New news on the possible fate of landbots

If you ask me, I think in general most bots (depends on what is constituted as a bot) should be allowed, but bots shouldnt be allowed to directly affect the economic market, especially the most important market in SL the land market

sorry clarification- The most important market to LL , the land market

Don't get personal, Jackson. I will happily disagree with people but hate it when they start using insults to bolster their position.

And for the record, I am quite aware that land prices were high because of the dearth of new land. But you clearly omit the effect of intermediate resellers in the end price. The auction winner would sell to one reseller, who sold to another reseller, and who might yet again sell to another reseller. And sometimes yet another, depending on the business model. This was not an uncommon phenomenon. So land that started off at 12L/m2 from the auction winner shortly thereafter ended up at 15+ because of people who were not flipping land for altruistic reasons.

hmmm

Claerly there have always been two sides to the disagreement

1 Many land barons got shut out of thier business when landbot came and those inparticular have a biased opinion of landbots

and 2 Those who suffered paying the price that land barons reaped profits on the land when it was sold

Now Im sure that there is a whole lot more of the latter than there is of the 1st group. and I dont disagree that there was some pretty shady dealings from many of the land barons, but landbots have had thier own shady dealings too, let alone burden the grid. All Im saying is landbots didnt better SL, but rather made it less that what it was

Huh?

I dont see this, I see:

*Pro Landbot*

- Landbot runners who want to keep things as they are becuase its how they make money.

- People who want to be able to sell they land extremely fast

*Anti Landbot*

- Land barons who don't run landbots who have lost money due to the automation.

- Customers gouged by both bots and barons due to them adding an uneccessary middleman (and middleman's profit) With Landbots a higher % of plots are now handled through a middleman.

- People who get land swooped by landbots. Anyone who doesn't think swooping happens more rapidly with landbots should look into investing in swampland in Florida.

It seems to me to make a great deal of sense to make the land-selling process more failsafe--even if there were no landbots. At the very least, there should be some delay in listing for-sale land on Search; other more elaborate mechanisms as suggested here may be viable, too.

But I don't think the real tragedy of landbots is the handful of residents who get burnt by them. Rather, it's the usual "Tragedy of the Commons" as manifested in the ever-escalating need to increase capacity of Search and other common infrastructure services, caused by all these libsecondlife-driven transactions, making every resident's attempts to use the tools more frustrating and prone to failure. If, as I suspect, landbots are consuming most of that capacity, then it would make sense to decrease their marginal utility--make them less profitable to run--in hopes of reducing their numbers and hence their detrimental impact on the infrastructure and hence on resident satisfaction.

Delay in listing land may be a way to reduce their appeal--although I'm not sure of that, and it could possibly backfire: the last attempt to throttle Search from the client had the predictable result of simply increasing the number of bots, thereby adding load to other services in addition to Search. My hunch is that private land auctions would be much better in several ways, but there needs to be a working auction mechanism in place first.

All that said, in principle, I wouldn't want to get rid of bots; they can serve a useful purpose in making in-world markets more efficient, and in (desperately) working around some of the hard constraints of the scripting language. I do wish, however, there were some way to require bots to pay for the very substantial capacity they consume--but I've no idea how to make that happen.

I think thats the same basic idea, just expressed differently.
I didnt include landbot runners as obviously they have thier own jaded opinion

BTW who has the fastest landbot?

Why don't you go back a little farther and look at what caused the reaction, Jackson? You made no point.

There has always been a middleman - or two, or three, sometimes four - in the last year. I joined 12/1. I went premium a couple of weeks later after getting blessed with First Land. I started watching land shortly thereafter, and noticed often that land would switch between resellers - which is how I came to learn who many of the bigger players were, and some smaller ones who have probably exited the business. And even the smaller ones, some of whom I thought were buying land for far too much, ended up making money because a bigger fish came along or maybe they finally got to an end user.

Granted, the paucity of land was the single largest component of the price being as it was, as the auction winners fought tooth and nail and paid 2700++ for a sim. Those days are long gone now, but they will likely be back in some measure (markets are cyclical). Other factors are currently depressing the price of land, and maybe the unwillingness of the smaller fish to get in the market because of landbots is one of them. I don't know, but it could be one factor. I don't consider it the major factor, however, as LL has done more than enough to shoot itself in the foot, either involuntarily (gambling ban, VAT) or voluntarily (broadly offensive policy, performance issues, age verification).

We should be able to put our land up for auction and
let the landbots battle each other in bidding wars!



Chris/Har/other-"anti-bot"-folks-

A bot, like a car, gives many advantages, but not everyone can have

Should cars be banned too because they're unfair to pedestrians?

I think it is rather mean-spirited and closed-minded of you to demand that *everyone* forfeit their right to run a bot... just because some people abuse them.

Oh, and... You demand that avatars always be controlled directly by a real flesh-and-blood human being? If you're going to dream, may as well extend that to include telephones and demand that answering machines and voice mail be abolished.

