Second Thoughts

The Cracked Porcelain Doll

Crap Mariner continues to manifest some kind of psychic disturbances, showing his avatar skin as human, with increasing patches of broken porcelain, like a doll.

Whatever is troubling him in RL or SL, I'm serving as a punching bag for this. It's strange. I don't know what it's really about.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on Twitter:

Lately Crap Mariner has been appearing as a human being or porcelain doll & not a robot. I'm finding this too Uncanny Valley. Make it stop! 1:44 AM Jun 14th via web

A humorous, light comment of the sort that someone who operates SecondLie Scribe and SecondLie some of the time  often makes  (apparently one of the people he shared this account with was the griefing asshole from Woodbury named Cam). A joke that hinges on the idea of a kind of man-bite-dog -- that ordinarily, you might find it Twilight Zone if a human became more robotic; but because Crap starts out as a robot, if he becomes more human, you find *that* Uncanny Valley.

For some reason, this comment struck home to this being/avatar Crap Mariner, and he began to savage me. He began to write the most awful untrue things about me. Like that I only cared about traffic to pay ads. Or that I was a greedy landlord and self interested only. Or that I wanted to become CEO of Linden Lab and was holding out for a better contract. Etc. Etc. Creepy! What makes people write lies like that? To impugn awful things to someone they know aren't true? That they've never said for years?

So, brushing past those obvious trolling bullshit techniques, I try to think, what is this *really* about. Perhaps my critique of Grace, that came before that. But yet, Crap seemed to remain calm about my remarks, possibly because deep down, he is pretty done with a lot of those musicians whom he tried to promote and help and never seemed to appreciate or cooperate with his leadership. He is likely indifferent to whatever scrapping is occuring between the Not Possible in Real Life marms and the musicians and whomeover over their 70 -- oops, now 4 -- sims.

Perhaps he got mad at my indifference to the Linden "bloodbath". I'm indifferent -- not maliciously gleeful as is wrongfully impugned to me -- because I think it's good that for once, the Lab took the hit and not the residents. But Crap, who was making these really nasty, vicious parodies of M Linden all this time, and was gunning for him to be fired next, saw it differently. He treats the Linden culling as some kind of noble losses in a civil war on his own side or something.

I don't have any use for M Linden, but I don't feel the animosity toward him as a "suit" or something that Crap as a geek and grid monkey feels. I appreciate whatever professionalism and efforts he brought to the table; I didn't appreciate his ruinious Viewer 2, which, bTW, Crap only praised as a toy to play with for all his Windlighty photos.

I once told Crap that I thought making a parody of M was a really great idea, and making him as an alphabet letter -- the really unpopular thing these new management types did in making them selves grandly named by letters -- was brilliant. But then, what didn't fit was his strange, retarded southern-style voice, like he was a hick. Whatever you want to say about M, I told Crap at the time, he's not a hick. He's a San Franciscan. This is a gentleman in the best clothes with the best that modern urban culture can give him. I would have parodied him as something like the hippie teacher on Hey Arnold, ineffectual, mild, bland, etc. Or as somewhat light in the loafers.

But Crap had a deep animosity to this *class* of human being -- manager of geeks -- as being a hick, stupid. Of course, there's something annoying -- even sinister -- about Crap's own class -- the geeks, the coders, the grid monkeys, the helpdeskers, etc. They have no loyalty to companies. They view themselves as highly superior to customers and management and other kinds of employees. They are in a permanent LOLZ and a sneer and view themselves as highly transient guns for hire that anyone is glad to hire and gets down on their knees and begs to work for $50-75 an hour.

I'm glad there a lot more of these people unemployed these days than there used to be, and I hope they will come to learn the joys of working at the post office, Rite-Aid, Kelly Girl, the 7/11, and the strawberry fields as I have over the years.

Now Crap is shrieking about this content loss of this fellow named Graf, and implying, by wearing a hated parody shirt of me called "Prok Star" made by the vicious little mediocrity Shaun Altman and distributed by the Woodburies, that I've done something evil. I've criticized Graf for being a prima dona and not waiting longer to let his case be processed and instead deleting sims and showing drama and charging out of SL in a huff.

I've been one of Crap's biggest fans, reading his posts and admiring his pictures and stories every day. I never became a groupie of the 100-word story events or other events on his sim -- I found that contrived and really not truly literary, but geeky -- not for us. But SL is such that an artist like Crap can have concentric circles of fans -- some people like one thing, other people like another, and the media is adjusted to have full immersion or lite sampling.

Lately, what Crap has been using his daily story hour posts for is to tell us the story of a RL diet and weight loss, coupled, punishingly, with a war on the wallet. I admire people who set goals and achieve them and Crap is doing that, losing weight, saving money towards other goals, eating healthy.

Yet...there's something back of this that points to a psychic disturbance. People have all kinds of reasons for losing weight and eating healthy -- it's hard to do and usually they finally take it on when either they have terrible health news delivered to them by doctors, or they need to find sexual/romantic partners, or they are just in midlife crisis -- something isn't right.

Of course, despite the always-on, always-share, Exposed Me quality of social media, we're not supposed to ask what is behind what already seems like a deep exposure. We don't Need to Know whether someone is 20 pounds less or ate burritos or clumps of spinach for lunch, but we're told this Too Much Information and then...we're supposed to shut up.

This is what I mean by social media as being such a burning lie -- such a subterfuge even as it discloses and exposes.

In real life, your very close friends who would tell just you -- and not the entire world -- that they were losing weight because their doctor warned them of a heart attack or because they needed a new girlfriend. That is, their valiant acts would come bundled with other relavant just-for-you news.

In social media fake life. somebody broadcasts their diets all day and their health eating and you feel like you're getting bulletins from Susan Powter and Richard, the sweating to the oldies guy, but you aren't hearing what's *really* up. And you don't dare comment or ask, except in a superficial way, because then you're rude, etc.

Social media like Second Life (which I clump together with this phenomenon, although they're different) also creates such fake and false friends. You think someone you've talked to nearly every day pleasantly, with understanding, with solidarity, with shared insights, with cameraderie is your "friend," but they aren't really. Of course you don't know them and can't see their *real* setting.

And they can turn on your suddenly like a junkyard dog and be harbouring terrible grievances for miles.

To which I can only shrug. Crap needs a punching bag and is using me. Something is wrong -- it's not about me. Even if somehow he has transformed it into being about me -- I don't care. I long since ceased expecting SL to be a place for real friends. When I want real friends, I spend time with my RL friends I can actually see and share a cup of tea with. I look at SL as primarily a useful interface for mediating enemies such that you can pry this or that feature of them and their works worth following from the other negative or disliked features of them.

What's happening with Crap reminds me of Maxx Monde. An arrogant FIC oldbie whom at first I appreciated as a newbie in the way you do when you haven't seen yet that a person is an asshole. Appreciated, even sympathized with, even exchanged RL info with. Then, you say something "off," they don't like, whoops, you're not a friend, and then whoops, you're savaged on the forums out of spleen. Max was breaking up his marriage, losing weight to find new partners, being an arrogant asshole, then moving on from his business of building in SL to whatever, only to surface back on the loathsome Second Citizen now and then. How filled Second Life is with such personages! Vain, stupid, arrogant -- making interesting and even beautiful things, but turning out to be assholes. Why?

Which is pretty much my attitude on the recent blowback from Prokofy, Soror, SaveMe, Finn, Indigo, Winona, Herald anklebiters, et al.

Who are these other people? I never heard of any of them. Oh, I think I saw one of them on Twitter but I don't know them. So, other people are giving blowback to Crap these days? Hm, maybe *I'm* not the problem!

