The Geek Keyhole on Second Life

Fashion Avenue, the elite shopping sim spoon-fed to CSINY newbies.

I've been debating Aldon Hynes, whom I only know from recent reading of his blog. Because his blog has a really frustrating -- typically geek! -- openID system to register (believe, I've worked OPENID stuff for ages and have a tremendous and justified critique of it), and a need to generate a new password if you try to use the standard registration -- AND apparently a word limit much smaller than typepads, I'm putting the answer here. I can't tell if it posted there.

The answer to Aldon can in part take up the need for a rebuttal to Grey on Metaversed.com which I was prevented from using even before my banning due to the comments being closed. I'll have more to say to Grey and deanpence and others from that thread in the next post.

This is a post about the huge perception problem we all face in SL, and it's time for those of you who can understand this to declare war on it, in ways that I"ve hardly been able to do in Second Life as much of an Infamous Antagonist as I've been -- the walls of geeky perception really need to be broken down and the geeks really, really need to stop seeing through their keyholes. They get insulted even being told they see through a keyhole, but it needs to be burned in: through their demographics of 20-something or 30-something male IT guys, with insolent Internet culture making do where culture in the humanities might have been imbibed 30 years ago; with their cynicism and me-first and entitlement outlook; with their belief that everything should be like "the Internet" and everything should avoid the fearful 1990s that they may have even missed, still watching Sesame Street.

Add to that those in their late 30s who DO understand the 1990s and their very, very VERY mistaken and deep-seated belief that "we can't have Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve" "just because we don't like it and history can't be allowed to repeat because we say so", and we have a really big factor for the destruction of what *is* revolutionary about SL and is now being stepped on -- user-content and amateur user consumption and generation concentric communities that bond through socializing or collaborative work who need protection of their privacy, IP, and space through land-based models of geographical contiguous space enabled for building protective structures emulating both real life, and serving as symbolism for trusted communication in SL. SL is a walled garden of walled gardens -- this has its plusses and minuses, but as long as some people tend to the public commons and seek collaboration across barriers, it need not be destructive. What is far more destructive is tearing down the walls in the name of "Information wants to be free," which only succeeds in making the fledgling space horribly vulnerable to large corporations rushing n and filling the vacuum with mass culture of the push kind, not the user-generated kind -- which is exactly what we are seeing in SL now.

In other words, the fear, hatred, and loathing of Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve will get us something that will merely be a mightier AOL in the end.

Dear Aldon,

I'm glad your willing to discuss an opinion you don't like -- or don't understand (yet) rather than disparaging it, which happens all too often -- and when that happens, you can bet that I will fight back hard, because I am just as smart, have just as much experience, and have just as much knowledge -- if not more -- as you, merely from other fields, and from another Second Life that you might be willing to concede exists, but which you don't see. I can't emphasize that enough: your take on SL is a keyhole, and while you may find that insulting, it has to be said because you just aren't panning out to understand what is at stake for OTHER PEOPLE among the 50,000 logging on who are NOT in the 5,000 demographics/social graph of you and your friends.

First of all, while you've used reason and logic to come up with the CBS viewer numbers, they aren't necessarily "the right answer". I or anyone else could use a different logic path and come up with something different.

First, let's listen to what Anthony Zuiker *himself* says about the characteristic pattern of TV-Internet tie-ins. He says the CBS sites will experience as much as 50 percent more log-ons. That means out of the existing pool of people willing to go on the Internet at all watching the show -- which is NOT the entire pool of viewers (some may not even have Internet access!), you will have, among them, 50 percent more of them willing to *go on the Internet*. So I put that figure as something like 280,000 (and someone could argue it to be much more if they like), and then I put the figure of the subset of *that* pool to be 28,000 willing to log on to Second Life -- so that's actually double what you're getting, but that's because I'm going to assume that some younger, WoW-playing demographic won't have a problem with the concept of downloading a client and entering a world.

But both of our numbers are basically purely speculative. Nobody really knows and that's why this must be understood as an experiment, and not the last word. The cross-over from TV to virtual worlds is not known. What we know from those who actually showed up to be counted, and that included a lot of SL existing residents rubber-necking, was no more than 4,000 at any given time for 3 hours, 10 per island (420 islands) as we all could vividly see on the map that 3 islands had 100, many were empty, and many had only 2-10 max. So whether 728 as Cocoanut Koala physically counted, or 4,000 x 3 = 12,000 as I was willing to say, we're talking about a far, far lower response that was possible -- and this isn't only due to the physical barriers, if 12,000 could still cross the physical barriers (wrong graphics card, download not working, gives up after one minute, etc.) (and I'll be the first to concede these thousands had a lot of existing SL members)

Of course, as we know from SL clunkiness they *will* experience interface frustrations. And they *did*. And a lot of them were lost. Even so, enough of a pool resulted to say some thousands of people will be signing up and have an option to stay. Because ESC is a private company, we many never know the truth of whether they came or retained -- something that Linden Lab, far more transparent, is willing routinely to tell us each month. So as a public hugely affected by this shared grid that suddenly expanded by 420 islands that may add as many as 4,000 or more concommitant logs, we need to understand these real numbers and how it will affect the economy.

The next problem you are having is that you are making the assumption that because you personally, and your little circle of even 50 friends never use classifieds, that "nobody" uses classifieds, that you are willing to say you are an "anomaly" but don't REALLY believe it, and therefore default to a view that classifieds are not needed, aren't important, don't affect the economy, and can be removed, even if people pay a lot of money for them.

This is the sort of claim made by "Grey" on Metaversed, and as I said with him, you are looking through SL through your keyhole, assumping that you as a programmer/creator/artistic intelligentia are a typical user with typical behaviour pattern -- you aren't. Grey counters that by saying, oh, but I've been here for 2 years and fly around a lot. To which I can say: fly around some more, and get it.

Another thing that those with this keyhole perspective instantly claim -- falsely -- is that only those with land rentals or sales care about classifieds and that's why it looms large in their concepts. This is insulting and silly -- people in the land business aren't just flipping parcels, in the rentals sector especially they are seeing what people DO with land and of those 50,000 logging on at any given time, MOST ARE ON LAND, and it's safe to say a majority rent or own or stay with friends renting. MOST are not flying around and making Moebius strips in a sandbox. That flies against a very deep, deep philsophical belief of tekkies that they feel is "oh so wrong" but it's the truth of Second Life.

