So looking ahead... what's the roadmap for the Marketplace?

Toysoldier Thor · May 8, 2012

Off topic - I just noticed that the SL Forum Spell checker caught Sassy as much as it caught me with its inability to spell ROADMAP... look at the title of the thread. I wasnt the only one that trust this silly spell checker.

ON TOPIC...

Regarding a Merchant Union.... The word "Union" is not really the right type of organization that would fit what merchants are believing we all wished we had to represent Merchant's interests and voice against LL. A Union is typically a structure of a group of employees or a category of employees - its organized labor used primarily to protect the interests of the group against their respective Employers.

The Merchants of of LL are not Employees of LL. LL is not our Employer.

We are more wishing we had a well structured ASSOCIATION.

As such, this topic has been brought up throughout the history of LL and Xstreet and MP by the Merchants. There has be a couple attempts to even start this Association. In fact, back in 2009 as a result of the Pink / Colosus Linden regime and the Freebie/Clutter Tax Roadmap that Colosus released on us in November 2008 (Yes... LL Commerce Group actually at one time created and released for all to read .. a ROADMAP!) I spearheaded the creation of one of these SL Merchants Group associations.

The backlash and anger by the Merchants from Colosus's horribly mis-guided roadmap and Pink's refusal to back off from the stupidity of the roadmap was sooooo huge that countless merchants moved their listings to competing web ecommerce systems, several delisted and left Xstreet all together, and during the monthly LL/Merchant inworld meetings, I devised a "silent protest" concept with a couple others for the event referred to as the POPCORN PROTEST - where many of us merchants brought custom made protest popcorn buckets to the meeting and just sat back and observed silently.

I also created a group and private MERCHANT MEMBERS ONLY group as a "GOOGLE GROUP" with 3 public visible threads and 7 private threads that allowed Merchant members the ability to speak frankly on all topics impacting Merchants without LL's peering eyes nor they forum governing control. I quickly got over 110 members to join the Merchant group and the thread's activities were very strong.

Things were looking good and we even had LL Commerce team members wondering what was being said in our private group. But then as the anger and fury of Colosus's horrible Roadmap subsided, the activity of new topics and participation subsided as well and by about April of 2010... the activity died out. (lasted 5 months).

So... if you all want to know what it would look like to see an actual association of Merchants... that is what happens.

Funny enough the old group forum structure (it was moved away from Google to another provider) with all the threads and topics are all still there as a legacy in time. I went into the group a couple months ago just to look around. It was pretty sad to see how a good idea faded away.

Sassy Romano · May 8, 2012

Nope, thread title is fine, we're all just replying to your duff spelling, just to keep it highlighted

Kampu Oyen · May 8, 2012

Before you all start pushing for a dental plan and free donuts on your coffee breaks, the first thing you should try to organize to accomplish is just to get LL to honor its own end of the service agreement as it currently exists.

If what already exists is unenforceable, there's no point in asking for anything else.

One of my long-term hopes for SL is that someone (me?) will eventually be able to create a sim environment where people can donate $L to a smorgasbord of various nonprofit organizations.

It seems to me that as a first step to that, we might be able to create a nonprofit corporation inside the State of California specifically dedicated to providing a legal incentive to LL to keep its nose clean in terms of how it treats users, and the funds for such a nonprofit could be raised inside SL.

Why would anyone at LL like this idea enough to allow it to happen?

They should like it because they should recognize that in a consequence-free environment, normal people will simply tend not behave as well. And they should like it because, really, most of them would probably prefer to work with subordinates and/or superiors who really, ultimately can be held accountable for things that are ethically dubious.

LL already polices users. That is, they already police the people who put food on the table for them.

So if users haven't already done more to protect LL from its own misbehavior by providing some kind of system of real consequences, part of the blame might be said to fall on the users.

Everyone, at some point, eventually, needs help to decide to do the right thing.

