Dwellfarers Unite!

I remember when I saw Kazanture's post the other day complaining that it was ridiculous that he, as a land baron, was getting Linden dollars ($200-250 a day!) merely for the fact that he had land for sale out, and people came to look at it and trafficked in dwell points.

I remember making a mental note that if now people like him (is he a barely-guised alt? or a shill? or more likely just a regular bell-weather kinda guy?) were complaining, the Received Wisdom was going to kick in big time, and the Lindens would be removing dwell soon.

So they did -- Philip announced yesterday that there was so much new money pumped into the economy from dwell payments that they'd have to tweak the economy to fix it.

We all know that camp chairs have fueled this phenomenon, whereby rows of AFK zombies just sit on your land and amp up your traffic to the point where the Lindens are hosed for dwell dollars and you essentially buy your way not only on to the top of the popularity list of the "top 20, " but on to what was called "dwellopers" which was just phased out March 31 -- where the Lindens paid you real USD to play their game and create "compelling content" for people to come to your lot. Of course...money trees, money balls, dance pads end up costing you more than you ever get in dwell payments or dwellopers' awards but with the drop in the Linden dollar, getting USD payments or steady income sources have been important for many entertainers.

BTW, money trees are one of those things that the FIC endlessly argue aren't like camp-chairs, but it's like saying white-wine spritzers aren't alcohol, but a can of Bud *is* alcohol. It's one of those drugs the FIC take and pretend it's "medical marijuana" -- money trees supposedly salve the philanthropic souls of the FIC, but in reality, they keep nOObz trapped on land just as long as camp chairs, to get the payouts, thereby upping the dwell, thereby keeping the FIC and SIC in the traffic numbers they don't deserve from their actual content. I speak as a user of money trees myself, so I know how this works. I view them as loss-leaders to help you find newbies who are then your potential rentals customers. Works great for me -- even if dwell ends tomorrow (which it will).

So, we're all against inflation, we're all for ending all this flood of useless printed money into the economy, right?

Well, wrong. At least, I'm not for ending dwell like this, in this sequence, now, and in this fashion -- due to the usual unintended consequences, the unforeseen hardships, and the lack of a plan to prevent yet another "sticking it to the mainland" situation and yet another "let's privilege the private islands" situation.

And I can tell I'm right when I see Gwyn Llewelyn, resident Socialist Social Engineer of Neualtenberg AND Enabran Templar, resident Darwinist Capitalist Bot Maker, both on the same hymn sheet, both not only cheering on Philip Linden, but chortling with a certain glee about their fellow residents who are now going to be having to pull in their belts. "Too bad you based your business model on welfare," Gwyn quickly replied to my protest about dwell, in the usual FIC/SIC hortatory fashion of people who never take risks and get paid pogey out of the game in other ways, like claiming it as RL work, RL work write-offs and expenses, or merely as reputational enhancement. They don't have to care about the inherent integrity and coherence of the world itself -- somebody else is always paying for it, not them.

I had written Gwyn that if I couldn't advertise my parcels in FIND, I'd maybe have to go out of business.

Is this because I depend on dwell to make a living? Not at all.

Let me explain -- and try to indicate one of the many Unintended Consequences from the Law of Unintended Consequences we can expect from the precipitous end of dwell and the method of sequencing.

I suppose I'm not a typical landlord in that I let my tenants collect the group dwell. It's just one of the many features I put in my rentals back when I began to try to compete with Anshe Chung, Blue Burke, and others who had all the rentals sewn up. It means that tenants might get a dollar or two extra now and then in their inbox just for being in my group. Sometimes, if the group is small, as I sometimes make it for someone renting larger parcels or doing a certain project, the officers collect as much as $100 a day. But normally, after paying the parcel feels, it essentially cancels out, with a bit of a sweetener. A reason I offer free FIND ads is precisely because the traffic generated from all the parcels everywhere is normally plenty to cover something like 75 ads or so -- even when communities are at full occupancy, I keep the ad up to say, SORRY FULL TRY X, for people looking around from place to place.

I'm sure an unintended consequence of this current reform is now the necessity to figure out how else to get these fees paid.

We could debate whether of not they should be paid at all -- most countries have either governments or large companies that provide yellow pages for free. You don't have to pay to be in Google; you don't have to pay to be in your city's yellow pages unless you want a large half page ad or something. In the same way, we all wish the FIND in SL worked better, and was free. Instead,it's $30 per ad to use, so it functions like a classified. Many people never put themselves in FIND as a result. The hits to the data base are probably enormous; the Lindens feel justified in making it a money sink to automatically debit $30 from your accont.

