Ginsu Goon

Gene Yoon sitting in the poorly-rezzing product offering.

Yes, Gene Yoon, AKA Ginsu Linden, is a kind of goon -- an organized griefer in the world of Second Life -- a world-destroyer, the greatest one to come along in a really long time. Surprising, really, but the VP of Business Affairs who you might think intuitively would be concerned to maintain the fiction of a user-generated world "imagined and owned by its residents" is now reversing the rhetoric and explaining that all of this is merely a product with features -- that some people just believe a little too literally in.

In speaking to a select and filtered audience yesterday at Metanomics, an offshoot of Metaversed.com (you can watch the video here), Gene Yoon (AKA Ginsu Linden) said with incredibly casual, chilling and cruel California condescension that Second Life's customers become so immersed in the "product offering" of Linden Lab (the world of Second Life) that they mistake the Lindens for "a government" or even "game gods". Why, these chumps even make something they laughingly call "a virtual economy" and accept these "metaphors" like "currency" or "land" as something "real". Insane! (something Robert Bloomfield began studying with fascination, but quickly dropped when he realized it was far, far more cool to study the sector of the RL economy called "the gaming and virtual world industry" and hang with industry magnates).

Yes, we feebs and choads are so "hooked" on Second Life that we laughingly do stuff like "buy land" and "purchase currency" and read the label on the can that still says "Your World, Your Imagination" -- even though Ginsu is here to tell us that it's really about "Our Product" -- that we can't be too excited about.

This isn't just about forking the grid into "The Experience" or "The World" and -- individual customers inside a shared, contiguous, streaming world interacting and making content -- and "The Grid" -- larger-scale corporations and enterprise-level bulk purchases.

This is about the rapid commodification of Second Life, what I keep coming back to: in one day, the Sheep could buy nearly as many islands, and fill them with content in a few weeks, cutting and pasting and using a team of highly-paid designers, and put as many people on them, as Anshe Chung could take in 3 years, filling 500 sims with real people living and interacting and generating their own content. For Ginsu, VP of Business Affairs, the dense complexity of Dreamland and its genesis and its prognosis is absolutely uninteresting, when he can generate the same number of island sales and customers through TV-Land through things like CSI:NY.

DREAMLAND V. TV-LAND

That is, no doubt Anshe's team could also fill 400 or 500 sims with content in a week -- probably better and cheaper than the Sheep did. But the point is, the Sheep built a TV-tie in that grew stale within a few days and forgotten with yesterday's newspaper and TV guide, and reduced from 420 to 28 sims, but yet represents the mass commodification of SL that will move away from the "world" model to the "experience" model; Anshe has built a persistent world-within-a-world, which the Lindens and their new corporate friends have basically disdained and devalued, glutting land into the economy -- because it's not an economy, it's their company's revenue line from their product sales efforts.

Suzerain Michael Linden didn't get Ginsu Linden's memo about how the product offering doesn't contain a government.

A PRODUCT OFFERING THAT HOLDS GOVERNANCE MEETINGS EVERYDAY

Yes, I said to myself the next day, reviewing what Ginsu said and turning on Second Life. These Lindens are so cynical, and in fact so little wish to be a "government" or "game gods" and "have just a product offering" that....they lay on a team of Governance Lindens to appear *every single day of the week now at 10:00 am inworld" to discuss governance issues, like the abuse report system.

Do these Lindens ever talk to each other? Do the people in Ginsu's office and Ginsu himself, who is busy with a kind of "mergers & aquisitions" (which apparently he did in his former life), and maybe even the big enchalada of Linden Lab itself being acquired or merged -- do they talk to the Community and Governance Lindens who are out there huffing and puffing and doing this impossible task of trying to manage the customer base in fact as if they are in "a world"? Perhaps even with an aim to keeping it? Because this base -- made up more of individuals and mom and pop operations than corporations -- is what feeds the Lindens' bottom line?

I guess not.

