BOT places! List them here!

Probably you have a higher purpose with this weird action? Please enlighten us Sling.


Proper use of Picks. According to who? Linden Labs? Utopian Headbangers? Sling?
Picks are used for the following, according to what I see during profile browsing:
- Displaying info about own shop(s)
- Displaying info about friends shops
- Displaying info about yourself when the first page is too small
- Displaying info about loved ones (dont mess with my sis!)
- Displaying info about shops or places you like (Forum Hangout )
- Displaying info about shops that pay out for the pick

Now which one is proper use and which one is not?

You don't know?

I'll give you a hint. One of them is a recent innovation and a systematic attempt to game the new Search facilities. That one has people Picking something that they would not have if they had not been paid to do so. It is totally at odds with the other uses listed.

Sling, you are perfectly right with your opinion that this is not proper use to your likings. Of course you are, as everybody is entitled to their opinion.
But ask the people having those picks what they think? I bet they think different. So not for everybody, the idea of proper use is the same.

Still wondering why you quoted 1 phrase of mine and changed it. That did not make sense, and was the cause for my somewhat sarcastic reply.
I still stand behind that phrase. Even with Picks paying, I do not attract people that are not looking for what I sell. The other 2 examples do that exactly.

So what is it exactly about the low prim furniture business that attracts the ethically challenged?

Greed

Chip, I do admire the work you did in and for SL, but this remark really is stupid. You know pretty damn well that bot use and paying for picks is happening all over the grid, and the only conclusion you can make, is that apparantly people in the low prim furniture business are more open about it then the silent mass.



You know, in a way you are right. Both Phil and me are in this business to make some bucks. If you want to call that greed, be my guest.
But do not forget, it is Linden Lab that presents SL as a business platform. Now I do not know wether you have a business or not, but wether you like it or not: businesses are in SL. Businesses intend to make money.

Btw:
Funny, that people tend to mention ethics when they cannot find any sensible argument.

This thread is loaded with sensible arguments against gaming search for personal advantage. Funny how people tend to dismiss them when they cannot come up with any remotely sensible or ethical defense.

maybe if people didnt focus completely on the business aspects of SL it would be a happier place. I have no want or need for SL to be a second, or first job, it cant compete with RL. So RL is where most make money and SL if for fun.


Ethics is no argument? Its an argument in itself. Shame that some think its a dirty word.
In the past I did have a successful busines but came to realize, why? I didnt need it, I didnt need the income, or greed. Now SL is fun for me. I still create but for friends and gifts. I didnt need to 'play' business person to feel fulfilled. Maybe its a part of growing up in SL over the years, who knows?

A panhandler that draws a circle on the pavement outside of Union Station in Washington DC can claim a lot of traffic, but damn little popularity. Putting the right buzzwords in your parcel description might get a lot of traffic, but everyone just might leave unhappy, especially if they spent five minutes looking for something that wasn't there. Popular? Traffic does not equate to popularity. Some of the highlighted businesses by LL are dead and do not back up the descriptions or placement in the search, yet they may have good traffic numbers from the visitors wandering around trying to find out what makes the place worth highlighting - right up until they leave irritated and disappointed.

Frankly, it is just as 'deceptive' to have 'hunt' items - freebies hidden on the sim to keep avatars looking around and there longer than their actual shopping would take them. In fact, unlike real life, SL actually rewards poor product placement and exposition in a store - again, the longer the avatar looks around, confused, the better, as long as they don't leave before buying.

One store that I actually like, as far as I can tell actually does not have one of the hidden freebies. Three of us spent several minutes looking - again, IMO a deliberate attempt to use their own customers to game traffic. Far worse than bots IMO - although I can't really get all that exercised about it. Have real issues to deal with in RL.

Of course Toy, but its not the case. Linden Lab presents SL as a business platform (among other things of course) so people will focus on that. And however I do not need the money, I do like the idea of making a business successful. Wether I succeed in that on the long term or not, remains to be seen

Now the fun part. You can have as much fun as you want in SL, be it with exploring, be it with socializing. For me, it is running a business (yes I do it for fun). What I really do not understand, is why those people that are in SL for fun, bother to protest against things that they should not be bothered by. Much more would I expect other business owners to jump in.
But hey, thats me.

About the growing up in SL, for you that might be the case, for me it was the other way around.

And ethics? No its not a dirty word. But my ethics are not your ethics. As Zaphods points out, this thread is full of arguments against optimizing ones search results by bots or paying for picks. Well I did not read them. Only people saying what we do is not ethical. Well, it is in my world.

