The Nanny State

I read with interest Lindens' diatribe against old "settlers" in SL written by a person who smacks of a "corporate suit". (Which is totally politically incorrect - I draw your attention to the needs of First Nations people as opposed to "settlers" in real America.) And I have read where Lindens intend to create mainland changes etc. And also new intentions about continents etc.

I am concerned that the imagination that created what I know as "sl" is going to be circumvented and compromised by corporate "needs".

SO, What do YOU think Lindens plan to do with SL?

Do you agree with it?

They may have created SL but we pay good money to be here,- in my case $40(US) per month and general fees - can they really claim total ownership or is the "vision" too much to handle? Are we about to be policed by avatars who need an education in the arts? Or will we be subjected to the "thought police"? Does dissent mean denial of membership in sl?

When I first came to sl, I was attracted to the freedoms allowed here - what does this new statement addressing mainland SIMs mean to us as residents?

Yes, I did read the site that we were directed to - I wanna know what people on the REAL forum think.

Can we all live in a Nanny state? To paraphrase Anthony Burgess writing in "A Clockwork Orange" - is woodness Goodness?

Diatribe link please.

The dia tribe are declaring war where?

Okay guys... blog post

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/08/05/the-future-of-the-second-life-mainland/

to the forum link

/346/d3/274884/1.html

Same ole stuff

If the nannies look like Fran Drescher in "The Nanny", I could handle having a bunch of them around.



They would spruce the joint up a bit.

Yeah but have you heard her talk... *shudders

Indeed. No voice chat for Fran.

Forget hearing her talk have you heard her laugh? I'm surprised the stagehands didn't revolt and give her the guillotine.

I think you might be mixing up "corporate needs" with "mainstreaming".

The more mainstream SL gets, the more the original "do anything you like" will become a niche within SL, just like SL itself was a niche at first.

People overwhelmingly want clean neighbourhoods with non-obstructive builds, the mass move over to regulated and covenant enforced rental sims makes that quite clear.

LL isn't giving into any "corporate need", it's giving its current customers what they're asking for and we can expect more and more of the same and a lot will indeed clash with why the "pioneers" were attracted to SL.

Quaint medieval disorganized and random neighbourhoods make room for organized blocks of cookie cutter houses. It's progress .

Sadly true. Fortunately, from what's been posted in the mainland discussion thread LL will only enact zoning or covenants on new mainland sims. The current mainland will remain unzoned and uncovenanted into the foreseeable future.

So you can rent from private estate owners if you like covenants and organization. If you prefer not to take the potential risks of renting you can buy some zoned/covenanted land on the new mainland sims. If you're like me and enjoy some chaos and creativity you can buy up some parcels from the older mainland.

Absolute freedom for all sounds great... right up until someone else's freedom means they go into the land extortion 'business' and put up glowing, spinning, ad-towers next door - or worse.

It's the age old duality. Freedom and rights come with certain responsibilites, because of the rights of others.

I'm glad to see LL are at last taking the cleanup of blighted mainland more seriously, or at least talking as if they are. BUT at the same time I'd also hate to see SL mainland become so bland and Disneyfied that it loses its magic or innovation. I hope M Linden is still keeping his eye firmly fixed on SL as a magical place rather than a sanitised, corporatised and prettied-up but soulless wasteland.

We shall see - but stopping ad farming and somehow making residents take responsibilty for their actions' effect on their neighbours is a must, I believe. That does mean some rules, and more importantly the enforcement of them. We have to hope they intend and will manage to improve on that.
--
Aes

I agree with removal of ad farms - BUT I thought that was already occuring.

Some things need to be done around land extortionist.
Freedom is great but at what extent?
Posted this but who know where it went.

LL non-involvement policy permits Land extortionist

Please Jack convince your buddies to do something in regards to this situation.
I know it effects others, your policy has been to release lots to whomever and not interferr which is perfectly understandable.
Think of yourself as majority sim owner of sim you got a small community but there is few extortion or over priced lots that you refuse to buy, eventually the lots become abandon and go to auction instead of majority owner of the sim.
In my friends case the auction price went up to 100K in Lindens 400 usd even though standard land price is around 4 L a meter.
The person won the land had no investment in become a part of that community and now
has lot for 65k.
When situations come up like this the land isn't used for creative purposes, it just extortion.
LL may gain money from this plus full tier price of the person is paying but those that live there are basically at mercy of whatever actions the extortionist decides to do with lot not caring about those around them.
Yet your policy is not to interfere.
Those who remain in the sim are force to deal with it with little recourse or paying incredibly outrageous prices to get rid of person.
If you had approached and offer to sell the lot to person who owns majority of sim in first place whole lot of peace and aggravation could been reduced but it has been your
current policy to not bother.

