The Discussions on Traffic Reform with the Lindens

I'm still on the fence what the best solution is. I can see valid arguments for keeping traffic around, getting rid of it alltogether, and all points in between.

The only thing I'm certain that needs to change: The ability for people to artifically inflate their traffic numbers must be blocked. *How* to best do that, is a very good question.

Additionally - I've lived through many instances where Linden suddenly & fundimentally changed the rules of the game. Event subsidies, Traffic Payments, and Telehubs to name just a few. Each time, the community collectively freaks out when faced with change, then everything returns to normalcy after people acclimate.

Regardless of how poorly thought out or drastic whatever change Linden makes with Traffic may be - it wont be the end of the world, and the community will adjust. How painful that adjustment end up being depends on the solution chosen, of course.

I think there's some potential in the combining of Traffic and Transactions data. I still think that, for business owners, the value is in analyzing trends of who spent and who didn't, on a per-avatar basis. But for those not up to collecting and analyzing that much info, I guess it would be something.

And it would be harder to game, if the only visitors that mattered were those who conducted a transaction. It *could* be gamed (bot pays prim, prim pays bot-owner), but it would be harder. And, of course, non-profit sims wouldn't get traffic this way, but maybe there's just no way to make traffic useful for non-profits (god knows it hasn't been, for a long time).

But I don't really think unique visitors is gonna help much. It would change things, but I'm not sure for the better. It would kill camping as we know it, anyway: how many campers are really gonna flit from parcel to parcel every five minutes? Bots would be a lot better at that. And it would change botting, too: I suspect the result would be centralized bot armies of hundreds of bots, scheduled to "make the rounds" according to whatever contracts the bot-owner has with the parcel owners. This would be way worse than the current situation, lag-wise, with all those bots constantly migrating sim-to-sim.

Because if you lose traffic, people searching for places won't know which ones are successful and which ones aren't?

I suggest that folks who are members of the Traffic Futures group drop a pointer to this thread, which has turned into a great discussion, into the group chat now and then (along with a reminder that the forums require payment info on file).
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Not neccesarily. Already today, traffic metrics are so unreliable, the shop with the highest traffic does not neccesarily mean that they're successful.

I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something - gone to the highest-traffic-rated places first, only to find that the numbers seem to have no bearing on reality.

As I said before, (if they decided to get rid of it), people will adjust without traffic. Different things will come into play when deciding the best place to shop... such as advertising, word of mouth, and reputation. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

In Real Life - the yellow pages don't have traffic listings, and buisnesses there seem to survive just fine

I'm with Travis.

Someone said yesterday that ANY rule-based traffic system will be gamed, and I'm afraid that's true. But yesterday's blog also saw LL proposing a big change to "Popular Places" in the form of a free-form "showcase", in which a few places would be highlighted each week. Getting picked for the "showcase" is NOT rule-based, it's highly subjective.

And THAT produced a huge rant from Cocoanut Koala, over on SLU, complaining that LL was now showing favoritism and "feting" people and places of their choosing. I'm not saying that Coco is wrong to be upset...but that seems to knock out the idea of NON rule-based approaches too.

I don't know the solution, but whatever LL comes up with had better be thought through very carefully, because it will have big social and economic consequences. An ideal solution, IMO, would eliminate traffic bots, provide some form of income for unskilled labor equivalent to camping, and provide information on successful/popular places to people doing searches.

I think there are two really fundamental issues at the heart of the Search debate:

a) working to increase ranking vs. cheating to increase ranking;
b) the world of quality vs. the world of opportunity.

b) is the biggest problem. Yes, search will help you find the best items, but which is more valuable in the long run? A world where you can quickly find the best art, spend US$ on it, but then find that all there is to actually do is to club dance, have sex, and fly around existing places? Or a world where you can actually make a contribution to it yourself and have it recognized? It's similar to the real issues of positive vs. negative liberty which are incredibly difficult to deal with.

