What To Do with an Offline message saying “Hi”

“Hi” – This is an offline message in Second Life. In other words, this is one of the most common lines you will receive in your email. Most of the times, the sender is someone you don’t know.

The Origin of Second Life Hi Message

Privacy has been a serious concern in Second Life since the very beginning. However, it was never addressed professionally by Linden Lab for 3 reasons:

Linden never cared about the complexity and variety of inworld interactions. They decided to use a binary solution: 0 or 1, black or white, all or nothing. You can choose to appear or not to appear online. Guess What? Most people adopted the same strategy communicating in Second Life sayin “Hi”.

Solution Unacceptably Lame

The solution was lame because the system marks you offline in 2 complete different scenarios. If you are offline, you appear offline. If you don’t want to show your online status, you also appear offline.

For simple residents this solution could be unsatisfying, but practical. For a store owner, this solution was not only useless, also confusing for their customers.

Creators requiere 2 features: privacy to work in Second Life and availability to engage their customers. It’s easy to understand why. A few years ago, Firestorm viewer added an interesting feature to the software: Auto reply to non friends. This solved a small part of the problem, but not all of it.

Best Solution: Answering Machine

It puzzles me when people talk about Linden employees saying how smart, intelligent and resourceful they are. Heck! They didn’t come out with the idea to create a ##@@ing answering machine. Really ? ?‍ 🤯😤🤬

All businesses allow customers to leave messages so why not Second Life? When the avatar contacts you inworld and you are offline, you get the message: “Second Life: User not online – message will be stored and delivered later.” Why not allowing residents to leave a custom message?

The Culture of “Hi” in Second Life

When people send an IM with “Hi”, they are not greeting you. Above all, they are testing whether you are online. It is absolutley retarded to say Hi with the excuse of getting the “not online”. Not only they do, they get the message and then they end the conversation there. Stupid, non practical, bothering and yet, that’s what most residents have been doing for years. I know, it doesn’t say much about the average IQ of Second Life Residents.

Now put in a store owner’s shoes. You get a “Hi” message, what do you do? You have to contact the customer back, if he or she is not offline, you have to wait for a reply. The process is not effective and the cause is obvious. Linden’s inefficient system.

The culture of Hi was created by Linden. If there is a “Hi” problem, it was not created by residents. It’s the result of the poor and lame tools. If you want to know more about careless actions from Linden in Second Life, you can read this other article here: 5 Signs Linden Never Cared About Store Owners

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