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Second Life To Remove Free Content From Web Search
Outland Traveller writes "In a move that continues to shake the Second Life community of content creators, merchants, and consumers, Linden Labs has declared that free virtual content will no longer be searchable without listing payments on their website portal; and additional fees will be added with the intention of discouraging content listed for inexpensive selling prices. The move is particularly troubling because the online Web listing service is the de facto search engine for virtual content in Second Life, since the in-world search tools are unable to provide information about an object beyond name and location — basic textual descriptions, pictures, or descriptions of licensing, size, or content-category are not possible. While initially the change was explained as a response to community feedback, the residents involved in this feedback process were revealed to be fewer than 100 in number, primarily larger merchants among a community of millions. Within 24 hours of the announcement, the feedback thread has swelled to over 1,000 overwhelmingly negative responses. Additionally, in-world protests have erupted throughout the day, and over 20,000 objects have been voluntarily removed from the online store by angered merchants." Read on for more details on the brouhaha.
Adding to the controversy are the officially stated justifications in the FAQ, such as 'They [free content listings] hinder the shopping experience because a "sort by price" puts all freebies first,' and the perplexing statement 'They [free listings] garner so much attention that Residents are driven toward the freebies instead of quality, fairly priced items.'
Various independent virtual content listing sites have been proposed, such as Meta-life.net and Slapt.me, but attempts to post this information on the Second Life forums has been met with aggressive administrative censorship of these links.
Adding to the controversy are the officially stated justifications in the FAQ, such as 'They [free content listings] hinder the shopping experience because a "sort by price" puts all freebies first,' and the perplexing statement 'They [free listings] garner so much attention that Residents are driven toward the freebies instead of quality, fairly priced items.'
Various independent virtual content listing sites have been proposed, such as Meta-life.net and Slapt.me, but attempts to post this information on the Second Life forums has been met with aggressive administrative censorship of these links.
The customer reaction illustrates that the following is a bad business model: creating a service like Second Life for people who have time to waste on services like Second Life.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Certainly nobody in my circles. I've asked - nobody I know uses Second Life. Are we missing the greatest thing since sliced bread? I'd wager a big no.
Oh no, now the world will...well, continue to not care about Second Life I guess.
It was a fairly neat concept, but I always felt like media outlets were pushing it a lot harder than it was really worth. It's basically the internet given form, so there may have been some gems of innovation in there but there were a whole lot of dirty, disgusting places as well.
Greedy fuckers
For real, here in the Netherlands media hyped about 2nd life about 3, 4 years ago. Some banks even bought some land etc. But nowadays, I personally don't know anyone using it. So where is second life big? This is not meant as a flame or anything, I am just curious. 1000 protests doesn't seem like a lot. Check the protests on Forza 3 missing custom lobby or the Modern Warfare missing custom servers... That's a bit more than 1000...
Not so much about Second Life, but about the way in which what is happening there parallels what we have in the real world. Powerful interests consistently manipulate our world's system to benefit the interests of a tiny few at the expense of the great majority. Hopefully massive protests will stop this from happening, in both SL and in the real world.
Where community members can establish there own virtual webservers and virtual search engines. And they should use ipv6 because somebody has to.
'They [free listings] garner so much attention that Residents are driven toward the freebies instead of quality, fairly priced items.'
How dare people give away their fairly created goods instead of charging through them! How dare they be non-materialistic in this fictional world! That's just un-American!
If you can't sell your product, you're pricing it too high. If someone can make it cheaper, expect to lose business. Welcome to reality.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
SecondLife community
I thought they were all wiped out in the Final Flying Phallus/Furry War of 2007.
So, the predicted doom and gloom of free virtual items given away by good, decent people assumes that no 3rd party directories will rise?
Doesn't seem very likely to me. If it's as popular as this news item suggests then I could see MANY 3rd party marketplaces popping up practically overnight. If no 3rd party marketplaces are created, then, as the saying goes, "nothing of value was lost."
More Twoson than Cupertino
I wonder if search engines will start treating paid listings as they do any other shopping site for indexing purposes. Hmmm???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Or we could just apply Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to mallice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
While some collusion _is_ possible there, it could also be that they just listened to the wrong crowd. That's also a "welcome to reality" kind of thing. A vocal minority can often seem like they're the majority, or at least representative enough for a majority of players. It's not just a Second Life or selling goods issue, it's that a tiny number of vocal people can generate more posts and whole circle-jerk treads, than the vast majority... who's too busy playing the game or coding flying penises for Second Life and doesn't bother much with posting.