Those who don't understand classifieds are leading to sales of many OTHER sectors outside of land (and take place ON land, of course) also have a correlary of "we don't need land to have fun" perspective which is one that I always chuckle for, as all content must be placed on *somebody's* land for which *somebody* has to pay.

I have been in SL for 3 years as a landlord and literally had tens of thousands of customers. Have you? I'm going to be like Scoble's famous podcast about his RSS feed knowledge now and push the point saying "Do you?". At any given day I have at least some 1,200-1,500 people in land groups spread over 60 sims many of them constantly IMing me for service. Do you? These constantly churn, as I specialize in having newbies communities and modest discount rentals for midbies to help them adjust to SL and get started in business. Do you have customers like that? I constantly help many more people than I even rent to because many don't rent and keep looking, and I come to learn their tastes and concerns. Do you? The hurdles to getting started in business for people *not* like you -- of which there are gadzillion in SL -- are tremendous for these people. Are you in touch with them, hearing their stories?

Say you're a black female 20-something worker in a RL call center in Atlanta who dreams of a dress shop or club with vendors in it in SL, who has a low income, or whose husband or parent won't let her use the credit card. She comes in and camps, dances, maybe even turns tricks, event-hosts, plays casinos or Tringo, does whatever she can to amass her first capital -- she's motivated, savvy, quick to learn culture, but not tremendously full of capacity. She might start first with a boyfriend richer than she, but guide his shopping dollar for furniture, prefabs, and rentals, all using classifieds/search. She works toward making her own shop. She's tremendously reliant on classifieds to get her store noticed -- she has none of the social capital you do with a core of geeky or creative friends you've accessed through your i-Phone, or conferences, or Twitter or your Ivy League College or whatever sources of social capital you have (and the presence of OPENID on your site lets me know you're a geek : )

She will put everything into that $50 classified and even up it to $500 classified to try to get noticed among the gadzillion dress stores which are dominated by a few oldby FIC types who had lots of Linden support in their day and who today still dominate the market through a complex induction and apprentice system not unlike the Middle Ages, and about as far from "the Internet age" with its frictionless entry to economies as you can imagine (i.e. it relies utterly on connections and status and ranking and class). She will build out social circles from clubs, events, that shop, and rely on everything from word-of-mouth to flybys but *it's not enough* and she, like thousands of other new entrants to the economy, whether they sell a $5 t-shirt of a $2500 brilliant new scripted widget, need a democratic, mass, accessible means of getting into the economy that doesn't rely on Lindens, calling cards, FIC apprenticeship, getting seen in the right boutique, making a splash on a forums or blog. Those things are important, they're needed for the top-earners of the economy who don't bother with classifieds (although if you peek, you'll see a log of them do use them!; but they cannot work for *everybody*.

A plain old-fashioned "shopper" type of ad of the sort millions use every day in Craigslist or in their local pennysavers is what they need out of Second Life. YOU probably don't even need those things in first life, as YOU may never have a burning need to sell your hair curler set to buy your next mixer. But they do.

So aside from that black female entrepreneur, of which there are many, there are hordes of demographics not-like-you -- Puerto Ricans from Philadelphia who buy gangster clothing and form gangs or -- breaking your stereotypes -- take up life as gay poets; retired white postal workers from Kenosha who hang out in Gorean sims as weekend whippers -- or, breaking your stereotype, start a non-profit group against the war in Iraq; 20-something Asian college students with Internet access at home and college but not a lot of disposable income who play war games -- or, breaking your stereotype, become dress designers, not coders; part-time Walmart clerks and soccer moms with one sim of 20 rentals -- or, breaking your stereotype, make the top selling animations and scripts in their sector -- you name it. Not to mention the 60 percent *non-Americans* pouring in the door -- Brazilians, Russians, and Japanese, all of whom are my customers or from whom I rent mall space.

THESE PEOPLE who far, far outnumber your demographic use classifieds heavily -- and in fact use SEARCH PLACES for the cheaper $30 even more! -- to get 80 percent of the sales going on in Second Life. YOUR sales may depend on your high-class Tupperware-like party of very niched, geeky, plugged in, designer/programmer friends. But THEIR sales are not going to get noticed that way; indeed, their products, services, events are in fact beneath your scorn, typically, as most people in the 10 percent geek/designer demographic that make content and opinion in SL are upper middle class to wealthy, and mass taste, and mass class affairs, are hateful to them. Indeed, a lot of my time in SL in these 3 years is trying to pry their hateful fingers off the mechanisms people in the mass classes need for commerce -- events list open to any kind of event, including one of mass taste; forums ads for land sales and rentals, not just for high-end FIC designers and geeks on colour sims; telehub halls and classifieds that enable people to buy into the economy at an open and fixed cost, even if high, rather than struggle to suck up to a prim diva.

Your experience with the OnRez client is only your experience, because you aren't using SEARCH as heavily as I do and as my customers do. I and many others use search as a land management tool -- now it will be broken for that (i.e. sorting by traffic to see where more sales/traffic take place, etc.). No, I don't use campers or lucky chairs, they're prohibited, and yes, I have a lot more healthier respect for traffic merited by people working hard and getting real visitors than you do, as you are willing to remove traffic from the system as it is now -- you hate it because it's gamed no doubt like most of your cluster of opinions -- and you're willing to throw the baby of merited traffic of those entering the economy as newbies with the bathwater of midbies who use camped up results in search as the poor-man's classifieds.

If I watch a Brazilian furniture maker, a Japanese dress designer, or the gal in Atlanta struggle day after day without campers to bring people to their stores and work their way up the traffic merit ladder to get their sales and *make it in SL* even at a modest level, I don't cut it out over a hysterical and geeky belief that it is "gamed" and "like AOL" and "not like the Internet". I tell you that the *real* revolutionary thing about social media is THIS, and NOT your scorn of walled gardens based on your fear of failure of the 1990s.

THIS, because it's -- NEWS FLASH -- not just for you, but for everybody.

What we have now with the ONREZ viewer is a very severe problem: the wiping out of the first view of an interface that used to instantly deliver into the central range of vision CLASSIFIEDS and PLACES upon hitting SEARCH, which as I explain, is what people use for SALES -- people NOT like you.

Now, we have a small SEARCH box which dredges up SEARCH ALL, which is the least used, and poorest mechanism for search in SL. Most people use PLACES to find things more accurately precisely because ALL is dreding out of Groups, People, Land for Sale, etc. and creating chaos and poor results. I've been discovering that geeks who hate SL search so much, and think it is "broken" are ONLY using this SEARCH ALL function, in the mistaken believe that it "Should be like Google" and "have the most in it" and that if they use Googlean closed quotes, they can get "better results" -- all entirely faulty logic -- SL's search works like amazon.com. If you don't plug your search term into a pull-down section like BOOKS or ELECTRONICS and have a word like "iron" you will dredge through kitchenware in search of something on the Iron Age, etc.)

