It's a bit hard for me to say if I found Second Life hard to use or easy to use. I started my time in Second Life before I began there with my nonprofit so I had completed the steepest part of the learning curve in advance. I will say that at that time the endless help I received from friends and strangers alike made getting into Second Life much easier. The fact that every single person was a noob that didn't know anything at one point tends to make all your foibles insignificant. The interesting part about Second Life is that often, if done with grace, you can ask almost anyone for help. You just have to be willing to reach out and do it and sometimes that takes getting over our fears of looking dumb. A bit of good humor goes a long way with that.
As to being difficult I can't help but compare Second Life to any new social media or computer tool I've used before. Watch people who aren't computer literate get onto the internet for the first time and you'll see that they are just as frustrated and confused. When you are completely new to anything it is difficult and overwhelming.
As far as what makes people stay, it's what I've always said about Second Life... life is what you make it, in Second Life or real life. What makes me stay is the interaction I have with people I would have never met if confined just to the web or face to face interaction. The fact that perfect strangers are willing to spend time helping you get started is amazing, and I'm not talking about volunteers here, just random avatars you pass on the street. In fact it's that helpfulness and compassion that inspired me to create my own nonprofit, Seattle Free School which is a nonprofit run completely without cash donations of any kind. In Second Life I eventually realized that all these helpful people weren't some strange helpful subset of real life but just a large cross sampling of real life. People are helpful, willing to give their time if they can and it's not terribly inconvenient. It's a good lesson to learn. Thanks to Second Life I have free website hosting for my nonprofit Seattle Free School from a good friend of mine in France whom I've never met in person. If that isn't randomness and beauty I don't know what is.
As for what to do there's far more then virtual dating and fantasy avatars. Explore the incredible artistic talents of so many of the people in this alternate world. Connect with other people like you- I can't help but think of the vets groups in Second Life and how wonderful it is for these men and woman, many of them suffering extreme mental and physical trauma, to be able to log in any time of the day and night and find people that actually understand what they are dealing with. Learn a new skill. The list goes on and on and on. Again, it's up to you what you want your Second Life to be. Like life it will be as limited or expansive as you are.
As for nonprofit interaction I've found a number of great people to work with in Second Life and helped spread the word of my other nonprofit, Community Voice Mail, through this world. We've had interest in starting new sites, new agencies have signed up and a number of CVM champions have been born thanks to Second Life. We’ve had interactions with folks who offered to volunteer for the nonprofit and interaction with employees of one of our corporate grantors, showing that we’re as interested as they are in discovering how to get the most out of these new technology tools. All in all it’s definitely worth the small amount of time we actually spend maintaining our Second Life presence.
"time consuming, hard to navigate, very high bandwidth and computing demands, and a user experience and interface that's really designed more for on line dating and games than non-profit interaction"
The same was said of the web not all that long ago.