The issue of public spaces in Second Life is something I know A LOT about -- I've maintained them on Ravenglass properties in every community, I've helped create and sustain the SL Public Land Preserve with some 50,000 m2 in about 25 locations, and I helped develop the infohub at Ross called "Memory Bazaar".
Recently, a group of people, evidently business owners from a few sims near infohubs, have been protesting vigorously, as they are affected by infohub griefing and loiterers demonstrably guilty of resource-hogging, They've been aggressively campaigning about removing these loiterers from infohubs. Lias Leandros is one who has been repeatedly nagging me with her version of the issues and trying to enlist me in her protest group and support of her website; another long-time resident, bladyblue Bommerang, has also been repeatedly raising these issues at Office Hours. Of course, people can campaign any way they wish freely, unless they violate the TOS and the Lindens boot them. There is an awful lot of latitude in SL for protesting, in fact. What I can't stand, however, is when you tell one of these door-to-door proseltyzers politely and firmly to go away, and they keep banging on you in an IM evangelizing their cause and arguing you. For that reason alone, you lose people for the cause.
What I can't stand for, either, is when the people pushing the cause so aggressively just aren't very bright, and keep ineffectually making the same redundant, retarded, and entirely unpersuasive arguments, as if by sheer force of repetition, you will knuckle. And what I really hate most of all is when a person attempts to globalize or universalize their local issue, and force you in under their tent, in the mistaken notion that the Lindens move better on globalized problems they can decide with one executive sweep, than on cases.
We all understand the problem of overcrowding and griefing at infohubs and welcome areas (and yes, indeed, you can't be shortsighted and see this as purely an infohub problem, as the chatters that Liandros imagines she can evict from infohubs safely to welcome areas merely bother everybody arriving new to SL or trying to get advice in their early weeks at welcome areas). We all get that the 40-odd or so telehubs converted to infohubs, of which some 16 or so are resident-developed now, suffer from resource-hogging, as large gangs of unverifieds and day-olds grief, harass, or just stand around chatting and taking up server space in ways in which others don't like.
I have a particularly annoying bunch at Ross, people wearing ugly avatars, taunting me, being intolerent of transgender, putting up giant megaprims with my RL picture on it, putting scripted objects around to follow me, bumping and pushing, orbiting, and generally behaving like asses. From their conversations, I can hear that they are barely literate stupid creatures whose uninspiring real lives have spurred them to Second Lives that they also cannot seem to enrich with creation, exploring, events, etc. and who seem to find the concept of endless mindless babble while draped around resident-supported high-end content, is just the ticket.
The way that Liandros and Bommerang have decided to fight this issue is first of all, to hone in, and to keep reciting like parrots, some document in the Knowledge Base they've found written by some Linden once that seems to designate infohubs for, well, info -- learning, education -- and welcome areas for, well, welcoming, chatting, socializing. They think if they just keep banging on this distinction -- utterly false and unfounded, in a misleading article they've taken too literally and wrongfully -- that the Lindens will knuckle and say, oh, ok, we agree, infohubs are for education only, so let's kick out the chatters and ban chatting and move all the chatters to welcome areas, for their proper designated purpose.
See how silly that is? You can't possibly deploy enough Lindens to make the content and form judgements to determine whether a group of people are learning or just shooting the shit. To make these determinations will inevitably involve subjective judgements and time-sucks that the Lindens never, ever EVER -- and I mean NEVER! -- take on, as much as we'd like.
Furthermore, by banging on this artificial and meaningless distinction, these gals are utterly oblivious to the larger issues of all mainland problems and their overall solution, and utterly oblivious to the civil rights and public interest issues at stake in denying people the simple right and pleasure and need of chatting with others in a public space. They should get to do this; if they do this in a stupid and retarded way, and clog up the space, it's merely a comment on the tragedy of the commons that we ourselves must find solutions for, rather than lurching for draconian solutions involving harsh zoning and penalizing for normal human activity.
