Soundboarding

Yet another annoyance in the secretive SL scene is the "Community Round Table" structure/process which is a small, selected, filtered group from which one can all too easily be banned with a "one-strike and you're out policy) (ahem), which enables people like Gwyn Llewylyn to post lengthy sounding-board type proposals and have the Linden ear basically to herself (not that she doesn't have that already) but one can never be too rich, too thin, have too much tier paid, and have too much Linden ear. It always pays to get Linden ear in front of other people, such as to be able to do the smackdown of them later.

I really hope that readers who are still quietly lurking on the CRT list can help us publicize it from time to time. It's had some really really bad stuff on it (like proposals being vigorously applauded to post all names of TOS violators on the police blotter, but never the name of the prosecuting Linden, nor the whistle-blowing AR'ing residents who blew them in -- very bad stuff).

Hence, here's a bit from this week's CRT which is on a listserve, to which you can only become party if Pathfinder clears your personal email to him.

From:       [email protected]
    Subject:     Proposal for Agenda for the Community Team Roundtable in February
    Date:     January 6, 2006 7:19:24 AM MST (CA)
    To:       [email protected]
    Reply-To:       [email protected]

Hello all,

After the somewhat fragmented (but still interesting) roundtable last Wednesday, I'd like to suggest the next roundtable to focus on the so many ideas that Robin left for us to think about.

I'm not minimizing the importance of all other discussed issues ? censorship vs. enforcement of ToS comes very high on top of my mind ? but just seeing if it's worth to discuss "future social changes" in SL, as opposed to "current community issues" (ie. where the harm is already done and we can only expect to "control it").

Robin (with some previous hints on Philip's interview to the Metaverse Messenger) suggested that we discussed a quality-focused, content-and-entertainment-is-not-for-free model for Second Life. If I'm correctly interpreting her words, this is basically a rough resume of what I have understood that is going to be released slowly as time goes by:

Assumptions:

    - all sorts of Linden stipends lead, sooner or later, to either "favouritism", "gaming", or "abuses". Adding more rules needs more (human) enforcement, and sometimes technical fixes to ensure "fairness" are too cumbersome to implement
    - in RL, entertainment is (mostly) *not* for free
    - SL has grown enough that we can focus on quality (which has a higher cost) instead of merely quantity (10 TBytes of content is quite a bit! Just compare it to "a few GBytes" for the common variety of MMORPGs)
    - also, losing a few thousand users because they cannot adapt to a "quality-focused world" where things have a "cost", is something Linden Lab can afford to do in 2006, but perhaps couldn't afford in the past
    - to better protect value of land, zoning is going to be introduced as a new feature in group-owned land. Groups will also be more like "companies" in spirit
    - nobody will prevent people to have their own "free content & entertainment" areas, but they'll have to self-sustain themselves financially, and not expect Linden financing

Measures:

    - eliminate Developers' Incentives
    - slowly diminish the importance of traffic/dwell, or eliminate it completely
    - adjust weekly stipends downwards (like Philip always said that would come in the future), or even reduce it to zero over time
    - no more Linden support for special interest groups (ie. cultural/educational groups getting discounts for their land/premium accounts) ? encourage them to get their own funding from other residents instead (or eventually RL funding)
    - eventually replace "finantial support" by "open, public contests" and contracts for producing certain types of entertainment/content that LL sees important in SL (just like a RL government works)
    - make event announcements be paid (like classifieds)
    - encourage content and entertainment producers to replace the "free" model by the "dirt-cheap" model. Most freebies (or free attendance to entertainment) can be sold by L$1, which most people can afford anyway. Thousands of people paying L$1 will enable even the most generous content producer to have a comfortable income, as opposed to being forced to rely upon stipends/dwell/special incentives from LL to continue to produce free content
    - encourage land owners and developers to zone their land on the mainland, by agreeing upon "zoning laws", and develop a mechanism to enforce those. This will mean that zoned areas in the mainland may suddenly become interesting again ("interesting" in the terms of "valuable" as well).
    - have a company-oriented model for groups, instead of a "free sharing community" model that is currently in place

All these changes show a distinct paradigm shift by LL. For a while, I think it was important that content/entertainment producers could establish themselves by relying upon external financing (in this case, "governmental" financing) to continue to be encouraged to produce more and more free content/entertainment. This, in turn, provides "quantity" (which we have right now) although not necessarily "quality". I'm not wishing to enter a discussion of what "quality" means in each and every case. For now, a simple definition shall be enough: quality items/entertainment are those you're willing to pay for them and feel that you're getting a good value for your money. This doesn't mean that quality content can't be free; it means that the willingness to pay for them (even if just an insignificant amount) is enough for people not to feel "cheated".