Considering the total userbase, the amount of active forum users, and people actually saying they find me unethical and/or immoral... well I will not loose sleep over it

oh crap, I forgot I said I would no longer post in this thread. So I will drop asking what you meant by "For me it was the other way around" Meaning SL dumbed you? TTFN

It is not about fairness, it is about impartiality. The Universe isn't fair, it is impartial. On that basis, you make choices. People that spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about other people choosing to be 'unfair' spend too little time thinking of the choices they made themselves. Things are just never their fault. Well, those businesses have the same choice and opportunity.

Of course, your premise seems more than a tad weak. Most people that choose to not game the traffic are not relying on anything to do with the traffic at all. They are probably working on a precise product definition that brings a targeted audience to their store, or having an event (geez, now that I think of it, lets hang all those mall owners that hosted the Relay for Life events) to bring people in. They probably realize that a lot of shopping, even in SL, is word of mouth and they do what they wish to do to build business their way.

Enough already. First of all, some of us enjoy business - its what we do in RL and/or SL. So if people enjoy doing business in SL, how is that worse (or necessarily better) than playing slave or slaver in a Gor sim?

Ethics? Everyone seems to be focused on some (unproven) cheated customer. Of what? If Phil or someone else provides a decent or better product, then perhaps they provided what the customer wanted - a fast resolution to the shopping process so they could get on with their SL life. Better products not seen? Perhaps Phil has saved someone from stumbling into a scrum area selling crap and the customer is better off for it. Exactly what proof have any of you shown that bots have resulted in a cheated customer? That's the central ethic here. And you can't prove or even demonstrate that any one, much less an aggregate, of cheated customers or even customers with a demonstrably poorer shopping experience or result. Do you really think that is an ethical issue in SL or RL?

Absent the cheated customer, who is being ethically mistreated. The competitors? Their real problem is that SL is an imperfect place to run a business, as is RL. If they rely on a very imperfect and flawed metric to be the only undergird of their business, then they fail. That's simple enough. They didn't find their method, their market to make sales. They need to stop blaming others and get to work. If one way of connecting distresses you, then by all means, find another. Or go buy a slave in Gorland. Or something. Live music is playing some place tonight and it is cheaper than failing in business.

Unethical to game an obviously imperfect metric? Oh, please. You haven't even established what the metric is supposed to be to anyone, other than each of you individually, at some particular point in time. Not much like arguing abortion and more like arguing that you believe that stones have lives and so stones shouldn't be hit with hammers. Phil, of course, would argue that stones do live, but happen to like to be hit with hammers...

You really have some gall, Phil.

Its one thing to insult everyone you disagree with because you are rude. I've literally lost count of the direct insults you have thrown out in this thread.

But to slander the quality of Chip's products is pretty low. Not to mention how much help he has given to clothing and skin designers over the years. Do you even glance at the design and textures forum?

The only reason your product's quality has been called into doubt by anyone in this thread is that people have put forth the argument that if you need trafficbots your products must be lacking something.

I have to quote this because of something.

Being allowed to use Trafficbots is not in the TOS.

Its just not AGAINST the TOS as far as anyone knows at this point.

There is a Considerable difference between those two statements.


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Lets not forget that there are banned activities out there that are not mentioned in the TOS either.

No one likes being called unethical. Nearly everyone sees themself as a "good person" Thus obviously they cant be doing anything unethical.

It is a simple fact that those who game the traffic system to gain business get that business at the expense of those not gaming the traffic system.

Thus by faking their apparent popularity to their customers, they take business from others.

Those customers must believe that popularity = Traffic or else they wouldn't be fooled by the gaming.

Its fits the very definition of unethical.

I wonder these days if college Business Ethics course include such things as Search Engine Gaming, etc.

When I took Ethics there was no Internet.

Actually I have to admit, for the reasons below, that Phil is correct about traffic never being a measure of popularity.

You see, back in the days before bots and camping, the residents of SL were an extremely stupid and perverse bunch of losers.
They used to spend most of their time in places they didn't like. They hated those places. Even though they knew of better places, they stayed in the crap places. They did that from Day One!! The moment the word went out that LL were measuring avatar presence per parcel, they abandoned the great places and flocked to the crap places.
That's how it was. Those stupid b'tards clocked up traffic in very unpopular places and destroyed any link between large numbers of avatars spending time in a parcel and the popularity of that parcel.

Maybe it was some form of protest. I dunno.

Oldbies have *a lot* to answer for. Morons!!

LOL.

I hate to sound overly nostalgic, but Second Life was a better place back in the old days before Open Registration, Corporations and all this naked greed.

When it was a niche place about hanging out and meeting people it was more fun even with less technology.

