Linden Puts in Discounts on Island Set-Up and Tier

[irihapeti]

ps

now that I have accused LL Board of timidity I will now accuse them of covetousness as well (:

Ebbe said this thing in a recent media interview

he said that LL takes about $65 millions in tiers. That the resident-to-resident economic activity generates a further $65 million for the residents of which LL gets only 3%. He then said that LL needs to reconsider this, that they should look at increasing their share of the take to something like 30%. With a view to balance their revenue streams,  tiers vs commissions

what this doesnt do is address the economic effect on the wealth-generating classes. The merchants and landlords

Creators dont generate wealth. People who buy and sell stuff [and services] do

Creators add value to the well-being tho for sure. Is not wealth this tho, in the sense that it dont pay the bills in itself all by itself 

 

+ eta

and services

+

eta more

am not sure I explained this well

i put it in a personal context

i can create stuff. I can script as well. I add value to own well-being when I do this. I can add value to somebody else when I share my creations with them

i dont create wealth (bill-paying wealth) doing this. I can only do this if I become a merchant

[ChinRey]

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irihapeti wrote:

he said that LL takes about $65 millions in tiers. That the resident-to-resident economic activity generates a further $65 million for the residents of which LL gets only 3%. He then said that LL needs to reconsider this, that they should look at increasing their share of the take to something like 30%. With a view to balance their revenue streams,  tiers vs commissions

---

Those are interesting figures, do you have a link? Last I heard was 60 million made by resident which is close enough (http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2015/05/ebbe-sl-users-cashed-out-60-mil-last-year/)

In any case, there are so many interesting aspects to this I don't know where to start.

Maybe by pointing out that collectively freelance content and service providers invest a thousand times more working hours and effort in Second Life than Linden Lab themselves can possibly do. Even if they all worked 24/7/365 there simply aren't enough of them there to match the amount of work freelancers do.

Both 65 millions and 60 millions are wrong anyway. The correct amount is 0$. The only official way to convert Lindens to RL money is through Lindex and Linden Lab does not buy or sell and has never bought or sold anything there. It's all transactions between residents. That is such a well established and well known fact that it would never occur to anybody to doubt it.

Seriously, the money we have in our Linden and US dollar accounts at Linden Lab is our money. Be bought it or we earned it by honest or dishonest means. For all practical purposes Linden Lab is a bank and the moment a bank starts to believe they own the money their customers have deposited with them we have a disaster at hand.

That being said, of course Linden Lab needs and deserves to be paid for the services they provide. But it is always about us paying them, never ever the other way round. This is something we should all remember and something everybody at Linden Lab always have to be very, very conscious about.

As for the 30% transaction fee, I assume that's not for Lindex - that would only open for an uncontrollable black market. Nor can it be for all in-world transactions - that would be sheer lunacy. So it has to be all about the Marketplace and that can be disastrous or it can actually be really good news.

Ebbe mentions a maker of mesh hands and feet (who that can be is still a complete mystery) who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars. What he doesn't mention, and possibly is unaware of, is that none of the other three top earners in the mesh body market sell on MP at all. You have to go to their inworld store to buy their products. Why? Because MP isn't worth it for them. B2B is never about price, it's about price-to-quality ratio and even today's 5% commission fee is not really justifiable by the quality of service MP offers to merchants. 30% is completely unrealistic .

Of course, in theory LL can force all merchants to close down their inworld store and only sell through MP. That would be the disastrous option and fortunately it's not going to happen of course. I've already used the word lunacy in this post so I'm running out of words here.

The only other option is to sugar the pill, improve the MP so it's actually worth a 30% fee for the merchants. That's what they have to do of course and ... I'm not sure they can. I don't even think they understand the magnitude of that job. The updates they have made so far - the ones that actually made sense at all that is - have been so minute it's been like trying to put out a forest fire with a glass of water. They have to do far better to even justify a minor increase of the transaction fee. Still, if they can do it, we'll get a much better Marketplace and they'll certainly earn my admiration!

[Darrius Gothly]

Howdy Prok. LTNS!

The problem you highlight is indeed becoming a real and true problem threatening the future of Second Life. But it's not the problem from the thread title ... it's the problem that Linden Lab hates land sales.

It isn't often you see a company that dislikes their core source of income. But that's what you see in SL. I would argue that it's also true with their other source of income, user to user sales. Even though they might not carve off a piece of coin as the "money" changes hands from seller to buyer, they benefit because each sale is one more nail anchoring both the seller and buyer in Second Life. Without those sales, no one will stick around to just chat or dance or socialize.

When you talk about the "Land Barons" being vastly different than the commonly held belief that they are equivalent to the Koch Brothers .. I agree with you 100%. I am personally acquainted with a number of "Land Barons" .. and they are mostly just getting by, full of good nature and anxious to provide top notch service to their customers. They are not stuck-up filthy rich knotheads with self profit their only motive. They ARE people, mostly the same as everyone else, just trying to get their business to stay alive.

One thing you do not have right is the imagined "Insider Geeks" that supposedly fight against realistic land prices. If there are "geeks" that want land sales and ownership destroyed, then they are poor geeks who do not understand the basic mechanics of business and finance. I am not one of them .. but I AM a geek.

While you champion the humanization of one class (so-called "Land Barons") please do not do so by smearing mud ... mostly imaginary mud .. on another class. You are incorrectly characterizing a class based on an incorrect perception. And you do yourself no favor by slamming a massive group of people simply to protect another.

We are ALL in this together. We ALL see the decline in SL. We ALL worry that it will stop working far sooner than we want. But blaming a class such as "geeks" as being the all-powerful hands of evil twisting the machine to some nefarious purpose, you would be better served to enlist them as compatriots .. and recognize we want the Land Barons to succeed .. so we have a place to come do our "geek thing" too.

[Pamela Galli]

I pay for four full sims, plus LL gets 5 percent of Marketplace sales and ~4 percent when I cash out. They are doing pretty well, considering the services they don't provide that they should, and the support services about General SL issues I provide residents that I should not have to provide but I do.

30 percent cut is not acceptable to me. SL is not Turbosquid. 

[Daniel Regenbogen]

ChinRey wrote:

Both 65 millions and 60 millions are wrong anyway. The correct amount is 0$. The only official way to convert Lindens to RL money is through Lindex and Linden Lab does not buy or sell and has never bought or sold anything there. It's all transactions between residents. That is such a well established and well known fact that it would never occur to anybody to doubt it.

 

*.*.*

 

Actually, you are wrong in that. LL does at least sell on the LindeX. What do you think they do with the fees they collect in L$? And it is a well established fact that LL also stabilize the LindeX rates if necessary. The LL sales on LindeX were reported in early years, but are not anymore for a few years now.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Daniel Regenbogen wrote:

ChinRey wrote:

Both 65 millions and 60 millions are wrong anyway. The correct amount is 0$. The only official way to convert Lindens to RL money is through Lindex and Linden Lab does not buy or sell and has never bought or sold anything there. It's all transactions between residents. That is such a well established and well known fact that it would never occur to anybody to doubt it.