What makes someone like Crap so publicly unadjusted and unhappy with their world and lashing out at friends over some minor disagreement?

BAN Seijin Roo and Network Frequency

Seijin Roo is not allowed to post here on this blog, not due to "censorship" or "my insecurity" or "my inability to let the truth be heard" blah blah but due to a simple rule I have: if you cause me damages in real life or Second Life, you cannot post here.

The threshold for such damages is pretty high. SL damages involved serial, repeated griefing and harassment, stalking and bullying as the Woodbury and related goons have been involved in. RL damages would have to be things like calling me at home (!) to harass me, or constantly threatening libel suits on me (on that sort of thing I say -- see you in court, and see you on your own blog, not mine.)

So Seijin Roo definitely fits into the category of someone who has constantly stalked, harassed and bullied me in SL.  He began first b showing up to be a nuisance on a voting event, and continued to make common cause with all the Woodbury and related goon alts showing up to harass me at that event (who made accounts with names like ProkofyAssistedSuicide or ProkofyChickensaredead etc). He constantly prevaricated and dodged the truth about the relationship with these people over and over in ways the W-hats always do (see Huns Valen), and continued to show up with them constantly to harass in the Ross infohub and in Ravenglass, I constantly saw him on the visitor's list.

Even being banned from every single little lot of rentals and stores in Ross, he would keep trying to show up on any lot left without him in the ban list -- a true marker of a dedicated W-style goon griefer.

Then in Ravenglass, and related sims, he began to drop one-prim objects on the ground that were invisible, or in the sky, or temp-on-rez, that you could only find if you individually looked on the list of prim owners on each individual lot. He put these objects on numerous parcels there on an alt named Network Frequency, which he didn't disguise as an alt, and put a notice on this profile that it was for "tests" that were unspecified. People that put scripted objects on my parcels for unspecified data scraping/mining/eavesdropping, whatever, get abuse reported, regardless of the nature of their "testing" and they get banned. It doesn't matter that my group is open for people to join, at the convenience -- overwhelmingly -- of the tenants and their builders and friends, and is occasionally abused by assholes like Seijin Roo and his alt Network Frequency. The problem isn't the open group, or the land not put to "group only rezzing" as these cynical nihilists always claim. No, the griefers are the problem.

Seijin Roo is typical of those young furry males that need constant and escalating attention, negative or positive is almost immaterial, and turn to griefing and harassment because their parents alternated between indulging and neglecting them in real life and authority figures also indulged them in their criminality without providing them support in life and they keep cravenly seeking attachment, negative or postive. I'm not required to play in loco parentis, psychatrist, or job counselor with these people, they get banned and the public is notified to ban them too.

Search Gamers Complaining About Broken Search

Here's a good example of notorious search gamers who used bots to game search (jacking up traffic to show up first in some keyword sections) complaining bitterly, even losing real-life livlihood from this. It's certain sad for anyone, even a search gamer, to lose real money, but it shows the appalling problem at the center of the SL economy -- some people gaming search, imagining that they are permanently entitled to this, and then becoming avid screechers about broken search -- and also proponents of removing traffic as a metric at all.

What's also on view is that smug, mediocre intelligence of people who use programmers, or even *are* programmers, and game the Google like search with SEO techniques, and then expect to rely on that, and never have the *other* programmers, the Lindens, undo that by undoing gaming -- gaming with manipulation of key words.

Supposedly the Lindens are working at getting rid of the "key word stuffing" now that has nothing to do with the offerings on that parcel. I wonder if they are also getting rid of the key word repetitions deliberately put in all ads now you see on the top. Repetition of words over and over will get you LOWERED in search rank on Google as an unacceptable tactic. Good! So why isn't that happening on Second Life which is using "the Google appliance"?

What are the Lindens going to do to fix search, and will it involve, in a sense, catering and caving to these screechers by removing traffic as relevance, instead of policing their bots?

For extra credit as a sideshow, we get Imnotgoing Sideways lying and changing his story from the public record. He's recorded to coming to an event on two sims three times and banned permanently as a result; he now says he came once. He was notoriously shown to have uploaded a picture of his alt appearing as a very clearly visible child avatar with a ball gag and metal restraints -- the BDSM child -- and he removed it from Sluniverse.com as we all saw him do. Creepy! But at least caught visibly lying now, part of his griefing shtick has been to continue to insist on innocence even as he continues to edgecase and commit outright crimes.

I don't know who Joshe Darkstone is. I don't remember ever talking to him or having anything to do with him. He's in something called Honourable Land Dealers Association -- that means nothing. He runs some rental sims or stores called "Birmingham" or something, and it's interesting to hear him tell about the fantastic sums he made from SL to support real-life costs of two people, but also instructive to hear how fragile that living is, how stupid it is to tell a partner to quit their job over an SL business reliant on Linden Lab or vagaries like search.

The Lindens keep tinkering with search. There's a bug in it I know about as I've seen it here and there that I don't think accounts for most people's complaints about search.

People who make false accusations against me get their bad behaviour publicized in an instant.

Dusan Writer for Linden Lab Board Member

Based on my own real life experience, which I won't go into here, I think one of the problems of the Second Life experience is the board of Linden Lab.

I realize in tech town boards can be very decorative. They can just be made up of a few guys that are representing the VC cash from whom in fact the staff try to hide the actual functionings of the organization, and spin just a few times a year, punctuated by the guys on the board riling up every so often with fury that the fake metrics aren't true. Even so, they have fiduciary responsibility, the bank has their board charter and only some of them are authorized to expend money, etc. They have bylaws, they have to meet --there is some accountability. They could be made to function in both a "democratic centralist" and more serious way and a public way.

I've always maintained that software for social media has to be socialware and people who are users treated as equal with the devs and brought into the process as equals with the same democratic rights, especially as they generate the revenue with their work and help others make it with their attention. I realize this is a very long and rocky highway. Users' rights such as some that came out recently in which various declarative rights like "you can't touch my private information or display it unless you tell me about it" are ok, but not really centrally the answer to the problem of tyranny and technocommunism in Silicon Valley.

Anyway, without another boring long post about those sorts of issues, I think Linden Lab has to make a really demonstrative "quick impact project" quippie sort of move right now with the resident population and put a resident on the board.

Someone who is smart, invested, respected but also trusted and supported by the Lab, which is basically an insular, secretive cult.

So my nomination would be Dusan Writer. I think Dusan would be helpful in making the deliberations that should be made, and helpful precisely by being a full-fledged board member, not merely on some resident advisory panel. I think doing this would force the board meetings which may be formal or decorative or maybe in fact intensively central but secretive, more accountable to the customer and to the world-product the Lab has spawned.

Other people might be candidates who are beloved by the Lindens, but they aren't sufficiently critical enough, they are smarmy fanboyz. God forbid if they put on any of those types. I'd not be for putting on Gwyn Llewelyn or Tateru Nino, who are alternately smarmy fangirlz and harsh geeky whiney critics, in part because both these figures are avatars who won't use their real names and tell you who they are in real life. They snipe from their blogs, and there's a role for that, but board members need real-life accountability.

Another candidate is Grace McDunnough, who wanted to become CEO in the worst way, and whom I personally don't care for, and care for even less after my normal criticizing of her song act and more importantly, her effort to play cultural commissar, led me to be banned and scorned by her fanboyz.

There has to be someone who is constructive without being smarmy, but critical without being wild-eyed and crazy -- and basically liked by the crowd, not hated by certain vocal factions -- i.e. like me -- I wouldn't want to be a candidate for this position and wouldn't be a good one.

I think just about anyone in Second Life could agree that Dusan is a good thing, even if they disagree with him sometimes very strongly (like me or cube3).

