Is Dwell doomed?

The economy looked more familiar before they eliminated the reputation bonus, but then the reputation bonus wasn't make-work. Eliminating it created make-work, and increased the imbalance between sims.

What would eliminating dwell do? Well, there's a fair number of useful services that are paid for by dwell. In RL these services are paid for by part of the economy that SL isn't simulating. And they provide value to paying customers and if they went away SL would be the poorer for it.

Amazon.com is selling real items that have real value. The SL economy is selling stuff that only has value if people enjoy hanging out in SL. The economy inside SL only has value in as much as it brings in money from outside SL.

Think of it like this: SL is like a big managed server farm. You can buy a server, and run a website on it. They call the websites "sims" and "land", but you're actually running a website. Little ones are free, big ones cost money.

When you set up a website that's going to make money, you look at google, and you get into the advertising business. Let's say the hosting company is in the advertising business. They've got a monopoly on clickthrough advertising on the site, though you can sell stuff yourself or run a shop for other people... and they pay you a rebate or even extra cash if your website does well and they get lots of revenue. Some people cdon't buy stuff online. Some people do.

In SL, the people paying for the hosting are the land "owners". The people with First Land are the free hosting customers. The direct sales are people selling stuff. The clickthrough ads... that's dwell. It's measuring the eyetracks on the land, rewarding people who run popular sites that *aren't shops* for the paying customers they bring in.

If you didn't have advertising you wouldn't have a lot of the really valuable services on the net. Like google. You'd have Amazon, but how much time do you spend on Amazon?

There's nothing as big as google in SL, but SL isn't as big as the Internet. There's a lot of little things.

OK, let's leave Amazon behind. Let's look at Disneyland.

Disneyland is interesting. Disneyland actually makes a huge amount of its money from content. Linden Labs doesn't... it makes its money by being the owner of the land under Disneyland. Disneyland makes its money from the rides and shows.. but it also makes money from the hotels and concessions, and from the parking fees, and the concessions in return provide value to the patrons at Disneyland.

SL without dwell is like the landlord of a Disneyland that has no concessions, just rides. And that Disneyland would be a lot smaller, and poorer.

Now let's look at camping ghettoes. What are they doing? They're like people who get paid to click on banner ads to inflate the ratings. They don't buy anything, they don't pay anything to the "hosting provider". All they do is divert some of the resources that would have gone to other sites into someone who's not actually doing anything.

LL doesn't know what's needed. If they did they'd have phantomed the roofs of the telehubs, the default animations wouldn't suck, and they'd have direct support for all the stuff people make to fine-tune the way SL behaved from animation overriders on up. So they've built an economy to tell them what to make, and also to help lead people in to making it. Some of the things they need to make can support themselves. Some can't. So they're using dwell... eyetracks from the paybacks to banner ads... to pay for that content that people like.

Without that, what you'll get is content that people want to buy directly. It'll all be malls and "vanity home page" free websites, one after the other, because selling stuff in malls will be the only way for people to make their rent. And that would be fine... except that people are *also* paying LL to provide the stuff they don't want to buy directly, and the malls are selling stuff you can only use in SL.

So LL has to provide a mechanism to make interesting content happen happen. And the only mechanism they have to do that is the Linden economy. And they want that economy to produce analogs of Disneyland and Google, instead of just the mall of the Americas and Amazon. So they need dwell. And if someone messes things up by gaming dwell, they need to change it. But I can't see them getting rid of it.

That's part of what makes this an interesting experiment. And also why it would be interesting to Microsoft. Imagine, they could play with strong DRM policies without pissing people off as much before they apply them in the real world... because people are USED TO strong DRM in SL.

Wait, weren't you the dude who was asking advice on how to get more dwell in another thread?

