Why Don't People Pool Tier and Govern Sims?

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Please cease and desist the off-topic personal conversations in this thread. Consider this the threads warning.

Gwyn, I think you've been around the social democrats too long, if you characterize my model as a "benevolent dictatorship". It's just a slam, pure and simple, and one I'd like to think you didn't intentionally mean, but I'm sure you're delighting in it in some level and even congratulating yourself to be the one to twist the knife into Prokofy's back most effectively. You surely know that in *this climate* on *this forum* to call my or my system a "benevelop dictatorship" is to just invite further derision and even loss of business.

Doing loads of customer service -- which means eating a lot of shit, basically -- isn't being a dictator. I don't have the brutally efficient technology of a GIGAS, a lot of it is manually done precisely to enable better customer service. I try to be responsive to what people need, and often have to factor in what neighbours want, too.

I'll never forget the uproar caused by a certain few in Alston over a big yacht in the water which in fact was only there temporarily until my tenant moved elsewhere. The nastiness I endured over that kind of incident is profound. Nowhere is there any recognition that most landlords would have given the back of their hands to any neighbours having a thing to say about what something looked like on their land. It's only because I've gotten four-square behind the idea of trying to harmonize with neighbours (I even asked my principal neighbour with a business what he thought) that someone could try to insolently "call me" on being a "hypocrite" by "allowing a big-ass build".

Far from being the dicatorship you imagine, my rentals system itself is set up with its rules -- pay the box, and get more or less the same view in the morning. The system and the people in it police themselves. It's the neighbours themselves who ask me if in fact a fellow neighbour blocking their view couldn't be asked to change, move, put up a tree, etc. The tenants just talk to themselves without me and fix their own problems as often as not. Some come running to me to settle disputes the way players here run to the Lindens, but most adults don't do that sort of thing and just work it out normally.

Disputes or problems actually happens a lot less than you'd think because most people read the instructions "build two storeys" and "don't block the view" and "no excessive scripts, particles, lag, etc." and they "get it" and they are considerate. Or they take an existing prefab.

I think you're describing your pigeon-holed view of this system from your perch on one spot in it, in Alston, where you don't even spend much time. And if you have some anecdotal impression of me "hovering all over fixing something" could it be I was spending a lot of time trying to brief a newbie on everything from "what is a prim" to "how to line up their prefab" they insisted on building themselves? Whatever. Helping newbies is sacrosanct activity burnishing the reputation of the sainted -- except when it isn't, and it's just benevolent dictatorship lol, eh?

In some other communities, there are people who are not just submitting to the will of some "benevolent dictator" but participating in a group in decisions. For example, making a market place, trying to deal with a problem club or whatever. Or putting up certain types of houses. Or experimenting with building. This is only just beginning to be developed and I'm thinking it will take some 2 years or more to develop. I'm hoping people will just take over these communities themselves, that I can just sketch them out and give them to people who want them.

I sold off most of Ravenglass with that intention, for example, once it was laid out, and sold then the other residents then take up the issues of prims and views and whatnot. I had hoped to find a residential buyer for the island there but it just never materialized for a lot of reasons so I turned it into an apartment tower and market thinking that might help get some use out of it. On Ravenglass and in other communities I've sponsored builders by paying them do make the community buildings or houses rented or malls where I'm encouraging low-cost rentals to help people break into the market.

I'd be happy to have more company in this project than a few long-term tenants who agreed to be officers, or those currently donating tier or those currently taking on building projects, sometimes for pay, sometimes pro bono. The obstacles are as follows:

o poor climate for business in general -- game performance is basically at issue, and a lot of people just don't log-in after experiencing all the patch issues.
o anti-business attitude -- buying and managing sims -- the land business in general -- has significant opposition from a small but vocal minority who seek to influence the Lindens who, in my perception, are themselves conflicted on these land issues or at least have some dispute among themselves on how to handle them.
o insecurity of group land tools -- officer recall problem, treacherous officer problem of selling land out from under you, tier-pulling
o group object bugginess -- HUGE problem as you must know if you've worked in a group.

These things will be resolved in the next year I imagine, and I think it will get easier to work in groups. I had just thought to start a lot of pots boiling and see which ones work. For example if I find that the stake-rent-buy concept is just too slow-moving (it worked to sell out one patch of about 18,000 in Pickerel and to sell a fair amount of Alice) then I'd junk that. If themed communities can't work in competition with themed private islands, well I might find some other recipe. The point is to experiment with what works.

Your characterization of Neualtenberg as this lovely bottom-up grassroots transpositional community is way off the mark. I can see that like any sim project it depends on one very, very strong -- even dictatorial *cough* personality. You know it and I know it.
And there are very troublesome features to any "social democracy" and the first of them is failure to advertise it for what it is -- not democracy, not "bottom up" grassroots organizing, but an ideological strait-jacket that sooner or later will punish dissent, curb free expression, and attempt to harness the natural human entrepreneurial spirit!

Once I was talking to a Linden about these residential communities. And he said that the chief ingredient that the Lindens can see in them is that one strong person takes charge to make the sim work. They didn't seem to cast that in a negative light, as so many do here when they snipe at if not massacre anybody who sticks their head up above the FIC-approved line. Instead, they seemed to realize that sometimes public interest projects or businesses that serve the community take strong leadership.

Frankly, I'm not afraid of taking responsibility, experimenting, and being called a "benevolent dictator" or worse. I hardly think that a person who lets others have sims for less than what they'd pay the Lindens, and have their own music, landscaping, house choice, etc. is such a "dictator" as you imagine. The service involved in staggering, you just have no idea. The work involved in trying to keep a sim looking its best is enormous, precisely because people disagree what it means. Sometimes, when it just can't go on working due to problem builds nearby or just lack of flight-pattern access, I just give away the land as I did they other night because it's not worth paying the tier on it.

