SL must move beyond the Techi Wiki culture

soooo does this mean it's the Techi Wiki vs. the Cranial Rectumati?

I see a lot of people making a lot of L$ in Second Life, even enough that they may do it for a living. The economoy is barely large enough for a few very talented people to make anything even aproching an actual living wage(maybe a bit more), but it certainly can't support everyone who makes a script or prim build... We need more buyers to support all the creators. Second Life is growing, and it needs the cooperation of many talented people to get things done..

When we have the population and the tools to properly support high levels of commerce in Second Life, then you can complain. By then, it wont matter.. The free stuff in second life will be just like the free stuff all over the internet in general. Great tools and content, that doesnt get massivly popular because they don't have the money to advertise.. They don't sell in retail stores... John T. Smith doesn't know anything about them... Someone else will come along, pump a few dollars into Second Life, and you will see them selling real life goods and services. Not the play toys of the Second Life of today, but the things you see sold on Amazon. There will be some market for the builders and the scripters.. to primp and make pretty and functional the stores and marketplaces of larger interests. For now, let them make pretty things to attract people... Let them show us what is possible in Second Life technologically, because until Second Life has a great deal more to offer, it's not yet ready for Coke or Disney or Amazon.

SO...

Would this be the "tekki-wikki" mindset that allowed someone like myself who is not a computer scientist by any means (behavioral psych is my field) to be able to make whatever she wanted in a world where creation by its residents is part-and-parcel to the point?

The same mindset that:

1. Made sure the content creation tools were accessible by anyone with an interest.
   
2. Maintained extensive documentation of those tools, including bugs and "gotcha"s
   
3. Encouraged experimentation with constant and open discussion of the tools
   

That mindset?

Bull. That mindset needs to remain.

The dangerous mindset is the one being spread by the Malicious Fifth Column. That's the mindset that claims that diverse peoples divide into warring factions. The mindset that suggests that the very existence of a technically oriented subculture inherently inhibits the growth of other subcultures (which the Malicious Fifth Column disgustingly refers to as the "unwashed masses".

SL is about building your own world. An I know for a fact, and I have seen it said repeatedly that in building the world, any given individual may never, ever need to pull up the prim editor tools. They would never once need to have the slightest idea what a library call was. Because the world isn't just prims and LSL, and everyone bloody knows it.

The only non-technical folk I've ever seen get shot down are the ones demanding that content be made for them because, darn it, they're paying good money for this game!

Well, dear, SL isn't a game. (Hold those flames!) SL is a framework on which to build games and whatever the heck else we can think up. If Linden Lab were making something like Everquest, then the cries for content would be perfectly valid. But that's not what they're up to.

Its users make the content. And its users are here - all of them, save for (perhaps) a very few - for leisure time. Fun time. Non-serious time. You've no right, no matter how much you're paying, to expect the builders and scripters of SL to churn out content for you. So, yeah, you're going to get shot down if you demand it. C'est la deuxième vie.

The Malicious Fifth Column is the real danger here. That bears repetition. Their whole purpose is to create false divides and false struggles to fight against. Artificial anger and strife and exclusivity are their weapons.

I normally avoid these drama riddled threads like the plague, but I agree with a few things Blaze said and even a few things Prok said, actually almost everyone brought something relevant into the discussion. As Teeny mentioned, it is true that the lowest common denominator is not going to find a home here, the requirements of the software preclude anyone who is not “technically advantaged” from really enjoying SL.

I am a relatively new resident and went through what I believe is a natural progression for SL’s target audience. I read about SL from an article in the Los Angeles Times, checked out the website, did a Google search to look for the REAL information. Found the real stuff in the fan sites, blogs and other articles on the web. Decided to give the 1 week trail a shot. Found the first 3 days confusing as hell and shied away from contact with any other AV’s. On the 4th day, I found the clubs. Somewhere in the next two days that followed, I stumbled on the dearly departed Punany Club, which became my home and convinced me to sign up for a membership (so, it ultimately is all Schwan’s fault).

