Bloomin Campers Again

Hey send me an IM next time you are in-world to remind me and I will lol. I did have a money tree, but I couldn't afford to keep it going, I don't own a shop so income is limited lol. Plus when it did run out and I didn't have the funds to top it up (nor did anyone else want to donate money often) I didn't half get grief from people looking for money (charming eh). Now I just hand out freebies and LMs to good places when someone needs them, I can afford that lol.

Titania xx

You can already have an IM forwarded to your email, even an email om your cell phone if you are truly paranoid!

I just don't buy the "limited capacity" argument because so many "non-camping" sims are totally empty! The ones with camping have maybe 10-15 "campers" and are otherwise empty.

Get to the top of the "popularity list and you start to see entire sims devoted to camping, with a limit of 100 AVs at a time.

Very few of those are actually full for more than a minute or so.

Sorry I still believe it is a "non-problem".

You might wish to look through these forums for all the complaints by people who are unable to enter their homes, or who are significantly lagged, then. Which will comprise only a small subset of the actual occurrences.

Even one of these is too many.

The other thing that bugs me is the legitimate campers (live avs who are camping whilst afk and trying to earn some money too - on pads that actually pay out) can be pushed off the camp pads by the pad owners so they get numbers up too. THEY are cheated cos they think they are earning lindens and in fact tricked there only to be pushed off once they are afk and not earn a single linden.

I don't have an issue with the people who are real avs (if that makes sense) who are trying to earn some linden, its the bloomin pad owners who use those campers to trick more people there, whether it be more campers to be pushed off and not paid, or people into an empty club/shop/region etc.

If people want to GENUINELY help new residents, then let LL provide camping areas of their own and let everyone donate freebies or cash.

Im just sick of empty areas and zombies in the sky, most of which now appear to be land owners own alts seeing as this tends to be the trend.

Titania xx

I get that. The point of my post was more about the second sentence: "The fact that some people game the traffic numbers with alt farms doesn't mean search results are more relevant." It's preposterous to argue that traffic gaming, in the general case, is a fine and dandy thing to do because it makes search results better by make them more relevant.

--Hugsy

Take a look at the literature, the "Turing Test" now is mostly about spoken conversations, several projects have consistently fooled unsuspecting subjects at least as well as a real human. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test The "Original Imitation Game" actually seems to do quite well.

The requirement is not to "fool all of the people all of the time" remember, just a one person in a very restricted setting.

One obvious "escape route" in this example would be to have a "standard" message like "sorry the phone is ringing" whenever things get too tough.

There are several publicly available "chatterbots" out there (I think it was in this thread that I told about setting up ELIZA with a "Doctor is IN" booth.

It might be interesting to try the experiment in a controlled way with a few camping "alts".

Any PhD candidates looking for a Thesis topic out there?


I already am - sorry but you did ask

I've been reading this thread since last night. This is my first post. I don't own land right now but I have in the past. I have spent a lot of money here. A lot of money.

What I have seen in SL is the attitude that it is your right to take advantage of the others here if you can get away with it. Business in SL, increasingly, is not about being the best at creating things neat things for SL anymore-----it's about being the best at taking unfair advantage of others that come here.

Personally I find all of you that game the search engine here and have the gaul to justify it simply simply because you can get away with it and make money doing it utterly disgusting. I don't care if RL is like that. The fact that it is justifies nothing at all here.

For those of you that are fighting back-------more power to you. And no----you are not whiners-----you have seen what I have seen----a steady decline in ethics of all kinds in SL.

I am not alone in how I feel either----People aren't staying here. The come, get ripped off and leave.

The number of alts is approaching a third of number of real residents right now------if this keeps up the only ones that will be here are alts.

And you camp in SL for free money? Can you spot me for a new WTF meter? Mine just exploded. Seriously, even if you think camping is fine and dandy and completely legitimate, why not leave the chair open for someone who might not be so fortunate, or better yet, leave it empty?

I said nothing about there being no complaints (see mom I AM playing nice!), only about reality not supporting those complaints.

I'm sure there are some who don't have all the access that they might dream about, but as an earlier poster pointed out with only 40 AVs/sim each AV "needs" a fairly large piece of land to get any access at all - camping or no camping!

Almost any plot of 4096 or smaller is going to have problems unless all of the neighbors stay away.


Nice rhetoric, but I don't see how it helps.

