All of a sudden, the Lindens have put Torley on the job of pimping the Infohubs. These desolate, forlorn places with their ominously cheery hippo art have been collecting at most 40 traffic points a day. The Lindens stuck them in the list of places and made them collect traffic (to see how they were doing) which means, among other things, they are diluting the whole traffic/dwell/dwellopers' award thingie in its last agonizing month.
I've camped the Infohubs now and then, as I have malls near them, and I see that no one ever comes, except sometimes the stray newbie collecting some freebies, or oldbie seeing if in fact there is anything that could be done with these blank, boring, federal spaces that have the blank, boring, federal look of all federal spaces.
Long ago, before these hippos ate my telehub and my business, I suggested that the businesses who owned the land around the telehub areas being converted to infohubs should be encouraged to form Business Improvement Districts. Those who succeeded in collaborating and making an association would be deeded the space for the group much like group deeds are given on private islands -- without the ability to sell the land. They would then frankly put their own advertising, events board, quest games -- whatever -- probably within some sort of limits, i.e. they might have been kept PG and free of casinos and camp chairs, but advertising would be frankly and firmly admitted as necessary in the world of horribly limited advertising capacity, a huge anti-business climate, and the only visible ad in game that of a land extortionist and political opportunist named Lazarus Divine.
I did IM a few business owners on various sims to see if they'd be interested in forming such Business Improvement Districts to try to save the telehub areas and make these proposals to the Lindens. Most people had only one concept in mind -- either to bail out of their business, which was now failing, or to try to get into the telehub buyback program, get some cash, cash it out, and go get an island to have a safer business, not only free from griefing and ugly builds, but safe from the endless Linden tinkering to the society which often occurs on the backs of people on the mainland and their properties. Who can blame them?
In my experience, unless you have a group behind your back already having created and done something, it's foolish to go clamour to the Lindens to do something like open up some of their Infohubs to a Business Improvement District concept. Still, it could be debated. Who, but the businesses in the area, are going to be more motivated and more interested in working for free? Of course, the anti-business gang on the forums, a determined and vicious minority, will try to kill this idea as being all about "helping barons blah blah". But of course, it merely helps the middle class because the barons don't need Infohubs, they have their hundreds of sims to sell and rent and their own worlds and "infohubs" to maintain.
Indeed, when Robin Linden said we should generate ideas about what to do with the Infohubs, and reiterated this, I had to say that their deadlines were, as usual, far too killer (it was like 6-7 days, and no one had any time to prepare something unless they already had stuff in inventory to plunk down or were part of the usual contest-winning group mafias). Not being a builder or scripter myself, I could commission something, as I've done for my own properties, but then I had to pause: why am I paying to put content, time, treasure, and talent on to Governor Linden's property, and giving him dwell?
I have my own properties to put time, talent, and treasure in and get traffic to, without having to feed the Lindens' lame effort to create "federal spaces".
If we had a real "federal government" and for that matter, a parliament and independent judiciary, I might be willing to put "volunteer work" forward to help "the community". But...I already help the community with lots of subsidized stuff, philanthropy, and low-cost rentals -- and in the face of constant government destruction of business through killing the GOM, land-glutting, removing the telehubs precipitously, and a score of other bad policies. Why should I be stepping up to "help my country" when I don't even have a country?
When I see that Torley Linden is "helpfully" proposing that these Infohubs even be rented out FOR FREE to "homes and business" I can only go into a fury, figuratively speaking (of course, it's only a game, duh). I can only shrug, and write to Torley and complain bitterly. Of course, the classic act of a disgruntled land developer is to "tier down in protest" and they think the Lindens are going to notice this "huge hemorrhage" of their bottom line *cough*. But, as Kenny Linden once crystallized it perfectly, "There's always another guy to buy the island. Do you want me to help you tier down?" That's the bottom-line attitude of the Lindens, and their attitudes to their own "Your World, Your Imagination" stuff. Sure, have that -- and have "Your Own Tier Bill" too. But then...they reserve the right to compete directly with you.
