Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Motivations and Goals

The thing is, a lot of high achievers are offended, did click the red x, and aren't here now. That is the problem.

This policy isn't designed for kids. It's designed for highly productive businesses, and educational and philanthropic institutions. Where Linden Labs is hearing requests for these changes is in conferences most of us are not invited to.

Actually, we want to sell to the whole world. Everyone is most welcome to buy.

Dont want any verification barriers between our organization and the general public. We need all the exposure we can get.

Well the classic reasons people have avoided SL in the educational related conferences/events I've attended tend to be, in order of frequency and importance:

i) having built the University Bell Tower in SL, we couldn't think of anything else to do! (that's from a colleague in the US who has funded a lot of educational use of virtual worlds)

ii) SL didn't have the technical features we wanted (e.g. reliability, sophistication of the accuracy of the model they were building particularly for historic reconstructions, programmability, but most typically complete lack of any ability to backup, snapshot or version control any SL builds)

iii) random people popping up with inappropriate attachments (that includes weapons as well as "adult" - none of the LL's plans seem to tackle that

iv) concern that students will wander off to the "unsavoury" parts of SL or that we would appear to be encouraging them to do so (and having a well publicised an designated red light zone, isn't really going to help)

Matthew

I think filtering the adult content out of the view of the general public is a fantastic idea that will promote the development of really high quality enterprises here in SL. Screening out offensive material is the biggest hurdle my organization faces to bringing in new residents.

I would suggest making the rules clear in the TOS and hiring enough staff to enforce them. Making the rules and not consistently enforcing them would be worse than not making the rules, in my opinion, because it will frustrate new users more.

That really is a stunning lack of imagination. It's hard to imagine such a lack of imagination. : )



Guess it depends on what you are trying to do and who your target audience is. I'm not finding it very hard to make backups even at the current versions level, and there are a tremendous range of features and tools I haven't even started to use yet.



This doesn't seem to be so difficult to handle using estate and land tools, or just a plain old security orb when you are conducting an event that needs to be closed to the public.



I do think it will help since it will not be so well publicised or accessible if you have to explicitly ask to see the advertisement and explicitly be authorized to access the location where that content is being sold. That's what all the squawking from the sex merchants is about. Their market is being restricted.

Most of the successful virtual world projects start with the idea, then they chose an appropriate technology which sometimes is SL, and sometimes isn't due to SL's limitations.

However, for each successful academic/education project in SL there are at least 10 Universities who decide to get a SL island because it is the "in thing" or because their Vice Chancellor, Principle or other senior chap discovers that their rival has an island, and wants to know why they don't. So they get an island, and then can't think what to do with it beyond building a mini-reconstruction of the campus.



If you are a project team building a reconstruction of ancient Rome on a sim or set of sims (making full use of the 15000 prims per sim), you do want to know that you aren't going to lose a day or twos work, just because someone mis-selected some items when making an edit.

One project was explicitly about allowing the general public to participate in the build...




The problem is public events - you don't want someone turning up with prim penises if you are holding an open day on an SL island to recruit the next intake of potential students.



The issue is less about how blatant the advertising is or isn't inworld but what the media perception is outside of SL. That SL has an officially supported red light district is not going to dampen such stories and perceptions in the media.

Matthew

Matthew,

Collaboration with other individuals and institutions is what makes SL worthwhile. There may not be much motivation for educators and their students to interact with other educators and students, and with the general public worldwide, but that would surprise me. Telling others what you know and hearing what others have to tell you is sort of the point of education. There are endless opportunities to do that in virtual worlds.

I agree that you may need to work carefully on large projects, label and save your work frequently, and take time to supervise anyone with permissions to make changes. It wouldn’t be effortless, but I wouldn’t expect it to be.

Supervision is necessary with public events, too. Someone needs to be present with the ability to eject unwelcome intruders from the venue. I’m actually looking forward to orbiting someone one of these days. I haven’t had that opportunity yet.
I can’t see that walling off the kind of content that would not be permitted on network television is going to make Second Life’s reputation worse. I really do think it will be a big improvement that will open the platform to far more creative and productive use.

Sure it could, if it's segregated enough. You don't hear eBay taking alot of flak for it's adult content so much because their adult section is pretty well buffered from the mainstream buyers and sellers and seems to do fine. If people want adult, they'll find it just fine. It's a partial solution that does more harm than good.

