Money Sink Ideas

Currently Second Life is missing a large money sink. The real only daily money sinks are ratings, listing fees, and upload fees. These don’t seem to be quite enough and there seems to be possibly too many Lindens on the market making the SL economy unstable. What are you ideas for new money sinks?


Here are some of mine

1. Increased upload fees. Possible price points being 15L, 20L, 25L.
   
2. Increased listing fees in find, probably to something more like $150L a week
   
3. Fees to place events in event listing (maybe this can be something like 20L for a regular event, 50L and your event is highlighted, 100L and you event is listed in red or some other color)
   
4. New Island sales in Lindens not just USD
   
5. Point to Point Teleporting for a flat monthly fee. I would pay $500-1000L a month a for this privilege and a lot of other people probably would also.
   

Those are my ideas. Feel free to shoot them down and add your own.

I'd only protest your first because it would stifle the new user creator type. The rest I'd vote yes for.

Yeah, I knew the first one would be a tough sell for that reason, but I thought I would put it out there anyway.

Double or triple high-resolution image upload fees (1024x1024).

Auction some islands off in linden dollars (BIG ONE, should be happening now).

Institute modest event posting fee ($L100).

That would do it.

LF

I like the dual effect of the image size charge - maybe ramp it too, 512^2 for L$20 and 1024^2 for L$30. I'd suggest similar for sound files over 5 seconds and 64Kbps and up.

Question, though. "That would do it" - do what?

I know that part of the sinks are going to be removed, and if I had my way, two parts (all the ratings) - so more sinks well likely be nessary in the future, but you appear to be referencing a current problem. Are you? Or am I misunderstanding?

Why not just have an income tax? take money form those who make lost and use it to fund the stipend for the basic users, essentialy recycle lindens.

Becasue the userbase grows and shrinks (hopefully more of the former and less of the latter ). Having a series of sources and sinks is flexible enough to handle changes in userbase size pretty much on its own, where a fixed pool would need constant attention from LL to maintain.

I'm not sure if you're being serious here?

Assuming you are, shouldn't it be the basics 'funding' those who put the effort into SL, not the other way round?

In truth I was only being half serious Hiro, well maybe 3/8's serious.....

It just struck me that all the proposed money sinks were things the would seriously impact people starting out, on a limited budget, no matter how hard they work, or they would yet again make it more diffcult for entertainment creators as opposed to Content Barons. So I was commenting on the midset that says "let the rich stay rich and the poor poor."


besides, an income tax system would require a tax code for loop holes and lawyers to exploit those loopholes, so really i am advocating a new market for my services. SL is after all a tool to make money!

Deflate the Linden Dollar a bit.

As it stands, there's no real driver for the Linden dollar -- all the auctions are in $US, thus bypassing the Linden dollar entirely. Sure, the land barons sell the land for $L, but they just recycle it back into the economy via GOM. The money isn't going anywhere, it's just going in a circle, the amounts always ending up at the barons, then back out at the economy.

Each time a new user comes in, more money is pumped into the system. Every week, millions of stipends are paid out. Bonuses are given. Referral bonuses. Linden payments ($L60,000 for the train stations, for instance).

THE MONEY ISN'T LEAVING CIRCULATION ANYWHERE. Image uploads + rates fees does not equal millions of dollars being printed on a weekly basis.

The net result is going to be the linden dollar will devalue, causing prices to raise, causing it to be devalued even more, etc.

The lindens have said multiple times that they want to keep the $L rate at/around $4.00/$L1000. It's currently at $3.80-ish. While that doesn't sound like much, I think it is. The lindens constantly say "oh, well, it's only a few percentage points off" ... yeah, but if the linden dollar sinks "only" 20 percent more, it'll be the lowest it's been since GOM opened. No biggie, I guess.

I've asked the Lindens no less than THREE TIMES to clarify the money sink problem in the Hotline, and all three times it's been ignored. Either they don't care about the Linden Dollar anymore, or have no real answers for me. I suspect the latter. I always ask the tough questions.

LF

perrsonnalyy, i think the ideas was how i say this,,,,,, not bright bc it will impact on ppl hardly. i think it was bettter when we had event support/ratings to L1.. which LL messed with.. itt was so much easier back theen even for the disabled people (such as myself) to earn the L they need in days time.