AIMEE'S PARTY: THE PLATFORMISTAS

Of course, Ginsu is feeding the script -- metaphorically speaking, because they probably don't even talk to each other but are just on the same wavelength -- to Aimee Weber and other FIC regs who are going around now with the message that SL is a platform, not a world, silly you, if you believed in it and spent any money on anything that was not portable, like virtual estate, and didn't spend it on becoming a kick-ass creator with portable content, using Aimee's new book.

Aimee must be between jobs now -- she's out on the sluniverse.com forums and elsewhere ranting about Prokofy, babbling gibberish, and admonishing other kids who seem to take SL as a *world* -- just the way Philip Rosedale spoke of it, "It's a world...it's a place..." -- and telling them they should realize it's about as much a "world" as Tile and Flooring World of Paramus, NJ -- and they need to learn how to make tile and flooring and shut up about it being a world.

And Aimee knows about Tile and Flooring World of Paramus, NJ...because...why? Could her cultural level be about at the level of Paramus, NJ perhaps?

'NOT AN ECONOMY, A PRODUCT'

Ginsu is spinning the "not an economy, not a world, but a product" crap now -- rather than really substantively answering *even a single question* about the currency market and the land auction system -- because he is setting the stage for *dismantling it*. Instead, he tried to cleverly turn the entire conversation around to a bland discussion of land-as-service or currency-as-service. Hey, we *realize* these are services because duh, WE are the ones PERFORMING THESE SERVICES, NOT YOU, GINSU HELLOOOO. BUT WHAT DO WE GET OUT OF ?! AFTER YOUR LIQUIDITY EVENT?

Don't think we are such chumps that we don't *realize* that, Ginsu. We get it. But what you don't get is what Kool-Aid poison you are suffering from. You imagine that you are growing, that you yourself are becoming more and more important, and that you will have this great portfolio of all these grid-level customers who will buy sims in bulk and pay a fortune for special licenses and hook-ups as you open-source -- whenever that happens -- or even before then (as ESC had a special license to have a viewer).

You imagine you can dump this model of having loads of choads buy individual parcels or individual islands and merely create lots of green dots and trouble tickets for you to manage, and move to a model where those green dots will be somebody else's problem to manage, and you will merely manage the relationships among these larger entities. But what will make those big entities come? Who will visit their builds? You really need to save the economy and the world, but for reasons of greed, lack of vision, or Bolshevik revolutionary zeal to grid up the whole known universe, you aren't going to bother.

GINSU PHONE HOME

But...guess what. Despite what everyone imagines -- people will be happy living in Sony Homes or Kaneva Lofts or Twinity Urban Dwellings. Not everyone will. Oh, perhaps the masses will -- and that's why they won't fool around on laggy and hard-to-learn Second Life. They will go to people who know how to make them a Home or a Loft or an Urban Dwelling precisely because they will value individual customers and figure out how to serve them well en masse. That might mean removing the power to create custom content in any kind of world-changing way -- but 80-90 percent of the audience won't want that anyway. So contrary to this geeky idea that nobody will want homes -- of course they *will*. And that's precisely the thing that the other new worlds will have grasped -- *people want homes and families and pets*. Because their real ones just aren't as good. And they will pay for them. The Lindens, who invented a system to make this work -- revenue for the home-builders and home-makers and revenue for the grid upholding them -- are going to be the first ones to piss on the model and say only non home use matters: entertainment (TV sims or live music), business (training meetings with identical potted plants on every table) or education (appendages to lecture halls usually involving video)

So Second Life, which actually did the homes and families and pets better in a more lifelike and robust and complex way with a real-life economy, will be the first to shit on that facet of their platform, because it involves individuals and not enterprises, and will likely roll up the best feature of its product ever made -- economy -- or at least so massively gut it and change it that it will be a mere collection of cockle shells of the type you get handed when you go to Club Med, to buy drinks.