I certainly think that these and other measures will mean less camping chairs, and more Tringo :) on the event side, and less freebies, but also more content producers that will charge you for an item but give excellent technical support for it. It will slowly reduce "fake events" to absolute zero (you won't profit from "gaming" the system). It will, to a degree, have people get used to the idea that to attend a club with a good DJ and have lots of fun, you're going to pay L$1 from your pocket to join the fun; but encourage you to do your own events as well, and charge L$1 per person to attend them. More money will change hands ? the economy will grow.

On the other hand, the defendants of the "freebie culture of SL" will raise their voices and threaten to leave at the slightest indication that they might not get "stuff for free" any more. Should we worry, or should we attempt to deal with the issue before it gets implemented, so that people get alternatives soon, and start to plan for them? Putting in other words: can (or should) we prepare this transition slowly and carefully? What can we offer to people that only log in to Second Life for the free content?

    - Gwyn

--
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."
  -- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08

Comments

[Cocoanut Koala]

I really should pay more attention to that list-serve. It's on my e-mail and I don't look at that very often.

I'm glad - when I joined SL in February of 2005 - that I realized it was almost impossible to make it in entertainment, and decided to become a builder instead. Because with these suggestions above, it WILL be impossible.

Sorry, but SL just simply does not translate to RL. My shorthand explanation for this, which others have talked about at length, is, "You can't charge for virtual drinks."

The events list - and having just oodles of things on it - is one of the best things about SL. That a few people have decided they don't LIKE having to look at all the things we can choose from will hold sway over the Lindens (and have held sway over them) to remove these choices pisses me off mightily.

I'm sick to death of people telling me that events I enjoy aren't "real" events.

I guess it's worth it to lose all those players who enjoy having those events and who enjoy putting them on. Let's keep working at it, and pretty soon all we will have left is content creators trying to sell everything to each other.

At that point, there will be no more reason for me to create content, and I'll be gone, too.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

There was an interesting discussion over at Clickable Culture on the events issue. Eventful, an events listing service for anything on the Internet, whether some kid's soccer practice to La Boheme or whatever, talked to Philip at a conference, and then grabbed the feed off SL of its events list.

And I immediately worried they'd hate the clutter, listen to the FICerati tell them it is eyebleed material, and wind up shutting it off and substituting it with Flipper's Sanitized Feed (R)

But, like all things Internet, it tends toward the open rather than the closed system. Out there in Internet land, people are just more open and tolerant than they are in the fussy little walled garden of SL.

So the guy, even hearing about the eyebleed problem, just shrugged. He figures people will filter it. I pointed out that the internal SL filters might not work on his thingie. But in fact they did, for those who took the trouble to tag their events.

So sure, the Internetverse is now suffering, um, eyebleeds from Tringo at 7, 11, 1, 2, 3 and My Yardsale and My Sexy Av. But they also have lots of other interesting stuff and things like the Barnett reading or Lessing visit or whatever too. They can FILTER. They also just BROWSE using their MINDS, that wonderful built-in browser thing behind your eyes you can use to filter with.

I agree that the events list should not be tampered with, and should be free, like a free shopper on the corner of 23rd st or in the supermarket. Shoppers are the lifeblood of the economy. They post all kinds of ads and things -- often for free if the community is small enough. If larger, the shopper itself is free, but those putting in ads pay a fee. LL is trying to duplicate that model. I think it's not a good one yet for SL because events aren't just events or sales opportunities, they are entry-level jobs in the heavily stratified and Darwinistic economy.

Yard-sales, contests, dances, money-balls -- these are all entry-level jobs, or money-making opportunities for avatars just coming in and not either skilled enough or committed enough to buy Lindens or work at learning a craft. So don't alienate those people by insisting they pay. And if you start making all the event planners and clubs pay for ads, they'll have to find a way to charge admission or figure out some other way to make money which will involve vending, selling rentals, selling fashion shows or whatever.

Efforts to charge fees for the use of land can be made, and I do have an experiment going with that on the SL Public Land Preserve but it is no way in hell to get tier paid.

Remember the buffets in TSO? Even when you had to sell virtual food to keep the virtual avatars fed and greened, people wouldn't pay for it. A freebie culture developed because a few put out free buffets as loss-leaders to get people in the door in their clubs or skill lots.

Once a few big places have those loss-leaders, then others can't charge $30 for the buffet -- same principle.

The big wealthy clubs run by people either on daddy's trust fund who can buy traffic or who have the sex escort/fashion vending stuff locked in as a revenue stream, will not charge admissions, and will even put in money chairs to get people to come and earn money to buy the sex and the clothes.

You can't sell virtual drinks, but you can sell virtual sex and clothes. Those are really the only sources of income I see in SL as rapid start-ups and as rapid entry-level income.

Nobody is going to pay to study 18th century poetry. They *might* pay -- some of them -- to learn texturing or building. Remains to be tested.