Linden Lab Lays Off 10% of Employees

Madi Perth

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Looking Into Reports of Linden Lab Staff Cuts in Engineering & Second Life Governance/Customer Support

The rumor mills are turning but looks like Linden Lab has cut staff. I was speaking with a friend in world and she has noted that user have dropped 10% since the new TOS and a large exit of Child Avatar users. Coincidence? I don't think so. I was at the governance meeting today and everyone was a no show. Tommy Linden is rumored to be one of the ones cut loose. I checked and his name doesn't show up search any more.

Alexa Linden Confirms

Alexa Linden was one of the ones that was rumored to have been let go, now looks like we have a confirmation.
 
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Madi Perth

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Is there a confirmed source that SL lost 10% of users? that seems like a lot.... But yeah... I'm worried for SL's future if they just laid off that much. I don't care about LL as a company but still like SL very much.
Alexa has confirmed they let her go. Whoever SauronLazy is seems to confirm too. Simon and Tommy Linden are not showing up in search any more. That doesn't bode well.
 
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Its just one person, two maybe, but down the road from my mainland parcel there was a guy who had a little house. His whole profile was about his love of his daughter. Who was the only one I ever saw there with him. The house had a bunch of kids toys too.

I don't think there was anything shady going on, but I noticed recently that his house and parcel are gone.

Kind of made me a bit sad. And probably related to the TOS change.
 
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Madi Perth

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Since the new TOS I've been keeping tabs on what has been going on in the child av community on SL. Most child avatars that I've talked too are feeling that LL wants them gone and has singled them out A great deal are deciding to go ahead and leave before LL finds a way to ban them.

Now I really don't personally think that LL is out to get child avatars, but a lot of people do. LL should have addressed that fear.
 

Monica Dream

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Now I really don't personally think that LL is out to get child avatars, but a lot of people do. LL should have addressed that fear.
I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't feel like I'm in danger, either. Then again, I spend most of my SL time as an adult these days unless I'm hanging out with my SL family or visiting friends. And 9 times out of 10 I'm an adult then, too.
 

Madi Perth

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Alexa Linden, Governance Staff among those laid off by Linden Lab

Reading this redit page and they seem to indicate that Alexa Lindens lay off might not be related to economic issues and hint at some kind of odd behavior on social platforms.

Tommy Linden was head of the governance board so he would have had a hand in the writing of the new TOS. A TOS that made a significant part of the user base unhappy causing them to leave SL. According to the numbers posted on Firestorm support that would be around 10% of the current userbase in a few months. On a platform with declining numbers a 10% drop is a huge loss. Tommy may have been shown the door because of this.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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Tommy Linden was head of the governance board so he would have had a hand in the writing of the new TOS. A TOS that made a significant and problematic to SL's public image part of the user base unhappy causing parts of them to leave SL. According to the numbers posted on Firestorm support that would be around 10% of the current userbase in a few months. On a platform with declining numbers a 10% drop is a huge loss. Tommy may have been shown the door because of this.
Fixed that for you.
 
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Madi Perth

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Fixed that for you.
In the future, when you do that FFY, thing you should probably strive to be more accurate. What you actually should say is minority of players, less than 4% of both adult and child AV were causing significant problems to Second Lifes public image. If Linden Lab had concentrated on fixing that issue from the start there would be no issues with Second Lifes public image today with this. Instead, Linden Lab chooses to pursue a ineffective system of 'wack a mole' policies and procedures that never addressed the real problem to start with.

Eventually this came to a head in April 2024 when Linden Lab mishandled the roll out of a new policy system meant to address this small 4% problem. Instead of correcting the real problem this caused a significant proportion of the user base to feel singled out and underappreciated for their support of the Second Life platform, causing them to exit the platform all together. On a platform with significant decline in user base; all this did was accelerate that decline by close to 10% in a few months.

Which brings us back around to the question at hand on Tommy Linden. As head of the governance board he would have had a direct hand in crafting and enforcing this policy, as well as how the system was rolled out. So, in a way, the decline over the last few months can be directly laid at his feet. Do you think this would have had a impact in the reason he might have been let go?
 
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Casey Pelous

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Way back when (when we made our own CPU's and GPU's out of mud and twigs) SL went through an exponential* growth phase. I think a lot of that was because there was some publicity about people Doing The Deed in SL, but my theory is that a lot more of the growth was due to what I'd call "critical mass." It was a positive feedback loop: A lot of people came to SL because a lot of people were coming to SL. (At the time, they all seemed to be Dutch or Brasilian, for some reason.) Long ago, someone posited that "the value of the network increases by the square of the number of users of the network." They weren't just talking about the monetary value, but also the value perceived by the users. I suppose the corollary to that would have to be that the decline phase would follow the inverse square law; cutting the population by half reduces the value of the network by four times.

Remember fax machines? Fax machines were invented before the telephone. Yet, you probably never had one until "everybody" had fax machines and then you had to have one. Every decent printer had a fax function and a telephone jack. Then email and email attachments replaced fax machines (except, for some odd reason, in the legal profession) and then, rather quickly, "nobody" had fax machines (except those oddballs in lawyers' offices).