And if a huge flood goes out of SL, Linden Lab can't really care. They are selling software. Someone will make everything, as Philip once told me in frustration at my pestering about how things were going to get done properly. Someone will get SL working better, perhaps, or on a separate grid just for big corporation unconnected to blingtards -- or will merely keep it around as a museum and pay LL as a research team to keep doing their lab experiments.

OUR NEW OVERLORDS

The role of Robert Bloomfield in this meeting was UBER frustrating. First of all, he simply didn't take the audience's questions, as is. He completely violated the protocol set for inworld meetings for years, where you pass on the avatar's question in good faith, in total, with his or her name, and not only lumped them together and strained out their meaning, he introduced his own hobby-horses, like the Metaverse Metrics Index.

And that pointed up a HUGE problem we have now with entities like Metanomics and Metaversed, representing corporate interests, entering the scene. They haven't been elected or appointed. They don't represent Linden Lab. Hell, they don't even represent the FIC. They just appear, because they make a claim to corporate presence/attention and then drag the Lindens over, who imagine they are speaking before a prestigious audience (they usually aren't, as you have to ask what kind of prestigious people have the time on a Monday morning at 11:00 am to sit in a laggy SL meeting with the audio not working.) So they in a sense usurp a function that they can't even perform very well, on behalf of themselves, not any community.

Before, when we had a world instead of a product, Philip Linden, or for that matter, just Jeska Linden, would come inworld and hold what was called either "a town hall" if very large or "a community round table" if smaller. People gathered, they asked questions themselves spontaneously, or through a moderator.

Duh, you don't have to explain to us that this doesn't "scale," but then...the Lindens' thinking on this doesn't scale either because they just aren't willing. They can hold these ridiculously senseless office hours now and have 40 people jamming on them in frustration, with another 80 banging on the door from the neighbouring sims, and not be willing to convene the meeting even on a 4-corner sim, or create a strict topic or speakers' list, or eject all the obvious Woodbury goons derailing the conversation. This isn't noblesse oblige; this is noblesse non-oblige, feeling absolutely no obligation to do a damn thing -- they are marking time, doing a load test, making an experiment, learning interesting things about erm...."emergent behaviour" until it's time to open-source, license off the viewer, and get rid of THEIR view of the green dots -- and let them belong to someone else -- that is, they do in fact belong to someone else now -- all the land owners and club owners and educational institutions and businesses -- but they can work it so that the new mega-meta-customers won't have any need of an economy to drive them here.

THE ECONOMY WAS THE STARTER FLUID

It isn't just that the economy needed the Lindens' starter fluid; the very economy itself was the starter fluid.
It will be burned off.

But...the answer isn't to have these usurpers come along and "talk to the Lindens for us" during what will likely shape up to be a pretty nasty transition period. Or to have "the media" in the old-dinosaur-media sort of recipe assume the role and talk to the "newsmakers". So what was in fact innovative, experimental, progressive -- strangers from all over the world meeting on sims with Lindens spontaneously or in a program where free interchange was possible -- is now reduced to this, as Caleb Booker explains:

"Cybergrrl Oh at SLNN covered the event, and in post-interview with Robert Bloomfield summarized: "Bloomfield wondered what Yoon might be “throwing away” by eliminating the metaphors. He pointed to the fact that Second Life does have an economy and believes that Yoon should be thinking about 'the supply and demand of product features that are traded freely among customers.' Regardless of Yoon's perspective, the 'product' is still novel and complicated."

Uh, was there a reason that Robert couldn't ask that to Ginsu *to his face* instead of *sucking up to him* while he was in fact meeting with him?! Was there a reason he couldn't ask the much sharper and clearer and less fanciful versions of these same questions from the people in the audience?!

The fact is, whatever Robert is still willing to cling to on behalf of the notion of "a virtual economy" -- something he has far less a stake in than people in small businesses in SL trying to make a living -- he's already behind the curve, as we all are.

These Lindens *are not interested in any economy*. The message from large corporate entities dismissing the need for any homegrown user economy or internal currency for micropayments is penetrating to them, and they have grasped that it is "cool".