So let's say you're happy to pay this, as I am, because FIND generates most of my sales -- how will you pay it now that dwell is gone? Well, you can't let the debit now circulate against all the tenants. If you do that, they will howl, seeing a negative against their account. It would be one thing if it debited as a visible charge that said "$2 parcel fees" -- they might resign themselves to that being part of their rent or something. But it doesn't. It comes right out of their stipends, invisibly, as members of the group. It just disappears, so that when they get their stipend, it says $496 or even $477 of the group has a lot of ads. If they get $50 elsewhere in total from the group's traffic, they are mollified (and even so, every once in a while you get a character who obsesses about this and even my long notecarded explanation can't help). But now? With ONLY getting a debit? Of course not, and no one can subject them to it.

The hacks around this system are two that I know of:  one, you sell yourself 16m2 of land -- you take 16m out of the group or another group, by selling it for $0 to yourself, keeping it as group land, then you set it for say, $1500, and then buy it from yourself so that the $1500 distributes equally all through the group, compensating people for the parcel fees debit. That's ok as far as it goes, but people don't always figure out that the $5 they might find missing from their stipend is the same $5 coming in as an unknown "gift" from a land sale -- when they don't recall ever selling land or know what's up. This only breeds fear and suspicion. Another problem is that you can't always know exactly what the parcel fee is if you aren't scrupulously keeping track -- and what if you have hundreds of ads?

Another hack is to close the group to membership (mine are all on open), and set a ridiculous membership fee like $1500 and then have yourself leaev and join to force $1500 to flush through the system. But as far as I know in the latest versions of SL (this changed awhile back), membership fees now only distribute to officers, not members. There's also the risk that someone will join if you leave it on open and get whacked with that fee; even if you close it and monitor it you still have the problem in a large group that someone will leave, just before the benefit, and yet still get whacked that week by the parcel fee.

All in all, these hacks/workarounds aren't a good, permanent solution for groups to pay their parcel fees for FIND. We could hope that the group tool reforms could include a way for managers to direct cash into the group's kitty that paid off the parcel feels. But they may not come soon enough.

We could hope that the Lindens could just SHUT OFF the automatic debit of FIND fees to groups UNTIL they find a better way for groups to pay rather than circulating debits to everyone -- but they aren't likely to pay attention to this idea, and there are likely to be forums FIC who will scream that the groups are getting a freebie on a sink everyone else has to pay (I'm for giving them this temporary freebie, as there aren't THAT many of them!)

So what will a manager of a large group have to do, in order to keep a live, updatable FIND list with ads changing frequently?

Ungroup the land. That way, the parcel directory fee will debit just that one owner and one account. This is, of course, a HUGE chore and carries with it constantly the risk of blowing off buildings set to the group, etc. because the only way to do it is to sell land out of the group to yourself as an individual for $0. Having to do so many repetitive tasks of $0 sales ALWAYS leads to mistakes where land is accidently avavilable for $0 -- it's just a statistical given, even if you are smart and savvy and follow all the error messages and the ARE YOU REALLY SURE messages.

But even if you get through that, you have then the nasty surprise the Lindens are whacking you with now TWICE, on top of the loss of the (minimal) dwell payments: you lose your 10 percent tier bonus for the group, which enables groups to get more tier to apply to land without tiering up additionally.

The 10 percent tier bonus is one of those things that both Darwinists capitalists and hard-left punitive socialists have in common, which is why you hear Jauani Wu AND Enabran Templar AND Hiro Pendragon all urging for it to be removed. The main reason, however, they wish to have it removed is class warfare: the 10 percent bonus rewards a class of people they are not in: land developers who group their land and stay on it, and provide content and services. Those who campaign against the 10 percent bonus are either content creators or builders or private island deals, where the 10 percent bonus doesn't hold.

Those of us not in the extremist classes are all urging the Lindens NOT to remove the 10 percent bonus. Indeed, I even suggested to them if they are determined to remove it, as they are all incentives, then they should sequence that first, THEN dwell, so that people who formerly grouped their land and got no benefit from dwell due to its huge circulation, could now reformat their land and at least get the benefit of dwell for a few months as individuals before they then also lose the 10 percent bonus. I kept raising this sequencing issue and of course no one knew what I was talking about and ignored me.

So now, instead of a more rational sequencing, in their zeal to remove dwell as the easiest and least painful incentive to remove for them that avoids the screaming from the loudest people, they are also taking a second whack at mainland groups and forcing them to ungroup to be able to advertise.

For smaller groups like Lusk or Boardman or something, it won't likely matter -- people will just communicate among themselves and figure out that they all have to eat the parcel fees.

