Should LL Participate in Resident Abuse?

Yeah. Here's the secret wink.



That was posted in March.

WTF. This thread is turning into the absurd.

Anyone can email Philip Linden IF THEY KNOW HIS EMAIL ADDRESS, and if they can fit themselves into an email client to bang out a coherent reply. I am coming up on 3 years of being a resident of SL and I've never been sent Philip's Email address. Perhaps because it's a google search away.

So is IRC. So what's the problem? It's not a secret club. All you have to do is ask around. "hey, is there a place where a bunch of people that sometimes play SL get together and chat about it?" "why yes, there is, and here's how you get to it."

There's no winking, no sexual favors, no FIC favoritism. If you can't be bothered to ask questions, no one can be bothered to answer you.


And you know, another thing. I'm really getting sick of being lumped into this FIC oligarchy bullshit. I have no connections to the Lindens, I'm not in any special groups that dictate SL policy, I'm not even in any prestigious design groups. I am well known and (allegedly) listened to on my own merits, not on who I brown nose to, thanks very much.

I'm an FIC of one, if anything. I'd appreciate it if people would drop the whole FIC moniker from my name, thanks.

Ooh! I can just taste that righteous indignation.

edit: It's a pretty stupid remark, btw. Lindens should cut themselves off from their community? Please.

I guess I have to stop meeting with that Linden alt for wild weekends of sex and booze?

So, the answer is "Yes, there is a gatekeeper."

Now, don't take this wrong Lordly, it's only meant in jest, but...

Nope, the answer is that you can be kicked out of you're a dick. And if you need to chat with the Lindens, you still have innumerable means of doing so.

Yes, Jim.

Crap, I thought it'd end when you figured out I wasn't really a Linden Alt, I didn't predict this ending at all

Oh yeah, totally. We ban people for using vowels, too. Every day of the week is a different vowel you're forbidden from typing, because we find vowels offend Lindens and thus must keep them to a minimum. Only those who have fasted for three months and meditated properly are allowed to use 'y'.

Thank you for the long and thougth out response Flip.

I have to disagree though. To me this is unethical behaviour. Whether or not any favoritism actaully happens, it is unethical for a corporate entity to engage in this sort of thing. The appearance is, that this is an FIC group with access to the Lindens. That appearance alone is enough for LL to be worried about.

It makes me so mad I can hardly think straight this morning!

I am wise enough to know that perhaps *because* I am mad, I will calm down a bit and see it differently later. However I find this so outrageous that I don't think I will ever condone it. I might step down from "outraged," to " "just really mad," (after I calm down), but I can't see me making it all the way to "this is okay behaviour." Obviously part of my anger is just being here so long and not knowing about it, but that is partly why ethical guidelines exist, to guard against these kinds of perceptions whether they are right or wrong.

Corprate communications to clients should all be above board and *all* clients should be aware of the ways in which they can contact employees. Perhaps this is partly due to LL's horrible communication skills, but I doubt one person out of a thousand Second Life residents is aware of some of those ways in which to contact a Linden that you listed, and I doubt anyone outside of the FIC on this forum knows anything about this chat group.

That fact alone means they should not be on it.

If this *was* Exxon, on the front page of their web site they would have a notice that stated all the ways in which the clients could contact the corporation. On another page they would have a list of all the employees of said corporation and their ocntact information. I have coded these pages myself at times, but I dont see anything like taht at LL. If one stumbled across an Exon employee on a private list, said employee would *not* be listing him/herself as an Exxon employee nor speaking for the company. It would be that employees responsibility to seperate themselves from the company either by hiding the fact that they work for Exxon or by clearly stating it and then refusing to get drawn in to conversations that deal with Exxon as a company. This does not seem to be the case here.

While acknowledging the personalities involved in the Hank vs. Cienna debate and that there is a lot of bad blood there, I also know that Hank is not a liar, depite any emotional baggage or exaggerations that might be happening there. Therefore I believe his interpretation of this channel as a place where Lindens come to:

- share information that they would not share in other places
- ask questions of the select group of residents there
- float ideas for future releases.