1 - your business
=====================
prok, i'm not belittling or attacking what you do in game. i think you enjoy what you do, and i think your tenants do as well. as far as secondlife as a game and hobby goes, it's great that you can have this community building expirement and break it even or a little extra.

my measure of profitable not only includes the fun factor but the value of my time. as i've told you inworld, land is a very expensive commodity, even in SL. economically, to own 5 -6 sims worth of land on the grid means easily an 8-10 thousand USD investment. that is an annual 401k contribution for most people. so it is essential at the very least, to not upset ones spouse or jeapordize children's college funds, that the investment atleast return a 15% return on the year.

unlike the island grid model, the main grid model requires the landlord to manage land tools. and as of the previous patch, i believe only officers could plant vegetation, regardless of the land option. there is terraforming, vegetation, ban list, music, parcel name, autoreturn, all things a landlord must immediately address on request to remain competitive with the island grid landlords. yes i am a group officer and when people mistake mefor your assistant, i get IMs to do these very things. this aspect of it makes your project unscalable. whereas anshe can hire agents to have the power to do these things for minimal pay, you have to find people who you can trust to hold 10k or your cash at their finger tips, people who would never be motivated to do what you do for the amount of money you could possibly offer.

so with all your running around, all your low scale drama with tenant issues, do you make a minimum wage for the hours spent doing this? is minimum wage good enough for you? clearly your personal enjoyment of this experiment compensates for what is missing in terms of L$.

2 - communes
=======================

now why don't people do this as a self initiated group? you listed most of the answers. also, a tier saving is not really a considerable amount for the complications it entails and the loss of freedom.

let's use a quarter sim example - definitely a player could save 25$ by grouping land with friends. but this would require trust witha 400$ "commodity" - the land. some people, like chosen few, have found this kind of trust and are all officers. but in the alternative you propose where one person is an officer, what is the incentive for someone who can afford a 400$ piece of land to loose out on immediate control of their land for 25$ saving?

the savings cannot be a huge amount, it never will be, because if people started doing this on mass, the small saving individuals incur would become hundreds of thousands of dollars a month as a total for LL. their pricing plan will always reflect this trade off and make it an unworthwile effort.

anecdote: i tried this very thing with some friends in world when i just was getting to know them and the idea of paying of a tier saving without even having a capital investment (which i made entirely) in larsen just wasn't good enough for them, and i don't balme them. eventually i had to adapt and do as chosen few has done and take the risk in trusting people with officer status to sustain my hobby sim.

Jauani, I find these notions rather judgemental and out of whack with reality. First of all, I question your figure of 8-10k on 5-6 sims -- that's just for primo mature, because PG costs way less, and you're forgetting liquidations, public land, low times on the GOM, and good bargains on the auction as a way to acquire land for way more than that. When you stop looking at land dealing as just a drive to acquire the best primo land and sell it at the best primo price, and you look to how to make a longer-lasting business and community land holdings that people can contribute tier and time, talent, and treasure to, then you start watching for inworld deals, people start liquidating to you, you pick up bargains, etc. etc. etc.

I wouldn't expect any 15 percent ROI on the Internet for anything.

I personally am not going to get baited into a side argument about whether one has a business or a hobby when one plays SL.

The question I keep asking is why people don't pool tier. It is obviously to their advantage to do so. I don't ask why they don't pool purchase prices, at least not in this thread. That's obviously much harder to do! I ask why you couldn't get things like 100 people each donating 512s in order to have 51,200 of forest land. Imagine if you had "Newbie Forest" and it was considered "good form" and "the right thing to do" to live on your first land, then sell it, then while you saved for more before tiering up, donate your 512 to "Friends of the Forest" for a time so that you and your other friends could play in and enjoy the forest. There'd be free newbie cabins there and the idea would be to have a transitory area for a time that would constantly revolve and maybe even grow. Then you move on. It would be a right of passage for some. "The right thing to do to support the community" that many, many people could opt into instead of being a funnelling exercise by the chosen few. Why can't that happen? Well, I'm coming to think because one strong person of near maniacal dictatorial power can't compel others to do it -- sadly, that seems what it takes. I live in hope, however.

Jauani, the current tools, and maybe even of a few patches ago, do allow tenants to plan. You put the land on temp edit and they do it if they're in the group. To be sure, griefers can grief it and even join the open group and put sky boxes, and that does happen, but not enough to stop this system.



Could I spell it out once again? You need not become an officer in the group. You become a member. One person makes the purchase. Then they share the tier burden. Full stop. Why is that so hard to do? That's all. They don't even recoup their original investment, unless they do it slowly over time with rentals or a business or related sales. They just share the burden!

Stand up, Tier Nation!

These are interesting observations. A few points...



Say rather that this is Thomas Hobbes's "Sovereign" - the person whom others decide to trust and give up personal sovereignty to, for the sake of convenience, protection, order, and reputation. It is not just the foundation of a modern state, but also the foundation of profitable capitalism in an ordered society: the Sovereign provides order so others can focus development, distribution, and profit. The "people" do not necessarily trust the Sovereign, but they do trust her/his ability to maintain order and follow clearly-defined principles.



Say rather that this is "primitive, extended-family socialism" as defined by Antonio Gramsci; what socialists believe is a necessary beginning condition in the arc to the formal socialist state. The trick is to introduce this condition - which is based on small group trust - to an organization consisting of thousands and thousands of people who do not actually know each other, and cannot exercise personal trust. This is what has defeated socialism in the past, but critics have argued that this step defeats democracy as well.



Hobbes was calling for an end to hereditary monarchies, and the beginning of "meritorious monarchies", a practice he borrowed from Greek and Roman kings who would appoint and train a successor based on achievement, skill, and talent.

I read your "anarchy/libertarianism" phrase to mean Rousseau's condition of natural disorder, in which the only government is the compulsions the individual feels in order to survive or relate to others in small groups. In which case, if you were telling the story of order in SL from a western classical point of view, the next step would be the development of "Sovereigns" to maintain order and allow others to focus on development and profit.

I don't see the emergence of feudalism in SL. The feudal order in Europe and Japan was based on a rural social structure with an agrarian economy, and a belief system centered around religious hierarchy. None of that is true in SL: the social structure is urban, the economy is guild/market town with some urban characteristics, and the belief system is diverse - again, urban.

But I do think it's possible that a loose, decentralized structure of power can emerge in SL, based on ownership, production, distribution of essential commodities, and an allegiance to one among many "sovereigns" or "family groups" for protection and order - urban in character, in diversity, and in condition.

