Commerce Before Community or Prim Perfectability

I'm going to argue just the opposite to this post, a guest post by, not surprisingly, high-profile massively.com technocommunist Tateru Nino.

Oh, I realize that leftoids will then imagine that I'm a greedy, grasping capitalist, ready to put profit before people, but, um, let's see if that's actually the case -- and whether those arguing "Community Before Commerce" aren't in fact doing the greater damage to humanity -- by actually spelling death ultimately to "communities" that really have no cohesion because they can't pay for themselves, or get themselves paid.

The thesis of Community Before Commerce runs like this:

1. First, a fallacious proposition served up as "fact" when it is in fact "religion": "Commerce cannot exist without communities". Of course it can, and I'll explain why -- and why it's desirable in a free world as well.

2. Second, that flogging of another fallacious propostion common to Internet-residing technocommies -- that people are "forced" into proximity by evil meat-world geography and "hate this". They are in a supposed "captive audience" in thrall.

3. Third, based on these flawed propositions, a "rule" (blecth, coders always come up with this shit) which is "you need a community before you can attempt to sell" -- ludicrous claptrap as anyone knows, and just one of those technocommie religious beliefs they'd like to get people to believe in. Second Life -- hey, Real Life -- puts paid to these fallacies, as you don't need any sort of community whatsoever to sell stuff.

4. Fourth, another fake rule with hortatory and pompous fake guru-hood: "you need to be providing something that the community wants before they will buy". Huh? Tateru has never heard of yard sale -- they run against her socialist constitution, of course. And impulse buys. And buying alone, online, or even on Second Life, following a list, not of friendships, but what you need for your house.

5. Now comes the Fifth fallacy,the collective farm bit, that has to be built to sustain the technocommunism. "You have to move into an established community or you have to build one". Well, nothing of the sort. Because you don't need a community. And it doesn't work that way, either in RL or SL as any cursory and non-ideological monitoring will illustrate.

Now, having said five false things, Tateru moves in with more fake guru-hood for the Sixth thing, a contrived use case. You can't sell a mobile phone connecting to RL in a medieval RP sim, she says.

In a spasm of further faux correctitude, Tateru then serves up a Seventh tip ''go back to print ads or billboards if you don't get it" -- but of course, you can have both in RL still, and of course can have them in SL even more so, and in fact they'd be welcome in some places (not as extortionist plots and ruiners of the view, but in welcome areas, clubs, malls, etc. especially if you pay to rent them. Like, come to Iris and pay to rent my billboards in our Cambodian fishing village : ))

The ideological grip on a mind like Tateru's is a terrible thing to see. It's like a steel trap that closes on something, and never opens. Tateru earnesly believes in these religious tenets of her techno-communism, and no amount of common sense, reasoning, practical experience will persuade her otherwise. That's one of the features of technocommunism, is that it is "never confused by the facts" because it never access them, preferring to remain artificially online in fake IRC channel "thecommunities" that persist like kudzu until somebody literally unplugs the electricity.

Of course, we're going to see the recession make quite a dent in some of this stuff as people have less subsidized situations where they can endless chan away and never earn a living the normal way.

WHERE SECOND LIFE COMES FROM -- NOT OUT OF PHILIP'S ASS, BUT HIS REAL MONEY

Let's take Second Life and follow through these bad ideas of her, and see how they fall apart.

First, there's the notion that community *has to* precede commerce. Well, no. In the case of Linden Lab, there was the initial Organizing Principle which could be boiled down to this: 'Philip played with his own money, which he had from cashing out handsomely from Real" [the company that makes RealAudio]. Philip then attracted other venture capitalists like Mitch Kapor with an ideological lefty bent. Those early employees were worked to death, far beyond the value of their salaries -- they willingly bled themselves. Enthusiastic people were brought in to play in the early beta -- but the *was* a cost - you had to pay at least a subscription fee, like any other service.