As for your claim, "I will note that when I do searches using the search box in OnRez, I often refine my search using the tabs on the top of the results that take you to the standard Second Life searches" -- you're forgetting that most people aren't Internet geeks/programmers/designers/Sheep fanclub members like you, and they look around not for other tabs somewhere underneath their present view on an interface, they begin clicking on the bars of their RESULTS, and finding them FRUSTRATING, they close the window and default to press on SHOP in the right-view spot, or fly into the store right in front of them provided by the Sheep.

I'm not one of those people concerned about corporations on the Internet. I'm not some geeky socialist Well-user eating granola. I'm fine with capitalism, corporations, and big networks coming into SL -- I used to work for some of them as a translator. That's not at issue.

What is at issue for me is ensuring a liberal, free, democratic society where there is a level playing field for the free entrepreneur and concern for small business and the formation of the middle class as much as these big corporations. Pluralism. There is NOT that if large corporations come in, subdue the population into inhabitants of company towns, and force-feed them content, wiping out the middle class as much as Bush has helped to wipe out the middle class in America.

We *don't know yet* if the CSINY people will dump these lame games that will take them about a half hour to burn through, and do more than socialize against a cartoony NY backroom with other TV-watchers and buy from the specially force-fed 12 designers on the Sheep sims who are in the Sheeps' feted commerce circle.

We can't know - yet -- if they will begin to consume elsewhere in an economy they can't even SEE in that viewer, especially as their masters -- like you -- will be telling them don't even bother to search in classifieds, they are for low-life chumps. They won't bother to be able to try to make something and enter the economy at a rung far, far lower than the FIC flagship stores on Sheep's Fifth Avenue -- because they'll be told the search is broken, shop with us, don't use classifieds for sales, buy, don't make. We're the makers; you aren't.

I don't know if ANY of this is beginning to sink in with you. But as you may know from my blog, I'm prepared to fight for this understanding of SL -- which I can see vividly from a million impressions -- because it is a very, very important one. You may be looking at life through another viewer. That doesn't mean that you feel the real world of Second Life beneath your feet.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, I made a point of not reading Aldon Hynes' RL bio publicly available on his website until I finished my manifesto here.

But now I've read it, I have to chuckle, because from all the social cues on his website, Drupal this, OpenID that, join me on GeekSocialNetwork the other thing, I could tell the following about him sight unseen:

o white male
o 40 plus
o New England resident (Maine)
o Dean voter -- and what's more *campaigner*
o IT guy with years of programming experience.

Can I rest my case now? He's not a an Italian 70-year-old grandma in Phoenix, a black female call center employee in Atlanta; a Puerto Rican 20-something kid in Philadelphia; a white European stock Walmart soccer mom in Kenosha; a 40-something postal employee in Manassas, Virginia. He's none of those things, and none of those people voted for Dean, if they voted at all. And even those registered for the Democratic Party, who voted for *other* democrats like the Catholic John Kerry.

Now, are these Dean voters out of touch with their own country? They are. They are still perplexed why people vote for Kerry, let alone Bush, and unfortunately, the Bush voters won.

Do these people who are white IT 40-something geeks in New England with years of programming experience get to determine the economy and the politics for the rest of us? No, they don't.

[Stephen Zenith]

"Brevity" obviously wasn't on your word of the day calendar, ever.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, but grieftard is : )

[Malignant Narcissist]

I keep looking and looking, trying to figure out where your disagreement is. From the looks of it, you're both saying exactly the same thing (except you make it a "book"). Is it just the fact that you don't like "male geeks" or something? That's all I'm seeing.

If he was an Italian 70-year-old grandma in Phoenix, a black female call center employee in Atlanta; a Puerto Rican 20-something kid in Philadelphia; a white European stock Walmart soccer mom in Kenosha; a 40-something postal employee in Manassas, Virginia, you probably wouldn't have a problem.

[Malignant Narcissist]

I keep looking and looking, trying to figure out where your disagreement is. From the looks of it, you're both saying exactly the same thing (except you make it a "book"). Is it just the fact that you don't like "male geeks" or something? That's all I'm seeing.

If he was an Italian 70-year-old grandma in Phoenix, a black female call center employee in Atlanta; a Puerto Rican 20-something kid in Philadelphia; a white European stock Walmart soccer mom in Kenosha; a 40-something postal employee in Manassas, Virginia, you probably wouldn't have a problem.

Prokofy, I fairly disappointed with your response. You criticize me for looking through a keyhole, yet you chose to base that criticism on a stereotype of the demographic you place me in.

You're argument also seems a bit contradictory. You do note that I am in my late 40s. So, yes, I did watch some Sesame Street with my daughters in the 1990s, but I don't think that was what you were trying to imply. During the 1990s I worked in senior management roles on Wall Street. They were years when the economy was strong, a Democrat was in the White House and are very far from 'Fearful'.

I'm also curious about the keyhole you are looking at the Internet through. I've looked at it though many keyholes, from my early days at Bell Laboratories in the early 1980s to helping building webpages in the early 1990s and helping large international banks connect to the internet.

I do not believe that "everything should be like 'the Internet'". In fact, when I speak with students doing social research into the Internet, I often have to remind them of the opposite, that so many of the new things that the internet is supposedly bringing, isn't really anything new at all.

More concerning in your long rambling piece, is trying to figure out what your trying to say. From what you've read before, it sounds as if you fear a corporate take over of Second Life. Isn't that what your concern about people searching the new search mechanism in OnRez is all about? To me, it sounds an awful lot like the "the fear, hatred, and loathing of Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve". They were the big corporations trying to take over the Internet in the early 1990s.

So, should we show show fear, hatred and loathing of The Electric Sheep and CBS for invading our little world of Second Life? It sounds like that is what you are advocating.

Looking deeper into your geek keyhole. Yes, there is a portion of the population that does not use classifieds. There is a population that does. There is a new population coming, thanks to the feared Electric Sheep that are unlikely to. Yes, that population will also less likely to create user generated content. That may upset you. But that's not going to stop Electric Sheep or whatever the Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve that tries to dominate Second Life is.

What is also disappointing is that you make many strawman arguments that are not only unsupported, but are simply untrue.

