About ethics: right or wrong?

So... here we are in an "About ethics: right or wrong? " thread.

Is right and wrong all about Sales and Tier?

To be honest when shops are up against the wall......people give two Monkeys about your ethics "right or wrong"...that's the reality of Second Life. In case you hadn't noticed, Shops are closing down all the while and not just small ones....as are SIMs being sold off (in extreme cases even abandoned esp Homestead SIMs) For many its just about survival!


.

It's not really a question of people not caring about *my* ethics.

It's a question of people not caring about the ethics that they liked to think that they had - or asserted that they had - before they noticed the wall approaching them.

I don't think that ethics and morality are meant to be 'a la carte'.


To build on Groucho Marx's line ...
"These are my ethics. If I don't like how they affect me financially, I have others."


ETA:
The original Groucho line was
'These are my principles and if you don't like them...well, I have others'

Merchants & Estate Owners worry about paying their Tiers....whether its plummeting sales or losing renters and having to consider selling off a SIM or two....these are realities of everyday SL. Piddling about and banging on about ethics won't be a priority that's for sure!

I had a resident 30 mins ago really anxious as she can't pay her rent this week..and whether i can loan her some money to pay for rent (didn't have to, as I can manually adjust the Days on the Paybox)....and that she needed to find an SL job as she didn't want to lose her nice home.
Even though it might be a Game to many, it can still cause the same sorts of anxiety as in RL (despite the Power-off button). Now it wouldn't surprise me if she ends up in the Adult sector for employment....whereby she might be throwing away her own personal morals and ethics and involving herself in activities she might not have done in RL
(She's only 20 living with Parents...so putting money into the Game is probably not an option)

If she can spend the time "working" in SL she could instead work IRL and earn real-world dollars to put into SL. Even McDonalds pays lavishly by SL standards, but some people will only "work" if they can do it in their underwear sitting in front of their computer. A lot of content creators work on this principle, too. This has taught LL and Philip that people will work for peanuts, and is why they are coming up with ways to pay sub-minimum wage through web interfaces.

They result in crap like this floating to the top...

/327/b2/330416/1.html

How is that helpful?

I don't know her personal work situation, so i'm not going to pre-judge her especially since the U.S has 10% unemployment! She might live in Hicksville which might not have a McDonalds

You might be surprised who is behind an av. There have been a few times when my alts have been late on rent because they are on a tight budget, or because they misbehaved, and I was holding out on allowance.

As far as working in your underwear.....please do not start an ethical debate on that. It won't be pretty. Some of us are passionate about that.

No, Hicksville has a McDonalds.

Yes, it is a shame when some people critisize others for their views. An aweful lot like it was when I posted a non-specific, general personal analogy about the human side of shady practices, and you reacted by calling it.. "bollox and rubbish", was it? And then have the gall to come back with something like your first line above? Serious?
Hypocrits suck.. you know that, right?
FFS.. tip over and twitch why don't ya. It's not like I ran all through the thread screaming "PHIL STUFFS!".. "PHIL STUFFS!". I don't care *what* you do. What I posted was a personal critisism of some of the reasonings and justifications that some use to enable, and make themselves feel better about stepping into questionable, greedy business practices. I'm certainly not going to feel badly about voicing that in a non-accusational way, especially in a thread about that very thing.

No, you're talking about local customs, not ethics.

Show me a "culture" that thinks it is OK to piss in a well after you've taken a drink.

Show me a "culture" that thinks it is OK to overgraze one's herd on commons land, to the detriment of other herders.

Show me a "culture" that thinks it is OK to take one's neighbor as a slave, without consent or willingness on the part of the neighbor.

Show me a "culture" that thinks it is OK to deprive another of his life, liberty, property, fruits of his labors, etc without just cause or due compensation.

I am sure you can find some culture somewhere which will, at one point or another, subscribe to one or more of those notions. At what point does that fact make ANY of them "ethical" or "right"?

As I said, there are SOME THINGS WHICH TRANSCEND CULTURE with respect to ethics, morals, and "right" vs "wrong". You hand-wave it away as not the point of the argument, but it is THE point; the ONLY point that matters.

Using traffic bots and keyword-stuffing isn't a "cultural phenomenon", it is a matter of ETHICS, just like the above examples. While SOME may believe that they are justified in participating in such activities as a matter of personal "freedom" or some misguided "spirit of competition", or even believe that they are ENTITLED to do so, the simple fact of the matter is that they are just WRONG.



..and what I wanted to show is that acting against the greater common set of ethics DOES make someone a "bad person", at least in the context of those actions.

