Questions for Lindens Regarding the Forum

A few questions.

Are you at all concerned that the criticism of your platform that was once contained in your forums will now be visible externally? I recall when I joined that the forums were closed to those without accounts to prevent dissent and criticism from being seen by non-residents.

The closure of the forums followed on the heels of Cristiano's suspension. Is the closure of the forums an extension of the retaliation against long-time members of SL who have become critical of SL recently?

Is the closure of the forums due to the inability of LL to permanently ban members from the forum now that they've allowed unverified accounts. More specifically, are the forums a victim of your attempt to inflate your membership numbers to achieve an illusion of impending profitability?

~Ulrika~

Heh, so I'm not the only one who thought of these things?

My Theory was: To get more investors, you cant have forums littered with complaints, whiners & other usual stuff.

Would you, if you were a Big $$ Investor, do so?

And THAT is my conspiracy theory!

I'm off now to don my Aluminum Foil Hat.

Sad to say, the same thoughts have occurred to me.

I admit that thought had crossed my mind too, as well as a few others.

Recently we have seen Linden agreeing to and encouraging the sellers guild, publicly stating on the front page "its your world.....", and now pulling out of the general forums in favour of "you wanna talk about it - make a forum for it".

Are we seeing Linden pulling away from "the world and community" in favour of promoting themselves as the platform provider only.

Scenario being they will provide the hardware and the software to any party who wishes to set up a world - the rest is up to them.

How long before we see "super group" utilities installed that have almost Linden abilities with "their" residents, therefore requiring less Linden interaction with that community.

As mentioned from a $ point of view it makes sense.

From a Linden perspective - piling people on to police the ever growing world is becoming expensive, much better that the residents handle it themselves.

From an investors viewpoint - they want a clean world, they dont want all the hassles and troubles that goes with it.
( Or all of the bickering that goes on in the forums )

From a community standpoint - each community would have its own forum and not be associated with the "technical forums" that Linden are proposing.

Are we seeing the beginning of a new LL dream/business plan - SL for all, where Linden are just the providers and not the governors ?

Thats my conspiracy theory at least.

I think the closure of the Forums is caused by a reluctance to listen in general. Fulsome compliments are always acceptable - though they do need to be earned. LL simply don't want to hear customers complaining about how buggy the software is, they don't want to hear about indifferent customer service, they don't want to hear about the never ending chain of buggy updates and consequent outages and emergency patches - in short they don't want to listen to criticism.

Another element is that they almost certainly see the Forums as being counter-productive, in their eyes anyway, in that a whole bunch of people complaining about aspects of LL's services tends to foster discontent and a perception that LL aren't very good at things like customer service and product development.
The point that providing a decent level of customer service, stable and reasonably bug free updates and having a proper development roadmap rather than the risible 'The Tao of Linden Lab' unaccountable and chaotic 'system' would mean there would be a lot less to complain about seems to have escaped them completely...

Of course at one point, not so very long ago, LL could always depend on the services of a loyal army of ardent supporters who would put the boot in in no uncertain terms to anyone who dared to stand up and cry 'Look! The king has no clothes!'.
With it's seemingly unerring ability to make really stupid decisions, LL has cleverly alienated most of these uncritical defenders, and those who remain seem to have lost the motivation to continue to defend LL. Not to mention the fact that a worrying number of 'old timers' seem to be slipping away these days...

No, what we are seeing here is an untidy combination of LL's obsession with new stuff - though I'd hardly call Blogs 'new', even though to listen to Robin and Torley and the other Lindens you'd think they had been invented this year - an unwillingness to accept criticism, and a desire to have a unidirectional communications system with customers.

The medium/long term results of this decision are going to be interesting to watch. From a distance.