Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Motivations and Goals

I keep checking for discussion as to how it is envisaged that the proposed changes will impact on private islands. But feedback in such respect has been limited to the point of being almost non-existant. The LL led focus of forced relocation from mainland to a new adult continent has, I think, distracted people from considering the impact on private islands.

The majority of people, in their enjoyment of SL, navigate from location to location by TP. In this respect no distinction is drawn between mainland and private islands. Contrary to the assumptions of some, private islands will be very much affected by these proposals. Those with adult content will have to reclassify (reclassification will be mandatory under the ToS) and the whole island will, in terms of those able to access, be indistinguishable from the new adult mainland. A number of serious adverse consequences could flow from this. I list the following, although others may be able to think of more:

1) Owners of non-adult businesses and residents on newly classified adult islands may feel that the serious restriction on those able to visit them compels them to leave. On leaving they will lose capital sums and advance payments made to the island owner and may have wasted time and effort building and landscaping. LL offers nothing in the way of compensation to such people.
2) Unscrupulous island owners may see the threat of them redesignating the island as adult as a means of extorting further capital sums and higher rents from their business and residential occupiers as the price of not redesignating.
3) The whole mixed use business model of the island could collapse, rendering it no longer financially viable, and leading to its removal from the grid.

Of course, the adult use might cease. I don't list this as an adverse consequence because I believe that this is what LL is hoping will happen, although many might rightly see it as so if that use was being conducted in a well managed way and causing offence to no-one

The idea that we should move all Adult content to one part of the grid so that we can assure people a predictable experience is skewed. When someone does stumble upon it, and they will, won't it be more shocking if for their first two months they had never even realized that something like BDSM was so popular in SL? Then all of a sudden they land in a place that is dedicated to BDSM items and who knows what else. Wouldn't that be more shocking and unpredictable? To think that for some reason business folk running corporations would not be age-verified is silly. Wouldn't it make sense that if you wanted to run your already very successful business in RL also in SL, that you would want people to know who you are? That you would want your Avatar tied to your RL name, and status within your company? How else would you prove you are the President of IBM in SL and not some 16-year old playing up the part? So it is safe to say that these people you are trying to hide all the Adult content from would stumble upon it sooner or later. That in itself makes things quite unpredictable.

Here is another thing I want to make clear. Whenever I was asked via survey "Would you like a more predictable experience within SL" The Yes please from my end, and I'm certain a lot of other people, was related to performance issues such as grid stability. It had nothing to do with adult content. For some reason I feel like all this data LL claims they have collected was via these surveys you run across upon log-in every now and then.

I agree that Estates are just as affected as Mainland, but I think these particular adverse consequences only obtain with the assumption that there will really be a substantial number of SL residents who remain unable (or, theoretically, unwilling) to visit Adult land. I think this assumption is incorrect.

For one thing, all residents with payment info on file are already verified, in addition to anybody who went through the Aristotle "ID Verification" exercise. Now, many residents (and their alts) are currently NPIOF, but after this change, the vast majority will verify, one way or another. They just won't have any practical alternative, given that most of existing Mature landowners will insist on keeping what they bought, and move or retag as Adult. And it's not as if there will be any choice for Xcite! and Sensations and Stroker's and many, many places that almost all residents visit at least once.

So, the verification thing is a bit of a pain (nothing compared to moving for Mainland folks), but retagging an island as Adult will be almost universal for current Mature islands.

I hope that you're correct in how you see things playing out, Qie. I myself have greater reservations in such respect.

The points that you raise in relation to age verification expose clearly the nonsense of this even being raised as an issue by LL.
1) If the purveyors of adult content wanted additional reassurance that the person with whom they were dealing was an adult, it is already possible for them to restrict access to those with PIOF (for what that is worth). In practice, I've never encountered anyone imposing this restriction.
2) The owner of an adult island or the owner of part of the adult mainland, will have, as I understand it, 2 options in terms access. He can either limit that to PIOF or to those adult verified by some other means. Most owners do not like to restrict access and so would choose the former. This will include people who may not wish to be exposed to adult content. Yet, they will have no greater protection against "accidentally" landing in an adult sim than they presently have against "accidentally" landing in a mature sim.

There has been talk of alts being verified by virtue of your main being verified, which would be one positive of this debacle.

Well! Now that things have calmed down a little I've had a chance to think more about the long-term situation faced here and I think Tatero Nino is on the right track:

http://www.massively.com/2009/03/15/give-us-more-worlds-linden-lab/

When SL started out we were a small town. It really was like a single community. But as we've grown, that fractured into many different communities and interest groups, many of which don't necessarily even come into contact with each other any more.

Now, it seems, we've reached the point where we've really outgrown trying to fit everyone into one world. It's time to start some new ones.

