When is ARing really Vigilantism

No. Not just one lone vigilante.
Like IMing a group to come and everyone gets naked AND THEN they ALL Abuse Report -Like that (for clarity sake)
When Linden Lab just logs the person off being mass AR'd in this manner - it encourages such activities. And when it is found out that these were set-ups - the offending parties are not punished for their actions. A major flaw in the Abuse Report system.

Except that there are no instances of ARing (either in singles or en masse) that can be classified as vigilantism. No one has had any power to get rid of the problem. Reporting the problem isn't the remedy or solution. It still is up to LL to DO something, and they have been notoriously recalcitrant towards action across a wide swath of their problem spaces since their inception.

How I wish it WAS true in the case of adfarms; it wouldn't have taken two years to get rid of them. More like two weeks, tops.

i can't believe people are getting in a tizzy over someone ARing someplace that was doing something against the rules..
there is an old saying..If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem..

if you see someone breaking the rules and hurting others in the process and you sit by just watching and letting it continue then you are part of the problem..if you AR their butt you help in getting rid of the problem..

If you don't see the bullet hit, you haven't shot anyone?

I didn't say it was successful, or even productive, vigilantism. Rusty as it is, though, it's still a blade that it's best left unsheathed unless you are certain it's absolutely necessary.

I'm not. I'm just saying... call a spade a goddamn shovel.

a spade is a spade a shovel is a shovel and a pitchfork is a pitch fork..
unless someone is taking the law into their own hands and becoming judge,jury and executioner..they are not a vigilante
they are only calling the cops..

The G-team isn't "the cops", they're a loose cannon.

It was just a metaphor for whoever it is that holds that job for LL..

I'm saying that the G-team's actions are so unpredictable that you can't treat an AR like handing someone over to justice, you have to treat it as firing a weapon... an unpredictable, usually ineffective, but occasionally deadly weapon... at the target.

Usually it misses. Sometimes it produces a reasonable and measured response. But sometimes the response is completely out of proportion to the action, and there's no effective recourse if it is.

and how are they not like the cops again? lol

In this case, I do not really care if the G-team over-reacts and locks the accounts and/or perma-bans them. You acknowledge a TOS when you create an account here and therefore you were told that gambling is banned. If you do it anyway and it causes major grief for where I am at, I will AR it in as many categories as I can find that might even remotely apply and I will do it to every owner of every object in the place............

And I do not even a tiny bit feel bad about it.

Sadly, this is largely true. Although mostly it fires squibs.

Again, the problem isn't the principle of the AR. It's the execution (so to speak). The entire system needs to be revamped, first, by making LL's rules clearer (and not scattered across half of their web site, from the KB to the ToS), and second, by making the disciplinary system much more transparent and accountable,

But if they "do it anyway and it causes major grief for where I am at" then you're not talking about vigilantism. You're not talking about roaming the grid in a mob looking for evil-doers and ARing them, or otherwise engaged in "mob justice".

It's common in many societies. Grand Torino was a great movie!

There is no gun, I'm not shooting anything. I am reporting what I perceive to be as a problem. If I am wrong, it is up to the powers that be to sort it out. Whether they can or not isn't my problem. I'm simply reporting what I perceive to be as a problem.



It isn't even vigilantism at all. A report isn't automatically a ban. Hell, with the way the G-Team operates, many reports aren't anything other than a big waste of time, regardless of their validity.

If I bother to report, I feel it is absolutely necessary; otherwise, I wouldn't do it.

I see AR-ing some as a bit like calling the cops in some third-world country where you know the law enforcement and judicial systems are pretty ramshackle and capricious, that it's pretty much a matter of chance whether they'll respond, and, if they do, what the outcome might be and that, while the end results may be OK, anyone they do arrest isn't going to get anything we'd recognise as a fair trial.

Under some circumstances, you'd call them anyway and hope for the best, but it's not something many of us would want to do lightly since the outcome is so unpredictable and quite possibly be something we'd consider disproportionate.

