About ethics: right or wrong?

No, they are *not* intended to be offensive. I actually believe those things about you.

So you don't want to make a deal, eh? I didn't think you would because you actaully believe you are always right, so you think it's right for you to post such insults, and you actually believe I am wrong so it's not alright for me to post such insults. Hmm... isn't that a bit one-sided?

That person with the list you mentioned really does need help for her compulsion. And the list was worthless on 2 counts. (1) it was list of phrases, partial sentences, and therefore none of them were in context and (2) not being in context, there was no indication of why I wrote those phrases, some of which were insults - the rest were fine. And as you well know, I don't throw insults unless the other person throws insults first. See what I mean by "out of context"? The sad thing about you is that you don't think you are being insulting because you fully believe that you are always right. Oh well, it takes all kinds, I suppose.

Ethics are in the eye of the beholder..if they were set in stone they wouldn't be ethics anymore they would be laws..

same with fair and unfair..everyone has their own view of what is fair and unfair..

it's all about keeping a good healthy flow of friction going to drive tempers up enough to create people that do random killings to keep the population down..
it's another one of Bushes plans ..like no child left behind kina thang..heheheheheh

Sling, this was posted quoting Phil, and was your first post in this thread. Need I say more?

I don't think I can agree with that. Otherwise, what's the point of etiquette; what's the point of protocol?

I am actually more offended by the law when some kinds of ethics and morals are made into requirements. Stuff I would do because I know it is right being legislated doesn't reinforce my desire to do it, it actually detracts from it.

I don't need legislation to be a good person. Woe be to those who do, though. <.<

Talarus,
With that you would thus say that ethics are not in the eye of the beholder, or as I said it: are not subject to cultural and religious influences? Your being a good person, might be a lot different from mine, for example. A person living in a jungle tribe has different ethical values then you and me. The same goes for a muslim living in Iran for example. The way they treat women might make you and me cringe, yet for them it is perfectly acceptable as they grew up with it.

Etiquette and protocol are both subject to time, culture, and a lot more things. For example I bet that in your culture it is not etiquette to burp after a good meal, yet there are cultures where it is

My husband was tryin to claim that just the other day, that burping thing....."well, in SOME cultures".......so I had to remind him, .yeah right but you a brotha from the hood, so don't even go there......

Culture is in the eye of the......culturist.

There are some things which transcend culture and personal belief. For example, there may be some cultures that believe punching a stranger in the face when first meeting is perfectly acceptable. However, in general, hurting someone without just cause isn't, no matter what the culture. People can hide behind culture as an excuse to do wrong, but that doesn't make it right.



Formal etiquette and protocol, perhaps; common etiquette and protocol, no. There are some things that transcend culture and time, from the way one acquires and keeps friends, to the way one treats a stranger in need of assistance or shelter, to the way one treats Elders and parents.

eth⋅ics  [eth-iks] –plural noun
1. a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture.

2. the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc.: medical ethics; Christian ethics.

3. moral principles, as of an individual.

4. that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.

we'll just agree that we disagree then hehehe


some don't but some do..

some may think they are doing good but not seeing the chain of effects that could be bad because they thought they were being good lol
just depends on how far past the paint job and what you consider to being a good person is..my version is probably different than yours.. hehehe

... and that, my dear Phil, is the perfect example of what I meant when I said some choose the almighty currency over making the moral choice. The draw of the buck, and the "competitiveness" justification allows them to take those extra steps into shady business territory that common business ethics won't let them go. It's very much a justification, and that fact doesn't change no matter what name one gives it, or how hard they agrue it. The very reason those shady things might help and make one stand out is because so few other people use them... and not because they're too stupid to figure it out. It's because they know it's questionable business practice at best and most creators actually do care about how they rank in opinion somewhat. Those with less scruples won't care and will very much stoop to justify and defend their sellout. My post was more or less directed at really indecent behavior, such and land botting with a no return policy, or truly deliberate scams intended to take someones money and not much more. If you choose to take what I said personally when I never mentioned you or any specific things you do, then that's your choice, but you tip your hand by getting so defensive about it when you weren't even the topic.