 

*.*.*

 

Actually, you are wrong in that. LL does at least sell on the LindeX. What do you think they do with the fees they collect in L$? And it is a well established fact that LL also stabilize the LindeX rates if necessary. The LL sales on LindeX were reported in early years, but are not anymore for a few years now.

---

How strongly LL still adheres to the original policies (the self imposed limits on how many $L they would sell, etc) would be anybodies guess.  But yes, they do sell $L on the Lindex, unless someone knows a more recent policy statement than this that states otherwise.

https://lindenlab.wordpress.com/2006/07/17/linden-dollar-economy-announcement/

 

[irihapeti]

i actually conflated two things so that it came out like the 30% is something intended for SL

Ebbe was talking about Sansar in the interview and he chucked in the example of SL as 65 / 65 (in the same way he chucks in the 900,000 number into these convos). He was making a observation that 3% or about, wont work for them (LL) going into Sansar, That they would be looking at about 30% commission on the Sansar platform

he indicated that when (or if so) then LL would be able to offer "sims" at a lower price than SL

+

what I was trying to say is that whatever is the cost price for sims ($10, $100, $1000 or whichever) and whatever is the commission rate for products (3% 6% 30% 60% or whichever) then just raising or lowering prices to benefit the platform owner, without also considering the supply problem and the effect this has on the margins for the resident merchants then things are going to turn out for Sansar the same as they have for SL

the products and merchants will end up in over-supply

+

personally I think 30% or any % is a fail. I think that merchant fees (tiers) is the way I would do it. Big shop more tiers. Little shop less tiers. Whether that shop be inworld or onweb

if a inworld sim costs 100$ for 10,000 items (LI) then so does a onweb store

reason:

if the cost of entry to my store is 0$ and I dont have to do anything or pay anything for evermore for my listed products and LL take 30% 60% or even 90% then what I care ? I just take what ever I get if I get any. Is not my worry that other people are trying to make a actual RL living

this the issue. LL do need to care about these people trying to make a RL living. They need to accept that is not just about them (LL) and what they (LL) get out of it

LL need to accept that Sansar is not a game. That is a platform on which grown ups can actual do business to the standards that apply in the RL. RL business, not internets bizness. Internets bizness is a game

+

hopefully they will get this and it will happen on Sansar. And when so then it might even come to SL as well

 

[Pamela Galli]

Agree: for a large store, current tier is very acceptable as a percentage of sales, for a small one, not so much. 

But here is the thing about 30%, which is what Turbosquid etc. evidently charge: I do a lot more than sell 3D models. I sell scripted and animated things, and above all, I provide a huge amount of customer service. And 80% of that CS is about things that have nothing to do with the product itself, but about teaching users how products work in the context of how SL works.

I teach people how to open a box, how to rez a coalesced group, how to manage inventory and find things in inventory (a good percentage are not aware of the search function), how Windlight affects how things look, how to unlink a prim, how to tint things, how to reset scripts, where to find transactions, and thousands of other things. Turbosquid sellers are done when they upload their products.

All of this takes a great deal of time, and costs me money (I pay my assistant good RL wages). If in Sansar LL wants to take 30% AND take over the task of educating residents that I now perform, that is fine with me, but otherwise, it is not.

[ChinRey]

I should have known better than use that kind of irony here.

---

Daniel Regenbogen wrote:

Actually, you are wrong in that. LL does at least sell on the LindeX. What do you think they do with the fees they collect in L$?

---

Oh, to them the amount of L$ it's just a number. They don't have to neither sell nor buy for their own part. It's one of the most funamental rules of monetary economics: money has no inherent value to the person/organisation that issues it.

But...

---

Daniel Regenbogen wrote:

And it is a well established fact that LL also stabilize the LindeX rates if necessary.

---

Yes of course they do. But they do like to give the impression that Lindex transactions are resident-to-resident.

 

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Daniel Regenbogen wrote:

The LL sales on LindeX were reported in early years, but are not anymore for a few years now.

---

and

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Perrie Juran wrote:

https://lindenlab.wordpress.com/2006/07/17/linden-dollar-economy-announcement/

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The highlight from that page:

---

Philip Linden wrote:

detailed information about Linden Dollar sources and sinks is always available at...

---

followed by a link to a 404. :matte-motes-big-grin:

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

ChinRey wrote:

---

As for the 30% transaction fee, I assume that's not for Lindex - that would only open for an uncontrollable black market. Nor can it be for all in-world transactions - that would be sheer lunacy. So it has to be all about the Marketplace and that can be disastrous or it can actually be really good news.

Ebbe mentions a maker of mesh hands and feet (who that can be is still a complete mystery) who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars. What he doesn't mention, and possibly is unaware of, is that none of the other three top earners in the mesh body market sell on MP at all. You have to go to their inworld store to buy their products. Why? Because MP isn't worth it for them. B2B is never about price, it's about price-to-quality ratio and even today's 5% commission fee is not really justifiable by the quality of service MP offers to merchants. 30% is completely unrealistic .

---

My understanding is the 30% figure would be used in a new product, not Second Life. The Second Life architecture makes land very expensive and inefficient for the Lab so they don't want the grid to grow any bigger than it is now. The high tier and "inexplicable" region-creation fees are there so that people won't buy a region on a whim and abandon it a couple of months later. (That's what Mainland is for.) People who want tier lowered always say, "If tier was lower I'd buy more land." What they don't say is "If tier was lower I'd give Linden Lab more money."

With a more efficient way to simulate land it would be possible to literally give small pieces of land away for free and pay for them from the commission on the tschotchkes bought to put on the land. With single-instance fixed-location land simulated 24/7 at the Lab, though, that pricing system will never, ever happen.

A car parking garage and a livery stable are very similar in theory - they are both used to store other people's means of transportation. However, if you try to use the pricing structure from one for the other you'll go out of business pretty quickly because of the different needs of storing cars versus storing horses.

[ChinRey]

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irihapeti wrote:

i actually conflated two things so that it came out like the 30% is something intended for SL

Ebbe was talking about Sansar in the interview

---

Oh, that explains it.

Everything I wrote is still valid though (apart from that crude Lindex joke of course). It's just that the last two paragraphs apply to Sansar only, not SL.

[Perrie Juran]

---

ChinRey wrote:

 

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

https://lindenlab.wordpress.com/2006/07/17/linden-dollar-economy-announcement/

---

The highlight from that page:

---

Philip Linden wrote:

detailed information about Linden Dollar sources and sinks is always available at...

---

followed by a link to a 404. :matte-motes-big-grin:

 

 

---

I remember when LL stopped posting that and cvertain other economic data.  They claimed as I recaled that no one really needed or used that data LINK.  There was some moaning  LINK but the decision stood.

