Dear Linden Labs

Yay someone agrees with me

I think there is a solution that can make everyone happy, but it would require a pretty serious update to the client.
If every user had the capability to keep their own "black list", land grief like this would eventually be rendered mute. All a user would have to do is right click on an object and choose an option like "block textures". It would add the owner of that object to a personal black list. Every time an item owned by a black listed user appeared, the textures could be greyed out or transparent. Simple.
The griefers can "express themselves" all they want and those who dislike it can choose not to be able to see it. If figure we should treat spam like, well, spam.
Anyone else agree this might be the right approach for LL?

Persig

These impeachment signs have gotten a lot of attention. They've been noticed by more people than less annoying signs would have been. These impeachment signs may be simple economic blackmail. If they aren't, they're excellent PR.

Technical solutions would work, but will dilute immersion. Censorship would similarly harm SL's environment. There are solutions, but at what cost?

A quote from terms of service....section 5.1 upload, post, email or otherwise transmit any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation;

Excuse me Mr Linden but isnt mr bush guys board "spam" and isnt he soliciting us to impeech bush? According to the TOS he is breaking the rules why dont you do something????????

according to the dictionary....

spam [ spam ]


noun (plural spams)

Definitions:
an unsolicited, often commercial, message transmitted through the Internet to a large number of recipients

on behalf of all the people who have posted complaints i respectivly demand some action be taken!!!!!
This message will be repeated in other parts of this forum if they remove it cause i am spamming they better remove his signs too

Thanks, Introvert! It seems I barely managed to get that award, since the year is almost over

The last time I thought a bit about it, based on some data, I posted the calculations here (at the end of the page).

I came up to half the running costs (ie. about $4M/year). However, I've often accused of being too much of an optimist on the salary side, and that I shouldn't consider the salary costs based on the Liaison's salary (the only value I have to work with in terms of US$/hour) and the assumption that every LL employee forfeits a big part of their salary in order to get shares of Linden Lab, so perhaps the $8M/year value you quote is more near to reality. Let's use it as a reference.

On the income side, the above link shows some calculations done in September. Here are the revised ones:

Monthly income (December 2005):

16,000 Premium Accounts at an average of US $8, that's around US $128,000
8,000 Premium Accounts paying for additional land, that's around US $50,000
18,000 new subscribers, that's unfortunately zero these days
100 new private islands, that's around US$ 125,000
400 private islands, at around US $80,000
100 land auctions - around, say, US$ 100,000
Fees from LindeX: around US$ 10,000 or so

That's about US$ 500,000/mo. It's hard to project the total annual income, as SL will grow towards 350,000 users by the end of 2006, so you have to take an average of January 2006 and December 2006, but if they reach that goal, here is the expected data for December 2006:

40,000 Premium Accounts at an average of US $8, that's around US $320,000
20,000 Premium Accounts paying for additional land, that's around US $125,000
100 new private islands, that's around US$ 125,000
1600 private islands, at around US $320,000
100 land auctions - around, say, US$ 100,000
Fees from LindeX: around US$ 35,000 or so

Total: about US$ 1M/month. I'm assuming that SL is not growing exponentially, just geometrically (ie. every month the same number of users, around 15-20,000, join SL; thus, the same number of islands are bought every month, etc)

Thus, the average will be US $750K/mo, or a total of $9 M/year, well above your predictions. Notice that the costs will be higher, of course — more Liaisons to hire (although there is no more need to hire any other people), more machines to support (since for the past months they have relied upon migrating the one-sim-per-server islands towards four-sim-per-sever structures, thus keeping the same amount of servers; but there is no way they'll keep up this strategy, they'll need more servers — around 500 new ones by the end of 2006 to support the extra 2000 sims).

The ratio of premium accounts and people paying tier above their included 512 m2 comes from very old posts by Robin Linden. The number of islands/new mainland sims is just based on this recent post by Robin.