So my proposal is this:

Start a few new grids, each one designed to serve a market you've identified. One would be the proposed red light district, but also open up one meant to serve educational and business interests. I'd recommend that both of these grids have large uninterrupted areas that require a *basic* form of verification, in that you'd accept any means by which someone is tied to a real identity but that information is kept private and not given to any third parties.

Or maybe three new grids to start: The Adults Only grid (verified 18+ with Adult, Mature, and Polite zones available), the Open Grid (unverified Polite and Mature but no Adult zones), and the Business-Educational grid (verified all ages, Polite zones only).
Each one would have its own operating philosophy based on the public it's meant to serve.

Travel between each grid is possible with a teleport but you'd need the right passport (verification type) in order to do so. Each grid would have its own entrance and Welcome Area zone. And each would have its own Search database, so people could choose which grid to search or can choose to search everything (with the right passport).

I think realistically you're going to have to do something like this in the long term, so it makes sense to run this current policy in that direction instead of this halfway measure. The problems with trying to enforce and relocate piecemeal across the existing continents would be a monumental struggle akin to cleaning up the slums of Mumbai or Los Angeles or (insert your favorite problem neighborhood). It's simply not going to get done quickly or without a lot of bad blood, and isn't likely to result in any good external PR either.

Instead, figure out some incentives whereby all the current mainland residents are encouraged to migrate voluntarily into the new grids. I'd think a basic area-for-area free swap might work. A program that would especially appeal is making an offer to provide sims directly from LL first in line to social groups that want to form a whole neighborhood together, rather than just opening the door for speculators. Perhaps another way to avoid speculators would be to have a lottery arrangement based on parcels of land being roughly the same size as someone's current total holdings. Estate owners would also get to move their islands to a grid of choice free of charge.

Plan on this taking a long time. To be fair to people, a couple of months is really not enough time. The voluntary migration window should probably be more like a year. After which the original grid would be slowly deprecated, consolidating the holdouts back into smaller areas and closing down empty sims from the edges inward. That might take several years.

Anyway this would accomplish several important goals both from your image perspective and for the happiness of the residents, that I don't feel your current thinking properly handles. For your image, you've got *several* sites, and each can be marketed as separate things, and you won't have the ongoing problem of having everything tarnished as "that freaky sex world". For the residents, this becomes an opportunity to re-imagine their own lives here rather than some oppressive nightmare (or more likely, something they'd totally ignore and leave you having solved nothing).

Now how does that sound?

My problem is that my main is not verified, one of my alts is. If this goes ahead then it needs to be spread across all alts.
This entire fiasco was predicted, in detail, by the community back in '06 when LL made it easy and free to create alts. All subsequent problems have arisen from that one stupid idea that gave them 12 months of unsustainable growth and publicity. We as the die hard residents are now left with the consequences and the pain of rebuilding our SL. I question if it is even worth the effort.

On the assumption that, despite the overwhelming lack of support for the LL proposals in these forums, they are introduced in any event, I hope that the majority of SL residents who believe strongly in freedom of expression, will place on one side their prejudices against age/identity verification, in order to ensure that freedom of expression and the creativity that it brings continue to thrive in SL.

I would hope that those unsure as to how to reclassify will err on the the side of caution and reclassify as adult. These proposals will then fall flat on their face and the only people disadvantaged will be the minority now complaining who may well find their access to some wonderful and imaginative locations barred.

I have no great interest in extreme sexual activities, I find violent RP and weapons distasteful, I find Gor distasteful because it appears to me to demean women, and I would like to think that I live my SL respecting others and offending no-one, but I am tolerant and believe fundamentally in freedom of expression and that was the concept that attracted me to SL.

I put this in the 'search filter' thread, but wanted to link it here because I think it also applies heavily to motivations and goals.

/352/d9/311511/4.html#post2357210

Awful. I would not have learned as much as I have about people since joining SL if it were a fractured grid. At the very least, SL provides a perfect classroom for learning tolerance. I don't suppose you'd consider that a valuable lesson to teach adults. Oh, yeah, did you know that SL is only for adults?

The ironic thing is that as we speak, there are already dozens of new grids coming online outside of SL, all using open-source versions of the SL client and server technologies. How is LL's mother grid going to remain relevant if it continues to alienate users like this? I don't want to see people leave SL for the alternatives, but I have no doubt this will burn still more people out of their villages.

LL has had the right idea from the start: let people buy up huge tracts of land and create their own standards for their residents. If you want a Sesame Street continent, buy land, set your own policies, and start selling / renting parcels out to people who want to live and work there. There's no good reason to enforce them on everyone else.

