Too Little, Too Late

View on Umnik Hax's ad farm from the Alice United Front Against Ad Farms, where citizens have taken action to mitigate the uglification of the view.

Jack Linden IM'd me in world at a very early (very late?) time for him, with a simple line, "Done with the Lindens?" "Yes," I said.

"Jack Linden reads further," he said, and I had nothing more to say. He meant my blog, and the next time I froze and had to re-log (an every-10-minute-occurrence for me in SL these days), whoops I saw a new blog by Jack on the ad farms issue, clearly posted before he was letting me know that he was reading my blog. Always making points, these Lindens. Always letting you know they're in the right, as if to say "Nothing we do is under resident pressure; we move in mysterious ways, our wonders to perform..."

Except, it's too little, too late, and nothing about it undoes my sense that I am "done" with the Lindens. For one, that awful experience the last few days of flying all over the new sims, and seeing literally thousands of parcels ruined by ad farms for people who had spent bundles of money on this land, was just...sickening. No amount of penance can undo that. Even if every single ad farm were removed, the loss of value, the breaking of faith with people already occurred -- and will occur again because it goes deeper.

Since I have land on 65 sims, I have to scamper around pretty busily every day to tour it all and see if it is all OK, and tend to tenants and vacancy signs and such. So I see at least 4 times that many sims' conditions every day, all over (I try to keep pace with the growing world by adding parcels in the new areas to keep visibility for Ravenglass). But I don't always have time to make a thorough tour of the new continents and see the awful havoc and mess. And when I have the last few weeks -- as I said: I have been sickened.

I've explained my reasoning here on the JIRA as to why I don't think I need to close my JIRA about applying the TOS to the ad farm problem (Torley and the fan boys will be along any minute to close my JIRA, so I tried to pre-empt them). Jack's concept is far more narrow, untested, and possibly easily gamed -- I don't know. Many will rush to lavishly thank the Lindens for putting this policy in place, but like the ageplay policy, when they do put something right in place, if you have long noted it, your first feeling is still revulsion that it took so long and that they did it under such a persistent and loud clamour and yet at such a slow and divided pace...Revulsion.

You can now abuse report ad farms -- so I did! And you should, too.

There's a school of thought that says you need to "cooperate" with a government/authority/power like the Lindens if they take some small step, make some concession, seem to bow to public pressure slightly -- and praise them and cease your dissent. I definitely don't belong to that school of thought, because I think it's a time when more, not less pressure is needed, because when they make these concessions, you must hold their feet to the fire. There is an awful lot of slippage that can occur, and will occur, as they try to implement such a admittedly (on their part) subjective policy. There will also be cunning forces at work trying to outwit them and game the new policy, too.

And for me, as for others in the past, I think the best thing to do with Lindens is to stop talking to them and stop engaging with them, and cease legitimizing them in some deep Metaversal way. After all, these are people who permabanned me from their forums and blog for no demonstrably just reason whatsoever. These are people who have stood by while I and my tenants have been griefed in the most awful ways, and laconically "uh'd" and sneered at me. These are people who have actually caused me a lot of grief over the years in various ways -- and it's just time to be done with them. There just comes a time when you look over the years, you realize you have been patient, abiding, helpful, constructive -- yes, engaging them is being constructive -- praising their baby steps, accepting their limp gestures as meaningful -- and at a certain point, the accumulated grievances are just too great, you realize you cannot accept such treatment any more.

As I noted on the JIRA, just as with banks and casinos, some of the adsters seem to have been tipped off, as they took off their "for-sale" signs from their parcels about 6 weeks ago, and took them off the market. But then doubled the size and ugliness of the towers (like Chrischun Fassbinder). Others, like Kalyrra, started linking up smaller parcels and calling the whole thing "mini parks" and putting just one spinning ugly sign, as if that will be less noticed set in a grove of trees. Both those situations will NOT be eligible for action under the new dispensation -- although it should, as I explain, under my interpretation of the existing TOS, because it still spams, disturbs the peace, interferes with the enjoyment of SL -- it devalues one's land.

