This is how ostiabs, the boy heading up PetPlay and who runs BonnieBots views his "fireside chat" with the Lindens - as having finally "beat the boss" in a 10-year-game he has been, and arriving in "Room 102" which comes after Orwell's Room 101, of course. pic.twitter.com/binrTuGvkM
— You Know Where to Find Me🌻 (@Prokofy) January 26, 2023
Since the onset of the BonnieBots scandal (which I've covered here and here), the interesting question for me hasn't been "OMG mah privacy" -- that was shattered ages ago with the help of LL's own staff and favourite content creators on the LL forums when their darlings, unhappy with my criticism of their favouritism and the negative features of the world doxxed me and put up my RL info on the forums.
My privacy has always been in tatters because the classic Internet tech thug's way to silence critics is to expose them to threats and disgrace in RL. I'll never forget (as described in my book) how a former Linden who joined the Tor staff, unhappy of criticism of Tor (which I share heartily), hunted down and outed a pharmacist in New Jersey, sicced the mob on him and accused him falsely of "misogyny," and cost him his job.
I may not care or I'm resigned to repeated doxxing in lieu of a valid argument. But other people in SL deserve their privacy and care about it more -- and there is so much more at stake here than "avatar profile privacy". Bonniebots is about how one group of people were able to throw the Lindens, gain their encouragement and help in silencing critics, and prevail as they slurped up everyone's data to their own benefit. Bonniebots claims altruism; they "don't make money" from this exercise; they are only doing it "for fun" and to "solve a problem" in SL, namely, that people don't know where to go or what to do and leave, and retention sucks.
But who died and made them king?
Search is Broken and So is Advertising and This Doesn't Fix It
We who live and work in the world know that the Lindens would be better off fixing their long-broken search on the regular viewer, losing their religion about search issues, improving good advertising capacity, and removing their ideological hobbles about on-boarding newbies if they were really serious about helping people stay. They'd be better off enabling companies interested in newbie business and helping being able to place ads in welcome areas. We used to have this at telehubs! There is nothing evil or exploitative about advertising to newbies -- it helps everyone in the economy, mainly the newbie herself, as most merchants realize the newbie has no cash and doesn't "pay off". But now, instead of normal event billboards or advertising for clothing and bodies that could help newbies and returnees find their way, we have the big bot scrape in the hands of a few petplayers.
All you have to do is compare the results in a third-party viewer like Alchemy, still using the legacy search, to see nice, neat tables of 100 exact search results on a business name, to the kasha that is the SL viewer today, with too much space and too much irrelevancy. Years of battling this cultic obstinance on LL's part over search and other technical issues lets us know that their management theories don't work, whether "the Love Machine" (which doesn't reward competence); the "Big List of Things to Do" (which enables unappetizing chores to fall to the bottom and be left undone); "Scrum" (which creates false user stories without user input"; and "decentralization" (letting Lindens have total power over their patch of turf to the point of idiocy). New owners and investors haven't changed this dysfunctional dynamic.
"Content Creators Rule" as the Organizing Principle of SL
The other mantras that we thought were disqualified by the failed tenure of past CEO Mark King -- "content is king" or the moronic "the killer app is each other" are back again as if no one learned from history - failed ideas circulate posthumously because of high staff turnover. Those few with institutional memory are busy on Twitter touting their favourite resident businesses, spouting inanities, and revealing their insecurities instead of making the product work.
When people say "democracy is the worst form of governance except all the others," you can still have a debate like: "But there's Canada" or "but what about Germany" or contemplate, "oh, Singapore."
In the Metaverse, our world is really the only viable one, after the fiascos of Meta and others -- and the only one with significant history of rewarding content creators and grappling with governance. Even if others have far more massive populations, they still haven't "taken over RL" as Philip Rosedale once said virtual worlds would 20 years ago. He said the skyscrapers in New York City would grow empty, and the cities would turn into unpopulated caverns, because no one would need to be in them anymore. That a pandemic achieved that goal along with newly-empowered "work from home" demands without any Metaverse is something I haven't seen him acknowledge.
Even so, I still believe in Philip's dream -- likely you do, too -- and I still live in hope that some day, the Lindens will find their ass with both hands and lurch the train forward to glory. They may, like Brezhnev in the old Soviet joke, take the tracks out from behind them to put in ahead, but ok, I'm on board.
Meanwhile, Bonniebots is not that train and the Lindens need to get off it tout de suite.
