No dwell - no point in free content

Yes. Its called enjoyment. If you are able to make money, then you should be giving back to the community. On any given weekend, I will personally give away up to 25K. With all night long events. Why, because i have been fortunate. I enjoy seeing someone win. That makes me happy.

Also good ideas.
It was a payment for services rendered.
You (the metaphorical you) pay L$25000 a month for texture uploads. Period. Nobody promises you that people will buy them or the products you make using them. But if I were to say that you shouldn't have any complaints if the rights system went away so that anyone could clone your creations and you didn't get any money for them, you'd call bullshit. Because, after all, nobody builds a business based on any single piece of data: they look at all the costs, all the potential profits, and balance them out. The cost of texture uploads are balanced against the benefits that LL provides.

Traffic incentives are no less a part of that calculation than having Linden Labs provide free Digital Rights Management. They're no less a part of that calculation than the money a website gets from their Google ads and ad banners. I've run websites that paid for themselves from those traffic incentives, and so have tens of thousands of others... and the web would be much poorer if they were to go away.

Linden Labs gets a lot more reliable income per visitor than Google does. Paying for the builds that earned them that money isn't a "free handout".
Would it be too much to ask for you to refrain from making this kind of comment unless you're responding to someone you genuinely feel deserves being tarred by the association?

Then I really can't understand the point of your comment. Could you maybe go back and post a more detailed response to my message if you think it's important?
Erm, the fact that the find menu is distorted in favor of the places that attract "free riders" instead of paying customers is part of the problem (albeit one that doesn't directly impact me so I tend to minimise it) that I'm talking about.

If a functional/profitable micro-payment system existed, that allowed me to pay a fraction of a cent to visit a website -- I suspect I'd visit quite a lot. Especially if the payment system was as easy as it is in SL. When the day arrives that we have a micro-payment system that is integrated (perhaps as a plug-in) to the top 3 major browsers, that allows us to keep our CC info secure, and authorize micropayments in less then 1 cent quantities, and would allow the content providers to collect those micro-payments profitably, will be the day people will start paying .2 cents to view an article on CNN.com, or .5 cents for a How-To article on building your own DVR.

Upon visiting random parcel X, where it was my destination, if I'm suddenly prompted to pay just L$1 to help cover costs -- I doubt I'd even give it much thought at all, before clicking pay. The trick would be that it needs to be painless for me to pay and continue on my way.

All the press about SL is about MONEY> Sprinkle some sex in there .. and voila.. you have an adult driven fantasy world. SIgh the voting stations were so nice way back when ...

The web killed the online services where these capabilities existed. People don't like to feel they're paying over and over again for going to a virtual library. And there's effects in SL that can amplify this problem... because you rarely go anywhere just because of the builds there, you go for the people, and anything that turns people off can snowball (thawball?).
I might, or might not, but over time all other things being equal would I keep going to the places that want me to pay for entry? I don't know, but certainly if have a choice between a place that charges me L$1 every day I go there and one that doesn't bother me with an annoying dialog, I'm likely to go to the one that doesn't charge.

I mean, I even tend to avoid places that notecard me on entry, and that doesn't cost anything. Back when I was homeless, one reason I Set Home away from the Welcome Area was to avoid that damned notecard.

And since other people are faced with the same choices, I'm more likely to go to the less annoying place because I'm more likely to find more people there.

Now... I can come up with micropayment systems that don't have this problem, but all the ones that are fair and that can't be abused to suck people's micropayment credit dry (for example, let's say you didn't get notified for L$1 charges... by splitting up a website/parcel into multiple parcels and charging just below the warning limit for each one someone could get L$10 or more per visitor) look pretty much like dwell.

OK, let's run through this again.

Money... I believe that people who are paying premium are less likely to be there just for money than the people coming in for free and thinking they can make a buck. Certainly that's been my experience... and the ones who are paying and looking to make money from SL aren't going to be expecting to make money at casinos.. you don't need a premium account for that.

Sex... There's nothing special about SL that's not common to every other shared computer environment. I mean, back when i got started on computers one of the cool things was making up a deck of cards to print out a pinup calendar. The Internet is full of porn. And yet... there's all kinds of other stuff as well, and it's the other stuff that needs a bit of incentive to keep as much of it around as possible. Removing raw popularity incentives just moves the balance further towards sex, 'cos it's easier to get people to pay for that.

SL will become pretty pointless to me as well

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I'm really pissed

very upsetting they want to run out hundreds of users because their line of work is Events

Could you provide a location for the land? How much are you asking?

I don't see dwell income as "free handout" nor do I see it as "payment for services rendered"

I see it as a "reward".

And, balancing out the pros and cons... it's losing.

PRO: rewards some land owners for exceptional content/offerings with L$ and 'popularity' points.