So a better comparison might be the merchant families and merchant princes of Renaissance cities such as Milan or the Hanseatic League - the Medicis, for example who ruled Florence, Italy, by cornering the commodities market and real estate.

Or you could compare to mafia families and godfathers in large cities in the western hemisphere over the last hundred years, who did somewhat the same thing in extralegal circumstances.

Either way, the comparison describes the urban, commercial character of the SL, the emerging loyalties based on commerce and distribution of commodities, growing perceptions of the need for order, and the backlash from those who have profited from the initial, individualistic conditions of disorder. And it's also a step in an evolutionary schema which I think you were trying to describe.

EDIT: Whoops, just read Jeska's warning a few posts up. I guess my response to Prok will have to go. Probably for the best. Thanks for interjecting there, Jeska before I let a few things stay up that I'd probably regret.

Seth,

I'm thinking Gwyn isn't going to find "Sovereign" a heck of a lot different or better than "Benign Dictator" in the socialist set-up. Sovereign is going to be exploiter blah blah in that world view -- but let her speak for herself.

And I've brought up the Medicis many times here before in SL discussions and TSO discussions, just google it. I believe the Lindens are like latter-day Medicis. Hanseatic League...hm...dunno. Maybe. But Medicis, yes, definitely, with the combination of lavish philanthrophy and patronage of the arts and subtle and not-so-subtle control of people and art movements.



All you have to do to see that there is feudalism of sorts is to admit that:

-- utopian vistas of fantasy architecture, flying, limitlessness, imagination et are the rural landscape
-- fiercely-knit tribes of niche-groups or friends who have completed quests ("let's all fight against the prim tax!" and tightly-knit bonded groups on some sims, especially older ones, are the rural social structure
-- the agrarian economy is the content-king economy --everybody is like the Irish lass at her loom in the cottage on the moor. If you think that sitting up to all hours peering at tiny pictorial representations of blouses on PSP is different than knitting or tatting or working the loom that some people's ancestors did in Ireland, well, think again...I think I"ve captured the modern equivalent of the Irish loom perfectly -- the Internet is the loom, the hours we pour into creations on it are the labour of the weavers, if we don't work our fingers to the bone literally, surely we'll find other things lost or worn because of our Internet work
--the belief system centered around religious hierarchy merely needs to be swapped for the techno-elite computer science religion of the tekkie-wiki with its obscurantist and arcane wizard knowledge-holders and gatekeepers and...

walla...we have exactly what you wrote about. It's just a question of transposing the key.

As for Gramsci, well, why do we have to bring him up every time we talk about socialism and society?

How about E.P. Thompson and the "Making of the English Working Class" and his study of people like the Luddites, and his later pamphlets in the 1980s like "From Below"? I found these tremendously inspirational in mapping out a social-justice oriented society but one that didn't have all that coercion of the usual socialist model and had more valuation of free-press, free democratic participation and "from-below" grassroots movements and life (apart from the "family" which isn't always the literal family but can be "the party".

the advantage is greater if there tier is pulled by one person. plus you listed so many reasons in your first post.

let me spell it out for you - people can get the same thing - ie paying tier only but directly to the owner - to an island land baron and have full officer privileges on the land. that is why it is so hard to do, and that is why you are the only person i know of trying to run this because you are the only person i know who is satisfied with what i will call a low return.

i can understand you wanting to promote this idea, and if you convince enough people this is good maybe you will get more customers prepared to pay more than what they do now.

it's an amazing system on the island grid for the owner though when you include the land sale aspect. you buy an island for 1000$, and then "sell" the land to tenants for 4 L$/m2 getting over 100% return on your investment of the initial setup, and then you charge your tenants the same tier as LL, making money for nothing. that is what you should do! then you can be landlord, build communities and everyone wins. if you own 20 of those with 8 tenants per sim you can make 2400 USD before taxes just for some dispute resolution. now that is a tier nation!

Possibly. I was looking at the Lindens as God. But the Lindens-as-Medicis and influential SL residents as "lesser Florentian families" works well, too.



Naw, I don't buy any of this. Not because I think you're wrong - I think there are elements of all of these conditions in SL. But because it doesn't cohere with the model of feudalism that Gwynneth suggested. Now if you're talking about early industrial workshop culture, the Protestant work-ethic, and the need to provide the increasingly-aware masses with fantasy-escape from the drudgery of (virtual) reality, you may be on to something there. In that case, what's emerging in SL is a mirror of a mirror of a mirror: the need for fantasy to escape the reality of the fantasy that allows you to escape from reality.



I don't advocate Gramsci's views. He's very convenient to cite because his work is such an excellent summary of the nuances of the socialist position. As for E.P. Thompson, I stand in awe, even though I don't buy a lot of what he says about the inherent "nobility" of the lower classes.

Hmm...well I'd cast the Lindens-as-Medics and influential SL residents not only as the "lesser Florentians" but some of the top craftsmen/artists/artisans who were the subjects of the patrons. See, that's how it works -- patronage, subsidy, but control. Creativity, but a certain "line". Really, I think there is ample material for study here. Whatever beauties you find in Florence you have to think about its decay as well.



Well, right about that time, people developed the belief in fairies, the stories of George MacDonald, etc. and then you had that interesting hobby where people created these little perfect worlds, these miniatures inside shoeboxes, remember? VERY similar to the The Sims or Second Life. Identical really, stripping away the techno differences...




People always cite him because he's the "better socialist" and they want to make socialism look its prettiest. I'm not for doing that. I think wheel out Trotsky, Deutscher, whatever, to show that it's not pretty one bit.



I think he was a product of his time like anyone, but maybe far out in front of it. I could say a lot more about him but it would get off topic. He doesn't have a *lot* to say about any nobility and was sanguine about the "masses are asses" problem but in that era, there were ideas floating around like "the noble savage" and "Adam and the first men as noble" etc. that you find in C.S. Lewis too and other British intellectuals of that time.

I was hoping that a discussion about "why don't people share tier" wouldn't have to end with a conclusion that "because the group tools suck". I'm not for blaming the group tools, which the Lindens will work on some day and understand are flawed, as the reason for everything bad in the lack of trust problem.

prok, you started the thread by listing half a dozen reasons which basically implied the group tools suck. you set the tone for this thread and essentially argued with me for agreeing with your initial assesmmeent, that tier donation had trust issues, complications for low returns, difficult to manage and fiscally disadvantageous.

truly, your focus on group tools is understandable but with island sims it is completely in LL's disadvantage to make the changes we require for group tools. i wish i could have the same fun deal on the grid that island sim owners have but that is not to be. i wish i could take tier donations and tier down and make strangers officers without risking my land, but that is not to be.

