Closing the SL Forums--The Right Move

No--"core business purpose" means concentrating on what is important to keeping the doors open and continuing to grow. It's why Google doesn't own semi-conductor factories, and why FedEx doesn't manufacture cardboard boxes. Companies that fail to do this "frack" their customers and employees by going under.

Spending money and man-hours operating these forums--where a tiny percentage of Linden Lab's user base can do the same venting they could do on third party forums--is not LL's core business.

Catch you on a bad day?

No--Linden Lab's core business is building, operating, and marketing a virtual world called Second Life. The SL forums are--at best--ancillary. Community is something that the residents of the world build themselves. All LL can do is give them the right tools, and stay out of the way.

Listening to people telling them over and over they are making stupid decisions and doing a poor job is a waste of time for LL--everything they do is hit with a barrage of negative feedback here. The noise has overwhelmed the signal.

I think it provides telling insight into the limitations of your faculties. Argument ignored.

~Ulrika~

Should you decide you want to discuss the issue at hand (rather than making snide remarks about typos) I'm sure you can find this thread.

No I disagree American firms can not see past the easy buck. This Phillip has done this before. Making a company and then cashing out. There is a tale of a Wolf who was President of several major American Airlines (USair and United). Each company he left in ruins while he made 100s of millions of dollars. IN two of those companies the dedicated employees have taken pay cuts to keep the company afloat while he made even more money. The retired employees lost the pensions and health benifits they had earned for their dedicated service. Yes Fracking your employees and customers pays BIG in the United States. The ones who are going to be fracked the hardest are those who have bought land. Their land and sims are going to become worthless as the new firm does a strict following of the TOS and takes back the land and sims.
In short, I dont trust them as far as I can throw a fully loaded Boeing 747-400ER! I smell polecat and it stinks!

Oh I refuse to wear the brown lipstick!!

A variety of relatively recent LL policy decisions - including closing the forums - militates against your utopian/libertarian point of view. While LL's "vision" may have paralleled yours in the past, clearly the company is now not allowing the residents to build their own community. It is taking an active upper-hand in bringing finance and commerce, artistic expression, opinion, and interaction under control - probably for purposes that have immediate corporate benefit. So you've got it backward.

You may argue that SL is LL's property, and they have the right. You would be correct. But you cannot argue that "community" is a priority for LL - in the diverse and human sense of the word.

I just figured out the whole quote thingy which I've always wanted to be able to do but couldn't and NOW they close the forums?? OMG I'm soo sad...

wait,,, does this mean we can't get together when they close down the grids on wednesday and bitch and tease?? I love when we do that... OMG I am soooooooo going to miss this forum..

Unless, of course, I loose track of it.

~Ulrika~

Losen up, Zug!

First of all, it's not the fault of the forums that residents who post there are heard more than residents who are not. There's no better way to communicate directly or indirectly with LL than with official, company-hosted forums. In-world events, blogs, third-party sites, these all represent a much smaller portion of the community than the forums. You think the percentage of the people who get listened to is small now? Wait until they only listen to the people who have blogs, go to Town Meetings, or post on third-party sites. Then it will truly be a small percentage of users whose opinions are given weight by SL.

Second, so what if some people leave SL because they don't like the forums? We're growing at such a rate now that the new people registering vastly overwhelms that small number. If people don't like the forums, they should realize they don't have to participate in them, not leave SL. Not liking the forums is not a good reason to leave SL, IMO. It's just a good reason not to use the forums.

Third, LL wastes times on many more things than they forums that distract from their core mission of running SL, and constantly improving the SL experience. Are they going to stop doing all those things, too? If they're enlisting the help of residents who volunteer to run things, why is it taking so much time? Why don't they just change the volunteer structure, or shift around responsibilities, rather than eliminating the forums entirely?

Will people come up with alternatives to the forums? Of course they will. That's not the point. Forums hosted by the company have a certain reputation and ease-of-use that no third-party forum can ever achieve. Whether LL uses them for customer feedback or not, they're an important part of the community and should not be shut down, but changed. Enacting this policy would be like if instead of fixing the bug that blocked group invitations last week, they'd simply eliminated groups.

Plus, now I'll never be able to get to thousands of posts, something I'd dreamed of for ever so long.

I am going to die from laughing when all of the private sims are repossed.
Stupid Customer: Hey I bought and paid money for my sims!
New Linden: You need to read the TOS. You paid a set up fee to Linden Labs, never in any of the infomation does it say you bought anything.
Stupid Customer :But I acted in good faith and my money made Second Life possible.
New Linden : We thank you for your past support but the new company pays a lot more money changing Second life into "barney land" a place where children can play and learn. Also those new goverment grants help as well. Oh we are setting up a new sim, want to pay us again? Maybe you can have your old sim back back. Trust me!

Perhaps the absence of something like the above might explain why more people don't know about the forums.

<3 Ulrika!

Its true, you're observation -- they don't chose there words very well.