I'd like to think that by going after even a narrow portion of the ad farm problem, the Lindens will create a ripple effect, as more and more cheap scuts realize that they can't get money this way, and it will start to dry up. We'll see. I sure plan to abuse report every ad farm within 64 m draw distance of my view, and encourage everyone else to do so, too.

The comments contain the usual gushing and kissing and wooting, some good skepticism damning with some faint praise (Carl Metropolitan) and then a misplaced rant on freedom of speech (Bob Bunderfeld). Everybody worries about reading "intent" and that reading intent will somehow whack at freedom of speech. That's how Michael Linden, with his cynical "Uhs..." could claim that he could keep remaining colour-blind to Blak Hax and his blackface antics or Umnik and his sneering Star of David abuse. But it's really, truly not hard to tell the intent of 32 spinning kiosks with the same snarky texture on them, or 32 ads with naked female butts -- seriously, this is *not rocket science*.

You know something? One thing about a streaming, 3-D, emotional, interactive world? It's as easy as hell to read intent. Pretending otherwise is to be living in ancient history on the Internet, and not in virtuality.

This is why I was for using existing TOS language about "undesirable ad content" and "spam" and "repetitive use". That way ANYONE who said an ad was undesirable could get a hearing -- as well they should. No one has some absolute right to stick a sign on a sim where they own only 16 m2 and destroy somebody's $3000 US purchase. Sorry, but you don't make a world that way. If I own an entire sim except only 16 m that somehow an ad farmer got, why should they get to hold me hostage?! I'm not going to be clicking on their ad!

Secondly, by interpreting repetitive ad farms as spam, mere repetition alone, either in height, with 20-cube ad towers, or in width, with 32 cut-ups of a 512, the Lindens don't have to fuss whether the thing is for sale or not. I had this thought out brilliantly.

So...what about my other "doneness" issues?

Blak Hax is still in the People list, and will likely be for one of those "Linden works in mysterious ways" reasons. But an obnoxious, unruly, and abusive avatar like this with minstrelsy blackface as his avatar from a RL photo of someone from the past -- well, that's going to be definable as racism all in itself, given the context.

I noticed that now the lovely Madelina Rossini, the "instructor of RL Woodbury" has started a new group, a kind of evil twin to the Linden Dept. of Public Works, called "Woodbury Road Crew".

"Residents who are supporters of Woodbury University in Second Life and all it stands for. These are not students, faculty and staff of the real life Woodbury University in Burbank, California, but have become friends of Woodbury through the metaverse."

So despite being told not to represent Woodbury, she's made this group, even though it claims it doesn't include staff (she's staff, duh). And Intlibber IM'd me to tell me that it was just an offshout, a fan group, and not the actual Woodbury University, so it was legit. Well, no. Because Madelina, who is a Rl instructor, founded it, and thereby blurred the distinction. I will be writing to her dept. chair.

She has knowingly and wittingly put in that group people like Blak Hax, a serial criminal in SL, because she's in on the whole shtick they're doing, which is pretending there's a great group of frisky but well-meaning kids, with only a few bad eggs. Bollocks. They are a conspiracy. Every single one. There are numerous serial harassers in the group.

But...if Blak Hax disappeared from the People list tomorrow, would my "doneness" be over?

No. Because, again, the cynicism, the nastiness that I've had to see coming from some of the Lindens, even ones I had thought better of, is just too over-powering.

I can't get over this very strong hunch that the success of Second Life for everyone -- but even just me personally -- really does depend on not engaging in some deep way with the Lindens, because at root, there are just too many elements of them that do not mean well, and have a very different agenda than one that I think will lead to freedom and civility for most people. Some tekkies think the answer is to create open sims and central grids to get away from them (love that free concept of "central," eh ROFL?) No, that merely replicates the virus, the hacker mentality, the Copybot thuggery.

