The Fanboi Playbook: what are your best strategies to counter?

Just basing it on these phrases.....

"the ever-presence of fanbois (and girls, of course) defending every LL decision"

"It may help our sanity to keep handy a list of the Usual Arguments these fanbois resort to (as many have observed, it's not the most creative minds that tend to fanboiism; they stick pretty closely to their playbook)."

"if the Forums ARE archived, you'll be able to counter this favorite Fanboi tactic.)"

" you can easily point out that the Fanboi's argument is a Straw Man Fallacy"

"the fanboi is knocking down a fake argument that you never made, instead of countering your actual arguments."

"So...what else is found in the Fanboi playbook? "

Then followed by a labeling of "arguments." Some of us can fit into each one of those "argument" categories, in some form or fashion. So to describe some sort of "strategy" on how to counter attack....just doesn't work. Some of us can't plan a "strategy" because we have a mix of ideas that work for us from two opposing "arguments"....and prefer to keep all options open, or just prefer to listen to it all, fairly.

I followed them, they don't really make much of a point, the content creation forums have always had less general chat, although some threads in there can get heated, png v tga etc.

Your list of bad threads gets off to an awful start when you link to a post from someone asking a question relevant to Second Life, a meeting the CEO has said will happen and someone asking if people have received invites is not a negative question, the OP didn't rant or rave, it was a genuine question, there's nowt wrong with that.

What I have noticed is that some people will seek offence where none exists.

There are good threads and bad threads, the combination makes up the whole, trying to cherry pick examples either way really doesn't prove much of a point.

For all I know, some people ARE posting in that hope.

That's not true in my case, however. At this point I'm posting to try to persuade readers that what Desmond Shang has requested--a place for free and open discussion, in an adult fashion, with no topics prohibited save for those that would violate the SL TOS--is actually in Linden Lab's best business interests.

TWWWEEEEEEEEEEEETTTTT!!!! This is your self-appointed REFEREE (and part-time princess)! Everyone take a timeout, NOW! Go to your corners.

That's better.

The problem with this whole series of posts is that some people have self-identified with one group or another even when the poster (including the OP) have talked in generalities about XYZ group. If you self-identify as a fanbois/grl then you will take offense. If you self-identify as part of some monolithic forum group then you will take offense.

BUT, if you think of yourself as an in-duh-vidual, then you should be able to discuss this stuff without taking offense at anything anyone has said. And that's the problem isn't it? Few are seeing this as individuals.

I can pull examples all day long from the Blogrums of posts where it has devolved quickly into (us vs. them) or (fanbois vs. Linden bashers) or (big merchants vs. small merchants) or (merchants vs. content for contents sake) or (individual vs. individual) or (known universe vs. Prokofy). (Sorry I had to throw that last one in there. ) It goes on and on.

I can pull similar posts from the Forums. Although, because the Forums have had little to do with Commerce for the last two years, the vibe is different. I tend to see more creative / land owner types here.

Mixed into the dynamic is that, at some point, we all have to pray at the Linden alter. They are the gods. Even though we are technically customers, we are also their subjects. We rail against the gods on bad days. Some pray to them in the hope they'll change their minds or bestow wondrous benefits. Really, it's almost religious dynamic.

I get mad at LL because I see lost opportunities, inept and misleading communications, poor customer relations, a weird development schedule and a business focus that baffles me constantly. Since I'm not very religious, I'm disinclined to pray at the Linden alter.

So think about how you self-identify and read other's posts carefully. Are they really talking about you? Or are they speaking hypothetically or about some amorphous group you may or may not actually be part of.

TWEET!!! You may now return to bashing each other.

Unless their customers request it. If they don't, they lose customers.

Nothing in anything you've quoted argues in favor of labeling people. Nothing you've quoted conveys that I'm either labeling individuals, or calling for the labeling of individuals.

The use of the word 'fanboi' does not label any individual. It describes a pattern of behavior, but not of any particular individual.


Acknowledging that a human trait or tendency exists, is NOT the same as labeling particular individuals.

I don't know how to put it any plainer.

Perhaps examples will help:

Does acknowledging that fans of Barry Manilow exist in this world, label any particular individual a "Barry Manilow Fan"?

Does acknowledging that some people in this world enjoy eating cotton candy, label any particular individual a "cotton candy eater"?

Does acknowledging that some people in this world try to tell jokes, label any particular individual a "joke teller"?


No.

So, does acknowledging that some people in this world have been observed to defend virtually every LL decision, no matter what, label any particular individual as an all-defender (aka fanboi) of LL?

No.

Acknowledging that a trait exists in the human population is NOT the same as labeling a particular individual with that trait.









Maybe some can, maybe some can't.