Dwellnor awards pay part (maybe as much as 15-20%) of my costs of running the spa. People talk about quality stuff being missed due to dwell, but honestly I think that people who create quality stuff in terms of events do rely at least a little on dwell to pay their teir and make it happen. It is true that it gets gamed by other folks. My traffic usually runs around 3000 (though this week it is much higher because of some fabulous events this weekend) but that winds up being $30-40 usd against my $220 costs of running the spa. The rest i pay out of pocket from sales (or, heaven forbid the day should come when I have not enough sales, plain old out of pocket).

In short, get rid of dwell and you get rid of an important way for people to do what they do in terms of providing a social landscape and functioning community for SL. Without that social landscape, guess what? No more sales of any kind. People who hang out by themselves building don't care if their shoes are cute (or I don't if I am building, at any rate).

SL and all of the merchants who rely upon it absolutely need SOME system of ensuring that someone does the task of making social opportunities. In part I am torn because heaven knows it sickens me a bit when people say they can't come to a really awesome event because they are busy paying off their slot debt by camping. Nonetheless, to get rid of dwell--without some other comprehensive system in place that rewards makers of social content--will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The way I see it, possession is and always will be nine-tenths of the law.

From a business standpoint, sure - let's make data a commodity that we artificially buy and trade, making ourselves new markets. Meanwhile, society slowly creeps up its own ass...


Well.

Fact is, something like that ultimately stifles competition, which is exactly what a corp wants. The only reason it kinda "works" in Second Life is because the world is small and the data is housed, in full, on Linden servers.

And because most of the hackers are polite enough to not break the code.


There is no doubt in my mind Microsoft, Sony, et al are playing with power. I just cannot see it being good for the end consumer or designer both.


Cory Doctorow, who I will concede is way more learned in the subject than I am, gave an excellent talk on the subject. The transcript can be found here:

http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

That is such a great talk, and a fun read with very wet, colorful language.

I lurve the part where Cory relates piano rolls to digitally coping music. Sooo true.

Gosh, humans can be so damned redundant.

A thought struck me:

Is it possible that camping chairs would stick around even if dwell was removed, because a big tower of green dots on the map is the best marketing under P2P? Ok, it's expensive marketing, but..

It's likely a variant of this is possible, because I know some Resis get very much concerned with how their traffic numbers look on a day-to-day basis. Green dots being somewhat corresponding to that. The whole spectator phenomenon or bystander effect of, "Wow, there's lots of people there, I wonder if something interesting is going on!"

I've actually wanted a list, not unlike an AOL chatroom (in the best of ways, I assure), that shows the # of people currently in each region in sortable order. And if that's too database-intensive, just the Top 50 or so. Hovertipping over all the stacked regions is too slow, and the world is getting so large that this takes a lot of map zooming. Very time-consuming.

Ever heard of Advogato?

Here is how you make such a system "game" resistant.
http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html

This could also be applied to the current dwell system and to the rating system. I don't know how resource intensive this process is, but it is probably the most efficient given its ability to strongly resist being gamed. That is if it is implemented properly. I think this would also avoid favortism problems.

Careful how you quote, it looked like you were asking me that for a second before I caught on that you'd accidentally attached my name to someone else's message.

*runs along to fix*

On another note: (rethinking the issue of dwell on 1.5 hours sleep, so maybe i'm especially loopy) removing dwell WITH a TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM IN PLACE to help event hosts / social content providers, would be essential to changing the way people think about entertainment in SL. Perhaps, given time, folks would be willing to actually pay for entertainment.

I capped the phrase above because it is absolutely essential to the rest of the concept. Events / social content makers have had to weather a number of difficulties established by policy changes, if they chose to stick around at all. Many simply stopped hosting (thus compounding the issue of lack of variety in the events list). Without a transitional plan of some sort in place, cutting dwell would be a death knell to many great establishments, as dwell funds the org. / owner either directly through dwellnor or indirectly through metadverse or vendor stalls. I think we'd see genuine events content drop dramatically at a time when new players are entering the game in record numbers and asking what there is to do here. This could lead to cognitive dissonance among new consumers which would not be good. I'd venture a guess that new players who decide, "Yes, SL is for me," bring other folks with them at a higher rate than people who have been here for some time.

