Second Thoughts

The Actual First Hour of Second Life

LL's trashing and burning of people going through this awful orientation experience is what leads to them never coming back.

Yesterday, I went through the actual Linden orientation again, it's been a few months.

It was the most God-awful experience I've had in a long time. Say, is there anybody who does interventions in San Francisco? Cult deprogrammers? Conflict resolution experts? How about a flash mob? Or what about a good old-fashioned picket? Something has to happen to shake loose the hippie techlibs from their In-A-Gadda-Da-Secunda-Vida groove and get them to realize that this just isn't working. It's hopeless.

Oh, unless course that's the idea, that they are deliberately, consciously throttling new users and filting out feebs and choads through this method. Remember this old thread with Andrew "Throttle" Linden? My God, does this make for fascinating reading, especially in retrospect! Here's what he said in 4/05:

"It was always the intention to start SL small and let it grow. SL 1.0 was not launched ready for 1 million residents, and it is still not ready for that many. SL is growing at a very healthy rate. In fact, LL's main challenge is to develop the platform fast enough that SL's architecture can handle the next season's population. At the moment don't see many reasons to speed up the growth rate -- if SL were to "tip" and suddenly become the next big thing such that hoards of people were joining up, then LL would be forced to throttle new accounts until SL's fundamental system was more ready."

Oops. Did Andrew get voted off the island in June 2006 when they decided to open the gates to free no-payment accounts, and the corporate invasion? No.

The First Hour in Second Life

M Linden, the new CEO is apparently revisting the "first hour" issue for newbies, since that's where they lose so many people. And small wonder. The Lindens as they are don't really want to keep them. When they are ready to change from within, then they will retain customers. They aren't changed from within yet. That is the Tao of Linden. In order to change, you must change. The grid monkeys don't want more people, they will create too much of a load. Billing has enough to do. Community Lindens are busy trying to tamp down and control the upstarts that they have now, without need for fresh challenges, and so on. When the Lindens really want people and really change, they will find the rest follows.

Meanwhile, few can resist trying to stick their oar in on this subject, and I'm no different.

1. Степ да степ кругом. So the first thing that has to be changed as I've said a million times is the orientation islands. See the Russian steppe? They have to look like that. Flat. Not International House of Pancake Island flat. But, flattish. With the rolling hill and tree part happening way up in the distance. No tiny landing area where people land on your head, that is SO annoying psychologically even though your little avatar head shouldn't feel anything. Making people land on that weird Myst-like scene only gets them Pysted. Falling down winding paths. Veering off cliffs. Falling into canals. Banging their heads on the temple ceiling in order to finally see the "teleport the hell out of here" sign. Good Lord! Make it stop! So, make people land on a lag-free, non-challenging geographical landscape that doesn't make it hard to move forward.

2. Billboards. Yes, I've said this a million and three times, too. Stop the aversion to commerce, the insanity about ugly ads, when tasteful, normal, fun billboards, kiosks and signs of all types can be made and *rented out for tier payments* or auctioned or lotteried off or auction or SOMETHING that not only help solve the dearth of useful ad space (ad farms are a water-water-everywhere-but-not-a-drop-to-drink problem) but be useful and fun to newbies. Click on this club and learn to dance! Click on this island and find your dream home! Click on this class in session now! Click on that live music! Click on this newbie skills island! Click on that hocky game! Etc. Let residents with venues they are willing to have accept newbies buy the ads and help the problem the normal way, with the market. Let them essentially rent the newbie stream in part if they can handle it. Like I said, this is *internal change*, Lindens. Commerce, capitalism, sales, advertisements = good. Communism, admonitions, forced labour, re-education camps, propaganda, freebies = bad. That means no select resident stores and their lame freebies, keep it out, let them buy advertising the normal way.

