Of Bots and Genies...

Recently, in a post about landbots and whether or not they should be allowed in SL, the comment was made that they were like genies in that they could not be undone. I've also seen this analogy in terms of land prices risking too high, in terms of copybots stealing intellectual property, and even in terms of private island tiers going up last November.

This analogy is false. Indeed in many of the old Genie myths, genies were returned to their bottles by god or a person blessed by god. While I'm not advocating prayer here, SL has a staff of gods. No need for faith in Second Life. We call them Lindens, and the Lindens will is always done.

RL doesn't have this copasity to be controlled so thoroughly and yet, negative crime trends have been turned back. In NYC, where I live, crime used to be rampant. In the past two decades, it has been greatly reduced. The smaller crimes were dealt with, grafitti and petty theft, etc, which greatly diminished the larger penchant for crime. It's called 'the broken windows theory', that all it takes is a permissiveness towards petty infractions and all of a sudden, nobody feels THEY have to obey the rules.

If LL wanted to stop the bots, they would. All they would have to do is put something in the TOS that forbade them, and search out a handful of them, publically stripping them of their accounts and their posessions, maybe even posting the results of their 'bot busts' on the blog. This wold not completely stop bots, but greatly reduce them, and there is enough economic incentive for those selling land, be they realtors like myself or your average guy who got burned mispricing his land, to hunt down those the that the Lindens miss and report them to LL who could then investigate. If LL took a zero tollerance approach to landbots, copybots, or to any other scams in SL, the problem would be dealt with in two months tops.

If these problems persist, it's because the Linden Gods are not vengeful enough, not that the Genies are too clever.

Taking a moment to remove myself from the other conversations, I will reply to this one on how I feel about the landbots. This isn't how I feel about people selling land, which is what that was about.

I hate the landbots. They've never stolen land from me, but there have been times when I saw a great parcel of land that I wanted, in the landsales, but by the time I get there it's of course already gone, or being sold at three times what it was just a few moments ago. Landbots tip the scales in barons favor, and make it difficult for us to buy land at reasonable prices. Now the barons have the land, and jack the prices up, forcing other people to jack their prices up to keep up. In the end the whole system is jacked up.

I, personally, would love to see them remove landbots. Second Life is still very much a game to me, but it's also very much more than that. I like my land, I like building things, I like learning how to script and how to play. And I know a lot of people who would love to have land, but can't afford to pay 180 dollars for a good sized parcel because land sales are completely jacked up.

For some reason I am reminded of this passage............


"The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. "

Jonathan Edwards.

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/sermons.sinners.html

Focusing on one specific bot is never going to result in a happy ending, it just shifts the actual problem from one type of bot to the next.

I don't really see why LL couldn't commit to drafting up a "community standards" for bots that prescribes a vague code of conduct for bots, the same way the CS does that for normal residents. If a bot violates those rules, it's banned/suspended from the grid along with its owner.

I don't get the whole bot thing anyway. A bot is basically an alt, correct? How are they getting away with having so many freaking alts. They need to go back to charging people for extra accounts again, and tighten up the creation of alts. I actually paid for this alt, which kinda frustrates me at this point.