Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Motivations and Goals

First question that springs to mind; is it your intention to move all landowners who currently define their parcels or have businesses built around mature content to this new mature continent, and in case how is this gonna happen?

Land swap?

Migrate parcels and content to the new continent by automated process?

How do you foresee business owners with extensive development and builds to sensibly move their environments (mainland) without business disruption and significant effort to integrate into the new environment?

We need some answers here.

Also, is this not gonna stifle development and investment for what must be a significant portion of the SL business for months on end?

Right, completely ignoring the fact that the one I hang around at has been kid-friendly since it was created.

in a nut shell

THIS IDEA IS JUST AS RETARDED AS IT WAS LAST TIME YOU TRIED TO IMPLEMENT IT.

If someone doesn't want to see user made art and content they can goto the Vatican.. Oh wait therr are naked pix all over the place there too.. .Ummm perhaps they should leave the planet..

That was a great post, thank you. I totally agree with you. This is all about a resident's choice to access whatever content they want. We're not trying to censor or punish the content creators or those who participate. The goal is to make sure that those who want it, can find it, those who make it can sell it and those who don't want it can avoid it. Its part of making the SL experience as predictable as possible.

I hear the bells mournfully ringing now LL are killing their own creation. One of the attractions of Second Life is that you can do things here that are impossible in RL. We are adults and you are now going to dictate how and more importantly we run our SL lives.
Whatever happened to freedom of choice.

If residents cannot tell when they are going into a mature content region and therefore can expect to see mature content then frankly they deserve everything they get.

I have a dead serious question to ask of this. How exactly will this impact what people sell on here adult content wise. I ask due to having come here from another 3dchat program after being tired of being mistreated as both an adult and a paying customer. I think we all have a honest right to know exactly how this will impact us who enjoy the more adult activities on here. If anyone at Linden Labs wishes to reach me just look for me in world I will gladly listen to what you have to say on this matter.

I too am another from the other 3d chat site and I for one will be quite unhappy if this becomes a reality. I have all but closed my accounts on the other site and have been spending most of my time here in SL. If this becomes a reality, do you not see that you will be chasing away the people who spend the most money here? I honestly can say I do participate in adult activities, not all the time, but when I choose. That's right - I CHOOSE TO PARTICIPATE - if I don't want to see something in a sim, I TP out of there and don't return. I do not know what the problem is with those who don't want to witness adult activities or products why they just can't TP away. Better yet, do searches for places to go that doesn't include mature areas. Honestly, this is still more of the same that I've seen at the other site - adults losing the right to choose to be an adult. BAD IDEA after BAD IDEA.

If the Supreme Court of the United States can't do it then I'm sure as hell you can't do it either. It''s utterly absurd to proudly claim you can make a clear definition of adult content. You will spend the rest of SLs existence policing your definitions arbitrarily, inconsistently and fallibly. That's not your fault, it's a fact of human nature.



Maybe eventually. In the first 6 months many adult operations will shut down. Most adult operations will lose their picks and their place in search, there'll be massive upheaval as they run around trying to find land equivalent to what they have now. Adult stores will be forced to huddle together in the ghetto where script performance and lag will be horrific. You'll have achieved your goal and the entire adult industry will be swept from the mainland and onto estate sims. But wait, no-one can get onto those sims anyway because they only can allow verified residents. The adult industry will be wiped out. SL will become Disney land but emptier.

This will help you identify and target those who are specifically interested in your goods. With the Adult content in one place, it'll make it so much easier to find. I would expect increased foot traffic.

Hey Everyone - I have to be afk for a few hours, but I'll be back a little later tonight and then tomorrow for the majority of the day.

See ya soon!

But there were many other ways you could have done that, with less disruption to the existing world. Create a new *non-adult* continent, to which people can move if they *choose* to avoid adult things. Rezone some of the existing continents adult and some nonadult, even; that would still have uprooted some people, but at least some adults could have stayed put. The choice that's been made seems to have been the maximally disruptive one, and definitely has an "adult content is bad and must be moved under the rug" feel to it.

We already have the Mature/PG system, including the Mature checkboxes in Search and so on. Presumably that wasn't working in terms of the goal you state above. Do we have any reason to think that this new, far more draconian, system will do a better job? I'd be very interested in the thinking that went into this particular choice of solution.

Well said.

To all Lindens currently either engaged with or simply reading this thread: please send me your bears!

Annie: It sounds like Yahoo and Linden Lab have different definitions of adult. We don't consider the LGBT community in and of itself adult, the same way we wouldn't consider any other community adult in and of itself. Adult is a very small portion of the large amounts of content and activities in Second Life.

