Rewarding Hot Spots (a.k.a. killing the voting stations)

At past SL Town Halls we discussed replacing voting stations with a better measurement of foot traffic in the world. Cory Linden has been doing some of the work behind the scenes to get a better system in place. Below he shares some thoughts – what do you think?

I’ve seen some of the tracking systems he discusses – they are very cool and will help us do lots more than just build a new rewards system. We’ll be able to make better maps, provide more meta-level information about where people and objects are located, etc. Take a read and chime in with your thoughts. Thx, hunter.

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While the voting stations have been a great part of Second Life, they are difficult to maintain, easy to game, and are an aesthetic eyesore. With that in mind, we are planning to change how the traffic bonus is paid out and I wanted to share our current thinking.

We now have the capability to track avatar position across all the simulators at one minute intervals. This provides lots of great data about where people go and how long they stay including info on the particular parcel where they are dwelling. When aggregated over a 24 hour period, this information provides an accurate picture of which locations were well-trafficked, the original goal of the voting stations.

Thus we can easily reward land owners for every unique visitor to your land during a 24 hour period and provide additional bonuses based upon the amount of time they lingered.

What this means is that if you spend a lot of time on someone's land, then you will be rewarding them without having to click on anything, and the longer you spend there the better. However, be aware that being near their land isn't enough, you actually need to be over it.

Some additional thoughts:
* the visitation data will be coalesced across all of your parcels if you own multiple pieces of land so uniqueness counts only once, but total dwell time can occur over a number of parcels.

* parcel owners are not eligible for bonuses on their own land, so this system doesn’t reward Resident A for just sitting in his home.

* we can also recognize popular neighborhoods and popular simulators but are holding this to accompany more self-governance tools.

* we’ll be playing with different algorithms and rules to avoid creating a reward system which encourages staying logged in all night at your neighbor’s place. Perhaps a max cap on the “additional dwell time” bonus.

* initial calculations of using this data as opposed to voting station results give the top sites about $500/day and result in total distributions about 33% higher.

Cory

Although my daily rewards will suffer with this system (I currently only rely on fly-bys, I have no content up yet). I feel that this is what needs to be done, theres too much risk involved with the vote stations we have currently (vote farms and such). This definately will make hosting events ever more popular (which is a good thing). I totally agree with this.

-Chris

Well, I love the idea, but there's a problem.

Everyone in Tan, Boardman, etc has a huge advantage in this system. People will invariable be passing over that land always, because well, you don't have a choice. This is a nice way to track traffic, but the problem is, you have to track what people are actually doing there. Basically my analogy would be that were we to track people based upon this, it would make the highways of the world look like the attraction, rather than the Museum it leads to.

In some ways this sounds like an extension of the rating system, in that it rewards sociability. I would hope that a system for rewarding builders would be put into place at the same time.

With the current voting stations, you at least have a way of expressing that you like how something is built; imperfect, but it exists. With the proposed traffic system, admiring a builder's work won't help them unless you hover right above it for a while; if the builder didn't purchase a buffer zone, you might be admiring someone's building from their neighbor's property.

Of course, I'm speaking as someone who likes to build scenery rather than discos.

Actually what it looks like is that the foot traffic only counts if they are over your land for more than 1 minute. So unless you own a HUGE stretch of land that takes more than 1 minute to pass through then you probably won't get any credit for owning land people pass over a lot.

hm yeah si has a good point. I hope they track it more closely by the amount of time we spend and not by the number of unique visitors.

in other words i hope its something like, each unique avatar counts as 1 times the number of minutes they spend there, and then add all those up. so if they are just passing through, they likely would only show up for one of the intervals, so they would only add 1 and that shouldn't be a big deal.

if they make it where each unique visitor is worth more than 1, like say 5, and then add the 1*minutes to that, i think it would be unfair, for the reason si pointed out. unless they want to reward for owning land in one of those 'highways'.

i'm wondering what eactly this meant:

That would be my concern as well. Other than that, it sounds good to me.

Hmm... I tend to agreee with Jake Cellardoor's opinion. While the current system allows for someone to express they admire a particular structure. I only see this as hurting more coders/builders since inorder to achieve these higher quality constructs, requires more time to concentrate on their product and less idlely socializing.

This also can cause a problem since if you are admiring a building, you probably are not on the land the building sits on. For example, most people whom may be complementing my building are probably on the road surrounding the building, which is Linden land.

Another issue is that just because you are on someone's land does not imply that you necessarily like what they are doing. Perhaps you were on their land to express/discuss how a particular action of the person displeases you.

What I would like to see is a system that rewards the creators of things for those who interact with their objects, not just marely standing next to them. Mind you thought would have to be put into how to stop that from being abused, but at least it would reward the builder/coders.

Well, the way I take it is that it will be a 'snapshot' done once per minute, not where the av stayed for that minute. IE: at xx:xx:01 it snapshots where all avs are, and records that as their 'location', and then records them as a visitor for that spot.

You could very well be right. However I made my own visitor counter a while ago that only counted visitor minutes when it detected the same person in two consecutive 1 minute sweeps. I made it that way because it was the only way that made sense. I didn't wanna track people passing over my land I wanted to track people staying on my land. I would assume that if the lindens want to track visiting and not traveling then they will do something similar.

What if you don't own the land your build is on?

I know in Blue and some of the other themed sims the wealthy members own 1/16ths and the poorer members just build on them.

(hint i'm one of these poorer members) so would I not get any money if someone was staying on my build admiring it?

the builds on the land are what draw the people there, not the land itself....

this system is a good idea but just as faulty as the current one for different reasons.

