be in the same sim - or the same game - but also grandfathered these communities preventing new ones from forming.
Which communities? Were they communities with a large out-of-SL presence anyway?
Which is a shame, I joined SL just as voice chat was added, and it’s all it is to me. I was never interested in reading text messages. I’ve moved on too.
Noob! ;-) But I'm wondering, how did you communicate with the masses of SL who didn't use voice? Or were your activities in SL confined to a specific voice using community?
Maybe it’s an generational thing
What generations are we referring to here? I'm 51.
but no one I know has huge friendships over exclusively text. It’s too impersonal/cold. Rude, even.
You're making my head explode again, Adeon. Text...impersonal? My goddess Adeon, LETTERS are a thing, e-mail is a thing, IRC is a thing, Facebook messaging in text is a thing. People have been making friendships over text for centuries. Hell, people romanced over telegraph even. And don't get me started on the people who made friends via Compuserve, the Source or Quantumlink.
Plus if you ever do switch to voice you learn it was never actually what you thought it was.
What do you mean by that?
What do you mean by that?
There is no room for misinterpretation.
Whut? Homophones are a thing, why do you think the military alphabet exists? Don't tell me you've never had to implicitly spell out words over voice when they were misunderstood.
Talk to me via text or via voice and you might as well be taking to two entriely different personalities and it’s nothing I’m doing on purpose.
Whut? I'm sorry Adeon, but this makes no sense to me. I can hear my "internal voice" while writing.
And this isn’t just true for me, it’s true for everyone who I know well.
I have a question, and I hate asking this one, but I think it is necessary for context. Are those communities you're a part of/the people you know, heavy with the "Autistic-spectrum furry" demographic?
This is totally a problem in High Fidelity where voice is the only option. Even with its small user base I've run into at least two guys who have been harassed over this.
One reason I rarely use voice, except with people I trust. I'm premium, I could use voice morphs, but again I use voice so rarely to begin with.
I have trouble following a conversation in voice if there are too many speakers, or if there is also music or background noise.
Yep, voice is useless for large groups, unless it's more like a lecture where one person is designated to talk.
Also, I’m often using SL at late hours when I don’t want people to hear me talking aloud.Text is silent and private. Combined with headphones, it keeps SL from being heard by my nosy housemates.
Yep, my work schedule is such that even on my days off, I'm up when others are asleep. It's yet another reason I don't voice in SL.
On a computer my fingers are busy and I would rather you call me on discord than text message me because typing and reading requires my attention but using my voice let’s me multitask.
Question, what are your fingers busy doing? Coding? WASDing in some game?
Voice in private communities are almost always meta. I like meta. I pretty much have exclusively talked meta for 12 years.
(Meta = talking about SL within SL: viewer development, scripting, texturing, modeling, technical support, bugs, new features, avatar modding; the kind of discussion that’s zero fun for an immersionist)
How the hell can you talk about technical subjects in SL like tech support over voice. Homophones are an issue as well as having to implicitly spell some things. Suppose you've diagnosed a technical issue that requires a user to delete their settings.xml. It would be FAR easier to tell them how and where to do that via text than voice. Another example, I commented on a Slashdot post where someone was complaining about systemd logging and how it doesn't go to the traditional syslogs. I told them that systemd can and in most cases DOES forward to syslog so they could use their old-style methods, but that isn't the default on Fedora. I also told them how to change it, which requires an edit in /etc/systemd/journald.conf Explaining that in text was far easier than if I had tried to explain that in voice. I would have had to implicitly spell out the path and probably the edit too.
Not only that, but copy and paste is a thing. Notice that the Firestorm support channel is text. And if you go to various classes in SL about various things, they would be done in text.
Again, Adeon, your whole "I don't use text in SL" thing just makes my head explode because text is extremely important in SL. For goodness sake, SL has notecards and LSL commands designed to recieve/send/manipulate text! Maybe SL was never a good a fit as a platform for you in the first place.
same as my uni course which was media production and editing (did lots of radio and films and presentations ....). In school, I was the default designated narrator for anything .... life really is unfair.
