Recursion

I had an interesting experience last night. I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate doing his thesis work on "avatar mediated sexual activities"...in other words, cyber-sex.
This wasn't your usual survey. He's doing in-depth conversational type interviews.

But I don't want to talk about that, specifically. As we were talking, I had a thought.

Here we have LL, working hard to stamp out all that nasty Adult Content in Second Life. And here we also have LL working hard to attract educational users to the platform. Just look at all the recent blog posts about this university or that college.

And here we have someone, several someones (our researcher, his faculty advisers, his colleagues on the project) from an educational institution, working hard to research the very thing that LL is trying to stamp out.

You know, we should've written to all the sociology departments out there who use SL to research human behavior and gotten them to protest LL's new policies toward Adult Content. Maybe under the Endangered Species Act or something.

All it means is that instead of studying Pixel Porn, the virtual anthropologists will be able to study how a company of allegedly well educated people can be so stupid.

... and horny.

Maybe they got religion - it stops people thinking (see other thread). *rolls eyes*

Recursion..again????

If they tried to study LL policies they would likely just get into a turf war with the business department... although it would probably do universities good to do more interdisciplinary studies (sociology studying businesses, business studying social trends).

I don't get the impression that they are trying to "stamp it out", it was Philip who said in the early years "Pr0n is what drives the Intenet."

I think what they are trying to do is put it back behind closed doors so it isn't quite in your face from the minute you hit mainland after orientation.

Phil's not driving the ship any more, and the new captain has changed our course. He's not listening to the passengers hollering about the icebergs ahead, either.

It never was. That was just hysterical hyperbolic nonsense. There were definitely cases of it being in inappropriate places, but for the most part you had to lok for it to find it. At least in my experience.

While LL may not want it stamped out , yet, it still brings them too much income, they do want it to be a dirty secret. And if the "millions of unheard voices" ever do show up, and SL becomes the 3D AOL/MyFaceSpaceBookTweetPlurk that it seems the Mand M boys want, I think it will be replaced with revenue from RL Corporate Advertising.

It is a funny series of events, except that LL isn't stamping out anything. They moved it off the mainland, and cleaned up search. That's not even close to stamping it out.

It's merely a step. Doing so in one fell swoop would cripple their income stream. They will let attrition take a toll as some people will get fed up and quit, play the "You can't move, but you have to"game they are playing now, and wait for the "new" SL users to do the rest. They hope enough will come in to make the corps come back, and let them all complain about the smut and once they have the Quatloos coming in, they'll transport the Zindrans out into the vacuum of cyberspace.

As usual, LL had quite a good idea . . .

Pep (then completely screwed up the implementation, which will take some time to resolve.)

PS It's very difficult to study wildlife in its natural habitat; much easier to pen the animals up so you can watch them closer.

Why Quatloos? What does it have to do with this?

Maybe it's just my particular perspective . . . after all, I'm not being very directly inconvenienced (although I will have to age verify now, which is a pain) . . . but I tend to the "LL wants to hide AC for PR reasons, but doesn't really want to lose that revenue stream" side of this. It seems to me that LL's horribly blundered attempts to backtrack on a more hard-line approach suggest that they are, in fact, worried about losing AC businesses. They seem to be far more concerned, for example, about AC that appears in search or advertising, than about what is actually on the ground (so long as it is tucked a bit out of sight).

The millions of unheard of voices have decided it's too complicated to jump on a poseball and are having virtual sex via Skype, AIM and Google chat. They ain't ever coming, at least not to SL.

The window to grab money from RL companies has come and gone. As long as you can only fit 40 avatars on a server without it crashing, there will never be a real reason to be an advertising presence in SL. The only reason to do so in the past was that the press release got picked up and distributed by the media. Since being an LL presence is no longer news, RL companies are smart in staying away and they will continue to do so, no matter how squeaky clean they make the Grid.

I know that, and you know that, but The Providers evidently don't.

Try looking at it this way, Lindal. Let's say there were a contest: human sex drive vs. Linden Lab top executives. Which of the two do you think is stronger and more effective?

LL knows this, and I imagine that they are counting on their current strategy to let them have their cake and eat it too. They now can point at a huge inworld upheaval that they imposed in the name of separating sexual from asexual players. Whoohoo, take that, lobbyists! The more uproar we cause, the more it backs up LL's point that they are sacrificing revenue to make their world safe for adults who don't want to see sexual content.

Does LL have any delusions that they can, this way or indeed in ANY way, ban sex play from SL? You bet your sweet ass not. Hey, they don't WANT any such delusions. It's the easiest and most consistent money in the world, it is largely recession-proof, and they WILL NOT walk away from it.

p.s. Plus, I have always maintained, somewhere here Newt Gingrich is playing a 12-year old girl. He's not letting that go, nossir!

Thankfully, their work is paying off. I've logged in ten times in the last month and my eyes have not been assaulted by a single topless avatar.

Just an aside ... Soft Linden noted yesterday what happens when you Google 'recursion'. Genius.

OMG, that's hilarious! Who'd have thunk it? Someone at Google has . . . wit!

I actually clicked it thinking at first I had spelled it wrong LOL Very cute.

Let me know when and where you will log in next. I'll be waiting. I'll have on a red skirt.

Go ahead, post the slurl for where you login. I dare ya!

*sends a PM to Elianthus that we need a small army of topless avies*

I'm gonna AR the hell out of you.

Where were you when I was topless in a public area last weekend?

I don't get it. Looks like a normal search results page to me...

This