Could Linden Lab even clean up Second Life if they wanted to?

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

That depends, I suppose, how one interprets the prohibition on "derogatory or demeaning language or images based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion or sexual orientation" in the Community Standards document (which is a sort of subsection of the ToS.

In practice, LL has demonstrated that they are very concerned about the representation of inappropriate activities involving minors, quite concerned about overt racism, a little concerned about attacks on LGBTQ+ identities . . . and not much concerned about anything else. (The idea that they care at all about demeaning language relating to gender is, frankly, a hoot.)

You can find -- I have found, and you can too if you spend about 15 minutes searching certain terms in-world on the MP -- a pretty substantial variety of things that violate all of these things. But I'm not going to get into the details here for all sorts of reasons -- honestly, Arielle, you should have come to my exhibit on "Virtual Toxic"! Next time, I'll send you an invite!

However, the issues are wider than just what is or isn't allowed by the ToS. It's also about how these behaviours are structured, so to speak. Which is why we are now talking about the rating system.

Well now that you define what you find objectionable and reasonings for it, I agree to some degree, but then like you am Canadian and I think culturally we are not as open to violence and coercion as our neighbours to the south where S/L is located. A rating system that includes a violence factor could be a good thing because even if personally it doesn't trigger me, it does make me go eww.

[Sammy Huntsman]

11 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Well now that you define what you find objectionable and reasonings for it, I agree to some degree, but then like you am Canadian and I think culturally we are not as open to violence and coercion as our neighbours to the south where S/L is located. A rating system that includes a violence factor could be a good thing because even if personally it doesn't trigger me, it does make me go eww.

Maybe have sim owners put disclaimers, stating what is in there. And if you don't want to see this, it's not the sim for you. That should be enough. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

28 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Well now that you define what you find objectionable and reasonings for it, I agree to some degree, but then like you am Canadian and I think culturally we are not as open to violence and coercion as our neighbours to the south where S/L is located. A rating system that includes a violence factor could be a good thing because even if personally it doesn't trigger me, it does make me go eww.

When I was putting together my first exhibition on this subject, "Is This Turning You On," back in 2010, I spent about 3 months not merely exploring, but actually using many of the devices and animations that were current back then to represent extreme sexual violence. We're talking dismemberment, gynophagia, snuff, torture p*rn . . . the really extreme stuff. I needed to know how they worked, what it "felt" like using them . . . and I needed pics for my exhibit. I was very fortunate that my SL bf at that time was as supportive as he was, and helped me with it . . . and getting over it.

The "ewwww" reaction was pronounced for about the first month of doing this stuff, but I got over that as I became more accustomed to it. What took me a lot longer to get over was the sense of . . . I'm seriously not sure how to describe it. It was upsetting (and the more so because I used my own avatar, with which I did, and still do, identify strongly), but also sort of deadening after a while.

Now, that's me. Others respond to it, obviously differently -- sometimes very differently. But it's really not a coincidence that I more or less left SL about 4 months later.

My last exhibit was a bit different, and not quite so intense, but even then, I had to do some serious detox for about a month or two after.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Maybe have sim owners put disclaimers, stating what is in there. And if you don't want to see this, it's not the sim for you. That should be enough. 

Actually, most of them do that already -- as a form of advertising the attractions available there. But much of it is in coded language, and it's not always evident how public this stuff is, or how graphic.

[Sammy Huntsman]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Actually, most of them do that already -- as a form of advertising the attractions available there. But much of it is in coded language, and it's not always evident how public this stuff is, or how graphic.

Then have LL update with a disclaimer box. So people can put stuff in there to warn residents of stuff that could be there and to stay away if they find it  offensive. 

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Then have LL update with a disclaimer box. So people can put stuff in there to warn residents of stuff that could be there and to stay away if they find it  offensive. 

 

Why would they do that voluntarily?

[Sammy Huntsman]

I don't understand why people are wanting to put the entire responsibility of certain offensive or traumatic events on LL. When they can easily go to the sim, see that it may offend or traumatize them. And just teleport out 

[Sammy Huntsman]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Why would they do that voluntarily?

Why make it the responsibility of linden lab. When you as a person could go there see something you don't like and go away. It's just like the whole YouTube fiasco that bugged me. People got offended by content and instead of exiting out and finding another video to watch. They reported these videos to the point that YouTube made it's platform family friendly. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Sammy Huntsman said:

I don't understand why people are wanting to put the entire responsibility of certain offensive or traumatic events on LL. When they can easily go to the sim, see that it may offend or traumatize them. And just teleport out 

Sammy, in many cases if they see it, the damage has already been done.

That's like suggesting that if someone hits you, you can just walk away so it doesn't happen again. Except . . . you've already been hit.

