Voting system acts against technical suggestions.

The voting system is acting massively against the likelihood of any of the more technical suggestions being adopted, ever.

Except for a tiny handful of ones that capture popular attention, they're never going to get enough exposure, and really this whole system is just allowing LL to totally ignore technical suggestions "because the interest is low". The idea of equating technical quality with mass popular vote is just bizarre.

This needs highlighting to Philip. Democracy has never worked in support of minorities, and technical people and their suggestions are one such minority. We would still be living in the stone age if technical inventions first had to obtain majority interest in the population.

You just need to look at the tail end of the voting list to see a huge raft of quite wonderful suggestions that have zero change at the hands of this wonderful "democracy". And no, I don't have any suggestion of my own placed there at all, but am sad to see great ideas made by others placed on the trash heap.

This isn't working, Philip. I don't see a general solution to the problem, but there is one specific solution for everything related to the client, and that is to open source it. Yes, I know that this introduces a raft of other issues, but they are solvable. And it would overcome this current problem of the huge majority of technical proposals getting lost through the wonders of the democratic process.

LL and SL wouldn't exist if The People had had to vote on it first.

'The People' have already voted in favour of SL by coming here...

I try to remain optimistic and work with the tools we're given (while at the same time trying to fix the problems in those tools). The feature voting system as currently implemented has many problems, and this is certainly one. The way we, as technical users, can try to mitigate this one is by educating others about why these technical issues are important, to try to draw attention -- and votes -- to them. Those of us who have technical proposals or who know of technical proposals needing explanation should probably be posting here in General in addition to the posts we're generating in Feature Suggestions. The posts here need to explain in clear language what the feature is, how it would improve the lives of non-technical residents in concreat terms, and must include a link to the voting page.

That includes me, of course. I'll try to get some threads going later today. (I'm at work now.)

neko

You misunderstood.

'The People' were able to vote on coming to SL, because that is not a technical issue.

'The People' could not possibly have voted (meaningfully) on the 10 million highly involved technical points that led to the design and implementation of SL, because it would not be within their competence to do so. So if all that prior work needed to create the world had been conditional on first gaining the popular vote, there would be no SL at all.

The subject matter of design and coding would be utter gibberish to the huge majority of non-technical experts, not to mention boring. And that's the whole point being made here.

I think you're wrong Morgaine. LL isn't stupid. They know full well that they have many different types of players in SL and that to be successful they need to cater to the needs of all the different kinds... merchants, developers, socializers, shoppers, and so on. Why do you presume that's not the case?

I do 3d animation for a living... a particular type of 3d animation. The software that I use is used by many different types of animators who share some common needs and who also have very divergent needs. Features that are useful for game designers may not be useful for special effects artists or people doing achitectural viz. Stuff that's useful for the architecture/mechanical animators may not be that useful to character animators, and so on. In every major release of the software they add some features to appeal to all of their users. Some releases might be weighted more strongly towards one industry segment than another, but there is always something for everyone. I'm sure LL is bright enough to know that they have a similar situation with SL and that they'll need to keep throwing bones to all of the different types of users.

In my personal opinion, if you believe that feature voting is going to mean that technical developer types are going to be forgotten, you're on crack. LL depends on the in world developers. They aren't going to be left high and dry. Why don't you wait and see how it goes before you start pretending to have psychic knowledge of how it's going to be?

You've missed the point of the post, Chip. It wasn't about in-world, content development, it was about infrastructure development, changes that require LL coding, and that don't necessarily relate to content creation.

Your good self, as a content developer, are one more of 'The People' who in principle will have neither interest nor competence in technical infrastructure details, and therefore you won''t be voting on them, certainly not if you have only 10 votes to cast.

This isn't to say that you personally aren't an infrastructure techie too, I wouldn't know. The point is, being a content developer wouldn't automatically give you any interest whatsoever in such other issues.

Since there are a lot of content developers, I expect that they will cast a very large number of votes for content-related features, so I am entirely sure that you're right that in-world developers won't be left high and dry on the features they want. The problem is in the other areas which their interest doesn't cover.

I think Morgaine and Chip both have valid comments here (though simmer a bit, Chip ).

Placing feature priority on popularity alone is a terrible idea. I feel that the new feature voting is not an attempt to do this - rather, it's there to see what is popular at a given time and offers LL better insight at what the community wants.