A ROBUST ECONOMY IS AGAINST LL'S INTERESTS

The economy does not butter their bread. It works against them. Its interests are not their interests. They need to sell islands and glut the land market and make land dirt cheap to accommodate mass use; they don't need to balance its supply. It's all temporary any way -- a New Economic Program like Lenin's, for expediency's stake.

So here's my message to Ginsu and other Lindens: hey, we know EXACTLY what you world-destroyers are up to -- and I mean EXACTLY. It's pretty plain to anyone who has been around here this long. You are not and never have been interested in making a world, which is messy and complicated; you just want to make software. Um, let somebody else make worlds *with* the software if they can manage -- but you're not terribly concerned how that works for them. Now, you are destroying the village in order to save it -- like Vietnam. You will not *bother* with the village anymore -- it's *in the way*.

And don't think we didn't notice you tooling and dying and fixing up the TOS long in advance to close every single loop-hole that would involve anyone taking any current, land, or content *seriously* and suing you for deliberate and destructive devaluation.

LAWSUITS

There are exactly two lawsuits in Second Life -- and they'll likely be the last: the first one (Bragg) tries to declare virtual land a real good that cannot be seized by an authority in a common carrier (leaving aside the issue of the exploitation of the product feature) -- the Lindens settled rather than let THAT one go by them; the second one (Eros) is about using real-life intellectual property law to defend designs that in fact are portable and can exist apart from Second Life in the abstract, especially now that there are other worlds, although of course they have their life only in Second Life for now -- that suit will likely get settled too, rather than decided, but serve as a deterrent to all the people who'd like to Copybot whatever content there is in SL now in the last days before open source and grab whatever they can grab.

I could make some sort of list of things I think the Lindens should do in order to try to save the economy, but given that they are so busy actively harming it, and given the goon perspective of the VP of Business Affairs, I don't think it makes sense. You could ask them not to open-source, or stage the way to open-source in some real collaboration and concern about inworld businesses on equal par as they have about inworld script-kiddies being in the Architecture Working Group -- there are a 100 things you could ask of them, but they won't be changing their nature, or their perspective.

DEVALUATION OF DREAMLAND

You could ask them not to sell Anshe Chung 50 islands this week (after she claimed she wasn't expanding) and not enable her to announce the devaluation of Dreamland land -- to the general anger and consternation of customers -- but then, how could you stop her? You need her to fill your bottom line; she is addicted to you to keep her market share.

And what is happening to Dreamland is no different than what is happening to Mainland -- the value is being glutted, diluted, and disrupted by the Lindens, and that means while newbies might be happier at getting cheaper land and will gripe less on the forums, and while oldbies are either hardened, living on 4096-tier-free-for-life or tiering down pragmatically, midbies are stuck, especially if they bought at $20/m 6-9 months ago and have to sell at $5/m today. They are angry at the devaluation of what they perceived to be as a "real estate investment" or a "fixed business cost" even -- and sort of bewildered how this could have happened.

THE EVIL PLAN

As the Lindens go hell-bent on growing the platform faster and faster to buy themselves market share before they open source, and before other virtual worlds grow more powerful, there are only 3 things rational for them to do:

o sell as many expensive islands as they possibly can to as many unsuspecting people as they can and not worry if they work or not after they are sold
o sell as many mainland sims as cheaply and as quickly as possible and boost premiums and not worry if they are devalued by microbaron ad extortion on small parcels
o print and sell currency as cheaply as can be tolerated by those still trying to cash out (and we could go a dollar below the current value and Ginsu will *still* find chumps to take part in this vain exercise)

None of these things are objectively in the interest of the world itself, which needs to hold value -- and to be free, so that its agents can ascribe value, i.e. by setting the price of the Linden/dollar exchange by the market, not by what Supply Linden needs to make as a salary for himself that month; to set the supply and demand of servers to the actual supply of newbies and landowners serving them; or to set the supply of islands objectively at what corporations are willing to pay -- and they can and should pay more than individuals.