Basically, they've taken a very very parochial problem -- their ownership of land in Bear and a few other hub sims that they personally can't access when the chatters and griefers are out in full swing -- and decided that by globalizing it, they can get it solved. I can only urge them to go solve it locally and stop bothering us -- each one of these infohubs actually has a different profile, and this problem doesn't affect all of them, or at least not daily, and creating such a blanket policy would in fact harm some very good things that do go on at infohubs that these campaigners cannot see. More often than not, the spontaneous group of 10 people at the landing point in the hub I visit daily and work on consists of brand-new people arriving, with a few people slightly older helping them out. This is really the best form for knowledge-transfer and making a friend, as the volunteers in the official system are just too officious, self-important, and sometimes corrupt in misusing the position to get traffic to their own stores. Many newbies of 3-4 weeks reinforce their skills and feel the pride in accomplishment that spurs them to remain in Second Life by teaching another newbie only 3-4 days old. This process shouldn't be disrupted.
The main problem at root at Bear is that it lacks compelling content to hold the education-seekers and information-seekers and more intelligent consumers of content, and leaves open a vacuum to be filled by chatting loiterers sucking up CPU. Once you appreciate the Camp Iwannalayya sort of atmosphere with the lodge, and fly around picking up a card or two like Pathfinders' Picks from 2006, you're done. And then you look idly around for chatting partners -- unless you want to fight your way through the slowly rezzing mall next door.
One obvious reason for all the chat is that - surprise surprise! -- people do not learn from technical manuals, or their crude and reductive step-brother, the notecard inside SL. They just don't. Perhaps 10-20 percent do. Tekkies. Older, more literary types. Not young people used to frantically clicking and getting pictures and activity of some sort on the Internet or in video games. If there is a living avatar nearby, they'd rather click and interact with that person than a tutorial. And for people who are uneducated, of which there are far more in SL than anyone is prepared to admit, the tutorial/notecard/formal learning approach simply fails. And by uneducated, I mean they cannot read at a 12-year-old's level and comprehend simple instructions.
(I was reminded anew by waiting 4 hours in bus lines trying to get out of NYC for the holidays of the really hampered, retarded, and perilous state of my fellow youthful Americans' state of comprehension. 25 years of having especially young boys spend all day in front of video games and TV sets may have its advantages, but its disadvantages come starkly in a pronounced inability to perceive the clues and cues of live, real life and the voice and human face in front of them.
A wide-eyed teen rushes up to me and asks me of this is the line for "pay in cash, leaving today". "Yes," I nod vigorously. "But is this the line for cash, leaving today?" "Yes definitely," I explain. Bewildered, clueless, wide-eyed, she gets on the cell phone with her friend. "I'm in line at the bus station...but I can't tell where I am, I mean, there's a line for will-call, there's a line for cash paid, I'm lost, this is so frustrating" (I heard about 10 calls just like this, over and over). I turned around, "No, this *is* the line for cash, leaving today." She blinks at me in startled confusion. "Huh?" The apparatus of perception is actually broken, from all the i-Phones, headsets, ADD, computer graphics. I try again, very firmly. "This is indeed the line for cash -- the Greyhound man just said so, and there's a sign." A fellow behind her comes up, equally blinky and stupid. "But what time do you have to leave?" he says. "Leaving today," I explain. "That means, um, leaving any time today." "Some people!" the impaired teen harrumphs at me, and tells her friend on the phone once again that she doesn't know which line she's in and people are so rude, and "it's the holidays". Meanwhile, another lady, to whom a Greyhound official has explained patiently literally 20 times what kind of line it is in, and why she shouldn't be in it because it's the wrong line," suddenly starts screaming and shouting because he has wished her a happy holiday. "Kiss my holiday ass!" she screams over and over, and finally the police start coming.)
Given the per-capital really stupid people in America visible in the public places of a bus station, is it any small wonder that they show up in the public squares of Second Life? But here are the solutions, some of them taken from real life (like signage and presence of officials and police).
1. Content. If the content isn't compelling, don't expect to replace chatters with learners. You cannot fix the dearth of learners by having chatters banned. You simply have to have enough compelling learning content of various types and levels that actual newbies and returning learners will want to use the stuff. This content ranges from mini-games to learn something, notecards, visual clues, displays, posters, free objects, polls, photo booths or bulletin boards, etc. All it takes is a critical mass of 17-20 or so people like that arriving or returning, and that breaks the back of the mob-rush of 40 loiterers in a griefing ring.
2. Events. If you see a concerted pack of "regs" filling up the sim day after day, watch them to see the hours and time zone they're on, and schedule a meeting a half hour earlier on newbie orientation or some public issue. Fill the sim up yourself. About a dozen times of this, breaking the habit of the chatters from resource-hogging the sim, and they will start to move on.