Usually, you want to strike a balance between what the community wants and what you, the company, want. Swinging too far in one direction can have dangerous repercussions, and again, I feel this is only an attempt to gather data.

---

However, voting - particularly voting on bugs - can in many ways be a flawed system. To quote myself on an earlier thread:


This problem is just a small subset of the whole. From past experiences, getting technical issues on the ticket can be done in one of three ways:

1) Lobby the Lindens with the issue.
2) Strike a very popular issue with the community.
3) Create the feature/fix in some form yourself.

These need not be the only means, but they're by far the most common. Of them, two of these points are in favor of the vocal and technical minority; the other method is in favor of "The People."

I think, in that light, that we should give the system it's due and reflect on what happens. The only point I am strongly against is using it to "vote" or "prioritize" bug fixes... but that's because I feel it's unnecessary crossover of existing systems.

It occurs to me that the fact that LL has implemented a "statistics" page which breaks out the votes by overall category may be a hint that they plan to try to implement the most popular features from each category, as opposed to only the overall feature winners. However, the limited categories present some problems, as right now a massive number of votes are sitting in "Misc-Other."

I'm hoping that as they start to go through the proposals today to combine duplicates (as they said they would late last week), they'll also create some new categories and file proposals appropriately.

I also believe this won't be their only source of input in prioritizing new features.

neko

Huh?!? What?!?

I just checked, and 3 of the top 6 proposals are all technical in nature (Havoc2, HTML, and Object<->Object Communication).

What are you referring to?

- Ace

I have been pretty cranky the past couple of days. Apologies for that. Might be time for me to take a forum break for a few days

I'm referring to the collosal number of great suggestions which don't get any significant popular vote whatsoever, despite being excellent from a technical standpoint.

In my opening post I said straight off that a few do get popular attention, exactly as you say. The problem is that the majority don't, especially the ones that are phrased in non-emotive technical terms instead of for popular appeal.

"Popularity" is simply not a valid metric for technical proposals, unless everyone is equally competent in the relevant subject matter --- it then properly turns into a weighted expert opinion, which is more reasonable.

I guess the populists propably reckon that their voting on brain surgery and rocket science is as valid as that of experts with 20 years training and experience in the field. But they'd be wrong.

Ahhh, so what you're saying is that your opinions should count for more because you're smarter than everyone else. Grrrrrrr! Morgaine, get over yourself. (Okay, I'm seriously going to stop responding now)

It was said before by Jeffrey Gomez, but maybe it should be said again. This is a tool for collect customer data. Linden Labs is trying to find out what issues are important to the majority of residents. This is a way to figure out what the "BIG ISSUES" are.

Rather than working on each proposal in the order they are listed, they are only a guide to what the community wants in general. Linden Labs understands that small technical changes and fixes can greatly improve Second Life, even if most users don't know it yet. They read your feature requests.

Running a popularity contest for hypothetical features is like going to a beauty pageant to find a wife. A lot of the choices look pretty good at first, but <make up your own ending, mine would probably get Lindedited>

I rather side with Morgaine on this one.

Open-sourcing is definately not the answer.

However, prioritizing bugs and some features even by a vote that statistically is inaccurate in knowledgability upon the subject being voted on *can* be a problem I imagine.

However, given that the relevancy of this data to LL's development efforts is in question, it may not be a problem.

Why can it be a problem?

Joe "what's turing" schmoe and his "i don't develop code for a living" gang vote on bug fixes or technical features that would skew the results of a fair, educated vote.

Why won't this be a problem?

Likely because LL have a lot more technical knowledge and intellect than a lot of this forum rebuttal to every move they make gives them credit for. My guess (like many others have already postulated) is that LL will probably use blind vote statistics in conjunction with their own data in order to assist in the prioritization process.

Which would be (and is the likely) ideal.

Cheers.

(now to go back to potty mouth.)

You're the only one who mentioned "smarter", Chip. That's called a straw man --- you invent an argument yourself, and then you knock it down. Sorry, it doesn't wash. Reread my post to see what I said.

The relevant phrase is *technically informed*. Surely you don't believe that everyone is as technically informed on technical subjects as experts in those subjects, do you?

You said that you do 3D animation for a living. Well I don't. Do you believe then that my opinions on the subject would be as technically informed as your own? And that two people who are not technically informed on 3D animation should override your opinion by popular voting majority? Please ...