Maybe we haven't helped LL enough, and maybe a legal fund specifically for holding LL accountable to users is one of the kinds of help we could offer.

Darrius Gothly · May 10, 2012

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Some of you have seen things long before I was able to get it through my thick skull.

I should apologize to Toy too, for dropping the F bomb on him a ways back. Not sure if I'd want to meet Darrius or Toy or a few others in a dark alley!

*grins and chuckles* There's absolutely no hard feelings over anything in the past ... not for me at least. We all have had our days of asserting above all outside evidence to the contrary that 2+2=5 ... so thickness of skull is not only forgiveable but anticipated and accepted. (Provided of course that same is returned in kind when I demonstrate the density of my dome. *grin*)

Your words did trigger a thought though .. .because one question I have not ever been able to find a half-decent answer for is .... WHY?!?

Why does LL continue to make missteps even in the face of overwhelming strident advice to beware the pothole? Why do they seem to launch off on efforts and ventures that not only have no obvious impetus, but seem almost to be engineered to cause damage to the paying customer?

As Toy mentions, the Merchant Community is chock full of people that have a wide range of skillsets. We are a very concentrated group that daily handles the entire spectrum of business, including sales, marketing, customer service, etc. and a few more etc's too. We also tend to be quite heavily populated with "Control Freaks" ... because we like doing the whole gamut of things required. So when we are forced to let someone else "drive", we're already antsy and uncomfortable.

So maybe the powers that be inside LL are the same type .. the same control freaks .. and when they are forced (or asked) to allow us to guide the progress, they get the same kind of antsy as we get. What if their actions that seem intended to disrupt us are just their way of exerting and demonstrating their control ... reinforcing that they ARE in control. What if they are not acting out of blindness or ineptitude, but out of jealousy and discomfort .. and making decisions that fly in the face of what is logical .. to us Merchants .. simply to prove the point that they write the rules.

It's an entirely human emotion, one that we see (and do sometimes) when we feel our authority challenged. How many of us have fallen into the response of assigning some really unpleasant scut-work to an underling when we felt they were challenging us, and in a way we did not like? How many times have we muttered or just thought to ourselves "Take THAT you twit!" because we had proven we were the ones in charge?

I can't believe it's the sole reason, but I can believe it is one of the causes for some of the decisions made. And maybe when you extract it up a few levels, to the BoD level, maybe it can be the whole cause. After all, if anyone is prone to reacting in a negative and spiteful way, it's a VC'er that feels his/her decision at investing so much into this venture is being questioned.

Maybe if we stop saying "you should do it this way because it's the RIGHT way" and start saying "can you please figure out a way to get us this and that" ... maybe they would use that opportunity given to exert their control and make decisions that meet our needs and didn't directly go against us.

Maybe ..

(jes thinkin....)

Kampu Oyen · May 11, 2012

>Why does LL continue to make missteps even in the face of overwhelming strident advice to beware the pothole? Why do they seem to launch off on efforts and ventures that not only have no obvious impetus, but seem almost to be engineered to cause damage to the paying customer?

I think I've already explained why every bit as compellingly as has LL so far (which is not hard, since they haven't explained it at all).

The probable reason "why" appears to me to be that someone inside LL believes that it is necessary to push commerce from the Marketplace to in-world venues in order to improve land revenues.

It sounds a little wacky, sure.

But a lot of stuff that started being predicted on this forum in August 2011 was at least equally wacky, and yet it has happened.

Am I wrong?

Pamela Galli · May 11, 2012

This thread is proof positive: there are no merchant LL cheerleaders left, at least anywhere that merchants hang out.

Does that say something, LL? That we are all beyond bewildered, shocked, astonished, and deeply disappointed?

Kampu Oyen · May 11, 2012

> there are no merchant LL cheerleaders left

Don't speak too soon.

Now that their alts aren't tied up preparing a deploy, you can expect them to flood in any time now, as they have in the past.