[Prokofy Neva]

We really are driving blind here trying to analyze the economy without any real statistics or information. We used to have a LOT more available when Lindens told us a) how many premium accounts there were b) how many people spent more than a dollar inworld each month. Those figures used to be about 90,000 and 450,000 when they last publicized them which I believe was 3 years ago. They stopped publicizing them only because they showed bad news - premium numbers crashed at that time, and I don't know that the slashes in rates or improved advertising brought them up. The 450,000 is HALF of the claimed 30-day monthly uniques, let's say, which were at a million and now 900,000. Yes, it is possible for half the population to log in and not spend any money because they don't need to, especially if they are bots : ) I suggest that the 450,000 figure reveals more to us, howeve, and that is the huge number of traffic/whore/greeter/group bots in world, plus alts. Only real people spend money. Even very poor people at least get a dollar from a money tree or a game and buy a shirt with it.

The figure of $65 million in what the Lindens get in tier is interesting because that figure used to be $75 million. So that may be what is driving their new world-creation.

But the figure of "3% of the resident content sales which is also $65 million" doesn't track as that would be $216 million, and the claims in the press have been that this world generates $450 million or more in *resident* revenue. That's an extraordinary thing and why I cherish Second Life; Facebook, which controls one-sixth of the world's population with their billion members, unlikely ENABLES that much to be made from the USERS of their platform as distinct from themselves. It's a very democratic and open system that I think needs more replication in platforms like Instagram that churlishly guard your content as their content instead of enabling you to make a buck from it.

Why the big discrepancy in claims? I think it may be that the Lindens calculate the $216 million number as such because a good chunck of revenue from land and content businesses has to go to tier! So those are sunk costs for the business and also a revenue stream the Lindens can't tax AGAIN obviously. So they have fees for currency exchange and MP sales and that's not enough. Of course they want to grab more. They realize if they grab too much, they'll kill off not only customers who hate taxes but creators who resent being tax vehicles losing customers. People hate Internet taxes and they're right to as they kill business.

Of course irahepti is right that they could do other things like slash tier costs to increase volume sales and especially get rid of other things like the jump in tier on the "step ladder" of prices that has never been justified in my view. In fact, I think it exists only because of the arcane geek factor of server space multipliers -- the reason land is divided into 512 or 4096 and not round numbers is because server math is expressed in these terms. Maybe they "have" to do this and therefore live with the more-than-doublers that occur, but we need to ask why.

I am definitely opposed for making rent of land a feature of the land tools. Once you allow LL to do this, you allow them to stick their hand in and take tax for rentals as they essentially do for land (through currency fees) and as they openly do for content (MP fees). So please, be wary of providing new ways for Linden to put their hand in my pocket and take even more of my meager profits.

There is no reason to do this to "stimulate the economy". I use open-source rental scripts that are in theory cost free (although I've paid coders real money to improve their performance and fix their bugs over the years). There is the leading rental device and other competitors so plenty of choice and ease in the market to putting out rental boxes. By putting land rental in the viewer you are also destroying all those businesses of people who make and sell rental devices especially those hooked up to their websites. Again, the idea that you need to destroy entire swatches of the economy for the sake of the purported "ease of use" to stimulate in the economy just doesn't work out. BUYING land is now so complicated because of the multiple dummy-stopper menus that you should first look to where you could streamline THAT.

We also don't know WHAT the discount is that the big land barons get. If we knew that, we could figure how much they cost the economy, or cost Linden, or are a privileged group who can be ported easily to Sansar with a new blandishment. My guess is that they get 50% and they are easily ported, but that leaves many of us in the dust.

@Perrie Juran I hear you about Linden Homes. The Lindens really shouldn't compete with their own business class. But remember, they hate land economy and land barons, they view them as an alien force unlike their beloved designers and coders who fit better into their California Ideology and they want to get rid of them because they view them as the enemy. The reason their former scribe Hamlet Linden constantly lobbies against land as a model is that the dream of coders is always to make an Internet that disguises their own costs as programmers with expenses like server farms by freeing up, devaluing and rent-seeking on everybody else's value. It's a miracle the Internet has succeeded given this essentially pernicious ideology at its root.

Linden Homes are a success for Lindens because they create real green dots, not traffic or whore bots, who buy things for their homes which they heavily advertise on the MP. They are a controlled population who can't commerce or whore or grief given their limitations. So what's not to like? They're also this: a very easily mooved Hooverville that can be ported to Sansar. THEY can get whatever 1:1 LL dreams up for them or hands off to a large land baron to "adopt".

The only thing I can say in their favour is that in theory, they add stability and value to our Mainland as a whole by creating more middle-class citizens who get out of the largely young-male griefing, war games and sandboxes categories and settle down and buy content and marry and have children, so to speak. So they add some tissue to our distressed world as any of them can leave their reservation to come to our business, or in theory, be groomed for land ownership of their own or even island or Mainland rentals in the future. I'd love to see those statistics, because the way the Lindens sold the "Assisted Living" program as Cocoanut Koala dubbed Linden Homes was that people would only start there, then we could pick them up to sell them 2048s with more prims and content down the line. I doubt it has worked that way...

There's more I want to say about the problem of the analysis of telehubs based on fallacious information and the problem of the Lindens' view of their own content production (the Moles and others) -- they don't view this as world glue or helpful for community; as I learned from Ebbe when I met him more than a year ago, he views it merely as a load test for his software. This is as devastating a blow to worldness as Ginsu Linden's explanation that SL is only a product, not a world. But you have to remember that when the Lindens say that Second Life is a world "envisioned and designed by its residents," they aren't kidding. That's all they want. They want nothing to do with governance which is why you can't tell customer service about a griefing problem but only add to a ridiculous queue of abuse reports that go nowhere.

@ChinRey you are right to put all kinds of correctives on to these magic figures of $65 million and the even more magic figure of $475 which you can find online. None of them calculate wage costs for designers or land barons, all of whom work on sweat equity if not sweatshop terms.

It's not true that people can't be paid outside the platform, however, as some land barons take PayPal payments directly (I do this on a tiny level) and some content makers accept PayPal directly as well for things like a build of a sim with all kinds of landscaping and content (I've paid such fees to builders) or some kind of experience, like a live concert or design of a clothing sales event -- all of these can happen outside the platform. I don't believe it's that huge a piece of the economy, however, as most transactions occur within the platform and are heavily taxed and devalued. Don'to forget that years ago, when we had an independent, free currency platform outside of Linden Lab, we cashed out at $4.00 for every 1000 Lindens, not $3.70 or less as we do now. That matters. Supply Linden prints and sells money to keep the rate even and cheap for end-users, now devaluating the wages of those cashing out their revenue. If I were in the content making class, I'd demand that the Lindens float the ruble, er I mean the Linden and let it rise to its true value rather than making it like scrip in the Soviet Union, in exchange for taxation. 

The problem with that is that soon, you won't be able to feel like a king by spending under five dollars and getting enough to buy at least a cheap skin and car for $1000 Lindens. You will start to feel as if you are paying "real money" for things and in the Club Med/carnival concept of SL as entertainment, that will start to burn and lose customers.