3. Solve appearance fear quickly. The biggest problem people can face is fear of looking like a newbie and not figuring out how to get appearance to work. It is AWFULLY clunky at first especially the hair. Have boards the instantly drop outfits on you the second you click. Here's where residents wanting to shine should be giving freebies or renting space and the Lindens should rotate through literally hundreds of outfits a week through some automatic system, it would be fun. They can always change quickly.

4. Stop sequestering newbies *and* allowing the welcome areas turn into hangouts for asocialized lamerz and griefers. End orientation as a sanitized de-licing quarantined experience like immigrants getting off the ship in the 1890s. Let them mix normally in public places they've selected off the billboards, or in the welcome areas, but have Lindens (not resident made police or deputized mentors) police the areas and not be hesitant to break up hang-out groups filling up infohubs with infestations of idiocy. A no loitering/obstructing new user experience concept should be developed and implemented just as much as it needs to be to set the tone. People forming large hang-out groups to block up welcome areas and heckling, harassing, and nuisance-casing newbies need to be told firmly to move along.

This isn't putting SWAT teams to take away users' rights blah blah. It's preventing an obvious tragedy of the commons problem that has grown only worse with liberal guilt paralysis and heeding the ravings of extremists like Laetizia. Welcome areas are for adaptation of newbies, not homeless oldbies to hang out. You notice they never go to new areas when they become available. It's like the problem of chatting in a group. If you make a special chat group and tell everyone "Get out of the rentals group, but go chat in the chat group," they won't. Why? Because they seek not rights, and aren't sincere about socializing which they could be doing in nicer and less laggy locations, they just want *attention*. Break their ties and get them moving.

Invalid Interlocutors

Time for another edition of "Invalid Interlocutors" so I have a nice updated link to post to any forum or blog in order to address recurring patterns whereby overbearing nits who suck up to mods and irrelevant infantile imbeciles imagine they can discredit me by using one of the following dozen techniques, outlined below.

There is a type of person on a forums or in blog comments who invalidates themselves for further discussion with me by reaching for various infantile attack modes, subterfuges, fucktarded methods, etc. Here's a handy guide to your problem so that I don't have to repeat myself on a forums or blog.

Ad hominem attacks *are not* one of the invalid techniques for others or for me. I'm a big believer in what most people call "ad hominem" or "personal attacks". Most people don't even understand where the term "ad hominem" comes from because they never had to study rhetoric in college.

It's not illegal or even unacceptable in a public discourse to make an ad hominem attack. You may. Indeed, the Supreme Court that interprets the law of the land, the Constitution, entitles you to make ad hominem attacks (see Times v. Sullivan for starters). You're allowed. Not only allowed, it is considered part of the "robust" sort of discourse that is *required in a democratic society to keep it free*. When you develop a situation where little special groups of people think they can't be called names and then start enforcing their thin-skinned neuralgia, you are ALWAYS in trouble! They will always threaten your liberty! Call them names, and label their problem : )

No, ad hominem is used in a very narrow sense as a discrediting terminology -- when used traditionally. It's just that if you make ad hominem arguments *in support of an argumentation* and you use *the characterization of the person in support of the argumentation" then your argument, in high-blown theoretical terms of rhetoric, is declared "invalid". That doesn't mean you can't go on arguing by calling names, with whatever nit thinks that raising the spectre of "ad hominem" (his own special brand of weak and fallacious argumentation) will stop you.

Example: Let's say you're arguing about Windlight with its maker. And you say "But you're the maker of Windlight, so obviously you're going to support it, you're selfish and inconsiderate." In LL-land, that is considered an "ad hominem" ("to the man" argumentation) because instead of arguing your points as to why Windlight doesn't work, you're referencing the status of the man with whom you are arguing.

But, you say. Wait a minute! How fair is that?! The guy who MADE Windlight is going to be biased! Of course I can reference that! Of course I can! And yes, you sure can, and SHOULD. And that's why old Latin-school philosophical rhetorical techniques that are helpful in deciding how many angels can dance on the head of a pin are simply irrelevant and even counterproductive in the modern world where you must determine interest and motive -- "who profits" in just about every interaction, especially Internet strangers you cannot trust.