I'm well aware of how search engines and "optimizing" your content for them work, thanks. Google spends millions of man-hours and hundreds of millions of dollars a year keeping their search engine results relevant, despite all the "cheating" that goes on. However, SL is a microcosm, and LL doesn't have the resources to put towards that kind of system. The default assumption is that people will try to be honest, and recognize where the line is. Of course, we all know that won't happen, because there is always someone willing to come along to piss in the well after drinking his fill. That fact doesn't change the default assumption, nor should it. After all, we're supposed to be responsible adults here, right? We're supposed to be fair-minded and not take more than our fair share of the resources available, right? When it doesn't happen, we get regulation, but doesn't that make the ones who necessitated regulation responsible for being unethical by taking more than their fair share, necessitating regulation in the first place?



You talk SEO, I am talking about all manner of shenanigans, including traffic bots. When the first 3 pages of the search results are nothing more than redundant copies of the same store, or the "top X" are shown as "really popular" from the traffic statistics, but in actuality are just a bunch of lousy knockoff sellers who have 35 bots on their 2048sqm parcel 24/7, how is the search tool of ANY value to me? Further, what about the residents who own the OTHER 63488sqm of the region, who can't even get into their region half the time, or the other 3+ sims on the server, which are lagging perceptibly more?

Traffic Bots were not and never were a fair, scalable answer to self-promotion, and using them thusly was unethical in the extreme. If we are to assume that ANYone could use them for that purpose "ethically", then we ALSO have to assume the case where EVERYone CAN use them for that purpose "ethically". Since SL isn't even remotely scalable such that every merchant can have an army of bots to "level the playing field" and compete on a fair basis, their use constitutes "overgrazing" of the limited resource and, thus, is UNfair and UNethical, in true "Tragedy of the Commons" style.

As for keyword stuffing, that's doing little more than pissing in the well. Yeah, you get your placement, but everybody else gets to drink the piss, not only your competitors, but all of the rest of the residents as well, because the search engine resource becomes useless.



Depends on what the ranking criteria are:

1) If it is Traffic, using means to raise Traffic which are not representative of ACTUAL "foot traffic" are cheating. More blatant abuses of it (traffic bots) should be handled more harshly than less blatant abuses of it (excessive "employees" or "models".

2) If it is keyword frequency, using redundant occurrences is cheating.

3) If it is keyword presence, using keywords which are not representative of the products/store/venue/whatever (using the word "sex" when there is nothing related to "sex" at that location) is cheating.

4) If it is picks (reference counting), then using an army of alts with their Picks full of the same pick over and over is cheating.

Do those show an emerging pattern here or do you need more to spell it out more clearly?



I don't think it is a matter of not having "entirely the same ethics", but a matter of not SUBSCRIBING to the same ethic. The ethic simply is; people can subscribe to it or not.

What makes me "so aggresive"sic) about it is that it directly impacts me negatively in several ways, both as a resident, and as a content creator. As a resident, the search engine tool is devalued and debased, making it useless for searching to find something of relevance to my queries. As a content creator, it makes for unfair and abusive competition, as the playing field cannot be level (bots/alts), or requires me to enter an ever-increasing arms race to further devalue and debase the system to even bother to compete (keyword abuse). I don't want to contribute to the problem any more by "overgrazing the commons" myself. Some may call that a "lack of gumption" to be competitive or whatever; I call it being ethical and responsible, and being a "fair competitor", trying to run in a fair race.

So the most important thing is the money?

If someone engages in unethical behaviour in order to make enough money to pay tier, should they be justly offended if someone describes that behaviour as unethical.

I'm using 'unethical' very much in the sense of them doing something that they might have questioned were it not for what they feel to be an overriding pressure to make tier.

Or, would they say that the behaviour is not unethical because they now have a new set of ethics which are not challenged by the new behaviour? Back to Groucho-speak.

What you wrote was "bollocks" and "garbage", imo, and I said so. I went on to explain the reason too. Something wrong with that?

Well, that's kind of the reply i expected from a Forum know-it-all.......that would go to extreme lengths to point score...and prove that a small town called "Hicksville" does indeed exist and it has a McDonalds too. Here in the UK "Hicksville" is terminology given to describe a kind of small sleepy village/town in the middle of nowhere!.......but you already knew that right?

You mean like your Bankers on Wall Street who kick started the world-wide recession?...yep you need to educate those types about "ethics".....and to stop them pissing into the well!

What "fair share of the resources available" would they be?

To be honest...who cares, it will be the last thing on the minds of those businesses or SIM's that about to shut their doors!