Just who made a limited supply of money in the world?

Rich people are generally rich because they are careful with money!

Read "Why we want you to be Rich" - Kiyosaki and Trump

They explain the facts much better than I ever could.

Well, then, if the requirement is NOT to fool all of the people all of the time, but just one person one time - well hey - that's not much of an accomplishment.

And even given that, the article you link to says that not one machine yet has passed the Turing Test:

"As of 2007, no computer has passed the Turing test as such."

It's not very hard to fool the occasional person, especially one who has no reason to know they are being fooled.

For example, people new to an online games, for instance, may not realize that NPC's (is that the right acronym?) aren't real people, even though the NPC itself isn't clever at all!

As it says on Wikipedia, more than that is required:

"Simple conversational programs such as [url given here] have fooled people into believing they are talking to another human being, such as in an informal experiment termed [url given here]. However, such 'successes' are not the same as a Turing Test. Most obviously, the human party in the conversation has no reason to suspect they are talking to anything other than a human, whereas in a real Turing test the questioner is actively trying to determine the nature of the entity they are chatting with."

Therefore, if you were to make a chatterbox that not only could fool one human one time, but could consistently fool virtually all humans - as explained in the Wikipedia article - I would say that you would definitely become very rich; the "millionaire" was an understatement.

Congratulations on your one million, by the way, or however much you have now; though I did not ask.

Make a machine that can pass the Turing Test and you will become rich AND famous.

I think, hope, and believe it is almost inevitable that that some day we will have robots on the order of the one played by Robin Williams in "Bicentennial Man."

And only when artifical intelligence comes anywhere near approaching that will I be at all intrigued by the questions of the machine's own intelligence, or self-awareness.

And as regards those considerations, I think this, also from the Wikipedia article, would be key:

"Another variation of the reverse Turing test is implied in the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1979), who was particularly fascinated by the 'storm' that resulted from the encounter of one mind by another. Carrying this idea forward, R. D. Hinshelwood (2001) described the mind as a 'mind recognizing apparatus,' noting that this might be some sort of 'supplement' to the Turing test. To make this more explicit, the challenge would be for the computer to be able to determine if it were interacting with a human or another computer.)"

coco

But that's exactly the argument against allowing campers on the Mainland (or, for that matter, net neutrality, but that's a whole different kettle of queuing theory). The idea is that if a practice uses a disproportionate amount of a necessarily shared resource such that it denies others access to that resource, it has to be controlled.

(I'm just pointing out that this argues counter to the intended point. I don't actually much care about camping one way or another--it doesn't affect me or places with which I do business in-world. And I find the camping chair a quaint anachronism in this post-libsecondlife era, but to each his own.)

Um um um um UM.

They aren't DREAMING about something they would like to have; they are paying for it and not getting it!

It is already a balancing act, and everyone knows this. But so far, it has worked, almost always, as a balancing act, because the bar is set high enough, at 40 avs per sim, give or take.

It hasn't BEEN much of a problem before, as people come on to SL at various times, and then log off at various times, too.

Camping - or zombie alts - make that balance no longer obtain.

I don't pay my money to SL to just sit and dream about possibly being able to access my land, and neither does anyone else, and LL is perfectly aware of that.


That simply has not been true in practice.

coco

However, those complaints _are_ supported by reality, in that they are made by people who have been denied access by the presence of campers. Well, we will exclude those people who are just flat out lying, but I've not encountered any on the forums yet.

"All the access (they) might dream about"? I am sorry, but there is no issue here; having land means access, one hundred per cent of the time, it is not a "dream". And no, no plot of 4096 or smaller will have these problems. Why would it? I spent an awfully long time on the mainland and never had such issues.

Goodness, so this thread is still going strong

At the end of the day isn't this all moot?

As long as "popularity" is a way of differentiating your business and increasing market penetration then business owners will rightly leverage it to make their business a success.

This didn't happen by accident, the Lindens designed the marketplace like this.

It's not any accident that one of the major searches available is "popular places", and in fact not so long ago they used to encourage this particular set of tactics by paying "dwell" to landowners based on the number of visitors and length of stay.

If any of this was of real concern, it's not really outside the wit of man to design another business incentive program.

At the end of the day, providing and financing camping chairs is a perfectly legal and viable tactic available to business owners in SL.