The arrogant premise of Bonniebots is "we know best" and we will privilege content creators uber alles -- we will show them on a leaderboard with their huge revenues (by SL standards); we will show the venues made by those with the most compelling content. The site then drives the experience from the privilege of content creators, getting avatars to stick to them and make sales, rather than driving it from user perspective, and the resident "looking for people and things to do" and helping him with empathy.
It really is a different dynamic as an organizing principle of a virtual world and I think this explains a lot the constant ruptures and dysfunctions in SL. The platform providers persist in their illusion that they need as their privileged partners the content creation class, since they themselves won't make much content, and they can't afford to look at the myriad and contradictory user demands.
Except when they finally do -- it took four years to get the Lindens to police ad farming and more than 10 years to get them to bless suburbia and picket fences, but we did it.
I figure that if Bonniebots -- like libsl "reverse engineers in their day who forced LL to open the viewer and later unleashed Copybot on the world -- have been busy since August 2022 by their own admission, that means they had Linden helpers or at least silent partners on the grid, given their ambitions. The unseemly embrace of these gangsters to the point of shutting down now six threads with critics yelping HAS to be about something else than the usual explanation of Linden behaviour: "they never met a script they didn't like."
Patch Linden Explainer is a Placeholder
That Patch Linden can turn in an "explainer" for the thread censorship only mentioning avatar privacy and "what you write on your profile, which is on you" and never touch all the other serious problems with BB -- and the fact that other Lindens like the Concierge team can only silently point to Patch's edict -- lets us know that there is something else going on here behind the scenes. We often assume that the Tigger-like personas, as in TSO, squeezed between the devs and the users, who are sent out for "messaging" are also decision-makers. They aren't necessarily.
It's not Patch, who, is ancient and versed in the grid since the dawn of time, who is playing catch-up on the news. Patch himself ran a successful men's clothing store (we're told) back in the early days -- although he never divulges its name so that we can see who his friendship circle is and figure out why certain people get unimaginable perks like having their wedding in the new community center. In another era, had BB been deployed, his store's revenue would have been exposed on that awful "Market" list as on Bonniebots. As it was, his proximity avatars were discovered and displayed on the short-lived SL Watch which the Lindens killed off dead back in the day. So what the hell gives here?
Who Are These Guys?
Whenever an entity like Bonniebots bursts on the scene and the avatars are either too new and are alts or have 10+ years behind them but have never been heard of previously (Feorie, call your office) -- there's a desperate hunt to figure "where were they" and "who do they know" and "what do they know," and the hunt is on to find them in compromising position with Lindens. There's at least one item circulating that looks freakily like a round of Linden/resident PetPlay, but that can't be -- it wouldn't be public if that were true.
The fact is, the Lindens unabashedly make partnerships with residents they like, for any reason or no reason, because they feel they are running a business, not a world, and fuck you. I'm not a social Darwinist; I'm a starry-eyed liberal idealist. I still think Silicon Valley's predatory nature can be regulated. But I recognize the reality of virtuality.
Skyler Pancake, who is styled as the spokesperson for the team, reveals her group's motive in her statement quoted on LL scribe Hamlet Au's blog. If you don't know the reasons for my animus to SHamlet, as I call his Twitter handle @SLHamlet, you can catch you up at the end of this previous blog and at the end of this one. You don't have to have any history with him to grasp what a terrible job he has done reporting out this controversy -- or rather, what a great PR job he has turned in for the Lab and their chosen ones -- once again.
There's a certain heedless witlessness and disingenuousness here about claiming not to know who the top designers are, and then needed BB to go and purchase them.
But the idea that revealing what hard-working creatives make in the Metaverse gig economy is going to bring in other creators and grow SL is an absurdity. What are they smoking? Or rather, what small pond are they paddling in?
Earning US $1400 per month -- like one top artist on the list selling bits -- amounts to poverty wages; in New York City, considered by some to be "the media capital of the world," $13,788 for one person per year is the poverty level and and $58,450 is still low income entitling people to benefits. As a long-time member of the poor folks living in HUD housing and working in the gig economy as a translator and news writer, I can tell you a lot about this if you'd listen. I can only hope the top merchants of SL have some side hustles, or that THIS is their side hustle and they have a real job somewhere, or "come from money" -- which is the case with some but certainly far from all SL creators.
Even allowing for the inaccuracy of the "What Customers Are Buying" scrape -- the data displayed can't possibly be "all sales" given the timing of it. More importantly, it reflects the Marketplace only. For some merchants, way more sales are made at merchants' events like Access or equal10 or Tres Chic -- not to mention their stores, especially during weekend sales. Does that mean in fact we can expect these poverty-wage-slaves make $2800 or $4200? Even if a few do, scroll down the list -- there aren't that many of them. There are only so many niches to make bank in SL when the concurrency is seldom at even 50,000 and more commonly at 30,000.