As Ann has pointed out, Lindens don't have comms. They haven't been blogging the real story of Second Life, and taking the heat of comments and listening to people and answering them the way dusanwriter.com has. So that's why I make this nomination.

And to be honest, if LL has no interest in this kind of direction, because I realize Philip is just sometimes very conservative and protective of software orthodoxies in this regard, then maybe we should must make our own advisory board and have serious meetings and make recommendations regularly until finally, Linden Lab does take Dusan or someone like him on board. In fact, and independent advisory board would be better than being coopted on the board, but I'm making this suggestion in the interests of time -- I'm not sure that Linden Lab has a lot of it.

I'd much rather see Dusan on the board, in the counsels of Linden, rather than have some smarmy suck-up like Wallace, who used to be publisher of the hate-rag Alphaville Herald (former Second Life Herald), but who never wrote much on there. A time of crisis often induces game companies to install figures like Tigger or Cuppycake, community managers, to handle the mounting problems. They see their role as playing a kind of dramatic martyrish office wife role to the male game gods -- they elevate the role of community manager from avocation to profession even though there's no such thing as a university degree in community management. Cuppycake for some reason even is proud of the fact that she didn't blog about her role as community manager of Metaplace, which just seems whack to me. I'm sorry, but silence about the real problems of a company/platform/community and that kind of selfless female coming out to meet the angry masses storming the gates while the superior male game gods stay inside and keep coding unworkable crap *is not appropriate any more for this day and age*. We are in the Metaverse. We are not in the back room of MIT 30 years ago, or in some corporate atmosphere where the secretaries have to get the coffee and do the typing, or where, if the company advances, they get to play outward-facing community marm to the pitchfork crowds while the men keep doing the things that make pitchforks be picked up in the first place.

What Linden Mods Erase

Well, this doesn't bode well for how Philip -- or whomever he puts in charge of Xstreet, or allows to take over because he's busy with other things -- deals with the merchant class.

We all know about the nasty, elitist, creator-fascists who have taken over the forums mindshare. Some people are able to cross them and their posts stand; but otherwise, it's like the old days when nobody could cross Siggy or FlipperPA or Jauani on the forums without their mod friends deleting you. This is one of those "freedom of speech belongs to those who own the printing press" sort of things, because the Lindens tend to cater to the highest revenue drawing merchants -- some of whom are on neutral alts there so we can't even tell what their inworld businesses in fact *are* such as to boycott them strenuously for their really nasty forums behaviour. (I've taken the one chest of drawers I bought from Pamela once and returned it to her. I liked her work, but I won't display it on my property as long as she continues to lord it over the forums so aggressively and nastily. And I'd advise others who hate the postings of some of these characters to boycott their business and publicize that they are doing so until it stops -- these types also have their fingers on the abuse-report button and I believe that if you respond to their individual post, they can also delete you, too, with the new system (maybe someone can confirm that).

Here's what got removed today, my response to one of the mediocrities whose life's ambition is to become top dog on a forums:

>Your "So what about you .. shut up and sit down" attitude in your  response to Pamela is exactly that sort of divisive and agressive attack  that turns a community solution into a bar brawl. I thank you for  pointing out to me why I loathed that type of attitude, and I thank you  for reminding me why it is I come here to post.

Let me tell you where the loathsome attitude starts, pal.

It starts with the posts of you, and Pamela, and a handful of other high-end merchants, some of whom are not transparent as to your main merchant inworld account but are using alts, posting time and again, loathsome, arrogant, elitist and destructive policy prescriptions and incitements that harm the majority of people and serve only your own interests.

So you get what you get when you do that.

"Something That's All Eshi"

It was hard to get people to stay on topic -- they want to talk about mesh and how it will affect the world.

I've written on this problem already, about how I think a) it will look crappy at first or not render b) it won't fit with the rest of the world c) it will drive a wider gap between high-end artists and the lumpen user who just likes to rez and slightly mod stuff.

We then eventually got around to discussing the Max Graf drama, his stuff has been copybotted.

I'm not getting the drama.

That is, sure, it's terrible when content is copied, and I spend my life fighting the technocommunist ideologies behind this problem, condemning it, pointing out terrible JIRAs that cause it, etc. I think when this sort of event happens, going off in a huff and a pique is petulant and childish. A mature businessmen would deal with it through the channels existing.

I see several things about this avatar, whom I don't know. One, he killed off a sim in March that looked pretty that he encouraged people to photograph, and now he's touting Blue Mars shamelessly and with a great hype on his profile. That tells me that either his tier is too expensive, he's tired of SL, he has 'issues' *even before all this* with the theft now.

I do realize that Second Life puts people into something akin to road rages at times. I know, I've gone through that myself. I guess because I'm someone who has waited 3 years or 4 years for certain problems to solve that I have trouble really getting down deep and sympathizing with someone who couldn't wait...24 hours.

The DMCA notice went in, and 6 days later, he had an answer. Fast work! I rarely see something that fast, but it doesn't bother me -- 7-14 days would seem normal to me for not only a world this big and complex, but a world that just lost 30 percent staff. Max gets a notice that his takedown is being honoured (and why wouldn't it, the case appeared to be airtight), but then he goes to the sim where the thief had his Rustica stuff - and it was still there, and the guy was still there, still selling it. Infuriating, enraging, to be sure. But to freak out, decide then to delete that sim, to conclude that the Lindens now were cutting costs by pretending they had removed content when they hadn't, deliberately, with some blanket policy? That's just immature and stupid. And yet, that is so often the form the road rage takes, extrapolating from the particular to the universal, finding a huge drama and pattern. I know, because I often see those patterns myself and extrapolate hypotheses and premises from them that no one else but me sees. I do think there's a difference between coming up with a theory about Philip's secular religion and...not waiting 24 hours for a DMCA problem that was in fact processed to be handled and finalized.

Looks to me like Max has been looking for a way to enable himself to cut the umbilical cord with Second Life. I see that happening with Crap Mariner too. These rage tantrums they are having with the full display of male geek rage fan-dancing, peacock feathers spread wide, are really about convincing themselves that they can either go to real life, or go to another world, or go...somewhere. And not be so wedded to SL. It's strange that it needs to take this hugely dramatic and rageful form. Content theft is not new. Yes, it's terrible when it happens to you and enraging. But it really isn't like the Lindens, having sent a notice like that, aren't going to make good on in. In 24 or 48 hours. The idea that they aren't, that you have to have such a crisis of faith, lets us know this isn't really what it's about. You are looking for a way to break up, you can't think of another way...

I try to explain more of this below. But it's about this deep feeling that these raging constituencies, and I'm one myself in my interest group, are just not what it's all about. And it's not about "the people" either, which is fake too. But, there is a world. The world is safe. Oh, maybe it isn't so safe. But, there's something about it...it can't be put together, it is together.

Educational Security Goons

I loath educational sims.

Here's why.