The Lindens cannot please everybody. They have a lot of interests to take into account, first of all their own. That doesn't mean that I and others must endlessly bend to their will, must less bend over. We have our interests, too! We pay the bills! I think the extent to which we can make a strong civil society and civic values on the grid without them, or even in spite of them, it's to the good.

Comments

[Alex]

Congratulations, Prokofy.
You've just said it. :)
Also, "paying the bills" is essential too. How? Simple. If at least 1000 or so big users paying a USD 1k or more a month will deside to solidarize and DEMAND something... You know what happens? :) I guess you know.
Otherwise these people can perform a CHARGEBACK for at least 2 last months. I leave calculations to you. :)
That's how this unnatural situation with 'gods' and their imaginary 'powers' can be solved EASILY. :)
So... 'people who pay bills' as you put it indeed HAVE power in this situation. I'm not saying they need to excersize it this way, but THEY CAN do it some day.
Regards.

[Prokofy Neva]

I would never use a chargeback as a means of dealing with a company. I think that's unethical.

[Prokofy Neva]

Keep voting!

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-4121

[Ann Otoole]

Ask your bank or CC company to perform a chargeback against LL and you will be banned from secondlife until the chargeback is reversed. So make sure you settle up and cash out first because that is the buh bye button. I do not see this financial policy at LL being anything more than responsible bookkeeping.

I do expect sedition to be added to the list of bannable offenses pretty soon.

So I say "Great Job on the ad farm policy" to the Lindens.

[Blaccard Burks]

A little note:

I had contacted many of the people running ads in Samoa ( since I own the majority of the sim) and was trying to get the ads moved to the road. Only 1 person complied on a land swap, all others wanted anywhere from 300 to 50,000 to relocate their parcel.... to a better place! Chrischun Fassbinder took his sales offline only to replace them now at over 15000 lindens as opposed to his usual 9950 lindens. Ancient Shriner still lives by his motto " in Second Life, you buy the land, not the view" mentality.. and continues to have his useless signs walled in. If they truely were interested in a advertizing business, they would work with people to place effective ads in high traffic places not in my back yard.

The umik.de guy has ruined alot of sims, but I can't blame him fully...see my next comment.

[Blaccard Burks]

A proposal I'd like to see:

The auction sales of new sims, go like this for those who don't know. A person "wins" the sim and immediatly parcels it out at just 1 to 2 lindens per meter over their cost. at a 65536 m2 parcel, on a 2 linden per meter flip thats a 492 dollar profit less your tier of 195 USD equates to 297 US dollars. I've seen people do this on 3 sims in a week. Not bad for a weeks work.

So the ad farm guy steps in and erects his 10 x 10 16m2 block in the middle of the sim and the rest of that person's dream of flipping the sim fast get ruined.... GOOD!

What the real shame is Linden Labs has created beautiful new sims and most will never see thier full potential because they get cut up.

My proposal is give people who win a new sim a rebate if they keep the whole sim intact for a defined period of 3 to 6 months. It will lower sim pricing overall, because basically,by using credit cards, flipping the sim, only costs you when you have to make that payment, and most sims have been flipped within a week. So a person who wants to make a real investment will have to either develop and rent or wait it out.

[Laetizia Coronet]

The problem with this policy is that it is - again - unclearly worded and leaves many a loophole.
As a mentor I fear the day I am called upon to judge an ad farm. LL doesn't give me the clarity I need to be able to make a judgement.

It would be better to be done with the 16m2 parcels altogether.

[Prokofy Neva]

This is why we don't need a Linden-supported mentor system. They have no clarity on their own, only what the muddled Lindens supply them. And they can't look rationally at an obvious case of extortion, and make a judgement call, as they are technically literalist and therefore illiterate.

[Desmond Shang]

Umnik Hax had a farm,
$L-i $L-i o h!

And on that farm he had some ads,
$L-i $L-i oh!

With a click-buy here
and a click-buy there,

here a click, there a click, everywhere a click click.

