"Centralized Hubs"

[Prokofy Neva]

So I'm looking at this Linden post and focusing on one point, because a lot of the other stuff isn't relevant to me or won't work, I put it in the "avatar food shadows" category. I see "fix search" isn't on there, so my mind wanders.

Now on the one hand, the description sounds promising in terms of helping newbies find their way, and find a friend and an activity that might make them stick:

New centralized "hubs" to better connect residents to the communities that match their passions and interests

So I imagine this would work something like this, there will be hubs labeled "LGBT" or "Elves" or "Steampunk" or whatever approved categories the Lindens already established on the Marketplace, which is where they will reach first, since this about selling content as well as premiums. And the Lindens will then select their favourite resident clubs, venues, activities and put teleport boards to them, or allow people from those interest or identity groups to come on and help newbies.

That might turn out to be relatively harmless, because everyone will agree that "Boystown" or "Fantasy Faire" (if it is in session) or "New Babbage" will be the thing.

But then there will be stuff people won't agree on, and we will get "Nature" as conceived by concrete-ridden urban communities and others enamored of trains and such, not trees.

If the bit about the residents coming on to help gets put in, it will be like the old Mentors, slinging notecards of their commerce circles to bring newbies into the wonders of buying certain hair and mesh bodies and not others.

The fair thing to do would be to have ad boards for sale that the Lindens could manage so that like a classified, anyone could buy and place a PG ad that would run for two weeks -- hey, we actually had that system at the dawn of time in 2004 as I distinctly remember as that's how I found "Riverwalk" (now defunct) and other delights and eventually placed my own ads which were useful. This lasted until the telehubs were removed in 2007, I believe it was. Every time I raise this concept -- with Brett Linden at his Lab Gab for example -- I get the stock response -- but billboards are ugly, but we have too much commercialization already in SL. Um, no. We have too many ugly billboards and ugly commercialization because it is not regulated or managed by the Lindens on their top venues for drawing eyeballs -- and that's due to their default of "no commerce" or "no business but our business" which they find hard to stretch past a few approved friends that make them look good. But they managed to edit this as needed in the old days -- it's not that big a job -- and they could again. You make rules. You remove those that don't follow the rules. It can be a sink or a revenue and works.

Given the track record with the BBB, the empowerment of this self-selected and Linden-selected resident group to fan out with "embassies" on every continent and use those perches to further entrench Bellisseria etc. we would expect a a minimum BBB kiosks and other kiosks of Linden approved-communities.

Those Linden-approved voices will drown out any criticism or even the reality of numbers revealing that it didn't work as planned -- what do you want to bet traffic statistics will simply be made invisible on those hubs lol? Which I predict could turn into the infohubs that came after the telehubs, which the Lindens largely retired, and enabled about 14 user groups to run them and provide content and activities -- many of which have fallen into disuse now (but not ours in Ross).

The Lindens have ENORMOUS AMOUNTS of abandoned Mainland land that they could repurpose as these new "centralized hubs" so let's hope they don't get the idea that they need to "clear outdated builds" or "outdated people" on the existing resident-run hubs. But what do you want to bet that Tenera will now sprout one of these "centralized hubs" in which they people around it will have no say. Or more likely -- not.

So what is to be done? Well, the people who *already* essentially run "centralized hubs" -- like Virtual Railroads -- can speak up and battle for influence in this new venue of FICdom. Or not. Just keep doing what they always did and walk around the robots (that is my own choice). I don't have to speak up for the "Sailing Community" which has been the most blessed and Mole-glittered of all the communities in SL history -- they'll do fine, when they recover from their shock that the Lindens are making a thing maybe not next to Bellisseria or Blake Sea (although some -- most? -- of the "centralized hubs" will likely be in those areas and not some waterless and roadless hinterland on Jaegeot.

I'm going to think about lobbying for things the Lindens aren't likely to include (rentals hubs, RL sim exploration, non-nature explorers, discussion groups (hardly any left in SL!), etc.)  or just making some of my own as an alternative, which I imagine others will do who aren't getting the glitter.

Let's hope all this "centralization" sells premiums! The sale of premiums is objectively a good thing for the whole world, although "centralization" is not.