Got a Minute?

A major difficulty of Second Life or for that matter, Twitter, is that you are on the Internet with thousands of teeming and streaming strangers, 99 percent of whom are in entitlement-mode and 99 percent of whom will really waste your time if allowed to because they only want what they want.

Ten or even fifteen years of Internet use -- a solitary, lonely, on-demand, instant-gratification pass-time -- has made for really selfish, nasty, ugly assholes. The Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't even begin to explain the problem of people in solo-silo mode who are used to the Internet credo: Everyman is an Island and I Get to Do What the Fuck I Want on that island.

Sure, they may have gotten used to using email in more or less a "bilateral" or "interactive" mode, although most people still use email as if they are lobbying an Exocet missile into enemy territory, taking alternatively demanding, whiney, excessively-emo tones with bosses, colleagues, friends, and relatives.

This problem of course is why Twitter and even Second Life don't work yet at a grand level -- most people can't switch off entitlement fuck-you hedonistic mode. They want to click, get, click, get, click, get, click, be entertained, click, move off a boring page, click, buy something, click, hear something, click, be fastened. So when they come into this famous 3-D Internet page that Philip talks about, where wow, you can now "talk to" all the other people "on the page," they behave with rude, impatient, entitlement-happy indifference to those "on the same page" with them, sometimes even writing things (like one nit in Twitter wrote): "Not sure who is more boring. You or not me."

In Second Life, merchants are driven to near-insanity -- to the point that they write on their profiles elaborate instructions about how to contact them because people are such raving loons. Of course, every day I deal with this kind of problem:

"Hi"
"r u online?"
"Hi, please state your location and request so you can be helped more quickly".
"r u there"
"State your location and request so you can get help"
"I'm at a club"
"No, state the location of *your rental* so you can get help on *your rental*."
"oh"
Pause
"Sorry, I crashed, r u there?"
"Can you please state where you are renting so I can understand your request."
"I don't know".
"Well I can look through my payment records but you could also look at the top of your game screen to see the location".
"Ravenglass".
"Ok, well, that's the name of the company. Now, can you see *the name of the sim or location*.
"$500 Tropical".
"No, before that. Next to the little symbol with the guy being pushed."
"I don't see the guy."
"Ok, well, never mind, you may not have that version. Let's try something else. Go to the upper left hand corner of this message box where it says PROFILE and press on that, then get my profile and press OFFER TELEPORT."
"I can't see it. It says VIEW"
"Sorry...crashed again...r u online?"

Turning My Back on Governor Linden

Hey, time to go on strike against Governor Linden and Second Life. Or, let's call it more properly: a work slow-down for 7 days where I'm just not going to blog about Second Life, bad or good, or roam all over hell's half acre sticking up for this virtual world to all the haters -- I need to picket with the handy sign I keep in my closet for every conceivable demo: UNFAIR.

Oh, I'm definitely going to be logging in and taking care of my customers. In fact, with less blogging to do, I'm going to get to some fix-ups and improvements I've been meaning to do for a time but have been too busy, RL and SL : )

But there are just too many nasty developments coming from Linden Lab, too much nastiness from all the little sychophantic fanboyz fanning them, that it's time to put up a protest.

Oh, no, I don't think my one-man picket has much influence, and I don't doubt a job action will only draw cries of derision from the usual suspects, but you know something? I've always found when dealing with really intractable authoritarian powers that refuse to listen to people or care about them that if all else fails, you can always *just not confer legitimacy on them*. You can just withdraw your active and noisy support -- the kind of support that even dissent against Linden Lab in fact brings, because even dissenting means you take the world seriously as an intellectual proposition and defend engagement with it.