The answer to that question in turn affects the answer to a). The line between legitimate work and illegitimate cheating is very vague. Is using campbots cheating? I've seen arguments on both sides here. Is keyword selection cheating? Again, not sure. Is it cheating to spend all day working on your SL marketing, thus gaining an advantage - but potentially blocking anyone who has an RL job from participating? That depends on your answer to b).

Because camping/traffic-bots inflated the numbers? If LL made it a ToS violation for people to not disclose that they use these things and you could filter your search on that, do you think that the places listed on top would still be bogus?


I'm not sure it's a bad thing either but I don't think traffic should just be tossed. If you removed the gamed parts of it, I think it's actually good data.


True but it's only true because they haven't figured out how to do it.

edit: oooo.. post #1234..

I have never shopped based on "traffic". I search for an item, look through the places that show up, go and look. If I like what I see I buy. If I don't, I move on to the next.

Traffic is meaningless to me as a shopper.

See, I still don't see how that's "punishing" the successful businesses. In market terms, it's not adding a rent, it's removing a subsidy. And my point throughout has been that the subsidy causes residents to congregate in congested areas, hurting both grid stability and the experience of those residents and everybody else.

Any measure that concentrates load is not scalable. There's just no way, long term, that individual region capacity can or should keep pace with overall resident growth. Sims currently protect themselves by denying entry beyond a cap, but even below the cap, resident experience is greatly compromised. (That's why some island sims that exist to provide rich experiences already set their caps very low. Next time you can't get into Svarga, look on the Map at how many people are actually there.)

I agree that it would be *possible* to solve traffic gaming by policy (and I think completely impossible by technical means). If the ToS contained new language or the current Terms were interpreted differently, traffic gaming could be punished so heavily that it would stop. This would take a lot of Linden resources to enforce. But for what? Even ungamed traffic is counterproductive, and will get more and more inappropriate as the grid population grows.

This is one of the newbies' rites of passage: Realizing that the traffic numbers are useless for shopping for anything. Helping educate the gullible and naive in this fashion seems to me the only practical use traffic figures have.

I wish it were different; good objective stats from LL operating as the U.S. Commerce Dept. does for the US economy as a whole would be invaluable. Unfortunately, I'm afraid Lindal is right: "Someone said yesterday that ANY rule-based traffic system will be gamed, and I'm afraid that's true."

Best thing to do with the Traffic count is to put it out of its misery

It's interesting to consider who pays for things.

Remember all those charter memberships the early adopters have? The free 4096m of land tier?

That's not 25 USD/mo being paid out of Philip's saving account, nor is it free bandwidth being delivered from on high, sprinkled like pixie dust. The paying users of the grid support all those people. I don't begrudge them this, because they got in early and it was fair.

Same for the old Premiums that pay 72 USD annually and get $L 500/wk. That's 94.68 USD even after exchange fees - a profit of 22.68 USD a year, plus 512m of free land tier. This difference comes out of other paying members. But how it was done, they got in early and it was fair.

Free users - the ones that never put in a dime or buy even $L 1 - are paid for by the rest of us. All their overseas voice chat, all the server bandwidth charges they incur - we pay for. And I understand the merit of that, to get people started and see the possibilities.

Campers - the blessings of my wallet die right here. I do *not* want to support someone else's legion of system-gaming, performance-draining abusers. No way, no how, and especially when it is at the expense of people trying so hard to do things the right way.

* * * * *

I have a really simple idea: Ban camping as broadly offending to the community.

Will it be perfect? No.

Will it be fair? Depends who you ask, obviously.

Will it improve grid performance and fix traffic? I think it will go a LONG way.


We've banned copybot abuse, sexual ageplay, gambling, banks and ad farms. Camping is even easier to catch than those first five.

I just can't shed a tear for the sort of people that spam my email, put pop-up ads on the web, or destroy my SL experience with a swarm of bots.

After that's done, we can revisit the traffic issue.

I don't see how it's a subsidy. It's a metric of how many people go to a place and how long they stay. Even though it's being gamed by some, that's really all it is.