Some will simply take out their parcel ads. So at the one time when they need to really hustle to get customers, and more paying customers because dwell has been removed, they will be whacked, unable to advertise except in Classifieds.

Of course the forums "experts" will tell everyone to go pay for Classifieds -- $50 not $30 -- and STFU. But the problem with Classifieds is that they don't search as nicely. They don't give the nice field free of clutter that FIND does. In any event, even if we make the switch over entirely to $50 classifieds, they don't stay checked off like FIND does unless you unclick it, and they will require constant attention.

So I might concede that sure, removing dwell makes sense. But in a land group on the mainland, by signing up for the removal of dwell's consequences, I also get whacked with a brand-new more expensive -- and more complicated -- advertising budget in classifieds, or I lose the 10 percent bonus.

Tough titties you say? Well...why? The removal of dwell will be bad enough for some groups, removing what was for them some portion of their income. Why should these productive people who make activities and services in SL and hold premium accounts and land that the Lindens themselves earn from be whacked so hard as to be whacked THREE times when everyone else is whacked ONCE (whacked by the loss of dwell, whacekd by having to ungroup alnd, and lose the 10 percent bonus, and whacked by having to use classifieds more, and pay $50 instead of $30).

This is what I mean by unintended consequence. Nobody learned of it or thought of it because they never asked -- they had to spring the change on the world quickly to reduce the screaming -- and judging from the forums, those who are actually harmed the most either haven't figured it out yet, aren't on the forums anyway, or feel intimidated from appearing on the forums and saying so, when they will be deluged with a tirade of 30 Darwinistic capitalists and 50 zealous communists who will tell them to get alife, etc.

What I find interesting is the class warfare that becomes so starkly visible at times like this. The people who consider themselves "the normal ones" and "in the statistical middle" and "the average" say: dwell is going to remove some of the fun from the game and is too harsh a whack. They say the Lindens should first reduce their land glut, that forces numerous cheap sales of land and a drive to buy cheap Lindens, and let land rise to its truer value. Or they say reduce all or part of stipends, if they make up 72 percent of the money supply.

What some people enjoy most about SL is the amateur quality. That is, you can get really good at being an amateur, even to the level of a professional.

And the things that people have chosen that work to get people to stick (aside from sex and camp-chairs) are things that people did in the 19th century and much of the 20th century -- the equivalent of parlour games like dominoes, Parcheesi, jacks, Monopoly, etc., word games, association games, story-telling, charades and all the Ingos.

All of those have a family-fun or college-dorm or group feel to them that is enjoyable, but readily seen as amateurish by outsiders. No one pays to play Monopoly or Scrabble or charades or Bingo in their home or dorm or parish hall, and they don't want to do it online, either.

So what Philip Linden or some other Lindens personally like about SL --live music and education -- will be what gets the incentives and subsidies.

RL educational groups or non-profit groups already get a Linden subsidy of having to pay only $150 a month in tier, and pay only $950 for the private islands, instead of $195 and $1250. Essentially, the Lindens are willing to go on doing this for RL entities, but they won't do it for world-created entities of the amateur level.

If a musician with a RL venue and RL skills and RL production costs covered can use SL as an add-on, then they can charge Lindens and people will pay it.

The more than someone has a RL entity, business, non-profit, or government, to cover the cost of SL itself, or cover other RL needs or production costs, the more they can benefit from this world going forward.

So it's another tear in the fabric of the world, or the curtain that keeps the world a special, magical place separate from real life where anything is possible. No one can expect the Lindens to keep paying for such a dream, however.

What's nasty about the Lindens' reforms, as they've carefully calculated them and religiously implemented them for a year and a half now, is that they do not privilege or even incentivize the middle class -- being revolutionary extremists themselves, they can't be expected to do that until it's too late.

The climate on the forums especially, but also inworld, is one of harsh, capitalistic Social Darwinism at one extreme on the right, or harsh, distributive, punitive Social Collectivism on the left, with no room for failure or experimentation or flexibility. That's how the Lindens like it, I've come to see.

How do I know that's how the Lindens like it? Because they let it be.

On the forums, those who don't "get with the program" are alternately pilloried for being poor business managers unable to adapt to changing conditions, or bullied by the collective as poor
socially-altruistic collective-participants in the grander project of making  LL's platform and software work and be competitive. Either way, they lose. They are lozerz.

