Distance Between Lab and Residents

[Prokofy Neva]

3 hours ago, EnCore Mayne said:

adding this post to see if there are any comments on the latest YouTube© Lab Gab (announced through the non interactive "community blogs" section of the Second Life Community website).

has anyone ever wondered why the Lab, since Philip's handover to M, hasn't developed a better way to communicate with us (their "community") than to use third party platforms? what ever happened to inworld town hall meetings? is our platform not supposed to be developed for the future of the metaverse? are our limitations supposed to be a secret? don't mind me, this post is for feedback as to the status quo YouTube hype.

anyone?

 

We used to have a country, as Philip called it, with real people, a town hall, voting on the JIRA, etc. But some years ago Bellisseria was created, all those things were removed, and they were all replaced with papier-mâché.

Were you not aware of this?

[Blaise Glendevon]

5 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

We used to have a country, as Philip called it, with real people, a town hall, voting on the JIRA, etc. But some years ago Bellisseria was created, all those things were removed, and they were all replaced with papier-mâché.

Were you not aware of this?

Your long-standing saltiness that Bellisseria competes with your estate land has been noted. 

[Brightstar7777]

20 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

We used to have a country, as Philip called it, with real people, a town hall, voting on the JIRA, etc. But some years ago Bellisseria was created, all those things were removed, and they were all replaced with papier-mâché.

Were you not aware of this?

Reality responds more to belief than assertion. One may believe anything, and if reality cashes the check then it is true, at least for them. As a corollary, you can shape a person's life just by convincing the people around them of some "truth" they credulously swallow without questioning. In this way, innocent people or perhaps even groups may be divided from their loving home communities with nightmarishly confusing manipulative alterations to the shared reality around them, perhaps perpetuated by someone who understands and unethically alters the meta with misapplied esoteric skills.

Linden Lab won't break up a grassroots town hall event, nor stop people from holding democratic ballots. One shouldn't underestimate the power of belief, and for this reason it's best to be optimistic if one wishes to exist in a hopeful reality. The naysayers may navigate themselves into perdition with pessimistic expectations leading to confirmation as they perhaps unwittingly transit massively parallel branching timelines through higher dimensional space-time, no? Enough time has passed that there are many different versions of Second Life existing on many different Earths, and maybe a few places besides. Once in a while, perhaps they overlap and we can move between them. That's probably where most of the furries and openly transgender people wound up-- a much more fun reality than this one, but it's never too late to start following the star that will lead you back home once you figure out that this is a thing, along with the meta, the esoteric, and other spoopy phenomena. Happy Halloween. 

Edited October 22, 2022 by Brightstar7777

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

15 minutes ago, Brightstar7777 said:

Reality responds more to belief than assertion. One may believe anything, and if reality cashes the check then it is true, at least for them. Linden Lab won't break up a grassroots town hall event, nor stop people from holding democratic ballots. One shouldn't underestimate the power of belief, and for this reason it's best to be optimistic if one wishes to exist in a hopeful reality. The naysayers may navigate themselves into perdition with pessimistic expectations leading to confirmation as they perhaps unwittingly transit massively parallel branching timelines through higher dimensional space-time, no? Enough time has passed that there are many different versions of Second Life existing on many different Earths, and maybe a few places besides. Once in a while, perhaps they overlap and we can move between them. That's probably where most of the furries and openly transgender people wound up-- a much more fun reality than this one, but it's never too late to start following the star that will lead you back home.

 

/me puts her fingers to the keyboard... takes them off... puts them back on prepared to type a response.  Reconsiders responding.  Chooses not to.  Sings to herself "I wouldn't touch this with a 39 and a half foot pole"

*settles on, "Wut?"*

I haven't found it hard to communicate with the Lab or Lindens.  I may not get the answer I want and I may not get the instant gratification of an immediate response, but I don't feel they are out of reach.  When they make an announcement, it is just that.  An announcement.   Not everything is a public debate on how we all feel about their business decisions.   That kind of whining is what these SL forums are for.  Discussions about SL.

[Prokofy Neva]

28 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

Your long-standing saltiness that Bellisseria competes with your estate land has been noted. 

But Bellisseria doesn't compete with my *Mainland* (not island) rentals. I have customers who are in both Bellisseria and Mainland homes. As I am, myself. 

