Vanity "newbie helper" Lyden Marikh invades Ross with megaprims, violation of the Linden trademark, grief-bots, texture theft -- and a huge attitude of "entitle me".
In order to write about the Lindens changing the New User Experience (NUE), which they have just begun today with a new Community Gateways program, first, I have to tell the story of what happened this last week in Ross, which has been pretty awful.
As many readers know, I have been working on developing the Ross infohub, which I named Memory Bazaar, since early 2006, about 3 years. Jessica Ornitz did the wonderful Moroccan-style build there, Ordinal Malaprop has helped with scripts for the Explorer Compass, others have contributed such as Gerami Fizz who made the texture for the compass, I have scoured the world to find all kinds of props, and the students at Virtual Morocco and their wonderful creations have been particularly appreciated.
Ross itself, like other telehub sims, of course had a troubled history. Just to summarize years of turmoil, originally Anshe Chung bought the area directly around the telehub and put up one of her successful telehub malls; Blue Burke was also in the area, as was DNA Prototype with a mall. Catherine Cotton originally successfully bid for the rare mainland island in Ross (in those days people just didn't buy the separate private islands as they were found to be unstable) and put up her Christmas store. I had a club and then later a mall on neighbouring Refugio, and I bought Catherine's neighbouring island when she quit SL for awhile after being hounded and harassed on the forums.
Eventually Anshe sold me some of the back mall land, when she figured out early (or got a tipoff) that the Lindens were planning to ditch the telehubs. She then took compensation from the Lindens for her remaining land later, even though it didn't technically fit in their dates. For at least a year, I struggled with keeping a PG mall alive, even when the telehubs were there it didn't produce significant traffic, and Anshe retained some land that she rented to me for passage to my mall at a high price. Typical cut-throat Anshe. When she took her buy-out from the Lindens, she left a strip of 448 m2 on Ross in her ownership, which ran between the Linden telehub land and the Linden-bought land which then became the new infohub. I call it a spite strip. She has refused to sell it -- who the hell knows why. After enormous efforts, I got her staff at least to put autoreturn and no scripts on it so that the griefers could stop using it as a safe-haven.
Most of the experience in developing the Ross hub has been positive. Every day numerous people come through and an informal group of people help them. I spend a lot of time writing and redoing the tutorials and answering questions -- I envision it as an advanced tutorial for those wishing to find out things like how to start a business, how to run a group, learn about machinima, etc. I try to put interesting interactive stuff and freebies also throughout the site.
Yet like other infohubs, this one has been infested with a group of annoying regulars who constantly heckle me, sometimes rising to AR'able TOS violations -- one particular frequent flyer has been permabanned for abuse of scripts (she used to orbit me regularly and override autoreturn with giant grief pictures of me, etc.) but has come back on an obvious alt. She and her little cronies, one of who rented land next to the hub to parasite off the newbie flow with cheap stuff, continue to annoy, filling the bulletin board with stupid or even obscene notes and preventing its use by newbies, standing around blocking traffic, pretending to "help" but more often hindering.
Oh, but don't I parasite off the newbie flow with cheap stuff lol? Well, I have run a mall there since 2005, at times with nothing there to attract traffic whatsoever (after the telehub pullout the infohub the Lindens first made had traffic in the low double digits and no newbies were sent there). But tenants remaind and the stores survived due to search and regular customers. I have made the whole sim a place where newbies in particular can get a start in business by having low-cost rentals. I have some newbie housing there for $150/150 prims and also floors and stalls in the lighthouse tower. The entire island barely breaks even because the costs of development aren't offset, even if the rents mainly cover the tier. I also have a money tree there. There is no question that I have spent -- and continue to spend -- on Ross more than I will ever make back on it. I just try to keep the costs down.
You can read about my philosophy for the tutorials here and here -- the idea is to help people learn not by having them look at flat, slowly-rezzing 2-D posters or movies showing them things like building or flying, or reading the wonky Knowledge Base, but getting them to interact with objects that "talk" and sometimes "do things" to help them remember where the information is visually. For example, click on the genie lamp for "help," click on the lamp to find out "how to turn on the sun," click on the parrot for "how to talk," click on the tent to learn about "privacy and security" etc. etc.
