WTF? Adult Content threads all locked?

It would be a very very sad day if LL decided to completely shut down Adult content in SL - I actually have felt the same way about the gambling ban (but understand it because of legal issues in that specific case).

Second Life is supposed to be a world where we can play at being something other than we are in RL, and that includes exploring the darker sides of ourselves, should we wish to.

But I also feel that it shouldn't be "in your face". It takes a LOT to offend me, as anyone who knows me can testify, but I understand, for example, that some are very intimidated by, for example, depictions of rape scenes, even if it's in "play". They might have no problem with nudity or even consensual sex, but get really freaked by that (for whatever reason). A friend once took me to a place in-world where they played out that sort of thing. I wasn't shocked, just surprised that people enjoyed that, but hey, if it's their thing....

I guess that I would like this sort of thing to be easy to find for those that want to find it, but not something that you come across without explicitly looking for it. Having three levels of content - PG, Mature and Adult, makes a lot of sense to me for this reason.

The decision to move the Adult to another continent seems a way to get it fully "out of sight" - so that people can't just stumble across a sim crossing and into a more "Adult" area. I can't say I fully understand the whys, but it does seem like the decision has been made by LL to do this as the most effective way of splitting it.

I guess what I am trying (badly) to say is that people should have a choice to see it and a choice NOT to see it - both are equally valid standpoints, in my eyes.

This blog and the linked news cast should point us all the way of the future for LL and the REAL reasons for the upcoming, already decided changes.

http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds/comments/the_virtual_world_a_compelling_place_to_learn_work_and_network/

Throwaway comment by the news commentator towards the end that Second Life are taking steps to make it more attractive to business. I think we now know first hand what those steps are, at least in part

Look at the growth of Webex et al and you'll see why LL would be wanting to grab a share of that market. My bet is, eventualy, Adult and Mature content will be hived off into a separate profitable business, maybe sold off but then again, if it's profitable? Certainly firewalled off.

Look, it's their company, their rules, they can do what they want but there is a HUGE confidence issue here. It's always been the case that if you 'bought' estate land it was buyer beware because if the estate owner went belly up 'your' land dissapeared.

Now it seems clear that buying mainland isn't any safer?

It used to be said it was OK because unless LL went belly up, it was a good bet subject to market fluctuations. Now, looks like if they say so, they can take it away - albeit with some sort of swap - but what you 'bought' will only be yours if they decide it's ok and there's NO guarantee now (was there ever?) that what's OK today will be OK tomorrow......

I don't intend this to be a 'skies falling' post, more of a 'adapt to the new reality' post

Kalderi: Does that apply to everything people might find offensive?

Trev: unless they can satisfy IT security requirements, it doesn't matter what they do to SL... most businesses aren't going to trust it for meetings. And once you've secured your "sim in a box" behind a firewall, it doesn't matter what happens in the public part of Second Life.

Argent, I take your point, and it's a valid one.

Lines get drawn by whoever is in power. Everybody draws their own personal lines where they wish. We have the choice whether to play in their sandbox or not, according to the rules they lay down.

Idiots.

"The gods must be crazy".

Yeah, they want a slice of the business market. They refuse to see that they are already sitting on a gold mine here, just as it is. This is entertainment with a capital E. A computer game created by adults, for adults. One that adults LIKE. I don't want to play Grand Theft Auto, or Call of Duty, or Worlds of Warcraft. I want my SL, though.

But, willy-nilly, SL will be changed, and changed, and changed again. More and more restrictions. Less and less freedom. All in the name of chasing after a market segment that DOES NOT WANT THEM, while they alienate more and more of the market who DOES.

LL has the biggest case of "my neighbor's grass is greener" syndrome I've ever seen.

Update: I've downloaded the IBM paper.

The meeting described was a special case one-off setup. IBM created an estate that was physically firewalled off the rest of the SL grid to hold their meetings in. That is the capability that HAS TO BE turned into a standalone product they can sell, routinely, before they can start worrying about any other barriers to business use of SL.

I've never had any problem with them wanting corporate customers. It's LL poking me in the eye in attempt to get them that's so annoying.

They still seem to miss the real problem which is that SL just isn't ready to play in this space yet. LL needs to do real, serious work before real, serious businesses will play with them.

Stability has improved but it's still not good enough - my mainland home has been hurting since around the time Etch rolled out and LL can see that it's lagging but doesn't know why. Great. Thanks.

Access (ie: group) controls are in dire need of an overhaul. There's no (that I know of) interest list/texture caching on the client side except on individual clients so bandwidth for a company with a lot of SL users is far higher than it needs to be. There's no security. It's been largely stagnant as a development platform. There's no IP protection. Sims usually max out at 40-50 people unless everybody's very careful. Rolling restarts are a huge improvement over the old shutdown Wednesdays but this still needs lots of work if you want me to host a meeting there. Newbies are thrown into the world with just a hope that they'll figure out how to swim before they sink. They raise monthly costs by 67%. The list goes on and on...

/me loves SL and wishes LL a long and lucrative future but please, please stop blaming us for the lack of enterprise customers and get back to working on the product. Enterprise people don't want to know that their land is safe for kids - they want to know that it's going to make them money and not be more hassle than it's worth.

You mean the contract that seems to say "You will give us money and we make no representation that we are giving you anything in particular, just the right to host content (that we reserve the right to unilaterally delete at our whim) on our servers (which may or may not ever be up or functional), and we can terminate your access whenever we want, and that there is no value to the content or any Linden Dollars"? That contract? The one that says in writing that it is the full agreement?

You're going to have to argue against parole evidence; unconscionability or something.

