Is Paying for Links in Profile Picks Cheating?

Well the residents who have camped inorder help pay their rent.. do so at someone's else's expense. I don't use campers on my Mainland sim where the cheap homes are located at. I don't care where my renters get their money from!

Rent for one of them is L$1000 a week, however she doesn't camp 24/7. L$1000 a week is in the upper reaches of spending according to the economic statistics by the way.




You need to think of the system as a whole, people who like to play house are going to drop other things before they drop land, by the time they get to dropping land they'll have stopped spending on clothing, furniture, houses and pose balls.

There is a difference with PAID picks that you seem determined not to see.
When people put commercial entities in the Picks, they were doing so as part of their Profile.
Profile = This is me, or as much of me as I am prepared to reveal here. Here are some stores that I personally like.
They did that completely voluntarily. There was no inducement, no reward.
I read people's profiles. I look at their picks. Sometimes that takes me to places that I might have never seen otherwise. These could be interesting stores or interesting pro bono parcels.
Picks might have had the effect of promoting parcels, but they were never "advertising" - unless the Pick was a persons own parcel.

That all changed once Picks became a ranking factor. How many businesses paid for picks before picks became a ranking factor?
You say "Any known ranking factor is going to cause business to chase that ranking factor."
That should be better stated as "Any known ranking factor is going to cause business to consider that ranking factor." However, an ethical business will not try to influence their ranking by unethical means.

Paying for picks is cheating. It's unethical.

Do you get 24 hours coverage from the 3?

Very true

Of course there was inducement and reward. You just don't want to admit it. Alt picks were there, friend picks were there, exchanged picks were there. However paid picks are still voluntary, another thing you keep ignoring. They are placed by the individual, you're ignoring the aspect that makes the parcel attractive to the person placing the pick.



Bingo! The nature of picks changed, you'd have to be Mr Naive from Naiveland not to have seen that coming.



Agreed on the consideration point but you need to take a look around you. Referral programs, google adsense, freebies, inducements, special offers, perks, manipulating statistics and much much more is how business operates. Business just simply isn't this nice world of shopkeepers who all smile and merrily go around wish everyone a good day.

How many businesses here don't use inducements? How many don't offer freebies, operate loss leaders, have raffle balls, lucky chairs, wonder chairs, money orbs, money trees, competitions, gimmicks, events, sales? They're all designed to tempt custom.

More or less yes....the only time not, is when they have SIM resets and they are thrown off.

Lol too true !!
i'm gonna call you Educating Rita from now on

I wonder how many picks I could sell if my profile said "my picks are bought and paid for, I do not support nor visit said paid for picks. They are just for the money!!!"

You could sell just as many as if you didn't say that in your profile.
Paid picks did not exist before picks became a ranking factor.
The pick buyer just wants your picks to game search.

There might be some benefit to the buyer if someone reads your profile and checks out the picks. However, the trigger for pick buying the introduction of new ranking factors.

You list some of things that people do to attract custom that are above board.

Paying for picks is a totally different approach. It is is an underhand method of influencing search rankings.

Paid picks are not an inducement offered by the parcel owner to the person doing the search.
The 'customer' in a search is the person entering the search query. The supplier in the process is the search engine. Paid picks do not benefit that customer or that supplier. Paid picks are an unethical process that interferes in the transaction between the search engine use and the search engine.

If someone is running a store and finds that another person is approaching their customers and promoting another store, thay might feel that the competing store owner is acting unethically. That's the sort of ethical standards that are involved in paid picks.

Search engines in general state that attempts to game the engines are unwelcome because they can deliver "a negative experience to the user" (Google guideline quotation).

You list a number of things that are inducements to the customer of the parcel.
There is a huge difference in principle and ethics between the two.

And your point is?

Google doesn't speak for LL, and you don't know whether or not paying for picks is unwelcome to LL. Don't imagine that, because it uwwelcome to you, that it is unwelcome to the owners.

The point is that search engine gaming is regarded as unwelcome and ethical by search engines.
It is reasonable to assume that LL would see the gaming of their search engine to be equally unwelcome, but don't have the resources to combat it.
FOr instance, they clearly did not want ad-farmers raping the landscape, but it took them ages to formally take action.