What's important for individuals and small businesses on the grid now to understand starkly and visibly is that *they are not needed*. They can go on huffing and puffing and playing store. They can go on playing house. They can go on finding bugs and sitting at the Lindens' feet in office hours -- but they are merely bug-fixing for a software that the Lindens will sell to the highest bidder in the form of special corporate licenses, and not get a penny back.

There are only about 300,000 of us, 50,000 logged on at any one time, with perhaps that famous 5,000 who decide the world serving the other 45,000, let's say. The Lindens don't have such a great need for a lot of salespeople and floor-walkers that they aren't above stepping on them and killing -- well, all but the most loyal and sycophantic. They can lurch and lump along until they open source, in 9 months or 6 months -- and it will be sped up by the announcement of some Other Big Thing that may be half-cooked but will be rushed out too, when they can begin to offer expensive hook-ups and licenses ahead of the mass open-source pack and sop up whoever remains on the grid -- and then let the new customers go into the hands of those licensee reagents.

Comments

[Alex Nikolaides]

How very interesting is the *timing* of Ginsu speech and Aimee’s blog post and her numerous posts about that subject on SL Universe. Add to these the recent overhaul of the front page of secondlife.com to include the “Second Life GRID” [sic], as if the SL Grid is something different than SL itself, and we got the answer why suddenly the “chosen” are furiously debating on the “world vs. platform” issue.

What is even more interesting, in an appalling kind of way, is that those “platformists/economists/ lawyers/venture capitalists” express strong opinions about the world without working or simply being *in-world*. What do we have here? Lindens (who see the world from outside), old established content creators (who haven’t produced anything in-world for ages), metaverse journalists (who admit, e.g., on SecondRant that “they don’t know how to buy land –land barons set it up for them”) and professors (who come in-world just for one hour meeting and don’t even have the knowledge to move few sliders to change their hideous avatar appearance).

It is more than obvious that all the above want a “400 TV-SIMs-on/off World”, complete with pre-made shapes/skins/textures/scripts/HUDs/land for their customers/residents to have a predefined tailor-made restricted experience. Will they succeed with their quest? I’m afraid they will. Do they care about the current 150.000 active residents who made the world what it is today? Why should they? We were just beta testers. 1.500 big corporations will bring more profit than 150.000 active residents. And they won’t complain about things not rezzing, lost inventories, scams, griefers, Ginko banks etc. It will finally be “Your World, Our Profits”.

[Prokofy Neva]

Thanks, Alex, it's nice to hear somebody resonate to the points I've been making for once and even make some I hadn't thought of, instead of dealing with a passel of idiots trying to refute it out of self-interest.

I was going to write a post about this "What is the FIC?" thread at sluniverse.com, but really, it's perfect to read all on its own:
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/showthread.php?t=2289

Cocoanut has some really sterling writing here rebutting all the old chimes rung by Aimee and other self-interested FIC regulars and FIC newbies and wannabees like Beeb.

The people who need to be treated as special and privileged naturally incline to the "Second Life as Tile World of Paramus, NJ" model. A New Jersey housewife may become immersed in this tile-world, believing she is in a "real kitchen" and "really chosing tile for her kitchen" as she stands in a model kitchen.

But of course the store manager knows she is merely in "Paramus, New Jersey".

She may object and say, but the tiles and the demo kitchen are very real to me and I'm your customer, but he can merely say 'Hey, I'm selling tiles, if you believe in my demo kitchen THAT much to buy my tiles, ok, that's good, but they are merely demos to sell tiles."

What's amazing to read about this thread is that the FIC types can't even see their own internal contradictions.

Beeb says that no software company would make their customers equals and hire them as programmers -- except under some extremely unlikely scenarious. These customers can't "tell them what to do" like a democracy.

Yet...that's exactly what the FIC theory *is* -- the Lindens DO hire their customers! They *do* allow these feted few and their hangers-on in the IRC and the office hours to tell them what to do! So they do in fact have a kind of managed, centralized democracy for those in the inner circle.

