Second Life - The Choice of Voice

For a while now one of my pet peeves in SL has been people who use voice indiscriminately, all the time, everywhere. It's wonderful that they have people they want to talk to so much, but _I_ do NOT want to hear their personal conversations. And they can get pretty darn personal, if you know what I mean.

Usually, unless I have to stay in the area, I just leave and go somewhere else. If I have to stay in the area for a while, I open up the voice control panel and turn down the people I don't want to listen to. It's that little button on the bottom of your screen with the headphones. Or, if like me you've trimmed off all unnecessary buttons, use the menus at the top. In that case it's Comm > Nearby Voice.

Now, it may seem like a silly thing to get worked up over, but think about it for a moment. Would you want to listen in on the 'dirty talk' of some random strangers while you're shopping for shoes? Or hear about all kinds of personal details of someone's life? I don't know about you, but I certainly don't.

And of course it makes one wonder what kind of people these random strangers are, flaunting their business in everyone's face? Have they no sense of decency? Have they never heard of privacy? Or is it just that they fail to realise that all those other avatars are actually controlled by real people? For all I know, maybe they just don't know how to use voice IM?

In any case, I finally gave up and just disabled voice chat. Much simpler and I kick myself for not doing it sooner.