Transition to what?

In the real world, dwell pays for a huge amount of the real economy. In the real world we can't do without dwell. We call it advertising, and concession stands, and sales tax, and thousands of other things that end up subsidizing free entertainment in RL, from public parks to "free" concerts.

Well, it's certainly less destructive to try an experiment in SL than RL, but I think it's been tried often enough in RL to make it a poor bet.

I'm not sure I understand dwell in the real world.

In second life, the more people spend time on your property, the more subsidies you get. Therefore we have people paying other people to spend time on their property.

In the real world, this is almost always the opposite, the more people who spend time on your property the greater your costs are going to be. In the real world we mostly pay admissions to be on private property or in some cases get free admission, but there are things for sale on that property. I'm having trouble thinking of a private insitution that pays people to sit around and do nothing on their property and is compensated for it by the government. They might enjoy a subsidy that increases the more popular they are, but institutions still charge admission and the subsidy is never so out of whack that people are paid to simply sit around and do nothing.

In your example, things like advertising and concession sales pay for the free entertainment. That's not the equivalent of "dwell" in my mind. The equivalent of "dwell" in my mind would be the National Endowment for the Arts, and your grant doesn't go up the more people you pay to sit around your apartment and watch you paint.

When you go to a movie theatre, you don't just watch the movie. You buy popcorn, you may pay for parking, you may eat at a restaurant in the mall. The theatre gets a cut of all this activity, and if it wasn't there you would pay more for the ticket. Sometimes that cut's large enough the "ticket" is free.

Avatars don't eat, so they don't buy that popcorn.

Dwell simulates all these little transactions that would be going to the property owner through franchises, rent, parking fees, and so on... that don't exist in SL. They represent an income source from an economic activity that's too boring and annoying to get people to do explicitly in SL. You never buy necessities in SL. EVERYTHING you buy is a luxury, discretionary spending, even the land you live on is optional.

There's lots of ways LL could have simulated this. They could have made your AV wear out, so it needed to eat, and simulated eating... but that's annoying, complex, and would plain turn me off.

Instead, they have dwell. When you get dwell for me being on your land, they're going "Argent spent 3 hours on your land last night, odds are he'd have bought dinner in this time, here's your share of the cost of the meal".

The analog for that would be the explicit events subsidies, no?

the p2p teleporting issue is a loss in the value invested in the land. it's about losing a priviliged position, not dwell.

one of the most popular clubs in SL is located next to my land in larsen. it's about 700 m from a hub.

Your examples of real life "dwell" do happen Second Life, 3rd parties pay property owners rent to put up vendors and in some cases advertising. Some places create such a great vibe that people want to rent apartments there. And there is no reason that in the future third parties couldn't sponsor popular places. That is the equivalent of the advertising and concessions from real life, not dwell. I just don't think it's a very good parrallel. The way dwell is implemented in SL is like the local government giving money to the local movie theatre and that subsidy increasing with the traffic the theatre generates. If the subsidy was big enough, maybe the movie theatre would make movies free, or even pay you to come watch. That's what we have in SL and it's silly.

But, I guess we disagree.

Anway...

There are two primary reasons why people want high traffic numbers:

1) A higher spot in various searches (which for some increases revenue from rent/sales).
2) Subsidies from LL.

I'm betting that what drives things like money chairs is mainly number 1, not the subsidies. A simple fix would be to greatly devalue the amount of "traffic" that one avi can generate in a day. After they have spent 20 or 30 minutes on your property you get no more (or very very little) benefit from them being there. This would encourage more events I think because the property would want new people coming in every 30-60 minutes or so, not to just get 10 avis to sit on chairs all day.