So, Commerce Preceded Community. You need money even to make a free sandbox. And the Lindens, like any technocommies temporarily using capitalism, because in reality, they are oligarchic state capitalists pretending to be "socialists", they created the land tier system to get money out of people using the servers. They  need to have lots and lots of servers to test their theory of an entire worldwide online community existing and collaborating interactively in real time. So they had subsidies -- dwell, events grants, free sims for artists and programmers, etc. -- but at the heart of it was the concept that you had to PAY. The community, if you can refer to those first few thousand people, or later the 5,000 logging on concurrently in 2004 when I came on, as a "community", only came about because of the initial commerce involved in getting PAYMENT. And not just a tip jar, but a model involving PROFIT. If it weren't for people making stuff and selling it and renting stuff, SL wouldn't have grown. It grew so slowly and so badly at first without commerce, and with only ideological technocommunism, that Philip had to fire people and retrench in 2003, until his pragmatism and Yankie know-how kicked in with Commerce, which then saved Community.

Now, let's go beyond that initial example of the entire substrate of the world, which Tateru conveniently forgets, and look at then the post-initial-creation phase and the communities that came about next.

KENDRA, UP IN SOCIALIST HEAVEN!

Let's take something like Neualtenberg (*waves to Kendra up in socialist heaven* -- yes *I know* Kendra. You *paid tier*. Yes! I *realize*. I got that point. But you know you got the sim purchase-price-free. Yes, Kendra, will you STOP ARGUING! You're still dead. Kendra! Now stop that! You should be enjoying socialist heaven more and letting go all these earthly cares that so weigh you down still, arguing about tier in SL! Sheesh).

Or let's take Chilbo, to take a more modern, less socialist, but still sort of communal ideological sort of place.

Did Community precede Commerce? Well, not really. Fleep or whoever got a grant, or they got a job which let them do SL part-time. You know, like I always tell my overprimming tenants who can't understand why they have to pay for prims: "Prims have to come from somewhere. They do not come out of my ass."

So in the same way, the Chilbo people all had to pay -- pay subscriptions for tier to donate, pay for the initial purchase cost out of grants or discretionary money they had to use to sustain their SL. It did not come out of somebody's ass. It was paid for.

And let's say that there was just some rich lady out there who bought them the sim so they could play socialism -- there, too, obviously, commerce would precede community. It has to. Stuff has to get paid for. And even if it is paid for out of a grant, those grants come from foundations that got their wealth from rich people in...wait for it...commerce. People who made their fortunes in cars, or dry-cleaning services or on the stock market.

Stop paying tier for one month, whoop, no more community. Everybody argues they will stay in touch, they'll get on Yahoo Messenger or Twitter or have a Meet-UP, but the reality is: no commerce, no community. Pay to play. Even Kendra's socialist paradise in SL, which preceded that rich socialist heaven she is now basking in, God bless her, involved commerce, selling stuff, making art, having artisans even pay rent -- or (in a system that I used to argue with her strenuously was fascistic medieval bondage, not socialism) -- payment to apprentice to a master craftsman and sell at an increasingly lower rate, the more you sell.

PONTIAC SIM

But let's be less literalist, like literalist technocommies, and try to understand Tateru's wacky concept more in the common meaning, of SL as "a community" of users, or series of communities, wrapped around various themes or role-plays or values. So that might run the gambit from harsh Gorean RP sims to Ravenglass Rentals, where the only shared value is a value for cheap rentals where the manager tries to protect the view, but if it goes, you press refund. Very wide spread there. Imagine if they let you refund from Gor! (I suspect that one of the reason my rentals secretly fill up with Goreanss on vacation is they don't let you refund from Gor lol). In Soviet Gor, Gor refunds *you*.

OK, so, let's just take, oh, a Nissan building community, which was fairly successful for awhile. Or, just somebody's tropical club sim where they get a few friends to pay tier or buy stuff or put money in the tip jars to pay for DJs. Even the Nissan people ended up selling their car, if I'm not mistaken. And of course there was that great Pontiac mall-like sim where they let all the content creators make car lots with the car theme stuff, but then hawk their own clothing, gadgets, etc. THEY understood that they had to provide that sweetener. None of this "community before commerce" crap from a RL business, instead of a commie CC business living off daddy's dime. They could have paid a few consultants, or just offered their Pontiac charm and car models and free land, and they might have gotten something going. However, I think the secret sauce there was that *they let people sell stuff in their stores*. That gave them INCENTIVE. Because as much as you like the Pontiac car hop and hanging out, it will pay on you if you CANNOT GET PAID. So Pontiac did a very good thing in LETTING PEOPLE GET PAID. Where it needed work was in phase two, which would involve GETTING PONTIAC PAID.

