How to help newbies financially?

Priming the economy and helping retention are given as plus factors for camping.
There are downsides to camping too.

Here's an idea that I just posted on the Blog (slightly cleaned up and clarified)


How about something like:



A community pot hosted by SL.



People donate money to the pot and associate a LM with the donation.

Each L$20 (for example) of the donation is treated as a credit in the pot system.
The system is essentially a pool of Credit/LM pairs

There's machine in Library for *anyone* to rez anywhere they have rez rights.

When someone under a certain SL age clicks it, they are given a simple anti-bot test to pass and then they are given a sum of L$20 (or whatever the value of a credit is to be), and a LM selected randomly from the pool of LMs remaining in the system. As a LM is given out, it is deducted from the count in the pool.
The LM's given out would have to be filtered by the maturity preference of the person clicking.

There would have to be some limit on the frequency with which an individual could get money out.



That sort of thing would allow people to donate and get some possible benefit other than just the feelgood of helping others.

For those more fixated on the benefit to themselves rather than on the benefit to the noobs, the system could produce statistics indicating the number of credits they have left in the system v. the overall number.


A balance between pure altruism and payback could be struck by something like the machines only functioning on a parcel that was still associated with credits left in the system.
It is true that the heavy hitters could flood the pool with their LMs, increasing the possibility that it would be their LMs that are randomly given to the noob along with the money.
The benefit to the people making lesser donations and wanting a payback is the lesser probability of their credits being used is that they stay in the system for longer. That would mean that they could have the machine on their parcel operational for longer.

Perhaps there could be a limit on the volume of payouts in a parcel in a time period. That would avoid just a few parcels getting flooded with avatars.
There could also be a limit of one payout to an individual on a parcel over a time period.
Noobs would be attracted to search out the machines, causing them to visit many places.


Noobs are helped financially. The economy is primed.
They are encouraged to explore rather than sitting around in the same place.
They can swap notes on where the machines are. It's a form of ongoing grid-wide treasure hunt.




Yup. People would sign up a grillion new accounts just to get a feed of L$ to pass to their mains.... but that unrestricted signup of alts is something that LL might need to be looking at.

People can donate to money trees that are about. The trees are only able to be used by ppl under a set age ( sl age that is) The good thing about the trees over camping is ppl are not hanging about when not even there as there is no point.
When I started I would get a few 1000L in only 15 mins love to see someone camping do that
One thing though that makes me less likely now to donate is so many "new" ppl are only alts

All payments from a box I rez will come directly from me. How will the "pot" work?

My bad explanation


The payments from the box that you rezz come out of the total pool.
The box that you rez could well hand out a LM for your competitor.

That might seem counter-intuitive, but is the same as someone saying that they give money to campers knowing that they will spend it elsewhere.

That initial post just confuses the heck out of me.

I do my share by donating to money trees.

How does the pot exist though? As far as I'm aware there's no mechanism in SL to create a pot and have a variety of people rez objects that access it.

The only reason I came up with the proposal was to float something that might have some attraction to people who were not prepared to give money to noobs without some payback for themselves.
The attraction would be having a noob magnet on their parcel while they continue to feed donations into the pot. Another attraction would be that their LM can be given to a noob along with the cash when thy click on a box somewhere in SL.

Try saying "Just donate to money trees" to some of the people who are complaining that banning camping will wreck the economy because noobs won't have money.
I think you'd get a chilly reception from many.

On a very quick read, this sounds pretty promising.

"There would have to be some limit on the frequency with which an individual could get money out."

Yeah, I think it would be important to have a known interval between destinations. Ten minutes, perhaps. That's to control grid load: it needs to be a slow excursion, not flitting around as fast as the sims can hand-off the agents.

The real technical challenge, IMHO, is the anti-bot test. We know a lot of things that won't work, but I don't know of any that will, and I'm afraid this may be insurmountable unless the payout is so low that it won't even be worth the time to solve the anti-bot challenge. And from the paltry pay-out of camping for traffic, we know that threshold is vanishingly close to zero.

One suggestion: A landmarked destination must be listed in Search.

(How the pot exists: think of it as a network vendor in reverse. Some trusted party runs the whole show, takes the donations, and pays out from server-scripted prims, which also track donations & landmarks, handle the bookkeeping, and verify the recipients)

Then the guy running the show has to rez everything as well.

It doesn't exist.
LL would have to create it.

The reason they would create it would be so that noobs could get donations without the issues created by camping.
The scripts in the box would be nomod.

The boxes themselves can't pay out, as the cash is not coming from the owner of the box.
The thing has to trigger a backend transfer from the pot to the avatar, with a popup to flag that their account has been credited.

FAIL.

OK, next idea anyone?

Hmm, wait, you could have a central server and trigger payments based on messages from the vendors but how would you prevent scamming? You'd need an airtight encryption scheme or something.

It's not that I'm against the plan it's just I'd like to hear how it is feasible.

It'd be easy to automate everything but the bot test, so I could fire up a bunch of alts, go get a snack while they moved to their assignments, sit down and answer a bunch of bot tests, eat my snack while they moved to their next assignment, answer a bunch more questions, read a web page on my normal rounds, answer more questions, read another web page, answer some more questions...

The payout is so low now that the money doesn't amount to much. Any humans who will camp for that little are likely just leaving the client running for IM, and they'd do that if there was no money at all.