This, from the furry running the security (sic) at RCHC, the Group for the builders and administrators of the Robert E. Cook Honors College at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania

18:45]  zFire Xue (auto-response): I am working on a fix for 4.0.1 because full sim mode is no good.  Soon the website will show 4.0.2 as being available.  I am working on it now.
[18:45]  Prokofy Neva: If you are an invitation-only group, care to explain why a day-old alt using my RL name to harass me in SL is in your group?
[18:46]  Prokofy Neva: Because you are my next AR for disclosure
[18:46]  zFire Xue: what group would that be?
[18:46]  Prokofy Neva: the group where you are the security manager?
[18:46]  zFire Xue: and why are you IMing me about this?
[18:46]  zFire Xue: what group?
[18:46]  Prokofy Neva: because you're listed as the security manager? duh
[18:46]  zFire Xue: What group?
[18:46]  zFire Xue: Or I mute you for wasting my time
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: Um, fuck you, andy our fucking griefer group budy
[18:47]  zFire Xue: and bothering me when I dont own any security group
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: AR AR AR
[18:47]  zFire Xue: go talk to the owner
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: you are listed as the security m anager of RECHC Builders
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: so stop the bullshit
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: AR
[18:47]  zFire Xue: oh that group?
[18:47]  zFire Xue: wow
[18:47]  zFire Xue: that is OPEN invitation
[18:47]  zFire Xue: and it is an educational sandbox
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: then expel the OPENLY JOINING asshole using my RL name, wise guy
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: or you get an AR
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: no, you get one anyway
[18:47]  zFire Xue: who
[18:47]  Prokofy Neva: By!
[18:47]  zFire Xue: if you give me information I can verify and look at whatever is bothering you
[18:48]  zFire Xue: however I warn you to check your language and your attitude if you want any help from me
[18:48]  zFire Xue: good, false ARs against reputable people go over very well with the lab =)
[18:48]  Prokofy Neva: No, you'll get one ANYWAY, that WILL NOT BE FALSE
[18:48]  Prokofy Neva: because you're contributing to harassment
[18:49]  zFire Xue: I can see why someone greifed you.  You sound anoying and acuse random people
[18:49]  Prokofy Neva: you sound like you have the fix in at the Lab tho
[18:49]  Prokofy Neva: I am familiari with the hubris frmo you educational people
[18:49]  zFire Xue: I am not the only security agent in the sandbox, so your logic is amazing.
[18:49]  Prokofy Neva: my logic is sound big guy
[18:49]  Prokofy Neva: done
[18:49]  Prokofy Neva: bye
[18:49]  zFire Xue: sound?
[18:49]  zFire Xue: ha
[18:49]  zFire Xue: talk to the other security people about this OPEN invite
[18:49]  zFire Xue: you said it was invite only?  Get your facts right
[18:49]  zFire Xue: mute and ban
[19:04]  zFire Xue: I am still curious who has upset you, and why.  I can tell your irate because it has gotten you to overlock simple facts and logic.  For one, I cannot find an avatar within an open invite group without a name.  For 2, kicking him from this group is pointless.  But it just so happens that I am in a possition to dig a little deeper then yourself and I would like to remove that individual, and their main acount from my lands, as I own the system that blocks people AND their alts.
[19:04]  Prokofy Neva: My you're being an ass
[19:05]  zFire Xue: I just offered to help you
[19:05]  zFire Xue: more insults?
[19:05]  Prokofy Neva: Your group appears to be INVITATION ONLY as I look at it, big guy
[19:05]  Prokofy Neva: that's why I bothered to write you
[19:05]  zFire Xue: ok let me look
[19:05]  Prokofy Neva: if it were OPEN DUHHHHHH I'd not bother
[19:05]  Prokofy Neva: DUHHHHHH
[19:05]  Prokofy Neva: but with SL so laggy, maybe it only appears, but I see it as closed, whatever, who cares, you have a griefer, using my RL name, they are AR'd and you are AR'd for being an ass
[19:05]  zFire Xue: Your right!  It is closed Invite now! wow.
[19:05]  Prokofy Neva: if you can't figure it out, then, whatever, educational sims are known for this
[19:05]  Prokofy Neva: wow is right
[19:05]  zFire Xue: So this should be all the simpler to find this guy no?
[19:06]  Prokofy Neva: and wow somebody INVITED in this deliberate griefer from Woodbury University
[19:06]  zFire Xue: It is a sandbox
[19:06]  Prokofy Neva: and you the security guy are not doing your job
[19:06]  Prokofy Neva: um, why is it closed if it is a furry sandboxy?
[19:06]  zFire Xue: I cannot do my job when you tell me nothing but insults
[19:06]  zFire Xue: It is NOT a furry sandbox
[19:06]  zFire Xue: I take offence to that LOL
[19:06]  Prokofy Neva: You've been told what you need to know deari pie
[19:06]  Prokofy Neva: look at your group
[19:06]  zFire Xue: deri?
[19:06]  Prokofy Neva: if you can't figure it out, I realize you're on it
[19:07]  Prokofy Neva: you're in on it
[19:07]  zFire Xue: oh, so I am in on it because I am not going to search the profile of every member looking for a day old avatar?
[19:07]  zFire Xue: And because I am one of how many security people?
[19:08]  Prokofy Neva: *Notes that you are in on the Woodbury Conspiracy because of what an ass you are being and how long you are taking with this*
[19:09]  Prokofy Neva: there are only 23 people in this group
[19:09]  Prokofy Neva: and you need NINE security goons?
[19:09]  zFire Xue: and you expect me to search them all for you after how you talk to me?
[19:09]  Prokofy Neva: and you can't find the griefer to expell???? ni your "open" group that is really closed?
[19:09]  zFire Xue: goons?
[19:09]  Prokofy Neva: goons
[19:09]  Prokofy Neva: goons goons goons
[19:09]  zFire Xue: =)
[19:10]  Prokofy Neva: hey I'm done with you
[19:10]  Prokofy Neva: mute
[19:10]  zFire Xue: I see why they chose you
[19:10]  zFire Xue: good
[19:10]  Prokofy Neva: People who make security systems are always THEMSELVES griefers
[19:11]  zFire Xue: people who make blanket statements and generalizations dont know what they are talking about
[19:11]  zFire Xue: furry sandbox?
[19:11]  zFire Xue: I do not look at all my groups to keep track of open invite status etc
[19:13]  zFire Xue: I wont help you, because your a troll
[19:13]  zFire Xue: and I do not have group powers to eject anyone anyway.
[19:14]  zFire Xue: I am rooting for whoever is bothering you at this point.  =)
[19:14]  zFire Xue: you must have earned it, I can tell

Here's this goon's profile:

Hi.  You found me! ACK!!!
Creator of the Full Perm Prim Animation Script Writer:
zFire Animator
Creator & Friendly Manager of the
zF RedZone system.
(Which bans even spoofed copybots, alts of banned greifers, and gives you a Webpage control it with.)

http://isellsl.ath.cx/

Need help?  I crash as often as I eat.  Please notecard me or I forget who said what.  If I am offline, I answer offline IMs.

Crap Screams About the SLapocalypse Because Dale Innis' Boss is Leaving

It hadn't occurred to me right away that the reason Crap Mariner has been so viciously nasty to me lately is because I've been happy at changes in Linden Lab that involve cutting staff, especially staff that I saw actively destroying the world or merely serving as a cost center with no value to the economy -- and because I didn't agitate for M Linden to be included in the next staff cut (as he did) and because I'm glad that Philip is back, although, as loyal opposition.

So while it may have begun as a personal grudge over my remark that he was doing a man-bites-dog reversing his usual more robotic look to a more human look in what was a reverse-Uncanny Valley, it's really more political. Crap is a member of the geek squad, when all is said and done. He may be a Republican, which I'm not, and I may share his supportive views on Israel, but at the end of the day, he sides with software, and like other geeks, hates on the Lab precisely because he is views it as a software company that doesn't run software that he, in his wisdom, would run it.

I view Linden Lab as a virtual world management company that is still in its youthful software obsessive phase but is growing out of it, so I'm less bothered by their goofy software problems, which have never been severe enough to prevent me logging on regularly for five years -- and, I might note, not severe enough for Crap to do that, too.

He hates land barons and finds them sleazy (that's why he won't charge rent himself but only cost, undercutting the market at least in a tiny way), and he can really only respect high-end content creators (like his MIA partner Eshi). OK, I'm used to that, whatever.