Edited December 22, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

I do like discussion groups and science lectures a great deal, but unfortunately they don't really seem like a community.  I just show up once or twice a month and join in.  I'm not even sure what a community of science lovers would look like.  I see a few of the same people when I show up, but when it's over we all leave for our other interests.

That is my problem with any community.   My interests are so varied I have 20 friend groups.  One for each interest and they don't crossover.

[Lindal Kidd]

21 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

I'm not even sure what a community of science lovers would look like.

[Alwin Alcott]

for me that post as mentioned is nothing more as the usual blah blah we get every year, and the words seem to get more meaningless every time.

[Zero Starchild]

So much shiney, new useless crap as always instead of fixing pre-existing bugs thingies.

[animats]

1 hour ago, Ziggy Starsmith said:

So much shiney, new useless crap as always instead of fixing pre-existing bugs thingies.

"It is the capacity for maintenance which is the best test for the vigor and stamina of a society. Any society can be galvanized for a while to build something, but the will and the skill to keep things in good repair day in, day out are fairly rare". -- Eric Hoffer.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

We all know of bugs and issues that certainly need to be addressed, and we can cavil reasonably about the priorities that LL has set.

On the whole, though, I'm impressed by how much they have been delivering of late. And while I'm not entirely convinced that this plan is going to be easily workable, or even necessarily beneficial, I think it targets something important that we've all long identified: problems with the new user experience, and particularly the difficulty many seem to experience in finding "something to do," or people with whom to connect, when they first arrive. If this works, that'll be a very good thing, and might make a measurable impact on retention.

As for how to do this, and in particular what sorts of communities get targeted -- some of those will be fairly obvious: role play, LGBTQ+, avatar customization, new user communities, etc.

And while I take Prok's point that we wouldn't want to see these, and the places such hubs point to, being determined through favouritism, backroom dealing, and so forth, I think that paid billboards, etc., is an even more awful idea. It just replaces a notional "FIC" with a sort of plutocracy, and ensures that we're directing noobs not to places likely to appeal to them, but rather to places where they will be almost certainly be pressured to spend money.

It shouldn't, surely, be that difficult to produce a list of themes for these hubs that actually corresponds to what people might be looking for?

Edited December 23, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

cavil

Today I learned!

[Bree Giffen]

All of the 2023 improvements listed sound quite nice. Adopting a new 3d format, realistic texturing, chrome and mirrors all sound very nice. LL also mentioned inventory folders and new LSL functions. That's also good to hear.

I'd love to hear more about those centralized hubs. It makes more sense than just general welcome areas.  Perhaps it will galvanize people to help out and build up the community they are interested in. On these hubs, maybe LL could make them more like shopping events where you have the newest creations related to a community available for sale and updated every month. I'm not suggesting these vendors should be front and center to pressure new players on spending lindens but just be part of the overall landscape of first-time experiences one would have in these hubs. Ad boards with links to community-related content would have to part of this as well. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

8 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

On these hubs, maybe LL could make them more like shopping events where you have the newest creations related to a community available for sale and updated every month. I'm not suggesting these vendors should be front and center to pressure new players on spending lindens but just be part of the overall landscape of first-time experiences one would have in these hubs. Ad boards with links to community-related content would have to part of this as well. 

Sure, but I have two concerns.

One is that it will leave the impression that you need to spend money right out of the gate to enjoy SL. And that's not merely untrue: it undercuts one of our advantages, which is that you can enjoy it freely.

And the second is aesthetic. The billboards I've seen at some infohubs are unspeakably ugly. The design has to be attractive. If new people think they've just landed in the middle of shopping mall or a strip of highway with ugly billboards, they are going to see little reason to hang around.

[Lindal Kidd]

6 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Today I learned!

Cavilry (n.) A troop of soldiers who always take issue with minor things.

[cunomar]

Boredom had me go for a walk today and had me realize i know of only one place big enough , because its maybe 5 sims connected and calls itself a continent , to kill some time just walking around .

I've been in sl long enough to give up on people and i never did nor will have any interest in building/scripting and all that mumbo jumbo . I do have at least 100 landmarks to empty sims most of which i can do a lap of in 10 minutes . So instead of "hubs" how about presenting walks as a way users new and old can waste a significant amount of time .

[animats]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The billboards I've seen at some infohubs are unspeakably ugly.