The Internet will grow beyong this when people stop seeing virtual worlds as a toy or a game or a prototyper or an educator and realize that much of real life does take place on them and through them and they need to be made more robust and real themselves. If 500,000 people log on to a platform for four hours a night and spend $5 or more US each log-on session for their principle form of social, sexual and even artistic enjoyment, it's time to stop ridiculing that and lambasting it as "having no life" and realize it is a modern phenomenon no different than buying digital music instead of vinyl records or a subscription to the digital New York Times instead of the hard-copy tree-killer paper.

I can't believe that 30% would be added to content sales as there would be mass rebellion and destruction of the market. 15% I could believe. I think Ebbe must mean Maitreya. But it doesn't matter. There is only a tiny niche for people to benefit from the MP.

The entire reason the world is gripped in gatcha madness now of epic proportions is that the MP doesn't work for people in multiple ways; gatcha is their rebellion. To be sure, some rares are sold on MP and it partakes in the madness that way again, but the entire industry of hunts, sales, events, gatchas, gatcha resales, the rares flipping market, etc. is a dysfunctional reaction to an abnormal economy. Linden has driven people to the MP by keeping high tiers and another nasty thing: not doing much about copybotting or griefing, so that people feel they are safer from abuse on the MP. That's pretty pernicious of them but it's Silicon Valley and it's how they are.

In my view, by driving many people to the MP, the Lindens have also crippled the economy and hurt their own island sales. That's because only a tiny few can get VISIBILITY on the marketplace because of the ability to spend hundreds of real dollars on ads or because there are built-in rewards to the flawed search program for them.

The inworld search, also always a problem, and the virtual absence of effective inworld advertising except big ugly spinning boxes on physics (!), depresses the economy and kills the world. The Lindens don't care as their formula is -- put it all on MP so we can get our cut.

If they were more nuanced and sophisticated in dealing with this problem -- and they can't be as there is no time or money for this -- they'd realize they need to make a better ecosystem of inworld advertising, tier incentives, promotion not destruction of the land sector, etc. etc. Philip Rosedale, for all his down sides, actually had a better intuitive grasp of these balances, along with some of his more "grown-up" (now dead or gone) Lindens like Joe Linden and Robin Linden than the current crew. It's sad. But I don't know how to get across these nuances to Ebbe Linden and the new crew who are a complete black box to me in time to get them to stop destroying the Mainland on the way to creating Sansara.

What's amazing is how the human spirit cannot be corraled. The merchant class, especially those not at the very highest end of it, responded by making malls come back in a new form: events. They put an end to freebies and non-transferable objects that people moved to out of fear of copybotting and created the gatcha game. It really is quite ingenious and testimony to the fact of how human beings will create markets and buy and sell no matter what tyrant tries to get in their way and squeeze their profits.

I have a lot more to say about the gatcha thing but I wonder if you agree that it is a sign of MP and world dysfunction.

Ultimately, the Lindens want to solve their problems -- and even ours -- with Sansara. They will be able to grab entire ready-made populations out of this world into the next -- all high-end merchants, designers, creators and scripters; all Linden Homes users; all large land barons with 100 plus or more sims; and much of the average user population that will be happier to go to a less laggy, bigger, prettier, and cheaper carnival.

I guess soon we will see what that leaves behind...

[Prokofy Neva]

@Pamela Galli

 

Re: I teach people how to open a box, how to rez a coalesced group, how to manage inventory and find things in inventory (a good percentage are not aware of the search function), how Windlight affects how things look, how to unlink a prim, how to tint things, how to reset scripts, where to find transactions, and thousands of other things. Turbosquid sellers are done when they upload their products.

Here's a thought: don't make products that require all that heavy user education.

Not just you, but the whole merchant class.

Stop putting things on "no mod" so people can tint and reset scripts, it's not rocket science.

Sell multiple well-tinted items with in the sales box itself, hey, imagine that as a concept.

Don't sell things in boxes at all -- gosh, it's hard to imagine and yet the massive re-sale market of gatcha used items let us know that the box is a concept that maybe could be retired. Imagine if you sold only the rez-faux and no box!!! Imagine a world in which this is possible!!!!

Don't make things that require Windlight to look nice (!!! are there really people who fiddle with Windlight other than a handful of fashion bloggers???)

Finally, put linked prims in rez faux. Everybody, even the newest newbie on my rentals, seems to figure out how to click a box that sprouts their prefab. 

You're exaggerating all these things, really, because some of them can be fixed by short, informative notecards and signs at the store. Oh, except you no longer have stores in the merchant class, you're all on the MP....

Finally, here's another gasping thought: hire people at SL wages. Not everyone needs a real-life wage if they are a store clerk who just gets free clothes or $500 in Lindens a day or even week so she can buy clothes. Lots of people would be happy to help others on that basis and it helps the problem of entry-level jobs for newbies.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

@Darrius Gothly, yes, long before you were born, I wrote about the Linden technocommunist hatred of land as a commodity. Philip Linden wanted it all to sell for $5/meter as a uniform, inbuilt function. I explained what is at root here in my long response above in which I said that the impulse since the dawn of the Internet of techies has been to disguise their own labor and materials cost by making other people's content free. That's why the "miracle of a free newspaper" -- a California newspaper at the time like the San Francisco Herald" that someone could download and print on their modem dial-up computer and printer was the first salvo in a destructive war of engineers against writers, artists, and publishers. What should have happened is that we paid $10 for the service of having paid programmers digitalize and upload and disseminate content. But they wanted to hide and pass on that cost to others to gin up the Internet. We are still trying to recover from the massive destruction of American business and economy from Silicon Valley, including from their political support of Obama, but the good news is that Amazon, ebay, Etsy, Facebook are all things that turn against that tide of "fee for me and free for thee" that Silicon Valley so loves.

The Lindens had their early scribe, Hamlet, aggressively lobby against land as a model. The hilarios thing is that Philip opposed it. One of the reasons I'm in the land business is that my very first day as a newbie, actually coming back on a new account after failing to get SL to work on my old computer 6 months before in 2004, was to hear a town hall addressed by Philip in which he said he was making more islands and mainland and wanted to see where "real estate dealers named Buzz swoop in on a helicopter and take newbies to look at real estate." I wanted to be that Buzz. Philip meant Buzz to be merely his engine to drive his island sales, however, not really the creation of a class in its own right.

It doesn't matter if you are a geek or if some other geek (and I have them as tenants) grasps that devaluing land and destroying the land merchant class is part of his own destruction because it means less customers and even his own store being cheaper than a direct purchase from Linden. The reality is the overwhelming majority of Silicon Valley executives and the coding class hate land and HATE HATE HATE the idea that the "land" of the Internet should be tilled by anyone else except themselves. That's why Instagram doesn't allow its customers an option to click "buy my picture and pay me" but instead calls customer content its own. That's why there is no commerce interface in Facebook where I can say "pay me to translate your post decently instead of like garbage in Google translate". And so on.