As I explored SL, I was certain that I would never learn to build or be able to create content. Nor did I want to at first, I had enough Lindens coming in from stipends and rating bonuses that I had no interest getting a “SL job”. I came to SL to play and do all the things that I’ve stopped doing in RL, dance in clubs half naked until wee hours of the morning, wear styles of clothes that are well past appropriate for my RL age, chat, flirt, explore….live an actual second life. Eventually, I decided to take a beginning building course. That led to time in a sandbox and discovering that I actually could make things. That, in turn, led to wanting land, which necessitated a premium membership. It didn’t take long to realize that 117 prims was not much to work with, which led to a much larger piece of land.

The financial backbone of SL is land ownership; the servers and bandwidth cost money. The staff to run them costs money. The ultimate progression for SL to continue is for a person on a trial membership to be having a good enough time to move into a basic account. This requires entertainment, lots of easy to access entertainment. Moving people from a basic account into a premium account is trickier, but without the examples of truly exceptional content (built, scripted, textured, animated or whatever) the desire for people to move into the profitable category of membership becomes limited. Loki mentioned a “bigger hook”, that hook is generally entertainment. The true geeks and artists will, of course, bypass everything and beeline into the sandboxes the minute they are off Orientation Island. But the rest of the SL users, they need entertainment to make SL worth their time and money when they could just be parked in front of American Idol. The nature of commerce is that you must have manufacturers producing highly sought after goods and consumers who want to purchase them. The fact that they don’t hang out together is irrelevant.

Too many people here forget that the forums are not SL. All this drama, whining and angst gets lost in-world. Some of it turns up at the WA, but you won’t go to the Edge on a Friday night and run into a bunch of people chatting about the anti-business attitudes of LL. I read all this gloom and doom on the forums, but the world seems to be going on about its business as usual. People close clubs in protest and three new ones spring up to take their place. Businesses thrive, businesses fail, which is the natural cycle of business. Markets change, public demand and taste changes. This year’s hot item is next year’s dud. Strong businesses adapt and strong artists adapt as well. Things that stagnate wither on the vine. Too many people fail to look outside their own box and see that sometimes a decision gets made that has a negative effect on them personally, but an overall positive effect on society as a whole. We forget that we are only looking at our own little slice of SL and LL is looking at the entire grid of 500+ sims and how to try and maintain control of a world that is almost too big for their staff to get a handle on.

Techi Wiki....... that's just dumb. Right up there with FIC. Sure SL is about roleplaying, and economy and fun, but terms like these are ridiculous.

So, respectfully blaze, I shall leave you with your imaginary friend.

That was beautifully said, Jillian. I couldn't agree more. Your entire post was right on the money. Many of us continually speak out against certain individuals at the risk of being seen as antagonistic because we see a malicious self serving and divisive mindset being preached for no other reason than exactly what I quoted above. If people really want the inclusive world they pretend to be fighting for they'd build bridges instead of burn them every chance they get.

I'm glad SL isn't the forums, or Prok and the whinerati would've scared everyone off by now.

So glad the cool kids could give a crap about what is posted here, really.

Isablan's post includes an interesting contradiction of sorts, and I think points to a larger truth about SL. All of those people crying for the poor untalented tringoistas are actually doing them a disservice in a way. Many people come into SL and think that certain things are beyond their reach - they will never build, they will never do this or that. They simply think they can't do it, they have no capacity for it or interest in it. I have met many people like that, who given just a little introduction to building, or making clothes, or animations, or various other things causes a lightbulb to go off in their head and they realize "oh wow, I can do this".

I have seen it time and again with friends - my girlfriend is a prime example. She HATED SL when she started, and was convinced she would never be able to do anything, and would just hang out, as she had done in There. After awhile, she started to experiment, and eventually discovered not only could she build, but that she really enjoyed it and it provided an untapped creative outlet for her. She has gone on to be one of the most established furniture builders in SL - and she started off with the mentality that she couldn't do it. Had she never tried, or listened to the doomsayers who say such things are bad, then she would never have discovered her own talent.

