Communist Buzzkill: LL Nixes Developer Incentives

Well speaking as some one who does not create nor own a bunch of land
i think getting rid of DI sux!
i think teh best term i saw was over reaction! instead of outlawing camping chairs ( if for a fact that is what prompted this) they kill off many margionally profitable sims. i have now been told by 3 owners that unless they can come up with a new way to make a lil Lindens ..they will be forced to sell hmm and these are sims where many different activities take place..sad
i try very hard to be positive, i love Sl and still think it is a magical place but i think it may be time for LL to start making soem decisions about what direction they really want it to go, they cannot continue to refuse to make any ruleings about what peopel can do (such as the impeach bush signs or camping chairs) because if they continue to allow complete anarchy they will lose more and more of their real and consistant customer base. i'm not sure i know what teh solution is, i am a very hard core property rights person but i guess when a legitimate complaint has been lodged by hundreds, it is time to take a stand. First teh event support went (which to me is no biggie , if you wanna hold a educatiuonal or cultural event..DO it people will come) then teh stipend bonus was cut, now the DI, i guess i'm confused, do they want talentless peopel liek myself , who are here for teh social aspects to leave? are they trying to turn SL into nothing more than a video catalog? shop shop shop.
It saddens me to see places that i loved to visit for teh builds and teh imigination going away because they cannot compeat , or afford to maintain the places without commericalizing them
there now that i have rambled and very poorly expressed by feelings...i think i'll go to bed a lil sadder at the possiblity of more of my favored places goin away

I have always been struck by how we create content and pay LL so that we can. Sort of backwards from the rest of the universe. Like a giant 3D vanity press.

I know which finger that was Siggy!!

Er, trying reading what I wrote, please. I didn't say that she said she wanted to create only for the money, I *said* that she said removing developer incentives will remove interest in creating things outside pursuit OF money.

I'm sure the experienced creators will not be affected beyond having to cough up the difference lost from Developer Incentive.

I think it is nice, albeit naive, for you to think that most development to date has not been in pursuit of developer incentive and money in general.... but a lack of economic understanding is hardly a good rebuttal.

I missed that... what was it about camping chairs? Have they been banned or something now? I do hope so.

Lewis

Looking around at other threads, I don't think it was just about camping chairs. It was probably about the fact that DI wasn't actually awarding development at all.

The big DI recipients were either a) buying large amounts of land, putting down some infrastructure items and then renting or selling on the remaining plots with extra prims (arguably delivering the useful service of working around the silly prim restrictions, and many of them were building themed areas and communities as well, but not all - and the DI mechanism wasn't checking for that), or b) buying existing things that other people had created, which in many cases were already known to be popular, and putting them out for people to use (like camping chairs and Tringo). Actually creating these things didn't get much, though: where's the DI for Kermitt Quirk? Kenny Jackson? Vanhal McGettigan?

There's at least some argument that a Hosting Incentive is needed because of tier, but if it was supposed to encourage Development....

I am your first, last and only line of defense against the scum of the universe.

Maam, please look at the flash...

You will not note I am a cleanser - you have never met me - you do not recognise my face - you will have a good day for the rest of the day - you will not remember this conversation...

They can't outlaw money chair. If they did they would have to outlaw money balls too, and sexballs, and Impeach Bush signs, and laggy particle full clubs, and kiddie-bodied AV in mature areas, and guns, and tringo, and... (the list can go and go and go for very long)

I dunno, it's in-line with me paying a web-hosting company so I can "create content" in the form of a webpage.

Of course, the analogy isn't perfect - other people don't have to pay my company to view that webpage - but when you look at SL from the "Web 2.0" angle, LL's decisions are not entirely irrational, nor without precedent.

Hmmm... your thread title mentions "Communists" and the body of your post mentions "Socialists," two groups that don't believe in the ownership of private property. The Developer Incentive was paid out to two-percent of tier fee paying landOWNERS (residents that had taken on ownership roles in Second Life).