Just look at almost any gaming board and you can see the same phenomenon: a minority of fanboys or malcontents can generate more posts than everyone else combined. And if left to their own devices, can actually gang up on anyone saying otherwise and try to drive them off. It can be about off-line single player games too (about half a dozen fanboys were enough to insult anyone who had a problem with Morrowind, back when that launched), online games (just read the Stalker boards in COV and you'd think that (A) 99% of the players want only PvP, and (B) everyone agrees that Stalkers should be able to one-shot any other class, including tanks), etc.
And occasionally you see some game screwing up spectacularly, because they listened to the wrong crowd. Without any anti-communist ideology being involved at all. E.g., it seems Vanguard owes half its screw ups to listening too much to the gang that, basically, went, "I've played WoW for 2 years straight and raided every night, and then discovered that everything about it sucks and only an idiot kiddie would like it." If you figured out by now that whoever makes such a claim, just called himself an idiot kiddie, and that only an even bigger idiot would take design advice from a self-confessed idiot... well, then you'd be smarter and more perceptive than some designers ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I cannot imagine how much spam items these search results must get.
But having said that, an option "hide free items" would be nice, instead of just taking that option away from the users.
There were no e-mails, although they claim to have twittered about the office hours.
People who hunt out the freebies, as opposed to shelling out a few real-world dollars for something that might be better, are a drain on both Linden Labs' resources and a frustration for the people who pay upwards of a hundred dollars a month for their shopping plaza islands, and who encourage more spending on in-game currency.
Freebies lose the company money. Charging extra to list them is simply recouping costs. Deleting posts that point to third-party catalogues is pissing into a forest fire.
I like Second life ... it's graphical chat with some wildly creative visual artists. (not all the furries are perverts, and you don't get issued a freenis when you join.)
I mean really, how hard would it be to just add a regex that modifies posts from this asian counterfeiter? You know he's doing it for the link juice, so a simple "s/coolforsale.com/goatse.fr/gi;" would do it ...
It would keep them from continually creating new accounts. Just a thought ;-)
ns.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I have no idea what this is about?
Just before the announcement of listing fees, there were 1.15 million items listed on http://www.xstreetsl.com/ , their web commerce site. Many of them were just color variations of the same item, or free items. By not having a listing fee previously, people had no incentive to be efficient in what they put there, in fact they had incentive to spam the listings with as many items as possible to be seen (just like email spam occurs because sending emails is essentially free).
So this move will force people to be somewhat efficient in what they put there. Note that the fee is L$10 per month, which equates to about a postage stamp for a year's worth of listing. Big surprise that people whine about the changes in a social media space (not). They were whining before the changes that it was cluttered with too many listings.
For those who say it's not popular, they have 750,000 active accounts (people who log in more than once a month), which is probably more than the active accounts here at Slashdot. It does not appeal to everyone, but then *nothing* appeals to everyone. It does, however fit with some of the tropes at Slashdot, the people who like to make their own stuff, and mess around with open source. The viewer code for Second Life (the client software you run on your PC) has been open-sourced for a while now, and around 40% of players are using alternate viewers (especially the one that has enabled "breast physics" *heh*).
Disclosure: I'm a top 20 currency trader in SL and derive a moderate monthly income from that and other in-game activities. I'm also a developer for Blue Mars, a new virtual world that's in early beta (much better graphics, using the Cryengine2 graphics engine from the Crysis games), so I'm agnostic about virtual worlds if they are good ones.
Tried it - just a vacant boring wasteland with a crappy interface. Even the hookers were uninspiring. The text MUDs I used to play had more users, more interesting content and were easier to use.
So... Obviously there is a significant portion of 'freebies' of adequate quality to satisfy residents needs. What exactly is the problem here?
OMG PEOPLE ARE GETTING STUFF FOR FREE! THE ECONOMY WILL CRASH AND BURN! SAVE US LORD!!!
On a related note, I've seen many expensive items that sucked balls and many freebies that turned out to be gems of wonder, both in RL and in SL.
It's very simple: there are hundreds of thousands of things on the website, the vast majority of which are crap. Not just bad, but crap. And they stay there because even if nobody wants them, there's no incentive to get them removed either.
It got so bad it's nearly impossible to find the right thing unless you know the precise thing you're looking for.
So, this move is them trying to get people to remove all the crap that doesn't sell, to get a more cleaned up listing.
pocrite
So... they concluded that the listing of free content was harming the sales of for pay products.