ELVES NEED MODERN MOBILE PHONES

So can you sell a mobile phone on a medieval sim? Of *course* you can. Second Lifers have a HUGE tolerance for anachronisms and weird juxtapositions, especially on mainland where all the genres coexist cheek by jowl. You could, of course, put the mobile phone object and booth used as the vendor into a theme-like thing, making a little ear horn that fit with the elves or whatever. But...you might not even need that. You could put a vine texture over the booth and still have something plastic and metal inside, and people will not reject it.

Here's one SURE-FIRE way to make sure it is adapted: make it a shared payment scheme. The sim owner who lets you put a vendor there splits the proceeds with you, getting either rent, or even rent, plus a percentage of the take. That will clear up that community blather in a heart beat, as people want to get their sims paid for. People have an enormous capacity to adjust to environments; they don't reject something that either pays them money, or that they need -- let's say to call their friends and say, "Hi, come and RP with me!" After all, in their real lives, sitting at the computer, they have a cell phone likely near their hand. Their elf in SL can stand having one, too -- they fit in your hand.

Or let's pursue this further. Can you sell RL stuff to avatars in general? Yes, we're aware of all the times when this has flopped, like American Apparel, who couldn't be bothered to a) put out even a t-shirt b) make the racks of stuff sellable to avatars with their own designs or c) enlist SL designers for special join AA/SL fashions for the world. But AA, if they were in earnest, didn't need a community of people who liked AA in RL, or anything of the sort. Like in RL they don't anything much beyond their lame advertising of ugly girls in suggestive outfits. They just put the stuff out, put a price tag on it, it sells. No need to force me on a mailing list.

It's true, that avatars in a world don't want to go to, say, a store representing an Indian retailer of metal parts for machines, and just gawk at posters. They would only go if the store offered them steampunk goggles or apocalyptic textures, or had at least a free coffee mug. But...not every store's purpose has to be to play to the inner world. SL is big and diverse enough now that some people will just plunk their RL showcase store into SL unadulterated or changed from RL, as a kind of mere add-on to their website. Possibly they might drop down into it and speak to a client overseas for a more interactive and rich experience, if they both avatarize well and aren't fussy about obstacles. There will be more and more of this sort of thing, and you can't stop it.

And, that's just what I want to get at here: the cramped and fussy technocommie use-cases that Tateru is dreaming up come from that rich but very much past Lindenor -- the pastoral utopian dream where coders will hang out together in sandboxes in their furry or robot avatars and create widgets together that they never sell, but Give to the People out of their deep, uh, magnanimousness (i.e. vain wish for recognition and flattery).

TIME AND ATTENTION = MONEY

The Lindens and their minions like Tateru want to make Second Life like Wikipedia, or like some of the free social media sites, or like Creative Commons. They have this far-out extremist notion that communities of content emerge full-blown out of some deep generosity of spirit and impulse to make a Better World. But...they don't. They emerge out of disposable time and income -- and more importantly, disposable attention, all deployed to shop and BUY STUFF and keep those providing the content in business. Those commodities of time and attention seem endless -- until they're depleted. They will become more depleted. Sitting on your real-life job's time and fiddling with SL scripts you give away for free isn't magnanimousness; it's idiocy, stealing from your employer while on the clock. If you love scripting, quit your dull job and make widgets and *sell them* in SL. Oh, you don't think you can manage on that income? Well, life is tough all over. Grow up, and apportion your time between what pays out, and what is just your hobby. Make less freebies, and there will be more valuation of people's time in scripting and making you a widget, you should pay for.

In fact, a powerful disincentive for the growth of the virtual economy is just this technocommunism, this belief that you have to share, give selflessly -- but not like Christianity, where you do this for moral reasons, or because you must have works, not only faith, or because you love Jesus and emulate him -- but out of a vain, secular impulse to perpetuate flawed, dying humans with some "institution" that is imagined to be "just" -- endlessly giving freebies to newbies. It's a dead end -- you can't pay for it.