It's not "imaginary" mud but a real, documentable phenomenon that you apparently can't grasp because you haven't looked beyond Second Life to see the content businesses of real life and their related busineses, i.e. book stores and newspapers and cafes, and even video shops.

We wouldn't have to care about one class being pitted against another for their own ideological or culture reasons -- that's normal life -- if it weren't for the platform providers being part of that perniciousness and fueling it. Ebbe Linden, like all before him, took a tiny handful of his favourite friends and let them see the alpha of Sansara and build their business responses to it before anyone else, giving them a huge advantage in the marketplace. He will mainly designers and scripters to gain serious advantage to the new platform by making them eminently portable as distinct from land dealers except all but the very privileged few bulk buyers. So it's not about us being "all in this together". We're not "all in this together" and it's silly to claim it. Some are going to get very harshly screwed.

The very highly-paid scripting class -- and you're not in it -- which makes the top animations, gestures, vehicles and gears to the working of everything else (rez boxes, vendors, etc. etc.) don't have any love for land or land barons in the slightest, except to the extent that some of them can sell more vendors by its existence (and I wish they'd be more conscious of this). ALL of these people are eminently portable to a world with large sims, no geography, no sims on demand, no resale of land, and no portability of content from this world. You aren't and I'm not. Learn the difference.

You're also not telling the truth about Second Life and its history, possibly because you don't know it. The biggest campaigners against the re-sale of island parcels as "land sales" and not rent, something Linden introduced into the client, was the top gestures and animations maker. Go figure. The biggest campaigners against land costing anything, or having any value or being a sector of the economy and being reduced to mere cheap toilet paper to be rolled out mechanically were some of the top geeks of the early-adaption of SL and today's FIC. Start with the crew that handled this last "interface" with the Lab talks with Ebbe and point to one of them who has championed land barons, land, etc. versus content as a driver of the economy or even as a legitimate participant in the economy. I rest my case.

[Darrius Gothly]

(I got this one Pam)

Prok,

The people you deal with on a daily basis are a whole different class and skill level than those that Pamela (and many others, myself included) deal with. While your people can figure out that a box contains something .. and they need to get that something out somehow, a large number of people rez a purchase from SLM or in-world .. see a box and FREAK!

And if there is no box? They FREAK!

If there is no Notecard? They FREAK!

If there is a Notecard? They ignore it and FREAK!

If the instructions are displayed IN THEIR FACE upon first rez .. they close it and then ... FREAK!

No, I'm not exaggerating. I've seen it first hand .. a number of times.

People that come to you for land are no longer the naive, scared, hesitant newbies that purchased a whatever. They are reasonably skilled, have been in SL long enough to know about Land Rentals and boxes and the like. But people that purchase goods in-world and on SLM? They are the newest and greenest and need the most education.

I promise you Prok .. the people you see daily are not the same population that we see. Your solutions work for people with skill and experience. They have been tried, are being tried .. and yet are still failing to prevent the inevitable ..

 

FREAK!!

 

LOL

[Darrius Gothly]

Simple truth must be factored in Prok.

We geeks don't set the goals, rules or strive to protect our machines. We sit down at the keyboard, do the jobs given us .. and move to the next task.

Those you identify as the cause or source of the problem, are just the fingers that rode the keyboard and made stuff happen. WHAT stuff? HOW that stuff works? WHY that stuff exists? That's the duty of the pencil pushers and managers above us.

So if you insist on shooting arrows at whole classes of people, just make sure you shoot the ones driving .. not the wheels, engine or transmission. Cuz for now, you're just flattening tires, pouring sugar in the gas tank and peeing in the transmission fluid. None of which changes the way the Driver turns the wheel..

ETA: Philip was not a geek. Philip was a dreamer and a manager. He sprang from geek seeds, but he stopped being a geek and started being a Manager as soon as he conceived of his Grand Plan. Fortunately for you and many others, the Geeks managed to pull most of his plan out of the fantasy world and plant it into the one we can all use.

[ChinRey]

Just a few random comments:

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

We really are driving blind here trying to analyze the economy without any real statistics or information.

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Indeed but we do actually have quite a bit of information. We can learn a lot from observing how SL works, some information is still officially available and, ummm, well... LL is often quite "good" at accidentally slipping info that wasn't meant for the public.

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

I suggest that the 450,000 figure reveals more to us, howeve, and that is the huge number of traffic/whore/greeter/group bots in world, plus alts.

---

I don't think the bots add much to the official number of active users. We have to keep in mind the difference between how active users and concurrency is calculated here. The number of active users is how many accounts have logged on last 30 days. The concurrency is how many accounts are logged on at any given time, That means an account that is always logged on has a relatively large impact on concurrency but when it comes to the active users number it doesn't count for more than an account that logs on for a minute every month just to check messages.

Bots add a lot to the concurrency (10-20% seems like a reasonable guesstimate - might even be more) since they are always here. But there's not that many of them so they won't add much to the active users figure.

It's the only way round with alts. They probably account for more than half of the "active users" but it's not very common for somebody to log in with two accounts at the same time so they don't have much impact on the concurrency.

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Only real people spend money.

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You should tell my alts!

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Even very poor people at least get a dollar from a money tree or a game and buy a shirt with it.

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Not at all, and definitely not every month! With all the MM boards and Lucky Chairs and Group Gifts and such merchants desperately trying to drive at least some kind of traffic to their stores put up, you can easily put together a top quality avatar without spending a single L$. The only thing you have to spend money on, is land - and a mesh body if you want that of course.

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

But the figure of "3% of the resident content sales which is also $65 million" doesn't track as that would be $216 million...

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As I said, LL is often quite "good" at accidentally slipping info that wasn't meant for the public.

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Maybe they "have" to do this and therefore live with the more-than-doublers that occur, but we need to ask why.

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There has to be some sort of stepped scale, partly because land in SL comes in 16m2 chunk that can't be divided, partly for practical reasons. How big those steps should be and at what levels they should be are something that can be discussed though.

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

I use open-source rental scripts that are in theory cost free (although I've paid coders real money to improve their performance and fix their bugs over the years).

---

That's why any serious business always consider TCO rather than purchase costs. Freeware can be quite expensive in the long run.

It's a similar situation with the freebie furniture many people use to furnish their SL homes with btw. Rental prices are more about prim count than land size after all and a free 32 prim bed can be quite expensive in the long run.

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

We also don't know WHAT the discount is that the big land barons get. If we knew that, we could figure how much they cost the economy, or cost Linden

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I won't actually regard that only as a cost. It is much cheaper for a company to deal with a few large customers than with many small ones and that's why we have quantity discounts.

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

My guess is that they get 50% and they are easily ported, but that leaves many of us in the dust.

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50%? yes, that sounds like a reasonable figure and with that we're talking about a genuine cost for LL. And of coruse, it is a serious problem for any small time or newly established rental business who simply can't compete with those big operators on price. And if that wasn't enough, it's not really good enough for the big land barons either, they'll need a far bigger discount than that to run a healthy business.