OK, so far so good, right? Nothing to disturb this difficult, but nearly idyllic existence in a virtual world. That is, the griefers and regulars I have are annoying and heckle me, but they don't add up to 25 or 30 people locking up the avatar slots day after day as the Loiterers did on Bear. I regularly have to ask the Lindens to reset the sim because bots are stuck there due to poor scripting, but basically, the problems are manageable. Abuse-reporting griefers from the "regulars" seems to help abate them. Telling some just to stop their annoyances, i.e. spam and sound clips and dick-waving, and asking them to leave because it's PG works, too. In fact, a solution for the hubs might be to make them PG, and therefore have a tool to combat all the disgusting "adult behaviour" at these areas -- which is really more about juvenile behaviour.
Imagine my surprise, however, when I get an IM from somebody named Lyden Marikh that he has moved into Ross and would like to buy my land in Ross, and that he is my new neighbour. At first I thought he had to be talking about Samoa, the neighbouring sim, because I couldn't see what land could possibly be for sale in Ross. I own the whole sim except for the Linden land on the two 4096s that make up the infohub, and Lilith Pendragon's 1536 m2 store, which she bought from Anshe back when I also bought from Anshe.
Oops. That's exactly what happened. Lilith was totally heedless and inconsiderate and put the land for sale on the open market without IMing me. I had only just IM'd her, as I'd been forced to do dozens of times, asking her to remove the griefing garbage from her land, which she had not put on autoreturn for 3 years that she was there. It was a regular annoyance with ugly newbie blocks, crashed boats, etc. but she had some "issue" with a no-show friend who had put out a vendor or something and couldn't fix the autoreturn. You would think, having just got that IM from me, she'd say "Oh, I'm not on SL much anymore, want to buy my land?"
Instead, Lyden swooped in, because he already has a "newbie helping" empire and is eager to expand. I don't have the empire-building aspirations of Lyden, which are pretty aggressive and nasty, even if accidently helpful or useful, or of others more beneficent like Carl, who is constantly expanding NCI. I have three hub areas I have worked for years: 1) Ross, where I actually develop the hub and own land nearby 2) Baileya, where I just happen to be near Hyles and therefore provide newbie housing and stuff to do but not tutorials and 3) Iris, where the SL Public Land Preserve, with the help of Clubside Granville and others, and again with Jessica doing the amazing build there, has an orientation area next to the Iris Temple, which is a landing area for newbies. I dont' have plans to expand newbie helping or my rentals; SL is too expensive, too hard, too constantly-changing, too harsh, the economy too tanking.
But because I would like to keep what I have going, I told Lyden, no, I didn't want to sell my land, that I needed it myself for prims. He then suggested we "work together". I was wary because I had absolutely no need to "work together" with someone moving in on 1536 of land on the waterfront and demanding that I sell passageway to him.
Next thing I know, I log on and I find a huge-ass build coming off this tiny 1536 steep waterfront parcel, which blocks the waterfront now. Boats can no longer pass if he won't move his huge bigfoot building, unless I remove the raft I placed right at the 128/128 point.
I had to put the raft there because people who type the name of the sim in to get there, ever since removal of the telehub, land in the water. I couldn't get the Lindens ever to change this, despite having conversations about the problem even with Philip. So I just put the raft there so people wouldn't get confused and land on something that gives them a notecard. Now to get boats past the aggressive invader Lyden Marikh's big-ass build, I'll have to figure out something else.
The build originally used giant megaprims, and what is more, glowing and bright and put up in the sky to get newbies to fly to them, completely ruining the view on 3 sims.