WAL-MART

One of the tirades people start against Wal-Mart is that it "destroys communities". This is fake, because those of us who have watched the development of malls in their communities in the last 30 years know that long, long before any Wal-Mart showed up, the inner villages were dying due to people's need to spread out, have their own land, drive to that land, and have an office park then with a shorter commute -- and then a mall, which was fun to walk up and down in, buying ice cream before you looked at the washing machines in Sears (before, you had to drive to the inner city to the big building of the stand-alone Sears, and there was no ice cream for miles). Those old village downtowns had to evolve and change into something people *wanted* to go to, instead of containing run-down cigar stores and gin mills. No, you could *not* force people *not* to move to suburbia, because *they wanted to*.

People like malls; they like Wal-Mart. Only the tiny handful of technocommies looking for ideological tokens to rail against fixate on Wal-mart in their anti-capitalism campains. I could never write a blog with better argumentation against all this sillyness than this one at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, but I will point out what I observe from real experience. The article helpfully starts with a CNN poll that found the majority of people answered "no" to the question "Does Wal-Mart Destroy Communities?" because...it doesn't. They already live in suburbia or exurbia, they already have grown up with malls; the malls *are* what is their community lol. And it works not just for shoppers.

Walk into Wal-Marts, say, on the day even that the commie world is raging that a line of people pushing and shoving before a sale went mad, and trampled a hapless Wal-mart worker to death. (BTW: that line at 5:00 am was filled not with rich Long Island Jews as the first racist reports went but with blacks from poor New York City boroughs -- and here, there was reverse racism at work again, too, among types like the Twitterati, because there was silence about the black people, and silence about the fact that the man trampled to death was black, too.

On that day, you could find in another Wal-Mart outside Washington, DC, the following scene: numerous people arriving of all races, faiths, and economic stations, looking for cheap goods, or leaving with overflowing shopping carts. I was able to find hand creme, Gummi bears, toothbrushes, etc. all for a significant discount over what I have to pay even to chain stores in NYC, where we have no Wal-Mart.

And here's what else was in that scene at Wal-Mart's: workers such as a Sikh man in a turban; a Bosnian Muslim woman wearing a scarf; an older white man shuffling from a disability; people all hired, in the colour-blind Wal-mart world, who were glad they had jobs. Rather than feeling discriminated against, as the commies were inciting them to do, they were feeling lucky they had a job, with more or less tolerable working conditions, despite their immigrant, non-English, or disabled status. Oh, such people should get better conditions? Well, perhaps, but socialist economies are terribly inefficient about delivering the goods to such needful people -- look at them in practice. They lock out immigrants. They give the poor or the disabled pittances. They encourage people who aren't really disabled to get on the dole, and therefore make the pie slices thinner for all people. Er, that's one of the reason why people *emigrate from* countries like that to America, where they still, even with Bush, recesssion, blah blah, have more opportunity.

Wal-Mart, whatever you might say about it, efficiently distributed the jobs to these people with free market principles. They also efficiently distributed the goods to all those people seeking the goods efficiently, at low cost. Oh, you're whining about the conditions of Chinese labourers making the stuff Wal-Mart sells? But, whine about them in general then, as a problem posed by all of communist China and its creaking and stifling leadership, don't blame some Chinese who got a better deal and better salary working at a Western-sponsored factory, for living in a setting where they're already exploited by their government. Uh, please do call me when Chinese workers making stuff in a Wal-Mart-related factory riot or strike or complain about terrible working conditions -- and if they do, let's contrast and compare THAT to *the rest of Chinese factories* lol. Ok, case closed.

Is this brutal and capitalist and evil? No. Because the Bosnian woman and the Sikh man and the white man with the disability weren't able to get their jobs in Bosnia, or India, or IBM in Westchester, NY. They were able to get them at Wal-Mart outside Washington, DC. And that's what counts, not your utopian notions.

ORIENTAL BAZAAR VS OCCIDENTAL FLEA MARKET

There's another aspect to commerce that the technocommies of SL won't recognize -- and that's the distinction between the Oriental Bazaar, with the need for face-to-face bargaining and quibbling and learning loads of information about your trader in order to make a deal that goes beyond the actual transaction, and the Occidental Flea Market, where you come, read the tag on the object, pay for it, and go, without a lot of extranous bullshit.

The chief feature of commerce in a free market is that it frees one man from dependency on another. He doesn't half to know somebody who knows somebody just to make a living; he can show up and take the Wal-Mart's job by filling out the application and meeting the basic criteria.

