It's time to restore voice to the Infohubs
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Rizzy Khaos
Sometime in the last 2 - 3 years Linden Labs decided to systematically deactivate voice across all the Infohubs as a result these places are now nothing more than landing spots for Bots and the social connectivity part of second life has become more difficult.
This is because privately owned sims that "cater" to social interactions are often moderated by power hungry control freaks, be it telling you "NO WEAPONS ALLOWED" when you're holding a fork, or telling you "DONT POST LINKS IN LOCAL" when you link Marketplace for a newbie who asks where to buy clothes from, these types of interaction have now socially engineered a culture in secondlife where no one speaks in local chat for fear of triggering another person for the most sanitized of comments and getting banned from said spot.
Some of us, dont come to Second Life to live out a whole other life and make pretend and get lost in roleplay. We're just here to meet people from around the world and talk to strangers that we may never have the chance to meet with otherwise. Lacking such ease and spontaneity to what the infohubs provided in the past has made this platform feel dead and empty.
Not only is it time restore voice to Infohubs, but its also time to make them more interconnected, there could be a board that offers teleports to different infohubs across mainland, and this would promote Mainland exploration to give users an appreciation of just how big and massive this metaverse is, not unlike how Yarapods travel from one hub to another, the only problem is NO ONE VISITS these Infohubs so the yara travel pods arent even being used!
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AlettaMondragon Resident
Whew Riz, where should one even begin to comment on what you did here... I'll try somewhere.
I can't say for certain why exactly LL had started to "systematically deactivate voice across all the Infohubs", and I'm also not sure if "all of them" are affected by this, but voice was turned off at several infohubs and then other public land because of a particular problem with "refugees" from a particular privately owned voice hangout. (IM me for details if you want, I don't want to post the whole story here.) When their hangout closed due to hardcore griefing and sim crashing, these people started to gather at mainland infohubs, and the griefers that followed them caused a lot of trouble everywhere around the infohub regions. When voice was turned off at one place, they moved to another, often just next to the infohub region, and so did the griefers. So then voice had to be disabled in those other regions too. In this journey they eventually ended up in Barbarossa and finally in Ahab's Haunt, and after several days of sim crashing and other problems in Ahab's Haunt, they "got" Boardroom, and they are apparently happy there ever since.
I don't think the main purpose of infohubs was to host heated debates between uneducated, aggressive people, whether in text or voice, but the purpose of an infohub would be to provide useful information, help explore mainland and SL in general as you said as well. There are a lot of things that could be improved at the old infohubs, it would be nice to focus on those things instead of turning them into voice hangouts again.
I assume you are talking about YavaScript Pods at the end. The pods aren't related to LL infohubs, infohubs are just among their stops. And for example the privately owned Da Boom infohub is a YavaPod station. The pods roam mainland regardless of the state of infohubs, and people use them when they want to. Unlike outdated infohubs, the pods offer everyone the chance to explore mainland continents all the time. Don't be surprised though if you don't see newbies or anyone riding the pods in your area, and if infohubs are deserted. The Lab has been focusing on Bellisseria massively for 5 years, and new people are encouraged to get a Linden Home there. It might not even be bad if most people learn the basics there and only get to mainland when they're more experienced, especially since everyone has the chance to jump to mainland and start exploring at any moment from day 1.
Beatrice Voxel
AlettaMondragon Resident The above tells me that LL should do more to punish/remove griefers, if they are disrupting infohubs to the point of having to turn voice off. An infohub should be a "patrolled" spot, with CS agents parked there to make sure that any disruptives are shut down and shown the door. (But apparently this is not the case.)
SL Feedback
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SL Feedback
Hello, and thank you for your detailed and passionate feature request regarding restoring voice to Infohubs. This idea has been brought up in the past and is currently tracked. We understand the importance of social connectivity and the unique experiences that voice chat can bring to Second Life. While we have no estimate when this feature might be reintroduced, please keep an eye on future updates. We appreciate your input and hope you continue to share your ideas to help improve Second Life. Thank you for being an active member of our community!