The Ungren hub is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

[animats]

58 minutes ago, cunomar said:

So instead of "hubs" how about presenting walks as a way users new and old can waste a significant amount of time .

Start at Neumogen and explore the are around there. To the west, it's very Japanese. The sakura are in bloom in the appropriate season. There are some vehicle shops with free demos. There's a railroad station with occasional trains you can ride. There's a museum with virtual replicas of some famous 3D works. There's a Japanese police station. There's a GTFO hub.

To the south is Calleta and the hobo colony. Classic freebie stores. Cheap motels.

To the southeast is a big area with many automatic trains. It's kind of strange.

[diamond Marchant]

The blog post said

Quote

New centralized "hubs" to better connect residents to the communities that match their passions and interests

My experience in SL has been that communities effectively use SL groups to communicate and connect residents. So I would continue to support/fix group functions such as chat.

My opinion is that centralized "hubs" would have unintended consequences. As Lindens would be allocating resources, it would be perceived as favoritism towards any community that received a hub. In general, I hold that Lindens should stay out of resident community/activities. By design, our game has ""no manufactured conflict, no set objective". By supporting individual communities via hubs, Lindens are advocating an objective.

[Love Zhaoying]

Wouldn't "decentralized" hubs be an oxymoron?

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

We all know of bugs and issues that certainly need to be addressed, and we can cavil reasonably about the priorities that LL has set.

On the whole, though, I'm impressed by how much they have been delivering of late. And while I'm not entirely convinced that this plan is going to be easily workable, or even necessarily beneficial, I think it targets something important that we've all long identified: problems with the new user experience, and particularly the difficulty many seem to experience in finding "something to do," or people with whom to connect, when they first arrive. If this works, that'll be a very good thing, and might make a measurable impact on retention.

As for how to do this, and in particular what sorts of communities get targeted -- some of those will be fairly obvious: role play, LGBTQ+, avatar customization, new user communities, etc.

And while I take Prok's point that we wouldn't want to see these, and the places such hubs point to, being determined through favouritism, backroom dealing, and so forth, I think that paid billboards, etc., is an even more awful idea. It just replaces a notional "FIC" with a sort of plutocracy, and ensures that we're directing noobs not to places likely to appeal to them, but rather to places where they will be almost certainly be pressured to spend money.

It shouldn't, surely, be that difficult to produce a list of themes for these hubs that actually corresponds to what people might be looking for?

Spending money is not at all a terrible thing, and in SL, your entertainment dollar stretches very far. I just got an "ugly Christmas sweater" for only 50L on FLF for example and I'm completely happy with the start and finish of my holiday clothing shopping lol.

People spend money anyways, and why not have them steered to places where they will get help, find Blaise's YouTubes or whatever because it is hella hard doing all that stuff. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the motivation of the helper being that they get paid for their content, if not for their time.

This is how liberal democratic societies under the rule of law work in RL, including your own RL society, and how they can work in SL. You can move the socialism slider up or down, ,but newbies already get an enormous amount of socialism in SL and the Lindens really do need to spend more time and attention on how their co-creators of this world get paid -- or they will leave. The devaluation of the Linden dollar is a big problem.

The Lindens will do what they're going to do, with their little friends, regardless. But it should sting. They should realize there is some cost to this old groove. And adjust it. It would cost them nothing except some small amount of staff time to vet the self-uploaded ads and in fact enhance their world. I suppose they could even put the ads in a queue like requests to be in Destinations. After all, they handle that with alacrity more or less so there's no reason why they couldn't handle an ad system *that pays them* in either sinks or sources.

[Prokofy Neva]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Wouldn't "decentralized" hubs be an oxymoron?

There's a difference between making them actually more democratic and liberal versus actually decentralizing them so that they disappear.

Say, when was the last time you visited a Bellisseria Embassy on the Mainland?

Ok, then.

[Coffee Pancake]

23 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens have ENORMOUS AMOUNTS of abandoned Mainland land that they could repurpose as these new "centralized hubs" so let's hope they don't get the idea that they need to "clear outdated builds" or "outdated people" on the existing resident-run hubs. But what do you want to bet that Tenera will now sprout one of these "centralized hubs" in which they people around it will have no say. Or more likely -- not.

The fastest way to create more abandoned mainland is to put a hub on the region next door.