For example, you suggest that since I am not up in arms about that OnRez not searching classifieds and that the people I know don't use them that I "default to a view that classifieds are not needed, aren't important, don't affect the economy, and can be removed, even if people pay a lot of money for them."

There is no substantiation to that. I believe that classifieds are needed and are important. I just don't happen to believe that it is the end of the world that a new set of people come into Second Life and don't use classifieds. There have always been people that don't use the classifieds. There have always been people that do. Whether or not a new viewer makes using classifieds easier or more difficult isn't going to change that.

So, your long rambling post has done little to lead me to the belief that this is as big a deal as you appear to be making it out to be.

Do you think you can spare the diatribe and present a more cohesive and coherent argument about why this is a bad thing?

[Prokofy Neva]

>Prokofy, I fairly disappointed with your response. You criticize me for looking through a keyhole, yet you chose to base that criticism on a stereotype of the demographic you place me in.

Your demographic stereotype CRIES OUT for expose as what it is: a demographic stereotype with a keyhole. Or do you think we all get to be demographic stereotypes, and you get to be special?!

Perhaps you're able to think beyond boundaries and classes and perceptions. Yet you haven't demonstrated that if you can't grasp how important Classifieds and Search are to other people. It's probably hopeless. It's probably useless and then you'll only understand the sharpest commentary -- and that's why you'll get it from me.

>You're argument also seems a bit contradictory. You do note that I am in my late 40s. So, yes, I did watch some Sesame Street with my daughters in the 1990s, but I don't think that was what you were trying to imply. During the 1990s I worked in senior management roles on Wall Street. They were years when the economy was strong, a Democrat was in the White House and are very far from 'Fearful'.

As a 51-year-old parent of 2, I was right there watching Sesame Street -- except I found it stupid and politically-correct and too celebratory of ghetto culture, so I switched over to Thomas the Tank Engine or Arthur, the one my children liked best. Even Barney!

I'm so glad that life has been good to you and, like somebody in Bonfire of the Vanities, you got your senior management position on Wall Street out of the 1990s. Great! But it's a keyhole. I don't care *who* you are. You do not understand New York, let alone the rest of the country; Second Life is beyond your grasp because again, you think you are privileged and special. You *are* privileged and special. But...there are other people here in this shared world with you.

The fear of the 1990s is the dot.com bust and the "lessons of Web 1.0" which you've absorbed like a toxic fume, and it colours your vision. Even if your job was safe, and your morph to a gentleman farmer in Maine or telecommuting IT consultant (or whatever it is you do now) was a smooth one, unclouded by 9/11, you have absorbed these "lessons" like the ABCs of a grammar book, and you don't wish to think about any other way of doing things. But you could be wrong.

>I'm also curious about the keyhole you are looking at the Internet through. I've looked at it though many keyholes, from my early days at Bell Laboratories in the early 1980s to helping building webpages in the early 1990s and helping large international banks connect to the internet.

I'm glad you have had this special, privileged IT guys life. I'm not without my access to privileged IT lives, either. I'm not required to paste my resume here and be further griefed by all the people who stalk me. Trust me, I saw plenty of the early days of the Internet, and have plenty of exposure to these issues.

Like the gadzillion rest of the people in the world not-like-you, Master of the Universe, I use the Internet, and my use of it has educated me to the point where *I don't need you*. That may come as a shock. But that's what the Internet and social media revolution is all about: we have less and less need of you and your guru status. We can set up a computer and a router ourselves, thank you very much, and download and operate an interface like SL, thank you very much, and make money without you in the middle with your hand out for payment of services just to click through some screens, which we can master by rote memory just as well as you can.

Sorry if you find that stark and rude -- but it's what it's all about.

Nobody I know was impressed with 20-something Dean campaigners drinking latte and thinking the Internet would win the campaign, even if we drank lattes and read our news and our blogs on the Internet. You're out of touch with what people's needs are.

>I do not believe that "everything should be like 'the Internet'". In fact, when I speak with students doing social research into the Internet, I often have to remind them of the opposite, that so many of the new things that the internet is supposedly bringing, isn't really anything new at all.

This phrase about everything needing to be like the Internet is from another opera than the one you are now invoking -- it's the statement of social media and virtual world coders who want to thin out games and worlds and put them all on browsers. They loathe walled gardens and "silos" with a violent passion.

So, should we show show fear, hatred and loathing of The Electric Sheep and CBS for invading our little world of Second Life? It sounds like that is what you are advocating.

I think fear isn't what it is about -- THEY are the scared ones. THEY have no advertisers. THEY are running out of viewers who are fleeing to the Internet. THEY are seeing their revenue shrink. THEY are roaming VW conferences with looks of animal fear in their eyes and recklessly spending like 80 year old guys with prostate cancer on a 20-year old hooker.

So loathing and hatred might be in order against people who think we are the problem, and our reluctance to have them take over is "fear". It's not. It's indifference ranging to hatred.

>Looking deeper into your geek keyhole. Yes, there is a portion of the population that does not use classifieds. There is a population that does.

Right now, that proportion might be 10/90 or 20/80. You refuse to admit it.

>There is a new population coming, thanks to the feared Electric Sheep that are unlikely to. Yes, that population will also less likely to create user generated content. That may upset you.

Oh, please, piss up a rope. I don't "fear" or "get upset" by people who aren't likely to create user-generated content. *They are my customers*. Duh. Can you GRASP that? What condescending tripe! However, read my other essays about a much more expanded notion of user-generated content that I have, that completely blows your cramped understanding out of the water.

A person making a friendship list, socializing, creating a home out of a prefab house IS making user-generated contest. That's why different than flying around a cartoon space with a dead rabbit on the ground.

Furthermore, I suspect that a lot of the TV watchers in urban centers are no different than the readers from Wired, then Business Week, then the New York Times, then the USA Today, who came flooding into Second Life. They'll take it or leave it and go back to TV. I'm willing to bet they won't expect life in a stultifying corporate town managed by CBS on line with condescending geek tools as a good substitute for their former lives as mere clicking couch potatoes.

Why? Because they already fled to the Internet where they already create the content I mean. You think content is some clever geek widget or some high-end designer. It's more than that obviously, and the best part of it all: we get to do it *without you*. I realize that may *upset you*.

>But that's not going to stop Electric Sheep or whatever the Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve that tries to dominate Second Life is.

Then perhaps you're conceding that ESC is merely a prodity or an AOL? Whatever. ESC is doomed. It will either be sucked up into the maw of CBS, remaining only as a kind of "studio" within it, or it will collapse. It's life as a creative and independent entity is over.