3. Patrolling. Presence not by resident faux police forces who are worse than griefers, but volunteers of good will to help people and encourage newbies to stay to access content or get questions answered and to AR griefers. I think this has to be balanced, as having floorwalkers constantly asking you if you need help is hugely annoying, i.e. in a department store.
4. Signage. Urge people in plain language not to grief, practice vigilantism, or loiter - it's amazing how people will do what you ask when you ask them!
5. Grief reporting. If you are assiduous on reporting the harassment that often goes with these big gangs of mindless chatting, intimidating and taunting of newbies, pornographic material and lewd behaviour, sound loops and prim litter, etc. they begin to break up. A few 3-day holidays for some of their ringleaders, and they start to slacken the pace.
6. Resource hogging. The police blotter shows that occasionally Lindens will respond to a report carefully documenting a mob rush that really is a resource hog, 40 people in one group all occupying a sim. Sometimes it does work. Rather than raging against the machine, simply file them each time you see them and see if it will get traction.
7. Confrontation. I find pushing back in SL is one of the greatest things on earth. Some of these resource hogs and mindless chatterers degrading the culture of hubs never have been told "no" in their lives. So tell them. Ask them to move along and find a life. Confront them with the fact of their loser status. Some find this counterproductive. I find it works enough times to be valid as a tool when other things don't work.
8. Sell your land and move. If you do not have a store trying to get infohub traffic, why are you in this sim? My God, SL has gadzillion sims now, very beautiful some of them, on the mainland, constantly churning out, for $7/m these days, even white sandy beach. Move! Sell your hub land, easily for a good price, and stop kvetching. Don't expect however, if you are there to get traffic, that chatters who are unverifieds and not likely to buy from you, can be expelled, and the vacuum will fill up with verified shoppers. The Lindens aren't going to create that for you; no one will. If you *do* have a store -- fill it up with stuff happening! Half of the infohub sim I have with malls and newbie rentals that people want to come to and hang out and chat and talk, but not in big mobs, in couples or threes in more manageable doses. When half the sim is devoted to such activities, the back of 40 is broken.
9. Opposition to obvious griefer groups. It's very clear to me as I travel around WAs, which I see as far more infested with this problem, that there are a few very obvious groups causing a lot of the problems. b/tards, W-hat, 4/chans, The Prokofy Fan Club, Woodbury University are among those who do this stuff constantly. There are some hubs I log alts on where I routinely see old w-Hatters reigning supreme -- don't they have homes to go to? Bars? Clubs? Geez, not even a sim to crash somewhere else? Something? Why do they need to hang around in WAs and be so retarded? With people like this, documenting and reporting their retarded behaviour is in fact an aid to both measuring the problem for yourself, to see if really is all that bad, and pushing back. Some people think if you confront them, they get worse. That's ok, their getting worse will lead quicker to a ban, if it comes to that.
Here's what will NOT work, and be counterproductive:
1. Calling for Mentors/Volunteers to have special powers no other resident has to ban people from these areas. Like the awful idea of the Linden-annointed "good citizen" on the JIRA, the idea of empowered Mentors is a horror. Don't fee it because your one little sim has too many people on it and you can't get home. Move before you sic this awful idea on the rest of us.
2. Calling for Lindens to banish group chatting as an activity -- they will never do it, and it's a bad idea for reasons I've explained about judgements. Zoning sims for only one kind of purpose is something the Lindens have always avoided, and hey, if they're going to divide chat from edu sims, I want them to extend that concept and ban 16 m2 signs from waterfront sims, par example.
3. Asking Lindens to close them down. They may very well like to close down these areas that are anomalies in their system, especially those with resident content. I have fought too hard, as have others, to make an interesting place I'm constantly trying to get better to let the Lindens simply kill it off. Some of us have spent lots of money and time (look at Calleta Hobo Station!) on the content. BTW, you never see the losers clustered in Calleta, because it has interesting content for people to access and learn about.
4. Encouraging police groups to patrol in uniform with aggressive behaviour. This just escalates it and creates wars between groups. On the other hand, I *am* for individuals to face down individuals. It never hurts to IM some regular idiot and asking them to move along, and abuse reporting them if they get abusive.
5.Privileging educational infohubs in general. Education is horribly fetishized in SL. There's this really stubborn and ignorant belief that everybody loves the idea of learning how to build and script. They don't. They want to socialize. Let them. Don't cede more territory to the Lindens' re-education camps for the creator fascists.