That's the quagmire the overinflated tiers have brought us all into and the only solution is to reduce the overall price level of land in SL.

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Linden Homes are a success for Lindens because they create real green dots...

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I think that should be created green dots. You don't see many of them in the Linden Home ghettos these days.

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

There's more I want to say about the problem of the analysis of telehubs based on fallacious information and the problem of the Lindens' view of their own content production (the Moles and others) -- they don't view this as world glue or helpful for community; as I learned from Ebbe when I met him more than a year ago, he views it merely as a load test for his software.

---

I hope he has learned otherwise since then. But yes, this brings up two of the essential problems with Linden Lab today:

They don't understand building anymore. They must have in the earlier days. The first few years they had some top notch content creators on their staff. Then LDPW came along and did a great job for a long time untill they plummeted into depths so deep and dark that not even somebody named "moles" should have to go there. The Moles have started to recover now but this change has yet to show up at LL as a whole. I've all but given up having any kind of meaningful conversation about building related topics with Lindens. It's not that they aren't helpful and positive, they are! But even witth he most basic topics, it's just so frustratingly impossible to break through that wall of sheer incomprehension!

And they don't really seem to regard SL as a world anymore. Unfortunately, they seem to be in line with the majority of users there. Second Life today is not about having a big virtual reality, it's about having the coolest looking avatar. SL has become very much a forum for solipsism. That's sad for many reasons. It's sad because so many people never get to see all the wonderful gems that are still scattered about the place. It's sad because at the end of the day the large continuous landscape is the only thing that really makes SL different from all the other virtual realities of all kinds. And it's sad because it goes against everything I believe Second Life was meant to be.

 

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

I have a lot more to say about the gatcha thing but I wonder if you agree that it is a sign of MP and world dysfunction.

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I don't know. I regard it as a lottery at a tivoli. The prizes are garbage but playing can be fun. I can easily understand why people get addicted to it. Then there is the collection aspect of course. Well, some people collect vintage Tupperware, some people collect gacha prizes. Same thing really.

[ChinRey]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

Here's a thought: don't make products that require all that heavy user education.

Not just you, but the whole merchant class.

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Yes, that is good advice to many merchants. But Prok, I happen to know that Pamela doesn't make any of those mistakes you list and she still has problems with buyers who can't be bothered to read even the simplest manual nor figure out even the most basics for themselves.

[Pamela Galli]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

@Pamela Galli

 

Re:

I teach people how to open a box, how to rez a coalesced group, how to manage inventory and find things in inventory (a good percentage are not aware of the search function), how Windlight affects how things look, how to unlink a prim, how to tint things, how to reset scripts, where to find transactions, and thousands of other things. Turbosquid sellers are done when they upload their products.

Here's a thought: don't make products that require all that heavy user education.

Not just you, but the whole merchant class.

Stop putting things on "no mod" so people can tint and reset scripts, it's not rocket science.

Sell multiple well-tinted items with in the sales box itself, hey, imagine that as a concept.

Don't sell things in boxes at all -- gosh, it's hard to imagine and yet the massive re-sale market of gatcha used items let us know that the box is a concept that maybe could be retired. Imagine if you sold only the rez-faux and no box!!! Imagine a world in which this is possible!!!!

Don't make things that require Windlight to look nice (!!! are there really people who fiddle with Windlight other than a handful of fashion bloggers???)

Finally, put linked prims in rez faux. Everybody, even the newest newbie on my rentals, seems to figure out how to click a box that sprouts their prefab. 

You're exaggerating all these things, really, because some of them can be fixed by short, informative notecards and signs at the store. Oh, except you no longer have stores in the merchant class, you're all on the MP....

Finally, here's another gasping thought: hire people at SL wages. Not everyone needs a real-life wage if they are a store clerk who just gets free clothes or $500 in Lindens a day or even week so she can buy clothes. Lots of people would be happy to help others on that basis and it helps the problem of entry-level jobs for newbies.

 

---

1. My stuff is all mod. Many things are light neutral colors so people can tint them any color they like. 

2. I have Help notecards, help blog pages, and a Tip of the Week, most all about SL in general. For my kitchens, which are the only feature-rich thing I sell,  I have a help HUD that connects to a website.

3. My things look nice in any Windlight, they just look different in different Windlights. 

4. I pay my assistant $L5200 an hour, and she is worth it. I need someone with a wide variety of skills who can manage and market the store and help customers while I create and supervise, and to whom I can give my login info, and this is the one person on the planet who fits that description. 

5. My store is 4 adjacent sims.

I am a former teacher, and one thing I do very, very well is write crystal clear instructions.

 Bottom line is you don't know anything about me or how I run my business. My point, which you missed entirely, is that my assistant and I spend a great deal of time providing general SL education, which Turbosquid sellers do not. 

[Prokofy Neva]

Darrius Gothly You couldn't be more wrong. I don't have a different class of people as customers; I have many of the same, and they overlap. I have very brand-new people who haven't even heard what a prim is; I have oldbies that have been here for 10 years but haven't been out much.

It's not true that people who rent from me are more experienced seasoned people, midbies and oldbies. I specialize in cheap Mainland rentals with starter communities and therefore I get people literally off the boat some days -- they land and see an ad for $1/prim land and they come. They may come after 30 days or 60 days when they get their feet wet. But they aren't the customer class you imagine out of ignorance of my business which is an open book.

Just because your notion of a rental business is limited to "no boxes" and only right clicking on rental boxes or doesn't mean it's valid. My business involves selling content, commissioning and reselling content, helping customers of the merchants of stores on my land who have content in boxes, and just generally answering questions to the clueless.

There is no objective reason why a product needs ALWAYS to be put in a box, and the gadzillions numbers of gatcha sales by new and old, clueless and savy, with no box should speedily put the lie to all that. 

Mesh has made the box be questioned if not on the way to obsolesence. Boxes existed because of the need to house linked prims that often took up too much space on a sim; rez faux diminished that need and now mesh, with less prims, diminishes it even more.

Gatcha makers deliberately out of some perverse sense of control and delusion usually put their boxes on "no copy" and "no mod" so that you can never put an item back in a box

So that rapidly you not only lets you know their attitude toward their customers, but lets you know you can dispense with them and their boxes, too. Many people in fact browsing vast gatcha markets want to see things out of the box because they are end-users and not flippers; other want proof of the pristine and authentic status of the item in the form of a box. But it's really half and half or really more in fact out of the box by the time you get into months after an event and people are letting stuff go at bargain bin rates.

I think you probably haven't been shopping in the gatcha market and that's why you don't grasp this.

