All of that may be true, yet there are still vast tracts of land in SL completely barren of anyone most of the time. Much of it feels post-apocalyptic .. a beautiful quaint seaside town, with a boardwalk and shops; an amusement park with booths and rides; a modern urban street; a lavishly detailed recreation of the Eiffel Tower -- and all of it completely devoid of life, quiet as a tomb.

We all know that Second Life isn't deserted. The chief complaint, I think, is that there is a large percentage of compelling creation that is. You speak of residential sims, yet nobody visits suburbia for leisure. When someone visits the advertised hot-spots on the search page, and place after place is gloomily empty of people, well, there's your answer on where the "SL is deserted" idea comes from.

You can write articles like this all you want, and all the SL residents who read it will beardily nod amongst themselves and perhaps make some more sidelong elitist comments about how free SL accounts are second-class citizens who obviously don't appropriately appreciate it. The rest of us will come to visit your virtual world, and after the 6th or 7th sterile, dead sim advertised as a hotspot, leave and never come back, preferring instead our usual bustling MMO or virtual space.

SL has reached a sort of virtual-world critical mass in my opinion. It's a place to create, and create you certainly have. But the amount of inhabitable space created has far outstripped the number of people who inhabit it. Even the sex sims aren't enough for tractioning new residents any more, as for better or worse you must give up personal information in order to visit them. This leads to the empty-world feeling that discourages many new residents from adding themselves to the tally of people inhabiting SL. This is the hurdle SL must cross, and the truth that many SL residents don't see -- It matters not WHY it's empty. The fact that it IS empty is enough to prevent SL from growing.