6. Calling for Linden Land bans by Governor Linden having a master ban list. Bad, bad idea. Entirely open to abuse. No recourse in sight. If someone's repeated, even petty behaviour, rises to the test of ARs, enough of them, and Lindens can judge whether a permaban is in order. They can't be expected to develop specific bans for specific people at certain parcels.
From my very first days in Second Life, when I simply couldn't figure out at first how to get Ahern to stop being my home, I was repulsed by the welcome areas -- as many are. I couldn't wait to get away from the sycophantic fanboyz capering before Lindens (in those days they were often on duty, but were as mindless chatterers as the other resource hogs). I hated the occasional taunting and abusiveness I saw then, which has now escalated to 24/7 harassment. I also wasn't about to go be a dutiful fanboy and learning scripting and building and read dumb cards all day.
No, the solution does not involve trying to police away bad content and people. The solution involves encouraging good content and decently-behaved people. That's hard work, and if you are not prepared to engage in this difficult work for an infohub in your sim, you should move.
I quite understand the feeling of never wanting to have your precious land pried away from you that you won by struggles over 3 years. I am like that over Refugio; I waited out the Barbie Club for more than a year, as nightly, they put 30-40 people on the sim, making it so my tenants couldn't even come home. I had to change away from nice waterfront houses and shopping in a beautiful gardens, to a large apartment tower for the people who essentially wanted a place to take the Barbie girls that was a little more private. I could barely make tier on the sim for months, it was a haven for griefing, but I refused to let it go -- I kept trying to solve the problem, sometimes literally camping the sim myself to hold open a slot until a tenant came home.
As I've noted, the problems in Second Life are severe, and many involve the spite and malice of people for each other, not Linden Lab's spite and malice for its own customers.
Therefore solutions, if they aren't in first life in the form of legal action or media attention, involve resident creativity, forming groups not to bang senselessly on tendentious points, but to hold events, directly confront individuals, abuse report, and use a variety of other more creative solutions to keep Second Life's public places free and open to the public for a variety of uses.
Just to comment on this website, where comments aren't allowed:
I couldn't disagree with your approach more, as I've said in office hours, and my alt, Random Unsung, has told you repeatedly as you kept haranguing him in IMs.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/11/infohubs-paying.html
And under no circumstances should you be trying to get the Lindens to stop delivering newbies to these hubs. We WANT them to do that! That was in fact part of the original agreement made with landowners, that we could forego the compensation and buyout of the land, and if we kept it, develop it as infohubs and the Lindens would drop off newbies -- otherwise, it makes little sense.
Your problems are on one sim: keep them there. Stop globalizing this issue and work on the strategies that work, like holding classes.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 11/22/2007 at 06:28 AM
Well one strategy that works reasonably is the "Optimal Newbie Distribution System". It really helps me get the I'm bored and there is nothing to see here crowd off my doorstep and onto public spaces and private areas who really want the traffic.
Posted by: economic mip | 11/23/2007 at 11:30 AM
I'm so glad you found use for my Optimal Newbie Distribution System lol. I wish the Lindens did. They keep jamming on their Random Newbie Distribution System instead of Optimal (Serial) Distribution System.
I would put one with all the WAs and IHs on OI, and then once they landed in one of those spots, I'd have the resident driven one, where anyone can add a landmark. I go through and remove duplicates from time to time for those who try to pack their store in. You could even make themed ones. I think this is the way to go.
I would load it up with all kinds of landmarks and there could be more variety.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 11/23/2007 at 01:25 PM
User retention is highest when people make friends within their first experience in SL, something that can be achieved by merely "chatting" with others. You do have a good point though the Favorite list by Pathfinder from 2006 is probably past due time to update.
~:~ Viva la Bear Infohub ~:~
Cheers! *passes out bumper stickers* Our infohub kicks your infohubs ass!
Posted by: Ravenelle | 11/26/2007 at 12:45 PM
Beautiful WIngtips here not only is this lady Lias bullying people but Ryan Radio and her have started making zombie boxes in the air filled with 20 or so robots to boost their traffic and lag up the sim for all the new residents Ryan Radio's shop is one giant copyright infringement and I hope he gets what he deserves for being so mean to everyone that calls Bear info hub home.
Posted by: Jesse Rangel | 02/25/2008 at 07:41 AM