Still, as you see, the difference between income and costs are slight — no one is going to get very rich by investing in Linden Lab — but at least they're not "losing millions per year". They're simply uninteresting and unattractive for outside investors expecting to earn billions with a "game" with 350,000 users (compare it to any other MMORPG where you'll get at least a flat fee of US$ 10-25/mo. per user, and only need a fraction of the servers to run — WoW with 4 million paying users only has 100 servers!). But for Philip and his kind, more eager to drive their ideas forward than to become stupefyingly rich in a short time (do the math for 2007, you'll see things starting to get interesting by then, as we approach the half-million mark...). Around 2008 or so — almost a decade since Philip started LL! — they'll be able to pay back all their investment. I'm not 100% that's according to plan, and it is certainly a very long time for investors to get their ROI, but it only means that the model works, somewhat, although nobody is going to earn billions, like they do on WoW, CoH, EQ, SWG, or even social MMOGs like There, IMVU, or TSO.

Yes, stubborness was meant as a compliment Perhaps a better word would be "driven".

And now back to the thread. Obviously, to keep it going, and to make sure people tier up, LL has to make everybody happy. Numbers on a spreadsheet are great fun, but if everybody is angry at LL for not complying with their wishes, people will leave, or at the very least, stop paying tier and sell their land.

Personally, I almost think that the refusal on LL's part to clear the signs ASAP (or at least, as soon as the residents wish!) comes from another reason: they wish to push people towards owning larger bits of land. The problem with "lost" 32 m2 or 64 m2 plots does not happen when you buy a sim wholesale (either on the mainland or on private islands). The message seems clear: if you don't want it to happen, get 3 or 4 friends together, split the cost among yourselves, and for just US$40 or $50 (well, almost what you would pay for playing some MMORPGs!), you can get your own sim together. This seems to be working. I'm utterly surprised to see how relatively new residents come to SL, gang up together or find a partner, and instead of buying that lovely plot of 2048 m2 together, to live in front of a wonderful view over a calm bay, they go straight towards buying a private sim. Because they know fully well that their 2048 m2 today will be in the middle of rotating prims, Bush signs, ugly towers, plywood cubes dropped from the heights, and irritating neighbours in just a few weeks, spoiling all your fun. So, the alternative is to jump straight into a private island and forget all about it.

Might LL be wanting to push people into private sims (or wholly-owned ones)? Consider LL's demographics now. 100,000 users, but only 8% pay anything for tier. On average, people pay US$14-16/mo to own their land. So, if 10 people leave in disgust, but the remaining 5 join to buy an island together, LL's going to earn about the same, but with one third of the population to support. In the medium/long term, the strategy works out fine: increasing the paying customer base and getting rid of the unpaying ones is the way to go when one has a "mixed" model (ie. free and paying users mixed together on the same infrastructure). These are perhaps LL's medium-term plans.

In the mean time, the only alternative for the ones that refuse to leave their tiny plots on the mainland, LL could completely change the way the group tools work, and give us the ability to "selectively view" other people's buildings (ie. when "muting" a resident, or banning it from your property, all their buildings become invisible to you). This is a completely different issue, a very serious one that will have implications in the way we perceive SL, but worth discussing — since we know they're tinkering with the group tools.

That's a scary scenario - and a very real risk. It doesn't even have to be a serious competitor, except in the mind of the instigator.


Extortion is bad, but imagine a disgruntled premium user who uses their 512m for sign griefing, and leaves the game.

We would be wishing it was just extortion, then. One solid year of Company-protected griefing to follow.


Jacqueline, unfortunately - your strategy will work. I only wish it wasn't necessary.

OK, I'm going to post this again because everyone somehow missed it. Let me add that it sets a very dangerous precedent for LL to censor any one resident no matter how annoying their supposed "message" may be. You're all threatening exodus now but that's nothing compared to the exodus that could happen if LL starts getting in the business of censoring people. Trust me.
So, here it is again- a solution that allows you to not be spammed by crappy "free speech" builds and that allows LL to keep their hands-off attitude towards censorship. PLEASE READ THIS:

A Perfect Technical Solution

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think there is a solution that can make everyone happy, but it would require a pretty serious update to the client.
If every user had the capability to keep their own "black list", land grief like this would eventually be rendered mute. All a user would have to do is right click on an object and choose an option like "block textures". It would add the owner of that object to a personal black list. Every time an item owned by a black listed user appeared, the textures could be greyed out or transparent. Simple.
The griefers can "express themselves" all they want and those who dislike it can choose not to be able to see it. I figure we should treat spam like, well, spam.
Anyone else agree this might be the right approach for LL?