[Prokofy Neva]

29 minutes ago, Brightstar7777 said:

Reality responds more to belief than assertion. One may believe anything, and if reality cashes the check then it is true, at least for them. As a corollary, you can shape a person's life just by convincing the people around them of some "truth" they credulously swallow without questioning. In this way, innocent people or perhaps even groups may be divided from their loving home communities with nightmarishly confusing manipulative alterations to the shared reality around them, perhaps perpetuated by someone who understands and unethically alters the meta with misapplied esoteric skills.

Linden Lab won't break up a grassroots town hall event, nor stop people from holding democratic ballots. One shouldn't underestimate the power of belief, and for this reason it's best to be optimistic if one wishes to exist in a hopeful reality. The naysayers may navigate themselves into perdition with pessimistic expectations leading to confirmation as they perhaps unwittingly transit massively parallel branching timelines through higher dimensional space-time, no? Enough time has passed that there are many different versions of Second Life existing on many different Earths, and maybe a few places besides. Once in a while, perhaps they overlap and we can move between them. That's probably where most of the furries and openly transgender people wound up-- a much more fun reality than this one, but it's never too late to start following the star that will lead you back home once you figure out that this is a thing, along with the meta, the esoteric, and other spoopy phenomena. Happy Halloween. 

Oh, I totally agree. This is how Vaclav Havel did it, to behave "as if," and before you know it, he was president.

So yeah, I do all those things and live my Second Life. I step around the robots.

[Prokofy Neva]

9 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

 

/me puts her fingers to the keyboard... takes them off... puts them back on prepared to type a response.  Reconsiders responding.  Chooses not to.  Sings to herself "I wouldn't touch this with a 39 and a half foot pole"

*settles on, "Wut?"*

I haven't found it hard to communicate with the Lab or Lindens.  I may not get the answer I want and I may not get the instant gratification of an immediate response, but I don't feel they are out of reach.  When they make an announcement, it is just that.  An announcement.   Not everything is a public debate on how we all feel about their business decisions.   That kind of whining is what these SL forums are for.  Discussions about SL.

I don't see anybody whining here.

I personally felt there wasn't much "hard news" in that Lab Gab, and I was appalled that Grumpity was out there stumping for changes to search, which is atrocious, as she is intelligent and knows better.

There is a fix for SL search. It's called "Firestorm". Although I remain devoted to using the SL Viewer.

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't see anybody whining here.

I personally felt there wasn't much "hard news" in that Lab Gab, and I was appalled that Grumpity was out there stumping for changes to search, which is atrocious, as she is intelligent and knows better.

There is a fix for SL search. It's called "Firestorm". Although I remain devoted to using the SL Viewer.

That wasn't directed at you, Prokofy.  I could have phrased that differently.  It was more about announcements and Lab Gabs not being open houses for every individual's opinion.

[Solar Legion]

Ah yes ... more of that "country" nonsense ...

Second Life is a software product, designed to allow for socializing, in software building and much more. It is not and has never been a "country" whatsoever.

To say nothing whatsoever of some user's love for presenting their own personal revisions of events ...

[Brightstar7777]

33 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Second Life is a software product, designed to allow for socializing, in software building and much more. It is not and has never been a "country" whatsoever.

It was and still is a virtual community, though I believe that many have failed to appreciate (or even apprehend) what that means, or they try to revise it with post-facto epitaphs or dismiss it as either merely a game or social media. Thou doth protest too much, methinks.

Edited October 22, 2022 by Brightstar7777

[Blaise Glendevon]

1 minute ago, Brightstar7777 said:

It was and still is a virtual community, though I believe that many have failed to appreciate (or even apprehend) what that means, or they try to revise it with post-facto epitaphs or dismiss it as either merely a game or social media. Thou doth protest too much, methinks.

Second Life has never been one homogenous community. It's been a staging point for a varied assortment of communities. Sometimes the lines overlap (as when we are all pouring in to hit the Fifty Linden Friday deals, and I'm trying on hair next to two furries, a Kajira, and a girl with a SL sorority sweatshirt on), but SL as "melting pot" isn't a thing. It's more akin to the salad bowl methodology of describing a population. Sometimes, I'm in a bite with two dudes from a motorcycle club and a lady who sails on the Blake Sea at an activity. But we're all discrete pieces of the population, from various home communities. 