For the sixth time, Jauani, you don't have to be an officer to donate tier. Members can donate tier. When someone is a member, they can donate tier, they benefit, you benefit, they don't steal your land. If you understand that, why do you keep harping about "making strangers officers"? So they can set the music URL? But then if that's the only concern, an officer does that for a member in five seconds. The member is in a group in the first place because he didn't want the upfront purchase of land as a cost and wanted the advantages of a group. If he was that obsessed about the freedom to set his own URL, he'll pay the purchase price for land.

I made a list of problems like trust at the beginning merely to see if other people came forward to say those were their reasons and to start the discussion, not because I think those are significant obstacles. When I put out a reason that it is "fiscally disadvantageous" I'm listing an option for someone to pick, not saying that I find is such a disadvantgae myself. I don't. I think it's worth experimenting with. I think there are advantages to being on the mainland versus the islands. They include:

- Linden-made landscapes -- I think even the most gorgeous islands can't beat the Linden team's artwork
- proximity of other sims and a contiguous landscape -- some people don't like those odd edges and drop-offs on the island sims
- customer service -- this is becoming quite the issue with very overwhelmed island sim owners not responding to requests
- parceling --- my impression remains that on the mainland the options for sizes of parceling and link are more flexible but this could be subjective
- fly-overs -- some people just like to have a fresh flow of people, neighbours, accidental encounters, customers, interaction -- there is more of this on the mainland than on the islands -- it's especially important for shops and malls but also some people's workshop/homes where they like more interaction
- PG -- no island sim owner seems to have made a PG sim and for some, that's a value
- terraforming -- you don't get instant terraforming and planting rights on an island and in fact can be denied them permanently whereas in rentals on the mainland there tend to be more flexibility

The group tools hamper both mainland and island owners, but of course a mainland owner making someone an officer is risking his land. And island owner can deed to other groups of officers and give them the ability to mark their land and return prims.

I think the flexibility and options offered by rentals groups on the mainland like mind that have buy, rent-to-buy, and rent and ability to move around the system will continue to be attractive to some people. Not everyone will want to bother with such a business that will turn into a philanthrophy in some places at some times. The burden can lift once people end their antipathy to tier donation, which is a function of lack of education and ardent belief that they face some kind of risk or scam. They don't, as the person providing the tier on the group to keep it together is the one who faces the most risk in this equation.

People donating at the level of 512-8192 in particular are going to find that this is a great advantage and they can help provide the stabilty for some groups and save them some of their tier payments.

this introduces the following problembut add to the list -
turning on and off autoreturns, changing autoreturns time, planting vegetation, creating a ban list to ward off griefersif there was a kind landlord willing to run around and do it for next and nothing this wouldn't be an issue. very few landlords are willing to do this.

i did not say YOU find them disadvantageous. your personal criteria for determining success is different from mine, and perhaps most people, which is why what you are doing is attempted by few. agreedi don't think any of these are the case. island sims reduce costomer service to billing, zoning, and dispute resolution. parcels can be of any shape or size, if there was a demand for pg, that is possible, and terraforming and vegetation is more accessible to the tenant in island sims.i agree wiith you that the options are great and i don't mean to diminish your efforts. but this system will always be a philanthropy. to remain attractive to a clientele it has to maintain a very low profit margin because essentially you are giving away your own TIME to this "charity". unless you share solid figures with, you won't be very convincing that what you are doing is a sustainable business, because many of us have tried it in some shape or form in the past and if it was sustainable we'd all be doing it, since rentals are certainly more resiliant to land supply vs population growth swings than buying and selling is. anshe's midge project has moved to the Landshe grid, blue's malls have moved to his grid, before that aqua galleria had moved to a sim.

so you introduced topics of why there is a perception that tiering is bad so that when people agreed, you could refute them? was that the objective of this thread?

you might feel that this damages your expirment, but really it doesn't at all. my arguement is that people who rent from you are getting a sweet deal because they get all the benefits of island sims while being on the grid. but it is important to make it clear that it's not profitable, and that you must be doing it out of enjoyment, to prevent the next rent baron wannabee from losing his or her shirt or marriage because you misrepresented the project. there is no shame in creating a low profit community on the grid for the sheer enjoyment of sl. don't be embarassed about having fun

I don't see this as the issue you do. Most people don't need ban lists. Most people don't want planting beyond what is out there already put by the manager -- because they don't want the vegetation taking up their precious prim allotments. Usually it's a question of five minutes of minor terraforming around a house fit. And I'd leave the land on edit except for the griefing that happens often enough to land left open (as well as the mistakes that happen when people see all grouped land, regardless of group, as aqua).

I find adding these services helps you keep in touch with what the tenants want and have a more flexible offering that sells better.

I find only one area that is a HUGE time-waster right now and that is videos and radios. I can't easily deed them to the group for a tenant's use sometimes because the makers haven't figured out what they need to do to get something to work on group land. Worse, they often THINK they have figured this out but then haven't put everything in their product on either a transfer or copy basis to enable you to transfer or buy it to get it deeded. But I'm working on this problem with a couple of makers now and hope it will be ended soon.



So many people could be doing what I do. They'd have an easier time, too, if lots of small groups functioned on their own. It's only attitude and entrenched interest groups that prevent this from happening, I guess.



Um, do you own on any of these new private island sims? I do. And BOY do they have problems. We're only beginning to see the problems that all hinge on BUILDINGS. This is something I hope to write about on my blog sometime. You just have no idea what you're talking about. Customer service on islands can be a breeze -- or a huge headache. How do I know? Because I've lost tenants to these private islands...which I don't mind, because I'm a tenant on one of them myself, and I support them and life is about change...but it's interesting to see some of my old tenants then come back. Reason? No customer service -- or at least, not what they expected. Most people on the islands are happy. Not all, however, so it's good there are some alternatives like my groups.