Anything that requires the attention of someone working for living wages (and face it, few other than Lindens do, and you're asking for Linden attention in this) needs a better return than this. LL would be better off giving noobs a stipend. It'd be cheaper. Even better, they should use their time to improve the game, create new attractions, enforce their existing policies, etc.

Oh you're so GRUMPY today!
Stop trying to drag reality into this!


But..

If it is true that a ban on camping would tank the economy and damage retention, then some other ways of feeding money to noobs should be considered.

Money trees are good, but they don't have the sort of reach that camping operators might wish their spend to have.

If it is true that LL only respond to the squeakiest wheels and to things that affect their bottom line, then they might consider the investment.

One good thing about LL running the logic of the machines and back end would be that they are in the best position to be able to profile the activity and history of the avatars clicking for payments. No normal resident would be able to that in such detail.

If LL is going to get involved at all, and I've no doubt they won't, the simplest thing for them to do is give a stipend to everyone - smaller than the Premium stipend, but enough to give people something in their pockets.

On the other hand, there is no reason for camping to disappear. Those who want to give to new people, as some in the blog say they do, can cut camping parcels and carry on with the camping. Most landowners are able to do that. I know that some can't (Rene for instance), but most can if they want to.

OK, the pool of money and the landmarks and the clicking could theoretically work. There's no possible chance LL will implement some crazy new feature for this. It can be done without but I think the messaging infrastructure would be very difficult to implement securely.

Meanwhile, here's my idea:

You put "Rent Land from NinjaLand - http://ninjaland.net" as the first line in your profile. Once per week I'll do a search in All under People for that phrase. The top person gets L$100, the second person gets L$99, third L$98, fourth L$97 and so on.

The competitors of course will try to get as high as possible in the rankings through whatever means they can.

The cost to me is L$5050 per week the benefit to me is hundreds of newbies have my website prominently in their profile and newbies get money for nearly nothing. Win-win-win-win.

Freebie accounts used to get L$50 per week just for logging in. LL cancelled it around the same time they started lowering the stipend. I'm pretty sure the death of SL was predicted at the time.

Only newbies with html pages could win, which I'm sure would exclude most newbies.

Also, while there are ways of improving an avatar's html page in the rankings, I doubt that more than a few people know the ways, so the same ones would be getting the money every week.

Right, but you get an HTML page just for creating a group. I suppose that means you need to get L$100 up front from somewhere. Money trees maybe.

As for the same ones getting the money every week. In my imagination people will come and go out of the rankings as they get rich enough to change their profiles back to something normal. Besides, if many businesses all operated this scheme each newbie could hardly be top for more than one or two different places.

I also think many Noobs are not Noobs but alts in many cases just to camp.
I am sorry but in these times its a case of he who helps those who help themselves.
If you want money in here get a job or buy it as one thing i have noticed in my time in SL, many of those you give a hand out to dont say thank you and brag how they would not spend money to be in a game. Fine dont spend money but dont expect mine

Could the pot be held by a Linden account, like Supply Linden? That would be simple, and wouldn't require any additional coding.

I like this idea. It's a bit like money trees, but it has the advantage of involving residents in a community activity, one that helps everyone INCLUDING themselves. Unlike money trees, the dispensing objects also give out landmarks, encouraging people to roam about and see more of SL.

Elan. I'd be interested to see how it works in practise. I can see the ones who win, just leaving the line there for the sake of the money, whether they need it or not. It would be great advertising, of course, but I don't see it working as desired (except for the advertising) - I could be proved wrong though.

Sounds ok.
It's honest. It's clear to anyone reading the Profile that this is advertising.
While it might sound like Pick-buying, it's different. It doesn't buy IBLs for your parcel. It doesn't have the ambiguity of Picks in which some picks might be paid for and other not.


Then we get people gaming their Profiles in Search
There will be a limit to the number of people with that in the first line of their Profile. The ones that don't make the grade will get no payments and will drop it.
However, you could get thousands who have it in for their first week only.


How to spot a noob:
- Carrying a burning torch because the tutorial in OI never told them how to get rid of it.
- Usual walk and prim-hair stuff
- "Ninja" in line.1

As I think about explaining this, I realize there's a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily obvious.

First, why not make this basically a network of camping chairs, where "camping" is just showing up? That approach fails because such "uncamping chairs" might not pay out (for one thing, the owner may be out of funds), so the network fails when it sends people off to destinations that aren't really giving out the L$s they promise. Hence the need for a trusted central "pool" of L$s (which is really just a regular agent account that holds the money and distributes it).

So here's one way it could work: Merchant rezzes Destination box, grants it Debit permission, and pays it some L$s. Box registers that donation, emails about it to central Server script, and pays that same amount to the bot, Poolguy Trustworthy. Central Server script gets accurate location, etc., from the email message header, and other info about the donation in the message body. Poolguy Trustworthy checks transaction history to match payment with the donation claimed in the email (that's why it's best if he's a bot).

This doesn't have to be done by email; http_request may be easier anyway, since the bot has to compare the donation message with transaction history. But either way it's a lot more reliable if payout to the uncampers comes from an in-world prim rather than from a bot, so the bot would tell the payout prim when the donation has properly registered.

(Where does encryption fit in here? Well, one could do away with the bot having to compare transactions to claimed donations, but only if one had a completely trusted method of authenticating that the source of the message about the donation was indeed a script that collected the donation. I can imagine a challenge-response mechanism that might do that over an encrypted channel, but I sure as hell won't be implementing it.)

By the way, I think Anya's army of interactive bots may be the fatal flaw in the whole scheme. At least I'm not seeing a way around it.