It sounds worse.
That would be THE thing to do if you want to kill SL.
We have to stay together on ONE Grid (Teen grid not included of course.)
Its not that difficult.. if you want to spend time in SL running a business, or holding meetings for a RL company you simply AVOID any adult/mature rated sims. That way you are not exposed to any of that, at all...

In case you Tp somewhere, and you end up in a ''sex'' sim, you simply press CTRL+ALT+H and poof, there you go.. to your ''home''

Thats the good thing about SL.
It offers things for EVERYBODY, SL is for people that love 3D art, and for people that love BDSM. Its for creative people that love to build the most amazing objects.. but also for people that want to ''relax'' on a sunny nude beach after they're home from a long day at RL work.

YOu have to ACCEPT that.
Splitting this is not going to work, really.
It would destroy our market...
All the creative builders would be on a business Grid..
And all the buyers would be on an adult only grid...
So please, dont ever suggest such a thing again.

The best solution I've heard so far.. is flagging PG Sims/items ONLY.
So people that want to have PG experiences.. KNOW where to go to.. and they UNDERSTAND that if they TP to a sim that is NOT PG.. they can expect mature things (this doesnt mean every mature sim includes sex though). But that way its MUCH easier for LL to police around.. you could even say that residents that are not age verified can ONLY enter PG areas.. that would solve the issue completely, with one swift strike..
Oh... and NO, not the Mature / Adult sims have to move, but you move the PG sims

Interesting. Does the included notion that inter-grid travel is as easy as a teleport, and your inventory and friends lists are intact make any difference?

Have any of these things worked reliably and together since you started SL in 2003?

=P

All this talk about the Teen Grid is begging one big question: what would be wrong with letting teens and even pre-teens into adult Second Life, exactly as it is now? Let them see penises, hookers, chain saw murders, and all the rest. Let children learn about the real world through the safe lens of a virtual community.

Are children really better off finding out about con artists, heart-breakers, and petty tyrants when they are adults? They're already playing video games that are more visually compelling than SL that show them unreal visions of meat-grinder worlds. What's wrong with giving them a dose of reality in a pill that they can safely swallow?

I know some parents will be outraged at my suggestion. To them I would say this: it's up to you to guide your own children. If you feel the need to protect them from adult themes, do so. Please don't ask me to do it for you. And if you want a better idea, consider sitting them down at the computer with you when you log into SL. Show them this stuff and explain it all in your own words. Instead of hiding them from reality, use SL as an ideal teaching tool. Then set them free to explore and invite them to ask you for insight into the things they see and do.

The 2 most meaningful choices residents should be given, but which are not being offered, are, as follows:

(1) Give those easily offended the option of designating themselves "PG" only.

(2) Give the estate and land owners the choice of excluding such people from their land.

I suspect few would exercise the first of those choices and that many would exercise the latter.

In 2003 these particular things worked pretty well. But then the database was tiny.

OTOH anyone attempting to wear the kind of attachments people have on routinely now would crash whole sims.

Well, they are already in the Adult Grid. Again, this is the fault of LL for making that process so very easy to do. If it can be done, it will be done. Not sure I really like the idea of removing the 18+ clause from the TOS which would then indemnify a lot of people, including Linden Research.

This thread has seriously godwined. o.O

IBTL.

NO THEY DON'T

Nobody is making LL merge grids. In fact they really need to split the grids up more, they need to have firewalled grids for businesses that are only accessed via a VPN, private grids for organizations, they need to be able to provide packaged off-net grids, all kinds of special-purpose grids. They need them to be genuinely disjoint, like the beta grid is, not just secret sections of the main grid. The teen grid should only be the beginning.

There's enough problems now just teleporting around the one grid without having to bounce avatars from and their content/belongings from one grid to another
Nothing wrong with seperate continents at all. I and many others don't want to create another account and buy more stuff just so I can be on more than one grid.

Linden Labs needs to act to prevent minors from getting into SL at all.

They did, originally, they had an area called (if I recall correctly) the badlands, and a big wall between it and the rest of SL. I don't know why they switched to a ratings-based scheme but they didn't go through all that work for nothing.

I don't know that anyone has suggested separate avatar accounts. Really the biggest technical challenge is how to preserve an avatar across multiple grids whether hosted by LL or independent. (Without running afoul of IP problems, that is).

You wouldn't need to be able to "bounce" them, you'd request a transfer of a snapshot of your inventory and account to your company's grid, or you'd log on with your employee account to your company's grid. I'm not talking about public grids here, I'm talking about grids behind corporate firewalls (either colocated in IBM's or HP's or Walmart's or Chase's server rooms, or accessed over a point-to-point VPN in a securely firewalled part of Linden Labs' colos) that real companies can use for real meetings.

Linden Labs wants companies to use SL for real business? This is how to get them taken seriously by IT departments.