Anatomy of a Fail

Perhaps some do. Perhaps some people look at the plants creators and find out where to buy them. Perhaps the place has notices and LM givers of where to buy them. And perhaps many or most people just go there for the pleasure of being there. Whatever the case is, it's no loss not to have samples of plants there if the plants business is doing well, and bots businesses do tend to do well.

12k traffic doesn't amount to all that many people and, if there are plants there from various creators, it would require some of those people to actually want to buy a few plants, and for some of *those* people to pick my plants, for me to consider it worthwhile having some of my plants there. In other words, it would be no contest at all.

Five pounds of flax.

I just popped over to the sim for 10 minutes or so. The plants aren't showcased - they are just there in the landscape, helping to make the sim quite attractive. Some are set for sale but aren't indicated as such, and there are no signs or LM givers to the main plant stores that I could see.

Some people were there but they didn't appear to be there to buy anything. Mostly they just stood or sat in one spot all the time I was there, with no open chat - I wonder I can see it getting 12k traffic a day if the number of people that I saw is reasonably consistent 24/7, but I can't see the "hundreds of people" passing through every day, as the OP stated - but I was only there for 10 minutes.

It confirmed my idea that there is no contest between using bots to bring people into a store and having some of the store's items placed there. The bots win by default.

Fair enough, but where does optimizing end and gaming start? What I mean with that, is that optimizing is done to rank higher, nothing more nothing less. When I chose my parcel name and description, I did it so I could rank higher. In your definition that could be seen as gaming as well.
So what is the difference between the link farms that are only there to rank better, and optimizing parcel name/description and items set for sale? What they have in common is that they make a page rank better, and they are both in the interest of the creator of the page. Considering the content is relevant to the searcher, also relevant to them of course, but the intention is to rank higher, period.

One important thing as well is: your competitors do it as well. My competitors use bots and pay for picks. Both things are not dishonest in my beliefs, though I rather don't use them. Because they are not dishonest in my beliefs, I can however use them without feeling bad. And it is the most effective way of competing: The better one ranks, the more chance one has to be visited by potential buyers.
Now I know that the argument "they did it as well" does not hold up to prove something is good, that is not my intention either. In your beliefs they are wrong no matter how many people do it, and that is perfectly alright. In my beliefs they are not wrong, no matter how many people use them. That is why I say that I can understand any bot runner: it is their way of competing with the other bot runners. Just as I compete with other pick payers. Again in an idealistic world no one would pay for picks or run bots, but we do not live in one. Neither RL nor SL.


Where did I ever say that people refusing to engage in dishonest behavior are at fault???
What I do say is that a government (or in our case LL) sets the rules for a society. As long a government permits things, they are alright in that society.
One difference: In general we could say that the laws should represent how people think a society should run, a general feeling of what is wrong and what is right. Not always true, but that is how a democracy should work.
Second Life is not ran by a democratic government, but by the owners of the platform. They cannot determine what is wrong and what is right, they can tell us what they allow and do not allow. Running bots was allowed until the blog entry (several people asked in tickets even, plus LL knew those botfarms were there as well).

Spamming is currently legal (the CAN-SPAM act is toothless, and doesn't target anything but the most extreme or fraudulent abuses). That doesn't make it "alright".

1. Laying out your stall clearly. Benefiting from the peer acclaim of other stalls.
2. Faking peer acclaim via link farms
"What they have in common is that they make a page rank better"
That's all they have in common.

1. I can earn money.
2. I can get money via fraud.
What they have in common is that they get me money.
That's all they have in common.

You could try answering the question that you were asked, Sling, instead of spewing out your tired old lies from your decaying old soapbox. It would make a grown-up of you - honest - which would save from a lot of embarrassment.

The main reason I even bother to discuss with Sling, is so people see what she really is about. As soon as any thinking is involved, she fails miserably. It is there for everyone to see, and that amuses me. And you never know, someone might actually respond with reasonable answers to my questions.