I have to say that I have a large smirk on my face at the moment. I also want to suggest that a vigilante is not just someone who makes their own law, but someone who decides which laws are worth observing and which are not. So as Pep pointed out I am a forum whistleblower not an AR vigilante.

Does ARing someone make you people feel good? I accept if its racist or totaly foul but does it have to be this "law of the posse and the handgun"? It's so Deadwood and Dodge. And here most of us sit in studies or bedrooms or offices ARing and looking for trouble. Why really cares if someone is showing a nipple or blowing someone off when they think no one is looking?

No one can STEAL anything here. No one can really kill anyone. Or rape. Or rundown in a vehicle. There's no organized crime, no bank heists, no fraud. Just some vaguely porny stuff and an occasional lunatic fringe group who duke it out between themselves.

Let's do more constructive stuff than that. People will leave because of all this "law and order" - I dont think many countries take it as seriously as Americans do. I don't see furious Italians ARing for shocking pics. Or French couples reporting a rude av. British folk couldnt care less; the world's tumbling in turmoil, anyway so one AR in a computer game wont make much difference.

Let's try and live and let live. Lindens would like that. Coz after all, they're watching us in this social goldfish bowl.

I think you are Pep. You're his av he used when he had a bet with his mate in real.

Sorry Jig, I'm not that petty.

Pep (And don't get me started again on Askandi )

That's an abrogation of responsibility: you are responsible for the predictable results of your actions whether you are the direct agent in those results or not. If you go around in groups and report what you perceive as problems even if they are not having any impact on you and yours (which is the only case I'm talking about here: I explicitly made that clear that attempting to use the G-Team as an agent of mob justice was what I was talking about), to an "authority" as unreliable as the G-Team, you might as well be shooting them.

But Argent, nobody has ever reported anything that has *no* impact on that person. They've experienced the thing they're ARing, and it's affected them enough to go to the not inconsiderable effort and aggravation of reporting it.*

What I think you're promoting is some threshold of effect--perhaps, if the trafficbots aren't in a sim where you have land, their effect on you is not direct enough to justify filing an AR. At least that particular example is clearly wrong: the worst effect of traffic gaming is not the individual lag on a sim, but their collective degradation of Search effectiveness--across every single trafficbot and camping pad on the grid.

Now, that's not your example, and I don't mean to imply that it is. I'm just saying that if mob justice is the only means of justice available, then mobs there shall be, even if the infraction is spitting on the sidewalk. Yes, as individuals we have responsibility for deciding which mobs we join, but if we want to effect change, we have few options here other than to rally a mob.

That Resi/G-Team is unreliable should be weighed in making that decision responsibly, I agree, but no justice system is completely reliable, and nobody is going to RL death row because of a trafficbot AR.

___
*There's a separate--and serious--problem of false ARs, but I don't see that to be germane to this thread.

That would not be limited to the US, Lil. I live in a suburb of Ireland's capital and if you know the kids getting up to mischief you had better damned well say something to them AND tell their parental units about whatever they were getting up to. I have explicit permission from dozens of parents to go apecrackers on their kids and I think they'd be dissapointed with me if I didn't

In 2L it's a bit different. There are very few subjects I would think it worth filing an AR over. I also have little faith in LL to act on the reports anyhow.

Don't be a dip. You know what I mean.

Why look, a few messages back I said "sometimes it's a necessary evil". Sheesh.

I apparently do not know what you mean, or at least I'm far from certain what you're advocating by what you're saying.

If you mean that folks who file ARs--individually or as a group--have some responsibility for the consequences, and that Resi/G-Team's reliability should weigh in that decision, then we're agreed.

If, by "necessary evil," you're granting that sometimes the responsible act is to form groups to AR content or behaviour that does not immediately and directly impinge on the reporters' experience but that does adversely affect the grid as a whole, then we're agreed.

(It escapes me how any of that justifies the "vigilante" label, but I understand they have hobbies now that are even more fun than arguing semantics.)

It's not essential that we agree, of course, but if we disagree, I'd find it more interesting if I knew what we're disagreeing about.