Which may very well be the case, but without them, it's a certainty that there is a not insignicant customers who might have otherwise stayed and browsed for a while will not. While it might be easier for people who are willing to pay for products to find what they are looking for, with fewer customers in the first place, it's not at all a far stretch that this move will result in *FEWER* sales, not more.
A much more sensible move would be to improve the searching capabilities of their service... to instead of removing free items altogether, at the very least, allow the consumer to decide whether or not he or she wants to see them. It seems to me that such a move would satisfy all of their concerns about free items.
That this idea did not seem to even have occurred to them in their discussion suggests to me that they didn't spend nearly enough time actually thinking about solutions to the problem.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I can understand their justification to some point. I have to append -ebay to all my searches on Froogle to turn up anything useful. Nevertheless, they're already at the bottom of the pit, why have they started digging?
Do you see what I did there?
If there's a real problem why not just give people searching a choice whether or not they see the free stuff? That can't be that hard to implement and wouldn't make life substantially more difficult. The lack of such a simple solution really does suggest that this is about the big merchants.
It's called Opensim, virtual world regions hosted on people's own computers rather than Linden Lab (owners of Second Life) servers. Since the Second Life server software is not open source, people are having to recreate the functionality on their own, as an open source software project.
A funny thing, to me, is the fact that free items actually show up at the bottom of the search results. Anyone with experience knows your higher priced items will be at the top.
How very inappropriate, thank you.
People GIVING AWAY stuff are going to be charged for it. One might think they had a right to complain about such a change in policy. Sure, if people getting the free stuff were complaining then you might actually have a point.
To summarize: you're an idiot who has no idea what he is talking about and simply wants to jump on the 'me too" bandwagon.
SL was neither the best nor the brightest of the various shells that tried to offer a 'new' way of browsing and providing web content. I can think of at least 4 off the top of my head, and that was 6+ years ago. It was essentially nothing more than a graphical shell for a MUD, an ancient concept in Internet years. (TiA: I was a beta for ViOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vios in 1999, so SL in 2003 was utterly not impressive.)
In fact, it was one of the slowest, kludgiest ones I ever had the misfortune to try. (In truth, that probably had a lot to do with the unprecedented amount of access the users had to customize their experience and manipulate the world in non-trivial ways.)
Probably inspired by books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, it was an attractive concept ... only until you analyzed it rigorously. Let's see, I can type "Deutsche bank berlin customer services" in a browser, wait 0.246 seconds for the links to pop up, and click one to get to their site. OR, in the 'internet as virtual world' paradigm, I could log in to my avatar, and go 'flying' at Mach 15 to wherever DB Berlin's virtual hq was (which I'd probably have to look up), "enter" it, and then navigate in some Euclidean way to the customer service 'office'. Lot more fun, sure, not so efficient (not to mention orders of magnitude more hardware and bandwidth required). I can turn on "NPR's Science Friday" or d/l from the web to listen at FM-radio quality....or I could go into SL (login), travel to the SL place, and then watch my screen flicker at 15 fps while the giant penis-avatar to my left keeps lagging into the zebra-chick hovering over the stage, all the while the audio stutters and drops all over the place. Improvement?
It took all the efficiencies of the internet, and rendered them BACK into their real-world constraints of geography and linearity - being able to fly really fast doesn't really help that. Putting the internet in a real-world context doesn't improve efficiency of use nor quality of results, so what good is it? Who ever thought that was actually, a good idea? As far as I can tell, only the promoters.
Second Life somehow managed to gather a tiny bit more focus and attention (probably because it was free for users), making it the "go-to" place for all the people WHO DIDN'T REALLY UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET IN THE FIRST PLACE. Thus, some businesses followed out of simple cash-sniffing self-interest. Some other sorts of organizations showed up - as the BBC article says, you could hardly open a newspaper Technology section or computer magazine without some reference to SL for a couple of years there.
Couple all this failure with the Linden Labs' arbitrariness and hypocrisy*, I was astonished then that people (and especially businesses) bought into it for so long.
* and I do mean hypocrisy; The only value I thought it MIGHT have was that I thought the whole thing MIGHT be an interesting social experiment of the concepts of the Commmons, broadened to numbers of people undreamed-of by late-90's standards. The ability to customize the code, plus what was a strict hands-off policy by the Lindens, seemed like it might be a cauldron for a working-through of the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/). Sadly, when actually confronted with a situation that turned somewhat internet-ugly, they folded to their interventionist sensibilities to make sure everyone 'played nice'. (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2003/07/war_of_the_jess.html)
People using Second Life to experience the internet always seemed to me like chimps futilely trying to use their termite sticks to dial a phone....it *might* work, clumsily, but conceptually you're light-years away from really 'getting it'.
