When is ARing really Vigilantism

Perhaps there isn't, yet. I never said there was, what I said was that it was possible. And... it is, and I wouldn't be surprised either way if it did or did not exist. If Philip Linden's dream of a Second Life a hundred times larger comes true, they absolutely will.

I've watched them in operation for decades on Usenet and on anti-spam mailing lists. I was really worried about them developing during the adfarm fiasco, and declined an offer for an AR party against an adfarm near my land. I'm concerned that they may start after the Zindra deadline with people going on AR parties against legitimate content in Mature sims.

This advances the discussion to something concrete on which folks may have opinions.

One can easily imagine an unholy coalition of the Adult Content providers and anti-Adult crusaders, all out hunting and reporting "adult" content on Mature land.

Contributing to this:

1. LL's definition of what is and isn't "Adult Content" is abstract at best, and already rife with contradictions in its history of public interpretations by Lindens and in precedents during the Zindra migration. A decision whether any particular chunk of content is "Adult" or "Mature" is almost completely subjective now.

In fact, it's subjective almost by definition; LL's handling of this may not have helped, but violence and especially sex are among the most generative of constructs anyway. (Ask a Freudian.) There's fuzziness about "adfarm" and "gambling" concepts, too, but they're pretty self-contained ideas compared to "adult content."

2. There's very substantial motivation for those who would want true Adult Content (whatever that is) removed from Mature regions. The anti-smut crusaders are on a moral crusade against the content itself. We smut mongers have businesses to protect *and* have the force of moral indignation against "cheaters". To both groups, it really matters.

At least the financial incentives were very much less for removing adfarms and casinos. Spread over the entire grid, adfarms had a huge negative impact, but most of the cost was to LL itself, with swathes of Mainland reduced to microparcel rubble, abandoned and non-tier generating; to individual residents, though, the financial effects were at the griefing annoyance level. The gambling ban ended up being a huge financial windfall for one particular supplier of faux slot machines, but that wasn't a factor in its enforcement: very small constituency who probably didn't even know the extravagant degree to which they'd benefit.

3. *False* ARs have impunity and incentive, derived from the aforementioned fuzziness of the rule and the financial benefit to reporters. One could construct or maybe find examples of false ARs in the other historical policy enforcement regimes, but they had to be rare: they just weren't very lucrative policies to "game." In contrast, an Adult Content supplier may bring advantage to their business by sniping around the edges of "adult" in competitors' product offerings on non-Adult land. And who's to say with any confidence that they're wrong in seeing sexual referents in most any damn thing? Hence, how is it even possible to file a demonstrably abusive AR in this domain?

Knowing a number of Adult Content providers, I'm confident they won't be filing ARs, neither individually nor en masse--it's anathema to their whole world-view--but my acquaintances represent a small and selective sample. Given the reasons listed above, it could get ugly.

No. The odds of eventually somebody you've AR'd getting slapped with a -punishment- approach unity. The punishment's being "inappropriate" is quite subjective, typically hyperbolic and based more on an observer's dislike of LL than an objective overview of a particular situation - and would be a different set of odds even if it wasn't.

Indeed.

While I don't know how representative a sample of adult content providers as a whole are the people who attend Blondin's office hours, it's pretty clear from whenever the topic of enforcement has been raised that some people -- who understandably feel aggrieved they've followed the rules and vanished from search and lost traffic and money thereby while their customers have flocked to other content providers who've just ignored the changes -- can't wait to get started AR-ing the competition.

I get the impression that, while most people at the meetings, at least, want nothing to do with such AR-posses, there's enough who do to make their presence felt.

That happens quicker, yes. BOTH curves approach unity. That one does so faster doesn't mean the other isn't doing so as well.
When high profile members of the community have been suspended for trivia, or even when they're absolutely not doing anything wrong, I gotta say... I don't believe that.

There is a difference between legality/illegality and right/wrong. There are many things that are illegal that are not wrong, and there are many things that are legal that are wrong.

Immorality results when someone deliberately harms someone who is not harming them or someone else who does not deserve to be harmed, or undertakes an action with reckless disregard for whether that action is likely to harm someone who is not harming them or someone else who does not deserve to be harmed.

Enforcing rules for the sake of enforcing rules is just another way of saying, "I was only following orders." Those who do this remain morally responsible for their actions and their results.

Yeah, "vigilantism" is the wrong word. I'm not saying it's always wrong to consistently attempt to enforce a particular rule--when it is clear that the result will be greater fairness and justice. In a lawless environment, impromptu action to restore justice and fairness may be the only reasonable option. We all know what justice and fairness are, in our hearts.

When people become interested in enforcing rules for the sake of enforcing rules, they are beginning to exhibit an emotional imbalance. The need to behave in this way does not stem from a rational place; it derives from emotional trauma and is in reality a misplaced effort to restore order and fairness within the self, with reference to past events. The more extreme this need and behavior becomes, the more likely it is to harm others. At some point as the obsession and behavior escalate, harm to others becomes a certainty.

This is the sort of thing that I think the OP was worried about, and which we all viscerally object to. Those of us who are unaffected by that sort of trauma can always recognize when it's being done and when it's not, and we don't need to be disingenuous about it. We have a moral responsibility to do what we can to stop that sort of behavior that is just as important as our responsibility to stand up to any other form of evil, so long as we understand that "evil" cannot be defined in a rulebook, but only by a careful and compassionate analysis of real cause and effect.