That means that I'm not going to blog about SL, go to the traffic groups, post on other sites, buy land, or do anything but wait on my customers. I'm not going to suggest sites for the Showcase, I'm not going to answer a survey about routes for the DPW -- no.

The news of the nerfing of traffic is one major reason any of us should protest, precisely to put traffic back the way it was -- my spidey-sense didn't let me down when I launched that Jira a few weeks ago.

Oh, no, I don't stand to lose from any changes to traffic in some deep way -- you know something? I am number one in the search/places category for the search term "rentals" -- without a bot, a camper, a gimmick, or much of anything at all, really, except hard work to wait on customers. ( don't allow camping or bots whatsoever on my parcels.) That is, get this amazing thing, people: I'm number one in my area NOT because of traffic because I don't have any. You would think that would sell me on removing traffic as a metric, eh? lol But the fact is, traffic matters, not just for me, but thousands of other people, and taking it out completely will kill the economy.

I Can Has Yr Stuff?

One of the SL lists I watch is called SL-Devs -- not to be confused with the far more tony and FICy Dev List that Glen Linden maintains (that's different); this list is for people who got the open-sourced viewer, and who are also interested in the open-sourcing of Second Life.

Of course, there's the predictable tekkie-wikis, scripterati, between-job contractor geeks, and griefing goons in this list, as in all things SL tech, mixed with people with Ph.Ds in real universities or companies who are actually in real jobs in the real world. Naturally, the talk there is all very technical and geeky and jargonistic, and the assumption is that because it is "just tech talk" that it only deals with "technical topics". Of course, like all SL "tech talk," under the guise of "just talking tech," vast social and political and economic decisions are being made about this 3-D streaming world where there are *other people beside the devs* -- a fact that, of course, is not in the vision field of most of the people on the list.

A good example is this issue, in which a guy whose name seems familiar (perhaps someone can memory-refresh) basically asks if he can make copies of all our stuff in SL so that he can back up his inventory, specifying, of course (oh sure!) that this would be "limited perms" (um, right). Of course he knows full well the consequences of all this. He is joined in the discussion by another guy who has been in and around the Patriotic Nigras and b-tards, top griefing groups in SL, one of the frequent-flyer annoyances on the Herald and occasional harasser of me in world. Eddy Stryker, maker and seller of Copybot, is also referenced in the discussion although the consequences of his past actions and his Second Inventory concepts aren't analyzed.

The ability to save inventory has long been a geek dream in SL, and their personal need to save their builds or widgets or scripts offline has always trumped, in their view, your personal need to save your intellectual property rights on your creations. Sure, DUH, we all get what a boon it is to have offline saves, but those insisting on simply driving through to this goal without reference to anybody else's interests or concerns are so typical of the nastyness of open-source in Second Life. The fact that nobody who is concerned about intellectual property even gets to know about this discussion unless they obsessively poke around and read every single geek-o-gram like this is also typical of the callous and indifferent attitude the Lindens themselves take to IP in their sanctioned user-generated world.

Then note the next issue, where a Linden address the "can I has yr stuff" issue -- but inadequately, because they toss the problem off to third-parties, where it is even MORE LIKELY there will be less respect for IP than Linden putatively has. Sean Linden makes a very casual assumption that Open Sim only takes things that it has "mod permissions for," but we know from the statements of Adam Zaius/Adam Frisby that he believes in making a world where there is no economy, no buying and selling, and no permission sets. I can see now how the Lindens will build up the case for their "plausible deniability" involving the sucking out of Second Life of everybody's content -- blame it on third-party sites, blame it on the inability to do anything "because the viewer can see it," and say that any concerns about this are just getting in the way of progress, just FUD, and just ignorance about technology.

Traffic Jam

The group called "LL Traffic Future" is the group to be in now to discuss the future of traffic in SL. Formed by the Lindens, the group is impossible to find in search/groups -- not because search is broken -- it isn't -- but because Lindens' server/database/power capacity is limited, and they recently borked search to make it not work on only one or two letters. So their own group's name is emblematic of the problem of search for many -- they can't find it. They find hundreds of groups with some of the words, and scroll and scroll...

