What Happened To Linden Lab?
When Linden Lab instituted the banking ban within Second Life this year, I said it was 4 months late. Being critical of Linden Lab has been quite easy over the last year, with Linden Lab seeming to be very far removed from its very own reality. But since 2008 began, there have been some visible changes. It is almost like there is a new company under the hood of Linden Lab.
When I did a survey on Voice - which I personally do not like - I was surprised that there were questions about transcript creation, and so forth. In discussion with the person who sent out the email, a Linden, I expressed my surprise and - yes - pleasure. Despite the podcast/talker demographic, there are lots of people who do not like voice or maybe cannot use it. One could even say that it is insensitive to the hearing impaired when it is used exclusively - and I know at least one person in Second Life who is hearing impaired. So working to include those people is good.
The new policy on ad farms, which some people are a select few are whining about (me think they doth protest too much), is probably the next best thing to dealing with unethical landbot usage (as opposed to the majority of ethical landbot usage). No one in their right mind wants to deal with these things. I have dealt with ad farms personally - enough so to have gotten the title of 'Sim Destroyer' from one of them. Tyrian Camillo, who is protesting the new policy with his own spin, has had his hand caught in the cookie jar. I know. It was my cookie jar. Still, be nice to Tyrian. His banking business is over, and now his ad farms are done. Yes, I would expect him to make loud noises - and one could make a case that the inaction of Linden Lab over the last years has allowed him to build an income on this foundation of distasteful stuff, but... We all make choices. And choices are like boomerangs.
Mono, which I don't think is really a great move, offers some worthwhile advantages such as speed (though the memory by the same scripts is reportedly higher when using Mono's virtual machine). Upgrading the scripting engine is great.
Where is the Linden Lab that was so easy to criticize? Did they take their New Year's Resolutions so seriously? It all coincides with the departure of Cory Ondrejka, but I doubt that Cory was directly responsible for any of these changes. Maybe the reorganization that followed his departure rattled some things in to place? I don't know. Is OpenSim a factor?
But I must admit: I am very pleasantly surprised with the direction Linden Lab suddenly seems to be heading in. And I'm curious - what's next?
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Changing roles
There have been some changes to the roles at LL. Robin's role has been redefined, in the middle of last year Daniel left, Chadrick left later in the year and there appears to be more power within Jack's role than there was previously.
As for where it's all heading, I'd hazard a guess that they would still love to ditch mainland with regards to estate management. They like selling space but they don't want to manage it. The howls of protest from residents at the idea of someone like Anshe being in charge of mainland would be loud.
So LL are going to take steps to make such a transition a little easier. Zoned mainland is almost certainly coming, hopefully only on new land but it's a project they will almost certainly embark upon. They would love governance to be resident run too, so taking a model such as Desmond has on Caledon and moulding it into something that can work on mainland is probably on the agenda. Beta testing of this will probably be in the form of estate owners being asked to deal with AR's before calling upon LL to intervene, something that has been on the agenda for a while but it now seems to be gathering pace.
Then the hope would be that people on existing mainland will see both the financial and security advantages of such mainland ventures and call for it to be grid wide.
Then they'll be in a position to encourage third party mainland management right before open sim arrives.
This is all speculation of course and I might be reading between the wrong lines, but I don't think I am.
Fugazy, you've been supporting bankers for months...
Fugazy wrote:
>When Linden Lab instituted the banking ban within Second Life this year, I said it was 4 months late.
Sure, you did. Before that, you've claimed for months that some banks were able to have a real business and to really pay the huge and unbeliavable interests they were promising.
Come on... I've been the only one, or nearly the only one, writing since last August that *all* SL banks could be nothing but a scam, a pyramid scheme, a Ponzi game. OK, Anshe Chung, that I quoted in my articles, said something about that, long time before I did it, but certanly not Nobody Fugazi. Since he's such a good transformist, I'd like to invite him to run for next Italian polical elections, where the art of quick-changing side is still very appreciated and where the people's memory about this kind of things is often very short.
;-)
Fabio Medby.
Well, Fabyo Medbi, you're wrong.