There is nothing wrong with not wanting to do any of it - to just want to come into SL and relax and have fun. What there is something wrong with is telling people they can't do something, or shouldn't enjoy it just for the sake of enjoying it - be it playing tringo or creating it.

Second Life IS NOT A GAME. Repeat that over and over in your head. It is a social experiment combined with a development platform and a virtual world simulator. In many ways, it is what the world wide web is in an alternate universe - it is whatever we want it to be, we just have to make it happen. We are here to create our own world, our own experience. Some choose to share it with others,some don't. In the end, SL brings out untapped potential in a lot of people, and elevates them to another level. Why are certain people so hell bent on perpetuating the idea that you can't learn, that you can't grow, and god forbid, that you can't share what you love with others just for the sake of sharing?

NOOOOOOOO ONE EXPECTS TEH FIC TECHI WIKKI INQUISITION!

That is the truth in a nutshell.

There are a set of people in every culture who cannot be content unless they are creating massive unrest and stirring division in others.

Interestingly, they almost always classify their efforts as 'for the greater good' or 'standing up for something', or 'not backing down from something', but if you carefully note their activities, they all have three things in common:

1) There's always something wrong.
2) There's always someone to blame.
3) There's always someone persecuting them for trying to speak 'the truth'.

Such people never take responsibility for themselves, preferring instead to blame some external force for their behavior. In much similar way, the answer is never to work WITH others, but to make others conform to their vision of 'the way it ought to be'.

Such people never quite manage to grasp how counter-productive their behavior is, nor how well it reveals their true agenda. It is never about caring what happens, it is never about the greater good. It is always about control. Always.

These people need to have your response so they can feel they have some level of control. Sad, isn't it? Every time you reply to them, even if (especially if) it is to disagree with them, all you are doing is validating to them that they have the power to stir you to response. That actually means something to them. That is all they really care about... the attention... the response... the rest is just doing whatever it takes to get it.

If you really, truly want to see an end to the psychotic behaviors of such people, all you need do is completely end your response to them. It is not easy, we all like to think it is possible to 'get through' to someone.

But there is no 'getting through' to someone who is only using the things you care about to get a reaction out of you.

He is made of harder stuff! Cardinal Fang! Fetch...THE COMFY PRIM!

The problem here is that these self-serving bastards aren't regulated. They waste precious server resources making things that The People can't even use! When have these smug scripterati ever helped a new player? They sneer at the rest of us while doing nothing but causelag! Filling sims with useless content that we have to pay for to use!!!! This must be stopped now!!!

What we need is a system of controls that guarantees that these arrogant scripterati direct their efforts in positive ways instead of using their dark arts to thumb their noses at regular users. I suggest these practical steps to controlling this secret cabal:

1. First we need to stop them in their tracks -- LL needs to turn off all scripting and building tools and shut down the wiki. NOW.

2. Next, implement a review process to control what is or is not created in Second Life to ensure that it contributes in a positive way. Won't it take those arrogant scripterati down a notch to make them beg for approval to start a new project? ONLY IF in individual gets approval to begin will they get the scripting and building tools enabled, and they must show evidence of progress within 24 hours or have their account suspended.

3. Once the project is completed, it will be distributed free of charge to everyone in Second Life with full permissions, and with the creator set to "nobody)". It's especially important not to let these underhanded techno-geeks gain influence over others by flaunting their tekki wiki deeds. All creations must be anonymous.

4. To ensure that scripters don't try to take credit for their work and contaminate the general populace with their sneering, arrogant, tekki wiki attitudes, scripterai will be relegated to a separate grid without access to IM or chat tools where they will work for the benefit of The People.

5. To ensure that The People remain free of their contaminating influences, LL should set up a hotline where residents can report any scripting tendencies in others. It's only through the vigilance of citizens like you that we can cleanse Second Life of the FIC.