So Crap is now actively deadpooling it, however, which seems worse than even Tateru, who seems to gain her dubious street cred on the gaming website massively.com by adopting a constant scornful and hateful posture toward Second Life.

Now he's claiming that IBM's departure is the sign of the SLapocalapse.

Good God on a crutch.

I don't know if he was too busy sucking up to Zha Ewry's partner Chestnut Rau at some Graceoclock but he may have missed the fact that...IBM already departed long ago.

Good Lord, open the map, Crap, and count how many IBM islands there are. I think I might even have more sims left than IBM does, or maybe they have a few more, go look. Quite a few were in Singapore, that might shutter with the closure of the Singapore office, although it could be unrelated.

In OpenSim, they have hundreds of sims. They went over there more than a year ago. They are on other platforms like their own Activeworlds version and they deliberately keep teams among themselves that are like red, blue, green or something, some who loathe virtual worlds completely and say IBM is a telephone culture and can get by with video conferencing; others that love Second Life, but they're in the minority; and still others that want to go on other platforms because they are excessive opensource freaks.

All the "evangelists" of IBM that used to tout SL are even gone entirely from IBM itself, and have been for a long time.

IBM made an announcement of strategic partnership with LL in...2008. That's a long time ago. They vowed to bring about interoperability. They didn't. Good! We don't need this; it's a geek affectation.

IBM may have bought some of those expensive $50,000 4-server "SL in a box" kits. So nu? Like that is more than a rounding error in an R&D expense budget? I don't know how many of those they had, but there'd be NO REASON for IBM to bitch about how they had to leave SL because it is turning consumer-directed if they were in their firewalled box. What may have happened is that the rumour that IBM was going to buy Linden Lab, or buy the SLE part of it, were true, but then, like the ill-fated GOM, the deal didn't come off. Maybe that's why Mark Kingdon and Tom Hale left, or among the reasons.

Amanda Linden is still there, interestingly, but who knows for how long.

Bottom line: IBM was really never there in the first place. A few of their wild-eyed early-adapter employees had some sims (or rentals from me, as it happened!). They built stuff, they dragged in the suits, and some of the big managers got very excited during they hype phase of 2007. They got bunches of islands, they did some meetings, but they left by 2008. They don't have "tens of thousands of people" meeting in SL every day; that's bullshit. When they claimed they had "tens of thousands of staff" or even more, that was bullshit, too. What they'd do is simply claim that everybody on a manager's email distribution list was now "in SL". None of those people ever came in and shopped or explored. Maybe some logged in for a meeting once.

All you have to do is pull open the map, as I do now and then, and see if there is any green dots. There aren't. Sometimes you get furries in their sandbox. That's about it.

I never understood why IBM wanted to have a second childhood and behave like such a goofball around Second Life. They were afraid of being left behind the curve as they were with the PC revolution or Internet 1.0 revolution or something, so they jumped in the pond with two big flat feet at first, but then they came right out. They didn't like Linden Lab's goofy and disorganized nature, which maybe accidently saved it from becoming the usual start-up lunch meat to big IT. So they went to Adam's Open Sim and I don't think they do anything particularly earth-shattering there or we would have heard those Thinkbalm people brag about it and we'd here more than just Reaction Grid propaganda.

And that's ok. IBM is just one thing in society; it's not the only thing. It's ok if it isn't the main attraction and even ok if it leaves. Bye!

And so the story isn't happening now; the revelation of what the true story was two years ago is now being made.

It's too bad that with this IBM retreat, they can't take Dale Innis/Dale Chess with them, but he seems grafted on to SL like a limpet.

Crap's other signs of Doom:

"The board has nobody to ask but Philip to run the company again."

Maybe Philip insisted on saving his baby -- Crap seems to forget he was nominally at least the *chair* of this board.

If I were Philip I'd ask the negative nabobs like Mitch Kapor, who never has a good thing to say about SL, ever, and Bill Gurley, who thinks the future is in other kinds of flash games without UGC to step down, and replace them with enthusiastic rich people with connections from the resident merchant class or something. You have to tell boards "give, get, or get out". Quite a few of them don't seem to serve a useful purpose.

Says Crap:

One more: "Firing customer-facing reps while promising better interaction with userbase."

Um, firing Blue Linden, Pink Linden, Rodney Linden and many other Lindens -- these are all pluses as far as the user base is concerned. All the helpful, kind, smart Concierge and Customer Service staff are firmly in place; apparently Crap never has to call them and doesn't realize this, and imagines that his one Linden friend, CG, being fired, even though who wasn't even customer-facing, except to the customer Crap, means the end of the world.

And yet another: "Outsourcing support to script-readers for a product that depends heavily on hands-on experience."

A large percentage of Concierge requests fall into two categories:

o griefing, which they refuse to handle with Concierge, but they have done by a G-team, which is no more, and merged with Concierge -- they refuse to deal except through abuse tickets. So that's all there is to it. Form concerned committees, write letters, start a blog like me.

o mainland sim resets -- this can be done by non-English speakers with a check-off box interface instantly.

o questions about "where's my transfer?" from aggressive geeks like Crap. These should be ignored in live chat and sent to the ticket queue.

What else was there?

Oh, there was Crap's entire fire-and-brimstone Doomsday speech at the "Control Panel".

I guess this is what the sound of the passing of the geek phase of Second Life sounds like.

I don't like human beings to suffer, don't wish it on them, and especially not Crap. I imagine he's screaming as loud as he is because he is attached to SL and it makes up a good chunk of his life, so he feels ownership. That's good, but he's mistaking the erosion of his class for the erosion of the world, something land barons often do, to the great derision of people like him, but it's no more reflecting of the elephant of Second Life than Pamela and the other picture and text hogs of Xstreet screaming because they are being limited on their presentation of their products in the catalogue there. Good Lord, these people on Xstreet are so unprofessional, I guess they never had to work with copy and photo limitations in real life on anything, on any *real* publication. I routinely cut photos and cut copy mercilessly on all my jobs because my bosses ruthlessly hew to limits and quotas and cut things sometimes just because it doesn't fit their gestalt. What can you do, that's real life. These people aren't living it.

Let me try to take a part some of Crap's Geekapocalypse:

o "The longer Philip stays as CEO and the more Mitch Kapor is involved in the process, the worse off Second Life will be."

I totally agree on Mitch. He needs to go, yesterday. If he didn't get his money yet, well, hmm, that's a problem but he is should go anyway. Do you have to stay a board member to get your VC money back? Legally?

o I agree about Philip. I don't think he's really management material. But it's Jimmy Dean and the sausage. Philip gets the sausage; Philip made the sausage; Philip likes the sausage. He gets to be Jimmy Dean at least until the frying pan is out of the fire.

o "Scoble blew Kindgon out of the water with a single question: So, how do I get to this? and Kingdon babbled like a dumbass. And if Scoble blows you out of the water, millions of potential Farmville-playing drool-factories out there slack-jawing their way through the cornfields won't understand it any better, either."

Um, that's let us know what Crap thinks of people who play Farmville, who are all my friends and relatives. So fuck that shit. They aren't droolers. They just play Farmville. They aren't interested in SL because it's too hard and they don't like time-consuming hard things. Even if it were made easier, it might be time-consuming. The hard/time-consumption factor is never looked at intimately related. It's ok. SL doesn't have to grow at some booming rate.