It isn't come to Hwang you'll see big ugly sign I don't even bother build on ground because of this.

I thought a lot of corporations had been to SL, stayed a while and then left. I'm quite happy to see some corporate involvement but on the whole, as a free spirit, I like the freedom and creativity, but that has to be exercised with care, because one resident's freedom and creativity can so easily be someone else's eyesore and nighmare!

It's been promised. Actual policies, fair decisions and firm actions are still awaited.

--
Aes

Which must be why so many "settlers" have progressed themselves right out of Second Life.

If LL has progressed so far from it's initial user base of "settlers" that paid them for the privilege of building their virtual platform for them, how long do you think it will be before LL progresses past their current paying user base?

What do I think LL plans to do with SL? Milk it for every penny they can before it implodes. If they run over a few paying customers along the way, at least they got some money out of them first.

Imagination and corporate mainstreaming never did exactly go hand in hand. "Your World. Your Imagination" was an incredibly effective tag-line to suck in the creative types, but it really should just be replaced with "Make Real Life Money!"

Expect imagination to find it's home on independent grids. It's no longer welcome in SL, unless it makes LL money in an unoffensive, mainstream kinda way. By this time next year, I think the list of things you can't do in SL will be much larger then the list of things you can do.

Thats an interesting point. Look at all the things that have been banned in the last year.

Add that to the big spectere of "uberban" that an actual enforced Age-restricted Verifiy policy would entail...

I do think Second Life (tm) will eventually become a sanitized,corporate colored, ad driven Yawnfest, wher Mr and Mrs Plastic can come with their 3.2 kids and the MyFaceSpaceBook crowd can share their Real Lives with the world. Anything Edgy, Entertaining, or Fantasy related, will be elsewhere in the Metaverse.

Yuck.

Probably right though.

I'm not convinced LL even cares about keeping SL around at all in the distant future.

They need us right now to showcase and fund their "virtual worlds are the future of the internet" dream but their long term interests seem to lie in platform building and providing, not to provide what is basically an entertainment product.

secondlifegrid.net for instance doesn't have a single mention of residents or anything resident built or resident accomplishments.

No. They wrote a nerfed policy, and then gave G-Team instructions to enforce it only when the violation was so extreme that not doing so would make the policy completely meaningless. Then they quit enforcing it altogether, as far as I can tell, and switched to only enforcing ARs issued *by* adfarmers against anybody who dared to put up a prim to block the ads.

FWIW, what is proposed here is *far* from a "nanny state." It is indeed quite the opposite. For a long time, the Mainland has been run as a government. An incredibly lax, lazy, and ineffective government, but *not* as a business. I'm pretty sure that, with the current level of vacancy on the Mainland, tier is not even covering server hosting costs anymore, let alone paying Linden salaries (as, of course, it must).

Weedy suggested on the Jack thread that it may be time to just nuke the Mainland and start over. I read that post as a desperate plea of a resident, but you know... I'm beginning to think it may be the smart business move.

Sorry, Sansara. Better luck next time.

Her laugh makes me think of little kids imitating the sound of a machine gun...... or a goat.


As for the OP:

SL is like the Web, in a way. Some web sites are chock full of flash ads, which really REALLY slow down the loading of the site.

Heh! Remember when you could go to a web page, read an article, maybe some pics, and not have a bunch of flashing ads or "Punch the Monkey" links???

I still have an old "Internet Yellow Pages" book from the early days where they could still compile just about every webpage in a book. Some required 'Gopher' to get to (if anyone remembers or still uses it)

Ahhhhh, those were the days.

Leaving aside the whole "sanitizing for the corporate world" discussion, I actually think zoning the mainland will *help* "our world, our imagination", since it'll let people join and build areas with an actual mood and theme, rather than having to wall their 512 square meter parcels in, knowing their wilderness spot can be ruined any day somebody puts up a techno-factory club next door.

I agree. Most things point in this direction. Clearly there is more and more of an effort underway to mainstream SL, presumably because this attracts not only more users (so LL would hope), but also as a way of making the grid technology more attractive to non-personal users. That's LL's endgame, I think. If LL can swing that transition with SL and its related Grids, then I don't think they'll shed too many tears to see the creatives and alternative people migrate to other grids. LL wants to be like the AOL of the future 3d internet, I think, if they can manage to pull that off. They don't want SL to be a niche product for creatives and alternative lifestyle people. Massive change for the culture of SL, of course, but it's being engineered by LL now. I mean zoning? Zoning? That is so antithetical to the initial ethic of SL, yet here it comes, with massive applause.