Basically, Lyden runs an aggressive "newbie-helping" empire called Second Living. The irony is that only a few weeks ago, I visited his build again in Hyles and found that he had a good orientation system and praised it even to Blue Linden to check out. It wasn't to my personal taste, focusing on Goth and punk imagery and clubs and such, but it was perfect for many people. I thought a particularly effective touch was a "photo store" that showed newbies how to put a photo on their avatar profile. The mall had a lot of freebies and the build was in good taste. Occasionally, people overload the sim there, and spill over to Baileya, but since I generally want an open public boardwalk in Baileya, I don't mind it. The occasionally newbie griefer is offset by the occasional newbie buyer.
But in Ross, Lyden was anything but tasteful or helpful. He kept telling me he'd "work with me" and get the build to fit better, and that we should "cooperate" -- but I didn't have any objective need for him whatsoever. He was clearly one of those vain types that thrives on helping newbies because it gives them an adrenalin rush of self-importance from being needed -- and making others dependent on him -- and I find that very rampant in SL and hard to counter. Such people are very aggressive about their role, and insist that only they help newbies properly with freebies, and anyone who tries to combine commerce with service to newbies is somehow a lesser human being. They're impossibly ideological. He soon began to demanding to know if I made money from this sim -- blah blah. Evil land baron and exploiter of newbies -- um, not. The sim barely breaks even.
I had a long wrangle with him, and refused to budge myself. I'm not selling, and not cooperating with someone I don't need who demonstrates his true intent by invading the sim to grab the newbie stream and putting up a big-ass build to get noticed. Had he merely put up a tasteful build that hewed to the land line and didn't destroy the view and been simply one more offering from the many offerings in the neighbourhood, i.e. movies and such, I would have been annoyed becaues Lilly didn't give me first dibs, but I would simply adjust.
But when I see someone who has deliberately come in to empire-build, who has bought land also from Anshe in Warmouth that Anshe refused to sell to NCI, when I see that he has aggressively put up the biggest-ass build he can muster with 351 prims, I ralize that this is someone you can't reason with.
Sure enough, he proceeded to "grief moar" as the kids say.
First, he put up a giant copy of the Lindens' eye-hand green logo. I AR'd that, but the Lindens don't care. For all I know, he is a Linden or a friend of a Linden. The logo has been there now for a week, large and life and twice as natural as a huge floor of a build, and LL does nothing.
Next, he put up a bot, taking up a precious avatar slot on this sim often overfull as people land on the infohub. I've never used bots myself just for that reason, and I myself move off the sim sometimes to nearby Refugio if it seems crowded. Someone coming into SL for the first time shouldn't get a message REGION FULL -- and no, the Lindens don't have a load balancer for this function because newbies just take a landmark randomly distributed on HI and go.
The bot's name was -- surprise, surprise -- Prokofy Neiro (new last name) and it promptly parked itself on the build, carrying a large Soviet flag, with a girl in her underwear dancing on it. Sigh. I AR'd it FWIW -- that will "go nowhere".
The bot keeps spamming me with requests to join its group.
Next, I was flying around trying to figure how to get around this build, when I realized the textures on it looked awfully familiar. Damn, now Lyden has had his builder steal by obvious Copybotting or Glintercepting the textures on the build I had placed there, by Eva Virgo, and no, it is not a texture for sale. It is on a limited edition prefab she made years ago and only sold a limited number of. She doesn't log on much these days so I filed an AR for texture theft -- it is so obviously blatant, exactly copied like Copybot or the texture exploit with the prim sides that is sometimes used inworld.
That AR "went nowhere" too.
I didn't ever seem to see any newbies there, but there was traffic on the parcel from that bot parked there of at least 1000. Maybe newbies would come. So I decided to make lemonade out of the lemons and put up a big billboard with my rental ads. I've never done that there, figuring it wasn't really needed to wreck the view, and newbies don't have money. As it happened, before Lyden came on the scene, I had already taken a shop that had been vacant because it's at the very edge and put my stuff in it for sale -- now I added more.
Did I mention that newbies do not have money? The newbies flowing through the hub for the first time by and large have no money. They are NOT the same people who shop and rent on this same sim, oddly enough, or at least, there is very little overlap. The people who come to rent a home or shop or hang out seem to come via search, or word of mouth or events. Some people who first landed at this sim seem to stay with it for life. They keep it as their "home point" or they just come back and visit because they like the build, so it's used by different and shifting populations of people.