Boxes exist primarily for merchants -- they want to push a landmark on you, a notecard, maybe an ad of some kind, whatever. Lots of this is unnecessary. You've already been pushed a landmark against your will landing at a store as they seldom make this voluntary. I know of some particular merchants including some scourges of the forums who have a REALLY ANNOYING custom of forcing a landmark to emerge out of every box you open, or push a landmark on you after every purchase in a store (where you already got one) or event (where you didn't but you don't care). I stop buying from merchants that inflict a landmark automatically on me each time I open their box again.

Sure, notecards are nice with instruction manual but most people don't read them, as I know from very vast experience with rental notecards of which I have dozens of forms which you can't possibly imagine.

I find that to repeat information that is vital for people -- like joining a group to set prims -- you need triadic repetition of the narrative, as in all human societies from time immemorial which is why fairy tales have triadic repetition of the narrative. So you tell them on the rental box; in a notecard giver on site; on the box itself; in a FAQs you push on them; and in a separate manual message if you still don't see them -- see, five times because three is not enough.

It's precisely because the inability of most people to absorb information that they didn't get from a line-by-line personal, live interactive real-time contact with you that I double and quadruple it because maybe something will stick.

The notion that my "solutions work for people with skill and experience" is so hilariously laughable that I don't even know where to begin, and it's so emblematic of how out of touch opinionated people on the forums are about the world (and the Lindens behind the forums) because they don't have on-the-ground experience.

Thousands of customers pass through my groups, rentals, malls, stores, games, gatcha sales, etc. etc. This is a tiny operation but it still generates many customers because they are small $35 stalls, $50 short-term rentals; $1 sales; etc. etc. So I see what new people do -- and believe me, I find people who don't even know how to search in Google or even right click as distinct from left click. Language issues are also often a problem and I readily translate into languages using online services or ask them to.

I had a relative new person stand in exasperation after a nearly hour-long tutorial about prims, meters, groups, teleporters, right-clicking, animations loading, etc. etc. "Why do I need a Ph.D. in physics to use this world?!" Indeed. She's not the problem and my "ignorance" or my "failure to have unskilled customers" you imagine are not the problem. What is the problem is the persistent nastiness of geeks and designers in failing to realize that they need to change, they need to adapt to customers, and they need to stop inflicting idiocy on us.

I am really tired of all of these merchants tied to one big vendor who blast me with landmarks over and over again; force boxes on me I can't re-open and notecards I can't even see because they forgot to put permissions on them; and excess junk. It's not uncommon these days to find a merchant who has boxed a prefab in a box; inside that box which is kind of a big ad is another box; inside THAT box is a rez faux. Or there's a rez-faux, and other things like furniture. Excess packaging is part of excess advertising and that's the issue.

As for you second post with the ignorant statements about Philip Rosedale, he isn't a geek-turned-manager. He's an engineer with a degree in physics and interest in neural networks. For a time he applied his scientific knowledge to business with mixed results. Now he is back *engineering* a complex virtual world and managing a team of engineers. 

What needs to change here is the persistent delusion of some in the merchant and coding class that they are right and the rest of the world is wrong. They need to learn what geeks and designers in real companies in the real world like Microsoft or IBM have to learn: the meaning of customer requirements and customer service.

[Prokofy Neva]

@Pamela Galli It doesn't take rocket science to follow your business when you are so vocal on the forums. It's great if YOU put things on mod but the default of many is NOT to and its vexsome.

HUDs that connext to websites are among the most complicated things in Second Life. I have tenants that avidly follow breedables that have HUDs and websites, or various appliers or other trees with HUDs and websites, and they get very confused, very frustrated, even spending hours adapting to them, constantly learning new things. I can think of certain products that simply faltered and lost their customers when they started website interaction with inworld links.

It's great of you pay your assistant a living wage. But you don't HAVE to do that and can't complain about the difficulties of your class of people in SL when you could spend 10% of that and both provide jobs in the economy and help your customers. This isn't a real society where people's jobs are tied to their food and shelter. It's an entertainment economy where jobs are offsets to make people cash to pursue their own enjoyment.

Of course, merchants often live in a completely different world than the rest of us inworlders and in fact function as real-world businesses/designers/merchants with real wages in the thousands of US dollars and that's precisely why they are so insensitive, impervious to fresh information, and in denial of the facts of people in the tiny micro-economy called "Mainland" or "inworld" on the islands. There's room for a variety of kinds of merchants of course but what's always been a chronic failure of Second Life is the inability of Linden and its chosen partners in the high-end merchant class to understand the rest of the world they've created and its dynamics -- even though their livelihood depends on it, too.

Gosh, I grasped your point about Turboquid but Mon Dieux I *disagreed* with it. Services like Turbosquid or say image services like Colour Box which I use don't have any interactions or at least, you don't need them if you can read a page half the size of your hand. They aren't selling 3D complext interactive items that break down; they're selling flat, inert models or textures. That's why it's an inept comparison. A buyer at Turbosquid doesn't have to figure out how to place a prefab house on rocky, unterraformable land with Linden land on autoreturn around him. A buyer at Turbosquid buys a 3-D model of a cat but doesn't have to figure out how to have it eat and breed. And so on.

There's always a drive by those who make "their real-life livings" in SL to diminish it as "a platform" and "not a world" or to claim it's no different than other online businesses whether Etsy or Amazon. That's not true. I don't buy a used book on Amazon because the person is my neighbour on a sim or we are sharing a rock concert together. 

[ChinRey]

I both sell some of my builds and rent out some of my land and I can assure you all that the user support workload is about the same for both. No point arguing about who's the most miserable here.

It's not really misery either, really. For each customer who harass you with stupid questions - or even problems not related to your product at all - there are ten nice customers with genuinely valid questions and comments. And quite often good ideas too, I keep making improvements both to my rentals and my builds as direct results of user feedback.

What is a stupid question anyway? Second Life is complicated and the user interface is hardly made for the benefit of the end-user. Then of course there's the language barrier. Clear instructions in plain English aren't always enough. This reminds me of what a friend replied when I complained about how user-unfriendly Second Life is: "The users have to be friendly to each other then."

No matter how you look at it, if you want to run a serious business, you need to provide sufficient customer support, even Linden Lab is beginning to realize that now. Personally I don't regard that as something inherently negative, quite the contrary, I see it as one of the most positive parts of the job. It does take time though. Time is money and for a typical Second Life business the margins are indeed marginal if they exist at all.

As Prok so cynically said, internet business is usually based on the principle of selling other people's freebies. That doesn't work in Second Life and it will not work in Sansar because both need so much and so specialized content there is no way they can find enough naive nice content creators who are willing and able to give their work away for free.

I think the real question both we and LL should discuss is: How can Linden Lab ensure that enough of the revenue stream is channeled to the content creators and service providers to make it economically viable for them?

[Darrius Gothly]

Wow! Umm .. okay. Gosh Prok, I had NO idea you were the only one on this planet .. and in this Virtual World .. that possessed intelligence. So sorry to have imposed my lack of understanding on one so amazingly aware of every facet of the human experience.

NOT!!

