From Watermeloney to Corporate Lackey

That would be my guess.

that is what you call "bait"

you took the bait and ignored everything else to be "right"

ignore the points that were made... enjoy being "right"

yeah, blame Mulch

I killed SL by my vicious trolling

address some points... or are you only seeing what you want to see?

The sad thing is that all this could have been avoided if only Linden Lab had done the decent thing and asked those who use the forum.

"We're thinking of closing the forums and using the blog instead, and of course you can still use third party forums. Do you have any thoughts on this?"

Let it run for a couple of weeks, then make the closure announcement - even if our opinions are ignored, at least we had a chance to share them.

That is, I think, the real problem here. Not Torley, not corporate BS, not those who use the forums. It's the process that has caused the problem.

After all, shouldn't we have a share in "our world, our imagination" - or is that merely applicable to how we use the in-game tools?

Lewis

Really now? I don't recall even mentioning Torley in any of my posts.
Nor do I recall mentioning what my plans were --or even what my opinion is.

But nice try, Ms. Cramer.

Now climb the fuck off my back.

Jarod broke it months ago by posting she was a "waste of carbon." Then he was suspended for three days.

The irony of this post is blinding and deafening.

I can't tell you how wrong I find this. That technique is the one they have used up until now. At least now they come out and tell us that they are going to crap on us.

Done.

I agree with Selador; it's past time for LL to drop the pretense of fostering Philip's Precious Fucking Commuuuuunity and operate the company in a professional manner. That means scheduling developers' time and treating us like customers rather than investors. One out of two isn't bad for now.

I could swear torley was a guy (no offense really). Damn....

Darn right, David!

What you said. I've always found her incredibly helpful, and willing to sacrifice her time so that I (and I suspect, a zillion others) can enjoy their time. She has my respect because she *earned* my respect.

I don't like the forums closing. I don't like a lot of things LL has done lately. But I'm not gonna hold Torley up like some sort of watermelon-colored scape goat.

Mari

You haven't been paying attention then!

-Kiamat Dusk

-Kiamat Dusk
...reposter...

This I can applaud. It's succinct and avoids blaming Torley squarely as a source of dysfunction/evil.

I will counterbalance this by stating that anyone in a uniform (The last name is a uniform) is merely an extension of someone else's will. Torley's environmental requirements make him/her well suited for this particular position - user advocate/forum help/liason . He/she is capable of reserving his/her emotions from his/her professional work and doing it well. Any sufficiently advanced large-scale customer-service effort is indistinguishable from kindness - except to those who know how it works.

If Torley disagrees with his/her management that the closing of the forums is a 'good thing', then the place for him/her to discuss it is with his/her management. As it stands, the Forums' functionality for the residents can be handled by individual groups on third-party forums and listserv; The Forums' functionality for Linden Labs will be taken up by the Linden Blogs. This will help Torley do his/her job /better/ overall. Everyone has a right to be able to usefully structure their workplace. In our case, it should be usefully structured in-world (though we don't by default have the tools to usefully structure our communication in-world short of notecards being dropped and copied to everyone in a group, or some tool that someone invents ...)

What you're expressing is a lack of trust in the cutomer service personnel of a corporation, a corporation that you've worked with and benefited and some of whose goals and methods do not benefit you. I identify, massively. I've given up good-paying positions from large corporations because I discovered that their policies and goals are unjustifiably selfish and harm the customer/consumer/public/individual.

I do not blame the people who work customer service for their motives - they genuinely wish to help people, and get paid to do so, and they do. Torley is the same. Naively, I trust Torley to do the right thing or - if the right thing is blocked - find a way to workaround, advocate, etcetera. I can't expect everyone to do the same thing I do, however - I have extremely high standards of professionalism from the corporations I work with, and train years of insight and education on perceiving and judging those corporations. Torley, I can argue (or have the conceit of) - doesn't yet have the same bad experiences with a corporation that you and I do.

I think it is a shame that anyone should have to blindly follow corporate interests. I doubt that Torley blindly follows corporate interests. I do think that, as part and parcel of anyone working for any corporation anywhere, she has a duty to follow the corporate interests that have been put forward by management, unless they break the law, but otherwise use what channels are available to change the corporate interests.

The removal of the forums is small potatoes as corporate wrongs go. There are other solutions that take up the functionality and provide more structure, more technical extensibility, more flexibility. The one thing it will lack is a central anything-goes discussion area for everyone who uses Second Life (and arguably, the forums were never that and could never be that.).

I think the good of the users/individuals is better served by a single, central, third-party mostly-unmoderated forum that people can sign up for in-world (to avoid forging identities) - a forum where the LL ToS regarding PG behaviour do not apply.

Discussion is good. Dissent, brilliant. Running a forum - hard, sucky. Running it under the PG ToS - even worse. SLForums can't be the solution for what we need, which is freedom of speech.

In this instance, I think and feel that while it may be a burden for the users to organise on a third-party forum (or forums), it will ultimately benefit them by providing freedoms that were impossible under the ToS. It's a chance to take up user self-government, and divorce LL's service from the administration of the societies that use that service. This, too, I see as a higher good.

It would be nice if they pointed us in a direction, endorsed something, provided tools, etcetera but none of that is actually their business.

In this instance, I can argue that Torley's backing of a corporate interest is also in the interests of the users.

That all goes to whether or not I ought to trust Torley (or anyone else) working as customer service for Linden Labs to always act in my best interests - I shouldn't. Torley works for Linden Labs and has to enforce a ToS that I find distasteful, objectionable, and arguably quashing natural human rights. I hate the entire notion of PG - enforced behaviour - it condones and encourages intolerance, because it is by definition intolerance.