I resent the idea of an income tax. But maybe we can compromise?

How about a stipend tax? That is, depending on your cashflow for the previous a week, a certain percentage is deducted from your stipend for the next week? If you're doing any reasonable amount of sales, the stipend isn't going to be missed much. And if you're not doing that many sales, the tax structure would work such that you would lose very little or nothing from that week's stipend. Since the stipend is just a gift from Linden Lab, it wouldn't bother me to have a few L$ shaved from that (as opposed to shaving it from each one of my sales -- that would piss me off, because I'm not doing all my hard work to make money for other people). Even if we didn't touch the stipend, we could tax the stipend bonus the same way. A little less distasteful for everyone and it would really add up, yes?

As for tiered upload fees, I like that a lot. Very few applications truly call for 1024 pixels. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra to upload an enormous texture on the comparatively rare occasion where I need one.

Also, I think it's silly that event posting is free. It leads to the wild spamming of the calendar we see today. I don't think it would be unreasonable to charge L$25 - L$100 per event, with special attention getting options as Eboni outlined. I'd also be in favor of increasing the parcel directory fee. It's really cheap as it is. Might be nice to have bold/color options for more money for that directory, as well.



Uh, that doesn't deflate the L$ nor add money sinks. This discussion is about strengthening buying power, not weakening it, via money sinks.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of the stipend tax. It seems to me like an excellent middle-ground position! But, isn't the stipend technically a game-play element that LL has "sold" you already? This seems like maybe it would lead to a lot of backlash.

Taxes are not the answer since you really aren't dealing with a finite amout of cash. LL just makes more money as the need arises. An income tax would only complicate SL with no net benifit. LL does not need Linden dollars to provide basic services to the populace and is effectivbly worthless to them. They can't pay the colocation fees with lindens. If you want an income tax real bad anyway, just pretend LL raised your stipend to $1000L but instigated an income tax at 50%.

I do, however , like the idea of an efficiency fee on textures. You load up a 128x128 jpeg 20k texture you pay the $10 fee, you load up a 512x512 tga at 500k you pay $100L and you load up a 1028x1028 2meg bitmap you pay $500L. This would go a long way toward making SL run smoother for everyone. Same thing for scripts, the more resources it takes to run it, the higher the fee (how to do this I don't have a clue). Another sink should be a $1L everytime you play a gesture, it should cost someone to play bananaphone twenty times in a row.

Griefing fines in addition to suspensions. You get a suspension you also get a fine, don't have the money for the fine? You don't get a stipend until its paid(stipends go toward the fine).

I'm not for taxes. I am more for higher usage fees, that way people are only affected who use the items. I'm not really for punishing griefers with fines either. The current SL judicical system is a bit of a mystery. It seems crappy to fine someone for a crime, when they have no oppurtunity to defend themselves.

I think the best money sink idea out there, is that lindends will charge 1 L$ per sqm on all land sales....


So lets say u want to buy a 512Sqm plot and the owner is selling it for 3,000... After u pay the 3,000 512 L$ will be taken out and the seller will get the rest. This SAME L$ Fee would be applied to ALL auctioned plots... This help sinks 2 ways.

1. Getting money out of the economy.
2. Getting money out of the land barrons. (to lower supply to GoM)

This would be a double-tax. Land owners already pay a huge USD tax monthly. Not very ethical.

Just had someone adjust my attention over to this thread.

I'm all for higher usage fees, especially the higher texture resolution of 1024^2. 512 should really be the biggest anyone needs in world; that and my graphics card despises high load areas.



I don't quite like this idea. Although I don't sell land, I do buy from time to time. This wouldn't work as a money sink on the land barons. The already ridiculously high prices of land will just get higher. It would become more of a money sink to the buyer.

How are you so sure there's a need for new sinks?

The issue is whether there is too much $L in circulation. But how much $L is in circulation, how much SHOULD be, and in what way is the $L distributed?

The only information I can find is here: http://secondlife.com/community/economy.php which shows the median account balance. The median balance isn't high by historic standards, its actually low. (It also isn't a very meaningful number, but its all we've got.)

A new or increased sink would deflect the rate of growth in the total number of $L in circulation. Merely deflecting the rate of growth in total Linden $ would not necessarily have a perfectly predictable effect. Worse, the effects of that would have a long-delayed reaction, so you don't know if you over-corrected until months later. The cure could easily be worse than the disease.