CON: vulnerable to contrived schemes.
CON: high percentage of payout not going to those it was intended for.
CON: creates more new money and sinks aren't keeping up
CON: rewards builds that discourage players from exploring
CON: why pay for land when you can just camp for profit?


I'm sorry that some of you feel so outraged by this impending change that you're going to give up and walk off.... but if a reward results in undesired behavior it's better for the reward to just go away.

No dwell income at all is more "fair" than making up some rules that require Linden Labs to police the people that receive dwell income... and try to manage all the awkward human bias that comes into that.

I relied on dwell in times past, but gave up on it as being insignifcant. If offsetting my costs were that important, I'd drop down one tier level and be sufficiently better off.

Perhaps one of the interesting side effects of a dwell-income free SL will be portable stores. (Damien Fate has a cool wearable store if I recall correctly.)

And.. I wouldn't complain if the post-dwell economy forces merchants to make due with smaller parcels with fewer prims. Perhaps the mega-malls with thousands of prims (each with unique 'merchandice' textures) will put a little more effort into consolidating and presenting their wares in ways that don't take waiting around for 15 minutes for everything to rez... (which always seemd just a contrived way to get some extra dwell out of a visiting shopper.)

Life is change. Adapt or give up ... and move on anyway.

**THAT** had to have been the most selfish, hypocritical piece of tripe I have ever heard in SL. And that's saying something, because generally I expect the worst outta people!

Many people (including myself) do free content to help improve and contribute to the quality of SL. It's called being generous and considerate of one's fellow neighbour.


Silly me, here I was doing free content when I could have been profiteering from it!


- Newfie

Thanks.

I do not feel it is fair for anyone to tell me how important or unimportant dwell incentives are to me. I geared my business on the concept of dwell, and now it's being removed. Sure, someone that owns a sim and has people camping to get their traffic, yes, the small dwell money received is ineffective... but for someone like myself that owns a under 4000m club, dwell is exactly the thing that causes me to put in that extra effort to re-coupe my expenses.

I really do not care if its looked at as a 'reward' or a 'gift' or whatever.... the fact remains, a lot of effort is put into successful events (just as selling items, or any other business in SL). Linden Labs purposely put the dwell system in place BECAUSE OF THIS FACT.
Just as high traffic websites get rewards for many visitors, high traffic lands should receive the same rewards.

I don't think Linden Labs should police anything... it's quite simple, people stay on your land you get incentive. I pay, just as everyone else in SL pays for things, land, items, services. THERE MUST BE A FORM OF KICKBACK AND INCOME CREATED FOR THE SL PLAYERS INVOLVED IN EVENT CREATION!

Just imagine, oh great Linden Labs, if your $20mil grant was pulled from you. Society's businesses in RL get grants, rewards, and subsidies from the government and private investors. If Linden Labs ever wants any substancial successful packed events after June, they better give us event planners a reason to do so.

You don't get to "gear" a business around things, and expect them to remain constant for you to make a constant profit forever. This simply isn't how the world works. Things change. Change with them, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

In light of the fact that residents refuse to raise prices as the exchange rate slides, this was a CRITICAL adjustment which will allow residents to continue monetizing their efforts. More adjustments will be needed WHEN the exchange rate begins sliding again, too. The next time the L$ moves 15% or 20%, I hope that people will take the hint and raise prices to stay on track, or the stipends will be next to be reduced and eventually vanish. Imagine how much bitterness we'll be hearing about THAT.

Like the US outsourcing of jobs. I know this is derailing but this is a good place for it. People want to keep the same and don't want to adjust and be more innovative, then not only will the jobs go to other countries because they are cheaper to higher, but they may be harder working and more skilled. It's become more of a level playing field with the internet, now people with high skills don't need to come to American or anywhere else, they could create a vaccine on their laptop in the home with the right info.

Agree, 100%. It is scary how much more skilled labor other nations are turning out than the USA in some markets.

I don’t know I pay over 1250 US$ a month and have never relied on any of the social handouts from LL.
I pay for my land by making good content and selling it and I also provide great places for people to live shop and enjoy themselves.

I been reading these sad sap stories of peoples social handouts being taken away for a while now and now I’m fed up and I find my self in great need to express my opinion for good or bad it may do to me.

It really makes me mad to hear people wine that their social handout is being taken away. If you can’t afford to own the land with out LL's help then you should not have it.

Further more when I first came to this wonderful world the first thing I wanted to know was where can I BUY money. It did not even cross my mind to look for a hand out. Every single person that inhabits second life is a real world adult and should act like it.

If you can afford a computer capable of running SL and the high speed internet connection required to connect to SL then you can certainly afford to pay a few dollars a month for the hours of entertainment you get out of SL.
After all if you spend say 20 or 30 US$ a month and spend on average 3-4 hours a week logged in to second life. Then you are getting a real bargain. If you just went to the movies twice a month you would pay more then 30 $ and only get about 3 hours of entertainment.