So? If a place fills up so often that it's always laggy, their traffic numbers will max out at the point where people who go there find it tolerable. That place can then chose to either live with that or expand their resouces by opening up sites on different sims.


I just don't buy that. Ungamed traffic is a perfectly good metric that I often use when I'm out shopping. Why not shop at a place that other people frequent? Or, if I'm in the mood, why prevent me from shopping at places that other people don't frequent?

Now that plan I would buy into.

The biggest problem I see with it though is that it removes a source of income, likely the only source of income, for new users. New user retention is pretty high on LL's todo list so I don't think you'd be able to talk them into it without coming up with some other way to keep new people interested.

My personal experience is that LL didn't get my credit card until I spent a week or so in-world. During that time, I spent some time camping and freebie hunting then, after I was convinced it wasn't a total rip-off, I hit the Lindex. Now, 18 or so months later, I'm a conceirge resident. Not like you are, Desmond, but I still put money into the world.

Figure out a good way to get new users through that initial startup time and I'll.. er.. camp on Jeska's door and promote it all I can.

But Desmond, surely you aren't paying for campers either - you're making a profit.

The people who are actually putting in the money to pay the campers are the same people who are paying business owners like you - the consumers, the end-users. And in their case, it's possible that camping - or at least, having _some_ way to get a little bit of L$ to play with, while being impractical for a person to use it full-time to get everything they want - is important to them. It gives some small amount of growth to the SL experience, which is what SL is lacking for many users compared to other virtual worlds (or at least, growth for "consumer" users - for "creating" users it has more growth than any other world).

This is quite different from campBOTS, of course. They don't do any good to anyone.

The subsidy is that they are already successful, but then they get _more_ success by being given a bonus in Search as well.

Why should people be told which are successful and which are not? I can't think of an RL equivalent of it.

Traffic rankings are an unmerited bonus for those with higher traffic than their competitors. It's a system where the rich get richer, and the poor find it very difficult to make it. It doesn't seem like a very fair system to me.

You may not mean to shop based on traffic, but if you use the new "All" Search, places near the top of the list tend to be ones that have higher traffic (&/or better marketing). Traffic is definitely a factor.

I wouldn't call that a subsidy, any more than I'd call looking at the billboard charts to see what music is currently popular a subsidy. Or being able to look at the line or number of cars in the parking lot of a RL club/restaurant a subsidy.


Then you haven't thought about it. You've never driven by a place in RL and seen a crowd or a packed parking lot and used that as part of your decision to go/not-go?

Traffic is a negligable factor in those results.

Good point.

So perhaps (if some sort of popularity ranking has to stay) the Traffic-Transactions idea has more merit.

It depends on what someone is actually looking for. How many people may or may not be there is often completely irrelevant to the searcher. Traffic compares things that aren't at all alike. For instance you might have an old established well respected store that specializes in what the searcher is looking for and has a very wide selection listed far below a place that only sells one related item but uses the keyword repeatedly and has rental housing and camping giving them large traffic figures. Does that make any sense? It doesn't serve the searcher, and it actually punishes everyone who doesn't look for ways to have lots of people around all the time that would have nothing to do with what the searcher is looking for. It's a crappy system.

QFT

I think removing Traffic completely might end up the best solution (as Desmond suggests as well). However,

I had a similar experience, tho' it was over a month before I put real $ into SL.

So I agree, if we remove Traffic, we need to find a new way of newbies making money.

I have a Money Tree, and would keep that as I don't think it makes a lot of difference to Traffic, and I wanted to give something back to Newbies. But I don't think that's a 'big' enough solution. Any other ideas?

Looking at the line or number of cars in a parking lot isn't a "subsidy" because it's not consciously and artificially provided by an external entity.

Looking at the billboard charts _is_ essentially a subsidy, though (and I'm sure that many people have heard of the extensive gaming throughout the music industry!)

Yes, it does make sense but I'm just trying to say that _ungamed_ traffic is a useful metric.

Shouldn't somewhere like Bare Rose or Bits & Bobs show up higher in search?