No. If I press on my land in Aksha to terraform it, it gives me an error message: you can't do that here! I can do it only with permission from the land lord, like my tenants on the grid.



Um, everybody in SL does that, Jauani. You want to tell me that you got $50,000 a year salary in US dollars as a real estate agent in SL like a RL real estate company, with health benefits, and then added on your commissions? Or even $10,000 salary? Please spare me. The Times story the other day about the land baron didn't mention anything like a RL salary and he was one of the top barons. Give me a break.

Everyone in SL is giving their time for free. I think there are only 2-3 individuals who could even remotely come close to saying they make a RL salary with a RL normal 40 hour a week (as distinct from a hobbyists return on investment to cover expenses and RL time expenditure of many more hours a week, or at least sleep-deprived hours on top of a regular day job).




Ah, I now see what your massive posting to this thread is (you've never posted more than a line before). I do have to wonder if you and other oldbies get resentful and possibly even envious that a new person comes along, buys up a lot of land on the grid, and tries a rentals business and claims to make expenses and even come out ahead -- because you tried this, and then after awhile stopped -- possibly before it could be declared a failure, just in time to say you at least paid some expenses and a few college bills.

You now go around telling everyone that you were smart enough to get out of this "abysmal land market" "just in time" "before the crash" when "the land glut hit" and the "private islands made everything obsolete". Well, um, maybe. But maybe not. The chicken little kind of stuff here often gets proved wrong. It's not over yet, and there's no reason to expect there's some big devaluation of the mainland. Whatever you experienced in your slice-of-life is just one story, not an analysis across the board.

Honestly, Jauani, that's what this is about. And frankly, I don't have to share my business' bottom line figures with you or anyone, in keeping with the deepest SL tradition of never telling your business information in this hostile climate which is often anti-business or at least anti-any-business-but-mine-and-my-friend's.

I've been subjected to way way WAY more criticism than anybody in this business precisely because I come on the forums and speak about problems and issues frequently. I even put strangers like you in my group as officers. But I don't feel compelled to have to share all my spreadsheets with you in the name of some anxious and hectoring public scrutiny that is at root about insecurity that the land baronry niche may be floundering. Maybe someday I might do that as an instructive lesson, who knows.

As I've said any number of times to you in-world when you've pestered me about this -- as it is constantly bothering you for whatever internal reasons -- I combine different things in this business:

o land sales
o land rentals
o land and home rent to buy
o a few object sales
o tier rentals

All of this combined usually enables me to pay the tier and have some left over. I'd have more left over if I didn't have to make defensive purchases of land to protect views, or buy new houses, some of which get really expensive, i.e. $4000. But I'm hoping these costs will level off and land sales will adjust the portfolio to become more manageable.

If it doesn't make some big profit, or only breaks even, or even requires me to subsidize it, I don't care, because it's an experiment.



Jauani, this is one of those received wisdom type of things that you see all the time in the land baron community. But do you fly around the world? Do you rent at malls? DO YOU LIVE IN THE WORLD? As distinct from logging on one lot, working on a house, staying with your friends on that lot, and maybe getting as far as Dore to pester newbies?

One of the things that my work in the rentals community gives me is exposure to lots of scenes, people, land, prices, information. That's precisely why I do it this way because I love studying this information. Far form "retreating to his grid" whatever that means (his private islands) Blue Burke is alive and well at most major telehubs. Anshe is alive and well at most major hubs despite downsizing and selling off some of her acquisitions.



Uh, no. I introduced the topic to hear what people would say. I realize that it is a time-honoured tradition in SL to use the forums to introduce topics and shills to influence the tiny toy economy, but honestly, I was merely conducting an inquiry.

I am still in quest to understand why people don't do the obvious thing and join groups and donate tier. This was obvious to me from day one. But this is more of a users' question -- an end users' question. You're turned it into a land barons' debate -- "why don't more land barons try this method to make money". That's not the question. But not enough ordinary people read and post to these forums so thanks for your comments but I'll have to look elsewhere for these questions and answers now, I guess.



Jesus, that's about the most condescending thing I've seen in a long time.

I'm not under obligation to prevent other people from "losing their shirt" in this game. They are adults, they can study the market and make their own decisions. I don't have to advertise or explain myself in such a way like some walking public service announcement in order to have other people have "fairness". I didn't get any such special treatment when I came into the market -- markets are volatils and sometimes harsh, and they have to figure it out themselves.

I am also not under obligation to the "land baron community" which you represent to justify this or that business practice, especially business practices that seem to you to have such low margins, or to have such a low rate of return *that they threaten the money-making land baronry that you represent*. Sorry, but that's obvious as the nose on one's face. You'd like to see the land baron niche filled with people dedicated to making it an area where people make "15 percent return on investment" (geez, something that RL land investment often doesn't bring you). You'd like to see it be "like paying for a trust fund for college". Well, it's not. And it's not my fault.

I'm not required to keep the land baron niche open to just a few to make a killing. I can enter it, and not make a killing, and that's too bad. I think Anshe would have to take the same attitude, given her often slender margins, and I think newer land barons or dealers also have that attitude. We're not required to help sustain the 4-6 very big names who are able to pull in their $1800 a month or whatever it is they claim to make.

I don't believe there's any shame in creating a low-profit community or even non-profit community -- some of the communities I supported like Pickerel were all nonprofit. So I don't understand where you feel that I'm exhibiting some "shame" or "reluctance" -- except in your own mind, where you want me to play this game of "let's be cut-throat land barons and make X amount a week".

It's not a matter of being "embarrassed about having fun" -- that's just condescending crap, as I said, because it says "You run along, little one, and have your little hobby, don't try to make it out in the forums that it's some profit-making venture that we big boys are involved in, *pat pat pat*." Give me a break. It's not about "having fun" in some silly entertainment way. I work hard because it's a compelling experiment for me. I work at it to make money to cover the expenses and have something left over. If it flops, I don't try to cover it up by saying "oh, well, it's just a game, I don't need to make money anyway, it's just for fun." Instead, I say, "Oh, how can I learn from that? Is it possible to reduce costs? How can I fix this?" Few real life experiences give you that kind of constant accelerated feedback to make adjustments on a business.