Pamela Galli · May 11, 2012

Kampu. Can you not just give it a rest? Ever?

WADE1 Jya · May 11, 2012

Pamela Galli wrote:

This thread is proof positive: there are no merchant LL cheerleaders left, at least anywhere that merchants hang out.

Does that say something, LL? That we are all beyond bewildered, shocked, astonished, and deeply disappointed?

Yes, I used to be cheerleader myself for sure but one by one they knocked away all my reasons for optimistic outlook.

Another thing I notice is there is a lot less of us then there used to be. First they pushed away vast majority of educators/nonprofits, then scared away solution providers to head for the hills, finally the merchants are now dwindling away... could be an illusion.... my stores are still ticking along inworld... maybe just the forum itself is growing in unpopularity... but I suspect there's something deeper to this.

Corporate winddown strategy? Who knows... when there is no communication or roadmap, no more quarterly reports, I can only begin to imagine the darkest of dark scenarios & conspiracy theories.

As to the union idea, thanks for the advice people. Might not develop into a union per say but I'm researching a bit what sort of representations or organizations are possible & what rights we may have as group or as individuals. Quite interesting to look at anyway... if something interesting develops you'll all find out.

Darrius Gothly · May 11, 2012

Kampu Oyen wrote:

[..snip..]

Am I wrong?

Josh? You know who Rube Goldberg is .. doncha? While your "predictions" may at times seem to hit the nail on the head, the path and motives you attribute to the process is very Rube Goldberg. I tend to think it's less "twisted nefarious plot" and more "someone has their head up their ... ".

If they truly wanted to increase in-world sales, the most effective means to that end would be to offer "Coop Deals" that tied Premium Membership to land ownership to "Linden Stores" ... much the same as they've offered Linden Homes. They would then put out "Marketing Packages" with Premium Shop Owners contributing a few products on loss-leader sales in exchange for ad placement in the advertising/promotion packets they send out to every one that is active on SL.

Convincing someone to move their sales in-world by destroying the offline sales site is not only an imprecise means of motivation, anyone with even a glimmer of sense would realize that it's a damned-foolish way to go. As a method of encouraging action, it's tantamount to covering the glazed donuts with dead bugs and cat poop .. just to entice people to buy more jelly filled donuts; it's bound to backfire and make everyone turn away from BOTH glazed and jelly filled ... and even the bear claws too.

You have "success" with your predictions in much the same way that Nostradamus has accurately predicted things like WWII and Hitler and 9/11 .. it only works if you read it backwards while chanting Hindu Love Poems and inhaling copious quantities of incense.

Marcus Hancroft · May 11, 2012

Darrius Gothly wrote:

Kampu Oyen wrote:

[..snip..]

Am I wrong?

Josh? You know who Rube Goldberg is .. doncha? While your "predictions" may at times seem to hit the nail on the head, the path and motives you attribute to the process is very Rube Goldberg. I tend to think it's less "twisted nefarious plot" and more "someone has their head up their ... ".

If they truly wanted to increase in-world sales, the most effective means to that end would be to offer "Coop Deals" that tied Premium Membership to land ownership to "Linden Stores" ... much the same as they've offered Linden Homes. They would then put out "Marketing Packages" with Premium Shop Owners contributing a few products on loss-leader sales in exchange for ad placement in the advertising/promotion packets they send out to every one that is active on SL.

Convincing someone to move their sales in-world by destroying the offline sales site is not only an imprecise means of motivation, anyone with even a glimmer of sense would realize that it's a damned-foolish way to go. As a method of encouraging action, it's tantamount to covering the glazed donuts with dead bugs and cat poop .. just to entice people to buy more jelly filled donuts; it's bound to backfire and make everyone turn away from BOTH glazed and jelly filled ... and even the bear claws too.

You have "success" with your predictions in much the same way that Nostradamus has accurately predicted things like WWII and Hitler and 9/11 .. it only works if you read it backwards while chanting Hindu Love Poems and inhaling copious quantities of incense.