-Styopa
And got paid *real money* too. A universities ill conceived attempt at virtual classrooms, or something. I never understood why the hell they were making a replica of the campus and need FIVE islands (which is like $600 something a month) to do it. Anyway, Second Life is ridiculous. Its probably used to be awesome or something when there were only 1000 people using it, but when the general public got a hold of it it became some kind of demonic three dimensional rendition of MySpace with the intelligence level of Youtube comments. I imagine they started doing this for two reasosn. One, dealing with spam. If you can imagine, take all the spam you've ever gotten, mix it in a bowl, and then shove it into a search index. Two, they need cash flow. And Second Life "residents" are probably the most self-righteous people on the internet. Their main functions consist of make spam and bitch about things they don't understand.
I'm sure this is really going to piss off the 25 guys living in their parent's basement that are using second life
I see a lot of people commenting who have never used or don't understand second life. It isn't a game, it is a social networking platform. Linden Labs has taken many steps to clean up SL such as removing gambling, advertisements, and putting sexual content in restricted areas. Their product search was actually an independent product that was bought by Linden Labs. If this is such a big deal, someone else will make a new site and take their business. The graphics have improved dramatically, and users can now import models from Maya and other 3d packages. The client is open source, and the server has been reverse engineered to create the opensim project. http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page . This could prove a compelling platform for virtual worlds, and if you don't like it: fix it. It's open source. The number of concurrent users 3 years ago was about 20,000. There was a pr blitz and it ballooned to about 60,000 where it remains today. I think there are over 20,000 second life servers, or 'sims', which cost about $250 a month in rent. This is where they make their money, and it appears to be working. The world is constantly growing. Hopefully this will clear up some of the misconceptions about second life.
ck You.
A brief overview of the comments on this subject reveal three things immediately to me: 1: non-SL users have no clue what goes on in SL. No big surprise there. If you're not in there, you really haven't got any information on which to be basing your opinions. 2: People who have tried SL and left unimpressed have little clue what goes on there and are therefore little more qualified to make informed judgements of what goes on there. 3: People with little or no clue what goes on in SL can spread a lot of misinformation to the rest of the non-SL-using world by stating their uninformed opinons as "fact" in forums like this. So, I thought I'd counter the misinformation before it gets too far out of hand. SL is debateable as a "game". Many people use it this way. Many others don't. "Having a lot of time on your hands" doesn't always mean one is an irresponsible deadbeat, probably unemployed, with time to "waste", as is often implied. Many people in SL have part- or full-time jobs in the real world, even those called "merchants" in this article. I am one who has a full-time job. I use SL. not as a place to "play" as if it were a "game", but as a place to advertise my real business, which I also have in addition to my full-time job. I create things other people buy and then I convert the inworld currency to real money in the real world, something often discouraged in "games", but something SL was designed to do. I personally know several people who make a full-time income (or two) in SL, and contrary to "having lots of time on their hands", their entire time is spent creating art, organizing business meetings and creating and maintaining connections to real-world networks. While I'm not certain I'll ever make a full-time income with my products in SL, it does pay for itself at this point, and I hope it will point people toward my real-world business, helping establish it as my full-time job before I am physically no longer able to do what I have done for the last 25 years. Which brings me to another reason why many people are "merchants" in SL: They are disabled, and in an economy where jobs are becoming more and more scarce and companies are cutting back and firing even their long-term most valuable employees, disabled people have an even tougher time finding full-time work than they usually do. If they are imaginative, creative and remotely skilled with a 3D program or coding, they can make enough real-world money in SL to pay the light bill at least, if not pay their rent as well. Xstreet has long provided merchants in SL with a way to sell their products to massive numbers of people. Because most users of SL want a convenient and fast shopping method, most shoppers in SL use Xstreet at least as often as they use inworld methods, if not more. Freebies, which actually are not "always crap" as so many people seem to think, but are often good quality products offered free by creators as a way to incline potential customers to want more of their stuff, are a popular section of the site. Granted, about half of the stuff there is "crap". The other half is decidedly not. A discerning shopper knows the difference. Contrary to Linden Labs claims that the freebies come up first in searches for any items, its actually difficult to find the freebies unless you click the Free category link. In addition, there is an Advanced Search option that allows the user to completely fine-tune their search, including the order in which the search results are displayed. In other words, Linden Labs lied. A lot. It is of note that until Linden Labs bought the site, Xstreet charged a commission for every sale. Period. This helped a lot of business owners to get their products out there and selling without a large outlay of real cash. Given that a number of business owners in SL are poor folks struggling to make it, and have turned to SL as a way to make real money from creating virtual content, (trust me, folks, this works a lot better than pay-to-click, stuffing envelopes and other lame options available to the disabled and otherwise disadvantaged in th
Linden labs would love people to experience the net through their virtual world, much the way many experience most of it through a browser today. In many of the posts I've read Second Life is being criticized for being slow and buggy and not a great way to experience the net. As a result businesses try it and flee (There are other reasons too, lost inventory that can't be backed up is a big one). LL keeps butting their head against the wall, trying to get this complex, bandwidth and processor intensive world to be a place for business but it is futile. When viewed as a social venue, which allows creativity, building, live music, and more it's a fabulous place. I have made great friends in Second Life. Looked at as a social game, its a wild success; if only the Lindens would realize that and stop trying to turn it into something it is not and never will be.