Scoble? I love Scoble. But he has the attention of a gnat and a case of ADD that makes even the Ritalin people scared. He isn't virtual world material. That's ok. There are others who are. They should work harder at finding people who aren't technologists, but who like the idea of virtuality and second-lifing and meeting across frontiers.

o "Mitch just put M in a sack and tossed him in a lake, and his hand is now back on Phil's choke-chain, looking for the next guy to add a few zeroes to that investment so he doesn't take a bath on that cash he should have invested elsewhere."

Again. Philip said that the VCs who originally put in were paid back. Well were they or weren't they? If yes, tell Mitch to leave. If not, figure out how to neutralize his technocommunist negativity. All Crap is doing is indulging him.

o Ken's emissary from Saints VC is sharpening his knives, watching the milk dry up from the cash cow and getting ready for selloff butchery (a little bit of gangrenous matter cut loose here and there, making sure the meat stays fresh for as long as possible... call it surgery if you will, makes for good PR).

Gosh, this is Crap channelling Ann Otoole.

So what is this all, really? It's Crap trying to talk tough, like a geek hardnose and cynical software investor in Silicon Valley, even though he's a helpdesker server wrangler in Austin. He's trying to sound more tough and cynical than he thinks they are, so they can't hurt him.

"Yes, basic business processes needed to be imposed on the Labbies for the company to serve its customers better, but I believe that bad metrics were places on their performance, resulting in measurements that isolated management from the truly abysmal customer satisfaction figures. Meanwhile, basic services like end-user support were foisted off on the customers themselves with Mentor groups, peer-support groups, wikis posing as help menus, and Viewer 2.0 with a weak FAQ and badly-cataloged videos that should have been context-sensitive instead of browse-and-graze, hunt-and-not-find."

This is all out of touch with reality.

There aren't any mentor groups.

Support works pretty good for premium and Concierge customers. It doesn't for free customers. So let them pay $9.95 if they need support, but it's not about that.

User entry isn't support; it's user entry. So the Lindens need to fix that not by insourcing or outsourcing but by allowing the freemarket of talented people, goods, and services advertise and perform in and around the welcome area and this problem will start to be solved. It's the persistence in technocommunist solutions that is making it remain unsolved.

Videos? I couldn't agree more. I can't imagine they can that much HELPFUL use. They might get accessed because any drooling bozo can click, but it's the drooling bozos who are Crap's peers from the geek and tech-savvy youth and male culture who click, not everybody else (if we're going to call names about droolers.)

So fire Torley, good Lord, that will end all that video sillyness quick. People who are Torley groupies, including some desperate Linden managers, think "Torley does helpful videos" and have thought that so long that they forget to look at these crazy, wonky, overtexted and weirdly explained tutorials and realized, OMG, they need a completely different person, style, concept for videos and Torley should be taken off it.

"But he's also the architect of a failed Disneyfication project of Mainland called Zindra (Blondinland?), the customer-facing denial-engine responsible for the bait-and-switch of Homesteads-Openspaces, and the deterioration of quality service and support for landowners while they wait for the development of decent land management metrics and tools. Some good happened, but a whole lot of bad got swept under The Great Megaprim Rug in the process."

Zindra isn't Disneyland. Crap is not a real rentals baron. He doesn't realize most people have quietly and happily continued their mature lives in mature in private, and that the clubland of Zindra is good to have on another continent where it doesn't lag residential sims. Zindra isn't a failure.

There was never a bait-and-switch on Homesteads. There were greedy landlords trying to hustle a buck by putting too many rentals on these low-use sims.

Why argue about this endlessly? The geek phase maybe is finally going to get the heave-ho.

But maybe not. There are still too many people, including Crap and his Graceoclock friends who think Second Life is for geeks and freaks and has to remain that way, and normal people who want it to become broaders are just droolers.

The King is Dead; Long Live the King

I was hearing rumours of this palace coup yesterday, and now it is confirmed by His Master's Voice who apparently still has hook-ups at the Lab.

I didn't know M Linden, and never got a chance to meet  him in RL or exchange more than a few IMs and get a bear from him (actually several; whenever I sent him a protest about something, he would send me a bear, like a child at a hospital having an operation). It was the highest-prim Linden bear I had ever seen in my life, complete with an intricately-designed set of headphones.

M Linden was famous for leading the charge of alphabet Lindens, whose first move was to make themselves have alphabet-letter names, making it very difficult to find them in search in the People List -- the system would reject a one-letter search and you'd have to paw through hundreds. An exiting Linden once confirmed to me: that was deliberate.

M Linden also had an incredible amount of...confidence. Unlike other Lindens, who tended to make the entire world, in a way, their personal canvas by this or that policy or decision about the weather (Windlight) or economy (telehubs, island costs), M Linden entered the world with his own personal real-life art exhibit of his doodles. They were good doodles.

This is how I understand M Linden (whom I don't know). He was a regular San Francisco guy who ran a big marketing company that was fairly successful but that was a bit dull. He was an experienced and accomplished businessman who had the basics down pat -- he came to work every day in a tie, he balanced the budget, he demanded performance reports from staff, he put up metrics and charts and graphs. All normal and good, and very different than the goofballs who came before who like geeks in a garage tacked up something called The Big List of Things to Do and cherry-picked off it the things they found "fun".

M Linden rightly put his finger on the pain point of Second Life, the rough landing and geeky viewer and hard-to-manage world. He couldn't seem to get the geeks on staff to grasp the need to streamline and fix this, so he brought his own friends from his own past business deals in as more normal people, but still within the California gestalt, to try to fix up this ridiculous thing and its spaghetti code. They toiled at it and found it was way more complicated than they thought and also found they had all kinds of backseat drivers, on staff and inworld, ready to kill them. They brought in other geek and design help that tended to replicate the same problems only with a shinier patina -- nobody thought about how they could make the average Wal-mart part-time employee mom and retired postal worker with Best Buy computers able to use this silly thing called Second Life in some normal and easy way.

M, to his credit, brought in grown-ups from real businesses with real profits (not reported profits you can't really check) from companies like AOL and Adobe (Tom Hale) and got IBM and other big companies to sign up for a prestigious SLE Enterprise stand-alone SL in a box, which he thought might follow the pattern of other software that had a big enterprise customer base along with consumers who had plateaued after two big drivers for rapidly gaining online members were removed -- gambling and ageplay -- and a third cause of consumer losses, content theft, began to be addressed by lawsuits and policies.

In passing, M also enabled the land gurus to continue to implement quality-of-life and community-policing "broken windows" improvements --- enforcing the polices on ad-farms, bots, griefing, and rogue third-party viewers. Cyn Linden and Jack Linden can be credited for designing and implementing these policies, eacn of which were not popular with some angry and aggressive and vocal minority of one kind or another, but were broadly popular and appreciated.

Concurrency plateaued; land prices tanked; land purchases dropped, however, for one big, fat, simple reason: the Lindens broke SEARCH.

They broke it for use with Music and other events; they broke it for recognizing merited shopping locations by traffic that was legitimate; they broke it for struggling businesses that had spent years perfecting their SEO even without gimmicks.

They also broke it with the ill-conceived notion that scaling, lag, and inventory storage issues required moving the world economy offshore, and putting it in the cloud on the web, making Xstreet the heart of the virtual world economy, and its search the winner, breaking inworld search, and disincentivizing inworld stores. Unfortunately, land owners and store renters disrupted by this move, as well as people with avid social networks and customs like grid hunts, suffered terribly by this "move to the cloud" and went out of business and loss income and withdrew or tiered down.

The Lindens have this great world that they can't scale, and which is very heavy, and difficult to use, and can't grow fast in the way software is always supposed to grow under the doctrines of Silicon Valley.

