Traffic bots are like LDL Cholesterol

Traffic bots are like nasty LDL cholesterol choking the system, thickening the blood of the economy. A silent killer.

If there is a Linden in charge of the SL economy I’m wondering why they don’t put SL on a fat free diet and get rid of this unhealthy, undesirable and unnecessary catalyst of mediocrity.

Traffic bots are unhealthy. The economy would be stronger without them.

Sometimes excluding something bad can produce more success than always thinking in terms of inclusion.

So why are they saying traffic bots are against the TOS and then doing nothing about them ?

Because that's how they work.

1. Make a new policy.

2. Announce it spottily, if at all.

3. Enforce it spottily, if at all.

4. Ignore user complaints about the policy, the failure to communicate it, and the lack of enforcement.

5. Profit!

About the only thing you can do is to AR nests of traffic bots, whenever you find them.

Hey- we hadn't 'botted' in a while

Where's Phil and Colette?

don't get me started..... grrrrrrrrrrr

They started enforcing the new policy only to find that there was way more bots then they originally thought and by kicking them out their "currently online" and "Residents Logged-In During Last 7-14-30-60 days" numbers would be cut in half and thats bad for their PR as they tout those numbers to potential big corporate dollar companies that are keeping them afloat.

All speculation of course...

Why is it things with a lot of cholesterol in them taste so good?

*logs in some oatmeal*

Quite possible, but it's hard to believe they didn't have a really good idea their 10-15% number came out of someone's ass. It's likely they knew the number before I counted, and that it's higher than my conservative estimate, and they likely received my report with chuckles of "If only she knew..."

More likely the slowness of enforcement is designed to put bot runners on notice that LL wants them to make the bots more realistic.

Another possibility is that they made the same mistake Elanthius did counting bots. His calculation determined what percentage of *accounts* are bots, and not the percentage signed in at any time. I don't know if I ever convinced him of that. It's possible LL made the same mistake.

I have a RL job now that involves gobs of hours and no time for forums.

Probably the same Data Analyst that came up with 2-4% adult

They need a new number cruncher.

Because if they sorted it there would only be 8K TO 10K online just like 2006.Why do you think it,s so quiet?

I still see places with massive bot use. I don't understand. Just words from LL, nothing else? Oh man, if I would do the same in my RL business, my clients would fry me.

If LL are wondering why Secondlife is not taking off, not going mainstream.
If they are wondering why it’s stagnating. The answer is simple

It’s not because there’s a steep learning curve, or because of the ‘first hour’ experience.

Here is the reason why.

It’s because Secondlife doesn’t look cool.

Why doesn’t it look cool ?
Because the current system encourages mediocrity.

A good creator will spend 80% of their time creating, 20% on promoting and managing their business.
A bad creator will spend 20% of their time creating and 80% of their time promoting their business.

The sum effect of this is that the good creators lose visibility.

And the knock on effect is that 80% of Secondlife is drowning and choking in a super abundance of dross. The cream cannot easily rise to the top

This effect never happens in RL.

Darwin must be turning in his grave. The survival of the best and the fittest is thwarted by an unbalanced and unhealthy environment – Traffic Bots, Copy Bots, anonymous accounts being able to build and sell, etc

Traffic bots must seem like little things to LL, nothing that could harm the platform.
But they already have done untold and unrecognised damage and Secondlife is suffering – it’s looking worse and worse

‘Look at the size of a grain of pepper and look at the size of a sneeze !’




Note : I am aware there are brilliant builds and sims out there and also amazing creators. But they are few and far between and losing visibility every day because of traffic bots

@ting:


it's not THAT bad for business.
All that traffic bots have "done" is making search-places moot. at least for shopping.

When i'm shopping for stuff, search-places is the LAST place i look.

Every time I go somewhere where there are bots, my computer crashes. That's kind of like clogged arteries leading to a heart attack.

I'm rarely around these days - I've lost interest in SL.

FWIW, Anya's surveys were no good, as just about everyone who participated in the discussions agreed.

What RL are you living in? The best does not always win in RL by any stretch of the imagination. If you can't market your wares it doesn't matter how good they are. The problem in SL is more a case of the creator trying to create, market, clean the toilets and handle customer service, it's the one man band syndrome.

Oh and survival of the fittest works just fine, you have to look at the whole picture, not just part of it to see where fitness is required.

A year ago I would have said the same – that traffic bots had minimal impact. But not any more

Traffic Bots are that bad for business. And virtual world economies are nothing like RL.

1. In RL you can’t make dresses in your back room and the next day set up shop, put 100 bots in the sky and have the same world wide presence as an established brand such as Gucci or Versace.

2. SUPER ABUNDANCE is the problem in virtual worlds. For instance, you have 10 brilliant creators who make ‘doodahs’ and you have another 10 talented up and coming ‘doodah’ makers. The difficulty in SL with traffic bots is, that you have 50 – 100 mediocre and lazy ‘doodah’ makers who use traffic bots to establish a show of false popularity. So consequently the 20 genuine and talented ‘doodah’ makers lose visibility in a super abundance of drossy ‘doodahs’

3. These things are very bad for SL because they make SL look like rubbish. Lots of low quality rubbishy ‘doodahs’ all around. One of the effects of this is , new users are given a bad impression and this results in poor retention rate of new users – which is bad for all business

Traffic bots degrade SL because they are a lie

Ting, I agree with most of what you say (mediocrity and hucksterism hurt SL in just the ways you describe) but I don't think traffic bots have much effect these days. The top players in the "all" search game are the ones that use keyword spamming. I'd say keyword spamming and redundancy (too damned many crappy malls and casinos), and the difficulty finding real, live humans, is hurting SL much more than traffic bots at this point.

Of course bots add an element of creepiness that might be hurting SL a lot, too. Clubs are about the most surreal and mind-numbingly stupid and lonely places on the grid, and that's where newbies go looking for company.

Gucci and Versace are expensive brands, they are not your run of the mill day to day brand for every day folk. Walmart will get more customers than Gucci or Versace.



Traffic is a figure based on time spent on a parcel as well as visitors, anyway who looks at traffic for a store and thinks it's a sign that the product is top notch is kidding only themselves, but we can go back to the walmart example of popularity not equalling best quality.



No these things are great for SL because it makes someone else think they can do better, what you're complaining about isn't really about traffic bots, it's the quality of items and when the bots go away, those items are still going to be here.

Retention of new users has very little to do with traffic bots.

The point was that some Joe Blow with no business experience, no product and no business plan can't set up shop in a day and render Gucci and Versace, or even Wal-Mart, invisible behind a flood of garbage. In the real world it takes actual resources to be visible. In SL, the shadiest are the most visible.

Currently, though, that has little to do with bots. Unless "places" search is more popular than I think it is.

Those things are bad for SL because it makes SL look like a bunch of hucksters selling redundant garbage.

Edit: Worse, it makes finding the good stuff more difficult.

That simply doesn't happen though, noobs find it hard to get established and found, it's not easy at all, even if they use bots it's not easy.