None of that is strictly ethical behaviour in that it's a private run place that the majority of residents have *effectively* no access to.

You are completely missing the point that it is one thing to send an email ... and a radically different thing to actually get a response.

I remember discussions in these forums about the lack of response to email sent to a wide variety of people at LL, on a wide variety of topics.

Saying that the email address is readily available and that anyone can send an email is a complete red herring. Are you saying that all of your email to LL gets more than an automated response? I find that very interesting. And telling.

I believe that Cienna isn't a liar, therefor every Tuesday is Free Taco Tuesday.

This is an excellent tactic ... to resort to derision and comedy in order to distract people from the real discussion. /clap

I often wonder why it is that lindens seem to be available regulary in IRC and in other extra-game forums, but never seem to be online.

I often wonder why, if there is supposed to be a huge advantage in 3-d web browsing over 2-d web browsing, many residents use the tradition web to shop and not the nifty 3-d store. I also wonder why, if SL is suppose to be a 3-d improvement to the internet, we arell waiting with baited breath for Web on a prim? Seems to be despite is vaunted platform nature, we act towards sl just like it was any other game, until the value of the linden is challenged, then it is a platform.

Of course if LL is a game, why is it I saw more lindens playing battlefield2 than loged inot second life?

I'm not really taking any position on the lindens in IRC, but it seems to me that a lot of people, lindens included. Have much more interest in dealing with drama outside SL, than spending time in SL. Just a thing that makes me go hmmmm.

Well, change that to "what is *effectively* or *apparently* a select group of favoured clients" then. Same difference to me.

If it looks like FIC, sounds like FIC and smells like FIC, it doesn't matter if it is or isn't FIC, because everyone is going to see it that way anyway.

At the very least where is the Linden announcement on their web site of the fact that if you are really geeky and like IRC, you can talk to Lindens on this channel about serious game related issues?

Recipes and responses to Cocoa's posts take up a lot of room, too!

Worth quoting.

I think LL should be eating their own dog food.

Their usage of IRC is a huge sign of a lack of confidence in the platform they have created.

I have nothing to do with Prok and we hardly speak.

I dont care about Hanks issue with Cienna, or Plastic Schmuck, or who was banned from the list or why, or any of that stuff.

I care about this being an *apparently* and to all intents and purposes, "in crowd" of people with direct access to Lindens that virtually no one else knew about, and I care about eithical corporate behaviour.

Something being "not hidden" is not the same as it being a publicly known way to contact Linden employees. I am sure there are threads here on everything from poop to potatoes but I don't habitualy search for those terms.

The Linden's use of the web to host the forums is a huge sign of a lack of confidence in the platform they have created.

Well I guess if one read every single post on the forum regardless of interest then one *might* konw about that. One still would not know that this was a way to get the ear of a Linden though would they?

Anyway... after a thousand word or so on the topic, some of us have to work this morning.

If Linden Lab started up their own IRC channel, it would be a broadly viewable part of "the Service", and hence the chat would have to conform to PG standards.

Wouldn't have quite the same flavor as #secondlife.

Also, the company probably doesn't want to encourage new users who may not have used a flexible, full featured chat program like most IRC clients would be because it points out the extreme crudeness of the chat system within Second Life.

You want to talk about stupid remarks, the one you made above takes the cake. I can just TASTE the stupidity.

No one ever said the Lindens should cut themselves off from their community besides YOU.

This IRC channel is NOT THEIR COMMUNITY.

coco

It's pretty easy to find reasons why a company shouldn't be engaging in some activity. I already know where that leads in this context: they soon won't participate in anything, their communication/interaction becomes distant and uninteresting, people accuse them of being out of touch (not that people here are shy about that), and eventually, they really will be.

So I'm more interested in seeing what happens when they don't spend too much time worrying about this sort of thing. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'd rather have people in charge who are people, not corporate drones who must hold themselves apart lest there be the slightest chance someone would see them as promoting stuff they aren't just by association.