Persig

I didn't miss it, Persig. And it's not that the message is annoying. It's what's being done under the guise of stating a message.

As for the solution, clever though it is, I think that's like treating the symptoms while letting the disease go unchecked.

coco

Actually, treating this symptom also treats the disease. You see, the Impeach Bush character is actually spending a lot of their own money to maintain all that land for their so-called political speech. The reason they do this, though, is that is still apparantly rewarding to do so. If you make it so any user who is annoyed or otherwise affected by this signage no longer has to see it, then all the expensive signage is rendered impotent. It's no longer worth it for the "Impeach Bush" guy to spend all that money on a statement no one can see any more. Forcing Linden Lab to censor somebody, however, seems short-sighted to me. Black-listing is a solution that can work much more elegantly in the long term.

Persig

Well, in the first place, it would not be censoring.

Mainly, though, it strikes me as kind like this: You have a kid that is acting up all over the classroom. You can invoke some magic so that no one sees the kid act up - but that magic takes an awful lot of time, cost, and effort.

Or you can tell the kid to cut it out.

coco

P.S. The reason I said it treats the symptom rather than the disease, is that making a way we can individually choose not to see this or that doesn't preclude more and more people coming into SL and doing the same thing this guy has done. You or I may not be looking at it, but it is going to be there still.

Ultimately, it's not going to do us any good to have thousands of parallel worlds where one sees this and the other sees that. And when other people come into the game - the media, investors, new players, etc. - they're going to want to see all of it.

coco

You know my solution isn't so terribly different from the established solutions forinternet annoyances today. Email spammers and annoying pop-ups exist on the internet but most people have filters and blockers installed to deal with these annoyances. It doesn't necessarily make the internet any less usefull or asynchronous for it's various users. It just makes it less annoying. Trying to prosecute individual spammers or companies who advertise by pop-up has proven fruitless thus far in the real world. However, these things are no longer part of *my* reality as an internet user because *I* have taken steps to ignore them.
While I agree banning would be the easiest thing to do in the short term, in the long term it doesn't make a lot of sense. If the Lindens come down and save the day by getting rid of this idiot, everyone will be happy right away. However, they've now set a precedent where they have to take action and ban users based on some arbitrary measure of community outrage. This sets them up for endless hours of sorting through land grief complaints in the future trying to decide which is legitimate and which isn't and by how much. Then, of course, there will follow the accusations of favortism and inconsistency and people will start threatening to leave on that basis instead. No, just banning a land griefer like this doesn't make sense in the long run EVEN IF 99% of the SL community is behind it right now. They have to implement a tool so that the community can police itself- just like a pop-up blocker or SPAM filter. Believe me, this kind of land grief couldn't last very long or wouldn't likely take place at all in the future if it was easy to sterilize from visibility. It costs too much money when you're just a temporary annoyance.
Basically, put your loud, annoying child in a giant soundproof room. Let them yell and scream to their heart's content where nobody can hear them or pay attention to their antics. You know what they do? They shut up pretty quickly.

Persig

Apples and oranges, Persig. SL is not an open system like the web. I'm of the opinion that SL needs to ban *no one*. All LL has to do is in house enforcing of such "spamming". No need to throw technology at the problem. That will more likely mess up SL just as every other upgrade has done.

Well, not quite.

http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=23331

Spam the net, go to prison. I hear one was murdered in Moscow, recently. Trend?



For a brief insight into how badly tech will fail, consider the developer incentive and the personal ratings system.


"Welcome to SL. Please ban the top 50 spammer names so you can see."

Alirght, you've got my attention. Please tell me:
How should LL go about enforcing this in-house?
How do they avoid the enormous overhead that goes along with this kind of active enforcement in the future?
By what standard, quantifiable measure do they determine that one person is griefing while the other person is exercising free speech?
How do they avoid claims of inconsistency in the future?

All I'm saying is just stopping the Impeach Bush signs is a quick fix that brings with it an even larger set of problems for Linden Lab. There will be others in the future. That's a fact.
The employees at LL are not dumb people. Most of them have college degrees at the very least and go on up to PhD's and/or decades of experience in the corporate tech world. They're all well versed in problem-solving and critical thinking skills. So why do you suppose they've chosen not to take action after such an overwhelming community response? You know they've all heard about it by now. They've probably even had some tense meetings over it, in fact. Perhaps it's because they have even MORE compelling reasons NOT to act- reasons so compelling, in fact, that they are willing to risk the short term loss of all the landowners who are presently ready to quit. That's just my take on it...