But perhaps they have $1 or $5 for some stuff, who knows. We'll see.
Meanwhile, Lyden is working aggressively to expand his empire, and it's not clear how his build will end up, or what he will seek to do. I can go on ARing him -- the Lindens will do nothing. They hide their eyes from infohub problems.
The problems of Bear allowed to fester all that time, with Torley's "wife" as one of the developers there who ended up putting up a spite wall, could never be solved. It's a basic conundrum: how do you let residents who developed Linden-owned land also control it? Then you have created a special class of residents and given them powers over their fellows that no one else has.
Except, the Lindens just did that with Blake Sea. They have broken the blood/brain barrier, so they might as well solve other problems like the infohub infestations in the same way.
If I had ban powers, I couldn't ban the annoying regulars as I could on my own land -- I'd only be able to ban them for strict violation of the TOS -- and these are experts at flying below the radar. But I'd have some deterrent powers. I could get rid of people who persist in waving their dicks around because it's PG; I could eject maria30 on the days when she is particularly aggressive with her "follow-bear" scripted annoyances and such. Small steps, but it's all about broken windows and community policing.
GENERIC PROBLEMS OF THE INFOHUBS
I had a long talk with Blue Linden about the generic problems of these hubs, which boils down to this:
o The newbie stream coming to them isn't adequately informed, and arrive confused; they don't understand why they are there, how they can get back, and why their home is set there -- not enough info is given them in the card at Help Island.
o The residents developing and volunteering at the hubs have no control over the land, they can't plant, or reset the landing point when it gets clogged with bots, or eject the bots, or eject griefers. They are stuck constantly having to call Lindens, who sometimes simply refuse to perform any of these tasks -- and small wonder. No Linden likes being asked to reset a sim twice a day.
o The Lindens refuse to deal with the infestation problem of the regulars, the people who hang up and fill up the avatar slots. They refuse to use "disturbing the peace" to break up these gangs who keep newbies from landing, by taking up scarce spots on the server, which on the mainland can only hold 40, and who once there, heckle the newbies more often than help them; this is particularly gross at the welcome areas, which are basically abandoned now by Lindens and mentors and have turned into wilding zones
PROPOSALS TO FIX INFOHUBS
Since Blue is taken off NUE, I wrote the following proposals to Jack Linden to try to fix these chronic and generic problems:
o Create a resident/Linden group a la Blake Sea for Resident Developed Infohubs and enable the residents to have the same powers that MarkTwain White has to remove non-group prims and eject avatars who are violating the TOS -- end of story. This is especially important for those attempting to run classes or events on the hubs.
o Rewrite the cards at Help Island to make them more clear (I provided a sample solution) to frame the narrative of what people are doing when they leave HI and land at a random hub -- this has to be redone, for sure, and is the chief reason for a huge amount of loss and failure to retain. Imagine, changing a few sentences, smartening up just a little, and you can end loss -- yet the Lindens have refused to do this for years.
o Fix the landmark delivery script to become a serializing rather than randomizing script -- this requires overcoming immense ideological tekkie certitude of course, but it's wrongheaded. The sample of hubs -- some 60 perhaps -- isn't big enough to have a randomizer be pragmatic. Each hour it is operating, 24/7, it randomly selects from the available landmarks -- but that means it can hit 10 in a row, or never hit certain ones at all, and randomly dumps newbies on only one of the sims, over and over, despite existing loads, and thenb underloads the rest -- creating load disbalance. A serializer methodically delivering to the entire list will load balance better -- and please stop obessing about scale, because you are nowhere near the numbers you have to worry about with scaling a serializer, and at the numbers where a randomizer might in fact be more mathematically and practically sound. It is not now. Change it, unless you have a better way to fix load disbalance, which you don't.
