“There” will be starting over. It’s likely you don’t know what There was.
Sometime around 2003, I got an email inviting me to be a “beta tester” of There. It was software that was developed as a 3D virtual world. It was fairly innovative at the time – it was built with a huge chunk of Venture Capital money. It was a great prototype, but a horrible business model. It had a lot of similarity to Second Life if you are aware of what that is.
After the beta was over, it was time to see if people would actually pay for a subscription. “Virtual stuff” in the world (clothes, vehicles, houses) had to be purchased with real money. People didn’t want to pay – they loved it as long as it was free. There paid people a referral fee for signing other people up, even if the other person didn’t end up joining and paying – so the place was flooded with millions of fake accounts. (See AOL: 1995) Money would be made from getting Wall Street investors seeing big subscriber numbers, not actual revenue or people.
The fatal flaw was as soon as ~1000 people were using the service at once, the servers couldn’t keep up. They figured the breakeven point would be about 1 million paying members. Even if the servers kept up, there wasn’t enough There there to keep it from feeling crowded. Making things even worse was that technically if a large group of people were in one place (like an in-world concert), the interactions among them explode exponentiallly and it becomes impossible to work (if you’ve ever tried to run an IRC server and watch how bandwidth explodes with the number of people on a channel, it’s the same problem)
Realizing that it would be impossible to build a real product from the prototype, the VC people bailed on the project and fired most of the staff, especially the developers and artists.
Rather than focusing on people who would pay a lot to use the service (to pay for the staff), they went the opposite direction. “Let’s make it all free and rely on volunteers!” – did I mention the software developers were from the San Francisco area? Anyone could sign up without proving who they were. The place was flooded with 11 year olds, most of whom were just interested in being rebellious kids. Even more annoying was the service included voice chat – so as you’re doing the things you enjoyed, you would end up hearing 11 year old boys practicing their newly found freedom to curse and be anti-social. Since they were not paying anything and there were no “police”, nothing could be done. If it got to the point they closed the account, there was no way to stop them from just creating a new account.
The avatars of the world were adults with the ability to customize your skin stone, how muscular you are, how big your boobs are, the color of your hair and eyes, etc… Being a 50ish male interacting with a 3D character who may be another 50 year old or might be a 9 year old girl… or the 9 year old may be within hearing range – is very dangerous – so you have to assume that everyone is 9 years old until proven otherwise. (and that women are gay men)
Another amusing angle was the conflict between There purporting to embrace diversity, but wanting to exclude religion. I bought several Jesus signs before they banned the person who kept pushing the issue. They came in useful several times for various reasons.
I found Runescape – a much less sophisticated technically, but richer environment. People have to pay to use Runescape – while the place is dominated by teens, they know there are real limits and if you cross the lines, you could lose the “stuff” you had worked for months to earn.
So There closed at some point. I just discovered that it is coming back – it will be a paid-only service and nobody younger than 18 (the old rule was 13 – but that was widely ignored, including by its own employees who let their kids “play”). While it will be an “adult only” service, it won’t be an “adult” (aka XXX) service.
So if I suddenly seem to vanish, be sure to look in There.
A “no-kids” rule is handy for a lot of online applications.