Umnik Hax had a farm,
$L-i $L-i oh!

* * * * *

Jack and the Bean$talk

Once upon a time there was a poor boy named Jack, sent to market to sell the family's last cow.

On the way, he met a land baron, who said: "I'll give you three plots of mainland for that cow." Jack agreed.

Upon returning home, his mother said, "that land is useless!"

Jack sat down in despair, and soon found out why.

Three giant adfarm towers had sprouted next to the land, rendering it utterly worthless and extolling him to join the Blingtard VIP club.

Jack thought: I'll see about this! And began climbing one of the towers, that went straight up into the clouds.

No sooner did he arrive at the top, when he discovered a Giant Ad Farmer!

"Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman!
Be he Live or be he Dead
I'll grind his mainland to make my bread!

Jack climbed back down as fast as he could, with the monster coming after him. Upon reaching the bottom, he chopped and chopped, and felled the ad tower, killing the Giant Ad Farmer along with it!

And thus ended the time of the Giant Ad Farmers on the mainland.

[Prokofy Neva]

And no thanks to Desmond, in Alice.

[SqueezeOne Pow]

Once again we see what happens when you try to get LL to regulate things in world. They go about it in a retarded, heavy-handed way that doesn't actually solve the problem but creates more work for everyone.

The simple solution would be either to make it so you can't divide land any smaller than 96m2 or to allow someone to visually mute an object as well as the mute options already available. That's just a few hours of work for someone at LL then they're done.

Instead they just opened themselves up to be innundated with 80% more bullshit ARs from vindictive bitches.

This is why I'm a firm believer in not involving the Lindens in anything more than being a service provider. They aren't a government. SL isn't a country.

[Ann Otoole]

personally i think LL needs to simply evaluate resident behavior and delete accounts that display extortionist and/or criminal behavior traits. ad farm extortion? GONE> no appeal. repeated IP theft? GONE> no appeal. and the machine banned. and if a consistent pattern of behavior emanates from a certain lower IP address quartet then that IP address with it's lower quartet wildcarded is filtered out of all sl related routers.

otherwise the miscreant behavior will continue on account after account after account after account...

LL doesn't have what it takes to be strong and proactive against criminal operations.

[SqueezeOne Pow]

Yes, nothing like the secret police making people dissappear in the night.

And LL would totally get it right and be efficient at it, too! They've got a good track record with administrative duties as it relates to customer service! ;)

The solution has to be technical and not political/administrative. That's the only way it could be done fairly with a company and platform like LL and SL.

[ichabod Antfarm]

"anything more than being a service provider"

Service providers police the content on their networks. Every ISP I have used has stated very clearly what kind of traffic is disallowed. They probe for smtp relays, many of them throttle bit-torrent traffic, etc. In other words, they constrain the behaviour of their users/clients in order to provide a consistent and tolerable experience for those same users/clients. How is this different from Linden Lab disciplining residents whose behaviour is abhorrent to the majority of their clients? This is why I support Prokofy's jira initiative. The lab already has the tools it needs in the form of the Community Standards.

"solution has to be technical and not political/administrative." Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. Advocating for a technical solution IS advocating a political position. Nihilistic techno-anarchism is still a politics of a sort :-)

How is it possible that in real life we managed to create free and open societies that are, more or less, lawful, peaceful and prosperous but when you propose that virtual worlds ought to be built following the same patterns we humans have been developing for thousands of years you get shouted down by a chorus of "can't be done, can't be done." Is it lack of imagination? Is it laziness? Or, is it, as I fear, despite for
sociality as such?

[SqueezeOne Pow]

ich:

Once again, as is the popular habit on this blog, you're looking at SL from within the context of SL instead of from RL.

Since we're pretending SL is its own world and not a series of programs used to SIMULATE a world let's look at it from within that box. It is erroneous to look at LL as a government. Although I hate to make this type of comparison, look at them like gods due to their abilities to make things in this "world" a reality that we will never be able to do (barring open source or employment but those are outside of the scope of this discussion). Societies have been made by groups of "mortals"; regular people like us who wanted order and progress. Not by dieties directly making it so to the point of actively appointing a leader and a structure to things (religious beliefs notwithstanding).