Jauani, you retired from the land baron business, though I see you still selling islands. I didn't retire from land renting and selling (I don't consider myself a baron). So please stop sniping at me from your retirement. FInd something else to do in your retirement, or find another target.

Let me just summarize where I think this thread and discussion stands:

People don't pool tier and work on managing sims together due to lack of trust.
They don't need to trust each other if they don't make each other officers, however. Still, to be effective, groups need to have officers who share the work, if even to serve in an emergency in a pinch.

Recently, I made Gwyn and Jauani officers in my group after yet another malicious officer recall attack, exploiting the vulnerability of the group. This is when a non-tenant -- someone who just joins the group to make an attack -- triggers officer recall to get a 2/3 vote to remove an officer. This would remove an officer who paid for land, and who paid for tier on land, jeopardizing the entire group. It also means that a rogue officer could be brought in to sell out the group by engineering a malicious vote. There's a very simple workaround -- you just leave the group to derail the election -- it stops instantly -- and then have your own alt or your friendly officer invite you back in the group. But given login problems, crashing, account mess-ups -- it's just good to have a back-up to have that all-important invitation to come back into what is your own group!

This is a fatal flaw in the group tools, one the Lindens know about, and one that Don Linden says he will remove in 1.7, although a few players continue to complain about this possible removal, thinking the benefits of removing "tyrannical or absentee officers" outweigh the risks. Trust me, I'm here to tell you, they don't.

So where does this stand now? Both Jauani and Gwyn were merely officers for me as a back-up, not with any deep support of me or my projects. Mainly, they support Neualtenberg, Gwyn as a long-time, active supporter with an evidently rich but complex relationship, Jauani as a recent member just "to support it politically" -- the one land project he appears to have put his weight behind. Each of these players have their own interests, projects, businesses, and Neualtenberg. Those are their interests.

They aren't my interests. I don't support socialism or social democracy projects and specifically not this one.

Both of these players used this thread to mount a critique on me -- which is their right. Jauani's critique basically amounts to "you're running a hobby but claiming it can make a profit with this model so you are lying and doing a disservice to the community". He deftly killed two birds with one stone there -- making sure that land barons can resent me for undercutting them, and making sure that freebie non-profit types can resent me for charging at least something. That economies ought to become more rich and diverse seems to have escaped him -- killing off some niche someone found seems more paramount.

Well, his critique is based on a flawed and distorted presentation of what he thinks he understands about this business -- he didn't ever really study the land list and members in this very land where he was formerly an officer, to see that not that many people donate tier, and the business model doesn't depend on tier, but is just the normal cash rental like his own.

Gwyn's critique amounts to the charge that the system is "a benevolent dictatorship," that is depends on only one strong personality (me) whereas she makes out her rosy-hued Neualtenberg to not depend on one strong personality *cough*. Well, food for another thread.

Bottom line, these two players have their own interests. They have their own critiques of me and my projects. That's fine, legitimate, and I respect it and I encourage them to post and discuss freely because I'm not touchy about critiques, indeed I open myself up to them frequently to get information, feedback, and the ability to change things.

Yet the moral of the story is: people have different interests. If those interests aren't shared, it's hard to have them be officers. If they're going to mount attacks on you and your business in the forums, well, let them. But then do they need to be officers? No, of course not. They can be friends, or not-friends, but the point is...officers in a group just generally have to be people you can rely on not to actually attempt to denigrate you and run down your business, even for the sake of interesting public dialogues.

this isn't a summary so much as a reiteration of your position while ignoring things you disagreed with.

Um, if it was important enough to you to discuss these ideas Self, you should reiterate them here and explain where you think my oversights are. I don't see them.

I think that I didn't ignore things like posters here persistently attacking what amounts to a fraction of my business plan by constantly rehearsing this belief that officers are needed for tier donation. I challenged it as incorrect. They never acknowledged it. Whatever.

This isn't a thread about my business. It's a thread about why people don't donate tier. Tier donation is part of a feature of my business, only one aspect of it. It's not something I've made some central tenet of some central belief system, just one aspect of something I think is worth doing, and I ask why more people don't do it, for business, for pleasure, for non-profit work. I just don't get it.

Trust is a big part of it. Yet you can eliminate the lack of trust in a game by having people pay the Lindens the tier. It's actually a brilliant solution to the problem. They are a kind of holding company. You trust them, you pay them. They give you a chit you use to pay others -- tier donations. It's really rather a brilliant strategy. And yet, it never worked.

I'd love to hear from the Linden or Lindens who thought up this concept. What did they intend? How did they conceive of it originally? Did they only see it as creative projects? Or did they imagine businesses with boards of trustees and a CEO -- a firm -- could emerge from it?

Honestly, I wish that Phil himself could comment on this so I'm going to put this question up on the Linden thing.

1> this discussion was initially about why people don't do this for themselves and make little communes to enjoy the benefits of group tools. then you brought in your personal project. this thread was not a critique of your experiment until you brought it up as an example to defend tier donation. you have to decide, is this about communes or your business experiment. personally, i think they are both problematic but am willing to be convinced on either if you actually presented a solid arguement.

2> yes its true i got out of the land market when i felt it was no longer giving me a return for the time i was putting into it. in the mean time every one of the land traders i talk to in world complained about the tough few months after the island grids came online. they chose to tough it out, i chose to cash out and wait for a better time. toughing it out can have great rewards but it is definitely a demoralizing thing to endure. now that the market has adjusted to the shock, you quite possibly might see jauani wu's name more often on the auction boards. but eventually, when LL starts releasing land on demand, you can expect land to become another hard nose service industry for you to punch your time card at. i don't know who this "Everyone" you talk about is. i talk about land trading with very few people. it's not very exciting conversation to make people endure.

3> rhetoric - anti business blah blah blah
i don't want YOUR figures - but the figures you might have used to rationalize this project to yourself and must use to encourage others to follow suit. i briefly illustrated that there were no financial savings for donating tier, in fact it was a loss, and that the loss in land privilieges negated any benefit from sharing one players tier. you want people to donate tier, presumabely for your personal business, but you can't illustrate why it's an unquestionable benefit. either for the commune idea, or for your business. just show us something to talk about.

