I guess I'll be missing the town hall -- except it's not even being called that. It's sad that Philip can't simply have a "first come, first served" attitude toward this event, and pass around relay radios to have it play on other sims, as they used to do. Instead, it's a lottery, which I suppose is hyper "fair," but it just takes the fun out of it, because then you just don't want to bother -- I've never won a single Linden lottery in five years, of all sorts. To be sure, you can watch it on Treet TV -- well, whatever, I 'll watch it later.
And ugh, all the posturing and preening going around to fandance before Philip. For that reason alone one would want to give it a pass.
Bring me my barf bag -- all the smarminess. For example, take a look at Crap Mariner, first implying in true fanboyz fashion (I guess he's a fanboy at heart) that people who are "negative" shouldn't get heeded and only "positive and constructive" suggestions should be collated.
Then he over-praises Snicker Doodles list of rants about Xstreet -- and in fact misstates what she is doing, which is in fact protesting and expressing a decided negative reaction to a chronic, deepset problem of Second Life -- which is the FIC. And that's ok!
I'm really tired of people stamping on legitimate dissent -- which has to be persistent, stubborn, and negative in RL as in SL -- and implying it is illegitimate, even "crazy" and "chaff".
Next thing we'll be hearing that we're feebs and choads.
That is, Crap may now be viewing everything through such a scrim these days of pro-geekitude that he may not realize that essentially, she is making a deepseated and negative complaint, and thinks she's just listing "positive constructive points" like all the good little geekies in the office hour or JIRA or forums or town hall are supopsed to do, jammed into whatever social-engineering template the Lindens find useful.
Yet like me -- exactly like me, although she wouldn't make the analogy, either -- she's getting at the fundamental problems of Second Life:
o the Lindens do not care about what their mass of customers want -- what Ann Otoole calls "customer requirements" -- they just don't.
o they want to do what they want to do, and are even insular and sullen about it with a vast sense of entitlement and victimhood
o the Lindens always pick their favourites from among residents, i.e. large merchants of things they like, or certain landlords, or certain public figures, and they privilege them, sometimes in outrageous ways, and are belligerently defensive of doing this.
And...you think people like that are going to change? In any way except by enormous force?
Snickers basically lays that out how messed up the SL Marketplace plans are, even dropping the freebies roadmap. To me, it looks like this: Pink (who is gone) and Collossus Linden (who is still here) basically said snottily "We need to drag the merchants into the 21st century and have them move to a website like ebay and have storefronts like we think they should have, get rid of their tacky low-class freebies and loss leaders and Myspacey fonts and inexpedient different sized pictures, and make this site look modern and slick and sell more in spite of these tacky people."
But, if anything, I'd say back to them, we need to drag these Lindens into the 21st century so they drop these 20th century web ideas like "ebay" and realize that we're more revolutionary here with variety, individualism, and connections to inworld stores and options like updatable products that aren't possible on ebay.
Snickers moans how the Lindens picked out a few big merchants and let them dictate what the freebies policy should be, which was a combination of jealous spleen over anyone competing with them (they never loose their insecurity, these prim divas) and just a geeky obsession about tidying up what they (wrongly) see as cluttered data bases. Some of the big merchants are geeks themselves, so they fit with the Lindens culturally; those that aren't originally geeks begin to imbibe some of the same culture through the platform.
What Snickers is saying is not fixable without tremendous changes -- stopping the arrogant attitude, redirecting the motivation for the software (not 'building our dream" but "serving our customers," and stopping the favouritism). Any or all of these three things will be very, very hard for the Lindens to change, as they are deeply ingrained in their culture. People complaining about the way they are, aren't the negative, whiney ones. They're reporting on a very intractable, savagely vicious situation with people that will claw you to death rather than change, that's how much they believe they are right -- it's a cult.
And yet Crap, being a little smarmy suck-up these days for reasons that remain completely opaque to me, styles Snickers narrative -- no different than mine or 1,000 others on the forums -- as somehow special and "constructive". Baloney. It exposes the deep, deep problems with the Lindens -- and the "constructive" proposals are only bandaids that would mask those deep problems -- because it's not about photo aspects.
If the Lindens were different -- not arrogant, not insular, not elitist, etc. -- they would say, OMG, we didn't realize how important the photos and bbcode issue was to you. What other system could we buy or code here? Do we really need to standardize it this way? What's so hard about having it the other way? etc.
(What the hell is always the issue with the bbcode anyway? Is it a security issue? They were this adamant about the forums ever putting back bbcode as well. I had to wonder what the big fucking deal was, as forums with that code operate all over the place seemingly without the security problems LL says. What am I missing here?)
Coming back to what Crap was smarming about -- there's this notion that there's this impossible list of proposals and ideas and complaints that Philip couldn't possibly get through. Oh, bullshit. There's like...387. That's about the number of people who have emailed or blogged or written on the forums. Not like it's thousands. And these are easy to skim through, and they batch in themes -- broken search is a big one.
But not a word has been said about the broken search. No explanations. No apologies for breaking certain key words terribly. Nothing. Silence of the Lambs.