And I could add:
o Stop trying to mix the Mentors into this equation -- they are irrelevant. They did not develop the sims; they did not accept this offer in lieu of telehub buyouts; they are only in the way, often dragging newbies to their clubs or stores or even participating in the griefing. Solve the problem of the Mentors somewhere else. No one wants or needs them. Let them go to Linden-owned Welcome Areas and practice their arts there, rather than leaving these as wilding zones.
WHAT DO DO ABOUT THE PROBLEMS OF HUBS
Now comes the thornier problem. What to do about these sims that are only partly covered with resident-owned infohubs? So that competing groups of residents scramble to try to gain access to the area with the newbie stream?
Here, I can suggest the following:
o Make them all PG, and require that the entire sims where they are located become PG. Every single new-user experience in SL must be mandated to be PG, so that the adult palaver and dick-waving crap can be stopped on that grounds alone. That will solve the problem of Leandros' big ugly sex club, but here, she will have to be compensated. She bought land there in good faith as the land was M. I don't think sex businesses in SL should be granted a ringside seat at the newbie stream. Of course, much of the newbie stream is interested in sex, but let them find it through advertising, search, word-of-mouth, rather than having it shoved in their face -- a still-large proportion of newcomers do NOT want sex pushed in their faces, even if a certain percentage of them will chose sexual activity down the line of more tasteful types.
o Do not allow the use of bots that take up resources and avatar spaces on the resident owned land near the infohub. Don't allow the bots *period*, and force those who poorly script their bots and don't enable them to relog and come back when booted from a sim, and instead land at the nearest infohub, to manage their bots or have their main accounts banned.
o Don't allow the use of megaprims to make spite walls and giant advertising
These three things can't completely solve the problems of Bear and Ross and others, but they can mitigate them.
'COMMUNITY GATEWAYS'
Are the Lindens going to do any of these things? I imagine they will not, knowing the Lindens the last 4 years. They hate helping residents accomplish things like this if it involves going against their techolibertarian principles. They are fine with having Desmond Shang or Big Pond have a newbie helping sim on a private island if it helps retain customers, that they can then later clip for tier or the Xstreetsl.com commission on content sales.
But for the greater unwashed coming into SL, the really uneducated and difficult-to-teach newbie, the Lindens are content to allow to fend for themselves in infohubs and welcome areas in the hopes that the shooters and griefers move on to other games, where they won't strain the governance systems.
The Lindens are now changing the whole configuration of the NUE, based on the Big Spaceship thing, and experience with the REG APIs. Here's what I've found out talking to several Lindens about this plan this week:
They will be adding 10 new spaces of "Community Gateways" as they are calling, which include lucky charmers like Desmond Shang, who has been assisted by Carl Metropolitan to make a newbie center in Oxbridge Caledon which will now get the newbie sign-up stream. Others will be language sims like the Japanese Melting Dots or country communities like Big Pond already in the previous sign-up system.
To qualify for becoming a "Community Gateway," you have to pass a very stiff list of criteria -- have staff available to serve newbies 24/7, prove that your community has grown in the last 9 months, have no disciplinary actions or DMCA notices on your record, own a certain number of sims if you are a business, have regular events, etc. etc.
Not a single one of the Resident Developed Infohubs would qualify for this "Community Gateway" program even though they each have developed a kind of organic community around them. Possibly one or two of them *might* qualify if these were given the opportunity to step up, or if some of the requirements were somewhat relaxed.
For example, how can a community that has to operate on Linden land show that it has "grown"? Only the Lindens can show that they have grown the signups -- or not. The communities surrounding the hubs in some cases may have grown or not -- but ultimately, they are at the mercy of Linden-owned land, where they can't control the experience -- not at the origin of the pipeline, with the badly scripted and badly written instructions at Help Island, nor at the end of the pipeline, where they cannot eject naked dick-wavers, shooters, or heckling "regulars".