No, of course they don't make the rest of us equals, but those feted few they do.

The other thing that is hilarious is that these kids imagine that the corrupt and suspect culture of Silicon Valley -- skewered in Valleywag all the time, questioned by all of America and even geeks themselves when it really becomes obvious in their own big IT companies or IT companies they become dependent on as purchasers -- that this culture is "the norm".

They imagine its business practices are "ok". If they never bid out openly and transparently; if they never have some kind of public accountability or some kind of demonstrable set of criteria for hiring employees and criteria, if it's all done by this vicious little system of craven sycophantism and such -- that this is "ok".

But it's not. Businesses *aren't* run this way. Companies openly put contracts to bid. They don't just pick the friends of their friends.

The FIC imagines that they are the demonstrable talented and deserving ones. But...they aren't. If they were, who would complain? It isn't ust that there *is* a FIC; it's that it's a particular pathetic and shabby and unconvincing FIC.

One senses that these kids have never been in real jobs or ever had to really run an office or a company themselves.

Another thing that is humorous is this idea that I'm now irrelevant and diluted out of existence by the supposed millions of SL. That those millions dilute *them* out of existence long before they dilute me escapes them. That they are has-beens or wannabee or "between jobs" is written all over their faces. What they write, they write out of insecurity, malice, spite, hate.

[Prokofy Neva]

Also, I come back to this post again:
http://slrecord.typepad.com/the_second_life_record/2007/11/the-illusion-th.html

in response to Aimee's latest convulsions from the Platformista Party.

And again I think of this quote I have long treasured by Vincent Shreur, a gaming lawyer:

"I contend that the end user licence terms (or ‘terms of service’) for a metaverse like Second Life perform a very different function to those of an MMO game provider. Terms of service for a metaverse exist to regulate a permanent, persistent alternate reality inhabited by real human beings. As such, they are much more akin to the written constitution and fundamental laws which regulate us in the real world."

What I like about this fellow's concept and his critique of SL's TOS in light of the U.S. Constitution is that he realizes that a persistent alternative reality WITH PEOPLE IN IT isn't just some software, some Massively-Multiuser Photoshop, as Eric Rice calls SL, for Aimee to have her career with. Yes, the MUPpets -- that's what we should call them.

[Prokofy Neva]

For those of you keeping score at home, Tile and Flooring World of Paramus, NJ recently underwent some changes, leading to an IPO and new management. Along the way, they faced a lawsuit involving claims of versimilitude to a "world" of their storefront on Route 17.

Sharp eyes have noted that Tile and Flooring World of Paramus, NJ may have become one of the chain stores of Ideal Tile -- there is even a store now near YOU in Parsippany -- and hey, for that matter, you stuck-up prigs, in Manhattan!

Ideal Tile of course doesn't have that same homegrown, wild feel as the humbly-named Tile and Flooring World of Paramus, NJ.

While we recognize that Ideal Tile is, well, Ideal and even has many branches Near Us, Tile and Flooring World of Paramus, NJ will always remain in our hearts.

[cube inada]

nothings changed, except the realization that nothing was really as one thought.

c3

[Ordinal Malaprop]

I was reflecting that there are two large blocks to the ambitions of anyone wishing to remove any "world" element. Firstly, as you point out, people stay in SL not because they saw a lovely sim somewhere that ties into their favourite perfume, but because they found a world; if they can't find a world, they will go elsewhere to somewhere that they can, even if they can't build there. To a consumer there is little difference between paying the world-owners for virtual goods and paying other residents for other goods.

SL has a huge variety of things for sale and activities to do, which means that it ends up being superior to other alternatives at present, but that is the result of its sprawling non-centrally-planned inefficient and endlessly dynamic economy. Which is dependent on its world nature. Lose or reduce that and people start to say "eh, at least I can log into There, even if the fashions aren't quite as good". And suddenly, all of the potential advertising recipients for the TV builds disappear.