Er go, LL is a service provider. Not in the internet sense (I forgot who I was talking to haha) but in the sense that they have provided us with a world and certain abilities to shape and interract with that world...just like (insert diety of choice) is/are a service provider in that he/she/they provided us with the actual world and certain abilities to shape it and interract with it (or to isolate one's self from it!).

I don't want to waste Jesus's time by having Him re-write tax law in the state of Nevada!

Conversely, LL doesn't have the omnipotence or omnipresence to discern things they have little or no actual involvement with. Don't kid yourselves. A decent amount of the Lindens that influence policy and implement features and fixes don't actually play the game enough to understand things the way we on the ground and in the trenches do. Just read most of the jira entries about Havok 4 regarding vehicles.

Now, zooming out and coming back to RL I stand by my assertion that any fix to something like regulating advertisement would have to be a technical solution rather than an administrative/political solution. What I meant is this...

The only way this situation will be truly solved (ad farms with ridiculous prices on the land) would be to make it so you couldn't divide land up any smaller than say 80m2 (for example). that way you can still divide your land up but it wouldn't be to the amount that making an ad farm would be as easy to do.

The other solution (they could work in tandem) is to make visual muting an option so anything you just don't want to see can be muted and blocked from view through your client or account...just like how it works with sounds.

Those are technical solutions. What people are asking for and what LL has implemented are administrative and "political" solutions.

Making a system where there will be MORE ARs heading into LL is administrative in nature but actually the opposite of a solution. It'll be another "broadly offensive" where offensiveness will be in the eye of the Linden and they will often miss the point.

Seeking an administrative solution to this problem is going to fail in much the same way as Prohibition failed. There just won't be the resources available to stop it from happening in this way.

Instead what I've proposed as technical solutions would essentially be akin to God (or whoever) making alcohol no longer taste good or have desireable effects to anyone.

[Danton Sideways]

SqueezeOne – You keep repeating that SL is only a game, and a program to simulate reality. You hold that LL as service provider should only provide technical modifications to the program, rather than any "political" solutions.

Do a Google search for "virtual community," and read some of what pops up, such as the Wikipedia article, or extracts from Rheingold's book. An on-line service provider such as LL provides a platform for a *community*, which is made up of real human beings and their real social interactions.

You should also read Clay Shirky's famous post "A group is its own worst enemy." Discussing the need for structure and rules in on-line groups, Shirky quotes Geoff Cohen: "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." Just as forums need to be moderated, so does the Second Life community. The question is how much moderation should be provided by Linden Lab, and how much can be provided by arrangements among the residents themselves.

Linden Lab appears to be increasingly aware that they as service provider must exercise significant social moderation. They long hesitated because of outspoken opposition from advocates of laissez-faire. But last year they banned gambling, and recently they banned banking. A week ago they announced a new program of "public works," and a few days ago they defined a new "violation of our community standards" as follows: "Using content, particularly advertising, to deliberately and negatively affect another resident’s view so as to sell a parcel for an unreasonable price." These are all social, rather than technical measures, and your point of view thus seems to be losing ground.

[ichabod Antfarm]

Squeeze,

The distinction between RL and SL isn't hard and fast for me as you have pointed out. The reason for my belief is based on another belief that the world of RL is as much a construct, a human artifact, as the world of SL and, as the product of human activity, it is (or ought to be) governed by whatever governs any and all human activities. That governance can be in the form of a legislature, a time honored tradition, a parent, or one's one sense of what is right and wrong.

So called "Technical" solutions to the problems presented by Second Life short circuit the processes that make us civilized, which is to say, the processes that make us human. But, as Prokofy always says, being civilized is hard and often dirty work and usually not very glamorous. Thankfully, it isn't impossible.