I'm sure it was tough for the Lindens seeing those kinds of threads in the forums, but it's what's on people's minds though. Free speech.. blah blah. The discussions needed far more moderation though at times.
Part of effective communication is knowing how to say stuff. Unfortunately the majority do not know how to, or bother to, accomplish this. It is possible to be highly critical of things without sounding like a dissenter. Admittedly it's not easy to do, but it's not overly difficult either.
I have voiced my unhappiness to the Lindens regarding things I believe they are doing wrong but to the uninitiated it looks like I'm not. I always launch my criticism with constructive statements and questions. I state things as I see them, in an almost dispassionate tone, then provide either a constructive suggestion or a process question that will move towards solving the problem. This is not something I made up. It's an established process used by professionals that keeps you in good communication with the person you're criticizing.
If more people communicated that way to the Lindens ... watch out for results.
Nothing has changed. You don't need to login to get to the resident sites page. Hit the community button and you'll see a link to the page on the left hand side.
Nothing stops the press from creating accounts there. Furthermore, the Lindens don't moderate those boards at all so everything's laid bare. Can't make the community much more transparent than that.
Their solution is to just shuffle us all off. Ideological conflicts can often get ugly. Best to hide it! Like I said, I can understand why they would want to. If it was my company, I'd probably do the same. But as a resident, it really does change the way you feel about SL.
It's a dilemma. I hate seeing the forums go, but it actually may be better for us. Ideological conflict is not a good thing to have here because there simply are too many immature people who don't have the slightest idea of how to discuss controversial things without going ballistic. Adrenaline is toxic. Getting mad to the point your blood boils literally kills you slowly. We can do without such flareups.
Better moderation I think. Not volunteers. Proper, hard-ass moderators.
If they made me a resmod, you'll see hard-ass, and people are not going to like it. But it's something I don't want to do right now because that's where I came from and it's really hard work and I'm tired. Where I was a mod (elected by the community), out of 7 of us I think you could rank me only #3 in being "hard-ass" behind 2 of the company mods. But that was our norm and the community by and large supported that. They helped the mod team a lot in making the boards peaceful. I once banned all discussion on a particular topic for one week ... and the community welcomed the decision because tempers were really flaring. But really, it's very hard work to maintain that level of peace.
I hope you're right, I hope closing the forums is a good thing for residents as well as LL. I guess we'll know in 6 months time. At the moment though, I can't see it being a big plus for the people who pay the bills.
I'm adopting a wait-and-see myself. I don't think any of us can see the whole picture of how the Lindens manage their data, and I'm not going to speculate. I definitely will be monitoring how things go and I suppose a lot of others will too. We can't see the comms network but there are visible indicators we can use as checkpoints.
What I think? We'll know in as little as a month if it's working or not. You can also trust that I won't keep quiet about this if I feel it's not working. I'm only going along right now because I can't tell if it will work or not but there is a possibility that it will work.
EDIT: OMG .. post #1500.
??? But ... that's how the web IS. It has thousands, maybe millions, of forums gathering together people of similar interests so they can discuss matters common to their individual groups.