Do you know why I tiered down two sims this fall after they announced not only p2p, but newbie housing and combat sims and instructional spaces? Because telehub malls are one thing that I could count on to generate some income to more than pay for themselves, because people really did come to them and really shopped at them, duh. I know that runs against the received wisdom. I didn't chisel rent, I provided low-cost rent, but I could still hope that would cover some other aspects of my business that I wanted to be loss-leaders or subsidized to build communities. If I already had a combat sim, opened up to the public for free and only asking donations, if I already had several newbie communities with dozens of spots for only $50/week, if I already had free vending areas, if I already had free instructional and meeting spaces or asked a nominal $100 if you were a business, then why would I encourage the Lindens to offer the same? If they begin using their considerably greater advertising and building clout (with FIC help) to put out the same kind of content -- combat sims, instructional spaces, newbie housing) -- why should I be harming myself and helping them to yet again vamp their own stuff and the stuff of their pets? Why????
Writing to the Lindens, asking them why they were doing this, urging them not to do this because I and actually many other people ALREADY provide instructional space, sandboxes, newbie housing (even free housing), etc. -- it produced a deafening silence.
Because as we can now see from Daniel Linden, the Lindens conceive of the mainland as Governor Linden's Estate. They want to run it and make it perfect. They want it to show off their game. They don't want players' content crapping up the view and harming their PR. That is -- and this is really a hysterical conundrum and a contradiction -- on the one hand, they want to have as little control over content and "creativity" as possible so as to lure in content creators with the illusion of freedom, and they don't mind then if whole swathes become Purina and go to the dogs. They won't even do a modicum of even the most basic TOS enforcement. But on the other hand...they want to control it harshly to make parts of it "look good" for the media and new customers and outside analysts (including, I imagine, analysts from other game or computing companies that are eyeing the whole prize to buy it up wholesale and run it themselves, keeping the Lindens as a kind of Maxis to EA.com to continue to provide "creative ideas" etc.) So...they want to control things like combat, instruction, and newbies because that's how they influence the most active and the most new members of society, to mold them into their vision. They don't want to let that go because it would mean letting go of their ascribed Better World mission. That other people might have something roughly similar to their Better World concept in also subsidizing newbies, instruction, and combat doesn't matter. THEY want the control over it.
You could posit a concept of a federal government that would maintain public spaces -- roads, easements, free vending areas, information areas, combat areas, instructional spaces, newbie communities. Many well-meaning tekkie wikinistas imagine this is a good thing, and the thing they imagine MOST about it is a very visible and vaunted role of THEMSELVES taking part in this great Wiki in the Sky and having their scripted or built thingie prominently featured as "helping the community".
But what in reality happens with totally federally-run and chaibolist/crony capitalist type public spaces, that don't have the partnership of real authentic small/medium/big business, is something much less appetizing. This would be a rough analogy to a very socialist-minded and social-engineering society, something like the Soviet Union which used to create vast parks for the People, huge Palaces of Culture, gigantic Sports Stadiums, giant Prospekts or avenues for people to parade up and down (they didn't use to have many cars of their own) -- all built in the Stalinist Gothic mold to overawe the lowly citizen and make him realize the power of the State. The vision wasn't that different from the Tsarist-era estates where one wealthy landowner would build a huge mansion or dacha in the country for himself, and have lots of cottages for the serfs, and then have various entertainments for them, ranging from pubs, folk dancing, to magic light lantern shows.
It's not enough that the Lindens have their phalanxes of Helpers, Mentors, Greeters, etc. to sequester and filter the newbies on Help Island and stream them to their own content and their own commerce circles to buy their content -- sometimes directly out of stores right on Help Island. They also want the mainland to be something where they can infiltrate their presence everywhere.
And frankly, life on the Grid is about choices. Would I rather have the bland federal government with its warmed over 70s liberalism and lefty Better World concepts run the public spaces? Or would I rather have the Goreans or Clubb Lagg run the public spaces? Like I said, life is about choices...
You would think these Lindens had enough to do with there tiny staff of 80 covering these 2000 servers -- just making the servers work right and policing griefing might keep them more than busy. But they always aspire for more -- especially that visible "more" that they can get out of maintaining combat sims, instructional spaces, etc.