Some of these merchants will be along soon to explain the breakdown, but I can't believe the MP is half of the revenue -- the MP is where LL takes out 10%, and many people, like me, go inworld to buy a product after searching on the MP -- much the way we use Amazon to browse and then head off to Home Depot in RL -- not only to see what we're buying, but to give the creator the 10%. But if Skyler's point holds, she's also assuming those creatives out there now getting magnetized to SL figured all this out, and realized the "$1400" was only "the tip of the iceberg". What Colour is Your Parachute!!!
The Old Days of Linden Economic Transparency
Back at the dawn of SL when LL was young, they would display their economic data -- you could hear Jeska's excitement at a community roundtable when she released the first round of this information. If you dredge up some old web site pages from archive.org, you could see how they would show the total amount of dollars spent inworld (they have that information! Bonniebots does not!), broken up by amounts -- you could see that most people did not spend more than US $25 per month and many less or even not at all. You could see the amount of dollars merchants made aggregated by category -- those that made above US $2000 or US $5000 were 500 or less. The concurrency was lower -- but not by much. The Lindens stopped publishing this data as it was no longer on the upswing and became unflattering -- it showed that the number of premium accounts, which once reached 100,000, were plummeting.
Today, Bonniebots shows only 28,000 premiums and 6,000 Premium Plus accounts for the concurrency (an important caveat which isn't explained properly) and likely it isn't triple that and is still less than 100,000.
Leave aside a discussion about faulty tools or lag or poor search (or as I always add, lack of good advertising capacity and a plethora of bad advertising), there's still the question of why adding another, say 250 or even 500 people willing to work 18 hour days doing their own customer service (*waves from the Mainland wilds of Ravenglass Rentals!*) because it's "fun" or at least "interesting" will "improve retention".
That's not how you improve retention, although I realize the Lindens and their fan base have a very hard time letting go of this belief.
Who's Not on the Leaderboard?
PS What's missing from the Merchants list is of course land dealers. Tyche Shepherd's grid survey -- done with far more skill and tact -- always showed the largest island and group land holders so that you had a rough idea of the top real estate companies. If you had all different names for your groups because you need lots of them since land groups load poorly, you might not show up. All those companies (not me) make significantly more than creatives -- but not a lot more. I always wince when YouTube serves me up the SL video of the couple bragging how they quit their bank jobs and went into virtual land and made $2000 a month. That didn't last because it can't; the world is not big enough and the vacancy rate and costs are too great. They're long gone with only one of them still visible in world with a profile merely describing his clubs.
I remember how shocked I was when I found top merchants who hadn't put themselves in search/places and didn't seem to know the first thing about store layout; even more shocked when I befriended some top designers in top events who had never cashed out their Lindens or learned how best to do this -- Scarlet Creative does posts and tutorials on this issue precisely because she found the same vast ignorance. Both the beauty and the bane of SL is that it is for amateurs; real investors wouldn't invest in land pixels; real creatives go to other platforms where they are paid properly; they probably do better even on Shutterstock.
Most of the merchants on Bonniebots list don't want their names there not because they fear hatred of the rich -- always incited in SL and always right at the surface ready to be wielded -- or even because their fear the IRS coming for them (there's have to be proof they cashed out Lindens after tier for that) -- but because it shows them to be small potatoes.
It's exciting that someone selling virtual vaginas can make US $1400 per month (a million something Lindens), but...every month? What's your tier? What do you pay staff? And are you going to fold next month due to the competition? A top mesh body designer, Slink, who ruled the world, is now no more. Even the great Anshe Chung no longer logs in, and her empire appears to have been split up into franchises to people who bought the right to use the last name "Chung," which was a block of avatars she purchased back in the day.
All you have to do is follow the vicissitudes and antics of Walton Wainwright, who describes himself as a "serial weeper" with a "coat full of owls" (and became one of my enemies last year) to see how hard the life of a creative is; how many emotional difficulties and insecurities they suffer; how their beloved fans become a weight around their necks -- and more. And Contraption isn't even on Bonniebots' list. PS WW seems to have a day job, so at least he isn't starving.
And I suggest you don't quit that day job, either. I never have!
Find Places and Make Friends!
Now let's consider the ostensible mission of BB - to "find places" which helps avatars at loose ends "make friends" or more likely "have sex" or find "Things to Do". Early on, BB trashed the Destinations list, which I would have thought would have turned the Lindens against them. But the Destinations Lindens aren't the same as the Lindens who embraced this, I guess.
They're wrong. I have my quibbles with Destinations and the splash screen (why are they still showing Bryn Oh's Lobby Cam months after it opened) but generally it's quite good. It shows "what's hot" where avatars actually are present, but not strictly raunchy adult-themed venues -- so it's K9 and so on; right now it's Muddy's Music Cafe and Freebie Galaxy. There are always spectacular art and romance and exploration sims included which actually are all of high quality and really do attract people and cause them to "stick" -- their photos on Flickr and Twitter and on their feeds prove that, as does the land traffic
Meanwhile, Bonniebots, even if it tracks the delta of visitors to shake loose the bots and the AFKers, pitches you into awful venues like "FinPlay" -- which is a brand of BDSM where usually a domme witholds money from a male sub to humiliate him -- as well as "Skilled Gaming" which is a legal form of gambling, and various tawdry adult clubs. If there is an M-rated club, it's one of those advertising pits where everyone is AFK except the greeter and where there really isn't any socializing as you are in a line dance perusing profiles and hoping desperately someone might talk to you.
Events that only have 15 people or even 5 are so much better and soul-satisfying, as we all know, if there are people live and present, playing and listening to live music; having a discussion; doing a show-and-tell of things they have made; cheering on a snail race or shopping.
Bonniebots doesn't reveal which merchant events are actually succeeding because you can't get to the shopping, past all their sordid adult avatar traps. Events are all hurting, as we know because we can jump into them now without any cam sim on the first day. The thumb is on the scales with Bonniebots as it is with every SL venture.
Watch the LindEx
The LindeX shows the Linden to have devalued to 244 for weeks on end now in the near year and that has got to be causing some headaches for Lindens -- who periodically have to gag Supply Linden and get Demand Linden to siphon off some Lindens.
For some reason a reader found an old blog of mine I can see in the hits which was published in 2016 after a LindEx crash when US $1.3 million was trying to get out the door. Yesterday, $1.29 was trying to get out the door; now it's US $1.34 million on a Monday, always the worst day f0r cashouts (and that's using the figure of 4 to calculate Linden/dollar equivalence which is actually too generous nowadays).
This is my conviction: our world is dying. I don't say this lightly. I don't recall ever saying it all this time. I am never one to cry panic about SL and flounce out in a drama rage to Open Sim or VRChat. I've been here for the duration, and as with the Sims Online, I'll stay until the big GAME OVER sign appears in the sky, as it did with the Sims, or unless I die, which likely will come sooner. But there are many signs of death or at least morbidity -- search broken for two years, scenes not rezzing, content missing from inventory, people leaving, stores closing, Bellisseria vacancy. All things on the Internet die; being pixels and being electronic doesn't save them. We've all had to go through many sites and apps. Remember "Zoom: Save Your Photos for Life" where we stored our TSO albums? Too bad that company didn't save their name to sell to video conferencing company 20 years down the line during a pandemic.
Bellisseria Vacancy
No one has discussed the "cheery picture" created of Bellisseria by this pernicious BB machine, making it seem as if "even unpopular areas", like Fantasseria, the elf-town, have tolerable vacancy. If you are in Mainland rentals, you know that 80% occupancy is already near death and you will have to close an area soon as you can't make tier. I have had to do this endlessly, now in my 19th year -- I am lucky to have become less sentimental about land over the years. I just closed another B&B last night.
Go know, who knew, Fantasseria is a bust. A clue in history that might have prevented this misstep was to notice how all the big Elf Clans left SL over the years and dwindled. The little people are driven away by iron, which is inherently in the Internet. But put in enough uglies and GTFOs and bad policies, they leave. I don't know where they go. I still know some of them. But the soccer moms, even those with husbands who have elf ears and the names of criminals, really don't like big mushrooms and giant rabbits and glowy stuff that much. I still keep the Embassy of Ross in Fantasseria and am unlikely to close it but lately, I've been surprised at how I let go alts whose lunch money of $500 a week I can shake down -- they're another mouth to feed.
The dirty little secret of Bellisseria is that the occupancy doesn't mean anything but the emptiness means there aren't content sales, tips, exploring, activity, you know, stuff. Linden Homes are like my cross country skis. I bought them -- used -- hoping I would finally learn to ski on them like the big boys. I never did. They sat in the garage as a testimony to my potential -- that some day, that "what if" of glissading across the Upstate snows in the woods. Then they got sold for a fraction of their cost at a yard sale when my parents moved. And that's Second Life. People get homes and don't log in; they leave them there like I leave my Instagram account, untouched. They may have annualized their account; they don't keep it.
Then there's all those industry specials the Lindens handed out in 2007 -- 512s for IBM execs. Waves to a Facebook pal who left his glowing green prim out on his giveaway lawn for the last 15 years.
I'm not going to burn the time on figuring out what BB is really saying about Bellisseria, and whether the persistent rumour, even quoting Lindens, is true, that Bellisseria is a "loss leader" is in fact borne out by BB. Someone might want to bother with this Tyche Shepherd is in a position to analyze this, as are other map nerds; maybe they won't waste the time. You don't need BB to see the vacancies; I have had a beautiful lake nearly entirely to myself for a year, even idiotically requesting three plots around it at one point on three Premium Plus accounts (something I then ditched within a month because three houses in a row aren't really that contiguous and it doesn't really work and is stupid). I wasn't chagrined when I saw a former tenant move in next door; he'll be back. Many of my tenants either simultaneously carry both a Linden Home or an island rental as well as my cheaper rentals, or they shuffle back and forth. They can get more prims for the buck even if they have to lower their draw distance on my neighbours' sims : )
Still, I'm proud of the Lindens for creating Belli and giving customers what they really want -- which they wouldn't do in the early years, hobbled by their technocommunist and technolibertarian urbanist dreams and loathing of what they viewed as stultifying suburbia. The infamous Ann O'Toole who worked as a computer programmer at big RL companies used to point out sagely that LL never listened to customer requirements. The reason you have Microsoft on your home computer and Linux is on the supermarket credit card swiper that always breaks down is that big companies who pay employees properly so they work 9 to 5 and get the job done, who have to pay attention to what customers want and not ideology, generally do better than open source projects -- and if you are still boosting the open source cult and saying "it's everywhere," remember you yourself didn't get paid for your work and they did.
Look at the film of my home town from the 1960s at the parody Bellisseria Commissary (upstairs in the Mushroom Room) if you want to learn why I myself am cynical about suburbia -- it's interesting to reflect that Rochester's Midtown Mall, the sensation of the century in those parts with a real working Swiss cuckoo clock and multi-level shopping, was torn down, killed off like the two top employers of the region -- Xerox and Kodak -- by the Internet, leaving a devastation of poverty, drug addiction, and power blackouts which new IBM investments are supposed to cure.
So what will be the new IBM investment for our beloved Second Life?
Can This Second Life Be Saved?
I don't think revealing the poverty status of top merchants, even with cloaked ID, or the tawdry top adult places that lure in people either with no imagination or no guidance, or the vastiness of vacant Bellisseria and Abandoned Land Land is going to do it.
So that leaves Mark King's "killer app" which was "each other" -- that socializing -- particularly dating and sex -- would be the big attraction. Hence the prominent display of every bit of data one can scrape off an avatar, even his big-bucks spending Premium Plus status. I keep thinking of that tenant who asked for more prims because she "hoped to get a boyfriend". The thought of an SL love who requires "more prims" would make sweat break out on my brow personally, but I realize that it's more likely the girl who will be paying for everything and decorating. Lots of low-life lounge-lizard layabout men in SL, gotta tell ya.
But all you have to do is follow all the sad girls on Twitter -- and there are way more women than men in SL, especially allowing for m2f -- to understand how every effort by the Lab and everybody with a venue doesn't work. There are so many things about SL relationships that don't work, mainly because of poor chat interface, alts, real life, and cost.
I like socializing in SL to some extent, and it's great to have long philosophical discussions about the grid or even RL or goof around and show off your outfits or things you made. Sometimes building out my rentals and making little things to sell can feel like more of an accomplishment, however. Isn't making it possible for OTHER people to have friends and romance more edifying, in the end?
Friends drift in and out of your SL, dropping like a stone when RL calls or disappearing for weeks when they have to go do a real job, or dropping from the People List when they actually die in RL, and you never knew their RL. This can never really be fulfilling. My best friends in RL include people who are never on the Internet; who don't use Facebook; who use the US mail system, imagine, and not all of them are my age. Not everyone is "online". Online is good for me in my work and personal life to keep up with Russians and Ukrainians during this awful war, and many others trying to cover it or provide relief.
Like the Anshe Chung types who "make a million" in SL, the people who meet and marry in RL via SL are a tiny fraction, despite the impression created by the Lindens with the help of Draxtor. Not everyone wants to marry and live happily ever after; I'm content to remain single and live unhappily as long as I don't have to cook.
When you think about other people in SL, you realize the validity of the phrase coined by Mark Wallace (formerly publisher of the Herald and for a time, Wallace Linden) -- "continuous partial attention". You are at an event, but in IMs -- a bunch of windows are open. You TP in and out. You might even be in Messenger or on Twitter at the same time. You sit and have a heart-to-heart conversation with a friend but you don't know what forces and distractions are pulling on them -- nor do they know about you. You misunderstand something they say; you miss a phrase in the Fractured Fairy Tales that is SL chat, and they cut your card over nothing.
No one is really present fully; it's the modern human condition and only exacerbated on SL. Remember the Philosopher's Club? They had a very long run in Nuba. I used to run into Rev. Magdalene there and have a chin wag. I would argue endlessly with her on Twitter and muted her for a time during the elections and whew, Biden was elected despite her worst prognoses. Now in place of the old Philosphers is somebody nearby called "drunken philosophers" with the Grateful Dead on the stream. "I Need a Miracle E-v-e-r-y Day".
Yet everyone knows that the Lindens -- or really any creators of virtual worlds -- have a very compelling and even addictive product, that is constructive as much as it is destructive. Everyone is going to keep trying to have mind-blowing sex or philosophical discussions (PS Thinkers still exists, but degenerated terribly to cultic nonsense as well, although I noticed Gwyn flash by the other day with a relevant topic.) Yes, I let my counter group called "Doers" lapse : )
So...Can't they figure out how to keep more souls occupied happily here without resorting to ugly data scrapes? They aren't going to work, anyway.
The Lindens would have been better off getting behind the new dating app Thunder and making sure it worked to its best capacity. Their "improvement" of the avatar profile -- yet again -- didn't help socializing but if anything, added annoyances, like the need to "just know" that you need to pull down a toggle menu to find "payment" or "friend".
Horrible Hamlet
It's been appalling to see how SHamlet has played up the platformista techie arguments in favour of BB, when they are so readily dismissed. Why, it's a good thing to know the revenue of top companies in real life, he crows -- it tells you which ones are worth shopping at and helps society regulate the wealthy in favour of the poor. But the little Mom 'n Pop shops in SL aren't publicly traded, and usually involve just one person -- usually female -- working at home, struggling to make ends meet. Why the glare of scrutiny in a society where we have no need for food or shelter and taxation doesn't create public goods, but provides revenue for the platform provider??? You owe your soul to the Company Store -- and you have to keep buying a new mesh bodies when the old ones get out of date.
SHamlet didn't even bother to report truthfully the awful scene he TP'd into, where he describe a cozy campfire. Outside the screenshot, was a giant board featuring avatars' rez days -- mainly women as often these things do. It's a way for any creepy male to IM them and pretend to have "just noticed" their birthday and flatter them. They didn't consent to have their profiles up there like hos at adult clubs to be IM'd. It needs to come down, soonest. Nobody likes those stupid profile grabbers that show you've been on a sim; I'm only aware of one German sandbox that made an entire board of them so the whole gang could see themselves. It didn't add IMing capacity to the board, however! That's the most creepy part of it.
SHamlet also failed to describe the sim he was on. It's called PetPlay. It's devoted to a horrid capture roleplay game where humans capture animals and beat them into submission. It's not pretty. The BDSM lifestyle here has bled out into the public at large. The usual cultic attempts to prettify it by talk of how violence and vulnerability build deep trust in BDSM relationships sure doesn't wash here: no one consented to have their data scraped, and we don't have the "safe word." We can only "opt out" - by giving them our email, like we would to a common spammer.
Worst of all, SHamlet failed to provide the names of the main avatars behind this operation. He described the person he interviewed first as "Bonnie Belle" (no such person in the People List; bonniebelle appears to be a dead account). Then he began to refer to them as BonnieBot96 or whatever, "the only one who would talk". But never the actual names of the people you can see sitting with the Lindens in the "Fireside Chat": ostiabs, sparklespice, and kristadesl (partner of ostiabs) plus spokesperson Skyler Pancake -- the only person with a last name showing her age.
I want @IsabelleCheren and other fanz of SHamlet to think about this piece: he TPs into a BDSM capture roleplay sim called PetPlay; never mentions that; with a giant billboard of women's profiles to IM them on their birthday - which they didn't consent to. https://t.co/7OcQtZUNdr
— You Know Where to Find Me🌻 (@Prokofy) January 29, 2023
Legitimate Analogies
Isabelle, whom I took to task, along with SHamlet, for their very gingerly and partial discussion of violence against women in SL and gross distortion of female bodies, astoundingly, claimed that I was singling her out for re-traumatization because I made an analogy namely this:
Not the first time I have quoted Andrea Dworkin nor made an analogy to other situations, some people endorse, some not. It applies; I won't be bullied from not using it by victims or net-nannies. pic.twitter.com/1gKhwrWWON
— Bird is Broken and So Am I🌻 (@Prokofy) January 26, 2023
It turns out she is a victim of rape in RL -- although this isn't on her profile or blogs that I've ever seen and we're supposed to "just know". What that means is that we can never use rape itself as an analogy of anything, in her view, because it undermines the legitimate horror of her experience.
Worse, we can't use the argumentation used in the legitimization of rape, either. And even more worse, if I say "People like you" referencing those who airily dismiss privacy concerns on the Internet because there is none to mean "rape victims."
Nonsense. Victims trying to constrain and turn language are not only failing at this woke task; they are now being dismissed as causing their own violence which is an outrageous state of affairs. It has to stop. I'm here to push back. I don't have to prove my credentials of empathy for victims of rape and violence nor my work on women's rights. Making an analogy to the reasoning involved is what is at stake here -- Isabell, like SHamlet, like the Lindens, have airily told us once again that "there is no privacy on the Internet" and therefore invoked the reasoning "nothing can be done". If we left something personal on our profiles we didn't want to get out to a larger audience, we're wearing short skirts.
Another even more popular vlogger, Meera Vanderbilt, rocked up to set me straight that I didn't know that one in three women is a victim of rape so that therefore, I can never discuss anything critically or use any unapproved analogies. (The figure for the US for sexual assaults, broadly understood, is one in six, but ok). Language and tone police don't win arguments on the Internet unless they can threaten loss of livelihood -- which they handily do. So don't use those methods. Vanderbilt casually admitted that she doesn't care about SL that much and would use another platform if this one doesn't suit; she isn't invested in the world despite obviously having splashed out a lot on clothes and furniture for her videos, although these may have come in "bloggers' packs," knowing how SL "blogging" works.
I'll go on watching Isabelle's and Meera's videos; I've lost my respect for them, however. If they don't think Bonniebots takes food off their table, that's fine, but they could "read the room" as we are endlessly admonished to do on this and other issues. Scylla has pointed out that pretty much everyone she talks to is opposed. I'll say I've found it's mainly Europeans, schooled in the GDPR reacting and hoping for a cure; Americans care less and also know less about the issues. I'll put a poll up at the Moth Temple and see what comes of it.
Even Feorie, the Linden/Mole suck-up extraordinaire, admits that the Lindens got the BB issue wrong, and it's rare to get six entire threads, each bolder than the last, on anything in SL, even gatchas. That has to count for something.
I don't see this going away. The Lindens have grabbed on to it too hard, and while they aren't listening to their customers and "reading the room," they are now heavily invested in reputation and attention economy, if not money.
If anything, BB will add other categories -- Lindens recently changed the search interface ostensibly to make it easier to find rentals, versus land for sale, but I haven't heard of them consulting any landlords or land barons of any kind on this, it's the usual code cave fandago with fans. It's not how most customers come to me; search/places on Firestorm or classifieds or ads or word-of-mouth are the ways they come. BB will get into this space and use either picks folksonomy or traffic or whatever they will use to display "top rentals" or "top land barons"
You can say it doesn't matter as most people will either not know or won't care and go on with their little secondary lives. You can also note that it is one more death blow to the world. The Romans didn't see the corrosive effect of lead in their drinking cups; the Lindens aren't getting that data scrapes of even "public data" in our little world are just as corrosive. It's not about privacy or gaining some financial advantage, although sparkle admitted freely that her little store is doing a brisk business with all this attention. What they are after is power and manipulation and reputational enhancement, which can lead to more power and manipulation. But in this small pond, for how long? Angel Fluffy, who single-handedly rolled the Lindens to destroy the democratic Features Voting Tool, is long gone, along with the Bush Guy and the Red Zone guy.
The difference now is the extraordinary Linden backing -- even Angel Fluffy didn't have that, as Jeska Linden was only relieved to have someone pick up the chore of "cleaning up" the Feature Voting Tool, and Torley was happy to delete anything "negative" she didn't control, but I doubt Philip ever focused on it. Geeks knew they still had the JIRA and office hours to influence Lindens; it was only the rest of us who lost out.
Bonniebots is likely to prevail; today you can see that the Top Merchants page no longer is filled with "redacted" because they fell off the list, most likely; now only the brave and the bold and the still-clueless are visible. While LL can surprise us and it is always possible this debacle will lead to the departure of some very long-term and powerful Lindens, my guess is that BB will continue, become more powerful, add more features (land sales and rentals), add actual dating features besides the pervy Rez Day Board, and more. Unlike X-Street, LL will likely not buy out Bonniebots just like they don't buy out Firestorm, to maintain "plausible deniability" in the face of silly invocations of "fiduciary responsibility" or "duty of care"
Your money or your life.
As pointed out on Twitter, don't know if you catched it.
Data scraping bots are in clear violation with Linden Lab TOS article 6.2i which goes a little like this:
6.2 You agree that you will not post or transmit Content or code that may be harmful, impede other users' functionality, invade other users' privacy, or surreptitiously or negatively impact any system or network.
You agree to respect both the integrity of the Service and the privacy of other users. You will not:
(i) Post or transmit viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, time bombs, cancelbots, or other computer programming routines that may harm the Service or interests or rights of other users, or that may harvest or collect any data or information about other users without their consent;
Short translation:
You will not use programming routines that may harvest or collect any data or information about other users without their consent.
Seems pretty clear right? Now the question is if these Lindens who shut the forum threads in a rush such as Kiera Linden, Tommy Linden (who are heads of governance), Patch Linden (who also got promoted into some role), are completely unaware of section 6.2.i of the Linden Lab TOS.
Are people in such company roles not supposed to know the TOS like the inside of their pocket?
If they did knew about article 6.2.i why did they have a productive conversation with these bonniebots programmers instead of just applying the TOS and stop their bots?
What is going on? Why the panic to lock threads about bots when their is community outrage?
Read what the TOS say. You will not harvest ANY DATA of other users.
ANY DATA as in the sales data of merchants, avatar data, resident whereabouts on the grid, data about attachments people wear.
I have serious concerns about the competence of these Lindens.
Again what is going on? TOS seem crystal clear.
Posted by: A concerned resident | 01/30/2023 at 10:56 PM
Thank you for your useful comment and TOS quote which others haven't noted. I think the answer is: the Lindens are pretty well lawyered up (remember the gatcha ban, which had absolutely no basis in any US law or pending suit or prosecutor's warning or anything except Japan waving its hands, which isn't relevant for a US-based company with no offices in Japan. One of their new investors is Raj Date, a programmer-turned-lawyer-turned-politician, the absolute worst scourge of the land, in my view, a la Benjamin Noble/Benjamin Duranske. These types feel they are vastly superior intellects who should control virtual worlds. And the world will agree that a Stanford-trained engineer and a Harvard-trained lawyer is someone to whom we must genuflect and bow, especially if they are a protogee of Elizabeth Warren and worked for the USG.
Of course, I genuflect only for the Host at the altar and no mortal being so I'm different. I would assume that Raj would be looped into this debate even back in August or last year when it began to be constructed -- Lindens know which bots are scraping what and what chat is going on about them; they are the all-seeing eye with server-side truth unavailable to client-side truths.
So as Patch articulated in his forums intervention, he already consulted with a "GDPR specialist". We don't know who. But it's true that you have to be a legal person to fall under GDPR protection and we're merely low-life avatars with no rights. While various UN committees have affirmed that universal human rights apply online, they don't because we are all bound by the TOS, which one judge called "unconscionable" in the case of LL and its "land". That's the deal, and when you sign the TOS, you also sign their interpretation, not yours.
They will say no information that is not public is available. Naturally we wonder about "premium plus account status," but it turns out they have an LSL function for that now used by Lindens and they tend to be guilty about god powers and want to award them to at least their friends among us mortals so that script is available and known to geeks.
The "online" status, however, goes against the function in the viewer which enables you to hide your online status -- remember when the Lindens awarded this feature to their favourite FlipperPA Peregrine FIC lad after strenuous lobbying? And per that function, your status online should only show to your friends to whom you've made that right available. So how do they square that?
Yet Bonniebots just added that function which shows they are feeling utterly brass ballsy after their fireside chat, despite having to concede "opt out" (which still means they have harvested the data for whatever use they put it to).
So to conclude, they cannot concede that there has been any "harm," from what I gather. They need help in seeing this harm and I hope we will all will continue to give them that awareness.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 01/31/2023 at 10:03 AM