Torley has little power over my experience in Second Life, however, beyond banning my posts, banning me, and influencing the management to not listen to /me/. She's a single gateway from us to Linden Labs. (okay, not single, but the most influential). Her guidelines are vague and allow her to exercise personal judgement and subtle power.

I, however, do not wish to have a reputation with management, nor with the gateways to management. I'm Machiavellian in that fashion - if they dislike many of my ideas, and can recognise an idea came from me, they can reject it out of hand. If the idea comes without a name, from just the /community/ however - That they must listen to.

I can craft arguments until the sun burns out, whittle and wheedle them, and I think that if they are good and reasonable, other people will take them up.

I'd rather Torley, as a gateway to management, be a guest in /my/ house with /my/ rules than for us to be a guest in LL's ToS PG house, with their PG rules, for issues that bust out of PG by necessity.

I'm rambling, but that's why I like Ulrika - she phrases things in a manner that lead to discussion.

Anyway - in this instance, I disagree. I think her actions don't tip the balance between acting on our behalf and acting in LL's interests, and can argue that their actions are ultimately beneficial to us.

[Edit - clearing up how I trust Torley. I persuaded myself in the course of writing that while I do trust /her/, I likely ought not trust her corporate office fully and implicitly.]

Torley is to Second Life as Thunderheart is to Star Wars Galaxies.*





* - Thunderheart was a member of the SWG community that was hired by Sony when they starting making huge changes to SWG that the vast majority of the community saw as bad ideas. He's still there, spewing corporate lackey lingo and "things are getting better" lies as SWG's population continues to plummet.

Call me a master-baiter if you shall, but Mulch why set-up the hanging platform and insert Torley's head if you dont have to??? Why not noose up good ole Philip, or Robin, ya know those are the ones you are after not Torley........just a thought dont exicute a innocent bystander when its just as easy to shoot the real problem in the ass.

As the newbie who's opinion really doesn't mean much, I will just say I forgive Torely for whatever he has to do while performing his job, we have all done shit like this that we don't agree with in the course of our work. Torely does the best he can, I think, given the circumstances, and is way overworked. I'm not going to tell him to throw himself on his sword and tell LL to take his job and shove it for me. He's not building weapons of mass destruction or something, heh.

And just as a side note, as someone who spent the previous few years on political forums, the cries of "kill this horrid monster of a troll forum that is so evil and vicious" make me laugh. It is a placid lake of calm reason compared to many, even many MMO forums. People need a thicker skin, methinks.

Everyone's opinion means something, counts - that's the important part. Making one's self or group understood to others? - harder.

In the end, however, I think that if Torley were to be persuaded to leave Linden Labs, that would be the canary in the coalmine - when he/she leaves, we all need to inspect why he/she does, carefully.

<grabs the baseball bat>
<looks around this thread>

Bring it on biatches....I've so totally lost any amount of respect I ever had for certain people in this thread. You have a choice to be a hurtful jerk or do something positive and this is what you choose? This says more about yourself and your personal character than it says about Torley. Do you forget the humanity of the person you target? Why do you have to be so mean? For a reaction? Apparently you can't get positive attention or you just seek out the negative, adding to the chaos and crap of the world.

<starts swinging>
<smashes the lamp in the room next to Ulrika>

Stupid jerks.... I feel sorry for your pathetic existence and the blackness in your hearts.

Shame on you.

Close the doors, close the freaking forums now.

<flips all the bitches off>

And always the challenge.

Thicker skins aside, I in no way meant to excuse nasty personal remarks about Torely, although anyone doing so will have to deal with the responses which will more than make up for the initial remark, as has been the case here. That is the nature of a forum. Yes, someone can say something many will find offensive. And those that do will respond in kind, no one can make a post with no replies. However, in my experience, the level of nastiness is quite small compared to other forums and much of it right now is purely in reaction to the present situation. People are angry and disappointed.

Sorry for coming in with the alt, I needed access to her account, lol.

Io

While I might argue that growing a real and human online community is preferable - for idealistic, practical, and profitable reasons - I agree that this is an acceptable alternative.

Given LL's inability to achieve anything more than LindenSpeak and starry-eyed, libertarian/utopian platitudes in the "community" area....

I never had the pleasure--as far as I know--of meeting Miss Torgeson-Linden in-world. But I certainly have known other folks who found themselves in similar situations, and I have seen similar memos and press releases written by the folks in those situations.

Having known people in analagous circumstances leads me to look at her comments closely, with an eye towards the idea that maybe, just maybe the person writing it may believe in the ultimate ends to which the organziation is working, but whose heart is being broken by the choices that the leadership is making in pursuing those ends.

When I read her thoughts, two things struck me. First, that she was saying how much she had put into the forums and what they meant to her. Second, that a good bit of the really over-the-top corporate-speak-gobbledy-blah that she used read like a parody.

As I said, I've seen memos like this before, where an individual who has invested their heart and soul into something has to go along with the leadership's choices that may or may not lead to a successful conclusion, but which involve going down a painful path. It is not unknown for people in these circumstances to register a protest in a round-about way, through an over-ethusiastic assent, or by going overboard with jargon that is so pumped-up and over-used or even mis-used, that it becomes a parody of the company line.

Again, I don't know Miss Torgeson-Linden, though I hope someday our paths might cross. But I cannot pretend to really know what she is thinking or trying to say. For that matter, she may not even be certain about what she is trying to communicate--perhaps even subconsciously. All I am saying is that what she wrote can be seen and understood in a number of ways--including possibly as a send-up of the company line and/or perhaps as an expression of her own anguish over the path that the company is choosing to follow. But I am certainly unwilling to be judgemental about someone who has perhaps found themselves in what is most likely a somewhat uncomfortable position.

That is about the cruelest shot I think I have ever seen on these forums. I can see now that your critics were right about you.