More to the point, the droves of shoppers don't need to know the Bosnian woman, the Sikh, the disabled white dude. They shop, they bring their items to the register, they pay, and they never have to deal with each other again, except at the level of pleasantries. They are not bound. I can come back tomorrow, and buy the same pack of razors or Bic pens from the same Bosnian woman without ever having to know that her father, a Muslim, married a Catholic Croat. It's irrelevant. She will sell me the Bic pens even if I'm an atheist and didn't go to school with her brother. We are free from each other, and this commerce, this freedom, is actually part of what enables her to continue her cultural forms as she wishes in this context.

PRIM PERFECTABILITY

SL works the same way. After my uncompensated consulting lol, Prim Perfect has made great strides in moving out of a fussy little boutique advertising to people whose needs it wasn't interested in filling, to opening up, making their parcel comprehensible, making the magazines buyable without having to IM somebody, putting out the kiosks to take without having to create a relationship with a prim diva.

Of course, there's still the problem of Melody Regent, who's a bitch. She's interested in that sort of petty control that people get over others in SL, making them dependent because they are buyers or RPers or living as tenants on your big-ass sim. So she rules her little SL roost with a vengeance, repelling all encroachers. I'm banned "just because". And she won't put the kiosks on copy "because I say so" lol.

I contacted Saffia again to explain that while progress was being made with kiosks, Melody still was apportioning them (and they turned out hilariously to be on copy anyway) and now there might be an issue with the script reporting -- the reports of subs were coming to me as owner, and I wasn't sure now what would happen -- would she get them?

And...that's one of the reasons why I would think a dispenser of issues should not be tied to creating sub lists. But of course, Saffia, steeped in the Commmmuuuuunity clutches of SL, replied: "But I want a list of subs so I can push landmarks to concerts".

Sigh. The clutchiness of commerce in SL comes precisely out of fear: fear that the person I sold the object to won't keep coming back; desperation that I need to extract not just one sale out of him, but two more (magazine, tip jar to musician, dress, rental). It's very common to see these "communities of commerce" staged around SL in quiet desperation -- trying to extract rentals, tips, content sales out of one music or public event venue. It's true you have to hustle sales with all kinds of stuff, but there's something that gets claustrophobic and spammy. I want to just hear the music, not get pushed the rental. It's as if they can't conceive of commerce as anything BUT community, where you can't just buy AND LEAVE, you have to "be in the community" and "become a regular" and "come to all the events" and "pay the tip jar". It's what makes Peter Strindberg rebel, finally, and say no, he won't go to yet another Eshi Osawara fashion flog which he's supposed to enjoy because of the commuuuuuunity, which is by now, a series of obligations and favour-banking so enmeshed, that it makes him want to roll an alt to get away from its stifling embrace.

It's like JenzAA's endless spamming of her music events on Metanomics, which she is given as an extra perk for helping to organize events. She's constantly trying to maul you and haul you into her music and dances and "wind-downs" (erk), which is of course all a ruse to get you to come buy in her store. Ruses to come get people to buy in stores are all well and good, but they get cloying after awhile. They're ESPECIALLY cloying because their practioners are floating a fake meme that they are "building a community". That "what's important is that people are friends and hang out and have commmuuuuunity, not that I sell widgets to pay tier".

But...that sort of attitude isn't even getting the tier paid.

CLUTCHED TO A PRIM DIVA'S BOSOM, AND SMOTHERING

Is this an artifact of online life? In real life, my grocery store or concert hall doesn't have to sell all kinds of OTHER stuff of spam me to death to get me to come back and keep buying. Something about SL encourages commerce circles and the spoonfeeding of them -- but then the inability to free them and to free sales untethered to all the other dreck.

It's these tight, concentric circles that make it so hard for newbies to break in and sell even to each other -- some prim matron is already clutching them all tight to her bosom hustling them freebies, which ultimately is about getting ads and tip jars to pay her tier and then some.

When will this clutchiness and closed society end? Well, probably just like real life -- when large convenient suburban malls are built. It's only a matter of time before we have worlds on the Internet where we can buy simultaneously IMVU, There, and Second Life outfits for our avatars, maybe all in one mega pack, easily, on Paypal, or for some Internet spacebux that someone enterprising will get going.