But how do you get from "some of us can fit" to 'Ponsonby is calling for people to be categorized' or 'Ponsonby is placing labels on people' or anything remotely conveying that I've labeled individuals or called for labeling of individuals?

How do you make that leap?

It's as if you are determined to believe that I've labeled, or called for labels....and you simply refuse to look at the evidence that I've done neither.

So I guess that's it. If you refuse to look at actual facts, and insist on believing things that aren't true, then that is your business. But at least the facts are on the record.

(I have full faith in the intelligence of readers! )


edit: grammar

QFT

Dunno Peggy, being a determined anti-whiner ever gets that.

Like you don't eat a burger rolled in winter slop slush and claim you are a great burger fan because you ate your mud where others would complain. Silly fools.

There's stuff wrong here, I cannot find a crap and internet forums never been a mystery to me. I mean, not that I have a clue in 4 years of SL.

Eat your mud, you are a burger fan. Only babies cry about eating their mud. Dunno some people get the idea of appealing to a consumer base, but hey, crazy wild stuff.

How can it be bad? It had OJ in it.

/me points to the poll I created

Sure sounds like you're labeling people to me. And I don't need to take some low tactic, and question your intelligence to point that out. Read whatever you like and interpret it however you like, but if someone doesn't agree....it's not a matter of IQ level.

Your post was a rally to get your group of friends to go into the other forum swinging. Plain as day. If you didn't want it to read that way....you should have worded it entirely differently.

And for the record, I don't "self-identify" with any jack squat that is hurled at me, from people in any of these forums. I FLY SOLO. And I don't need to rally a herd behind me.

Not all customers are created equal though Chris.

Just because you use Burger King's toilets now and again when you're caught short on a shopping trip, doesn't necessarily mean they have to stock that soft and gentle toilet paper you enjoy so much.

If you were to buy a burger now and again.. well that's a different matter.

Please note, 'you' was used here in the generic/plural, I have no idea what sort of toilet tissue would please you specifically Chris.

Burger analogies rock.

I would imagine the people in this forum are the ones who go in and buy a round of whoppers for the who crowd.

Will you buy me a Whopper, Chris? *Bats eyelashes.

For you I would even throw in an order of onion rings and a shake.

Good move, since BK's fries suck, onion rings are the preferred option.

25 to go.

I couldn't comment on that either way, especially since I doubt "people in this forum" could be treated as a homogenous lump of humanity.

As a Scot I notice that you quote a line from Braveheart.

The thing is Chris, Wallace didn't pick a fight armed with nothing but imaginings.

Part of his success (albeit ultimately limited) was attributable to the fact that he learned as much as he could about his enemy, his strengths and weaknesses, the topography of the battle field.. he made sure he knew as much as he could rather than simply imagined.

Let's accept that reality mirrors your imaginings, that LL are the cash obsessed but ultimately inept business people as portrayed here. Then winning this particular battle should be easy.

Come up with the monetary value (current and forecast) represented by the people on this Forum.

Show that at least some of this revenue stream might be compromised if the Forum goes.

Present the findings to LL.

Obviously the tactics would be more sophisticated than that and the analysis provided more in depth, but essentially that could work.

Don't get me wrong, Wallace liked to goad his enemies from afar, so please lift your kilt and flash LL as much as you want.

Ultimately though, the battle is won by actually.. well doing battle with real stuff, like claymores and axes.. and facts and figures.

Blush. Can I watch?

True. True.

Spoiler alert, but:










....when the lead astronaut is doling out the survival kit items, after a jet crash in the desert, he pulls out the items one by one, and says 'and here's a knife'---and looks at OJ---pauses a couple of seconds---and gives it to the OTHER guy.

I mean, it's spooky.

Right, I read that thread (and posted in it earlier today).

But notice that the key idea in what's quoted above---the "be EFFECTIVE" part---hasn't been answered convincingly by any participant.

By the way, I very much agree with what you wrote here:




That's the sort of communication I believe could be valuable to Linden Lab. There are people who are very experienced/successful with business matters not only inworld, but outside, whose reactions to LL decisions are not irrelevant or without merit.

Yet if the 'no open discussion' folks have their way, these resources will be lost to LL.

Here, I did the easy part. It's a start.......and very effective if you put some effort into it. I know, I know....it requires a little pen and paper to get the ball rolling.........how ancient of such a high tech corporation. You run with what you got though.........at least the devoted do.

http://lindenlab.com/contact/directions

So, there's a long history here that you probably know. (If you're who I think you are, you know more history about the Forums than most anybody posting here.) But this was a different fight for the forums this time 'round than the one we staged a couple years ago, or the one before that.