Someone like Gwyn Llewelyn can lecture me about the need to end "welfare for business" and issue hortatory pronunciations that it's "too bad I didn't have a better business" model -- and be in perfect step with a harsh, Darwinistic capitalist like Enabran (he's really more of a state oligarchist) who would tell me that businessmen don't complain, they make a profit, or they die, due to the demands of evolution. Whether by harsh evolutionary conditions, or by brutal and abrupt revolutionary conditions, the leftists and rightists in the extreme in SL alternate lobbying their Linden factions with either ideology and they succeed, over and over again, because of the ability to grab the levers of most communications system.

If Gwyn says I need a better business model, say, if I depend on dwell in any fashion, why can't I then get her to point out that content-creators who depend on low Linden value and the constant punishment of the land-dealing class also have a poor business model? Because they do -- not only for themselves in the long run, killing off their customers, but for the world in the long run, killing off the world.

The reality is that the broader middle outside these extremes, which sometimes has to become the "radical middle class" to override the extremism of the extremities, can recognize that a mixture of incentives and disincentives are needed and that the greatest -- numerically -- productive forces of the world -- premium account-holders who buy and tier land and put businesses or homes on it -- have to have a say in the world's survival, too, and cannot be constantly called upon to make sacrifices for the good of the extremes. When a middle class cannot thrive, the world can't flourish.

The Lindens are banking on a notion that a middle class of higher-spending end-user sim-buyers and mass content creators are going to come in and make the middle class. Good luck with that!

I'm supposed to lose my ability to pay for parcel fees now, or my ability to collect dwell dollars, for the good of the world and LL's business but...what did content creators get asked to do on the far right or far left extreme?

Content-creators win once again -- they never have to sacrifice as they are king! -- they get to keep their customers who keep using cheap Lindens for a good long while because cheap land is still flooding the market and still finding wholesalers willing to chop and sell it cheaply. The theory is that removing dwell from the system will make the rate of the Linden vs. dollar improve.

Fortunately, we'll get to see how that will not happen, so that the Lindens may AT LONG LAST realize the errors of their ways -- that their land glut and premium account and basic account generosities are the root of devaluation. They picked something that the two vocal and visible extremes wouldn't be harmed by, and which even the middle would be forced to concede is a good thing because no one likes camp chairs (similar to their political sale of p2p as well).

Even if I'm wrong, and the Lindens get the Linden value to improve dramatically, content creators merely raise their product prices at the flick of a mouse in networked vendors using third-party sites. Those rentals agents who aren't Adam Zaius, however, will have a harder time having to make many manual changes in the system; those businesses that are smaller and don't have networked vendors and third-party sites will also not adapt quickly enough to the inflation and die. It's ok! Deaths are *needed* objectively by Social Darwinists for Evolution and by Social Colletivists for revolution -- whether content creation by FIC (goods inworld) or SIC (services to RL outside companies) or whether improvement of the platform by FIC *and* SIC and assorted tekkie-wikis -- those are what have to take precedence now over rank-and-file customes or the dedicated and struggling middle.

What's happening is no different than what happens in many third-world and developing countries, especially after fascism or communism. Indeed, the prosperity of an America is caused by its ability to avoid the extremes and create the buffer of a large middle class.

The Lindens are not going to change, are not going to stop listening to extremes, and not undo the harm they are causing by poorly-time or poorly-sequenced economic changes. So if you don't like it, go to WoW or what is now called Entropia instead of Project Entropia as it is more stable.

But it is still possible that if the Lindens hurry along group-tool reform and improvement of vehicles, they could inject some life into the mainland. They spent all that time and effort and money on making this vast system of roads -- if they finally make something to put on them that is viable, they could do something vaguely similar to what the US did in the 1940s and 1940s after the Great Depression and World War II: build a system of national highways and parks. This stimulates commerce, connectivity, business, recreation, spending of disposable dollars, and creates jobs. The "creates jobs" part comes in inspiring legions of people to make the interesting vehicles they can sell to those who want to travel on roads. Then other people will have a reason to create road houses, cafes, race tracks, stadiums, stores, etc. The only thing missing is the fast food -- as usual, the SL creators will have to substitute fast sex as the only thing that people can still want and get online in a virtual world.

The Lindens need to listen to the people they are harming by the removal of dwell, figure out whether there is still anything they can change about the timing or sequencing of this change, and see if they can't really figure out, if not to incentivize the middle class of non-inventoriable content providers and consumers, at least stop punishing them. I have two groups to join, Mainlanders, to work on mainland issues and reform of the group tools, and Dwellfarers, where partly in jest I have the title Dwellfare Queen, for discussion of these issues and planning concerted action.

Comments

[Megaupload Premium Account]

Great article, it sure made me think about the whole thing!

Thanks,
Rui "Megaupload Premium Account Master" Santos