And that's just what exasperates me about Philip -- and why I keep my distance these days. There was a time when I would enthusiastically write to him with ideas and suggestions and criticism, and he would answer about one out of every 50 times lol. But then I stopped. Because I found that if you said something he didn't like or thought was "too negative" or whatever -- he just tuned you out. Literally shut you out. I suppose "great geniuses" get a certain amount of work done by just tuning out all the negativity and criticism and just doing their thing. I know *I'm* that way : )
So -- whatever. You do get tired and you do go away soon enough. I even find writing an open letter a chore -- were it not for a sense of civic duty -- certain things just have to be said, over and over again:
o the Lindens vandalized search. Deliberately. Their attitude is fucking outrageous. It needs to stop. Make it stop, admit you were wrong, and start over. Take the people whose attitudes remain on the victim/arrogance meter OFF the job (Sea Linden).
o the Lindens are not doing what many customers want on the SL Marketplace. Yes, we realize they no longer view it as a resident marketplace, but view it as "theirs" which is why they are breaking it, being peremptory and arrogant and filling it with ads for themselves. But even here, they could switch course and put some things back.
o the Lindens' vision for 7 years is that they only want to work with the FIC. Their favourites. The powerful and politically correct. OK, well, then if their business model is to go on working with elites and shitting on the masses, then I guess people can either be masochists or leave -- but maybe with the ecnomy doing badly and the sign-ups flat-lining they could change. This would mean changing an attitude about so many things -- advertising in sign-up areas, building an SL for what's actually on sale at Best Buy as lower end computers, etc.
Here's Mr. Know-it-all shining on with the old brisk and knowier-than-though geekitude:
The fewer staffers there are, the more valuable their time is. Would
you rather they waste that time on being their own secretary and
filters, or someone dedicated to that and sorting the wheat and the
chaff for them so that time is spent on projects and solutions?
One two three... show of hands here... five six... yeah, looks like
people really want a focus on projects and solutions instead of
glorified inefficient punching-bags too confused to code and fix issues,
right?
See, I think my hunch is write -- that Crap essentially identifies with the Lindens *as a tribe* and as a class of geeks, and he is overprotective of them. He implies that Lindens become "punching bags" if everyone yells at them at once -- except, given their arrogance, insularity, and absolutely astounding unwillingness to listen to what everybody is saying for six months about broken search, they need more punching, not less, and there is no fucking way you can "constructivize" the "fix the broken search, fuckfaces".
Strangely, Ann Otoole keeps saying the search is getting better and it works, while admitting it is badly and even deliberatley broken on certain key words. I'm finding it hard to imagine how Lindens get up in the morning and hold meetings and pull up HTML pages and say, "How can we fuck over the rentals key word today?" -- yet in fact, that literally seems to be what they are doing.
It's very odd that neither Sea nor Philip nor any of the other major or minor Lindens have anything to say about why they are breaking search. And I can only conclude that it's because for them, Google is a religion, and they can't stop believing.
Crap also imagines -- crazily -- that "the competition" is picking through the cornucopia of complaints from users and figuring out what they'll do differently. Oh, stop it. There isn't any competition. What, Blue Mars? Huh? Twinity? You think Twinity execs are pawing through the SL forums (they'd have to make a fake alt with fake products to get into Commerce where some of the serious bitching is) and making lists of how they'll do it all differently? Please. They truly seem to be on their own wavelength doing their own thing -- and none of these other worlds seem to advertise by saying, "Tired of inworld search being broken? Come to our world". Um, I guess because the other worlds don't have any search at all? Nope, I don't hear the siren call of some *other* virtual world crying, "Unhappy at picture aspects on your marketplace where you sell your user-generated content connected to inworld stores? Give us a call"
Honestly, people are *freaks*. They have no perspective.
And Crap's fictional notion that Wallace Linden is culling through responses and packing them for the company executives to digest. Huh? Is he truly on drugs? Because Wallace's comms are outgoing, not incoming. He's there to "have a conversation" as in "all markets are conversations" and spout the product and steer people into tidy channels, not collate their complaints like an ombudsman.
In fact, I've often wished there was an ombudsman who was a Linden, or part of a Linden, or a panel of 2 Lindens and one resident rotating, or...something. As in RL, this ombudsman would be entitled to go to a prosecutor or a president and say, why are you doing this? What's this all about? Why have you done this bad thing? etc. And get answers.
But what really made me retch was this suck-up by Grace -- why are we not surprised? Comparing Philip to Indiana Jones, and even making a Photoshopped picture of Indiana Jones with Philip's face and talking about him fitting the big hat. Sigh.
I could write for an hour and explain what's vacuous and annoying and even detrimental about that post -- but figure it out for yourself.
I like the Indiana Jones movies, but this was just -- well. You know something? They're out of buttermilk in the store, so I can't first coat my stomach and then go back and look and write more about all the density of sickly sweet suck-up on her page. Like so many others, she is trying to be seen, fanning the peacock plumage, hoping to be noticed, saying a lot of nothing and trying to be "constructive".
I realized something. Neither Grace nor Crap try to make any living of any sort in this world. Whatever tips Grace picks up are merely chump change to her high RL salary. Crap may not have such a RL salary, but it's a good one, and for him -- as I suddenly see, tumblers clicking -- SL is just a hobby. He has no reason to REAAAAALY care if something is broken because there's no bottom line.
I'm little more than a hobbyist myself. But I'm enough of a go-getter trying to make a buck that I get the difference between the idle rich class in SL, going to art shows and Plurking about how evil Prok is and preening before Philip, and those desperate to pay tier with their stores sinking in search.
"We are bound by the laws of reality. We are customers of a software company. The End."
--Eric Rice