I'm trying to reflect on this from all angles. On the one hand, I'm something of a federalist (at least when it comes to a Russia-like or Yugoslavia-like situation) at least having centralized human rights and economic standards and transparency to prevent local abuses and corruption. I think a Linden federal government is a good thing. I'd rather, of course, if we have to have a government, that it be a more normal affair of three branches with their famous checks and balances. But I realize Tsar Lindenoff is not going to let go of the Estate any time soon, and if he does, it will only be to create the Soviet Union with all its All-Union Enterprises run out of the Central Committee. So probably the only hope to break up this coffee klutch of theirs is to have lots of local communities that defy federal intrusion on certain freedoms, even as they allow federal power to ensure certain standards -- for example, I think many of us could agree that there shouldn't be sims where people are griefed on the basis of race, sex, creed, political belief, etc. However, given that some "role-playing" communities actually seek these "local standards" the Lindens are about to face squaring some really nasty circles on this -- another blog topic.
It's funny that after nearly three years of sandboxing, laughing and peeking through their fingers as they watch script kiddies go about crashing the grid for fun, making socialist hippie communes, and a flurry of Hippo statues, the Lindens are finally settling down and saying, gosh, gee, we need a public commons...like the Boston Commons!
And again, I'm torn between saying, ok, good, that's a great, uniform, federalizing activity that I welcome and wish to help, and condemning it as the usual intrusive, annoying, competition to their own residents. It's because of the way they are going about it, as usual.
Of course other people long ago realized this need, and just put it in their own communities. Most big neighbourhood projects, whether a Lusk or a Neualtenberg or a Slate, have public areas for meeting. I knock myself out to put them in every one of my communities -- and of course it's just empty space I tier, out of which I can sometimes get extra prims to sell, but which normally goes to waste....except when it doesn't, which to me, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the SL adventure, to see what works and doesn't work to bring people to public spaces.
Maintaining a roster of several dozen public spaces and the SL Public Land Preserve, I could write a book about what people do in public spaces. Maybe I will some day. One of the highlights of my day is to turn on the game and do a search under these properties and see what people did on them the previous day. Sometimes they build something interesting and lasting and sell it. Othertimes they fire-prim bomb it. Sometimes they fall in love. Sometimes they come to hate each other and ask me to ban all of each other from each others' properties. Here's the short form:
o People don't gather on public spaces that you call "public spaces" and put park benches on. They run from them like from fire. I mean, who wants to sit on a boring fucking stone bark bench made out of municipal cement? Jesus H. Christ, this is Second Life, not First Life. If I'm going to sit, I want to sit on something that is far more compelling.
o Nevertheless, because some people do use their First Life memes and look around for FAQs and things like newbie housing listings and free prefabs and suggestion boxes and the Metaverse Messenger and SL Herald boxes, it's a good idea to clump these together in a little area around benches or something that says "public commons" about it. It's a shame that the one freebie municipal-looking park bench is so high-prim, but there it is, putting out other kinds of benches doesn't send the message.
o A Sandbox is probably the thing most likely to get high traffic. People even outside the community looking for a quiet place to build without shooters and assholes that you constantly find in these big Linden-sponsored sandboxes will come to those neighbourhood sandboxes -- Obscure Sandbox gets huge traffic, as does Anshe's Mature Sandbox, and at my level, my smaller sandboxes in Columbia, Hartwick, Tuliptree all get good traffic.
o Other kinds of activities are also good to have. I have a variety of things for people to click on: wishing wells, Tarot, information about the game, housing/renting/buying land info, fish to feed or watch, eating animations at tables, games like Skeeball, barrel racing, woods and builds to explore, treasure hunts, news to read and links to newspapers, the SLExchange and Ginko terminals, etc. etc. I WANT NONE OF THESE ON INFOHUB LAND BECAUSE I WANT THEM TO BE ON MY LAND TO DRAW TRAFFIC, DUH, AND SO DOES EVERYBODY ELSE IN BUSINESS.
o Regularly scheduled events are also a must. People will come to an area regularly if they know there is always an event there. In fact, some of them will even log in there regularly and hang out, or stay after the event.
o As much as the forumerati sneer at them, realistic things like eating animations, builds that actually look like pubs or houses or temples or churches, etc. make people feel comfortable and they come to them. There are some who like the theory of a modern, sharp-edged, geometric, complicated structure in this world and think avatars should be forced to like it. That's the theory behind the public toilets of white porcelain that Adam Zaius makes for the instructional spaces and the recruiting center for the Lindens when he "wins" the contests they have. But all you have to do is look at these spaces when there is no Philip Linden or Hamlet Linden in them: they are starkly empty. No one will go to these places unless chloriformed or frog-marched under armed guard if there are no Lindens in them.