Persig

Are you trying to tell me that the threat of imprisonment is stopping SPAM? Uh, not by a long shot. Not yet.

No no - no banning. I am not for banning this guy. I'm for making him remove his signs.

coco

How do you "make" him do this? If you can't threaten with a ban do you threaten with a stern scolding?
What if this user (or another) then changes all the Impeach Bush signs to porn but puts them up on only half as much land as before? What if it's not porn, but a classic Greek depiction of Zeus raping a woman in the form of a bull? Art? Porn? Will Linden Labs then have to determine whether this is still grief/spamming or not? What if this user leaves ALL the impeach Bush signs up but no longer puts the land up for sale? Still totally annoying but it's no longer extortion. Is that acceptable? Do we gauge it by your moral compass or that user right next to you? At what *exact* point does this change from obvious spam to free expression? Please enlighten me.

The Lindens would be the ones to enlighten you on that. And enlighten that guy, for that matter - if only they would. IF I were them, I would say to him - you overstepped the bounds, remove those signs. And don't do it again.

You can't have law enforcement without making judgments. Just because everything is not clearly black and white doesn't mean that no judgments can ever be made.

The Lindens have had to determine in the past whether something is art or porn, and not everyone has been happy with their determination.

Likely this situation will be less up to the Lindens' moral compass than it will be up to whether or not this costs them too much money. That they keep their game solvent is the highest "moral" good in this situation.

coco

i seen this today while exploring

http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/4769/extortion3lc.jpg

it reads wana buy some land?
under that a ss of the impeach bugh signs

and at the bottom

Land Extortionist:

Like the Mafia only tackier.
this is posted right infront of a impeach bush sign

only one word, AMEN.


has anyone elese seen signs like this to combat the bush signs? or made any yourself?

At what exact point does a man become bald?

What hour, minute and second, exactly? How many hairs?

Funny though, nobody has a problem identifying blatantly bald people.

>>How should LL go about enforcing this in-house?

like they do other cases of AR. Cease and desist warnings. If neccesary, short term and as last resort, permanent bans.

>>How do they avoid the enormous overhead that goes along with this kind of active enforcement in the future?

Not enourmous. Re-active enforcement is all that's necessary. When hundreds or thousands of user complain about the same incident, thet should cue LL that something foul is afoot. One LL individual could take care of it.

>>By what standard, quantifiable measure do they determine that one person is griefing while the other person is exercising free speech?

Like all griefing determinations, judgement calls.

>>How do they avoid claims of inconsistency in the future?

This is LL we are talking about. Thats a fact of life.

"The reason they do this, though, is that is still apparantly rewarding to do so." -- Persig Phaeton

This is not necessarily the reason. There are plenty of people in the world who do things just to be annoying morons. More so, in fact, that there are reasonable people who can get along with others. The creator of these annoyances is clearly in the former group, while it seems a large portion of SL may be in the latter.

The only way this could be rewarding to the creator of these signs is if it strokes his/her ego in some way which most of us can't comprehend. Unfortunately, they take energy from us (such as those of us who write these messages) to puff up their pitiful existence.

Get rid of them, no questions asked. See if anyone complains seriously. Then deal with that. I'll bet we'll hear cheering, not shouts of "censorship!".

As I've mentioned elsewhere, if he is going to do this in the name of free specch, then perhaps we should put in place other "features" of a free society, such as democracy, as in giving every resident the right to vote on important matters.

The residents could, in effect, serve as a jury be being allowed to place a vote on matters like this that will obviously have an effect on the entire population.

I own two parcels, both of which are littered with these disgusting signs. I simply check if he has auto-return. If not, I cover them. Just put a nice texture on an object over it. There's no rule against that, so long as he doesn't have auto-return. I asked him several times to remove them, but he didn't, after claiming he would, so I simply took action.

I still think a "reputation system" could be of use. It's being implemented in other aspects of online life ( see http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8889 as an example), so why not here? Why was it scrapped (no, I haven't read all the threads about it).

A reputation system with some teeth could take care of problems like this.