I demand that LL implement these steps *immediately*.

OMG! It's contagious! Noooooo!

RUN AWAY!

without getting too much into the whole labeling thing...

ll appears to be stepping out of the social engineering business, and moving onto just providing the tools for the residents find their own way.

this may be rather technical minded, but in the long term it may be the only thing that is sustainable.

on the other hand, tringo came about even in this era of tech-mindedness. so perhaps ll social engineering is not needed.

if the supposed majority wants the kind of sl you're talking about, then perhaps that majority should do it themselves. that may be ll's message.

still, i think ll could make some tools that make sense in light of the fact that some groups work better if they can formalize their structures (e.g. contracts in sl, better group tools, better land tools, better group officer management, more ways to pool individual resources.)

One of the happiest things I have found about Tringo, SL-ingo, Bingo, and other group games of the sort are not necessarily the technical mechanics behind them (as I am unaware of those as the Yuuzhan Vong are of the Force), but rather, the social atmosphere that goes with it and the lighthearted banter between moves/rounds. It really brings people together. Tringo on a cellphone is gonna be different in that reward, as it's more of a singleplayer activity, and traditionally web-based games have been this way. Or, you square off against one, maybe a few opponents at a time, but not 30 (HOLY LAG!!! But funny).

I get a big kick out of messing up in Tringo and then going -7 after -7 with friends laughing around me. It doesn't feel so bad or lonely after all!

Sure, I may not understand what any of my scripter friends are going on about when they start talking with lots of big words, but it does make me curious to find out, to learn, to better myself and to progress. By asking questions, I learn lots. This is a curiosity that is very-present in SL and that brought me here in the first place, and will continue to keep me here.

I'm so happy to be here.

And we're so happy to have you, even if you can't script. You are a fashionista, which is far more important

"Fifth column" -- yeesh a term right out of the Bolshevik handbook. This place!

Cristiano, your argument runs a little bit like the argument that people make to justify the space group. They say that all those billions spent on sending people up to cold, harsh, airless rocks, killing some of them on the way, was justified due to some freeze-dried Tang. Well, sure, um..yeah.

OF COURSE technology benefited the whole sexay-avatar-bling thing, and your business, situated on this fareway, is well positioned to see how technology is exploited for commercial purposes.

But you're the first person to come in and get in the way of Anshe putting land on the land-for-sale list, screaming to the Lindens so that at least one very important Linden then takes it off. You're in business for yourself, but you take others OUT of business if they seem like a threatening sector or just don't "fit" with your "worldview". And you don't like other things about the "overcommercialization" of SL and the "benefits" of the land-owning classes.

You don't see that when you add up all the scripting and programming and animations and building, it doesn't equal what the content is for sale. That's because most people just hack around, or because they can't reach the marketplace. If I'm wrong, and you can show that most play-created content is in fact for sale and making a profit, ok, shoot me. But that's not what I'm seeing in the game.

The people on the tekkie wiki abhor tringo, abhor bling, abhor much of the mass culture. They may secretly in the dead of night make something that enhances the mass culture, a prefab, a curency exchange terminal, but they do it with a great sense of distaste. They don't care about customers.

The kewl kids who you think make and inhabit the world in fact are damn mad and frustrated a lot of the time because *stuff doesn't work*. That rosy portrait of the world you portray does nothing to convey the sense of people constantly crashing, not getting the videos to work, buying $999 videos and not getting them to play, having stuff go wrong constantly, struggling to learn things -- I guess I see a lot of this because I don't just sell something to someone that I never see again because they click and play, I sell something (rentals) that require constantly going back to hear their struggles with the game. I'm not overly negatively portraying the picture. A good share of the people get the game to work and have a good time and buy their bling and animations. But quite a few get frustrated and quit, and feel a wall between themselves and the technocratia that rule the game. Just go back to Caliandris' post. It is not me who says this only.



Cristiano, that's great, but it's a drop in the bucket in the SL economy, which mainly appears to derive from land sales. Maybe that's why you hate land sales and landowners so much and want to claw away their advertising capacity?