Funny thing is, the people who you want to displace would like to sell to the whole world as well. Many of them came into this place very early on and invested a lot of time and money into bulding the world that you now see, but don't seem to understand.

Looking at your profile, I find it highly ironic that your desire is to:
A. Come into a "new world" and build a place of your own.
B. Complain about the wild culture of the original settlers of this new world that you've found on arrival.
C. Sell your trinkets to those original settlers and attempt to convert them to your definitlon of civilization.
D. Realize that isn't working fast enough, so have them all removed from their land by order of the federal goverment.

So, is it hypocrisy or revenge? Whatever it is, I'm sure you're enjoying this.

My point was that other virtual world systems offer much better tools for making snapshots and backups., and generally making this process less painful. In many cases this is the deciding factor for using an alternative to SL in a project rather than the presence of adult content.



Agreed, and LL's current plan will have no change on this at all.



and I can't see that headlines such as "Linden Lab Creates Red Light District in Second Life" or "Second Life creates new continent dedicated to porn", "Linden Lab flirts with the sex industry by supplying them with dedicated servers", etc. will improve SL's reputation either. Best case scenario would be no change.

Bottom line is that when I've heard educators saying that they have left SL or not used SL, it is normally because they went into SL for the wrong reasons, or hit technical limitations. When adult related issues have arisen, they are issues which either aren't addressed by this new policy or want be significantly affected by it.

Matthew

Are you trying to say that any sexual and violent type items built within sl are not as creative or productive as maybe non-sexual, or non-violent items? That is a pretty bold statement. What about Roleplay that has mature or adult themes? That can be creative.

Why is it that we will be told how to be, how to act, how things should be to be good. To me what Linden tries to do now is an attempt to tell us how to behave to be the kind of people they like. A certain kind of public behaviour is all a good thing in RL, but i want an SL that allows me to safely express things i can't/won't/shouldn't do in RL. Now i am told that doing this makes me a deviant and i will have to move to a Ghetto or suffer the consequences. That frankly SUCKS and i cant say it more politely even if i wanted to. Stop this trying to put a lid on what people wish to do in SL, it will not work.

Love from Signal

Mony,

Never once did I say that I perceive SL to be a "family friendly" game. Actually, the tone of my post should have made it clear that I am against having minors ON the grid. But, I believe my reasons for this must be very different than yours. I don't have a vested interest in three very popular sex places. I don't have to worry about having my account suspended for content that I place in my profile.

I don't feel uncomfortable when my child is in the same room as me when I'm online. I don't feel uncomfortable when he stands beside me and watches the monitor to get a better look at what I am seeing. SL content not only includes the activities that you enjoy and consider the "normal activities within a mature game", it also includes the activities that I enjoy. Activities that are very suitable for a child to observe. Actually, it might be beneficial for him. He is getting exposed to geometry, algebra, scripting, graphics...Nothing like the "18+ rated movie" experiences that your time in SL seems to have afforded you. It has always been my choice to avoid content that doesn't appeal to me. And, I'm happy that the enjoyment, the activities and the friends I have found in SL have never put me in any sticky situation that makes me concerned about my child's welfare. The content that my son gets to view over my shoulder is just as legal as the content that I view over his shoulder when he is playing online at sites that do not allow adults to participate.

I have been scratching my head trying to determine the actual reasons the Lindens have decided to implement these changes. What the "motivations and goals" are. It isn't very clear at this moment in time.

But, if the goal is to combine the grids...ouch.

I know they have not been successful in keeping kids out of SL. I absolutely cannot believe that have managed to keep adults out of the teen grid. Maybe they believe that if the two grids are combined and homogenized that they can combine resources to combat the problems they face more effectively and get some positive press for their efforts...

Let's give them their 15 minutes right now. That's all they'll get before the child predators discover this wonderful new world.

Matthew,

The issue I am concerned with is expanding the diversity of the population using SL for education, community networking, social services and commerce. It may not matter to the average university that some segments of the public are deterred from using this technology to its fullest potential for the sake of pornography. It does not matter to me that some pornographers may be deterred from using this technology to its fullest potential, either. There will always be plenty of smut to go around.

Yeah, I guess that does come across, doesn't it? All that stuff is about the same.

Personally, I am looking forward to screening the Goreans and some of the others role players that trash Native American women right off the main grid. I don't want to see that crap advertised and I don't want anyone else to see it without explicity asking for it.