4> this has nothing to do with neualtenberg. and i've been a member since it's inception. you conveniently chose to neglect this when you needed to pick my brain for months about land. you really make too much out of n-burg. in fact, it has been an example of what you have been proposing since before you ever laid a pixel on the grid with donations from a multitude of players through out its history. and to remain sustainable it is moving to an island

5> you posted this thread disingeniously to find a more clever way to advertise your business so you could skim 10% tier off of players to leverage your other rentals and land sales. it doesn't hurt anybody, infact the real benefit is to your clients, since what you are doing amounts to penny chasing.

6> prok, who are you trying to kid? i was in your group as a favour to you to protect your land holdings while your account was under review by linden lab, same reason shaun is in your other too. don't paint it out as you were being magnamious to me. i gained nothing from protecting your land for you, something i need to do since you cancelled our "friendship" because, in your word, this thread was "hurting" your business.

7> that ny times article only listed earnings for mall rentals. not content sales and land sales. you know this and yet you try to misrepresent the situation. perhaps you also missed out where anshe states 6 digits? there are dozens of people making rl salaries on sl. a land trader on your tier could potentially make 2-3k USD a month if they played their cards right. that is why what you are doing is not a smart move with that much money.

you turned this into a business debate by using your experiment as an example. tier donating is obvious to you, but it seems nobody else. you still haven't said anything to make it obvious to me, anyway. the costs in playability is too high for the 10% benefit. show me otherwise.


i'm under no obligation to shut my mouth and let you mislead people into wasting their time and money on tier donations with people that they barely know or trust. it only works with officers atm, and people will be frustrated to try it otherwise. i'm entitled to argue that at least as much as you are to promote your experiement. you did get this treatment, anshe, shaun and i advised you at length. you solicited our opinions and you got them. infact on a few occasions, shaun and i went out of our way to help you.


see the thing is prok, it is. in good seasons land trading more than recoups investment and time. do you really think anshe went from 4 sims to 40 entirely on with rl investment? this is weak rhetoric since you can't be that oblivious to think what you say is true.

i scaled back from maintaining tier exclusively for land trading. i trade i miniscule irrelevant amount - 16 k m2 left over from owning a gridded sim. just so there is no confusion.
your not my target prok. the sl economy fascinates me and i enjoy discussing it. make a strong convincing arguement and your words can stand. post misleading anecdotal advertisements and you'll be taken to task.

Your response shows a great deal about your character, Jauani, and I hope some day you will feel a sense of shame re-reading this.

This thread was not designed as an infomercial for *an aspect* -- *one feature* -- of my business, but a genuine inquiry. Only a fraction of my tier donation is covered by tenants' tier donations because tier simply is not understood. I shown amply the benefits -- they don't pay up-front purchase cost, they pay Lindens securely, not me, with their own credit card, they have a sense of regularity and security in knowing the price is the same each month, and they provide me then with the 10 percent bonus to help me get my tier bill paid, even at its larger discount rate, and enable me to do things like buy lots to protect the view. Of course, that may be a fool's errand on the mainland -- the jury is still out for me on that. Maybe ultimately we'll all come to see that the mainland is for chumps, "feebs and choads" and that the smart thing to do is just lease a lot of islands, which by that point may be sims connected on the grid and zoned by Lindens, who knows.

I never claimed to be doing anything "magnanimous" by having you serve on an emergency basis as an officer, and for you to portray me as saying that, flying in the face of the record of this thread and the facts, is outrageous and just a blatant effort to pimp up your own image at my expense. I'm puzzled why you needed to do that. My even citing of the fact of you having this temp offership was to get you to look at the land list, see the number of tier donors on it, and shut up about this being some main feature of my business such as to cast the whole thing into some light if insanity.

I've more than made the case for why it benefits me and them. We'll go on doing it, without your permission. The Lindens only seem to welcome it.

I felt it was prudent to have other officers on my land due to the malicious officer attacks that paralyzed the group, and because of the review of my account. You're not supposed to discuss disciplinary actions on the forums, Jauani, and you know that. You had to get in that punch because you wanted to make sure to harm my business and my reputation some more, by portraying me in some unfavorable light to pump up yourself. For the life of me, I can only cite a sense of insecurity on your part that would make you have to do that. This review is not affecting my land so please move on. I'm going to be continuing my business.

I haven't found enduring land market fluctuations demoralizing, what I find demoralizing are unequal TOS enforcements and friends who feel the need to step on you on their way back to the land auction. Ugh! Not a pretty sight! I now understand how you got on Catherine Cotton's infamous Christmas list which was removed from her land by the Lindens.

There are indeed financial savings for me to receive tier donations. I don't have to pay that tier then, somebody else does. Each drop of tier paid by someone else is a boon for me in the way that I had it structured. I've said over and over why it is a benefit to them, but you just don't find it is -- you'd rather they paid in cash, in a system you understand, where a profit -motive is clear, in order to make it understandable -- it's as if any kind of cooperative, and one that isn't the social democracy experiment, just doesn't "fit" for you. Well, fine. It does for others. So please move on.

I didn't pick your brain about land, Jauani. You took it on yourself to always push tips on me and advice that you felt would "help" me because you, like others in your little clique, took this posture that I needed "help". I didn't need "help," and not help like that. I listened to you, but I did my own thing. I'll never forget you were the one who told me to buy in Perot, because that's where the telehub was going to be. When I pointed out to you later that it was thousands of meters from where the actual new telehub ended up, and therefore any purchase there was a total waste, you backtracked and mumbled.

I bought your land you needed to sell kinda in a hurry, Jauani. You got everything you needed out of the "friendship". So move on.

Newoldenberg is not an example of what I'm proposing, because I have nothing anywhere near the top-heavy governance, politics, Bolshevik personalities and ideals, etc. in any system I would run or participate in.



It's hard to know whether this statement bears a retort or just a copy to help in the process of you finding your shame. I'll opt for the latter.

The NYT article blurs the distinctions and the author never asks about tier or about sales or about anything else. Content sales were not brought up by the interviewee, either. So the story remains a muddle, and not my muddle.



LOL. That's a pretty sophisticated smackdown. "You aren't land baron ENOUGH and you must be STUPID too." Could people have other valuations in life? Could they actually assess that trading on the auction in the last 6 weeks would be suicide with that tier level and wish to try something else? Um...didn't you just say that yourself? Whatever. What business of yours could it be? You're not my friend. Nor my group officer.