>What is also disappointing is that you make many strawman arguments that are not only unsupported, but are simply untrue.

For example, you suggest that since I am not up in arms about that OnRez not searching classifieds and that the people I know don't use them that I "default to a view that classifieds are not needed, aren't important, don't affect the economy, and can be removed, even if people pay a lot of money for them."

As I noted, in my address to you, I took on board rebuttals of "Grey" as well -- and frankly, your class of cohorts think this, even if you might concede -- and only as a temporary expedient -- the need for classifieds as part of the LL business model until they open source.

>There is no substantiation to that. I believe that classifieds are needed and are important. I just don't happen to believe that it is the end of the world that a new set of people come into Second Life and don't use classifieds.

In a very big sense, they ARE using classifieds -- the kind of classifieds you get when you are CBS, and have enough money to buy yourself a team of devs with SL experience, a team of Lindens freed up from other pressing work, 400 islands, and lots of other tie-in advertising and merchandising. Yes, $7 million buys you that humongous big-assed classified.

But people have a way of slipping out from under the clutches of ads. If they don't lock them down on the Sheepscape, the detectives may begin to fly out to the mainland or get their own islands. We'll see.

>There have always been people that don't use the classifieds. There have always been people that do.

Your problem is that you believe this figure is like 20-80 with the users in the 20, instead of yourself in the 20, or 50-50. But it's not. It's 80, and will stay 80 unless the Lindens and their new big TV dance partners obliterate the inworld economy.

>Whether or not a new viewer makes using classifieds easier or more difficult isn't going to change that.

Of course it will. The SEARCH ALL sucks. The Sheep know that. They will put in THEIR OWN SheepSEARCH they obtained by scraping the world against its world with Grid Shepherd. And then if you didn't not only submit to the scrape, but also chat up and friend up the divas there (including even TheDiva lol), you'll be SOL.

>So, your long rambling post has done little to lead me to the belief that this is as big a deal as you appear to be making it out to be.

That's because you will never give up your keyhole. You will only understand force -- and that means the most forceful kind of critical expression. I'm here to provide that experience for you.

>Do you think you can spare the diatribe and present a more cohesive and coherent argument about why this is a bad thing?

No, because I'm not paid to compose crisp techno copy like Mitch Wagner on Information Week. And because even if it was given to you on a silver platter in the format you think you can hear it, you won't. You're too old, too set in your ways, and too convinced of your own superiority.

[Prokofy Neva]

Wow! there's no such name as Malignant Narcissus in the People List in Second Life, even though I could have SWORN there was. What a great name for a typical anonymous forums grieftard!

My rules are that you must post with a recognizable SL first and last name or recognizable blogger's name or RL name. So you need to get gone.

And your point is stupid and contrarian, and those people I've outlined would stare goggle eyed at anybody who would take away their classifieds from them in the name of some superior geeky search.

[Cocoanut Koala]

What is this "new set of people who don't use classifieds?"

Why would there be any particular set of people that wouldn't use classifieds?

If a viewer makes classifieds harder to get to, yes, it is going to change how many of those people find and use them, by less by their choice than by interface design.

I don't think there is anything particular about those people which says they are the type of people who won't use classifieds, so no need to give them to them.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

Coco,

Aldon, like Grey, like probably a dozen geeky males on Second Life, don't use classifieds.

o they don't shop
o they may wear the same suit of clothes for years (I'm actually just like that lol)
o they don't care about dresses, events, sexballs, clubs
o the mass culture inworld economy is a bore and a bother to them
o they sell their little vehicle or widget or scripted thingie or educational HUD or whatever it is they sell without any classifieds
o they don't need land to have fun
o they use SL for some Serious Purpose and leave buying to the servants and lower classes in their sherpa organizations

This new bunch of people could also find that they don't need them if:

o they are satisfied with the prefabbed TV content they are given
o they shop in the 12 stores lucky enough to get a berth in TVland
o they use SL merely as a kind of glorified flash browser to play little self-contained gamelets or TV tie-ins
o they can't see classifieds in the browser, and they press on ONREZ and buy from the third-party shopping site, they may just convert to that, and never go to a store in their lives inworld

Some other things might happen though.

o People will ditch the TV sims and come on the mainland and learn about classifieds and events and such and get frustrated with the dumbass Sheep browser and SEARCH ALL and even dig into deeper, if they like the other pieces of it, OR they will download the new LL browser, especially if LL competes with some Shiny Thing

o People will keep their HUD and Sheep browser and still graze only with the Sheep, but they will start to get on the other inworld networks and find more fun or serious stuff, depending on their bent

o They will evaporate out of Second Life like the morning dew, the TV sims will be filled with blowing newspapers and chaff, and these company times will go the way of all company towns, and convert to Leavittowns and then eventually sell out to malls or offices.

[Cocoanut Koala]

You know, I'm thinking today about this looking down on Classifieds, and on the SL Search; saying they are useless, etc.

(Search was apparently down for a while this morning.)

Whenever Search is down, or for some reason a person's Classifieds don't show up (sometimes they just don't, even though you paid for them), sales go way down.

As I have frequently said, my sales depend largely on Search and on Classified.

This makes sense, because unless a person has already been to your place and has a landmark, they won't be able to find you, or even know you exist.

So I'm thinking: Why on earth are some people always trying to make the case that Search is "broken;" that we don't use Search; that we don't need an LL Search; that nobody needs Classifieds, etc.?

I have PROOF that people use Classifieds - at the bottom of each Classified entry on my profile is the numbers of people who TP into my store from the Classified.

So . . . why this campaign against Search and Classifieds? Which, I might point out, is nothing new - certain people have been campaigning against them since I joined SL.

Well, I think I've figured it out.

Those people not only don't care about other people's businesses; they'd rather they starved and disappeared.

Now, why would they want that?

Well, one reason would be if they have always hated the idea of others making money in their businesses, particularly others who they feel don't "deserve" to make sales (being crass, mass culture, etc., as you often point out, Prok).

Another would be simple competition: to clear the way for their own businesses, which may have been famous early businesses, or which may have other options for advertising, such as important friends on important blogs.

In any case, it is decidedly unfriendly to try to kill that which makes our businesses possible, and which makes fledgling businesses possible.

Yet, I must conclude that is exactly what those insisting Search and Classifieds are irrelevant want to do.

Why else would anyone suggest something tantamount to burning the yellow pages (and I only wish it were more like the phone book), or destroy the ability of anyone who likes to buy visibility on the same terms as the next guy? (Corporations excluded.)