Seriously? lol

I think it was Liberace who coined that phrase. If you don't know who he was, he was a top american entertainer and, as such, came in for some criticism (it's the nature of some people to criticise those who do well). That was his reponse to some criticism.

However, you are mistaken (assuming that your comment was about, or included, me). I don't make any immoral choices in my pursuit of making money. You may not agree, of course, and that's your personal view, which is shared by some other people, and to which you are entitled. Others do agree, and that's our personal view, to which we are entitled. You see things your way and I see things mine. I'm happy for you to do things according to how you and others see them, and I'm happy for me to do things according to how I and others see them. It's just a shame that some people are so keen on criticising those who don't share their particular views, but that's life. When I do something that hurt you or others, then come back and criticise.

It's in the nature of people to criticize those who "do well" by cheating, too.



Through your actions, you contributed to debasing and devaluing the use of the SL search tool. That hurt me and everyone else.

Of course there are, no one said different. Yet in some cultures it is actually polite to burp after a good meal, while in my culture that is pretty rude.
What I wanted to show with that example, is not that it's suddenly perfectly allright for anyone to burp after a meal. The knowledge that it is polite in some cultures, makes it understandable when someone from such a culture does burp, however.
This thread is meant to make it easier to understand that ethics can differ between groups of people, so when someone acts against your personal ethics, that does not mean they are without ethics. Theirs simply are different from yours.


Again, no one tells different. Still acting according to ones personal/group ethics, can still go against your own set of values. That does not make anyone a bad person though, which is what I wanted to show.

In Portugal, it is impolite to mention bodily functions, so it is impolite to say "I am hungry". The polite way of saying it is something like, "I could do with something to eat".

Again, this thread was not about the Search tool, though it was inspired by the discussions around the search tool. But let me go into this remark since the thread is derailed anyway.

One thing is sure about any search engine: You always will have to optimize the collection of documents being searched, to get good results. When Search All was introduced, LL acnowledged that fact of course and called for all users to optimize their pages.

When you currently look at the first page for "Low prim furniture", every store sells low prim furniture. The results are very relevant: no matter what store I Tp to, they sell what I want. So exactly how does that hurt you? Or everyone else? Why is the value of the SL search tool less, because people choose to optimize?


There comes the question: What exactly is Search Engine Optimizing? Where does optimizing stop and cheating start?
According to the new guidelines, doing anything to artificially inflate your ranking, could result in penalties. Now would someone care to tell me what artificially inflating my ranking is? Changing parcel name or description so I get a better ranking already IS artificially inflating, as I change one of the parameters. Putting a prim up in search with some relevant keywords is. Putting any prim up in search is. Every way that you influence your html page, is artificially, isn't it? Which makes the statement in the guidelines utter bullshit. First they call to optimize, then they say you can get a penalty for doing so.

But let us forget the guidelines for a moment. Just remember the fact that LL asked us to optimize. And there is where this question gets back to ethics again. There are several ways to optimize, just to name a few:

1- change parcel name
2- change parcel description
3- get more traffic by advertising as much as you can
4- get more traffic by putting up MM boards, lucky chairs, fishing ponds, just name it.
5- get more traffic by putting up bots. camping, or store models
6- get more picks by asking people
7- get more picks by rewarding people with prizes or money

There are more of course, the parameters (not their weight) were given by LL. Now the only question is: which ones are right, which ones are wrong. And why.
One group believes 5 and 7 are very wrong, one group does not. The second group still acts from within their ethics it seems. So the only difference, is that from their ethical beliefs, one group thinks different then the other.

So tell me, if it is only a matter of not having entirely the same ethics, where is the need to get so aggresive about it?

Here's a very practical question: let's say you very own store ranks at the very bottom of all the relevant results and before anyone who doesn't actually sell "low prim furniture".

Would you honestly be happy with that? Would you accept that you deserve to be at the tail end of the results? Or would you start looking into ways to boost your position because you feel you deserve better?