o As the New York City Police discovered in trying to curb panhandling and drugs in Penn Station and Grand Central Station, music can play a huge role. They put on classical music in Penn Station, and the druggies scattered -- it drove them nuts. Meanwhile, the middle class appeared and began to linger longer over their Annie's Pretzels and lemonade. I recently discovered that one of the reasons one of my public spaces never had people on it was because it had rave/trance on -- I simply shut it off and more people came with no music than if I had tried to put on more crowd-pleasing music. The people who re-did Bryant Park made these discoveries too -- they put in lots of activities like chamber orchestras on the street or jazz at lunchtime, book stalls, latte stalls, etc. Lefties might snark about "gentrification" but people get damn sick of picking their way past hypodermic needles and people trying to hawk weed and chicks at them as they try to get to work.
o If anything, Bryant Park has TOO much in it, and that's one of the things to think of -- how to leave enough of a blank slate for people to put stuff out on themselves. What I've discovered, which mystifies me, is that you can have an elaborate build, with various interactive clicks, and people ignore it, and stand around a relatively empty place just starting at a fish stick waiting to see if a fish will come. It all depends on whether the other people they are with are their friends already and they like them. Friends will stand around on a flat plain with a rock; strangers might require more interactivity and visuals so the right mix has to be found.
Accordingly, the Linden infohubs should have room, space, rezzing ability, some free content, some information, and then go away and leave us alone.
If they can't provide a long enough time-table, and a free enough environment for actual businesses to take on these areas as Business Improvement Districts that put in content in exchange for advertising, then they should make sure that they provide just the minimum, and don't compete.
Many people have gone to a huge amount of trouble to create gathering spaces of all kinds -- and I don't mean the top laggy clubs with their raucous music, scantily-clad avatars, money balls, camp chairs, and vacant zombies either AFK or in cyber chat. I mean the literally hundreds of nice neighbourhood pubs, meeting places, coffee shops, garden cafes, jazz clubs, plazas, group seating, large homes open to the public, etc. etc. I've got dozens of these in my communities, but I'm not tooting my own horn. I see many people, especially newer people, making entire sims that have housing, shopping, clubs and public space all conceived in them as one whole. I can think of Motor City, with its tire swing, freebies, cars, and Tringo all rather nicely arranged. Or the new garden cafe in Grace, which is really turning out to be a great sim as it stabilizes away from malls set down on cheap PG land, mafias (ditto) firebombing the place etc. and now as St. Paul's Cathedral nears completion, the rentals can fill up as all the firebombers ebb away, people begin to buy in the area to put out homes and lower-impact stores, etc. It's a great thing to see, one of the greatest things about the mainland -- if only the Lindens don't kill it!
There are numerous pubs all over of the very nicest type with friendly, local people, genuine friendships, not that laggy/forced/cybery feeling that giant hypey clubs have. These are in the Elfen lands, in Ansheland, but also places like the Creative Commons fund-raiser held over this weekend. There's the club for business people that Hailly arranges on a regular schedule -- there are actually dozens of art galleries now in SL (come to Society for Virtual Architecture in Ak'sha and get the list of them to explore). SL is settling down, becoming more middle class -- and that's a good thing, as it gets away from the extremes of basic account poverty which leads in some percentage of cases to griefing, clubbing, and instability and bulk discount wealth, which leads to a feeling that only a few oligarchs own the world. The middle class is what actually helps SL become more creative and diverse and have a lot more granularity and less extremes in it.
All of this the Lindens will kill, once again, with their lefty social engineering if they start offering InfoHub spaces as fancier builds that are "rented out to houses and businesses". Houses and businesses already pay the Lindens tier, for God's sake, and the people paying that tier are desperate to get tier, traffic, business, and if nothing else, fine fellowship on their lands. Let them, and get out of their way. Don't try to provide a substitute for that.