So what will that do to the village store? Just as in RL, they will have to specialize. In our little villages in real life, such stores became the place to sell work-specific uniforms, customized school uniforms, hand-tailored prom and wedding dresses, etc. The malls selling cheap off-the-rack goods heightened the value of the village stores. Some went out of business because they couldn't compete. And why be sentimental about them? The forces of bigness and commerce can be greedy and evil. But they are rooted in what people need. People no longer needed a store selling overpriced Levis in the village, when the mall, even with the cost of gas, sells them cheaper; rather, they need a store selling snow globes and Hallmark cards along with local postcards.

Ultimately, you cannot stop people's commercial instincts and drives. They are human and natural. They will trump community every time when community gets so restrictive and clutchy that it controls commerce or apportions it out only through f2f or loyal tribal connections. A business looking at SL and hearing that they have to cater to some tiny, fussy, clutch of roleplayers too neuralgic to allow a mobile phone booth on their elf sim will move on, and sell them to a less clutchy group of RPs or to another world completely, and leave that space for selling crap to other fussy RPers. That means the worlds will grow much more slowly. But ultimately, community is simply not viable -- it cannot pay for itself, it cannot get *people* paid -- if it behaves in this oppressive, medieval manner.

Here's how the real world works, even in our virtual world: some girl in South Korea has made a cute little scripted robot. She's put it out in her store, in search. It speaks Korean; she speaks Korean; I don't speak Korean, but money talks, bullshit walks. My money doesn't need to speak Korean. I go to this object, not even able to understand its instructions, or the people saying something to me in this store, I right click, I buy the little cute robot, she's richer by $100 Lindens, I'm poorer by $100 Lindens, but now with a cute robot, and I take him home. Lather, rinse, repeat. We aren't in a Korean community. We're not in an Extropian AI bot community. We aren't in a RP community. We're not in anything except a strict create-shop-sell-buy matrix which isn't community, but commerce -- and God bless it, it makes us free, it gives us happiness, it gets people paid -- and if you want a community, go buy one too, and let's start a fan club.

Comments

[Yumi Murakami]

I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I think this is one point where you can't equate SL and RL. In RL things have a much more intrinsic value than in SL. If you have a diamond ring in RL, the diamond has intrinsic value, no-one else has that diamond. But a diamond ring in SL can be just a textured prim, that has no intrinsic value aside from what others give it. If it is a well made diamond ring it may have artistic value too, but it still doesn't have the fundamental visceral value of a real rock. Humans have an instinctive appreciation of these values, just like the commerce ones you are talking about, and in SL it doesn't activate - if it did you would have people racing to buy diamond rings for US$0.40.

But for RP content, you DO need community first, not as necessity but for honesty. Second Life still has huge numbers of stores selling cheerleader uniforms and animations in a world where there are maybe 2 cheering teams, no-one watches them perform, and at least one you have to pay to join. That's fundamentally dishonest giving new users' tendancy to map RL values to SL initially and I can't believe the merchants involved don't know that.

[Prokofy]

Yumi, wrong, as usual. You'd be surprised at what people pay for in SL, far more than they'd pay in RL. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous stuff. They intrinsically value not what you say they should value, but what they value, full stop.

You don't need community for RP *first*, you need somebody to a) use their development money from an angel b) use their sweat equity paid for by thei RL job to BUILD the space and ideas of that community. Nothing is free.

As for cheerleader uniforms, hm, I don't know how to explain this to you, Yumi, since you don't seem to be very well versed in the facts of life...

[Yumi Murakami]

Oh, I know people value things highly in SL, but differently to RL. Exclusivity is highly values in SL, I know - but it's only valuable if others care about it. If you have an RL diamond ring it is still a diamond even if everybody hates you - few things in SL have that kind of value.

On the community building issue, what you describe is probably a flaw. Many communities are never built because of the stark choice between risking thousands of dollars building for a community that may never form, or trying to form the community first and having it drift away while waiting for the build. This is compounded by the fact that you can't advertise to people who have left SL, "you know that thing you couldn't find in SL back then? It's here now!" Both of these problems could be fixable and maybe they will be (eg, with offline building)

And, oh my, do you mean people are using those uniforms for sex? :). They might be used that way but are buyers buying them for that reason? The stores are cheer squad stores, not Ann Summers equivalents, and some are in PG or even child avatar theme sims. Are they cheating people?