I've always wondered, as someone who, long ago in my youth, worked in giant bloated corporations that wasted shamelessly and hire promiscuously and then would lay off thousands of people and destroy livlihoods, and in later years worked mainly inthe nonprofit world with mainly small organizations, or worked in small businesses, why the fanatacism of large and rapid growth had to apply to this particular project.

I realize it is received wisdom and absolute orthodox canonical truth according to some hockey-stick growth chart or matrix named after somebody's name, or two people's names, that software always and everywhere has to have this early adapter phase, then shoot up with an enthusiastic later adapter phase, then have some rocky periods and firings of the founder and staff and have mainstream adaptation phases, etc. etc. Growth, growth, growth and more growth.

Why?

There's the MMORPG "MUDflation" and the life and death cycle of virtual worlds that always occurs with online games as well, where they never last and always start small, peak, and die, like some animal's life cycle.

Since software has always seemed to me secondary to what Second Life is, although I realize it continues to be as religious as Communion for many, including the Company, I wasn't terribly concerned if SL did not hew to the patterns of either those Gartner cycles or the MMORPG cycles but acted more like a little country. I still think that's fine, and I still think it should grow slowly and not get ahead of itself, and that's ok. I mean, what is objectively driving it otherwise?!

If it is true that the original VCs were paid off (I'm not quite believing it because they are still hanging around, but whatever), and if no new infusions have come in that require more VC mouths to feed, and if the revenue really all comes from tier and virtual currency sales, why can't it be kept going modestly and indefinitely and grown rationally? Because...somebody on TechCrunch or Valley Wag says it can't? (they themselves are instructive, with the former growing in that enthusiastic bloated way that will lead to a very bad hangover a year from now when it crashes, and the latter having died and been absorbed by another company).

I was inspired, as I always am, by Philip's birthday speech. Even though Philip always speaks with this sort of New-Age California wild-eyed hype that inevitably will sound fake to an East Coast intellectual, he injects so much enthusiasm and sincerity into it, that you tend to take him at his word. Basically, he said something that M Linden forgot to say when he announced he was cutting staff:

"We're Safe. The World is Safe".

Whatever you want to say about Philip, he understands that Second Life is about the world, a world created by his company but with everybody else, and as he himself said, which contains many people's livlihoods.

That care and concern *about people's livlihoods* is almost never heard in big companies, IT or others (see above what I said about companies I worked in years ago like Xerox which thought nothing of laying off people in huge droves; my father left a small company upstate that he and a few other men had built up successfully in a small town where they kept their patents, to work at a large company, Xerox, that took his patents and constantly harried him and other engineers with management whims and then unceremoniously dumped thousands of them off full-time benefited payroll -- only to hire them back in the immediate emergencies that ensued, but now as unbenefited and lower-paid consultants).

So it's good that Philip made that the center of his reassuring speech.

Then comes the exasperating part about Philip. He says, about his 10 years in Second Life (because he spent several years building it up before it went beta):

"I wouldn't take back any of it and wouldn't do it any differently."

Oh, Philip? You couldn't have put in the land-cutting policy four years earlier and saved us all harm of value? You couldn't have devised a bot-registration and banning system to stop traffic fraud the minute it got started instead of being fanatically devoted to software for software's sake, with "you never met a script you didn't like" driving all your policies?

You wouldn't put back the telehubs, which could have been left along with adding p2p on the map, making it so that those who typed sim names into the map list would land at a hub instead of water at the forced 128/128 landing?

You wouldn't delay Windlight until most of your customers actually had storebought computers that could actually play this stupid thing?

I mean, you just never hear it, do you. Loveable, but exasperating to beat all.

"I wouldn't take back anything that would mess it up," says Philip, as if his interventions on some of these issues of governance and economy that would ensure more freedom for all instead of for a few would someone "mess up" the world rather than improving it.

Then, Philip read a list, that was like a sort of "I Sing the Body Electric" which gives us an idea of just how complex are the systems sustainings everybody's notion of a better world:

Our financial fraud detection systems; the systems we use to transfer assets from the Teen Grid; the central databases; our dark fiber backbone; our asset servers which have about 450 terabytes of data; the 40,000 simulator cores in the system; the group chat system; the LindeX Market placement and fulfillment systems; the physics core; the visual rendering system; the scripting engines; the ability to transfer and move land; the region conductor that manages all the sims coming online; the map servers; the inventory servers; the client UI; the content takedown tools; the monetary policy, processes and systems we use; the customer support tools; the Department of Public Works; our international payment systems; our backup systems; Linden Homes; the Welcome Islands; the Infohubs; the grid monitoring tools; the localization systems; the private regions; our land auction systems; forums; search appliances; the Support Portal; metrics dashboards; our Phoenix, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. data centers; our 3rd-party Viewer directory, open source repositories and programs, and our internal build systems.

Whew! I'm glad I do my little part on that list, which falls under "Infohubs," helping to maintain two of them.

They *are* complicated systems, and I'll tell you which ones I'd junk immediately so as to make the entire thing less risky, expensive, and complex:

the systems we use to transfer assets from the Teen Grid;
our international payment systems;
Linden Homes;
the Infohubs;
the localization systems;
our land auction systems;
forums;
search appliances;
our 3rd-party Viewer directory
open source repositories and programs

Open source brings no value to the table; it brings only griefing and content loss; it is a fiction. If people love the Emerald Viewer, they can go use it on OpenSim. If there really is some significant user base and the features are determined not to be incompatible with a broader Second Life, the Lindens should GOM Emerald, hire those Emerald devs as Lindens that they can do criminal background checks on, and dump the rest of the anonymous and alt-abusing griefers who cling to the projects, and call it a day.

The privacy problem will disappear overnight as Linden Lab would take over all the customer data mined by Emerald from day one -- or no deal, and banishment from the grid.

The teen grid should be closed; it's a loss leader, it was poorly managed from the start, and it's a fiction, as teens continue to access the main grid. If a system cannot be created to enable teens only to log into PG sims on the main grid, then scrap it as an adult grid and be done with it.

Localization plans have to be scrapped, as the foreign offices are closing, and unless they can partner with robust companies abroad in wealthy countries that have a lot of investment capital to burn for 5 years, they shouldn't bother.

International payment systems, if this means the outsourcing of billing overseas, should be scrapped and systems within the regions of the main customer base should be substituted.

If the Lindens cannot manage the Welcome Islands properly, they should close them. Managing properly means paid and benefited LL staff coverage, not outsourcing to a CS company or mentors, and it means kicking text and voice miscreants immediately to Zindra or offworld for 4 hours and 2 weeks and permanently if they can't learn to function as adults or aren't real adults but kids in the first place.

Close them, and have the sign-up process provide either themed and community gateway entries, or entries directly into a rotating list of events such as music or art or clubs or shopping that can be purchased by merchants for dollars as a form of advertising, and combined with Destination Guide, which should be in the entry process not inworld on a viewer or search people struggle with.

The search appliance should be suspended and the search and rolled back to the previous search.

The forums should be outsourced to a third-party that can make them visually attractive, functionable, and fairly moderated.

You note that I put auctions among the things I'd kill. Why? Because the Lindens should stop selling mainland until they can get the mainland market functional again.

Currently, they are using the auction system as mainly a place for abandoned land to be recycled. In its place, there should be a user-to-user auction that supplements the inworld view of land for sale that functions with an open and accountable system where the name of the seller, and the names of all people who bid, including the winner, are visible at the end of the auction (we had this system years ago; it was destroyed when the new ebay software went in.)

"We tried to make everything better at the same time," says Philip. With these complex systems, you have to; that's how countries are. That's why Obama is failing, because he's using ideology from the peace movement of the 1980s in his youth to run a country, which is a more complex thing that an ideology can handle practically.