Given that the Lindens are bound and determined to monkey with public spaces in SL, however, and can't seem to let residents themselves take care of this, we can only try to curb their excesses. I think the bare minimum is that all of us in the land development business and many people who just run their own clubs, pubs, galleries, meeting places, etc. have to object strongly and loudly to the Lindens getting into the meeting place business -- they merely draw traffic away from residents. They simply MUST NOT rent out these spaces for free or for pay, and get out of the rentals business entirely. These spaces must enhance business by providing more advertising capacity, links to other builds/spaces/activities run by residents, etc.
The single greatest recommendation I can give for these Infohubs is to have fairly large, rotating, payable billboards on them for people to advertise THEIR OWN businesses, services, and gathering spaces. Currently, the telehub-ad format really sucks. It's hard to maneuver, there isn't enough time to put both the card and the texture in, you have to know to hit "control-mouseclick" to drop the texture -- otherwise you see a "lock" icon (it never tells you that, and many go away frustrated) and it just isn't visible enough -- only one person's ad can be visible at a time. The Lindens and their FIC friends simply have to get over their fastidiousness about large see-at-a-glance billboards that might have one big add or 10 smaller ads stretched across to see all at once.
I'm amazed that a billboard I have like this at Pharos with clickable pieces to get a link to go and explore something else actually gets traffic on it, even if in the low double digits. That means if I put more effort into refreshing it and putting events on it I would get more -- without even doing a thing, just putting it there, it gets traffic.
Real people in the real world look at, and use, billboards. They don't like them in their view, in their water, in their forest at home, like this awful Lazarus and Mr. Lee stuff. The Lindens need to get rid of that and enforce their own TOS. But they COULD be putting in large billboards in public spaces. Absolutely. Could and should. The traffic and usage they will get on these billboards should put paid to the minority of forums FICers howling. I wish they would do this. Active Worlds has this when you land, as do other worlds. It's just normal. It's what you have in a normal world when you aren't hobbled by lefty social engineering design concepts where you imagine that people are going to genteely dress up in tuxes, congregate on a lawn like Apres Midi Sur L'Herbe, spot a tiny engraved placard of less than a meter in size advertising a rousing study of 18th-Century Poetry, and click on it and congregate and traffic up a storm.
The Infohubs need to have the monopoly of InfoNet ended. All residents with daily/weekly news services should be encouraged to put their newspaper kiosks/terminals in a "free press" corner the way New York City allows the free press to be put in boxes on street corners. A very light touch should be used on this free press -- it should not be censored, nor should the Lindens, under the guise of refraining from interference in fact merely let a fake public-interest entity like InfoNet, which has a very determined agenda and bias, dominate the public airwaves.
The Infohubs should also have rezzing in all of the areas, so that people can put stuff out. It can be put on 30 or 60 minutes autoreturn, but the thing most people do when they meet is show their acquisitions or creations, so that should be accommodated.
The Lindens should stop listening to all their screaming Mentors and allow newbies to rez in the Info areas. Let these lazy and feted Mentors stir their stumps to come and camp the few InfoHubs where the newbies will spawn. Mentors object that having newbies rez all over the place will make it "too difficult" to collect them all in a herd and indoctrinate them. Well, the whole concept of having newbies spawn in infohubs is to allow those of us who still have land near the old telehubs, and still run businesses, residential areas, and public spaces, to informally help these newbies and provide something for them to do. The world is too big and growing too fast to leave all the newbie stuff to this official phalanx -- which, of course contains some real bad eggs in it and is corrupt at root as a system in any event.
I imagine there aren't a lot of businesses left around the telehubs, but there are some. Of course, a real hoax was perpetrated on the Lindens. Some big barons who had telehub land clearly and unmistably purchased before August 1, 2005, which was their deadline for the telehub buyback offer, managed to sell the land to themselves or reparcel, thereby technically changing the date on the land, and then get the buyback from the Lindens. Shame on them, and shame on Lindens for being so obtuse as to not see this. One of the side effects of this bilk is that it tied up all that land for weeks in Linden hands and they are only slowly going to get it up on the auction. While they claimed they sell it for Lindens to help soak up the inflationary Lindens they just pumped into the system with their telehub buyback, in fact, they've been selling some of these old telehub parcels for dollars. Oh, well, the Lindens always do what is in their interests. It was in their interest to look the other way on these fake dates so that those barons could get the cash to buy their new bulk-auction sim areas. Basically, the Lindens just want a way to get the population controlled better, to make the green dots siphon off to newer servers and private islands and bulk areas where land barons and their staff do the work, so the Lindens don't have to.