[Prokofy]

Yumi, you're so full of shit, seriously. No one needs to pay thousands of dollars to form a community in SL. I've seen them get started with a few 512s. You're just plain ridiculous. But they won't get far until people find some way of using commerce to sustain the bills. And so they do. All over. With richness and variety.

Offline building is a silly geek affectation that 99 percent of the people do not need or want -- even those who are competent buildings. Say, Sims 3 is coming out soon, go and build there and play with the sims if you need offline building.

Uh, Yumi, re: cheerleading, you figure it out. I can't help you more there.

[Beyers Sellers]

I don't know how to define community. But commerce is difficult, and can be impossible, without information.

[Eric Rice]

I think what's missing is that community can also be a commodity to be sold, but not in an direct way.

I can hold two boxes for sale. In one, is toilet paper. I sell it, you buy it, there's not a concrete 'community' of buttwipers. It's a product. I can also hold a box of black and white lego blocks, and also throw in some tools and services that enable you to share pics of your work with others--- and all of that context means that you are buying a specific item AND something that might appeal to people like you (those that build with this specific medium (websites that try to do this with commodities crack me, Tampax anyone? Srsly)).

LL is in the biz of selling a service and is more into selling the service+community as a product. That's not to say the 10 bucks a month guarantees access/use of X amount of people-like-you, but it's implied.

I think in advertising we call this 'selling lifestyle' which was the pre-community terminology.

In other words, yes I agree. Some things have community, some things don't (and don't need), and sometimes, community IS the product.

But then again, I'm a technocommie who likes to get PAID. :)

[Prokofy]

Beyers, you don't need to get information from some "community" unless you are a collectivist connectivist commie. Please.

And BTW, you are banned from my blog because I'm banned from your blog, and please don't tell me that shit about needing to register for the site, I registered already, and was banned. I won't be registering again. And whoever heard of having to register for a friggin' SL site anyway?! It's a forced commuuuuunity trying to trap eyeballs to see the shit your sponsors are hawking. Lame.

[Yumi Murakami]

Maybe no-one needs to pay thousands to start a community on SL, but they do - are they being missold?

And offline building is fantastic for commerce. Make your build offline, take a few snapshots, and then go to the community and say "this is what you can have, tomorrow, if we can raise the money together". Once the money is raised, you can buy the island in the Land Store and hit Upload.

And cheerleading - what do you want me to figure out? If it is that all of SL is implicitly a sex shop then that iso't something that should be figured out, it should be shouted nice and loud, so all the investors can hear..

[Darien Caldwell]

You certainly don't *need* a community to sell something. However, it can make things easier if a community has intrinsic interest in what you sell.

If your product is 'good' and 'desirable', the last hurdle is for people to find out about it. Advertising, and word of mouth (which often flows through communities) is perfectly sufficient.

I have friends who have built RP communities around their products, quite successfully, and they never spent more than rental on their land. Their sales from products more than offset that. In fact, they turn a tidy profit.

[Prokofy]

I fail to see why there is so much confusion about this. You don't need a community to sell unless you live in, oh, Tibet or something, cut off from the world, where you have to trade with people over the mountain and suck up to them. But that's not necessary in order to participate in a modern economy, especially in the West and modern Asia. It's simply silly to keep harping on these ancient medieval rituals.

if you have a niche group like "All Catholic parishioners" you can sell them "the Virgin Mary statute". But...they can also buy it in a store without being attached to a community. Communities in SL exist around divas with dresses and wonks with widgets merely because it's an amateurs' economy prioritizing socialization, and the items are mere tokens in that process.

But there is plenty of commercial activity in SL devoid of any specific RP community -- and that's a good thing.

[chris]

All this blog blather over the "web2.0" semantic difference of "markets" vs. "communities" and that any produced item sold looks for a market, and people buy what they want, blah blah.

If a "market= wants to buy it" exists.. its easier to sell the item thus "survival" in a "pay to play" environment keeps you in biz.

The issue again is the grey area- accidently stumbled upon by LL of SL being both a Platform for many "markets/communities" and a "Video Game" where nothing is "real" other than the money and time you invest to use it.

etc. etc.

[Yumi Murakami]

I think the criticism comes from the fact that creators who don't organise communities can spend 100% of their time creating, and thus displace those that have to split their time between creating and organising a community. Thus, you end up with the community closing down because it can't pay for itself any more, and then the value of the created content drops as well.