I hope that your possession of my friendship card in these past months, and your brief stint as an officer in my group gave you enough gossip to fuel you for the next year, Jauani.

Meanwhile, take pride in the fact that with the rest of the smug jackals, you've helped close down yet another thread about an idea for change and cooperation among players, and helped preserve your position in the status quo, and kept people from doing what needs to be done to transform the possibilities for this game/metaverse beyond the small group that first created it and benefited from it.

This thread devolved into a personal dispute but it had issues of stake to the public interest so it will be closed but not deleted and hopefully will serve as a marker for those who want to contemplate the risks and rewards of donating tier.

I like new pennies, 'cause they're shiny.

~Ulrika~

prok,
i no longer expect you to actually put forth a sensible arguement for a commune that does not necessitate players already having forged a strong friendship or trust, or that your experiment can every function without being a time sink (it's unscaleable). given the oppurtunity to build a model for either, you choose rather to remain vague and mix and match the possibilities of a variety of different models, never fully fleshing out any given one.

if you can't see n-burg is just a benign commune of players coming together to do a project they are interested in and enjoy (in this case a chartered sim government) but see it as a horrific threat to secondlife as we know it, you probably are mixing metaphors and are having a tough time shifting from reality to fantasy. n-burger is someones fun way to spend an evening rather than watch law and order, and not some threat to western civilization.

you can attribute my posts to a antibusiness oldbie mentality, "horrific" social democracy (that you yourself support with event payments) or some some delusion that you are the essential stepping stone in my design to reenter the land market, or any other variety of intersting short stories. send me a pm to let me know if i've inspired some more fanfic novels in the future. i guess the idea that i also enjoy debate and hold strong opinions is not really something that fits into your list of possible motivations.

this thread has become a personal dispute because you have a media politic style of avoiding the topic and hopping around playing hopscotch when you face any serious contestation of your ideas and quickly turn it into a character attack. if being your friend means people have to agree with everything you say, then your not going to have many friends. you made this thread personal. you increasingly degenerated this discussion into more personal exchanges. i share a part in that, but from my vantage i don't feel i initiated that escalation. you try to undermine my arguement by shifting the discussion to my character or my motivations, and purposefully misrepresent in world events, cancel my friendship card for not worshipping your questionable idea. i don't know why you prefer rhetoric over content. you are wasting my brain. i'm signing off this thread. there is nothing of merit here at all. you can now repost an itemized list of your ravenglass propoganda.

I don't seek to make my particular larger groups and multiple groups scalable, I seek to encourage and empower people to do this in smaller groups, in fact, they can take my groups off my hands if they want to assume the work load. Few seldom do on the larger scale of a whole sim or a themed community, but they could be handling smaller amounts of land. There's nothing at all vague about my very detailed explanations and my repeated calls for you to go look on my land list and see how many people donate tier and how to assess this, on each given sim. But you evidently don't want to be confused by facts.

Nburg isn't benign, not on your life. And this isn't me being some nutcase. It's because the ideology of socialism is a pernicious one, that has harmed millions. It's anti-business, and hence anti-freedom. It's often anti-property. These are real concerns. It's hard to imagine how a land baron justifies hanging out at N-berg and even endorsing it, but I guess it's the old story of the rich man sending the poor man on a scholarship to go live in the commune he wouldn't want to be working in shoveling out latrines. And shovel they do. I can quite appreciate the odd afternoon sitting in a Thinkers' meeting in Nberg, and I do that on my alt who is a member of the Thinkers. But I take ideologies seriously because they have consequences in the real world in the virtual world.

It's hard to know what you mean by me "supporting social democracy with events payments." I don't pay them. And I never get them. I never apply for them. I don't qualify for them.

I'm glad you enjoy strong debate and that's why I've been your friend for months, because I enjoy it too. But now you're coming into the forums, and dumping on my business, for no blessed reason, just because it makes you feel good. Of course, little of my good name in SL or even RL can endure on these forums, but I don't let that faze me. It's not some touchiness about criticism but just a sense of revulsion that someone has to do that -- to what end?

You had to prove I'm just a rank hobbyist? Wasting money? Huh? Like that was necessary for you to feel better about your own jerking off in SL?

I haven't fasted any serious contestation of my ideas, Jauani. What I've seen is a facile and flippant and factually incorrect and loose engagement with them. You make statements that show you think officers are needed to donate tier -- they aren't. You make statements that my business model of tier donation sucks -- but that isn't my business model. You double back and say I'm a heartless gouger of tier "skimming of 10 percent" with loaded words like "skimming" -- as if you don't charge more rent than I do for the same bunches of land? Huh? Skimmer?

I didn't degenerate the discussion, Jauani, I defensed myself from attacks on my person and my business. You misrepresented it and me and my ideas. You didn't really grapple with the notion of what could motivate a person to donate tier. You can't get beyond a literal and pig-headed "revelation" that it's not a good discount for me. You can't see someone renting at lower amounts of land because you don't rent out those lower amounts of land so you don't grapple with these issues.

I deleted your card because arguing and posturing were more important to you than being a friend. You didn't argue with these ideas graciously and gracefully. Instead, you had to use it as a venue to dump on me, calling me a hobbyist, a skimmer, stupid, wasting my money, and a hundred other things.

It's only a reflection of how you feel about yourself, Jauani, and you know it. I can only say you should get over these feelings of inadequacy and celebrate what you are doing in SL because it's damn important.

I don't need someone to worship my idea. I need someone to debate it. They don't have to agree with it. All you've done is provided a textbook case about how people behave on forums -- running down and denigrating even a friend just to fit in with the mob.

My Ravenglass "propaganda" is openly available here and inworld and people can discuss it. Is yours? I've never even seen your rate card, Jauani. Do you even publicize it?

Yes, I'm grateful to you for one of my biggest revelations of SL, that the reason I was hated was because I tried to do in the open for the public what others were trying to do in secret for the select few.

So go back to doing that! Sorry to interrupt!

try posting your questions to the hotline or sending him email. if you catch him in world, you can im him.

nm.. you seem to have posted (and been answered in the hotline), but i you email philip or im him... you might still get more details.