Hint: use search/people for Jeska Linden and find her profile, and this group, and press on it and join off her profile link to the group. Then you can join.

The chat has been contentious, tumultuous, retarded, and totally SL-stupid in the way SL-stupid always is. It now represents only a tiny percentage of the user base, and an even tinier percent of business or land owners. A few loudmouths and special interests have joined. I'm one myself: I will fight very hard for the Lindens not to destroy the economy over this. Vote for keeping traffic just as it is here.

Now, the people in this group break down into "types" as follows:

o Widget WOMmer -- Usually an arrogant script kiddy or geek IT guy with a huge attitude and a huge heap of hate for commerce that he finds tacky or ugly. He has his little circle of buyers or customers for his scripting talents, and though he is merely a kind of Tupperware Party in Virtuality, he imagines he is the greatest gift to social media. He refuses to acknowledge anyone else's business model except Word of Mouth (WOM) could ever work, and even if it does, it is ugly and stupid and culturally inferior, like people who tote guns, believe in Jesus, and drive SUVs.

o Sappho Sex Clubber -- This club owner, often a lesbian or lifestyler who is not on the well-beaten porn track -- hates the fact that all those other sex clubs are beating her. She has 40,000 on her parcel by the natural method of just selling sex and dresses and friends, and she refuses to allow bots or camping as they are culturally inferior, resource dragging, and expensive. She is furious that other people get 100,000 camping by parking bots in the sky or under the earth, putting a handful of AFK pole dancers to work, and legions of campers scrubbing floors to empty rooms except maybe one guy from Raleigh, NC jerking off in the corner who hasn't heard yet that the *real* lesbians aren't *here* where it's all manginas; the real ones are over at Sapphos with the quality stuff.

o Desperate DJ -- This club owner, more mainstream but not in the A-list, currently has bots and campers. But he hates it. He can't look at himself in the mirror. He's here in the AA meeting of Second Life to confess his sins because he wants ALL bots and camping to be REMOVED so he never faces any competition. But since that isn't likely to ever happen, he wants traffic excised from Second Life like a cancer, so that he can thrive again without bots even, but just on the basis of friendship networks and good music.

o Presto Scripto Script Kiddy -- Presto thinks the world is his sandbox, he thinks bots should live and thrive, and if he can get away with draining a camp ground with his legion of bots, he will! He swarms around with the critters, fights for their rights, and is a good example why the few (arrogant coders) shouldn't run the many (all of us) with their programs (bots).

o RenFaire Rhianna -- Rhianna thinks commerce is icky. It's dirty and grubby and people should share and give to the planet. She makes lovely capes and gowns and has a small but loyal following that buys her wares on a themed RP sim. The sim doesn't need traffic because a rich former movie actress turned Second Life Socialist philanthropist is bankrolling the sim. Traffic would mean Other People who are often dark and ugly, especially in real life, and have cooking that smells, too, in real life. Rhianna wants everything to be Nice, and get rid of all the low-lifes who get in the way of the world being Better.

o Boutique HotnBot-hered Betty -- Betty cannot stop bots. They make her senseless with rage. The thought of inanimate beings that might spy on her having sex in her skybox are of course a horror, but the thought that they may suck out her soul when she's sleeping is a worse fear. She hates the idea that they may be nesting and replicating in the sky up there somewhere, because, well, that's evil (and who could disagree?) She has her little boutique with her little friends. She is "just in SL to have fun" and hates that people buy and sell stuff for real! What, don't they have lives or something! Betty can't really point to any actual bot sites. Well maybe this *one* with 100 people on it and only 12 girls dancing but she JUST KNOWS they are ALL OVER!