Now that Second Life R SRS BZNS its just not the same.

Colette, I do not mind you quoting me (not to mention I could not do anything against it ), but I already clarified in a later post what I ment. Due to me not being a native speaker, I typed "within the TOS" where I did mean "not against the TOS". That does make quite a difference (actually I assumed what I typed would mean: within the boundaries of the TOS).

Linden Lab makes the rules, we have to live by them. It is perfectly allright to disagree with the rules of course, so am I at certain points. But I am operating wihtin the boundaries set by LL, and so is Phil. Both of us even spoke openly with LL about it. So I think we are doing nothing wrong, and apparantly LL thinks the same.

Again about ethics. You say you took ethics, so maybe you can clarify something for me.
Is ethics an exact thing? Meaning that there is no discussion about wether something is ethical or not? Let me clarify with an example:

Using Copybot is in my opinion unethical.
Using Picks Camping is in my opinion not unethical.

But I am no authority, so I could be wrong. How is this determined? The user of Copybot might think different, yet I think the majority of people would agree on the ethics aspect of it.

Let me be perfectly clear: Even is it is unethical in your eyes, I will run my Picks Camping. Because it does not feel like a bad thing to me, and that is what counts on my end of the line. But my interest in the ethical part of it is genuine. We could make a seperate thread out of it as well.

What I am saying is Trafficbots aren't even in the boundary of the TOS. They just exist.

The TOS doesn't allow or disallow them. The way the TOS works is more like LL saying -

"Heres the rules *YOU* have to follow, not *US*. And we are the sole judge of what we mean by them"

So Bots are only allowed by the TOS until LL says they aren't and the wording wouldn't change at all.

Not that it is likely, but thats how it works.


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On the question of Ethics. On day 1 of the class The professor told us that we were not qualified to discuss Ethics with him and on the last day he said we finally were. So it is like that.

Of course Ethics are debatable - however debating them using the tactic "Ethics has nothing to do with it." is not debating ethics.

If you were to debate the Ethics of Gaming the Traffic System and wanted to say it was Ethical, you would need to come up with reasons it was Ethical, much like those who have said its unethical have done.

It is abundantly evident that Linden Lab's intent for such features as parcel dwell and Resident picks was precisely to gauge, and reveal to others, Residents' overall interest in a particular location. You can see through the entire history of these features that they have been refined, changed, or eliminated because they were not functioning as designed/intended. Why? Because people exploit them for personal advantage, over and over. Is anybody really so blind as to not be able to see the very real ethical challenge here?

Jeska's post, partly quoted above, removes any doubt as to the intent of these features, and removes any doubt as to why they continue to refine them in order to serve their originally intended purpose. People keep gaming them. Linden Lab keeps changing them. See the pattern? See the intent? See the ethical challenge?

Yes. The Pro-Traffic Botters don't understand Jeska isn't going to come out and say =>

"Because you people are running Traffic and campbots and ruined our system"

But in fact if you read carefully she says exactly that.

It's very simple, Marcel. Your competitors are people just like you. They're your peers and members of your community. They surely want to succeed too, and like you they likely run their businesses for fun and profit. Every system LL has created like voting boxes, dwell, traffic, and now using picks to give people better search rankings, they're all created as a mechanism to reward people for their success. When people cheat these systems in order to cut in line what they're doing is stealing those rewards from their peers - from other members of the community.

When people are so hell bent on success that they're willing to trample their peers to get there then we, as a community, have a problem. I bother to protest against such things because I happen to believe that people deserve the rewards they've earned and don't deserve to have them stolen. It makes me wonder if people like you and Phil just don't stop to think about the impact your actions have on your peers or if you just don't care. I just don't understand the cut throat attitude towards SL business. Does anyone else's fun matter? or just yours?

What you "really do not understand" is that many people look to an environment in which high standards of behaviour are evident.
The arguments that gaming of traffic is just business, not explicitly contravening TOS, and so on is anathema to people who care about society, be it in RL or in SL.

I do believe you. You really do not understand this. Nor does Phil.
In my view, and obviously in the view of others, your actions are those of a moral bankrupt. Your own interests trump those of the environment in which you operate. You are a polluter.

You are in the same moral territory as are spammers.
One of the classic denials of spammers is that what they are doing is bringing valuable information to the attention of people. We've had the same thing from you and Phil. You have this ludicrous position that people who game traffic deliver a benefit to people in that they save them the effort of searching for information on 'quality products'.


There is some hope for you though.
It hurts you that others would have a low opinion of you. It hurts enough that you keep coming back for more in this thread.
Maybe it will sink in.