Nope nope nope.

[Prokofy Neva]

2 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

The blog post said

My experience in SL has been that communities effectively use SL groups to communicate and connect residents. So I would continue to support/fix group functions such as chat.

My opinion is that centralized "hubs" would have unintended consequences. As Lindens would be allocating resources, it would be perceived as favoritism towards any community that received a hub. In general, I hold that Lindens should stay out of resident community/activities. By design, our game has ""no manufactured conflict, no set objective". By supporting individual communities via hubs, Lindens are advocating an objective.

There's a fix for broken SL chat: it's called "Discord". Did you know there's even now a secret developers' Discord run by the Lab to which you must get an invitation to participate? Just like the good ol' days in the IRC.

Surely you know your Lindens by now to know that they can and will have centralized hubs, just like they have weddings of their special friends in their new community center. The question at this point is merely "how". It can be a better or worse for of centralization. They can take their existing collection of buddies and do what they want and claim "business interest".

Or they can widen it out. They can only widen it out if they feel social pressure. So if you are in some kind of interest group, now is the time to step up and offer to help and influence the Lindens toward making this help get paid, somewhere.

After all, all that commerce-free Bellisseria commerce actually takes place in Bellisseria groups, all of which work "good enough" even without the Discord fix to enables various car, house, furniture etc sellers to sell their wares. I don't find it as fair a system as putting a lot in search and putting objects to sale on land, but the Lindens like to cloak commerce and steer it towards "the great and the good."

I don't know if there is an actual document proclaiming the "no manufactured conflict, no set objective" -- would love to see it!

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Each time the Lindens created a sim and parceled water, they set up a conflict vector -- and they still do, with their auction choices, timing, and cuts. Conflicts galore.

Each time they favour Bellisseria with their ticket answering and short the Mainland, the Lindens create a conflict vector -- and no amount of ambassadors flying around on their private jet system to their much-vaunted embassies can fix this.

Nor can DJ events with the caste of approved Belli DJs. 

There will be built-in favouritism and built-in conflict vectors. The task them is simply to make it a better version, all told. So it means that if you have a railroad community, or a collection of Linden bears, or whatever it is you want to flog in SL (let's hope they will either make just one adult centralized hub although they have that already) -- then now is the time to step up.

Having been repeatedly ghosted by the "community managers" of the aptly-named "Nature Con," when I merely wanted a 25-prim booth like dozens of other people,  I personally don't want to get involved in these "centralized hubs" as I view it as a loss in advance. My goal is at this point to make sure they don't erode any more of the existing Mainland programs and builds in favour of some lobbyists getting their ear now.

[Prokofy Neva]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The fastest way to create more abandoned mainland is to put a hub on the region next door.

Nope nope nope.

I guess you're not in the land business.

The fastest way to see property values SKYROCKET will be to plunk a centralized hub next to them. The telehubs worked in this way magnificiently, just as in RL and that was perfectly fine.

The infohubs work in a far more crippled way, but still, there are some dogged types willing to work that patch.

The centralized hubs will not have 40 people on the sim lagging out that sim and those nearby looking into it. They will have...four. And that steady footfall will be more than enough reason to buy land next to it.

In fact, the smarter land barons are already casing the joint and even talking to "their" Lindens no doubt about where their new centralized hubs should go. 

[Love Zhaoying]

17 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There's a difference between making them actually more democratic and liberal versus actually decentralizing them so that they disappear.

Say, when was the last time you visited a Bellisseria Embassy on the Mainland?

Ok, then.

Then, I guess the Land Barons should control them. They must have all our best interests at heart.

[Coffee Pancake]

Telehubs .. yeaaah. Back when people couldn't just free teleport and to get anywhere they had to navigate lag fest mall-mazes set up by entrepreneuring souls ... a behavior that directly lead to free teleports because it was so utterly irritating.

[Prokofy Neva]

19 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Then, I guess the Land Barons should control them. They must have all our best interests at heart.

Self-interested land barons already control swathes of the Mainland in part because the Lindens run a very flawed auction system with no transparency so that we cannot see who jacks up every auction with bids so that only an actual end-user on that sim most interested in that land pays an inflated price for the land. If these names could be known, along with their alts, they'd make a lot less sales and they might find simple shame would work on them to stop this atrocious practice.