If you were at the supermarket would you expect the supermarket owner or other customers to pay for your groceries would you expect the movie theater owner or other movie goers to pay for your ticket and popcorn?

Commentary:

I know exactly what you mean. The year I spent doing Game Show Channel in TSO was the most satisfying thing. I LOVED people winning, and I loved giving them the money.

But when I got here, I saw that I would have to pay real dollars out of my pocket for that privilege, with so little way to support it. So I became a builder.

Loss of dwell just makes a sorry situation worse.

It remains to be seen if people will actually pay for each ride once they get into the amusement park, and that will be interesting to observe, if nothing else.

coco

Great! So the spamming of the Education Events will finally stop? You've been violating the rules of event post far too long with your political crap. I for one am glad to see you go!

PRO: Provides a few Lindens a day for most even modestly interesting builds as a "carrot" to dangle in front of hopeful builders.
PRO: Noticably offsets tier for anyone willing to spend time promoting their build.
All four of these could have been avoided by basing dwell income on an outcome that actually benefitted Linden Labs (places that paying customers - Premium accounts at least, and possibly Basics who are officers in landholding groups or making significant purchases on LindeX) are attracted to)
It would be better to reduce stipends across the board than to kill dwell.
Of course it's not necessary for them to do this, there are a variety of better options.
It's unlikely that most stores will be affected in any way by the loss of dwell.

Argent is saying what I'm thinking here. The point of dwell isn't to have it as a sole source of income, free builds don't exist just to get a "free handout" as someone put it, they're there to entertain, or to allow the builder to share their creativity.
The problem is that with dwell removed, the owners of the land need to pay the full amount of the tier charge and that's not easy. I switched to rented land after owning a 1024 sq metre plot, because I've decided that $5 US a month isn't worth it for me.

It's the same as developer incentives, while I'll agree that those were a really bad system, removing dwell AS WELL means there is no reason to try and make anything popular anymore. Why go to all the effort of advertising if you have to rely on donations alone to fund yourself? Many operations are very difficult to fund on donations alone, especially if you have a big build!

I personally think this is a MASSIVE mistake and we're only going to see SL become significantly less creative for the sake of creation and purely economically driven which is IMO not desirable, as I don't to see rent-spaces and malls opening everywhere. There are enough malls, casinos and rent-spaces around as it is.

LL are driving popular, cool places like Furnation worlds under, but why? They are some of the best places but things that helped them get by and remain creative are being taken away. So does that mean the future of Second Life is to have the Stargate in Furnation replaced with adverts for household cleaner? The ring-system reduced to charging for its use?
What about other similar places? Many of the games around don't run a profit at all, they pay-out what is paid in and the owner doesn't make money, except from dwell.

I fail to see what was wrong with dwell at all, so people camped in chairs, if that's what they wanted to spend their days doing then fine. I don't see that as an exploit, if anything I see it is nothing more than sad, but many camping chairs were social places as well which was a good thing.

If the L$ sinks are running low (which I was under the impression was not the case, I heard there were plenty of them as it is?) then put more in. Argent's suggestion for charging more for big textures is ideal, I'd personally just charge per kilobyte or something for all uploads and make sure the animation preview window isn't such a GUI nightmare (how many times have I click upload instead of play?).

I was unable to locate this free content build, or any build aparently owned by the OP, in the OP's picks. Does anyone know where it is, what it is, or if it even/still exists?

ITs a few days later, and I'm still pissed traffic incentive is being taken away.

I think that those of us who design, build and sell items for profit should be able to support those people that host events and create free content through the use of advertising. Not in a blatent, in your face kind of advertising, but subtlely. No spamming or anything drastic like that. Take a tringo event. I'd be happy to pay a few thousand L$ a month to display my branding and images of my builds at the top of a tringo board in a high traffic area...todays tringo is sponsored by Acme build company etc. As long as I could display a few images I think my product sells itself. This seems to be the way the world is going and in the uk even the weather forecasts on tv are sponsored by some insurance company or similar, pretty soon you wont even be able to take a crap without it being sponsored by an air freshner company or such like. I think there is a balance to be found between the profit makers and the free content providers so one can support the other and ultimatly both benefit. Im sure there are many of you anti-advertising but if it helps build a better world who are you to grumble? (although im sure you will ) Free content with subtle advertising is better than no free content at all. Am I right or am I not wrong?

Events are less of an issue... they're localised and you have enough people there to be able to use peer pressure to get donations. Games like Tringo should be able to make it if the game's worth playing without paying people free money to play... and if not, that'll just demonstrate what a lot of us suspect - it's the free money that made Tringo attractive, not the game itself.

What about places that are just nice places. Would you be willing to sponsor the equivalent of parkland?