"Oh, there are loosers."
I think its a great move to get all all the people who have tons of time to spend making and selling cheap stuff to rethink how they do things. They are destroying the virtual economy and because of them soon no one in SL will be able to afford land. Not them, nor those who used to be able to afford it but cant sell anymore of their quality items because everyone expects free.
I'm not sure where all the doomsayers came from, but SL is still relevant. There are more users logged in than ever, and they're spending real cash there. There are even people who make a living in there, and don't have to work in RL. I make enough money selling a pool table on SL that it pays for my AION habit. And, I have enough money in SL from sales to buy any clothing or gadgets I need/want. I sometimes go in SL and roleplay as a medieval fantasy character, its almost like tabletop gaming. Many of the people who hang out in SL are taking breaks from WoW and MW2 and other games. They go in there to dance at clubs, play mahjong, bowling, chat with friends, etc. The spatial voice chat in-game is really good and you can walk into a room and start having interesting convos with people from all around the world. If someone doesn't speak your language, there are automatic "babblers" that people wear that use sites like google translate/babelfish to automatically translate their typing to your language. You can view webpages or watch music videos/movies with friends on any 3D surface. There is a new gadget out now called a skywriter that lets you draw in the air around you, which is fun. A few popular HUD games exist like tiny empires, vampire games, spellcasting games, etc. A lot of people find love in SL, some people use it as a quick dating service when they're lonely. I personally know three people who actually live together irl now after they met on SL, two of them have gotten married. A lot of the things in SL are forward-thinking new concepts that don't exist anywhere else right now. I really feel like it is like Web3.0. And, ya, it is sometimes easier to go to a website, but SL makes the web more entertaining and 3D.
Just try to find a real person!
This is yet another bad move on the part of Linden Labs, and it's driving people away.
Just wandering and looking when using Emerald reveals: Few people are using the Linden-supplied viewer. Reading the news shows that the OpenGrid is picking up more and more followers, in general people have decided they are sick of the Lindens and they can do better on their own.
XStreet was an example of this: Search in SL sucked, still sucks (though not as bad as it was), and so people independently created online methods of listing and searching for items. The linden response: buy the two most popular ones and shut down one of them. We expected integrated search, automatic listing, elimination of commission when linked to a paid account-
but instead we get nothing but another horrible decision to drive users away.
My prediction: this will kill XStreet, and everyone will just switch to some alternative. The most popular alternative will get integrated search and automatic listing added to Emerald (or similar community-made viewers). Commission will probably stay the same, though integrated search and automatic listing could make ads valuable enough for commission to be eliminated.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Who cares? Noone is using Second Life anymore, except those marketing people who still think, they can advertise there...
and the last mention of it in mainstream media was 2-3 years ago (afaik)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
This is where you totally fail to comprehend what a virtual world is. Linden Lab (or anyone else) has about as much chance of exposing "what goes on there" as anyone in real life has of exposing what goes on on planet Earth. Any attempt would fail.
The only thing you can say categorically about what goes on in SL is that "people do things", only limited by the constraints of a digital world. It's no surprise that as many people leave as arrive in RL --- an immense number of people find that impossible to grasp.
Presumably those same people would also leave real life shortly after entry, for the same reason, if they weren't forced to take several years to acclimatize to a place where anything is possible and where you create your own goals.
"Active accounts" for slashdot is pretty meaningless when 90% of the site's regular visitors likely do not have an account. SL has no equivalent to an unsigned-in consumer of content.
Having said that, 750k beats out the vast majority of MMO's, so it's got that going for it.