A better idea would be to replace the current search utility with a more google-like search engine. Allow property owners to create more complete descriptions of their property with more key words. Traffic should affect the the search engine, but in a less obvious way. Perhaps not even display traffic numbers in the search engine.

As for the subsidies...

Is the idea of these subsidies to encourage real quality entertainment within SL? If that is the case, they should drop dwell and the development incentives, because they aren't working. Instead, they should create more contests and sponsorship programs which directly reward those who are making Second Life a more interesting and fun place to spend time.

I highly doubt that dwell income was implemented by the Lindens as a way to simulate revenue from concessions. It was probably implemented as a way to reward the creation of desirable content and events. But like all systems it runs the course of the path of least resistance, which results in free money chairs. I am new here so maybe dwell does not directly result in free money chairs, but it is probably a contributing factor. I think its been mentioned before but there is a big reason why money chairs are used so much.

Here is how I see the cash flow in SL.

Successful merchandisers want their goods placed in high traffic areas, to maximize exposure and therefore purchasers. Land owners see this potential market and want to be able attract merchandisers and to be able to charge a premium for placing product on their land. The best way to attract merchandisers is to have high traffic numbers. The best way to have high traffic numbers is to be in the top of the search results. The best way to be at the top of the search results is to have high traffic. The best way to have high traffic is to have money chairs. And thus indirectly merchandisers drive the use of money chairs.

Merchandisers and content producers are not neccesarily the same people. Some distinction needs to be made between high traffic in general and high traffic of people with Lindens to spend and willingness to spend it on something. While money chair people might not be the same as shoppers it is difficult to distinguish the two and to attract them seperately. They probably both follow the crowd anyways, so if you get one you likely get the other. Some might argue that even campers spend every once in a while as well. Maybe some smart fellow can innovate a way to attract the shoppers and not the campers. Of course there may not be any efficiency with this seperation thus making the effort not worth it.

Is Dwell doomed?

Yes LF it is.

These two statements are equivalent. The purpose of ANY economic activity is to reward the creation of goods and services, and the most effective ones do this regardless of people's intentions. The most effective mechanisms are going to tend to be similar, no matter how they were intended to work or what they were intended to do.

So it doesn't matter whether that's what they explicitly intended or not, what they did was fill in a hole in the economic model. They would be best served by looking at what's filling that hole in the real world, and borrowing features that are useful. Like the ones I'm suggesting.

Doomed, I say....DOOMED....muhahahaha!

In an economy where the only things for sale are luxuries, I don't think that's going to be a big enough factor to produce the attractions LL wants to see.

I think that's been tried before. But like the user ratings, it becomes a case of "I'll vote for you if you vote for me", which then extends to "I'll vote for everyone because everyone will vote for me".

Basically, in any system where any of the participants is getting money from nowhere, there is always going to be an "everybody-wins" game of maximising the income obtained. The difficulty is finding something, like a drink IRL, that you can sell at events that increases the event's value while not making it worthless to anyone who doesn't buy one. On SL that's especially a problem, because the type of things it seems you could sell (like small accessories, personal particle effects, etc) could be sold just as well independantly of the event or even just created by the people in question.

Just adjust the dwell based on the income of the resi.

Then you've got more incentive to attract people who can't be trivially bought off with camping chairs.

Mags...they are not talking about it because many are AFK while sitting in money chairs, or dancing on money dance pads, and even standing on money surf boards, all designed to get the dwell benefits for the land owner.

Dwell is not just about the meager amount of linden received as payment, or even DI...dwell is also about getting the top listing spot in the directory, another competition set into place because of the Linden penchant for ranking by popularity. A better system of in-world advertising would help that problem and to really, honestly, eliminate all the various forms of "BEST OF" whatever that remain in SL.

Do you think the current way that Dwell happens is encouraging the production of attractions that LL wants to see: Islands inhabited with AFK zombies collecting money? If that what they intended and desired, well they certainly got it.