[Sammy Huntsman]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Sammy, in many cases if they see it, the damage has already been done.

That's like suggesting that if someone hits you, you can just walk away so it doesn't happen again. Except . . . you've already been hit.

So how would you change the rating system? 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Sammy Huntsman said:

So how would you change the rating system? 

I would add, as I've suggested, a rating for extreme violence. That rating would be alongside the current G, M, and A ratings. If you see a sim that is Adult, and has an extreme violence rating, you'd know that that was not the place to go if you wanted a vanilla hookup, and didn't want to be exposed to someone being dismembered or r*ped.

It would work the other way too. If you were looking for CARP, this would make it easier to find.

It empowers everyone to make more informed choices.

[Persephone Emerald]

19 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I would add, as I've suggested, a rating for extreme violence. That rating would be alongside the current G, M, and A ratings. If you see a sim that is Adult, and has an extreme violence rating, you'd know that that was not the place to go if you wanted a vanilla hookup, and didn't want to be exposed to someone being dismembered or r*ped.

It would work the other way too. If you were looking for CARP, this would make it easier to find.

It empowers everyone to make more informed choices.

Check the Ratings descriptions. I'm pretty sure that graphic violence already has to be in Adult areas.

[ValKalAstra]

Could Linden Lab clean up Second Life? On a theoretical level, obviously. Shut off the platform. Done. Not being snippy with that reply. It's just my opinion that as long as two people have got a way to interact with one another, they will find ways to make it sexual. The most basic example that comes to mind is tea-bagging in competitive games, where the simple act of repeatedly crouching your avatar is meant to simulate a demeaning sexual act. People will find ways to make things sexual.

The next aspect would be moderation and AI systems. The moderation required to permanently watch all users for proper behaviour would quickly escalate past the point of feasibility and it would be a proper privacy nightmare to boot. Automated AI systems on the other hand are a struggle of precision and accuracy. If you want to catch 100% of something, they will misfire. A lot. Here's an example of an image that current AI systems tend to trip over.

Yeaaaaah. Very raunchy. Case in bloody point, the image host it is uploaded to considers this NSFW. Yeh. So if you tweak the AI systems to NOT catch something like this, they will also miss outright pornographic imagery. AI at this point in time is laughably bad and overhyped for what it can and will actually do and that's coming from someone that once wrote machine learning code to analyse her own prose.

So what *could* SL do? Well that is the thing. Let's say LindenLab decides to take a more proactive stance on moderating adult content, they don't actually need to catch every single instance of seedy conduct. Using something like the panopticon theory shows that you don't need to *actually* watch Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (but you should, good absurdist movie :P), just create the illusion that at any point in time someone *might* be watching. That leads to a self-disciplining effect where people watch their own behaviour and adjust it because they can never quite know when the watchful eye lands on them. Come down hard on some prolific cases and the effect will quickly ripple outwards.

Would SL be the same afterwards? Doubtful. Could it survive something like that? Well, Tumblr survived the porn ban. OF quickly paddled back when things went up in flames. The coin could land on either side. Will SL always have got the choice? In my opinion the platform is one media article away from a wildfire and ultimately, something like MasterCard and Visa could very well force LindenLab to comply.

Now all theoretical deliberations aside, my personal opinion on this is ambivalent. My first experience with SL around 2 years ago or so was... off-putting and awful. After leaving the tutorial place, I landed in some social hub and the first thing I saw was a very childlike avatar in translucent lingerie licking phallic shaped Ice-cream. Not even two minutes later, some naked guy ran up to me and played a bunch of sexually harassing animations while moaning into his microphone. Luckily a friend was there to teleport me away but that onboarding experience was nearly enough to let me log out and never come back.

However here is the curious part: I've only ever had these kind of experiences in places where newbies are bound to flock. Places focused on Adult Content were very careful about content and consent. Yeah it's true that looking for adult entertainment in SL very quickly shows you all the ways that people fantasise about what British Broadcasting Corporation do to young mothers, it'll prove that not all roads lead to Rome - but apparently they lead to the farm and that there are a lot of people that are really into family values. But these are opt-in. Go there if you search for it and want it. Yet among all these, there's a common and shared theme. A certain type of content is actively banned.

In my personal opinion in this novel of a comment:

Could they? Maybe. It would burn down swaths of SL and get a lot of innocents in the crossfire. Should they? In part. LL should be way more vigilant about what happens in places newbies are funnelled into. While I don't agree with all of the adult places and sometimes feel grossed out seeing them in the list - I simply opt to not go there.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Check the Ratings descriptions. I'm pretty sure that graphic violence already has to be in Adult areas.

Yes, but not all adult areas involve graphic violence. In fact, the vast majority do not.