I believe there are cases on record that support the notion that any such contract is not binding. The two possible arguments are "I had to click Yes, if I wanted to use the service." (coercion) and "unreasonably unfair"...they promise nothing, while you promise something definite, or give them definable consideration.

The main thing that has struck me from the beginning is that such a huge announcement was not made by M Linden.

Is he still there or did he quit or getting ready to bail or something?

You have to read and accept the terms before plunking down your dollar, so it's not coercion. (You are thinking of where you buy something at the store, take it home and then it tells you the contract. There have been rulings either way, and the laws vary across states, but in general this has been deemed legal. But that's not what LL is doing here anyway.) As for unreasonability -- LL has been to court on this once, and they repaired their advertisements and terms of service to make sure it's reasonable. And they don't promise "nothing", they promise that it will be flakey and that they can delete things at whim, because you are paying for the enjoyment of participating in their experiment.

I'm not saying that it's impossible. Just that you're not going to hire some random lawyer, march into court, and have a straightforward "They broke the contract" argument. It's something MUCH more complex and expensive, and you are liable to lose. This is why people don't sue them all the time. The cost of attempting to do so far outweighs the value of any SL business, and your chances are not good anyway.

LOL. How about this for an idea.

"M" is outside in the "Real World" discussing the most opportune way of selling LL..?

Face it guys, we are not the customers here.

We are the commodity.

...and a very annoying one at that...

....

To be fair, in the article where M talks of business meetings as the "killer app", he does say the LL is working on providing private grids for such meetings.

Which begs the question, whether the clean up of SL is really related. Businesses are going to hold these meetings either on private estates or (more likely) on private grids.

In neither case will the attendees go anywhere near the mainland. If the meetings are on private estates, what might put people off is inappropriate content in the welcome areas, however, if held on private grids the only thing putting people off will be SL's reputation in the media. That reputation might be eleviated by branding these private meeting grids differently but hardly by LL creating a new "porn continent".

Matthew

To the extent that if every single person left all at once, they would be screwed, we are both. But in anything other than the most microscopic view of the timeline, we are neither.

Complete and utter disagreement on this one.
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If;

"M"'s basic motivation is to sell this platform on the stock exchange, he needs his product to be easily manageable and understood by "the corporate suits" who will invest.

Yes, he has a platform, and he has a paying member base = We are the Commodity.

...

I think the mainland will be cleaned up for business, but indirectly. LL wants residents on the mainland, but not the ones who inhabit it now. it wants the middle of the road , whitebread family of users, who will then be the focus of corporate advertising inorld. A while ago , LL signed some kind of deal with a company that develops digital advertising of some sort, that can be tailored to the people in a particular sim. Data Mining, aka ID verification can provide Ll and it's sponsors all sorts of info that could help them create an ad campaign just for you.

The conversation is back open, I think LL are having us at it as they say the dialogue had slowed down, well obviously it had when they locked the threads!

Dialogue? AHAHAHA!!!!

Good one, Ciaran!

May i say she has the right point and this will hurt them more then us bucuse ya know what someone will get pissed off anuff and go and make there own sl clone and they will not be the top dogs no more lmao i mean come on we are in a in a bloody recession and thay want ppl to come to sl well this is not the way to do it it will make more ppl leave then stay . i must say thay have shot them selfs in the foot with this one and when thay come beging for us to come back to sl bucuse thay have pissed everyone off thay have no one to blame but them selfs

PS: Its 2nd life so y force us to submit 1st life info,,isnt sl about escaping 1st life for a while not addin extra pressures to it
& while youre at it LL..make a viewer that enables u to go to preferences & check a box that allows US THE PPL THAT GIVE YOU $ YEAR AFTER YEAR to block YOUR AV from mature content YOURSELF,,then IF you CHANGE YOUR MIND ....YOU can uncheck it at a later date & stop forcin this bull on all of us!

Indeed, as use of the term "dialog" would imply that *both* sides are talking.

I prefer to call it a polyphonic monologue.

They've reopened discussion in the "Further Conversations" forum with a single thread, instead of the five they had before.

And it will be ever thus until it starts costing them business. As for myself, now that I have learned about this issue, I have determined to STOP SPENDING MONEY in SL on inventory purchases. If things should ever get to the point that I don't want to play here anymore (I'm still catching my breath from the Open Spaces fiasco) then I will have less to lose. And as to the IT world in general, don't buy anything from them you don't absolutely have to until they treat you like a valued customer. Period. I just went through a bunch of crap like this with iTunes and it has cost them a customer.

Isnt it strange that all the time this hullaballo about 'adult' content is going on there's a barely mentioned change in scripts looming which I see affecting 'genuine' sl users far more than explicit content. I always get the feeling stuff like this is a smokescreen for other things which are being more covertly changed and the fact that there are issues which are of more concern to 'paying customers' which never seem to get resolved or even tackled - my favourite bugbears are the continual farce of trying to flying over regional boundaries without going out of control and the ludicrous business with clashing transparent textures - we never ever see any mention of these being dealt with.

Every announcement from Lindens never ever seems to be of benefit to sl users.

When was the last time they reviewed land tier charges or land allowances or generally announced something good AND USEFUL for the fee paying community of SL as a whole ?

They do give the impression that they don't work as a team as a whole, that little teams do their bit with no thought for how it may impact elsewhere.

They simply don't seem to think systemically. The people behind the adult continent don't seem to consider the implications for the land market, which has stalled on releasing full mainland sims due to how flat the land economy is.

This is also a concern of mine with script limits, it sounds nice but is it taking any consideration of existing content? Is it taking any consideration of vehicles and exploring and social activities that people engage in?