It's really sad to think of all the hard work that I, Jessica, Ordinal and many others have put into this hub (volunteers like Lee Ponzu who are usually helpful) being run into the ground, with all the effort and time and money lost if the end result is that the hub is griefed even more, and has to struggle with interlopers bent on creating empires like Lyden (people who are sincere about helping newbies for their own sake don't need to steal the Lindens' logo, their neighbours' textures, or confiscate scarce avatar slots with grief-bots that harass the infohub developer, now, do they?).
OPTIONS TO FIX THE HUB PROBLEMS:
But there really are only three options here:
1. The Lindens do nothing, and let it fester. We continue to struggle to cope, with less newbies, which may shake loose some of the griefers who seek attention, and the empire builders, who want to grab the flow, but we'll also be getting the worst of the newbies -- those who couldn't figure out how to pick Caledon or Big Pond or Melting Dots. Yet we will be the worst equipped to help them without ban tools and 24/7 paid staff. Resident disputes over scarce commodities like proximity to a newbie stream do not improve with Linden neglect; they worsen. There are no ways to fix them except waiting them out.
2. The Lindens completely remove the newbie stream from the resident-made infohubs, which will shake loose the griefers and regulars and opportunists who seek attention. They could consider selling the land to the residents who developed them, or rotating them through Showcase as a Linden site. If sold back to residents, then they can sink or swim on their own, without a state-supplied newbie stream, and if they are really ambitious, they can apply to the CG and meet its criteria and become mainland CGs -- or not, hoping to be put in Showcase or buying ads.
3. The Lindens step up and make a group of all the resident infohub developers, empower us more, and add us to the CG system. The newbie stream is less, but at least it is one that newbies chose -- perhaps the Lindens can also wire up the HI entry better. I firmly believe there have to be billboards with pictures and the portal script, not just notecards and landmarks that people don't read or understand. With greater control of the hubs (and they could think of how to handle the welcome areas in the same manner, possibly with mentors), with the PG status and the ban on bots on those sims, we might be able to significantly improve the NUE. The Lindens can test this with metrics for 90 days and see if it works. but they'd have to be willing to relax some of the harshly-demanding CG criteria.
Of course, if the Lindens opt for 1) or 2), they will have screwed over the 14 resident developers -- but some of these developers have other FIC gigs like Kim Anubis or have moved on (the Hobos are now in Rezzable's OpenSim) or don't log on anymore (Chip at e(moticons)). If the Lindens called a meeting of all us, they might get half of the hub developers to show up, and might not get them to agree -- I'm going to try contacting them all myself now.
In the scheme of things, given the Lindens' big NUE program involving M's cronies from BSS and involving favourites like Desmond who produce tier and income in large amounts, trying to help the scrappy mainlanders with the old unwanted telehub areas isn't going to be a priority. The Lindens will opt for 1 or 2 --likely 1 will be what they do because they always resort to inertia if there is a hard decision to make.
The thought of having to deal with 2) -- and suddenly have to buy from the Lindens some 10,000 meters and pay tier in order to keep my dream -- well, I've had to do that so many times before. I will certainly do it just this one more time to save the build and labour. But I'd have to sell something else, and probably at a loss. And not for the first time.
THE COLD TRUTHS
I understand the cold truths here. The Lindens do not need or want us unless we can help them make lots of money. They never consulted any of us once during this entire process of revamping the NUE -- even though we, more than Mentors or Lindens combined, probably understand more than anyone else in Second Life about what newbies arriving actually do all day and what works to teach them. Oh, well.
In fact, with this program to get the Linden-sponsored newbie stream thrown their way, Desmond and Carl *are* eaten by LL, even though I didn't think they could be. If they don't "perform," the Lindens will either tell them to change content, practices, or terms, or take the stream away -- and all their development work will go to waste (like mine just did, eh?). It's harsh social Darwinism, and the rules aren't spelled out in advance for "evolving" so you can't make the best choices. Desmond is good at tacking with the winds of change at the Lab; Carl will adjust. Perhaps they will show the Lindens how to retain better and be eaten more by the Lindens.
Perhaps the Lindens, specifically Robin Linden, who was in the negotiations with the land barons constantly in 2005, might remember what the Lab promised then, which is that we could develop these hubs if we didn't take their buy-back offer for telehub mall land. We took the less-lucrative option and spent money to fix them up.