What I find fascinating about you two is that you appear to be genuinely incapable of seeing the difference in principle between
1. laying out a website clearly, honestly and intelligently (optimising content) and
2. Falsifying peer acclaim by manufacturing inbound links via link farms (gaming)

What you are totally lacking is any feeling of empathy towards the people who are searching for information.
You are sociopaths.
You need to be told in explicit detail what is honest and what is not. You are incapable of working it out for yourselves.




You know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Wow! You really don't know what optimising a website means. And yet you try to teach a professional. Really, Sling! How much more embarrassment can you take? I actually thought you would have had an idea by now - my mistake.

Oh, and btw, why don't you try to answer the question that you were asked? Politicains sidetrack questions when the answers would be embarrassing to them, but you're not a politician.

Ting, I wanted to pm you but couldn't - do you have pms turned on? Anyway, I make plants - hand painted stuff. I sell via SLX.

And one day, I'll get round to putting ALL my stuff on there. Honest!

IM me in world if you want to see anything rezzed.

What makes you think they do? Google's ranking algorithms are proprietary, but they do tell webmaster not to participate in link schemes if they want to get higher rankings. They may not be able to enforce that policy, but it is their policy.


Gaming a search engine is doing anything to manipulate the results in your favor that doesn't correspond to a reason that the users of the search engine, as a group, would consider a good or useful reason for placing it higher. The users may not care about bots, but I don't think they believe that they're helped by having stores that use bots appear higher than stores that don't.

Only to those whose criteria makes it the "biggest success of all". Not everyone shares the "ethic" that "those with the most profit are the most successful". Businesses exist for whatever reason they were created for (and sometimes discover along the way).

Bots certainly don't increase MY "customer satisfaction" of a store using them, not the least of reasons why is that they are a significant barrier to allowing me to be a customer in the first place.

While you may be right in that cheating gets you a "high score", in the end, if that is all that matters to you, good for you. For many other people, knowing they played a good, honest game makes their lives worthwhile.



No, we feel satisfied giving our money to honest folks, like ourselves, who almost always make superior products to those who cheat, thus rewarding them for being honest as well as being the best.

Whether you consider it a "success", according to your own warped criteria is irrelevant to us.

We never walk away empty-handed or empty-hearted from our choices, so that point is a non-starter.

Lower Mainland, represent!

Idealism and realism in balance is what makes most long-term businesses successful.



The "law" doesn't permit it anymore and, arguably, never should have in the first place.



Ever heard of a "mission statement" before?



The "main goal" of a pyramid scheme is to make money, too; that doesn't make it any more ethical even if you call it a "business".



"Gaming" a search engine is supplying false information to achieve better ranking. It can be using popular terms (like "sex", "porn", "drugs", etc) when you have nothing even remotely related to such terms, or supplying/inflating other metrics with artificially-generated information, like traffic, or number of hits on a web page, for example (does anyone really believe that some podunk website with a webcounter that reads hits in the millions is even remotely accurate?).

In the case of "traffic", it is MEANT to represent the relative popularity of a place, based on the presence of ACTIVE avatars. Until the advent of camping and bots becoming available and (not dis-)allowed by LL, that's precisely what it represented. It is intended to be a metric of some place's popularity with OTHER residents.

With people camping there and skyboxes full of bots, the metric not only loses its meaning and usefulness, but it also represents an ever-escalating concurrency and resource problem for the grid.

Let's say that LL approved of the use of bots to game traffic, and that the barrier to entry was lowered to almost nil by some enterprising individual(s). Now, EVERYONE's place is "popular" on the search list, and the advantage to using bots becomes diluted. No one can TP anywhere, because all these "popular places" are full -- of bots. Login concurrency shoots up into the stratosphere, or tries to, until it hits the "realistic" maximum that saturates LL's frontend and backend, just like it does on days when we hit peak concurrency. Teleports, transactions, rezzing all start failing again, and continue to do so, whilst 10,000 businesses attempt to get their 20-bot quota logged-in.