o Platform Platypus appears as a creature and bobs up and down annoyingly, lagging the sim with his avatar. He says SL is a platform with software, and people shouldn't be trying to make an "economy" out of it and "sell stuff" because it's just interesting but bug-filled code. He does sell some gadgets in his shop by buying a $100 ad in classifieds because as a rich IT guy, he makes scads of money, and this is a kind of passtime, even game. Why people think they can use SEO gimmicks like the Internet in SL just amuses him. Traffic should be removed. This will make camping disappear, and make the world safer for bots, but also make sure that there are less poor and stupid people in SL. Actually, come to think of it, the buy/sell interface should be removed because it's unnecessary, people can give each other gifts or use PayPal. Actually, why even have inventory, because a platypus needs no clothes. In fact, why not just fly around and chat indecipherably?

Happy May Day!

Actually, Molotov, on a propaganda poster saying "Beat the Drought!"

In celebration of the Worker's Day, I took on Lawrence Lessig right on his blog! I'll bet that will cause a certain fury from all his fanbois. I look forward to reading more of his books. I've read his articles on the Internet and read the chapters while hanging around in bookstores. Hilarious how slashdotters give him Republican cred because he clerked for Scalia or Posner, as if that somehow "washed off" on him, and as if that innoculates him from ever being leftist or called leftist. Actually, if you want to read a good analysis of why Lessig is allegedly not Marxist, an unwittingly self-exposing essay by the socialist Dan "Zheleznyakov" Hunter is a good place to start. Dan is the one who said, like the guard Zheleznyakov at the gates of the Russian parliament, that he was "tired," and banned me from Terra Nova.

The scary thing about Lessig is that he is around the Obama campaign, inciting extremism, flogging the left techlib agenda, and that means this thinking is uncritically insinuated into the Obama campaign, and that helps Obama lose, and that's a bad thing, because then the Dems are split worse, they fail, and we have four more years of all this awfulness. So, thanks, Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig for getting on the Obama wagon trail and helping him lose! I wish you folks would learn to restrain all your sectarian impulses.

Lessig and Beth Noveck are said to be advising the Obama campaign on new media/social media strategy. Uh-oh. I find this uber awful in so many ways but I'll be studying it carefully, first to see what it really means to be "advising". Sometimes people "endorse" a campaign and then called "advisors" but do nothing really and nobody listens to them. We can't know the tubes that lead to a failed Lessigian Creative Commons/Second Life "protect your intellectual property with Copybot" scheme and...the American economy ROFL.

Yes, I continue to marvel at the sheer bizaarness of the echo-chamber of the Valley, the little men behind so many new media curtains lol.

Funny how their cadres circle the wagons with them, too, all chiming in that I'm weird and even something called a "firthlister" -- and I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like being a Moonie.

One of the funnier aspects of this whole scene is that while I was booted from this show for calling Lessig's thought "Marxist" by Gillmor, who says his father was a community, I continued to chat with some of the haters on the website at the tech TV site, and then @stevegillmor himself came back with his lovely wife and their lovely girlfriends to argue with me some more. Gillmor kept saying bye, and kept coming back to argue. I didn't know what to make of it.

They're All Bozos on That Bus

"The future is fun! ... The future is fair! ... You may already have won! ... You may already be there!"

Wow. That was really a horrible experience! I went on this geek dude's call-in Internet/social media TV show yesterday and I can't remember a worse experience since being strip-searched and interrogated by the KGB on the Soviet border. It really chilled me, to see the totalitarian face of social media up so close, and personal.

His name is Steve Gillmor -- I never heard of him before going on Twitter. Of course, he's, as they say in Russian, "widely famous in small circles". He's one of what I would call the Gang of Four (Some days that Gang is Scoble, Calacanis, Winer -- or on other days Arrington, Israel, Feldman or others -- it's a shifting Gang lol). They're in the Berkeley Cybersalon, or basically in the Silicon Valley tech set who are either making or power-using or taking over social media in a huge way. (A typical feature of this Social Media FIC is that they, too, constantly say there is no Social Media FIC).