Lets begin with your insistence that I am a member of this imaginary class of Evil Geeks that you so detest. Somehow I am also a member of the FIC, the beneficiary of insider info, and a contributor to the failure of Second Life. If not for the fact that you've maintained this delusion for years now, I would be worried that you've begun to fall under the effects of some form of paranoia. You seem to have a very complete (in your mind) understandng of both me and how I run my business. In fact, you have a complete and total picture of how everyone runs their business.

Based on .. what? A few purchases you have made from others that upset you somehow. Have you ever actually purchased any of my products? Have you ever contacted me for any form of customer support? Have you spoken with anyone who did? Well then, you speak from a place of complete ignorance. Nuff said about that.

You have no qualm heaping derision on others for having products and methods so complicated and obtuse that they must spend hours unconfusing customers, and then in nearly the same breath you extoll your own virtues because you (and you alone) are able to spend hours unconfusing customers. Wait .. what? Ohhh .. it's because it's YOU that it's okay. Anyone else with customers that need help, it's the Merchant's fault. But your customers that need help? That's the Customer's fault. Exactly when is it your fault? Never? Gotcha.

As someone who trumpets her extensive "(second) life experience", you are totally ignorant and wrong on the reason boxes exist. You completely bypass the truth that boxes are the one and only method available ... due to technical reasons beyond the Merchant's control .. that can be used to make deliveries from in-world devices to anywhere on the Grid. And yet in this overly self-absorbed imagination you base your proclamations on, Merchants somehow invented the Box as a means of enforcing Mind Control on unwitting soon-to-be zombies.

You slam Merchants that overstuff their evil Boxes .. the Mind Control ones of course .. with Notecards and Landmarks, all of which are in your words "unnecessary". You heap every Merchant into the class of evil promoters of social decay because they seldom allow you to enter their stores without force feeding landmarks and things on you upon entry.

And THEN you go off about people needing "triadic repetition of the narrative". So explain to me why it's evil for others to put multiple forms of information in their product packaging, but yet necessary for customers to have multiple avenues of information exposure to truly master a concept? Which side of your mouth are you going to spit venom from next?

I am not really surprised though that you are (apparently) using Rental Boxes that need individual notecards to operate. Your unreasoning fear of anyone that dares to push the envelope, or that has the temerity to disagree with you, leads to a situation in which you must spend hours tending to notecards that need updating .. instead of using a system with advances that are designed to make it easier .. to understand and to manage.

I am left with one further conclusion .. and this is based on statistical theory. When one person has nothing but bad experiences with every one, every thing and every situation .. without any exceptions .. then that one person is the source of the bad experiences. If you are the only constant in the equation, and the equation constantly turns out bad answers .. then the constant is the problem.

Against my better judgement, I posted originally in hopes that I could nudge your toward a more realistic and accurate evaluation of the situation .. ALL of the situation. But sadly, you have once again proven that you will only make pronouncements based on one or two examples, bad-mouth entire groups of people based on a few you don't like, and generally declare anyone not in exact agreement as members of the Dark Underground of Techno Communists working to ensure your destruction. (Which you have masterfully avoided despite ALL the best efforts of your enemies. Kudos!)

I have again thrown hope to the wind, tried to give you a bit more insight into the full complexity of the situation, and spent time giving you many examples of what else goes on. And once again you have proven to me (and many others I suspect) that you have no desire nor intention of looking at reality, only firing your invectives at innocent people based solely on your own prejudiced and paranoid view of the world.

And I leave you with this. Perhaps you might take the time to read and learn what really happens in those rare spaces of Reality outside your immediate view:

http://www.dgp4sl.com/wp/2015/11/the-rewards-of-customer-service/

 

[Prokofy Neva]

@ChinRey It doesn't matter, because instead of saying "I do this, but I recognize my fellow merchants don't and yes, it's a problem," she continues to maintain that because she does it, anybody else criticizing other pernicious practices must be wrong. Furthermore, I made an extremely salient point: boxes are not needed as much as they imagine, and don't even really serve a purpose in the age of mesh, and yet there is a clinging to them mainly to overpackage and over advertise.

Re: your other post:

1. Have you looked at Zindra or most store sims? There are way more bots that you may imagine.
2. Your alts are real people and spend money because you do as a legal person. We don't know how many alts there are in SL but 450,000 is not a big number. More importantly, the numbers for people who might wish to get into, say, the island renting business are even far smaller -- the number of people willing to spend $25 US inworld is tens of thousands, so you can see the problem with the oversaturated land market.
3. It doesn't matter if you can put together outfits by scavenging freebies. That's not relevant. A LOT of people don't do that. I don't know what kind of customers you see. But I can tell you that just as in real life you can see well-dressed poor people with cell phones because those are their priorities, so in SL you can see very poor people from third-world countries dressed to the nines in the latest mesh.
4. You need to distinguish between your need to rectify what your imagine are my "wrong" points and the larger picture here, which is *using these numbers to judge the economy*. You could plan for a business that might get the $25 US market when you know how big that market is. Now you don't, full stop.
5. I'll say for the gadzillionth time that the "16 meter size" is merely an artifact of the geek mind and the server partition. There is absolutely no reason in hell this can't have a wrapper around it of a different size.
6. There aren't good mesh freebies, there are only $25 gatchas, and the mesh freebie as an artifact for newbie furniture has yet to really appear in the world. But scouring gatcha sales and looking for bargains is a good way to furnish a home.
7. The problem isn't THAT the Lindens have bulk discounts, which any company of any size with any diverse customer base has. The problem is that it is NOT transparent and is part of politics rather than an open market. When I go to a blogging platform, I know that if I pay $9.99 a month I get X size and storage but if I buy multiple blogs for $14.95 I get X server space. LL should print on their website what you get off if you buy 10 or 50 or 100 sims and not make it a negotiated secret without clear-cut criteria.
8. You're absolutely wrong about Linden Homes. Fly out to them and look all over them. Look at the map. Plenty of green dots. Sure, empties, too, but more green dots per sim than most island rentals or mainland rentals.
9. When Ebbe says his Moles make content not for the world but to load test his software, he really isn't kidding. The plummet isn't about the people who do the Moles job; it's about LL having decided that content and world building is Not For Us and just using it as a load testing. Seriously, pay attention. Other than a few Linden realm games there isn't much new Mole content and they are laid off.

10: "It's sad because at the end of the day the large continuous landscape is the only thing that really makes SL different from all the other virtual realities of all kinds. And it's sad because it goes against everything I believe Second Life was meant to be."

Well, yeah. That's the problem. And this is all now going to be not only defunct but disparaged. It would be one thing if LL still saw a value in it and got out of its way if not promoted it. It doesn't, and is in danger of total deprecation.

The prizes in the gatchas are in fact not garbage at all. And the collection impulse that humans have hard-wired in them is very much tapped here and is a driver for some to make fantastic sums. I think you should look at it more and visit the many events they have like Arcade or Shabby Shiny or 6 Republic or Lost & Found. All of these things have replaced large telehub malls and post-telehub giant stores.