Of course, the inevitable decline if SL will also be exponential, as in "everything's fine until one day the bottom drops out."

I'm sure LL is well aware of these curves. If they really lost 10% of their users in a month or so, it must look to management as though they may have started down the precipice.

Of course, the doom of SL has supposedly been imminent since the very earliest days. I guess if penis griefers/charging for uploads/that guy who was CEO for a while/sculpties didn't kill it, it may be immortal.

* Not real sure of my math here -- might be some sort of logarithmic curve. Actually, y=x^((log x)^2) (y equals x raised to the power of the square of the log of x) makes a really intriguing curve; a few early adopters rush in, then growth slows for a bit, then, whoosh, away we go. Nobel Prize in Math for Casey! :applause:
 

Madi Perth

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Is there a confirmed source that SL lost 10% of users? that seems like a lot.... But yeah... I'm worried for SL's future if they just laid off that much. I don't care about LL as a company but still like SL very much.
Not exactly "confirmed" sources but I think the source is trust worthy.

Second Life Stats

There are numbers there halfway down the page. With a highest daily user peek in April of 51,785, and a report of September of 46,240. The math indicates 11.3% user drop from April to September. Looking at todays online data base on Firestorm of 38,834, doing the same math, shows a ... holy fucking crap ... a 28.5 reduction rate since April.

Looking at the user data before April shows a steady user base of around 52K, with a significant reduction starting in April. Where it remains stable for a May and June, after which it starts a downward spiral after June. June would be when the full effects of the new TOS went into effect.

The numbers on this page also mirror numbers I have seen when logging on in the morning over the last few months.
 
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Casey Pelous

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Not exactly "confirmed" sources but I think the source is trust worthy.

Second Life Stats

There are numbers there halfway down the page. With a highest daily user peek in April of 51,785, and a report of September of 46,240. The math indicates 11.3% user drop from April to September. Looking at todays online data base on Firestorm of 38,834, doing the same math, shows a ... holy fucking crap ... a 28.5 reduction rate since April.

Looking at the user data before April shows a steady user base of around 52K, with a significant reduction starting in April. Where it remains stable for a May and June, after which it starts a downward spiral after June. June would be when the full effects of the new TOS went into effect.

The numbers on this page also mirror numbers I have seen when logging on in the morning over the last few months.
Not to send you on a wild goose chase, but do you have any idea how that compares year-to-year? There might be an annual drop when school starts...
 

Madi Perth

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Not to send you on a wild goose chase, but do you have any idea how that compares year-to-year? There might be an annual drop when school starts...
I'm still looking for those numbers. So far I've not found out away to get the web site to cough them up. I'm going to reach out to Daniel Voyager to see if he has them. I do hope you are right though and this is just a blip. I can see Second Life surviving a 10% drop with a recovery. I don't see it surviving almost 30% user drop in the space of a few months.
 
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Soen Eber

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Didn't the dailies used to be around 100K?
 

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Tyche Shepherd did a weekly inventory of land holdings in SL for years -- maybe still does. She would post them here (or on SLU). If she is still posting those surveys, that might be a more significant indicator than logins.

ETA: Tyche is still producing the surveys. https://www.gridsurvey.com/index.php

There's certainly a long-term grinding decay of land ownership, but I don't see a recent precipitous drop.

ETA Again: Oops. I don't see a recent precipitous drop because the graphs I was looking at ended in 2017. The front page shows data from 10/6/2024, so she's still doing some sort of survey. Sorry, but I don't have time to go digging on Tyche's site to try to find current data.
 
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Not exactly "confirmed" sources but I think the source is trust worthy.

Second Life Stats

There are numbers there halfway down the page. With a highest daily user peek in April of 51,785, and a report of September of 46,240. The math indicates 11.3% user drop from April to September. Looking at todays online data base on Firestorm of 38,834, doing the same math, shows a ... holy fucking crap ... a 28.5 reduction rate since April.

Looking at the user data before April shows a steady user base of around 52K, with a significant reduction starting in April. Where it remains stable for a May and June, after which it starts a downward spiral after June. June would be when the full effects of the new TOS went into effect.

The numbers on this page also mirror numbers I have seen when logging on in the morning over the last few months.
April to September is basically summer and the time of year when users aren't online as much. It's a normal drop that happens every year. People usually start trickling back in once school has been in session for a month or so.

That isn't to say there haven't been more people walk away from SL for good this year.
 

WolfEyes

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Tyche Shepherd did a weekly inventory of land holdings in SL for years -- maybe still does. She would post them here (or on SLU). If she is still posting those surveys, that might be a more significant indicator than logins.

ETA: Tyche is still producing the surveys. https://www.gridsurvey.com/index.php

There's certainly a long-term grinding decay of land ownership, but I don't see a recent precipitous drop.

ETA Again: Oops. I don't see a recent precipitous drop because the graphs I was looking at ended in 2017. The front page shows data from 10/6/2024, so she's still doing some sort of survey. Sorry, but I don't have time to go digging on Tyche's site to try to find current data.
I think Tyche posts that on Twitter now. Sorry I don't happen to have a link.
 
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