/QUOTE
I have been scratching my head trying to determine the actual reasons the Lindens have decided to implement these changes. What the "motivations and goals" are. It isn't very clear at this moment in time./QUOTE



I think that it is clear that LL feel that having got SL up and running the future for them as an technology company lies with providing other companies and organisations with a virtual meeting place platform. Look at the growth of virtual conferencing platforms such as WEBEX and you'll see why. SL could gain a big share of that growing market.

The target organisations would be very uncomfortable investing in SL as a platform to use if they felt that there was any accessible content in it that wasn't squeaky clean. Imagine running a virtual training session in world when the boat from nOOb island crashes and disgorges dozens of out of control naked guys with 3ft appendages, all wanting to know how to have sex in SL. Imagine watching your delegates tp out to a red light district that came up in search!

I suspect that long term, the wishes and comfort of the pioneering original inhabitants of SL don't really figure in the corporate plan for SL.

I'd like to think I'm wrong, but it seems to me to be heading that way.

I think you better try asking Lindens to deem the words Gor, Gorean and Roleplay Adult content then. Otherwise I can't really see how it will be filtered from your searches.

Ban lines are a bad solution to a problem that should be directly addressed in other ways. The ground level ban lines were originally placed so that at normal flying altitude (without flight scripts) you flew over them. You didn't run into them. If you just avoided visible objects and green dots on the map, you could actually fly places without having to continually re-route around ban lines.

Instead of raising them, Linden Labs should have implemented a real privacy scheme, so that you could build in a private area on your land that people couldn't see into. Dozens of suggestions have been made, and individual Lindens have occasionally responded favorably, but nothing useful has been done... just continual tweaking of the worthless "ban lines".
UNITED STATES v. CAUSBY, 328 U.S. 256 (1946).

I am not "dressed in a costume" in Second Life, and I don't have such a costume in the real world.

If, in the real world, it was possible to transform into a humanoid animal (via Niven's magical "autodocs", or via nanotech, or magic), then you could start talking about drawing that kind of close analogy between what you can do in SL and in RL.

What I can do in SL would make Michael Jackson cream his pants. I can't fly in RL, teleport from point to point, turn into a four foot ferret, or a two foot rabbit, or a twenty foot dragon or fifty foot mecha. When Hurricane Ike came through, I didn't wave my hand and rez plywood over my windows by wishing... I had to buy it, cut it, nail it up.

Second life is NOT LIKE real life. If it was, I wouldn't be there.

Blondin, I see quite reasonable clarifications and comments from you, BUT: Somebody wrote and published the (now unavailable) knowledge base article with very far reaching definitions of "adult", which was in effect anything not squeakily G-rated. So somebody in LL must feel that is the way it should be, or they wouldn't have written it in the first place.
Against that, we have essentially only your comments.
Who has what authority to decide the end result, and what is your status in this topic? -You're obviously outright contradicting something which was written by another Linden in the knowledge base, and other comments and threads indicate that at least *some* part of this policy change is non-negotiable.
There is still more than a little bad blood from the OpenSpace issue where Jack Linden made a show of discussing in the forum while M gave interviews (correctly) stating that the outcome was already decided, and frankly, the threads on this topic smacks badly of the same tactics.

Like it was at SL5B?

Now, be fair, SL is way more stable these days than it used to be.

I understand that - I was merely saying that from the people I've spoken to in the educational sector, technical limitations in SL were seen as a much more important barrier to using SL for these purposes than the presence of adult content. The same applies to commerce - until the financial systems have far more robust controls, safeguards and audit trails than at present no-one is going to trust it for as a serious commerce platform!


Also, I believe that this new policy is much more likely to damage that diversity (many against this policy are not pornographers, just tired of LL's constant u-turns in policy which makes any investment of time and money too high a risk: six months ago LL took action against those using open spaces within the original terms that open spaces had been sold; now they are taking action against those placing mature content on mature regions etc.)

Matthew

There are two main issues:

1) The ability to opt-out on various types of content.
2) Underaged people on the main-grid.

The biggest logical flaw in the proposed plans, is the idea that the two issues are related in any way. They're not.

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Regarding 1:

Opting-out by flagging adult content is illogical as well.
The sensible thing to do is to flag non-adult content, if you want people to be on the desired side of the inevitable grey area.

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Regarding 2:

Age-verification is a topic of discussion.
In my opinion it will create many false negatives, false positives, and a false sense of security.
Telling teenagers not to do something is often a sure way to get them interested.
Lying about your age is one thing, committing fraud is another!

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Live long and prosper \\//