This is the digital age, people are used to dealing with non-human minions.

--
so many witchhunts, so few witches.

Well Jopsy, if your bot stays on your land and does not affect anyone else, I have no problem with it. Any way landbots are not as big a concern to me as these scanner bots used by unethical people like ESC to scan every item and list it without permission of the owner on their website.

As for answering machines and voice mail, I do refuse to use them. I hear an electronic voice, I hang up the phone.
But even they only interact with those who choose to interact with them. Not like your bots.

Whoa, hold on here, Jopsey. I am not anti-bot.

I am anti-malbot, which is why I took issue with ESC and its sheepbot(s) back when that was the bot du jour, but that was because it was badly designed and harming Residents, and ESC's apologists responded to complaints, not with attempts to fix the problems, but with quite astonishing arrogance. I later supported another Resident's attempt to put a bot-based search-and-buy system in place - because he went out of his way to correct or avoid the problems the sheepbot had exposed. Never minded his fleet of 10 searchbots at all for that reason.

I don't much like landbots, but I am not actually opposed to them. I just want people to be properly warned that the things are out there, lurking. They can be useful if you want to get rid of land fast; they are a danger if you are careless or unwary or don't know they exist. But that is because the land-sale interface is inadequately designed. The remedy I proposed was putting a warning on the land-sale window, not banning landbots.

The problem with bots is not bots. I am not a Luddite. The problem with bots is people who insist on using them in ways that are harmful to other Residents.

Launch a beneficial - or even just not harmful - bot, and I'll be fine with it.

Actually way back in the day you could buy land from the previous tenant, you could even beat the swoopers since they were busy chasing down bad land for sale cheap.

Human Land Barons were far less efficient at grabbing up all the bargains than landbots are.

But in the last year, there were no real bargains to be had, other than First Land, until the crash. First land was sold for a pittance, and instantly turned around and marked up to 10k. Freshly cut auction land was quickly purchased, and turned around with a box on it featuring some well known baron. And that box would be replaced by another baron, maybe a little smaller. And maybe once more by someone else. Margins were thin, but it made money. At one point it seemed that the only demand was among resellers. This was in January or February.

I don't miss those days at all. Not with regard to the land market, anyway.

Sounds like you would also have a problem with a bot that "affected you" "on your land" - by calling you at home to play a recorded message.

Which was exactly what the reverse-911 caller bot used in San Diego recently did. It notified nearly a million wildfire threatened citizens and that they should evacuate. (and, no, that's not like LL using bots... the phone company isn't run by the goverment.)

Har- I stand corrected, and agree, the problem is exploitive people that will do pretty much anything to take advantage of others. Malicious bot use is just an extension of that.

My main angle in this is that bots are beholden to the same laws and rules that we all are when we use an avatar. Perhaps the ToS/CS needs a little revision... but ultimately enforcement of SL law should not have to be concerned with whether an avatar was controlled by a human, a bot or a cyborg (human/bot hybrid).

If it isn't controlled by a human, it should not have any rights.

And 911 systems are government run, at least where I reside. I pay a tax on every phone bill I pay to support it. That tax goes to the local government and the employees of the 911 call center are government employees.

how can you say that? didnt you ever see bicentennial man? it made me cry

I agree, but some of the repercussions may not be entirely convenient for the humans. For example, I suspect it's just a matter of time before something like CAPTCHAs start appearing in parts of the UI, just as a means of controlling the resources used by automated clients. That's not to say there shouldn't be automated clients, but they do tend to use a disproportionate amount of resources, compared to a human user.

It reminds me of the dreaded old "screen-scraping" approach to lashing automation atop some old mainframe program... except there's a lot more overhead required for the grid to keep an agent in-world than for a mainframe to format and process a CICS screen. IBM sold a lot of mainframe capacity, just to satisfy the demands of "screen-scraping" automation; I'm not real eager to see tier increased to fund the capacity needed to keep the bots happy.

Because I am a cold heartless American Bastard.

QFT

QBISBFOTE

(Quoted Because it should be Fucking Obvious to Everyone.)

Hey Jackson: Rule #1 of catfights: NO DUDES!

All the bots did in this respect was shift all the lindens accrued by barrons between the buy and the sell to one person, the owner of the bots who did nothing but set up the program and let it run. The botmasters sell the land they get at market prices, no more, no less. They in no way altered this aspect of the land market. They in NO way lowered the market price on land. What lowered the market price was the influx of new land VERY fast, not only from LL's creation of new sims, but folks dumping large sums of older land due to the gambling ban (casinos took up lots of land) and VAT (Europeans owned lots of land they could not afford w/ VAT added to their bill). PS, the botmasters are not having their bots programed for flipping for altrustic reasons either.

Yeah, thanks, I already know.

if memory serves me correctly, jackson aint a dude.

Especially not Tito