At first I thought Gillmor's short and pithy twitters were thoughtful and funny, when he wasn't just geeking out on tech, and I thought his very spare and white looking news site, apparently relaunched lately, pretty interesting. But then I began to see him chiming in with Dave Winer and others who were filling up the blogosphere with this Wright-speak. Winer was telling everyone to go watch Bill Moyers interview with Wright, and read this speech of Wright's, and follow that justification of Wright, and the usual Hillary-pillory.

So when I saw the news on the wires that Obama had -- shockingly -- denounced his old pastor finally, and disassociated himself from his wacky rants, I thought, wow, I wonder what Dave Winer, who has been flogging Wright so hard will say now! What will they all say, those folks trying to whitewash Wright! So I just wrote a one-liner and a link to the news piece on Obama, and wrote @scobleizer, @davewiner and @stevegillmor as he had just had a news show devoted just to Wright *and because they are all Valley tech social media dudes trying to get into politics these days*.

I wrote a grand total of...four twitters. Here they are:

Prokofy @davewiner why aren't YOU as outraged as YOUR CANDIDATE about Wright? http://tinyurl.com/5f5wnw 03:03 PM April 29, 2008 from web in reply to davewiner

Prokofy @davewiner you guys really get nutty when you go so far as to try to right the Wrong Rev Wrong here. Stop it. Get over it. Move on. 03:04 PM April 29, 2008 from web in reply to davewiner

Prokofy Neva Prokofy ""What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for," Obama said." 03:05 PM April 29, 2008

Prokofy Now, could we get the same thing from @davewiner, @stevegillmor and all the other Obama flaks on here please?! 03:06 PM April 29, 2008 from web

That's it. Those four tweets. That's what this entire drama is about lol.

Trafficking in Traffic

To Arms! To Arms! The Motherland is in Danger! Battle Stations! The Lindens are going to nerf and possibly even remove the traffic metric from Second Life and add a FIC-filled subjectively-edited Showcase in lieu of the over-gamed Popular Places. It's a culmination of many years of effort to filter out, fan, and promote those they feel are more precious than others, and not a democratic, inclusive, and diverse approach to making a world. And it's a move that will harm entree to the economy for thousands of ordinary people currently able to do so precisely because they can start businesses that get visible in search without gimmicks, or, if they chose, go to the gimmicked lots for sustenance in the form of money or clubs or friendship that will orient them in the way they select to be oriented, outside the Linden nanny-state.

The Lindens are working hard to filter, sanitize and even destroy the user-generated world. This is the latest phase of it. Indifference to this issue, or belief it won't touch you because you make word-of-mouth sales, will be done at your peril. There is a large, invisible population of people in the positive-linden-flow list who make their money from non-gamed, non-camped parcels in search. My tenants and I are among them. I won't accept the destruction of their business or mine over the problems somebody has with soiling their eyeballs with a sex parcel in Popular Places. They can avert their eyes: I don't wish to destroy businesses.

Please look up Jeska Linden in Search/People and see the group LL Traffic and join it (it's open to join, but very hard to find in the search/groups due to the new data-base-conservation measure to remove single or double letters out of search). And to vote for keeping traffic as is (separate from the Popular Places problem) go here.

If your business or non-profit or activities venue depends on search plus traffic for sales, then vote for traffic to stay just as it is.

Solving the problem of how to do Popular Places is a separate problem, and one that needs massive public discussion and brainstorming, but the solution to it shouldn't involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater and killing off the economic engine of Second Life -- most people don't use camping or gimmicks and earn their place in search the honest way by diligent work and good content -- and I'm not willing to stand idly by while those with an allergy to a few mass and crass sex and free Linden joints destroy the entire system.

In discussing this in the group now, I found a strange collection of self-interests at play: