Winter Ventura

You can take this privacy paranoia thing too far.

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Ann Otoole

LL fully intends to enable http textures from the web. The only choice you have is to not render them. However the option to replace all textures on all content with a goatse when you quit SL totally justifies the use of the feature just to teach Linden Lab about this anti privacy error.

Argent Stonecutter

That's the point. To make damn sure that option DOES remain.

Argent Stonecutter

It's not paranoia. People are already using IP bugging to track, stalk, and IP ban people in SL using parcel media. Given how insecure and eminently spoofable the SL protocol is, I WILL NOT risk to informing some W-Hat or P-N asshole what my IP address is while I'm IN SL.

Anya Ristow

I once found something remarkable in what he said. He said, based on the positive cash flow numbers, that he thinks residents earn more profit than LL does.

Now, since the positive cash flow numbers don't include tier (most residents' largest expense) or a fucking salary, I have to assume LL reports its income to the IRS before it deducts the costs of its San Francisco facility, its equipment and hosting costs, or its employee's salaries, right?

He's a business guy, right? So surely this subtelty of business (you know, profit is what you keep after paying your expenses) doesn't escape him, so...

This was the turning point. I used to give them the benefit of doubt and assume they mean well but just don't put enough effort into things; particularly communication. After their lead business guy pulled this number, I now assume they are intentionally trying to deceive us. I now assume everything they say about "the economy" is a total fabrication.

The 10-15% bot numbers they used to claim should have tipped me off. Nobody can be that fucking blind with the data LL has.

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Anya Ristow

katiem1066 is onto one thing that has improved under M: they have a direction to go, and perhaps even a smidgeon of accountability. Maybe they even have assignments now? At google you're expected to work on something of your own initiative 20% of your time. At LL it'd be helpful if they worked on something assigned at least 20% of their time.

There's something else that has improved, too. Mediocrity and the incentive for theft and re-selling is the fault of LL's hands-off approach and belief that everyone deserves a pat on the head and an equal opportunity for exposure (except their friends, of course, who get two pats on the head and some prominent placement). What SL most needs is some human discrimination. Instead of coding democracy they need to start coding some filters. And in the last year they've shown at least the awareness that not everything is of equal value.

Quiplash

My money's on Blue Mars, they're off to a promising start, but they're at least one full year away from being a serious competitor to SL (assuming they don't shoot themselves in the foot).

The only question in my mind (and the possible topic for a new thread) is this: Will Second Life end with a whimper or a bang? i.e. a long, slow, drawn-out demise, or a short-n-sweet-lights-off-everybody-out-of-the-pool moment?

Argent Stonecutter

Unless Avatar Reality turns a 180 on their content creation model they're not even in the same business as SL. That doesn't mean that Linden Lab isn't going to perform a "controlled flight into terrain", but it won't be because of Blue Mars.

Well, they could pull a Palm, and cut their throat trying to out-compete a non-competitor, but they don't HAVE to.

katiem1066

BM's content creation system freezes out most players from actually contributing to the world, which I guarantee will turn away most people who like SL. I think part of SL's appeal is that everyone starts out on the same foot. Even the most famous content creators were newbs one day. This egalitarian social model appeals to something in the American psyche, where BM's social model is strictly hierarchical - very much like a caste system. That, right there, is enough to turn me off to the platform.

Also, BM's method of transmitting data to the client will not scale - you have to download each region, in its entirety, before you can visit it. I've heard this is in the neighborhood of 1.5-2 GB per city. I for one am not willing to turn over 100 GB of my hard drive for what, maybe the equivalent of 70 to 120 SL regions? Unless they choose to drastically change how their platform works, you're going to end up with a fragmented user base, because not everyone will have downloaded all the cities.

My impression of the situation right now is that BM will not be a serious competitor to SL. LL is making rapid technical and managerial improvements to their system. I think that LL's approach, streaming the data as required to the viewer, is the superior solution. It is much more scalable than BM's system, and bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue.

Charles_D

My SL experience does not need monkey punching.

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Charles_D

That's M.

He's incapable of talking like a normal human.

JennL

Maybe but disk space is cheaper and if bandwidth is becoming less of an issue then so is downloading that and not having to put up with the lag shit of SL and to see crappy meshes and crappy graphics. Yes it will be a while ( a year or 3) and maybe it wont be Blue Mars but to say SL is making technical advances is like saying they putting lipstick on a pig.

Hypatia Callisto

aw, but pigs are cute

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Anya Ristow

You may consider UGC the business of SL, but I doubt even LL agrees with you anymore. I think you're not going to like 2010, in the same way "adult content" didn't like 2009.

Brenda Connolly

I hope it goes down in a conflaguration of epic proportions. One that would make Nero say "Holy Fuck!" It will be fun to watch, a great way to end a virtual existance.

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katiem1066

Pardon my ignorance, but what does UGC stand for?

ChatNoir Moonsoo

User Generated Content

Taco Rubio

Hypatia Callisto

Sadly I think you are right.

What is worse, is that the current path is actually ruining their fundamentals as as company. They should be seeing how to get their rightful share of the money that residents are making, not trying to slow the growth of trade. By trying to reduce demand, they are actually running the company into the dirt. I hope they figure their way out, for everyone's sake really.

Ann Otoole

Please do explain. If people know LL is planning to cut off UGC they need to be an adult and say so. People that know LL is about to destroy SL need to say what is going on so others can stop paying to be here based on false statements made by LL to the contrary that they will not end UGC.

Argent Stonecutter

User generated content is what makes SL different from There.com and Activeworlds and IMVU and Lively and Twinity and all the rest of the soi-disant "virtual worlds" out there.

Now, Linden Labs may have decided that it's not the business of Linden Lab any more, and they're going to turn Second Life into something that is fundamentally different from what it is now. And it may be that I won't like 2010 and I'll quit participating in whatever they turn Second Life into... for the same reason that I never even tried participating in There or Activeworlds or any of the rest. But that won't be because Blue Mars beat Second Life, it will be because Linden Lab turned SL into a completely different kind of product.

RIGHT NOW, what makes Second Life what it is, is user-generated content. Without that, it's something else.

katiem1066

Running with what Argent said ^....

Even IF LL decides to implement a system where in order to sell your products for a profit you have to jump through some extra accountability hoops, that doesn't change the fact that everyone in SL can go into a sandbox and start throwing prims together. Under a vendor verification system they might not be able to sell it, but they can still *make* things.

Ann Otoole

Yes and even if transfer rights are removed they will all simply use viewers with export/import and torrents for mass distribution.

The SL economic system was working pretty damn good before 2008.

LL keeps discontinuing any metrics that show a consistent downward trend. They just discontinued the most important metric of all: Positive Monthly Linden Flow

Now they are trying desperately to convince people that circular references are the best indicator of health. I.e.; bots and alts transferring l$ around in circles means the economy is in great shape.

Anya Ristow

I don't have inside info, and I doubt they will cut off UGC. I'm just making predictions based on recent events.

For two years now I've been pointing out things that I think make SL look ridiculous to normal people and limit its appeal and potential success. LL's policy decisions haven't always been what I'd have done, but here are some indicators that we're on the same page:

1. Bot policy. They knocked 10,000 off the concurrency numbers and barely made a dent in the number of bots. People didn't believe me when I said half the concurrency numbers were bots. I bet LL believes it, even if they aren't willing to say so.

2. Paying residents for venue reviews, to replace the showcase. I've been saying it's hard to find real, live humans, and people have told me it's my fault. When I ask them to put up, they name the same three places: Blarney Stone, Nancy Blakes and The Shelter. Surely there must be more. I have my own solution in the works. LL's solution is to pay people for 15-minute reviews. I hope they'll do more, but it looks like they're finally getting around to putting humans to the task, even if it's not their own humans.

3. Senior programming position, search. There was a second, lesser position that has apparently already been filled. Here was my critique of search: Just how useless is search?. That there are people who defend search as it is is a mystery to me. Apparently, LL sees a problem. I'm relieved.

4. Marginalization of adult content. It was suggested that LL should instead build a new continent for the non-adult content and I tried to explain how that couldn't possibly meet the objective. Indeed, LL didn't let the tail wag the dog.

5. Blake Sea. LL gets directly involved in creating Things To Do. I expected we'd see more, and I still do.

6. Talk of social networking, which people have interpreted to mean the mainstreaming of SL and integration with facebook and others. I think there are opportunities that are unique to SL and I think "social networking" could have a more general meaning of being better able to connect with like-minded people in SL, using SL tools (mostly, new tools).

7. Some kind of seller authentication program in the works. My thoughts have appeared in the content theft threads, though my primary concern has been the quality and redundancy of content available. It's clear, though, I'm not alone in wanting the barrier to entry to be raised just a bit.

I'm going to wait until I see how my 2009 predictions turned out before I make specific 2010 predictions, but I will say I see this much coming: the marginalization of easy-access UGC. I don't think they'll change anything at all about who can create content and how it's created, but I think LL is going to completely change who gets financially rewarded for it. It will become pointless for some who are currently "successful" (a whole other rant of mine) to continue creating content, because they won't have a market.

People who think that SL is defined by the ability to spend a couple hours in an evening creating something and be able to sell it will find this unfair and not very touchy-feely.

Compulsion

Blue Mar's content creation methods are pretty similar to IMVU which has consistently higher concurrency than Second Life. All users not being able to make content isn't that unpopular, this forum is just a little biased.