[Ace Albion]

Prokofy, I think the community thing would be like, if you make an elven bow and arrow set, it will boost your sales if there are a whole "community" of elven archery roleplayers, as opposed to hoping to snag a few people who just happen to like dressing up as elves for parties.

You don't need the community, I think, it's just a very handy way to grab a customer base. And if you know there is a community of elven roleplayers, you can sell them boots and stylish hats and tree houses also.

Yumi, the PG store owner probably doesn't know or care why people typed in "cheerleader outfits" into search and landed there. Or maybe they do! But don't tell anyone. The reason SL is more popular than Red Light Center is because you can claim to be in it for the social experience or virtual museums before sneaking off to dress up as a cheerleader in the skybox...

[Prokofy Neva]

Ace,

I get it about the elves and the bow and arrow.

But communities end up constricting content sales more than they help boost them, I find.

For example, let's say I admire elf or dragon clothing, houses, weapons. And I want the outfits or gadgets, but I don't want the full monte of the role play and the claustrophic community.

I have to run the gauntlet of getting to their sim, crossing their red ban lines or not, risking ejection as being "out of character", trying to buy something while not going through their rituals, being castigated as not one of them -- etc. It's almost not worth it. Everyone knows EXACTLY what I mean. Shopping for elf prefabs or dragon avatars while in human civilian clothing not in their circle means to be on borrowed time.

The content would sell better if they were more open and welcoming of the casual shopper -- but they aren't. They rely on fiercely tribal connections and loyalties to get started and maintain their little world, and that inhibits its commercial growth in the end, too. They have to strike a balance, like natives everywhere, between eroding their culture with commerce and using commerce to preserve and enhance it.

[Yumi Murakami]

Ace - I confess, I despise that attitude, of throwing out content with no consideration of its place in the world. It leads to groups of new users feeling cheated when they buy content that turns out to be unusable.

[Ace Albion]

Prokofy, I know exactly what you mean, especially about dragons. Gosh that was awful.

Yumi I don't understand what you object to- are you saying (for example) it's bad for someone to make something- staying with roleplaying stuff, maybe a fancy elven sword, that then doesn't work with all the other elven swords and armor and stuff?

If everyone is using something already, it might not be the best option. Maybe something new would be better. In the case of a certain large dragon community, at the time I was playing with dragon avatars, I got a very real sense that only one style was considered appropriate- woe betide anyone who had a dragon avatar that wasn't one of the local flavour...

[Yumi Murakami]

Ace, what I object to would be people making elven swords in a world where there were no elves or where nobody fought with swords (whether a scripted combat system existed or not). Even then I wouldn't object to them being made - just to them being sold without consumers being warned that they are nothing but props.

Now in the actual world, there are lots of elf communities and people do fight, so there's no problem with elven swords. But with cheerleader uniforms, if they are sold outside sex shops, then people might be buying them to.. well, to lead cheers. Not knowing that they can't, because no-one else will be interested.

[Prokofy]

Yumi, you have made an utterly stupid, literalist, geeky retarded fake use case and fake hypothesis.

Um, please bring me a documented, notarized RL name signed complaint from an irate SL customer who bought a cheerleader outfit, only to find that there were no football games to go and cheer at, and we'll talk.

[Yumi Murakami]

Obviously, I can't, because the "irate SL customers" have already left. Getting concrete information about this is very hard because of the leaving, but this doesn't mean that all theories are wrong. Why not try labelling all the cheerleader outfits with "for sex only" and see if their sales go down?

The statistics show that there are a number of users who are coming in, buying L$, then leaving. If they got what they wanted for their money, and their time in SL was adding value to their purchase, why would they leave?

[Prokofy]

>Obviously, I can't, because the "irate SL customers" have already left. Getting concrete information about this is very hard because of the leaving,

Yumi, you have definitely lost your mind.

There are no irate customers.

None.

Nobody has left because they bought a costume to cheerlead and couldn't find a football team. I assure you. Hand on heart.

[Yumi Murakami]

Many, many people leave because they are bored.

Several people I've spoken to admit that they bought outfits for roles they never got to play because everyone was just nightclubbing.

I even knew several fantasy-magic type roleplayers who went into BDSM because it was the only way to find people who would RP with them in a way that involved them having control of what was happening.

It is not cut and dried that there are no irate customers.

[digital dissertations]

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