This ^^!!

Darrius!! I'm so glad to see you posting in the forums again, my friend!

Medhue Simoni · May 11, 2012

Darrius Gothly wrote:

Kampu Oyen wrote:

[..snip..]

Am I wrong?

Josh? You know who Rube Goldberg is .. doncha? While your "predictions" may at times seem to hit the nail on the head, the path and motives you attribute to the process is very Rube Goldberg. I tend to think it's less "twisted nefarious plot" and more "someone has their head up their ... ".

Convincing someone to move their sales in-world by destroying the offline sales site is not only an imprecise means of motivation, anyone with even a glimmer of sense would realize that it's a damned-foolish way to go. As a method of encouraging action, it's tantamount to covering the glazed donuts with dead bugs and cat poop .. just to entice people to buy more jelly filled donuts; it's bound to backfire and make everyone turn away from BOTH glazed and jelly filled ... and even the bear claws too.

You have "success" with your predictions in much the same way that Nostradamus has accurately predicted things like WWII and Hitler and 9/11 .. it only works if you read it backwards while chanting Hindu Love Poems and inhaling copious quantities of incense.

Ditto on these parts.

Medhue Simoni · May 11, 2012

WADE1 Jya wrote:

Pamela Galli wrote:

This thread is proof positive: there are no merchant LL cheerleaders left, at least anywhere that merchants hang out.

Does that say something, LL? That we are all beyond bewildered, shocked, astonished, and deeply disappointed?

Yes, I used to be cheerleader myself for sure but one by one they knocked away all my reasons for optimistic outlook.

Another thing I notice is there is a lot less of us then there used to be. First they pushed away vast majority of educators/nonprofits, then scared away solution providers to head for the hills, finally the merchants are now dwindling away... could be an illusion.... my stores are still ticking along inworld... maybe just the forum itself is growing in unpopularity... but I suspect there's something deeper to this.

Corporate winddown strategy? Who knows... when there is no communication or roadmap, no more quarterly reports, I can only begin to imagine the darkest of dark scenarios & conspiracy theories.

As to the union idea, thanks for the advice people. Might not develop into a union per say but I'm researching a bit what sort of representations or organizations are possible & what rights we may have as group or as individuals. Quite interesting to look at anyway... if something interesting develops you'll all find out.

There is really nothing for us here in the forums anymore, other than to complain and try to find resolutions from other merchants. We still don't even have a thread or category to post announcements or new releases. That's how fricken bad this forum is now.

@LL - We already pay you a craploads for everything else, even classifieds. Can you stop nickel and diming us, for goshsakes, and give us a place to post new releases? You haven't even made a place for us to do any marketing, outside of MP enhancements and Classifieds. Merchants are not going to stop using those just because we have a free forum category, but users will have a place to see new releases, and especially see things by creators they have never heard of.

WADE1 Jya · May 11, 2012

I doubt they'll grant the request. We don't have a space here & haven't had space for a very long time. Any space we did have anywhere across Linden Lab properties -- even space in newly-glommed SL-related properties -- has been eliminated, or made ineffective in one way or another. Every time we lost a square on the board, people begged & pleaded to regain their space, yet to no avail.

Us having no space is even actively enforced & it's quite obviously an overtly intentional decision (part of a roadmap). For contrast, take a comprehensive look across SL at what kinds of activities are actively nurtured & what kinds of activities are passively allowed to occur.

Think on those things & why you might not be informed of any roadmap either.

I came to a conclusion of what is happening more than a year & a half ago.

Kampu Oyen · May 12, 2012

Please: if you're only going to call CommerceTeam Linden by that name, I think it's only fair that you refrain from expressing your latent favoritism by calling me things other than Kampu Oyen.

> I tend to think it's less "twisted nefarious plot" and more "someone has their head up their ... ".