There is a "law of unintended consequences" in economics. For example, if you impose a "tax", then that might slow down economic activity, and reduce the tendency for people to spend their $L (i.e., produce "negative sentiment". A downturn in sentiment or confidence would cause people to convert $L into US$ sooner than they otherwise would, even to the extent of wiping out the revenue from the tax.

For example, a resident sitting on L$20,000 might continue sitting on it because they feel like they might want to spend it soon. If they decide not to spend it soon, they might dump it on GOM now, figuring they could earn it back or buy it back later. That is an example of economic consequences of how people feel. This means nothing if it is only one person, but if it becomes a trend, or a sentiment that is felt by lots of people, then it can have a very powerful effect on the value of money.

Sentiment is actually a much more important factor than money supply alone. If a segment of the population decides to average a lower $L balance because of the way they feel, that can have a HUGE effect on exchange rates. If your "cure" causes the "how much money should there be" to go down more than the "how much money there is" goes down, then, well, do the simple algebra.

Buster

Buster makes really, really excellent points re: unintended consequences. That's the sort of thing you need to consider for any sort of system, but economics in particular makes it interesting.

Hmm, will think on that.

What is the problem for which these are the solutions?

LL has stated that they keep the money 'pool' fixed at about L$4500 per account. If they are able to do this as they say they are, then the sinks we currently have are obviously enough.

What is the problem? Why do we need more sinks?

Except they're not quite enough, since the L$ exchange rate is at 3.8 intead of 4.0 ?

To me the best solution is definitely land auctions in L$.

The problem is someone put 2 million Linden on GOM a few weeks ago, deflating the Linden. The Linden is slowly recovering but the fact remains there are large numbers of people with millions and hundreds of thousands of Lindens that could devalue the Linden to nothing in a matter of minutes. The typical response is that "People with that amount of money would want to keep the Linden high, not low". That is generally probably true but human nature if a fucked up and tricky thing. If someone gets angry or desperate enough there is no telling what they will do. We live in a very small town, we have some George Bailys but we are "Mr. Potters" heavy and one day the chickens may come home to roost. (okay the chickens part, wasn't necessary but is always funny.)


Currently with new and current members millions or hundred of thousands of Lindens are poured into the world through stipends, only a small percentage of that money is pulled out the system every week. Lets use the example of the small business owner/content creator in SL.

Stipend $500L a week
Earnings from sales $2500L a week
Land listing fees for store in find $30L a week
Texture uploads per week $200L
Lap dances $500L per week
Rental Fees $350 per week
Insert whatever else people blow loot on here.


The point is most Lindens are recirculation in the system; they are not pulled out the system. This is all hypothetical talk really aimed and getting point to point teleporting because I am lazy, under the guise of community concern

The reason the L$ price on GOM is currently low is simply because more people are selling than buying. Furthermore, as a GOM "trader" I've noticed a lot of "consumers" are artificially lowering the price by constantly placing sell orders 1c below the "going rate" so they get their order filled quicker. So the next person comes along and doesn't want to wait either so they place their order even lower...

Greed is a human nature thing and won't be changed by adding more money sinks or taxes in-world. If the Lindens were randomly creating large amounts of L$ and effectivly flooding the market you would see inflation in prices in-world. The one thing I can possitivly say is that prices today are around the levels they were two years ago, or even a little lower as more people become skilled at content creation and competition increases.


You may find the stipend payout is suprisingly small. The only people getting L$500 a week are the premium account holders (mainly people who want to own land) and Linden has said that they represent around 15% of the population. With all the land rentals going on I have no reason to believe that this figure has changed, which leaves the other 85% getting L$50 a week stipend, not L$500, (assuming they login during the week) which instantly reduces the apparent money "creation" by 10x

Seen in this light, L$30 listing fee + L$50 upload fee for 5 textures + L$50 to give 2 rates... the sinks are plenty deep enough compaired to a L$50 a week stipend.

Just release more land for Lindens. If anything gets an increased fee, or becomes at cost, that would suck.

Some people are multi linden millionaires but most have just a few thousand, and a world where every five minutes you're facing another bill would suck to high heaven. You could rename it from "Second Life" to "Stinking Life". Most people play SL to get away from bills and poverty and all the bad bits that come with life.