To get all the business for themselves, is my conclusion.

Well, you know, to hell with that.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

yes, Cocoanut, you have ABSOLUTELY hit upon it.

It's what I call the FIC's "No Business But My Business" approach.

ABSOLUTELY burning down the yellow pages!

The loathing of classifieds, search, ads, etc. is the loathing of free enterprise at one level -- the loathing of a free marketplace that lets anyone come in and at least try their luck for $50, or buy their way into view with $50,000 if that's how they want to use their start-up capital. It's FREE AND OPEN.

But what those who loathe these listings loathe about them is only in part cultural. It's in part, yes, a hatred of mass and crass culture. They hate things that say "99 cent sale" in real-life, too. They never shop at K-mart or W-mart. They never read the Pennysaver or Craigslist.

Yet more to the point, it's about funnelling the views and the search and the business *to themselves*.

It has ALWAYS been about that, and that's why I've ALWAYS whacked very hard at things like:

o FIC getting their wares into the library
o FIC getting their stores on the WAs and OIs
o FIC getting their pictures on the splash page
o FIC getting mentor tags and dragooning newbs to their stores
o FIC hogging the forums
o FIC trying to close down land ads but keep products
o FIC trying to close down the events list
o FIC trying to prevent island parcels from showing on the land-for-sale list

Every single bit of it is all about creating a corporativist, fascistic, highly-controlled society in which only those few patrician families, or favoured chaibolist sort of firms, or the "connected" ones get to sell in the economy.

Everybody else is pushed away, muted, kept down to prevent competition.

It's very conscious, very deliberate, and very evil -- and ultimately makes societies very brittle, and incites warfare, and societies collapse and change the hard way.

Our only leverage is to keep steadily saying, but we pay tier, but we pay tier, but we pay tier.

And that leverage is now eroding, if Giff Constable's new client CBS can come in and plunk down $7 million and buy himself as many islands in a day as Anshe built up with her customers carefully in 3 years.

With a highly-paid team of FIC content creates, they can cut and paste content, get greeters, and babysit the newbs in company towns. That's the worst case scenario. And replace the million people in SL today with a million other people who will help Disnify it.

Perhaps it might evolve more organically, slowly, and more integrated and be beneficial for all. But that isn't Forseti's "ecology". His "ecology" is about real life companies, metaversal companies and "residents". "Consumers". "People to be data mined".

It's not about small or medium business and consumers that don't consume HIS content (especially his old cottages).

I've never seen such a graphic example of how the rich fund the revolutionary destructive people to undermine the middle class, just to maintain their own class position.

[Prokofy Neva]

And I might add for the sake of discussion -- most people will find this analysis, which I believe to be spot on, as "too extreme" or "bat-shit" crazy.

And if they are 20-something kids, they may merely shrug and adapt. They will butter up the divas on Fashion Avenue. They will wangle a Sheep gig -- these MDCs burn through builders and coders like Sherman through Georgia -- Lordfly has been complaining lately about the burning of builders.

They will find a way to get their party lights in SEARCH ALL, like Wrestling Hulka has been doing. They will float around the CSI sims and pick up tricks or take people to their clubs -- just as they did at LL's WAs.

If anything, they'll appreciate that somebody has put all the new people in one place for them and try to sell to them. Some of these newbies will be turned off by the penising or propositioning but it will probably be a lesser percentage than the Lindens' overall newbie stream.

[Rhys Hutton]

o they don't shop
o they may wear the same suit of clothes for years (I'm actually just like that lol)
o they don't care about dresses, events, sexballs, clubs
o the mass culture inworld economy is a bore and a bother to them
o they sell their little vehicle or widget or scripted thingie or educational HUD or whatever it is they sell without any classifieds
o they don't need land to have fun
o they use SL for some Serious Purpose and leave buying to the servants and lower classes in their sherpa organizations

This new bunch of people could also find that they don't need them if:

o they are satisfied with the prefabbed TV content they are given
o they shop in the 12 stores lucky enough to get a berth in TVland
o they use SL merely as a kind of glorified flash browser to play little self-contained gamelets or TV tie-ins
o they can't see classifieds in the browser, and they press on ONREZ and buy from the third-party shopping site, they may just convert to that, and never go to a store in their lives inworld

Oh. So they use SL for different purposes.

WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Fucking intolerant bigoted BABY.

You can take your idea of how everyone should use SL and shove it straight up your ass. No one appointed you president jackass. No body elected you to tell us how we need to use SL.

Anyway, the way you dress in RL in that ubiquitous cigarette butt smelling granny sweater, wispy hair and big fat gut, leaves you no place for criticism of geeks. LOL! Didn't YOU used to work for Xerox or something? Is that old self-loathing bubbling forth again?

You're the biggest throwback geek reject of them all.

Oh and I noticed you're commiting what you have called "Avatar Murder". Surmising RL info about the subject of your pointless rant.

OMFG!

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm not the fucking intolerant bigoted baby. THEY are. YOU ARE you brainless twit. I understand they make up 10 percent of the population, and 10 percent with a valid right to exist. They can exist. I don't tell them what to do. I *can't* because they're the ones in power enforcing their geek keyhold.

THEY don't understand that, and want that vision to be imposed on the rest of us! To translate out of what I say some concept that they don't get to exist, that I am shoving my vision down another's throat is merely to confirm the problem -- the keyhold makes you read texts like that, and makes you invert and distort any criticism of your keyhole vision as encroachment. Instead, it's merely a fight for the larger turf that should get to exist beyond the goddamn keyhole. But you're too fucking STUPID to understand that.

THEY can take THEIR -- and YOUR -- FUCKING intolerant ass view of the world and shove it up THEIR ass -- because I'm not denying their right to exist, but they are denying ME mine and a lot of other people! -- and frankly, I represent far more than they do.

Oh, and I have a suggestion: post your real life name and real life picture so that we can see how YOU look in real life : )

Scared?

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, I just took the trouble to look up "Rhys Hutton" inworld. I wonder where this yellow-bellied invective comes from.

I see an account that is clearly an alt. Blank as to picture, groups, picks, and only one thing: "Bub's Underwear Models" which is of course Bub Linden's FIC group (Bub having been a resident before he was a Linden, and putting his little friends in it).

And i'm sorry, but that's not a recognizable First and Second Life last name. It's a scam.

When you're ready to say stuff like you've been saying to my face with *your* face -- even a recognizable SL face -- you're welcome to post here. It's not criticism or hate that I don't tolerate or "people who criticize me". What I don't tolerate here are anonymous fucktard cowards.

