Black Friday Protest

That's a great plan Felix. I'll help you pass out the kool-aid.

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LL is privately held by a bunch of people who have already taken deep drafts of their own Kool-Aid. Limp-wristed boycotts like these are a waste of time and are just needless frustration. It's like a gas tax holiday. Unless you put your money where your mouth is and start taking public transportation or riding a bike, you aren't doing sh*t other than working yourself up into a tizzy.

Not advocating any course of action.

Your not advocating taking a bus - your advocation blowing up our cars. Please realize how completely irresponsible your suggestions are. In my town our public transportation blogger started small but has a huge watchdog group that the Public transportation officials do not want to get on the wrong side of. Organized whining is effective and will always be. 100 blogs of protest is one way to make them and potential investors see that there is a unified front of paying customers that will continue to post in many languages until we are heard.

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I agree that a "run on the LindeX" is a non-starter; Supply Linden sells, but AFAIK, s/he never buys.

In this particular case, a protest is redundant; simply acting as rational agents in the market will be quite enough to get the message through to LL.

I mean, how many people really want a 750 prim sim with strict (but still TBD) limits on scripts, for US$75/mo? A few, but damned few.

How many people will pay US$125/mo for the "Homestead"? A few more, yeah, but I think nothing like the numbers of current OpenSpace sims.

See, the thing is, if SL had become *worth* that extra money, then our hypothetical rational agent would have nothing to complain about, and would just go ahead and pay for whatever land configuration best worked for his/her needs. But I sure don't see the SL economy having had such a dramatic upturn (e.g., a huge influx of new residents eager to spend for in-world goods and services) to make higher fees financially justifiable for landowners.

I believe that there are Lindens who are very much motivated to make SL worth more to us. For all the skepticism around it, I think the US$10K award is one example of that--not the money of the award, of course, but making SL more relevant and compelling by giving residents an incentive to innovate in ways that have RL impact.

Whether that will work or not isn't the point, but having just been announced it certainly hasn't worked *yet*, and looking around the grid, I don't see the killer app that's pushing up demand and so lifting the economy that we should all be eager to pay more for our pixels.

So, what would be the point of a protest? To warn LL that they've just bitten the hand that feeds them and their bottom line will suffer? I should hope that by now they recognize that a large number of residents think that's the case.

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FWIW, I think that's the case, although I think the bottom line impact is more a result of disastrous communications and the details of the new limitations, not the pricing itself. I think they were trying to gloss-over just how badly they'd hurt themselves with the previous mistake of pushing Openspaces with so many prims so cheaply. They'd hate to admit publicly that the huge and growing proportion of Openspaces in their sim mix actually represents a huge and growing drain on profitability. That would make Zee's report a lot less fun for investors to read, right?

You know, they don't exactly give away fiber rings between San Francisco and Dallas.

I can imagine that one fine day, M was presented with a flawless business case for that very expensive fiber, justified by real savings on bandwidth costs. And faced with a multi-million dollar network investment as the most cost-effective approach, M realized that the company's products just weren't making a credible ROI. And that it was getting steadily and rapidly worse. And so Operations was tasked with per-product accounting, to find and stop the bleeding. And in that instant, the old terms for Openspaces were doomed.

Maybe it didn't happen exactly like that. But we can bet that LL knows full well that it f*cked up: they've come as close to admitting it as this company ever has.

So it's not that they should be let off easy. But I'm not sure what purpose is served by rubbing their noses in it further. I think they know they're going to lose customers and the grid is going to shrink. And all we have to do to make that happen is exactly what we'll do anyway, as rational agents in the market

If a sufficient number of people wanted to protest sufficiently vehemently at recent changes or continuing erratic customer service (and looking at another thread apparently peaceful protest can get you banned anyway) and impact upon LL's business plan (I don't - I think the way to improve things is by continuing to express our opinions on changes and present cogent arguments that make sense from everyone's viewpoint) then you might cancel all your alts.

Real world business reputation is built on confidence about continued growth; a sudden severe reduction in the apparent numbers of participators (and from what I have seen there are a LOT of alts, especially if you include all the camping and traffic bots) might cause some concern. Investors can't tell the difference between deleted alts and real emigrants. It would also increase LL's administrative workload temporarily. I presume it would also improve performance. And everyone could continue to enjoy sl with their mains.

Pep (But those who rely on bots to keep up traffic figures or for camping revenues won't do it will they?)

In all seriousness, if enough L$ is taken out of SL in a small period of time, here's what would happen:

1) The Linden dollar would immediately depreciate. L$263 limit sell orders would fill up, then L$264... and so on. This could either cause

2) A panic in the L$ market, starting a domino effect where all others try to cash out as well fearing a L$ collapse or

3) people simply hold onto their L$ and wait for the artificial inflation to sort itself out.

Now, if people massively saved up L$ in preparation for a dump, what could happen is that Supply Linden sales would fill the gap due to increased savings. Then when all the L$ is sold at once, it would flood the market and create one hell of a mess.

So yea, the potential is there. Not that I recommend doing such things.

This seems to be one of the more rational posts about repercussions. M Linden just showed us he is going to make the same bizarre moves as Phil made all of these years.

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And, as M clearly stated, premium accounts are "insignificant" in their bottom line.

And the alt is outed...

Already public knowledge!

Pep (watch out for the next one . . .)

/or more?

Heh, I didn't know it was public knowledge. Here I was, being all detective-y.

It showed about as much talent for disguise as a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a Polar Bears Only golf club.

Irresponsible to who(m)?

Why is leaving SL irresponsible , if that is what you want to do? If you are no longer getting out of it what you are seeking, or the company that runs the service has totally lost your faith, why should you stay? If "organized whining" is acceptable to you, that's fine, but some people are truly fed up with SL's myriad of problems. It's their money and their time, and their time, and the only responsibilty they have is to use it to their best puropose.

And all because none of us has his business sense. At least Phil had the excuse of not really being a business type person. He's more an idea/execution man.

You know, LL could really save itself a lot of hassle if it'd just tell us who is it's "ideal customer." Then the rest of us could just pack our bags and move on.

Disguise? What disguise? Funny how people back off from confrontation when an -ism might be involved though!

Pep (You haven't yet spotted the mole in deep cover though . . . )

You mean Jumpman Lane?

And LL did that to themselves when they opened the free account floodgate.

yes....

guddamit breda now youv let the mutha***** dogg outa the friggin baskit

You'd be better off doing it through XStreet, which means that LL doesn't get the same cut of the money that they would if you did it through the LindeX.

If everyone tries to sell at the same time the market declines in a hurry. Look at the stock market, more sell orders than buy and wheeeeeee the free fall begins. Anyway, LL seems not to care if you go as they are ramping up their enterprise business to go after the deeper pockets of the corporate world.

In case LL hasn't noticed, the "deep pockets" of the corporate world are proving to be a lot shallower than the corporate world thought.

There are built-in trade pause for dramatic swings in either direction.

Why? Alts should not be created in order to screw with other people's minds. Alts have a legitimate purpose in SL, but that is most definitely not one of them.

But then, I have always lived by the idea that a person should not ever be intentionally mean, nasty, sneaky, or devious to another person.


My RL is not perfect and not always pleasant, but that does not give me the right to try and make other people's lives miserable in some misguided attempt to make myself feel better.


/me walks away shaking her head