And where you do draw the line at how far you're willing to go to artifically boost your own ranking? Once you've done all the clearly sanctioned means and find that while you advanced some you're still burried behind a dozen of pages are you going to accept that?

Or move on to more controversial "optimizations" where you tell yourself the end justifies the means because your store is so good that it really deservers better and people will of course agree once you claw your way to the first few pages?

If you didn't feel it yourself already that last paragraph is where - in my view - the hypothetical you would stop being ethical since you would have started to deceive yourself into believing that you were doing the right thing.

We have argued about this before but a ranking where you rank high because you choose to rank high simply is not relevant but is artifically relevant and are not good results. You may feel your store deserves to rank high but that is not a decision you should have any say in (neither should I for that matter ).

Or changing to a completely different example: if someone was looking for a victorian themed rental you'd probably agree that Caledon should be one of the high placed results. Not because Desmond should subvert search to end high but simply because it's a result that should be there because it deserves to be there.
If there were dozens of competitors who weren't nearly as good or simply unknown they should not be able to bury that result just by artifically inflating their own rank.

Search doesn't exists for your own (selfish) desires for self-promotion, it exists to provide people with results that a majority will find relevant. And maybe that does mean your store, but maybe it doesn't. The very last person who should get to decide that is you because you can't be impartial about it and every other store owner fitting the search is going to want to end up on that very first page.

Marcel:

What Talarus probably means is that, as long as he knows that people have optimised for search, thereby improving their rankings, search is debased and devalued and he is therefore hurt. If he chooses to be hurt by optimising, then he is hurt by every search engine on the web, but it's his choice.

There is a remote sense in which he may be considered to be right about the other things - natural results, which are results that are not influenced by optimisation, however slightly. It's possible that some people would prefer result to be like that and, for them, any results that have been influenced by optimisation are debased and devalued.

But no search engine wants that because their results wouldn't be as relevant/good. They actively ask us to help them by doing things to our pages so that the engine can 'know' what the pages are about. So those people can choose to be hurt by optimisation if they want. It's their own choice.

OR...

By my actions, he may mean keyword-stuffing, in which case I'd agree with him in part. It doesn't hurt anyone or debase the results, of course, but it does devalue the html page (not the reults), because the html page doesn't list the items for users. There is something else that devalues the html pages that you and I know about, but is caused by the GSA system itself - but that's different.

I know that you asked Marcel those questions but I have a view too

No I wouldn't be content to be in the ranking position you described, and no I wouldn't acceopt that it is the position I deserved because "deserve" doesn't come into search rankings - relevance does. Yes I would take steps to move up the rankings but not because I feel I deserve better. It's an error to think of search rankings as "deserved". The line I draw is - whatever I can do that is within the rules and doesn't hurt anyone. Causing other pages to move down a place to make room for mine isn't considered as hurting them.

Now let me ask you a question:-
Suppose there are 100 hotels in New York, each of which has a website that the engine has indexed, and none of the sites have any optimisation, or any search engine considerations, applied to them. When searching for 'new york hotels' the engine ranks them according to what's on their pages. One of them will, by chance, rank #1 and another of them will, by chance, rank #100. Should the hotel at #100 accept the ranking because that's what it "deserves"? That's the question.

@Kitty

Your long story can be answered with a pretty short one: No one deserves any place in Search. The place you get is a direct result of how you built up your html page, ergo: how well you optimized for the search parameters.

So where do I stop? I think I answered that already. According to me, all optimizing that is within the TOS, is good to me. Using keyword stuffing for example, is something I do not like (because the page looks rotten), but as long as it is permitted I will use it. My morals/ethics see no wrong in that. Neither it did in using traffic bots (though I did not run those).

is my store so good that I deserve a place in the top 10 of search? Really I do not know. What I do know, is that when a person searches for Low prim furniture, they want stores that sell that, and I am one of those. So I am just as relevant as Phil, as Lok, as anyone specializing in Low prim furniture. The 10 businesses that did the best optimizing, will end up at that first page. If you really want to talk deserving, the only way to derserve a spot, is work for it in terms of optimizing, nothing else. That is how Search engines work.