Bye!

[Malignant Narcissist]

What makes you look "too extreme" or "bat-shit" crazy is the fact that search pretty much works the same way that it used to.

You're complaining about this because it doesn't work "exactly" the same way?

What's your main point? Aldon Hynes is the newest member of your "push back hard" club? Maybe anybody who resembles a "geek" is part of that club?

Do you "ever" wonder why you're banned from posting on so many different places? I think "too extreme" or "bat-shit" crazy may be part of it. The other part is that even when you are proven to be wrong, you keep on "pushing".

The OnRez viewer's search works nothing like you described, a couple weeks ago. Now that you've been proven wrong about it, you needed to find somebody that "likes" the way it works and push on them. This may be some type of disorder... you might want to have that checked.

BTW: Your rules are that we must post with a recognizable SL first and last name or recognizable blogger's name or RL name. TYVM

[Yumi Murakami]

Hi Prok,

I share a lot of your concerns about the changes in OnRez, but at the same time I think there are a few things that you don't allow for.

First of all, is the fact that the "non-geek" "majority" etc are actually just as exclusive as the geek cliques and FICs that you object to so much. If you don't happen to meet the right people with the right connections then you'll have no-one to rent with or interact with much. Someone makes a big build and invites their friends and then you don't get into that group but others do because they like the build, and you can't make your own build because you don't have the support from others that they have.. Just like the FIC business this isn't done maliciously; it's just that people tend not to allow for "equality" in their social behaviour. If someone meets a new person at a party and really like them, they don't make sure to pull away from that person in time to allow someone else there to meet them just in case they wanted to. You might not know this, but I didn't originally want to fit into the geek category on SL.. I arrived to meet people and play house and role-play with them, but because of my timezone I couldn't meet the right people and I learned to script because the alternative would have been to play gooseberry to all the people who were having fun, or do nothing and log out. At least the "new script" button is online whenever I am. :) The majority of people on SL aren't making homes, or renting, or reading or not reading Classifieds. The majority of them are, sad to say, leaving. And this is true on pretty much 90% of the social online games or virtual worlds that exist now. Why? Because most of the limits in our real society are the result of human nature, so if you want to build a society which overcomes them, you really have to not trust too much of it to humans. Very, very sad, but true.

The second point you don't seem to allow for is that natural distribution of talent will sweep in and undo anything you try to do to make FIC situations more fair. Yes, it is true that there are many very good artists who are not employed as such because companies have not hired them. But that does not mean that any random person who really really wants to have a business doing something is justified in assuming that they are one. That might sound harsh but think what it would mean if anyone on the street could go into competitive business - it would mean that the standard of products in that economy was still no better than any random person could make. And I'm not "looking down from on high" here - my own abilities have proven not to be enough to get into making some things I wanted to on SL. Yea, I ranted at some people about it, and just wound up offending them and no better off. It's just, as before, the way things are and human nature. What can you do? When a company wants to add a team of 100 professional 3D artists with 10 years of experience each into SL, do you ban them because others wouldn't get a chance? If yes then, well, why not ban whoever's at the top of each market now?

Second Life will become a platform. Inevitably. I don't think, anymore, that it's a case of the Lindens driving towards that. I think they're embracing it because they've worked out that's what's going to happen whether they like it or not, and they are going to have to depend on it for their business model.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm banned because people can't bear the truth about themselves, and can't bear criticism of their sacred cows, that's all.

Aldon Hynes is simply *wrong* -- most people use the classifieds and search. He's in an elite minority and sees SL through a keyhole -- as do you.

It isn't that "the search doesn't work exactly as it used to". It's that the view of the search most responsible for sales is covered up -- made invisible. Accessible, only if you dig and figure it out.

And that's truly no accident, because as geeks, the Sheep coders who don't give one flying fuck about the inworld economy and small businesses don't *care* about somebody's shop -- except for their friends' shop. It just would never occur to them to use anything but SEARCH ALL, as the geeks they are, and then if the rest of the panel is covered up, it really doesn't matter. That's all there is to it.

The OnRez Viewer works EXACTLY the way I described because I had excellent sources on it. There is NOTHING incorrect in my statement. The view IS covered up. The user IS forced to use SEARCH ALL. The viewer IS pulled over to SHOP. Nothing whatsoever incorrect.

I don't have any "disorder" -- but you may, if you persist in *lying about* what anyone can see with their own naked two eyes. Um, is Malignant Narcissist some kind of blogger name or something?

Yumi, you're not making sense. Sure, people tend toward groups and cliques and clubs in Second Life. Duh? But all these cliques and groups and clubs have some behaviour patterns in common: they use search and places. That's how most sales are made. So they may not come out of their grouping, but they have that *behaviour* in common. Geeks, on the other hand of this type (not even ALL geeks) brag that they don't use classifieds. So, there's the problem.

I really have to Laugh Out Loud when you claim that the majority of people are leaving. I don't see evidence of that. What you may mean is that the little puddle YOU have been in with your connections or friends or activities are changing or shrinking. I look out across many sims and see lots and lots of new people coming, especially non-Americans.

I see many people who have been with me in my rentals 9-12-18 months, even, Some leave, and come back. If "90 percent of the people are leaving" -- try to use sense and logic here -- I'd be out of business. I'd have no customers. I'd have to close. But my rentals continue to make a profit, I continue to soldier on. After the slump in the summer and the horrid spate of griefing, business picked up quite a bit.

It didn't pick up with students, as someone (was it Desmond?) predicted. It picked up with non-Americans, and those Americans coming in seem to me to be the classic f32 and m22, same old SL demographic, except less white and less rich.

People continue to read classifieds. They TP to them. They rent the houses at the end of them. They buy in the stores of the people who rent the land from me. Etc. If this weren't happening, I'd be folding my tent.
But I don't see that I need to fold my tent really, when we had 56,000 people logged on tonight, and like every night, I log on, see the money to be made, and say, "I'm going to get my piece of that," and get to work doing whatever I have to do.

You've got some very, very screwy notions of "distribution of talent" as well. These are cultural, national, deep-seated, and I probably can't dissuade you, but you're just plain wrong.

I see people without even any special talent come in and start businesses all the time -- sometimes failures, sometimes modest successes, sometimes brilliant. They might open a t-shirt stand, a wedding photo studio, a $10 L store, a furniture store, a dating service -- whatever. No world burners here. But then every once in a while somebody goes to the head of the class.

