What happened to Second Life since it was hyped as the Internet’s next generation a few years ago? Today tech personality and Gnomedex host Chris Pirillo offered a remarkably misguided analysis: “Nothing really ‘happened’ to it other than being overrun by people addicted to porn and gambling,” he asserts. Literally everything about that sentence is wrong, including the word “and”. Since Pirillo’s repeating a commonly held myth, it’s worth explaining why it’s so misguided here:

For starters, Second Life holding company Linden Lab banned in-world gambling in the Summer of 2007, near the peak of the hype wave. Shortly afterward, user growth hit a long plateau period of some half a million users. So it’s much more likely the exact opposite of what Pirillo claims is true: Second Life’s growth was slowed at least in part by a lack of gambling. As for porn, there’s no evidence it has ever “overrun” Second Life. In 2007, SL land mass flagged to have “Mature” content that was violent, sexual, or otherwise explicit in nature (only a fraction being pornographic), was reportedly just 18% of the total. By the end of 2009, months after Linden Lab segregated explicit content to a “red light continent”, only 6% of SL Land was “Adult” rated for pornography. And since 2008′s plateau period, Second Life has been growing again (albeit slowly), and currently counts about 850,000 monthly active users. (It still gets several hundred thousand new signups a month.) So I’m at a loss to explain where Chris Pirillo gets his information.

It is more narrowly true, as Pirillo adds, that Second Life has not evolved into “the be-all, end-all that people thought it would become.” (Indeed, that’s precisely why I’ve written about how Second Life might save its reputation as an Internet innovator.) But the reasons for Second Life’s waning status have little to do with gambling or porn.

So what’s the more likely explanation for Second Life’s unfulfilled potential thus far? Something like this: As a downloadable, resource-heavy 3D client with a high learning curve, Second Life was and is poorly positioned to strongly grow in an interactive entertainment market that’s been inexorably moving toward smartphones and web-based, social network-powered content over the last few years. This problem was probably compounded by Linden Lab’s recent misguided efforts to turn Second Life into a real world work platform, and a cultural failure to understand that SL must be fostered as a fun game/play space first. But then again, uninformed analysis from putative experts like Chris Pirillo or media outlets like the BBC haven’t done Second Life any favors either.