In case you hadn't noticed ..a 100-Sim Estate is about to be reclaimed by LL (It's on another thread on RA). Think of all the residents and businesses that are going to lose their lands in the next day or so. That's the reality of what's happening on the Grid right now....yeah sure, you can question the Ethics or whatever of the Estateowner that allowed this to happen. We don't know the full details...could be his occupancy rates were too low, and those 100 Sims were starting to cost him more than a RL mortgage....could be he lost his RL job. Who knows....might have nothing to do with bad ethics.

Ethics doesn't always put food on the table!

I don't mean to dig back into the thread but this has me curious..
I had heard there was a 40% U.S. base in sl and 60% from other countries..
If this was true there would be a bigger English speaking base than 40%..

I'm just going off of stats i had heard being tossed around so i'm not sure..this does have me curious of which stat is correct..

For most business people everywhere, the most important thing is the money - profits. That's what businesses exist for. It's what the corner shop exists for and it's what the multi-national exists for. To suggest that it might be unethical is nonsense.

In SL, the most important thing for many, perhaps most, business owners is the enjoyment of doing it - fun, but it doesn't mean that real world business thinking is suspended in SL. Businesses in SL are a mixture of RL and fun ones, even though many of the fun business owners would love to turn their businesses into RL ones.

Are you seeing some commonality of behaviour/attitude between certain behaviours in SL and the behaviours of those bankers?

I read on a few occasions U.S is 35%.
The creator of one those Babble translators had a website which more or less broke down precise percentages by country & languages. It was 40% for English speaking countries in total around Oct/Nov.09 time. Unless there's been a mass invasion from the U.S with new SL users....i'm guessing those percentages still hold true at this moment in time..

Ceka

This is a very old link that i found....but even as far back as 2007, the European community was the largest...which still holds true today.

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/02/09/europe-takes-lead-in-second-life-users/

I'm trying to locate the guy that develops those Tranlsators, he has more up-to-date figures on his website. I know that Germany has the 2nd largest community now replacing France.....and Japanese is quite high now.(can't see it in that Reuter's 2007 listing....nor Australians!!)


.

Nope

To be honest I am not even going to respond to his posts... people can read it for the nonsense they are. Everyone making a compare between slavery and optimizing for search is really not worth the discussion. Both seem to transcent culture

@Sling: I really do appreciate the serious posts, to be honest I did not expect a serious reaction. Thanks.

@Kitty: Your idea's about alternatives are not bad, but not realistic either. We simply do not have the alternatives. Furthermore, they are gameable even more then the current system, as Rene showed. Current techniques do not allow us to have a game-resistant system. Bt I really hope the introduction of GSA6 will help.
As Rene said, the top 10 will hardly change. You know why? Because exactly the same people that put tons of effort in Search optimizing now, will do it tomorrow.

@All
If I read things well, the biggest comment is that keyword stuffing/picks rewarding arenegative for the searcher, and for the business fields I am in, I want to say something about that.

Indeed, neither keyword stuffing nor buying picks, or whatever you can come up with, are directly beneficial to the searcher. Indirectly they are though. And the result set in search all for the generic keywords: "low prim furniture" and "one prim plants" do show that. Simply because all results on page 1 are very relevant to the searcher. And why is that?
Simply because in general, the people putting lots of time, effort (and sometimes money) in their search rankings, are people actually taking their business very serious. They will not try to rank #1 for low prim furniture, when they hardly sell such stuff. Believe me, optimizing takes hours of work, investigating the top rankers and making changes to ones setup. You do not do that when you do not have the stuff for sale.

Of course you would be right when you say: If no one did it, they would be found as well. But people DO it. And in that case Sling did show the choices: Join the arms race, or fight against it. Well most business owners join the arms race, because of two reasons I suppose:
1- their monthly costs do not allow them to be idealistic. Tiers have to ba payed, as well as other overhead. Myself I only have 35.000 sqm of land, but together with my advertising/marketing budget I need at least 60-70K of revenue to break even. So even if I did not want to cash out, I would still have to make 60-70K. That means I cannot afford an idealistic attitude and a shop no one can find.
2- They do not give a a damn. It is not against their personal ethics. To that group I belong as well: I prefer a pretty search page, but if messing it up makes me appear on page 1, I mess it up. Because I do not sell html pages, I sell furniture. And believe me, I see in my visitor count whether I am on position 5 or 50!

Cheers, Marcel

thank you =)
As i said .I didn't mean to dig back but i had heard this 40% number being tossed around a few times..When i heard your version it became a little confusing..
Thank you for clearing that up for me