I also agree with whoever posted about builders suffering. I was under the impression that the vote booths were there so that you could vote if you liked someones build (but of course most people just vote if they like the person). so we are going to replace the system that is supposed to reward builders but is faulty because it only rewards social people with a system that will only reward social people?

Something just seems wrong.

JV

Continuing what Jon said, I think we may need a 'rent land' feature. There would be a land owner, and numerous people can rent specific spaces in this plot of land (possibly even the alititude that the rental is part of, like 25m to 50m...for apartment buildings, ya know?)

Just a thought...

Oh, I like this idea, Lindens!

I like it!

Then perhaps you could work out an agreement with your landlord and ask for a cut of the money you earned him/her.

I like this system it sounds great. I do have to say that I don't consider the voting stations an eyesore. But I guess that's just me.

I don't know that this would work based on the fact, what if the land owner doesn't make any money off of this, and in most cases you are already paying rent, why give him more?


My thoughts,

Upon first reading this, I thought "Hey great idea". But, I sat on for a few miniutes and came to the conclusion its not a good as it sounds, There is the issue with the Themed communities who desparatly need and rely on voteing station money for funding, Then there are those who rent. My other concern is, when you don't have a huge parcel of land, with some type of structure that you can walk through, this will end up hurting you more than helping. Sometimes when I look at a structure, I am not on the owners property.

Ideas,

Design it so that you can track it but structure not, owned land. There would just have to be a stipulation about how many structures can be tracked within a certain distance from eachother. I think that if designed that way, it would in the long run be a bennificial system.

Personally, I have never had a huge isssue with the voteing stations.

-Skippy

Maybe this is why Tan is a high-land-cost area? Hummmmm?

I think I've made my hatred of the necessary evil of voting stations well known, and I really like this idea.

My only concern has already been expressed, that is, in co-operative builds (like Gibson, for example), your stuff and your events aren't always on your land,

But no system would be perfect and this is far and away the best workable proposal I have heard.

after thinking about this further I wanted to add that this will be an issued for anyone building statues or small builds like my tipi. My tipi gets a lot of recognition but its so small I hardly espect people to go in and hang out. Small builds while still often good, arent very sticky.

Then yes, theres the group build issues.

Someone also mentioned that maybe you are "visiting" someone for negative reasons such as solving a dispute or following up on a lead of stolen goods. Its not great that you are also rewarding them for bad behavior. It doesnt really make you want to go try to solve it knowing you will be on their land giving the undue credit.

I still think the idea has real merit but there are kinks that need to be worked out.

i think this brings up a good point. the vote booth system, among other things, gave us a good way to acknowledge a nice build. this system gets rid of that. the time-on-land system instead only acknowledges time spent there. it rewards attracting people to your land, not whether they like how it looks. the place could look nice, ugly, whatever. (although a nice looking spot might attract more visitors)

that being said i still like this idea. vote booths are too vague. they have no connection to anything in particular. time-on-land instead emphasizes something more specific, and IMO positive. it will encourage us to be more 'social' and create places that people want to go to.

as for a way to reward nice builds, we still have the ratings system, but... well... ok i don't feel like repeating why ratings don't work right.

I want people like Jake Cellerdoor to be rewarded. I look at his waterfall every day, but I look at it from my land. Currently, I can fly there and vote for his waterfall. With the new system, I'd have to go there and sit for a while-- not too practical.

There are people who build hidden, cavernous, enclosed places because that's what they like. But under the new system, those places, which by their very design would not attract crowds, would not be rewarded.

So that brings up the question: What is the reward for? For encouraging socializing? If that's the case, then the new system will work well for that. If the reward is to encouage productivity of any kind, then there will still be a few kinks to work out.

And another thing.... I have a neighbor who has noise items that are often left on, playing loudly over and over and over and over... So I have to visit frequently to shut them off. I guess under the new system, I'd be rewarding him by going there. hmmmm....that ain't right!.....

Maggie

I agree with Jake, and I don’t like the idea at all. Rewards will be COMPLETELY based on sociability and of course, the new ways that will be invented to make one stay on your land. It will foster fake and manipulative social structures. It will not reward for a lovely build, it doesn’t take long to look at a build and you wouldn’t be visiting every day to relook.

This new plan may just create a sort of social divide, those who do and those who do not, and of course those who do not will suffer. It almost appears as if we are being "forced" to do something, as in the dreaded needs of TSO.

If this is all true, correct me if I am wrong, then to me, it is going to distract from some of the really cool stuff that SL has to offer, and what initially grabs and addicts the user.

fen-

I think that this would work really well if they institued group owned land. But this would also include having group owned objects, vote stations (if they keep them), a group account so on so forth.

i just thought of something. people might not want to kick others off their land all of a sudden... what if we want privacy? we lose out on rewards then...

and like what maggie pointed out, we could come up with ways to attract people to our land only out of annoyance or frustration...

in general i see us all becoming very aware of who's land we're over at all times. could be annoying, but i think at this point i still like the idea more than vote booths.

and i'm also concerned with how this is gonna work with group builds.

Sia and I have land in taber and welch. We both own patchs of land on either side of our isle and bay. This may cause a few problems.
However if we know for a fact we can get the same land for the same discounts and taxes we may be able to shift some of it.

I have been watching this thread all day, and I noticed that people are strongly oppossed to making someones like for a structure a social thing. I think that a simple solution to this problem would be to institute both as a voting option. However you can only have one of the options per property, not both.

That way, those that find the vote stations and eye-sore, or would like to be socialble, have a solid alternative.

What do you think?


-Skippy


PS: I really don't see whats so bad about our current system, except for voteing farms, but your hard pressed to stop that anyway.