So, again, someone wanting to go to an adult sim for whatever reason cannot currently ascertain whether there is violence there.

[Persephone Emerald]

29 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

I don't understand why people are wanting to put the entire responsibility of certain offensive or traumatic events on LL. When they can easily go to the sim, see that it may offend or traumatize them. And just teleport out 

Sammy, it's not just about seeing something one doesn't like and then leaving. I can do that without what I've seen traumatizing me or giving me nightmares. If this happens to someone who's suffered RL violence however, just seeing it can trigger a PTSD reaction. This is true for people who've experienced RL sexual violence, non-sexual violence, been in a war zone, or seen someone killed or nearly killed in RL. It's kind of like how flashing lights can trigger a seizer, because they can't control how their mind will react to being reminded of the incident, so they need to be warned ahead of time to avoid being triggered. 

[animats]

I'm more worried about moderators with ban hammers and immunity for their actions. Roblox and Facebook/Meta have huge numbers of outsourced moderators, and it doesn't help all that much. Second Life spreads out the moderation task to landowners, and this works better than giving low-paid employees police powers.

I've been writing a paper on how SL got sex in the metaverse right. Haven't yet decided if I want to publish it. Creating adult areas moves most of the sex-related activity there. That solves most of the problem. Visibly having sex in non-adult areas is frowned upon by SL's users. That solves most of the remaining problem. The remainder is people being jerks, and that can be treated as ordinary griefing.

SL's reputation in mainstream media is more of a problem than what actually happens in SL. SL really needs to get out from under the Twitch ban. Not by caving in to Twitch, but by pointing out that Horizons and Roblox have worse problems. They don't have adult areas to which sexual activity is contained. So there's no easy way to sort the videos by rating.

“Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” - H. L. Menckin.

 

 

[Persephone Emerald]

10 minutes ago, ValKalAstra said:

Could Linden Lab clean up Second Life? On a theoretical level, obviously. Shut off the platform. Done. Not being snippy with that reply. It's just my opinion that as long as two people have got a way to interact with one another, they will find ways to make it sexual. The most basic example that comes to mind is tea-bagging in competitive games, where the simple act of repeatedly crouching your avatar is meant to simulate a demeaning sexual act. People will find ways to make things sexual.

The next aspect would be moderation and AI systems. The moderation required to permanently watch all users for proper behaviour would quickly escalate past the point of feasibility and it would be a proper privacy nightmare to boot. Automated AI systems on the other hand are a struggle of precision and accuracy. If you want to catch 100% of something, they will misfire. A lot. Here's an example of an image that current AI systems tend to trip over.

Yeaaaaah. Very raunchy. Case in bloody point, the image host it is uploaded to considers this NSFW. Yeh. So if you tweak the AI systems to NOT catch something like this, they will also miss outright pornographic imagery. AI at this point in time is laughably bad and overhyped for what it can and will actually do and that's coming from someone that once wrote machine learning code to analyse her own prose.

So what *could* SL do? Well that is the thing. Let's say LindenLab decides to take a more proactive stance on moderating adult content, they don't actually need to catch every single instance of seedy conduct. Using something like the panopticon theory shows that you don't need to *actually* watch Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (but you should, good absurdist movie :P), just create the illusion that at any point in time someone *might* be watching. That leads to a self-disciplining effect where people watch their own behaviour and adjust it because they can never quite know when the watchful eye lands on them. Come down hard on some prolific cases and the effect will quickly ripple outwards.

Would SL be the same afterwards? Doubtful. Could it survive something like that? Well, Tumblr survived the porn ban. OF quickly paddled back when things went up in flames. The coin could land on either side. Will SL always have got the choice? In my opinion the platform is one media article away from a wildfire and ultimately, something like MasterCard and Visa could very well force LindenLab to comply.

Now all theoretical deliberations aside, my personal opinion on this is ambivalent. My first experience with SL around 2 years ago or so was... off-putting and awful. After leaving the tutorial place, I landed in some social hub and the first thing I saw was a very childlike avatar in translucent lingerie licking phallic shaped Ice-cream. Not even two minutes later, some naked guy ran up to me and played a bunch of sexually harassing animations while moaning into his microphone. Luckily a friend was there to teleport me away but that onboarding experience was nearly enough to let me log out and never come back.

However here is the curious part: I've only ever had these kind of experiences in places where newbies are bound to flock. Places focused on Adult Content were very careful about content and consent. Yeah it's true that looking for adult entertainment in SL very quickly shows you all the ways that people fantasise about what British Broadcasting Corporation do to young mothers, it'll prove that not all roads lead to Rome - but apparently they lead to the farm and that there are a lot of people that are really into family values. But these are opt-in. Go there if you search for it and want it. Yet among all these, there's a common and shared theme. A certain type of content is actively banned.