We still don't have economic analysis from Philip about WHAT KIND of sectors are getting the players' trade. If we look at "last 10 things sold in world" it's Skunk Money.

Well, keep talking there Cube, you're on to something in a general sort of way but your sniggering and satire and exaggeration of course get in the way of your point.

I have a much, much, simpler idea.

Charge.

Yeah, charge.

Like, you know how it says on my sim: "500 scripted objects". If I find out that 499 of them are yours, Cubey, for all your kewl flying submarines and stuff? Dragging our sim? Down to 37 FPS? Well, I don't pay all that money in purchase and tier to have a fucking slide show. So what I would suggest is that YOU pay to have all those scripted objects of YOURs drag on the server. Pay-per-CPU-use.

Once you have to PAY for your draw on CPU/server resources/however you want to call those things, then you will be less inclined to inflict them on others.

No. Tringo came about because the Lindens pulled the plug on events grants. That meant all those sexay avatar contests ended, dwell surpluses ended, and people ran out of ways to make money.

If Tringo hadn't been invented, somebody would have to invent it.

I 100% support you in this assertion. Those arrogant, smug scripterati should stop logging in to have fun NOW!! They need to be pressed into the service of The People. I demand action.



Prokofy is right! All of what you see in SL is user-created and I know for a fact that it WAS created in the dead of night. At gunpoint! And they hated every moment of it.

Hmm. Actually, considering how productive they are in the dead of night, I suggest that we implement longer night time cycles.

Oh my god!!! It's me?? I'm the one that's been causing all the lag and NOT PAYING FOR THE CPU!! Ban me!

Hey wait a sec. I *did* pay for it. Didn't I buy an account and land like anyone else?

Or is it that you want me to pay people to use my vehicles? I have to admit, I'm not sure why I should do that.

In the end, if you go to these lengths to discourage content creation, there would be precious little to do in SL except stand around and chat. And they don't need to rent land from you to do that, Prokofy.

In the spirit of recent suggestions and enlightenment, I propose we begin charging by the word for forum posting.

There's a lot of hogwash in this thread.


Good start.

Perverted conclusions to say the least.

A wiki is very similar to a forum. In a forum, somebody goes in and says, "I have problem X, what can I do about it" and some other helpful soul supplies an answer. The only difference is that a wiki is organized like a user's manual, which makes it easier to find information.

There is no notion of "democratic corrective" or "openness" behind a wiki. Usually a wiki appears as a response to an information vacuum. Tekkies get frustrated because they can't find documentation, so they start a wiki and collaborate on creating documentation. If LL documented LSL adequately, there would be NO WIKI for it.

There is no similarity between Marxism and "Wiki culture". There is a sector of the tekkie community that thinks that all software should be free (a socialist point of view). But this is a very small minority, and it doesn't allign with wikis at all -- wikis are frequented and contributed to by just about anybody who can contribute, including people who don't subscribe to socialist ideals at all.

I think it is amazing that there are seemingly smart people out there who say, "What I do has no value". So I am just as puzzled as you, Prok, at this sector. I think its wrong to confuse the "software-should-be-free" crowd with anything to do with Wiki, however. For example, I am NOT part of the "software-should-be-free" crowd. I think they're crazy. But I use and contribute to Wiki's all the time. I think most wiki-frequenters are like me, and not elitist or socialist at all.


This is a perverse analogy to say the least. A wiki is NOT a "collective" in the Soviet sense. It just isn't.

A wiki is more like graffiti on the wall in the men's room. Any man who can think of something cleverly vulger can contribute. But women can't. Is that a "collective"?

I'm out of time, so maybe I'll revisit this later. But I see astonishing leaps of logic and bizarre attribution of motivations.

Buster

So that's what SL is?

Now that Prokofy has dismissed my argument based on my using one of his own tactics, does that make me feted and inner, or am I stuck wth Flakey Outer Crust?