Using Alts to bump up visitor figures is again, a legal tactic available to business owners. Let those without an alt cast the first stone.

Also, as predicted, there have been a few messages here saying things like;

"I know someone who makes real money without resorting to these tactics".

All I'd say in response is .. bully for them

Finally, I appreciate the point of view of people talking about the impact of visitor numbers on sim/package performance.

However I don't really understand why a laggy sim is easier to live with if the visitors are attracted by the best product in SL, rather than a set of camping chairs.

Anyway, who exactly is to say that a product is "good" just because it meets a popular SL demand?

The Escort business in SL is very lucrative and popular. Does the fact that hundreds of sex starved avatars are slowing your sim down while they browse the offerings, really make you feel better than if they were afk in camping chairs?

Yes, but we are not talking about truly passing the Turing Test "as such" (even the limited version that HAS been done).

Rather we are talking about a random and unsuspecting person striking up a fairly predictable conversation with what appears to be a "live person", and furthermore has quite a few credible excuses for any shortcomings. Lag, Second Life bugs, and RL phone calls are the obvious ones.

THAT falls far short of the Turing Test!

In fact i have often been sitting enjoying a conversation with someone when I was booted for "being a bot imitating a person"! Mostly by some landowner who was booting out everyone because they were all "bots" - in one case they didn't even know what a "bot" was except that they were bad!

In rereading this, I think we are even agreeing with each other for the limited scope of this discussion at least.

Sigh.

Well after a nice dinner with my son I will take my own advice and go away for a while.

When I ran a club, I did have a small number of slots open on a campmaster, about 1/3 of my usual crowd. It was posted policy that if you were not active, you would be booted. I gave 3 warnings in open chat over 5 minutes. If you gave no response I ejected you. It isn't hard to tell a bot from an active resident.

Dwell was removed explicitly _because_ of camping chairs. (In the days of dwell, you could run a site with lots of camping chairs and NOTHING ELSE, and still make a profit, because you'd pay out less than you made back in dwell - naturally something had to be done about that )

Also, while dwell was active, every account had to have payment info on file, and alts were limited.

The idea that the Lindens intended people to keep idling bot avatars on their parcels to make them popular because they implemented popularity searching is just silly - that's like saying that when they implemented the old rating system, they intended rating parties and negpiles.

Hello Yumi,

I'm not sure we can ascribe a particular distaste for camping chairs to the Linden's decision to get rid of dwell, just that they prefered to actually make money from SL

Also I don't believe that they "intended" to encourage any particular business tactic by implementing popularity searching, just that it obviously isn't perceived as an issue, or they'd change the emphasis on "popularity" as a search.

Finally I'd just like to point out that the Lindens themselves are using the alt/bot tactic to increase the perceived popularity of SL.

The tacit acceptance of alts and the removal of the requirement for payment info to be on file are an explicit RL adoption of the same tactics people on this thread are berating SL businesses for.

It is percieved as an issue, the only problem is that they can't decide what to emphasise instead!



The Linden statements have always claimed that this was because something like 75% of visitors to the SL site, backed out of the registration process at the credit card request screen. Moreover, although it's been said that the Lindens do inflate registration numbers, this doesn't slow things down for anyone else!

Well, that's what, I think we are agreeing, too!

coco

LL has been slammed repeatedly, here in the forums and moreso in the press, for using dodgy practices to inflate their user numbers (and as Yumi points out, it isn't at anyone else's expense).

The implementation of free accounts and easy signup was intended to facilitate having 3rd parties drive people to SL to experience their content, for those using SL to promote their RL company, film, tv show, celebrity, or what have you. In that respect it made perfect sense since having to sign up for a paying account would make most people turn back at the door, severely hampering SL's viability as a marketing platform. It was a policy decision aimed at people like Pontiac, Dell, and Playboy. It just happens to have also brought a host of unintended consequences. I'm not sure why the alt restrictions were removed, but my guess would be that it had something to do with streamlining internal LL account management and not with facilitating bot farmers.

that other thread gave me a better idea about gaming the traffic system.

Just claim you have Jobs for noobies, Offer an outrageous wage ..

but never actually hire anyone.

Make them come in person for an application...

Your sim will be crowded with people.

All for the price of a classified ad.

---------------------------------------------------------

Before anyone says it sounds crazy - it is no less absurd than camping chairs.

QFT!

QFL!