Now, a certain person here would say "gee, I could make my bot system smart so it logs some out as other human avatars teleport in. However, that only works if everyone else also uses such a system, like, say, his neighbor(s). They may decide to run a full quota on bots (up to filling the entire sim). They surely aren't going to drop their usage down, because it would hurt their rankings, and they surely don't have any less right to "high rankings" than Mr. Smartybotpants. What's their incentive to "give a little". Business is all about making money, regardless of whether it screws over some(every)one else, right?



They are entitled to a FAIR ranking, not one of their choosing, since EVERY business would, of course, choose to be ranked at the top. However, with cheating condoned, everyone will FEEL entitled to the best ranking they can screw out of the system. Ranking is a GIFT from Linden Lab. It is free advertising offered as a metric in their search system. It is far from an entitlement, so that is what makes gaming it that much more odious.



You have a very interesting take on reality vs idealism. So you feel it is OK to allow people to game a system to the point of destroying the system for everyone, because "that's reality". Well, yeah, in a sense, you are right; in "reality", we have trillion-dollar bailouts of entire industries because people were allowed to do "whatever they wanted to make a buck". Not everyone CAN follow, nor CAN they succeed if they do follow. Just like in a pyramid scheme, those that "follow", especially late in the game, can never succeed. That's what makes them the "victims" or "patsies" in the first place.

I certainly don't advocate more UNNECESSARY regulation on people's lives, especially my own, but when people are willing to go to extreme excess in the name of "money", "profits", et cetera, I will take the lesser of two evils; in this case, regulation.

I would suggest some light reading: "The Tragedy of the Commons"



You're right. Most people don't give a damn, because they don't know about it. Did many people care that Microsoft was a convicted monopolist? Nope, but that doesn't make their business practices any more ethical or allowable, either. That goes either before OR after they were convicted. You can't take the stance that "well, only after they got convicted was it bad". No, it was bad BEFORE, too, hence the conviction.

Whether people know that it is happening or not doesn't justify it in the least.



LL's normal slow-as-molasses approach to such problems always initially looks like failure. I know *I* have given Jack a LOT of crap over the adfarm/extortion policies when they were announced, and for months afterwards whilst the gears of progress at the Lab ground slowly forward. However, if you look at the mainland now and the number of adfarms/extortion microparcels, I don't think I would call it a "failure". That it took months to more than a year to get to this stage might seem to be a failure while in the middle of it, the end result most definitely has not been.

As such, given the way Jack likes to make and implement these policies, it may take a month or two, but I expect that in a few weeks, there will be a lot less bots (or a lot less bot-runners, either way).

Going back to camping will be an issue, but if it continues to be a resource problem, then Jack has indicated an inclination to look at it as a "next step" for policy.

We also suggested decoupling traffic completely from Search to solve this problem, but Jack compromised. He claimed that they will be lowering its overall weight on Search ranking, but that has yet to materialize.

I asked before and no one answered probably thinking I was joking that I didn't know, but how do you pick these bots? Are they fake avi's or just some script running?

You go to the SL website, create an account (or 20), then pick up a bot client (or write your own on top of libSL), and create an instance for each account, giving it the avatar name, password, and location to log in at.

The toughest part is getting a bot client, and setting it up to run 24/7.

Thanks Taurus, so they look like av's but are fakes.

Yeah, they just sit there, or do whatever they are programmed to do, but there's rarely a real, live human sitting at the "keyboard". They are basically like NPCs in online roleplaying games.

And yet they tell webmaster to get more links to their sites to rank higher. Confusing, init?

You got that bit wrong. Gaming a search engine is entirely to do with what the search engine thinks - not the users.

Oh, I think they do. I think that users welcome places that have what they are searching for, and that use bots to get above places that don't have what they are looking for but rank highly for it. I think everyone would feel helped by that. If both places have what the users are looking for, I don't think they are bothered whether one of them uses bots or not.

Nonsense. Businesses exist for profit, and the most successful are those that make the most profit.

You didn't read what I wrote. I said high customer satisfaction and low customer dissatisfaction, and that you can't please everyone all the time. You fit in very well.

Nobody suggested that cheating does anything. Do try to stop lying. There's a good boy.

You can feel what you like, but you only speak for yourself, and you don't qaulify to use the royal "we".

Us? You and your alt, perhaps?