We used to have transparency as to bids and winners. Now we don't, ever since moving to the e-bay system.

Self-interested land barons already control swathes of the Mainland in part because the Lindens don't enforce their own rules against ad cutting, and they look the other way as large land barons openly sell and rent tiny patches of land they have in fact requested originally as larger abandoned parcels. Everyone can see this chicanery, especially if they live or work on a sim in question. The Lindens could end this practice tomorrow by simply acting against a few large land barons and telling them they can't keep doing this and they will get no more abandoned requests until they stop.

Of course the Lindens will naturally gravitate to the solution of auctioning or allowing abandoned requests around these new hubs which will bring in the most Linden dollars. That's natural. If someone has the stamina, they can go around and report on this and try to create some sense of community pressure so that the Lindens start a) making the auctions transparent b) ending the practice of handing over large tracts of abandoned land to people who chop it into 16 m pieces and re-sell or rent it for fantastic sums.

If they don't like social solutions involving policy -- and they sure don't! -- they can fix the code so that no land parcel under 256 m2 can ever be set to sale. That would eliminate a fair amount of blight. Of course, the land barons described could still rent them -- and they would. 

The Lindens used their Linden Homes system -- once a minority of purchases by premium members -- into a burgeoning, successful system by -- management.

They could do the same with the roadside ads by installing their own Linden billboard ad systems, with tasteful yet functional ad boards and that would displace a lot of the scammers. 

Edited December 23, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

23 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Telehubs .. yeaaah. Back when people couldn't just free teleport and to get anywhere they had to navigate lag fest mall-mazes set up by entrepreneuring souls ... a behavior that directly lead to free teleports because it was so utterly irritating.

Philip Rosedale had the right idea when he followed the suggestions of Jane Jacobs and made telehubs, so that shopping areas could naturally spring up near transportation areas -- just as they do around subway stations or train stations in RL. 

They weren't lag fests, although one particular telehub in Fuji near a lot of forums dwellers and oldbies was quite the avatar trap so they would generically complain about this constantly because another actually desirable thing was happening: newbies were renting stores at telehubs even if somewhat high priced because they were on the open market.  No apprenticeship to an oldbie was needed in the old guild system, so that they had a fair chance to break into an economy utterly controlled by oldbies on old sims far from telehubs. Naturally those oldbies complained when they could no longer have a lock on the economy with their Ren Faire and their Lindens advertising their wares. Understood.

Most telehubs that came in after the old Sansara hubs when other continents were added were in fact bucolic delights -- the Lindens were well aware of oldbie complaints about lag fests and changed them. They had no avatar traps in the form of malls because the land around them was Linden land and consisted of grass, trees, or water. Any stores near them were then forced to have an easement around them and far less lag or trapping. The utterly distorted picture of how the telehubs actually looked and functioned in the reality of virtuality is what led to the clamour for p2p, not any actual situation.

All you have to do is fly around to the old telehubs which are now infohubs to see how false the "lag fest mall maze" claim is -- look at even Plum, Stillman, Miramare on Sansara; look at Iris, Brownlee, Hyle etc in Heterocera; and keep going around the continents. The presence of Clunn or Grizdale with their close-up shopping malls can't undo the actuallity of the majority of other hubs which had plenty of Linden land around them as easements with parks and water. Even this rather tendentious wiki can help you see that.

Philip frankly admitted that most commerce on SL happened on telehub sims, and in fact that was a good thing.

People went to them and shopped and socialized. I once took Robin Linden on the tour of the non-Sansara hubs her own company had created so she could see with her own eyes that the forums cartel picture was utterly false. Along the way, all kinds of friends, neighbours, and tenants said hello and she could also witness that they were social hubs. Still, the clamour of oldbies with businesses away from the new telehubs and in general the success of the next generations of SL users made the vindictive oldbies throw the Lindens on this point.

And they could make an argument that was very compelling to the collectivist Linden mind of the era -- that everyone should have the same god powers that the Lindens had, as with their god powers, they could use p2p.

The Lindens then did a bad job of installing p2p, and never took care to move the landing points of those sims at least to the new infohubs or somewhere reasonable instead of in the sea or in the side of a wall. Oh, well.

 

Edited December 23, 2022 by Prokofy Neva