Don't imagine that, because it convenient to you, that it is not unwelcome to the owners.

There you go again - assuming that your ideas are the ideas of LL. And worse - you even imagine you know what LL thought about ad farms.

What is "reasonable to assume" to you, in this case, isn't reasonable to assume at all. It's only reasonable to someone with a personal agenda, as you said that you have.

I agree that LL didn't want the way ad farms turned out, and when it reached a point when they didn't want it, they acted. Prior to that, is seems that they wanted it, as you can tell from the new rules. Have they banned ad farming? No. They have taken steps to reduce its impact, that's all.

A morally bankrupt person twists truths to suit their own personal agenda, in an attempt to deceive other people.

Phil you are assuming what LL thinks, and turning those assumptions to support your agenda.

Not at all Mort. If you read carefully, you'll see that Sling wrote 2 assumptions about LL's thinking. One was that gaming their search engine is unwelcome to them - she actaully stated that as an assumption, but based her argument on it. The other is her statement that LL didn't want ad farmers raping the landscape (true), and followed it with an assumption that it took them ages to formulate action (completely unkown outside LL. I didn't make any assupmtions as to what LL thinks. I merely pointed out that Sling's assumptions are just that - assumptions - and nothing to base arguments on.

And I don't have an agenda. Sling does - she said so more than once.

Btw, taking things that someone says, and simply saying words to the effect of "you do too" is a very childish way of discussing something. You've been doing it for a while now. I'll let that one go, but don't expect reasoned responses to all of those childish things.

Sling seems to argue that Google does it this way, Google doesn't want that, etc. and applies Google's attitudes to LL. She's wrong. When Google finds things in a website that they don't want in their engine, they remove the site from the index. LL knows all about the things that Sling is against, and yet they don't do anything about them. They don't even say that they'd rather they weren't there.

Sling's arguments are all about what Sling wants, and have nothing whatsoever to do with what LL wants, or even what the population wants.

Ah yes, a dastardly agenda of fair-play and ethical busniess practices... absolutely horrible!! Sling, you should be ashamed of yourself!!



I am soooooo tempted to use this as my sig tag.

ty Sling, so it seems Picks are simply there to be gamed (BTW, my picks are true picks

And you make plenty of assumptions about the population and LL's actions and lack of action

All in order to promote your beliefs about how search should be gamed or manipulated... never mind there are no search systems intended to be manipulated.

Which ones? Paid picks is no different to many in my list. There's nothing underhand about it, unless you, and I challenge you once more, can produce the strict criteria by which picks must be used. Without that you're piddling in the wind because people can choose to pick a place for whatever reason they choose.

If Linden Lab announced today that paid picks were outlawed you'd be right to say that offering them is cheating, until such time you're trying to outlaw a person's right to choose.




In that case so are money trees, money orbs, raffle balls, freebies, loss leaders. So is having the knowledge to know how to name a product so that it is searched for more frequently.



Not really Sling, no more so than someone naming their products better than a competitor.



I agree very much with you here, but the search engine here hasn't defined paid picks as being contrary to the search engine. Search engines are defined. Google admit that paid links are a normal part of the economy when done for advertising purposes. The vast majority of parcels in Second Life are advertising their wares through search. It's up to Linden Lab to decide how to incorporate the realities of paid links within their search engine.

You're applying google rules to Second Life, Linden Lab apply the rules here, not google. If Linden Lab decide that paid picks aren't welcome then so be it, but they define the use of their search.

How very childish of you.

Ciaran, a very good post indeed.

Indeed LL is the only to determine what can and cannot be done, and needs not even a ToS change for that. Simply a blog post would do, but they do not seem to mind.

One more thing that has been mentioned, is that the weight of picks is not to big anymore. So probably paying for picks becomes less and less useless. If that is true, paying for picks is charity instead of an unethical practice

Anyway, no matter how long this gets discussed, some people will never show even a bit of understanding for the other camp. So that renders the discussion pretty useless anyway. No one is right or wrong, we just think different. And as long as the only argument is, that people like myself are unethical, it is useless.

One thing this discussion is good for though. It shows which people are able to participate in a good discussion, and who are not.

whoa, I need boots, its sure gettin deep in here!!!