I should point out that business is just starting to pick up after the horrible blow of the p2p, telehub buybacks, and then bulkauction sims. Business -- and the Linden rate -- might just pick up and stabilize IF THE LINDENS DON'T DO ANY MAJOR THING TO MESS IT UP AGAIN. Of course, their "reform" of the group tools, if done badly and implemented hastily, might be just that sort of thing that might mess stuff up badly. The world seems to have an incredible resourcefulness about bouncing back from all their deadly cuts and destructive changes. Free economies are like that! Now, when they remove Dwellopers in March, there will be an immediate impact felt. Therefore I hope they have the good sense not to introduce any other horrible change in March TOO to really deliver the dealth blow to clubs and other businesses.
Honestly, I really wish the Lindens would just GO AWAY and make the servers work and stop tinkering and doing social engineering.
I could spend another three hours "consulting for the Lindens for free" as Aspen urges me to do lol, but don't I have my own properties to run, where I need to develop and add content and "add value" on my own, especially since they compete with me at every turn? I don't mind competing with Anshe Chung or Hiro Queso, they come with the territory. I do mind competing with the Lindens, however, because they really do have an unfair advantage, not only by controlling MOTD, the forums, and other public media, but by having their phalanxes of free fanboyz and FIC to do all the work for them.
The InfoHubs, like all federal space in SL, will fill up with fanboyz and FIC. One could try to participate and stem this tide. I sat in at least one seemingly endless meeting of many hours as a group of land barons tried to figure out how to operate a quest, or some sort of newbie question answering station that would pay out for work in a way that camp chairs do not, and after lots of helpful suggestions were made, and lots of brains were wracked, people gave up. Because it just means yet again, spending, time, money, tier, and staff on doing something not for your own land, that has suffered huge losses with telehub borks, grey squares, GOM killing, the LinDEX falling, etc. but doing something for the Lindens -- not even the general public that you might conceive of as your customers in some fashion, directly or indirectly. You just don't find the motivation under these circumstances.
I can conclude by pointing out that the Lindens have far from analyzed or completed this very hasty and ill-advised transition from telehub to p2p. They have a hallucinatory concept that this is what people wanted and it was all good.
But..if things are so good, why is the Linden/dollar ratio so bad? It can't all be explained by telehub buy backs, referrals farming, or camp chairs.
When the GNP figure of the world changed from $40,000 to $150,000 or even $200,000 practically overnight with p2p, and yet the Linden/dollar ratio drastically dropped (now 50 cents lower than what it was for many months on GOM, i.e that $4.00 that Philip always said he would try to keep it at is now at $3.50), you just have to wonder what the hell is going on.
Of course, there's the land glut -- the Lindens just put out way too much land, but they do that because in fact, the old land on the mainland is pretty much all owned, even if that means people are waiting months and months to sell their land to get off it, or barons are spending months with it on their tier. As long as somebody owns it, even if the market is flat, it's no skin off theirs. They know the illusion of the "land is your blank canvas" is so strong that people will keep spending more and more to buy fresh fast mature up north or down south or in the northeast or southeast bulk sims just to get that "new sim smell" feeling with your avatar zooming around almost too fast from all that great FPS oxygen going to his head.
Of course, the Lindens could fix the LindEX up enormously by not having the worst possible sell-rate pop into your box automatically, so that everyone logging on sells at the worst possible rate (which makes it the buyers' market that the Lindens want it to be, of course, and benefits the Lindens). The limits on buys, i.e. the ability not to be force-fed a number, or not to have to go and study another screen but see the whole market in front of me as I figure out what my limit should be, would help the rate, as some people would realize they could put out better sell rates and wait even just a half day or a day to get that better rate on their sale.
But when I see a jump like $40,000 to $160,000, I know that what's really going on with p2p is that many content creators got the windfall of their dreams. Everyone is shopping more. It's not even p2p that works for you in terms of a map and this fake "exploration" that the Lindens still imagine people do (when in fact they face more ugly ban and bounce lines than they ever did since p2p).
What works is to press on somebody's picks or on the FIND or the Classifieds ads and go right to the place. You can even click on a build, and while in edit mode, see the author's name, click on their name, see their picks, and p2p to their store to buy their prefab -- even with the object still in edit mode on the new sim you're on (I imagine some rubber bands snapping on servers somewhere with that practice, it can't be a good thing lol.)