This time, there was no direct, frontal assault on the forums' existence. The plan was to kill it with kindness, by "upgrading" it to something unusable and "streamlining" its structure. Yeah, it will be a possibly fatal blow to the existing community here and that may or may not be their intent, but it doesn't matter: proving the value of the forum would play directly into their hands. "Of *course* the forums are indispensible, that's why we're making them integral to the New 2.0 Life 2.0 Web 2.0 Experience 2.0!"

So it was a different story a couple years ago... although we didn't know it, going in. We (Nika and I) thought we were just trying to get a software upgrade, some support for the ResMods, and a little cosmetic restructuring, possibly including a recognized "General Discussion" area. So, to motivate LL to invest the week or so of effort it would take to do what we asked, we prepared a slide deck showing how much value the forums had to LL's stated business priorities and initiatives at the time (it wasn't the most quantitative argument, but it was all business), and went into a meeting with Robin to argue our case.

It turned out that our business case (such as it was) first had to overcome a prevailing faction in the Lab that the forums should just go away, before upgrades or changes could be considered. Robin fought for us that time, and I honestly believe we came close to getting what we wanted, until the initiative was diluted by an inept new hire they brought in to effect the change (among other things at which she was ineffective).

Anyway, that's not what we're faced with this time. The only possible fight was against Clearspace and the threatened restructuring. Fighting Clearspace would be an easy business case if numbers meant anything to LL's management, but they're locked into a bad decision and a sea of sunk cost and just can't entertain rational argument. Fighting the restructuring... well, I raised it in the blog comments when the timeline was announced, Des quickly raised the stakes, but it's a tough business case to make on short notice; we did what we could, and *maybe* we softened them up; the language certainly changed with successive Linden responses on that topic. I guess we'll see tomorrow.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't have done more. We should have been hounding the right Lindens behind the scenes for months, persistently, but nobody could get to those "right" Lindens, blocked by and redirected to Blue, who obviously isn't making any decisions on his own.

Maybe there were smarter ways to fight that we didn't imagine, flanking manoeuvres pitting one Battery Street faction against another. Or something. Prok seems to believe so:

I have a sinking feeling she's going to be proven correct about that.

LOL, I 'll havie to watch it again, I don't think I've seen it since The Incident. I thought Telly Savalas was a riot in his bit part. "Perverts".

I'm grateful for your post. Not only for the interesting perspective it contains, but for the way it actually embodies a refutation of many of the No Free Discussion people's arguments.

The argument 'if you want to post about the benefits of LL providing a free-discussion forum* then you are OBLIGATED to provide statistical evidence of direct revenues from the forum to LL, otherwise you may NOT discuss the benefits of LL providing a free-discussion forum' is a bad one on several counts.


First, the skeleton of the argument---that free speech may exist ONLY if free speech may be proven to directly generate cash---is ludicrous on its face.**

Second, the attitude that customer suggestions/criticisms are best ignored unless the customer can provide impossible-to-compile statistics (impossible because the customer would scarcely be given access to the relevant raw data), is an attitude virtually guaranteed to sink any business whose success depends on customer satisfaction.

Third--and possibly most important--the concept that the only statistics that matter are those that show direct cash revenues from a free-discussion forum, demonstrates a basic lack of business knowledge.


Yes, even those who are clever enough to concede in one place that a forum CAN provide intangible assets to LL, in another will contradict the concession by calling for hard numbers such as Number of People Who Use This Forum On a Daily Basis, How Many Unique Questions Have Been Answered, Solutions Discovered, and so on.

These calls show that the writer completely misunderstands the current and potential value of a free-discussion forum to LL's business success. That value lies, roughly speaking, in two broad areas:

1) there is so steep a learning curve in SL that if people don't have a FUNCTIONAL venue for asking questions, they will be more likely to leave; and

2) people become passionate customers when they feel they have a 'home' in which to communicate with like-minded individuals. Few who find no such home will move on to the stage of becoming passionate about SL. And, yes: though not every passionate SLer is a big spender, virtually all big spenders are passionate about SL. Because the set of passionate SLers (as a subset of all SLers) is where LL's best customers are to be found, it would be penny-wise and pound foolish to neglect to provide a forum home for them.

(Actually provision of such a home could be a money SAVER, in that this Forum has proven that heavy moderation is an unnecessary expense.)

These points suggest that posts scolding those who call for free-discussion with the directive 'stop talking about this unless you can provide hard statistics' is simply Another Bad Argument.







*as always, of the type Desmond proposed: adults being treated as adults, posting within the SL terms of service


** (Although...see thread "USA Now Officially a Plutocracy, Huzzah! at /327/64/361408/1.html we're not far from charging a fee for 'free speech'....)