The reality is, however, except for me and possibly one or two others who in fact later moved on, most of the people who went on to develop these hubs are NOT the land barons that Robin negotiated with. They are long, long gone -- to private islands and IMVU (Anshe); out of SL completely (BLue Burke); to OpenSim -- wherever.
Most of the resident developers aren't land barons -- they are oldbie or midbie FIC designers who wanted to have some Linden land to implement their ideas on, and so responded to the Lindens' offer on the forums back in the day -- because the overwhelming majority of barons were not interested in developing something that they saw as a total time and money suck with no profit value.
Out of the 45 or so telehubs, only 14 were ever resident-developed later, and the rest were sold on the auctions or left fallow, only recently to fill up with Mole content from LPDW.
Kim Anubis who designed Hyles had no land there; she just grabbed the idea to add to her resume and showcase her design work for her consulting for "solutions providers". Lewis Nerd had no land as a land baron operating a mall; he grabbed the project also to implement his ideas and provide a free showcase to his consulting business Pocket Protector, Inc. Neither of them provide newbie greeting services even informally as we do in Ross.
Others who man these hubs and spend hours making content and helping newbies are oldbie veteran SLers who just love what they do. Like Osprey Therein -- who just scripted and produced the moth lanterns again for us in Iris -- a sweetheart. She is running Ambat. Or Orhalla Zander and the Hobos, who are still at Caletta with enormous amounts of content that is used all over SL. Or as in Violet, that at least at one time had the attention of Barnes and Ingrid who didn't need a showcase for their work as they already had plenty of others.
Isabel is developed by the erstwhile Shelter staff, even if Travis is unable to be in SL that much, the work continues. Bear and a few others have had the attention of other builders who may be less involved in SL than they once were -- it's hard to know if they could ever deal with this stiff criteria to become a CG.
EVOLUTION...AND CIVILIZATION
Someone is sure to come along, it might be the Good Burgher Desmond, and say "evolve! embrace the inevitable! Change is good!" People love it when they can arrange evolution so that *you* get to be "creatively destroyed" in Schlumberger's "business cycle" but they get to "creatively innovate" and get spared destruction.
We're in an artificial -- not organically evolving -- situation where ultimately Linden Lab gets to decide what is best for itself and the mass of users as they understand them to their benefit. There will be someone to come along any minute and tell us that it's a company, not a world, not a government, and it does what it wants, and if you are unhappy, go to another world or spend more time at RL pursuits.
So, nu, I say. Go ahead and "creatively destroy". Builds can be copied and put elsewhere. People can regroup. "Evolution" can be countered -- if not by revolution, by something human that has always been older and stronger: civilization.
Good article, Prok. If there's a meeting of the old hub builders, I'll be there.
Lyden Marikh has been a problem at the Hyles hub, too, but he's not nearly as frustrating as my inability to update or even repair content (like plants that mysteriously moved on their own) without having to nag Torley for help.
I already explained last time this topic came up that I volunteered to work on the hub near my home, but LL shut that one down and asked me if I'd help out in Hyles instead. But you can go on characterizing me as a lean, mean FIC business machine if you like . . . you polish my resume more than I do.
Anyway, I agree that it's time to update the hubs, with more organized planning this time around.
Posted by: Kimberly Rufer-Bach | 01/28/2009 at 04:32 PM
Prok, I absolutely think you and others should try for having a gateway; I think you would do a great job. But why not at Ravenglass itself? Fighting for sufficient control of an infohub sounds like a losing battle.
>>In fact, with this program to get the Linden-sponsored newbie stream thrown their way, Desmond and Carl *are* eaten by LL, even though I didn't think they could be.
I just have to respond, because you can't pass up such a good setup line:
http://www.moo.com/is/r/333/62a62c91-29e9-408b-bbc6-0811257c8f62.jpeg
Posted by: Desmond Shang | 01/29/2009 at 09:36 AM