I never said it should be up to chance or random . LL is in a unique position since it can observe what people do *after* they've clicked a link and tp'ed over and can make a relevant metric based on that.

Web analogies also don't make much sense since for one the search engine has piles of text to base things on and a whole network of links from other sites (we have picks in SL but that doesn't really map over).

But "yes" to the question. It's not up to any one of those 100 hotels to decide where they should rank. It's possible the ranking algorithm doesn't yield results that people who search agree with (ie let's assume that the hotel that everyone unanimously agrees is the best ends up #100) in which case it's the algorithm that needs work *and* it's something the people who search will judge, not the hotel.

If I searched for "new york hotels" I'd want a list of hotels to pick from (which ideally would be more or less ordered from "good" to "bad" and not a list ordered by which hotel happened to optimize for search best. How well the people who created the hotel's site can optimize (or outright cheat) really isn't even remotely relevant to me wanting to stay there.

I wouldn't actually even search for "new york hotels" in the first place though since it's a far too wide search for a search engine to handle and would search for sites that have listings of recommended hotels in New York. It's going to be far more useful and relevant than anything a search engine can come up with.

Which really brings up a different point about SL search: there is no way to do anything like the paragraph above. I really don't want a gamed list of furniture (or low prim furniture or tropical furniture, or...) stores since chances are I'd have to wade through 20 stores full of junk and I'd would be far, far more interested in a result that leads to a page with a human composed list/review of furniture stores that have good furniture.

Search would be the more useful choice if I wanted something specific like a "room divider" or a "mirror", but for general terms it's really quite useless.

Yes, because that's what everyone really wants: if they search for furniture they don't want the store that's most likely to have something they want but they really want the store who optimized best for search .

Why do we need all or places in the first place then? Just make everyone use classifieds: it's really just as relevant and as a big perk it's an economic sink so LL can sell more L$.

Another plus is that with classifieds it's at least painstakingly obvious that the order is determined by the seller rather than having any relevancy for the searcher.

So if some started up in competition with you, using a store name that was very similar to yours, your morals/ethics would see no wrong in that because it is 'permitted'.

But Kitty, isn't this how any Search works? Whether you think of WWW search, or Enterprise search through the GSA or (for example) IBM's Omnifind, all search engines need input. That can be actual content, or metatags, all of which have to be configured by whoever offers the data. On the WWW and in SL those are the site/page owners. There simply is no other way (yet). So we, as business owners, do the best with the tools we have gotten, just as any commercial website will try the best they can. And you know what? The result is relevant sites!

What the average searcher for low prim furniture wants, is furniture that is low on prims, period. The entire top 10 does exactly offer that, and much of it. So again, what is wrong there? Isn't the result relevant to the search words?

So how about this? I've got an old 2-prim fireplace I made, back when prims were tight for me. Nobody would buy it, but it's a fireplace. Oh, and a 1-prim "couch" made of a seriously tormented Tube prim and some moderately clever scripting to figure out where to seat an avatar based on where s/he was standing. Nobody would buy that, either. But they're low prim, and furniture.

Now, I know a thing or two about optimization for SL's Search. My alt won Elanthius's keyword scamming challenge every week, back when that was going on.

And god knows I've got plenty of land otherwise idle. So, say I set up a low prim furniture store, and optimize the hell out of its pages. Yeah, you guys all have some advantages--you've had a healthy head start--but I have a trick or two up my sleeve, too.

Say I set up twenty of these very selective "low prim furniture" stores, always optimizing to exactly the limit LL specifies, with no intent of ever selling a stick of furniture.

Would that be ethical?

What I say is that the fact that keyword stuffing, bot use, picks rewards (for example) are permitted, they do not go against my ethics. They are simply part of optimizing ones parcel for search.

Piggyback riding on someone elses success does go against it. Using false keywords does too. Because they actually do harm to people, whereas search optimizin does not: People find what they were looking for.

Clearer now?