You need to stop spouting nonsense, Chip.

By your argument, if Linden Lab does Second Life for a living, and we don't, then we shouldn't be able to vote... so, shall we remove the feature voting system?

Exactly the same would apply if the voting system included proposals on business issues like LL tax strategy or employer benefits or overtime policy, say.

It would be entirely meaningless if those of us who know nothing about such things were to have majority-voting influence on LL's direction in such matters.

Yes, it's a general principle which applies to business as well as to technology.

If it was me, I'd analyze the votes by percentage in each category, not by total #.

Clothing
--------------
Proposal A: 500 Votes (50%)
Proposal B: 250 Votes (25%)
Proposal C: 250 Votes (25%)

Scripting
--------------
Proposal X: 50 Votes (50%)
Proposal Y: 25 Votes (25%)
Proposal Z: 25 Votes (25%)

In this way, proposals A and X get an equal "share."

Do you see what I did there?

You could also take the total number of votes into consideration separately, sort of like how the US has congress (each state gets a # of representatives in proportion to its population) and senate (each state gets 2 seats regardless of population.)

no eggy. the voting board's primary purpose is to foster the belief that we have input into the development of the software. remember when we used to believe that. well most people, that care, believe it now and will for (how long did we walk the primrose path?) a year or more.

to remove it would be as foolish as removing custom animations. wonder whatever happened to the people who were gonna do something purposeful with those? i heard a lot of talk about using them to demo bodily exercise routines and produce inworld play scenes to test stage arrangements et cetera. but i haven't seen any of that yet.

sorry, back to the topic, considering it's fundamental purpose, it doesn't matter that the voting system acts against technical suggestions.

Yes Huns, your approach is far superior to the current one, in that it would no longer try to weight totally disparate things against each other. Given enough categories, this could make voting become moderately sensible, despite still catering to mass appeal and so reducing the profile of technically sordid issues.

It'll take at least a couple of dozen separate categories to achieve this though.

The number of votes would have to rise too, or more simply, the fixed limit could be made applicable to each category separately. This is completely crucial, because without it one would still be pitting the items within each category against items in other categories, through competition for votes.

Er... I actually know of a project which is actively working on that.

However, I can't provide any evidence against your main point, that the voting system is a sham to keep people thinking their opinions count in the development prioritization process. I just hope there's a bit more merit to it than that. (hope != believe)

neko

That is certainly one possible interpretation. If one has been around here since the beginning and has witnessed no significant takeup of feature suggestions then the conclusion that this is on purpose is understandable, I think. I'm a relative newcomer.

There is no doubt that the takeup rate is infinitessimally small compared to the rate at which suggestions pour in, even if one counts only the better ones. That proportion is unlikely to change significantly unless LL open-sources its software, and even then it might not --- it purely depends on whether this project captures the FOSS community's interest, whether there are better ones to support, and other issues, as past precedent has shown.

Anyway, that's not happening now (if ever), so we're left then with looking not at the proportion of ideas taken up by LL, but at the absolute number of ideas taken up say per quarter, to gauge progress.

Do you have any rough idea on what such numbers might have been, over time?

I definitely know that the number of requests implemented is not zero, because my most pressing feature suggestion did finally get implemented --- "Leave my Camera Alone!" during Edits, as proposed by many other people too. So there is some movement.

Admittedly, it takes a lot more than that to truly substantiate the premise that "we have input into the development of the software". I would love to see some figures on this, either way.

I am well aware of what you said, Morgaine. You're asserting that you are more experienced in software development than the average person and therefore your opinions on what LL's priorities should be should be weighted more highly. I tend not to listen to self proclaimed experts.



It's funny that you mention this, since my introduction to you in these forums was you going on and on about uploading arbitrary meshes into the game while being blissfully unaware of why it wouldn't work and then touting your expertise in engineering as a counterargument when anyone tried to explain why it was a bad idea. I think you're a bit too impressed with yourself to be objective about these things. You can proclaim your genius all you like. You saying it doesn't make you any less prone to being wrong or uninformed.

Excellent, Chip. I'm glad to see that once I turned your argument on its head by showing how it would undermine your expertise in 3D animation, you've now acknowledged that there is such a thing as some people being more technically informed on a subject than others.

So, ignoring your railing against me personally, I'm glad to see that you support the proposition made in this thread, that voting by uninformed people is less than helpful.