[diamond Marchant]

YouTube is fine.

Perhaps the real issue is that the discussion that concerns many of us is existential (for SL), not the "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" kind.

Patch and Grumpity do their best but they do not hold SL's future in their hands. They just work there.

The Waterfield Group will decide what and when things happen. And they are not available for comment.

[Blaise Glendevon]

Just now, diamond Marchant said:

YouTube is fine.

Perhaps the real issue is that the discussion that concerns many of us is existential (for SL), not the "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" kind.

Patch and Grumpity do their best but they do not hold SL's future in their hands. They just work there.

The Waterfield Group will decide what and when things happen. And they are not available for comment.

Honestly, most of us aren't catastrophizing. Second Life is doing incredibly well for a nearly 20 year old virtual world, has a steady user base, and gets semi-regular improvements. It's fun to imagine cataclysms, but as things go, I think we're good. 

[Coffee Pancake]

40 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

Patch and Grumpity do their best but they do not hold SL's future in their hands. They just work there.

The Waterfield Group will decide what and when things happen. And they are not available for comment.

Individual Linden's are passionate and invested.

The corporation has historically been out of touch to the point of being antagonistic. SL has a decades worth of missing investment and direction and we're feeling the pinch and pressure from that now. I only hope the renewed investment isn't too little too late.

[Sammy Huntsman]

46 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

Honestly, most of us aren't catastrophizing. Second Life is doing incredibly well for a nearly 20 year old virtual world, has a steady user base, and gets semi-regular improvements. It's fun to imagine cataclysms, but as things go, I think we're good. 

Thank you, all this doom and gloom every time there is a change. Is really giving me a headache. Like I know change can be hard. I have a hard time with it, but I also realize it. That it isn't the end of the world. It's just that change is inevitable, it's part of life. My point is, people, need to stop fear-mongering, due to change. They just need to wait until things settle and see if it is bad or good. 

[Blaise Glendevon]

2 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Thank you, all this doom and gloom every time there is a change. Is really giving me a headache. Like I know change can be hard. I have a hard time with it, but I also realize it. That it isn't the end of the world. It's just that change is inevitable, it's part of life. My point is, people, need to stop fear-mongering, due to change. They just need to wait until things settle and see if it is bad or good. 

And listening to the interview, the goal is for the changes to Tilia to be almost invisible to the SL user. It's not going to affect our end-user experience at all. 

[Sammy Huntsman]

Just now, Blaise Glendevon said:

And listening to the interview, the goal is for the changes to Tilia to be almost invisible to the SL user. It's not going to affect our end-user experience at all. 

I watched it, so I could know what is exactly going on. But even then, I can't predict what is going to happen with any investment or update. If it is gonna be bad or not. I just need to watch and pay attention. Instead of making farfetched speculations. 

[Paul Hexem]

Second Life, a revolutionary form of collaboration and communication.

At least, that's what they tell me in their YouTube videos.

[EnCore Mayne]

many good responses. more than i expected. so, there's that. maybe one day people's evil intent can be recognized and ignored for the harm they do to the good people whose contributions to the game (including voicing their opinions on the direction the Lab commands) makes the path we all take easy on everyone.

i get it. people are hard to handle. putting a bunch of them together might seem crazy. if we had a common purpose, like, i don't know, maybe if your life depended on it! yeah, even that might not have the correct response. so...

is there no way for technology to be invented, especially by the people who nearly invented the virtual space we live in, to make these announcements to the community stay within the confines of the platform? i always found it outrageous for the Lab to resort to social media conveniences, as if they were "playing along" with the general impetus of the web based world. did they not realize their platform was the foundation for a new way to live? was Philip's heart/vision so vapourous as to be totally discounted? was it only about the money?

personally, confining myself to what i imagine, coding world breaking technology is not in my wheelhouse, could there not be some clever genius who could devise a way to use or invent a tool for the world we live in to communicate to the people who live in that same world?

there are between 30 and 50 thousand people inworld concurrently on any single day. there are MILLIONS of registered accounts. putting a notice on their blog seems defeatish. are they singing to the choir?

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, EnCore Mayne said:

...

did they not realize their platform was the foundation for a new way to live? was Philip's heart/vision so vapourous as to be totally discounted? was it only about the money?