I'm pretty sure that it's both. Especially after how clumsily the cover-up of the Mad Men promotion has gone.

WHY is surely less important than WHAT, though.

We all should be able to agree by now that someone at LL needs to be permanently removed from her position.

Debating what motivates her is splitting hairs anymore, because we all know what the bottom line is anyway.

That is: even if every single thing that has happened so far has at least started with some kind of very honest mistake, that wouldn't be anything like an adequate defense either of her job performance or of how she has followed through on the problems her presence has allowed to precipitate.

All the theory of intentional service downgrades does is to make her behavior slightly more predictable than a theory of mere incompetence.

Take, for example, the impending shut-off of box use to the Marketplace while DD continues not to support breedables and items of similar permissions issues.

Being that the consequences of this up-coming incident have been known for well over a month, and being that all that need be done to prevent such a thing is to allow the boxes to keep functioning until DD can support breedables, which theory better explains why this service downgrade is going to happen?...

A) CTL somehow still has missed the point that shutting off boxes on 1 June without fixing permissions support for DD will force a large number of merchants to either stop selling their items or to sell them in-world (as a higher land use cost).

B) CTL is aware that shutting off boxes on 1 June without fixing permissions support for DD will force a large number of merchants to either stop selling their items or to sell them in-world (as a higher land use cost)... and wants this to happen.

That CTL is sufficiently oblivious to the content of this forum for A to be true is completely inconsistent with the recent process in which the link for MadMen5 was changed to a link for Madstyle5 when the link was pointed out on this forum; in which the image in the MadMen5 link was removed after it was pointed out on this forum that the link still showed the image; in which someone began to flood forum moderators with requests specifically pertaining to the Mad Men discussion after it was pointed out on this forum that Google still had the image indexed in a way that demonstrated it as incriminating.

Incompetence would better explain some of what has happened, sure. And malice or devious desperation would better explain some of it.

But how much of what is to be explained by which has become a mostly very unnecessary point of contention between myself and the other people on this forum who, at least now, finally, seem to agree that there is a persistent and pervasive core problem with the way CTL's domain of control is being administered, and with how it has been administered for many months.

If it will help produce any kind of solidarity here in terms of demanding decisive action from LL in regards to the removal of this destructive person, I will be happy to offer better support for a theory of mere incompetence as a valid competing theory after the 1 June incident does not occur as predicted.

In the meantime, I can't in good conscience fail to again emphasize that the incomplete roadmap provided by CTL at this point consists almost entirely of the 1 June signpost; a signpost that points less to mere incompetence than to a continuing pattern of intentional service downgrades.

Marcus Hancroft · May 12, 2012

How to even begin, K...

Your hatred of the person about whom your last post referenced is apparent. I've read through ALL your posts of late as well and I'm fully aware of your theories about what's caused all the marketplace problems and who is responsible for them. The big problem I see here is that, since none of us are Linden Lab employees and work specifically in the commerce team, we can't really know what's the cause and who's to blame.

I'm quite positive that nobody in Management at Linden Lab is going to come into these forums and state:

"We just wanted to let you know that Soandso Linden has been the cause of ALL the problems and bad decision making in the commerce team."

Hells bells, it could be ANYBODY, or several anybody's, or the entire TEAM! The fact is, we don't know for positive and we never will. So to continue to rant about a single person on the commerce team is silly. Demanding her/their immediate dismissal without all the facts is REALLY silly in MY book.

I understand the human nature to want to blame someone. But without every single fact presented to us, we could be blaming the wrong person and flaming them here might be construed as libel. You have to be very careful about such things. Make sure you have the correct person that did that, made this decision, damaged the other thing.

In the end, since we aren't privvy to all the correct information about everything, all your theories are just that...theories and conjecture. Neither one can be proven.

Take care of what's going on inside your own "four walls" and let Linden Lab deal with their own employee problems. Nothing any of us say or do will make one whit of difference in how the company runs internally and that's as it should be.