As I've noted before, there are two schools of thought, Athens and Sparta. One says you create conditions for 40 people in a class to be free and supported. One or two might rise to the top; 4 might be very good. another says you take 6 people and exclude the non-talented and brutally raise them to be excellent, using Darwinistic methods. The people you produce with these two methods aren't the same, and the second method is brittle and horrible in the end and ends up killing the society.

What you can't seem to grasp is that Second Life, like any place, needs a range of quality from excellent to bad, from expensive to cheap or even free, and people will enter into this economy and go up and down it where they find their level.

The job isn't to create Second Life, invite people in, treat them like shit for the most part, fete and coddle and handful and give them NDAs and special contracts, then hand only those programmers and designers off to a TV company.

Oh, wait...um...ok...that IS what they are doing.

But you can bite back hard. The very thing that makes the TV station come in here is the idea of a world. Those people can't all have jobs as the top content creators, but will have a range. And frankly, the corporate-sponsored stuff is getting less in quality. Plenty of room for competition there!

Sounds to me like you are reluctant to market yourself and just want to whine.

[Yumi Murakami]

Prok, I didn't say that 90% of people were leaving. I said that 90% of virtual worlds that are based on social activity have low retention rates. And I'm pretty sure that's true, as there are relatively few of them. I should add a caveat though - 90% of virtual worlds THAT ARE PAID FOR and are based on social activity have low retention rates.

The figure that "the majority of people on SL are leaving" is from the Linden statistics, or the ones they used to give out to volunteers, where they've said that 60-70% of people who visit SL don't stay around (and that the volunteers should be trying to improve that). The growth of the total account number compared to the 30-day running login total confirms that. You wouldn't be out of business - the people I'm talking about would leave before becoming your customers in the first place. And the number of people who do stay around is still a lot of people. But you only need to browse Search and see how many dead, unused avatars there are to see that there isn't that much retention.

And yes, it would be nice if Second Life could have space in the market for lower quality products too, but the reality is, who is really going to buy them? The "streaming" of the economy only applies for cases in real life where higher quality products require higher quality raw materials which cost more, but in SL that doesn't apply, and most high quality content creators will price for volume because they know they can get it. We can say that we do not want Sparta, and we want the less talented people to have a place, but who shall we force to buy their products when they could buy better ones for the same price?

I don't see how you say I'm "reluctant to market myself". I, um, do market myself. My sales are down a bit recently, but that applies across the board from what I'm told.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yumi, that's saying the same thing. If the retention rates are low -- and we know that in SL it's been out of out 10 staying past 60 days apparently -- that DOES mean 90 percent leave. But...I just don't see it. I guess the people who bother to rent don't leave, they've reached that point. That is, I look at the people I prune out of my groups every 21 days, and some I see bought land or move d to other rentals or something, and less seem to have just left completely (and some even write that).

Low rentention rates don't bother me. The world will grow slower -- should grow slower. That would be OK -- except, there isn't enough money from the developers, I guess, so they have to flog it to grow faster.

We all realize there's no 9 million people. They came and left, leaving their avatars as tombstones. But there's now not 5,000, but 100,000 land owners, and 1 million people. That's ok, it doesn't trouble me.

You are looking through your keyhole. You have fancy tastes and high notions of what is good, but you aren't everybody. People buy stuff because their friend made it.

Newbies can sell to each other, and do. Unless of course oldbies disrupt their market by inflicting too may freebies on them.

The economy is in trouble, and perhaps it's dying, but with growth continuing, it won't die for awhile, and the "everybody is leaving" stuff doesn't have to be a factor -- yet.

Your sales are down because 10 other people came who are like you and make the same things and their associates buy from them.

[Yumi Murakami]

But Prokofy, you're making my point for me. If there are going to be cliques no matter what we do, then what's the point in stopping the Sheep, or the FIC, or anything else, setting them up? There'll just be there anyway.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yumi, because the cliques that get set up with this or that club or house or sim don't try to put the others out of business. My God, that should be obvious. They don't try to scrape the grid, put all the objects in a mega search, sell ad space, bring in giant TV networks and buy up 400 sims at a time to put up company towns. You act as if they are a clique like any other; they aren't, they are a clique that has NDAs with Linden for more than a year and a special relationship.

Of course, they may be straining that relationship at the seams now, we can't know what goes on, perhaps LL feels they've grown to big for their britches, perhaps they think LL are chumps, who knows. But they can't be that unhappy about outsourcing a big management and content production fandango to another company and then just collecting all the island fees.

[Ace Albion]

I think the classified teleport count resets every week? I'm not sure.

I have two L$50 classifieds running (each with one or the other of our brands named first).

Last time I checked, one of them had nearly 2000 clicks. That's clicks from the classified search- clicks from your profile are counted seperately (for those "hi, where's your store?" "check my profile" customers).

I can't imagine people spend every day looking for houses- they're not like shoes where you buy two pairs a week. Maybe one every two or three months as you move to bigger land or something.

I think 2000 clicks is a lot for a niche like that.

[Yumi Murakami]

"The cliques that get set up with this or that club or house or sim don't try to put the others out of business."

Are you sure about that, Prok? They might not be actively trying to, but they have that effect. Groups of friends meet up in sandboxes, find they like a similar building theme, work together to make some objects and sell them... and 10 newbies who were not so fortunate as to meet them, nor each other, are pushed out of business because they can't compete against a group working together. Sure, the original group probably had no intention for that to happen, but it did. Sometimes members of those groups help out others too, which is great, but I can name a good number of creation cliques which were founded a while ago and whose members have now put up big "DO NOT ASK ME FOR HELP" notices in their profiles because otherwise they were deluged. It's the universal problem with social games.. social behaviour isn't scalable, so it forces people into competition.

This even applies outside of businesses. Just ask the people who wind up with their house or club being ignored because someone else in a similar group has a nicer one. Ask anyone who has their own ideas about fantasy role-play, but now has to explain to every potential player why they should come play on their 4096 with newbie prefabs, rather than in Avilion, which has 4 sims built by teams of builders with years of experience. Even the sex and BDSM people have their own limits. Wasn't SLough posted here at one point?

My point is that railing against the FIC or the Sheep is pointless while these are the case because if it is not the Sheep it will be someone else. And if the Sheep are being paid to create a better overall experience then, well, isn't that much better than getting paid for just making one shop and not having to care about anyone else's ability to be anything other than a passive customer? If we get rid of all the Linden favors then, well, there will still be a dominating clique, it just won't have Linden favors and will therefore have a harder time producing quality content.