In my personal opinion in this novel of a comment:

Could they? Maybe. It would burn down swaths of SL and get a lot of innocents in the crossfire. Should they? In part. LL should be way more vigilant about what happens in places newbies are funnelled into. While I don't agree with all of the adult places and sometimes feel grossed out seeing them in the list - I simply opt to not go there.

Your initial experience in an area intended for new users was off-putting. It seems to me then that LL should focus on moderating new users areas. It makes no sense to let new users be scared off. The rest of us can guard ourselves from things we don't want to experience, but newbies need a bit more protection and guidance.

[Akane Nacht]

Depends what your definition of clean is going to be... a lot of the sexual content I've come across is consenting adult stuff, with some eyebrow raising fetishes but on the whole it's too cartoony to be alarming. For things like gambling or glorification of drug use, this might run into problems with some jurisdictions (outside the US) who don't understand that SL doesn't force-feed any content (unlike typical games), you have to go looking for it.

The thing I'd like to have cleaned up personally are adverts for sex related, fetish, drug related items on MP. If those are not in-your-face as much, so long as SL is explicitly an Adult Place, it should be ok.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Akane Nacht
pesky grammar

[CandyCole]

One of the worst things about THIS forum is that in order to participate you MUST use an actual SL avatar user account to do so. That in turn threatens your ability to log in to the SL world itself if you fall foul of any forum rules. They are one and the same.

What this results in is people potentially feeling the need to tip-toe around words and/or descriptions used within this forum and feeling gagged in how any subject which may fall within this topic can be described. Nobody has actually stated categorically what they are talking about without using cryptic means. Much of this topic I do not understand.

I often wonder how many people use a throw-away SL account in order to participate more freely on this forum versus those using an account which has many years and lindens worth of investment. If you are the latter then your freedom of speech is definitely hindered.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

10 minutes ago, CandyCole said:

One of the worst things about THIS forum is that in order to participate you MUST use an actual SL avatar user account to do so. That in turn threatens your ability to log in to the SL world itself if you fall foul of any forum rules. They are one and the same.

What this results in is people potentially feeling the need to tip-toe around words and/or descriptions used within this forum and feeling gagged in how any subject which may fall within this topic can be described.

That, as they say, is a feature, not a bug.

The forum may be about many things -- community, information about the platform, making friends, discussing interesting (and now, SL-related only) issues -- but it's never been about "freedom of speech," at least as an absolute.

[Akane Nacht]

16 minutes ago, CandyCole said:

Nobody has actually stated categorically what they are talking about without using cryptic means.

I'm not even sure what some of the fetish stuff I've seen on MP is called ... and I don't want to describe it 😬

[Rowan Amore]

LL could easily clean up the platform per their own ToS so the only question would be why they don't.  Money.

 

6.1 You will not post or transmit prohibited Content, including any Content that is illegal, harassing or violates any person's rights.

You agree that you will not:

(v) Post, display, or transmit Content that is obscene, hateful, involves terrorism, or is racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; or

(vi) Post, display or transmit any Content or conduct or host any activity that is sexually explicit, or intensely violent.

[Love Zhaoying]

Idea: If a massive cleanup were needed, LL could have "AR Parties" with "finders fees" in L$! (Bounties)

[Coffee Pancake]

6 hours ago, CandyCole said:

I often wonder how many people use a throw-away SL account in order to participate more freely on this forum versus those using an account which has many years and lindens worth of investment.

Many.

[Qie Niangao]

8 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Public perception is very hard to change, especially if it's been a certain way for years or decades.

TOS updates or even actually enforcing them won't magically make people think SL isn't full of weirdos.

Yeah. What's the practical upside to further restricting Adult content now, at this late date? What new users will find SL and feel more at ease visiting Adult regions because they have no risk of encountering something especially offensive? (Without knowing the specific offensive content, I guess it could be so heinous that even the "Adult" label isn't warning enough.) But how many more residents would SL have if that were the case? 

It's a wholly different and quite academic discussion, what range of challenging content is best for a hypothetical virtual world starting from a blank slate. But the topic is SL, and its business inertia much constrains the potential effects of any change.

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yes, but not all adult areas involve graphic violence. In fact, the vast majority do not.

So, again, someone wanting to go to an adult sim for whatever reason cannot currently ascertain whether there is violence there.

I guess, but graphic violence is a category of content you find off-putting. My revulsion at vanilla heterosexual intercourse may not be as strong as your reaction of graphic violence, but how do we know that? We'd need Criteria of Squick to decide which things need special labelling.

(Although, if such labelling makes it easier to find the sim for savage skull-penetration of the Supreme Court justice from Gilead, that's a win.)