Dartagan Shepherd · May 12, 2012

Belated reply to some good points, hadn't noticed it at first.

Absolutely agreed about the spite thing, have seen that many times.

Users request something even simple and they refuse to make a 10 minute change. Users point out that a promotion in the middle of a bug ridden marketplace is dumb and that it's riddled with abuse, wasn't defined properly (not worth more than a sentence that they were actually trying to ride on the coat tails of a television show), keyword spam, etc. Didn't even make them flinch, let alone stop it.

You can see plainly that users are nothing more than bits of monetization to them.

Love this gem and summary of Phil's latest sales pitch to the world,

"Philip Rosedale, the founder of Coffee and Flowers, referred to humans as herd animals and reminded listeners that we all have a desire to feel safe, then turned around and asked the audience to consider whether companies need CEOs at all."

(My answer would be that we apparently we don't need board members either, care to quit that position? Of course not.)

http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2012/05/philip-rosedale-work-together-and-help-each-other

That's basically us in a nutshell, monetized herd animals.

The rest of the article reads like The Burnout School of Business, which makes more sense in a Keanu Reeves voice while trying to hold in a lungful of smoke.

At the end of the day, there's 10 years of proof that while LL is a cash success (loosely defined because it's declining into yesterday), it's a management and product fail.

It leads to teams not being accountable, it breeds punks instead of employees that produce quality.

Case in point, Oz's latest idiocy in requesting mesh for the deformer project, then back peddling and saying that he was only trying to stir up trouble to get peoples attention.

In the meantime the point is completely lost by the "herd" ... do you "really" want a company working on clothing deformers that doesn't have anyone in their employee capable of doing it themselves? And shouldn't the company be doing it themselves before they release it. And why did users contribute $5,000 USD for an ex-employee to code it that also can't manage to whip up their own test mesh?

And where are the plugins for applications for mesh? Where are the supporting files like LL supplied rigs? For that matter, where are the new rigs or the ability to rig non avatar mesh? Every game developer on the planet has access to this stuff, but it seems to elude the "lab".

Consider also ANS. I mean jesus it's a simple concept. Store sends transaction data with a handful of fields. That's all she wrote. Is there a web based company anywhere that can't handle something so simple? I've never seen one.

LL seems to be the dork of the tech industry and the village idiot of the gaming industry.

Sorry LL, not very herd-like of me, is it?

Meanwhile people think communication is the issue. If you get communication it's going to be fluff and not backed by stable deliverable product overall. It's going to be blowing hot air into a feature or issues that aren't "all that" and should be managable by amateurs that took far too long to do it and wasn't fully mature or well thought out.

But if you can't be cool and you can't be good enough to stand up the to level of quality as the rest of the world, you might as well be punks and social engineers. Problem is that it has a threshold and they reached it and just don't get that either.

Also, this isn't open source. If LL wants open source then let them open the whole technology. You don't expect people to do the work for you of open source and then charge them as if you're not open source.

Jira that, LL.

Kampu Oyen · May 12, 2012

If I'm somehow wrong about who to remove, then I'll certainly understand that they might remove a different person.

But, so far, all the signs that point to anyone in particular have all pointed to the same person.

As for hating said person, I think that's inaccurate.

I'm done hoping that that person will grow whatever she needs in order to stop ruining things on her current job, but I still hold out hope that there's a job that's a better fit for her somewhere, and that she'll be less tempted to sacrifice integrity in order to maintain that next job.

In fact, I'm sort of hoping that there is some medical facet to her behavior for which intervention and/or treatment currently exists, and that (one finally relieved of the pointless pressure of keeping the current position) she'll be able to derive maximum benefit from said intervention and/or treatment while growing into the next job.

I can't claim to really know what's going on in regard to that, but there does seem to be a bit of a hint in this message.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketing-Opportunity/td-p/1484001

Can you spot the hint?

Pamela Galli · May 12, 2012