I'm not seeing that a move is required - only control. As a university professor at a public university, I find that some students are very negative about SL because of the adult content. They do not want me to require them to go where they might accidentally encounter places they would not go in RL or on the internet. In addition, my university's attorney has given me numerous cautions and, if any of my students should complain to administration, I will have to abandon SL as a teaching strategy. It has proven to be a very good teaching tool and I would hate to do that. This would give me a way to prevent that from happening. I am certain most educators have faced this problem. I have brought over 100 students into SL in one year and if you multiply that by the number of educators (I believe currently over 200 universities use SL - and many of those have a number of professors) found in SL the population of students is substantial. And this does not even address the issues with the teen grid - I'll leave that to future discussions. I think it's a needed move. Logistics will be interesting to say the least but I, for one, look forward to the change.

Then why not approach it from the opposite direction - give those who want to avoid it, a clearly defined and enforced space where they CAN, rather than trying to sweep up the current grid piecemeal. More efficient use of resources to make a new PG rated space for open development than to try to round up and move the existing content creators. Making people move locations is disruptive and based on the feedback I'm seeing in the forum, people are considering it punitive - it's not what your intent is in the implementation, but rather, how it is being received by your targets (see also: typical corporate sexual harassment guidelines, for example - it's not whether you intended harm by telling an off-color joke, it's how that joke impacted the person hearing it). Reframe this enterprise in a positive way by developing a new space for people who don't want it, so they can avoid it, instead of the other way round. It's Public Relations 101.

I would expect intolerable lag, since sex scripts and weapons scripts are notorious resource hogs. So let's put them all in one place! Great idea! The increased foot traffic will be like swimming through molasses.

I find it hard to believe that this initiative is really the result of Residents "asking for more clarity and control over their experiences", whatever that means. I haven't met one person in my 19 months here who's asked for any such thing. Where's the evidence of this request?

The real purpose for all this effort towards the enforcement of "adult content" distinction and control is the merging of the grids. The failure to list this, coupled with the deceptive "non-denial denial" from the Linden representative, is dishonest and renders further participation pointless. The reasons the grid merge is an extremely stupid idea have been listed repeatedly in previous threads, but obviously the facts mean as little to the Lindens as honesty. None the less, I will list the key reasons the merge won't work one more time: if the Supreme Court cannot define "adult content" it is unrealistic to assume Linden Labs can do so in any way which is not merely the imposition of some chosen person's tastes and biases on the subject. Period. If the grids are merged, no adult content will be safe to provide legally, since the law accepts no excuses (including involuntary or unknowing violation due to technical failures by Linden Labs). Period. And please do not bother denying that is the grid merge is the real purpose for this preparation. There is no call for these controls on the main grid by its current residents, and it makes no sense to spend so much time and effort solving a non-problem between adults. It only makes sense as a precursor to merging the grids. I will continue to be a paying Linden Labs customer until I am impacted by this plan, at which point I will delete my assets and abandon my land and save myself $50/m. In these extremely trying economic times, it boggles my mind that Linden Labs seems hell-bent on the one course of action that will destroy their business. Adults do not come here to participate in a sanitized world palatable to children and marketers. Linden Labs will learn this the hard way, it seems. So be it. I'm done wasting my time trying to warn them.

You have got to be kidding! Tell the residents of any war zone that they need to go somewhere special to experience extreme violence!

What sentimental twaddle! (a) the Stand Up button (b) teleport (c) quit... i guess this debate is going to contain a lot of this kind of thing... even though the Lindens are explicitly saying this has nothing to do with children's experience of a future all-ages SL...

Sorry but you did not convince me. What i see is just another desperate try to fix with old-style solutions really new-era problems. Your statement about "many residents asked this" is ridicoulous... which percentage? Of real people or fake alt-avatars? Why not a referendum then? To segregate is always bad... you are losing... as for gambling that stopped your exponential grow (and hype) in favour of other sites that are booming now.

You will not be able to be fair in taking on your shoulders such responsability of judging what is black or white, in or out, and this will not help your ultimate goal whatever it is.

It is not for adult contents (read religion, morality, violence, football fan or music fan etc etc) that SL is not how you Lindens dream of it, stop to apply old mindset to something that is (still) completely new and maybe you will find out the right answers.

You have to thank adult content and (past) gambling for being what you are now, that is not just another chat site where few people played for a while with some interesting building tool...
As for any other new technology of the past you should have waited SL community change alone, pass through several phases until the real effective business model would have appeared... you will never enforce one, you can only put it at risk more and more killing artificiously its original soul that created the break in the future.

Prez

This really isn't a debate is it? you've already made your minds up to do this, just like you did with the Homestead issue, and no amount of disagreement will change your determination. Why do you bother to consult us? It just pisses us off. Go ahead and make whatever changes you like - it would be easier to take than this constant reiteration of the press release in the face of every objection.

And what about those who don't care, one way or another, about most of what you seem to be defining as adult content, but do care about other aspects of builds and people who it seems will have to move... given the rather puritan definition of adult in the FAQ?

I love the Lindens today I really do.

You are showing a true openness and acceptance of the different views of your residents. In the past I had thought this was not one of LL's qualities.

Thank you for proving me wrong.


Just don't blow it in the end like you always do!!!! *rage*