But in reality, Lindens sequence. They sequence what *they* think is important. They dawdle and become hugely dilatory on what really matters (putting search back the way it was) and they become sidetracked on things nobody asked for (making viewer 2).

Policy, not software, is needed to fix new-user problems.

Cleaning up the nasty welcome areas or closing them; allowing advertising them so people can get out of them quickly and go somewhere fun or interesting and not suffer caging and spewing of obscenities; signup procedures that more quickly put them in interesting venues and enable the community to buy advertising that really works in a virtual world for many people instead of rewarding a tiny handful who can buy key words and top classifieds at a huge cost.

Remember what Jason Calacanis said yesterday, being willing to admit that when you had something that "frustrated many and rewarded only a few," you have to stop. And suffer the howling of those who were slavishly rewarded at least for a time.

So the Lindens' work here is clear. They have to close the third-party and software adventures and GOM Emerald or ban it; they need to clean up the welcome experience and put their few remaining coders to work building a resident-to-resident auction system instead of working on obscure projects that thrill Torley and a handful of geeks and goons who go to a few office hours, like avatar foot shadows.

I think it's an exciting time. I love Philip and I'm glad he's back. I hope his sojourn out in the parks and coffee shops of San Francisco with his solar-powered laptop making his goofy Love Machine has maybe sorted rather than addled his brains, and brought him to a point where he can motivate staff and reach out to community constituencies compellingly.

Ann Otoole has pointed out so cogently that comms have to be fixed up -- office hours, forums, little gatherings of specials -- these are all crap.

Bring back town meetings, bring back Philip and other Lindens at them, and control griefing by prebanning and ejecting the obvious Woodbury remainders instead of indulging them because they are the friends of people like Rodney Linden.

Bring back the Feature Voting System!

out of enthusiasm, excitement, love

We're not going to risk the livlihoods by growing ahead of profits


We're safe, the world is safe.

city, huge walls, moats, over the walls, amazing new world

Is Jason Calacanis Eating His Hat?!

I was surprised to get this email from Jason Calacanis, who had expelled me from Mahalo summarily when I objected to his outrageous vertikal management and revenue grab of content providers on his web human search page. I'm contemplating now that Jason is eating his hat and grovelling to his workers, although of course, not without sticking it to his former FIC, whether I should go back and keep my little pages updated -- that is, if my ban is removed.

It's an interesting episode for the Metaverse, because it shows that a stubborn ego-driven geek like Calancanis can still be persuaded, when he hears enough agida from his workers and sees his bottom line fail, to turn around and change. Like the IMVU guy did on his tsuris with the adult verification thing.

These are lessons for our Lindens, too, and it's still not too late for them to call Viewer 2 an exotic Beta for power users who want shared media, and go back to pushing the old viewer to newbies so that search works in the old way, and what new people who do join can find businesses and the economy is not ruined.

Nota bene, metaversal managers: Schemes that make "for a happy few and a frustrated many" even if they are plumping your own bottom line -- and they won't, eventually -- are non-starters. They have to be fair. They have to be based on open and fair and flat payments and on metrics visible to all: traffic. Indeed, the old web page counter should go in that the geeks scorned and measures to prevent gaming it go in as well. After all, if you can prevent gaming of ad clicks *good enough* you can prevent gaming of web counters. And ultimately, any system that puts in non-expert overlords over content providers to manage them and "help them" and grab their revenue will also fail on the fast-moving do-it-yourself web where experts rise to the top quickly and don't need a management class to siphon off their value.

BUT I'm not seeing that Jason has thoroughly changed if he still has the pernicious revenue-sharing concept in Mahalo Answers, which will get more traffic than most of the pages. He's saying he has "shelved the vertical management system" that arbitrarily pinned to content producers like me expert on some subject area and gave them the opportunity to be paid by management's revenue share for their work. Good! But...These vertical managers -- who shouldn't exist, really -- are being turned into more august game gods and now called Guides and being given a compensation of $1000 a month. What's their job description now? What I think would be more fair is for the Mahalo company *gasp dare I say it* to behave like an encyclopedia or newspaper of the old days and have an editorial board and paid staff like a normal company. They should not be paid on the basis of traffic or their help in revenue boosting of a page, but should simply be paid a flat wage to do the job of editing and curating -- or simply eliminated as a class.

FROM JASON:

A message to the Mahalo Community,

Our goal at Mahalo is to build a high-quality content and community destination – one that delivers information our consumers can trust.  To do this, we need talented, motivated writers.

For the past year, we have experimented with a writer-compensation method that shared revenue from our pages.  While the revenue sharing system seemed entrepreneurial and fair in theory, after careful examination including getting your feedback, we've concluded that it failed in practice.

We heard your feedback about huge variation in writer compensation that was not directly tied to quality, and about the confusing nature of Mahalo dollars.  In short, the system created a happy few and a frustrated many.

So, starting on July 1st, we are moving to a more traditional flat-rate payment system, with incentives based on quality and traffic.

Here's how it will work:

1. On July 1st, Mahalo will stop revenue sharing on topic and "how to" pages, and shelve the concept of vertical and page management.  Revenue sharing on Mahalo Answers will continue.

2. All Vertical Managers will be offered Guide or Senior Guide roles based on their tenure and performance as Mahalo consultants to date. Guides will receive $1,000 a month for their content and Senior Guides will receive $1,300.

3. Page Managers and Go Team members will be given the ability to apply for one of 50 new Guide positions, paying $1,000 per month.

4. All Guides will be responsible for 25 new pages, 12 hours of updating (i.e. on the Go Team), and 10 questions or answers weekly. You will be able to do this work whenever you like so you can easily schedule it around your other writing obligations!

5. NEW FEATURE: We're moving payments of Guides to – wait for it – weekly!  The week after you perform your work you will get your PayPal payment. This was one of the most requested features from our writers and we're thrilled that our new flat-rate system will make this easy to implement.

6. NEW FEATURE: Mahalo Dollars will be removed from page management and creation. You will not have to worry about the conversion ratio anymore! Mahalo Dollars will be limited to Mahalo Answers where folks love them and the fun stuff they can buy with them. You've told us that real writers wanted to be paid in real dollars and we've listened. No more conversions!  Everyone will have 31 days to cash out their Mahalo Dollars (cash outs can occur anytime in July – no cash outs as of August 1st).

7. Mahalo Dollars will only be used in the Mahalo Store going forward. No more cashing out for real dollars (gift cards and donations will still be available).

8. NEW FEATURE: A group traffic incentive of $100 each will be shared between Guides for every month that Mahalo breaks the previous month's traffic.

9. NEW FEATURE: A group revenue incentive of $100 each will be shared between Guides for every month that Mahalo breaks the previous month's revenue numbers.

10. NEW FEATURE: A quality incentive will be given to a selection of pages and Guides each month based on our Community Team's judgment.

There are going to be many questions and comments on these changes I'm sure. The small number of folks who had the killer revenue pages are going to be disappointed, and the majority of folks who were not breaking $500 a month are going to be excited.

We understand change is hard, but our intention is to build a system that creates a vibrant, fun and profitable experience for everyone.

I'm sure there will be some issues we have not anticipated, and you can expect us to pivot, as all start-ups must, if something isn't working.

Mike Bracco and I will be discussing these changes in a town hall meeting today, Wednesday, at 11AM Pacific time (2PM eastern). Join us here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mahalo-tutorials

We look forward to your feedback.

All the best,

Jason McCabe Calacanis
Mahalo founder & CEO

PS: If you have any questions, comments or concerns you can always reach me directly at jason at mahalo.com
PPS: We are discussing this issue here on Mahalo Answers: http://jc.is/jasonmessage