Since you ask, right from the start Second Life was a solution looking for a problem. It actually found one which is quite unusual, but its purpose always remained a bit vague and there was never a clear road map or purpose or a consistent direction in its development. That's not necessarily bad since it gives us a lot of opportunities to put into it whatever we want to put into it but it is what it is.

As for making a new (and presumably better) way of life, throughout the ages a lot of people have tried and a lot of people have failed. Going digital won't improve the chances of success since it's still the same human beings, still stuck at the point where the falling angel meets the rising ape. If there's a difference at all, it's only harder to get it right because of the faux intimacy of the internet.

Edited October 22, 2022 by ChinRey

[ChinRey]

Oh, I forgot:

1 hour ago, EnCore Mayne said:

was it only about the money?

There's nothing wrong about making money! It used to be hard but nowadays we have cheap high quality printers.

[SeattleChris]

I don't know if this gab is a good example, but I have felt over the past several years that the Lindens are ... less interested in our opinions and our input than they previously were.

My opinion. Your mileage may vary.

On the other hand, I feel a revamping of the /my page couldn't hurt. To me, it's a bland account management portal from 2007. There are lots of announcements and news items there, but I rarely think to look for them. I usually log into /my to accomplish something specific (look at tx history or my current land, etc.) There's nothing that draws my eye to news or announcements. Just bland, tabular data. It looks like work, not quality of life reading.

That's my own little take on things. For perspective, it also took me about a decade before I realized I could use the forums to just ... talk to people about Second Life. I know, I know. A startling discovery. I'm usually hyper-focused on what I want to do, and then I wonder why my world atlas from 1975 is no longer valid in many cases. As Hannah Gadsby put it: "Vague as @#$^." So maybe it's just me, but I can't help but think that a little formatting can go a long way.

I think a lot more information is being shared than we sometimes feel is being shared. Only, it gets lost in the din.

ok... so yeah. It's 3 am and I'm babbling. TL;DR: Better news widgets for /my or anywhere else on the site. Maybe info hubs could include a media player that links to the latest announcement videos for those who prefer to get info in-world. All aggregated and easy to find while people are thinking about finding it.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

There's nothing wrong about making money! It used to be hard but nowadays we have cheap high quality printers.

When I was a cub, we traded pretty rocks as if they were money. People even wore pretty rocks on their handpaws!

[Feorie Frimon]

15 hours ago, colleen Criss said:

What's stopping any of you from submitting questions or ideas for up coming Gabs? I'm sure that would be helpful as well and likely welcomed. @Strawberry Linden is pretty accessible. TBH I prefer it be on tube 1. Because I can listen at my leisure and not have to sit at the screen. 2. Because I can go back to points that brought questions to my mind. 3. Because in world snipers are a pita.

Agreed! I've found Strawberry to be really accessible and I thought the questions she asked were really good! She even got Patch and Grumpity to talk about the mainland (which was awesome). It was encouraging for me to understand what the Lab is focusing on and it was encouraging for me to hear them say that they would look at mainland infrastructure when they finish off some those of these other projects (new avatars and the 2048 Belli homes). And lowering of mainland tier? And homesteads? And mirrors (ish)!

It was a good one for me.... cool stuff coming and I deff feel like the Lab is listening when residents talk. I see the effort they are putting in! 

[Feorie Frimon]

10 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Thank you, all this doom and gloom every time there is a change. Is really giving me a headache. Like I know change can be hard. I have a hard time with it, but I also realize it. That it isn't the end of the world. It's just that change is inevitable, it's part of life. My point is, people, need to stop fear-mongering, due to change. They just need to wait until things settle and see if it is bad or good. 

Approach change with caution, but I agree wholeheartedly! It has to happen - especially if we want Second Life 20 years from now. This kind of transparency helpes me understand what the Lab thinks is important - for their business, all of their jobs, everything. 

In general, I think it's easy to pretend the Lindens are just avatars, but let's not forget that they are people too... with paychecks and jobs working for a company that is trying to figure out and unravel really a complicated mess of a technology knot. They don't want the Residents to hate them or Second Life - they want residents to like Second Life and want to come and spend time and money here. 

For me, let's 'try it'goes a long way with change....