Do make an effort to enter reality. Your stupidity stick out a mile - and cause successful business people to just laugh at you. Imagine that! I walk into a large store and tell them that I won't shop there because they sell stuff that has been produced in a way that I don't approve of. Then I march out in triumph. I wonder what that loud laughter sound is that's coming from the store as I walk to my car. Surely I've been incredibly sensible, so they can't be laughing at me ....... can they?

To put it another way, you don't matter and your views don't count. Customers and potential customers matter - not avowed non-customers.

Is there no end to your deceits? Resorting to lies, when the truth doesn't support your argument, is very low.

It is obvious that you are referring to me, so where did you get this "as other human avatars teleport in" from? Human? Alright, it's a lie and the lie suits your argument, but it's a very low thing to write. So this next bit is just nonsense...

because it's nothing to do with you whether or not my system worked for me in those circumstances.

Now, you're wrong there. If that's the way you work, you are a despicable person. Businesses are about making profits - that's why they exist - but they should *never* screw people in the sense that you mean. If that's the way you run a business, I'll never buy from you.

Ethics quiz:


1) Movie studio is releasing a new film. To promote their film, they create a fake review to use as a marketing blurb. The fake blurb helps sell a lot more tickets.

Wrong or right?


2) Hotel pays reviewers to submit positive reviews of a hotel stay they never had. They glowing reviews help them sell more rooms.

Wrong or right?


3) Computer equipment manufacturer makes a deal with a online retailer to provide an "incentive bonus" for favorable reviews of their products and first placement on product lists. Manufacturer sells a lot more products.

Wrong or right?



4) Search engine takes money for "premium placement" on results for specific items and fails to disclose the top level result was a paid placement.

Wrong or right?



Discuss.

No, because they don't tell webmasters "to get more links". They tell webmasters to get more of the right type of links.


Elaborate, please. I think you're trying to equate "gaming" with "search engine optimization", when the connotations are totally different, whether or not the actions they describe are the same.


That's a contrived analysis. There's no basis for saying that it's the one that has what they're looking for has gotten the higher ranking. How do you know the other one hasn't made more effective use of bots to achieve a higher ranking?

You're also missing the point. It's not whether they're bothered by the use of bots. It's whether the bots give them the same results they'd get if the results were sorted by the users' intuitive needs. I say intuitive, because it's very difficult to translate those needs into words that precisely define those needs.

From this response, it sounds like you're saying that it's ok to use bots to get a ranking that you think you'd get if bots weren't allowed at all. Is it ok for someone to consistently use bots or other mechanisms to achieve search results better than yours, when their product selection is smaller, of lower quality, and with higher prices than yours?

That's right. Get links and get the right kind of links, both amount to getting links, and Google suggests that webmasters do it.

What I mean is that it's the search engines that decided whether or not something is acceptable, and each decides for itself. It isn't the users of the engines that decide.

No it's not contrived. In fact, it was one of the two reasons why I started to use bots. At the time, the place that ranked #1 (Places tab) for "low prim furniture" didn't sell any low prim furniture. They sold furniture but none of it was low rpim. My use of bots put my place at #1 insteaad, and I *only* sell low prim furniture. That action was beneficial to people who were actually searching for low prim furniture.

But the Places tab results are sorted *only* by traffic numbers and, even without bots anywhere, that sorting wouldn't produce results that just contain what people are searching for. It's another reason why a simple ban of traffic bots and camping won't work.

The size of the selection and the quality of the goods doesn't come into it with the Places tab. The only thing that I've ever argued in favour of is using methods to promote *relevant* places in the the rankings. If the Places system could produce that, without any external influences, then it would be fine, but it can't produce that. On its own, it's just a totally crap way of ranking places.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm a supporter of traffic bots. I'm not. From a long time ago, I've tried to push LL to do away with the reason for them. I'm a supporter of places being ranked for what they are and not for what they are not, and if some places that have high traffic for something that isn't related to, say, furniture, and are ranked at the top simply because they have the word "furniture" in their descriptions, then I think it's right for places that do sell furniture to do something about it if they can.