I've been giving balanced accounts on the banks, and staying within legal limitations. Everything has been alleged. Nothing proven. Saying otherwise is slander if it cannot be proven. These are fine points on covering things.
I realize you're not well read on these issues or have ignored the majority of what I wrote on banks and exchanges, so you probably missed a lot of the bad things I said about them. You also probably missed a few other things. I'm not surprised.
Perhaps more time reading than writing would be appropriate. :-)
Now, I will be writing something on banks in the near future. Pay attention. ;-)
Second Life Consultant
Bank ban?
Nobody, I do respect your opinion and your blog. You always have good insights. But I would like to offer a correction on a term that you throw around pretty freely. LL did NOT ban banks, they banned the promise of interest or a promised return above and beyond the monies given to Avatars via an object such as an "ATM". That is a big difference. I really think that the concept that the SL populace picked up about "banning banks" hurt more than helped! I agree that that action was long coming. I have never agreed with the ridiculous interest rates offered because no one could really justify them. But the "bank" as an entity can survive and is surviving. The question is for how long? What can the banks offer now that will entice new investors? Market forces will decide if LL and pundits will leave it alone.
This is off topic a bit and I apologize. However I think LL is coming to grips with reality in the many "scams" going on in SL and is trying to do something about it. Be it land scams via ad farms, or ridiculous interest rates, etc. And for that effort I applaud them!
However, I think LL will overstep it's bounds when it begins to ban such things like the "porno" market for example. There is no scam going on in that market, it is just morally reprehensible to a segment of the population. Will LL give in and actually ban escort services, sexgen products, etc.? If they do then, imo, they will have crossed the line from cleaning up scam artists to possibly suppressing free expression. What then?
Hehe.
If you're here to split hairs on that, then I wrote something pretty decent. By the letter of what they wrote, they did not in fact ban banks - they banned anything posing as a bank. Since this site is contextual, writing 'bank' here implies a Second Life context. Styles may vary. Maybe I could have written that better. But I'm pretty sure people in Second Life knew what I meant.
In other words, I accept that criticism and leave it here - but I don't think that is the most important part of the article. Indeed, that is just background.
I think that there will be no bans on porn. It is impossible to institute properly. They can ban types of porn - such as the child related stuff - and most people will not blink. Take away hetero-sex, well, there will be an uproar. And don't mess with the people with rainbow flags - even HBO is cashing in on that crowd. Sex is as much a part of Second Life as the Linden dollar. And from what I have seen and heard, people exploring fantasies or even being open about a lifestyle that they are less likely to be open about in a synthetic world seems to be *generally* a good thing.
Thats why I spend most of my time as a penguin. No one thinks of penguins that way. I hope.
So - Linden Lab banning things? You know what? I'm all for Free Speech. I'm all for a lot of things. But some people create Laws by their lack of conscience/ethics. It wasn't ALWAYS illegal to kill someone. It was considered unethical in a lot of the world (not so in others), but it wasn't illegal. People, by their actions, created Laws. And so, in Second Life, people create Laws by their own actions. Whether those Laws infringe upon user rights is really a hot topic for debate, and one which has been mainly US-centric in discussion. What Linden Lab has learned the hard way is that the world is not as US-centric as the discussions... and that also has a lot to do with user rights.
Armchair discussions about that are, in my opinion, pointless. Things will evolve over time. And there will be good things and bad things...
Like first life, Second Life is a work in progress.
Second Life Consultant
Banks
@Arnaud - if you disagree that LL's ban on paying interest was tantamount to a ban on banking, I'd be interested in what your definition of a bank is. I have always struggled to find any justification for banks in SecondLife at all, other than as sophisticated extortion and hence griefing mechanisms.
I'm also pretty surprised. I
I'm also pretty surprised. I had always assumed that LL were basically planning on ditching the entire mainland sometime within the next year or so. They've said themselves that they want to get away from selling virtual real estate. Maybe they're beginning to realise that virtual real estate is actually quite a good way to make money and that is why they're starting to clean it up a little bit. The ad ban, the department of public works, the highly stabilised land market of the last 4 (or more?) months - these things point to the possibility that LL is starting to look at the mainland more seriously.