And what are those content creators doing? Well, they are just cashing out. Obviously. That's what they do. Their sales were languishing for so long, they faced stiff competition from new people and telehub malls, so they just want to get "what's mine" now. They are cashing out, and playing WoW. They are not sinking money back into the economy in terms of new creations that they sustain by either sponsoring others to build or have jobs managing clubs, or sponsoring the arts, sponsoring contests, sponsoring builds even for commercial purposes, sponsoring scripting or creating any jobs or new opportunities whatsoever.
We're seeing the obvious logical results of creator-fascism. Squeeze money out of consumers for expensive content...then take the money out of SL, i.e. not put it back in through investment into commissioned builds, commissioned scripts, contest money, grant money -- money of any kind that goes beyond oneself.
This kind of selfish activity is "normal" and to be expected in a slash-and-burn capitalist society. You could try to appeal to the social responsibility of some of these creator-fascists who just believe in creating content, cashing out, and blaming newbies for not learning how to create content to get along in the world -- and after they're done humiliating them in that way on the forums, expecting them to go buy dollars on the LindEx and buy the creator-fascist content. And they're right. Most humiliated people do exactly that LOL.
BTW, Anshe is one of the people who doesn't do this "taking out of SL" stuff. She is constantly investing back into the community -- but the community by her lights. That is, she buys more sims and terraforms them and makes themed communities on the people's demand. If they want sandy beaches, she gets it for them. She also sinks a certain amount of money into builds, public spaces like Central Park, organized vending like the Plush sims, etc. etc. Her money stays in SL and grows her businesss and it's a tide raising other boats who are the people who get jobs within her system, or simply move their and have residences and stores and an improved life.
There's also the conspicuous consumption nouveaus that Desmond Shang has talked about, the "rich as God" type people who have thousands of RL dollars to blow on land, houses, and bling. I see these people all the time as tenants -- and God bless them. They are engines of the economy and great for business. They create jobs and a need for content and services and they are the backbone of the middle class. In many cases, they aren't just the "filthy rich" living off LindEx purchased dollars, they are people who started small and worked their way up through a huge amount of effort to make stores and content, and then at a certain point, they want to retire -- or at least spend some free time on-- a private island with a huge, expensive mansion. Whatever guffawing the anarchist basics and leftoid snotty architecterati might do over these nouveau riche types and their taste, they are keeping less snarky and less fussy architects and builders in US dollars enough to even pay their RL bills--and God bless 'em -- we can only hope this is another thing the Lindens won't kill somehow.
There's one thing the Lindens could still do to fix the telehub/infohub disaster,which I continue to view as an unnecessary disaster. They could end the 128/128 lottery. This lottery was won by anybody smart enough, or accidental enough, to have purchased the land at 128/128 on any sim.
That means whenever I type 128/128 for Columbia or Hartwick or Alston, I land in people's stores. Worses than any fighting-my-way-out experience at the old telehubs, if I don't feel like pulling out the map, waiting for it to rez correctly, peering at it, finding an empty spot to teleport to and hope it is updated enough not to port me to water or a wall (and this is 90 percent of all people who have this experience), I type the name in of course. I land and fight my way out of these stores, possibly even stopping to buy in them.
I think it might be a good idea to remove the 128/128 landing concept, and have all type-ins make you arrive at the Infohub for that region. Why not? You will then have to fly the rest of the way to your destination. You won't face the same laggy malls, of course, but you will have to fly. Still, you won't be FORCED to fly that distance or land in that Infohub -- if you want to go to the trouble you can either a) look on the map and pinpoint teleport or b) do a FIND and pull up the ad on FIND or Classifieds and pinpoint by pressing the teleport bar.
Ending the 128/128 unfair and unplanned lottery could be done at the very least for former telehub sims, to make people land in the inforhubs. Ideally, they'd be for all sims. That will "force traffic" to infohubs -- but it will be the traffic only of those who typed names in a list.
It's not a perfect idea, because some people would rather type in a name and land in the water in the sim they need, than have to land 1000 meters from it. Still, it's worth considering as a necessary and doable corrective to the utter devastation of the transportation system they had.
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