The second, and connected, point is that SL creators, in the main, have gained their skills precisely _because_ they have been interested in the world. Scripters, I might argue, are the least likely to be in this situation, as it is possible to learn LSL as if it is just another language (and professional programmers are used to learning languages) but if they are any good they need significant world experience, knowing how people use items, where they use them, what they use them for. A scripter unaware of world issues is, well, just another programmer, there are millions of them.

Builders and texturers and designers need even more world experience because their skills are useless without it; if you don't know how people walk about in a building in SL you will make a bad building. The "ship in a bottle" school of architecture, where one makes something that is pretty to look at but inaccessible, results in huge, pretty, architecturally-sound and empty structures (as we see in many corporate builds where I assume somebody has specified "it must look like RL building X!").

In addition to this, LL have made sure that what is required to build, script and design in SL is not terribly compatible with industry standards. If someone is a whizz with Maya and can make huge castles for WoW, it doesn't mean that some amateur can't outbuild them in SL, just on the basis of the tools they must use.

Kill worldliness and you not only wreck the basic economy that keeps people there in the first place, but you also prevent people coming to the position where they _can_ make your specialised corporate structures and tie-ins. You create an esoteric Powerpoint with a dwindling number of authors and a dwindling audience. This is not why I promote the idea of world but even looked at in purely pragmatic terms, rampant platformism is a bad thing.

[Alex Nikolaides]

Perhaps all those invisible-in-world “platformists/economists/media planners/ lawyers/venture capitalists/professors”, instead of pushing their own agendas on forums, blogs and meetings, they should consult first what the people who actually spend time in-world have to say.

The timing could not have been more appropriate for the release of the SL survey conducted by Angelica Ortiz and Pierre-Etienne Noble, “both whom are professional researchers, and yes, avid Second Life members” (from the site). It’s interesting to note that the survey was not conducted for marketing purposes (much to the dismay of the above mentioned out-world metaverse evangelists), but it was an academic research project, i.e., the results are available to anyone.

The full results can be found here http://slsurvey.wordpress.com/the-survey/ and they are a blow on the face of the platformists beliefs and their hidden agendas about the future of SL.

Some interesting bits:

1. On the question “Why do you participate in SL?”, 48.7% answered “Because it’s a
*world* where I can create and build”

2. On the “activities” section, a whooping 94.1% use SL to socialize and meet people. Only 4.7% don’t socialize and spend their time probably in a skybox using the “platform”

3. And this is the most shocking result even for me as an avid resident. The question “When I am in SL it doesn’t feel “virtual”, it feels REAL.”, a huge 45.6% agree/ strongly agree and only 17.8 disagree/ strongly disagree! Imagine… almost *half* of the people surveyed, not only consider Second Life a world but they feel as it is a REAL WORLD!

I can’t wait to see what the platformists, metaverse evangelists have to say about that. I almost hear their reaction coming: “this is not a marketing survey, it’s biased, it’s unscientific blah blah…”

[Maklin Deckard]

"I can’t wait to see what the platformists, metaverse evangelists have to say about that. I almost hear their reaction coming: “this is not a marketing survey, it’s biased, it’s unscientific blah blah…”" - Alex

And the funny thing is, no marketing survey is scientific or unbiased. They are ALWAYS skewed to to make the creator's product/service out to be the best. Kind of like those idiotic JD Powers surveys for the car companies (ford, GM) that they tout about INCREDIBLE customer satisfaction rates in ads...while their market share continues to plummet to foreign competitors.

And on the rare occasion a marketing survey asks what you like about a competitors product compared to theirs, there is never an option equivalent to 'I hate both of your products and use Brand C'.

Marketing is basically a giant con-job...con the masses into thinking they need your product and con the execs into thinking your advertising is actually returning value. So why would anyone outside of the rarified air of the upper level corporate execs with their oxygen-deprived braincells and the professional prevaricators of marketing actually consider a marketing survey useful? :)