As the actual percentage of tier-fee paying residents has fallen to 6.55-percent of the total population, those 2-percent of tier fee paying residents _earning_ Developer Incentive Awards are "oligarchs" (as they don't have to be _rich_ to make the list they're not "plutocrats".

Note that the percentage of residents _owning_ property above and beyond 512-sq.m has fallen from around 12-percent seven-months ago to 6.55-percent. If there was "rampant abuse" of the Developer Incentive Awards then there would also be "rampant land ownership". There isn't.

Slightly more than 93-percent of the total resident population either won't or can't compete for these awards though the threshold to compete is quite simple: Own _more_ than 512-sq.m of land. However, over the course of 2005 Linden Lab has repeatedly come up with new and different ways to disincentivize account upgrades and land ownership, typically by failing to maintain its relationship with its customers (If you can have access to the same poor customer service for US$0 a month as you do for US$25 a month which is the better value?).

The reason for the elimination of the Developer Incentive Awards is quite simple: Belt tightening. LL has been missing it revenue targets for months now and needs to show an increase in tier fee revenues, no matter how small, as quickly as possible. As the end of the fourth quarter of 2005 is rapidly approaching they need to eliminate this program before the end of the first quarter of 2006 so they can show their books to outside investors and pretend Second Life is "turning the corner."

--

Oh, and this also eliminates a simple benchmark for measuring one aspect of the health of the Second Life economy. After the Developer Incentive Awards are gone there will no longer be that useful monthly 2-percent statistic that can be worked backward to derive the total number of residents paying tier fees which can then be compared the resident population as whole. You're giving kudos to someone who is making the economy (that you're a self-proclaimed expert in) LESS TRANSPARENT.

pwnd

Dwell and DI *are* visitor donations. They're like a hidden part of your stipend that goes towards paying a fee to the people whose land you walk on.

Camping chairs were sucking the value (to Linden Labs) out of the developer's incentive. I expected that camping chairs would lead to an overreaction from LL. And here is that overreaction.

LL doesn't seem to respond to abuse by going "what's the minimal change we can make to stop the abuse". At least that's what it seems like to me. Am I wrong?

And the lack of a way to reward you for the value of that page has led to page after page after valuable page on the Internet going down the drain.

It's a failing model. Paying for content works, but it has to be something automatic and invisible, like dwell or the DI. You pay LL your ten bucks a month, and LL pays the locations you spend time at some of those ten bucks.

... until they figured out a way to make it work. On the webcomic front, I point to things such as Penny Arcade. On another front, you have one of my favorite websites (rpg.net) which is funded through a combination of ads and memberships (you may use the site without a membership, but a membership grants a few nice bennies, like the ability to use forum attachments).

RPG.net is probably the better example, since I don't believe it's run as a for-profit deal.

umm wrong, Sorry but the world is full of examples of one thing being outlawed while similer things are not. The slippery slope argument is a easy one to fallback on. Also i did not say theyshould outlaw camping chairs i said instead of ... ok maybe i should have worded it differently, how about..Instead of addressing pecific issues with abuse of teh DI or revamping it they have chosen to throw out teh baby with the bath water.

They didn't.

A small number of websites, the very popular ones, make a small profit.

The absolute top of the line ones make a big profit.

The vast majority don't even break even. Yeh, there's a lot of webcomics. But other sites that have a lot of casual users just vanish, without explanation. The Internet is full of broken links to dead sites, many of which used to carry important information. I've been providing hosting for a couple of sites that were otherwise going offline... they're not maintained any more, but there's a small but steady traffic of users. Not enough to interest advertisers, but more than enough that if I got a "dwell bonus" every month I wouldn't be faced with the question of whether I'll be able to afford to keep them up.

Linden Labs doesn't need to make the same mistake. Support the people creating the content that your paying customers want to see. Expecting creators to pay LL for the privilege of making Second Life more attractive is just going to lead to the same failures.