Why, in Second Life, jerks are a minor problem.

[Ceka Cianci]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Nah, the opposite of "Geek" used to be "Jock" and/or "Bully". Everyone knew that except Geeks. See: Every John Hughes 80's movie, and Revenge of the Nerds movies, etc. 

I thought it was the rich well off cool crowd kids vs everyone else and some of them were athletes.. Because not all rich or well off were athletes.Most of them weren't even the best athletes. A lot of those movies were made in chicago in places like Lake forest and other really well off areas..

[Love Zhaoying]

18 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I thought it was the rich well off cool crowd kids vs everyone else and some of them were athletes.. Because not all rich or well off were athletes.Most of them weren't even the best athletes. A lot of those movies were made in chicago in places like Lake forest and other really well off areas..

Athlete, Jock, potato, poetahtoe.

[Ceka Cianci]

27 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Athlete, Jock, potato, poetahtoe.

I watched them movies because they were made up north,sort of close to home.. Just about any movie made up there I would watch just to catch something familiar from up there like a landmark or area of town. My perspective of all of them kids at the time was, What a bunch of spoiled rotten well off suburban kids with first world problems.. hehehe

Those movies were so silly hehehe

They should have show the big game where they play Lincoln high and die.. LOL

Lincoln high and  the inner city schools were where the real athletes were.. If you ever seen Ridgemont high and the guy that everyone feared.. That's every Lincoln high team ever.. They make potato soup out of those suburban boys.. hehehe

[cunomar]

Humblebrag lol , i will take that , used to piss teachers off that no matter how hard they tried that they could not hit me as hard as i was hit at home .

[Love Zhaoying]

54 minutes ago, cunomar said:

Humblebrag lol , i will take that , used to piss teachers off that no matter how hard they tried that they could not hit me as hard as i was hit at home .

Goodness, with such treatment, one could end up a jerk! Glad you turned out ok.

[Paul Hexem]

9 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

If that is the impression you get, that is on you.

Based on how many people agree with me so far, I'm not sure it is.

[Solar Legion]

That's nice.

If it brings you comfort ...

[Sammy Huntsman]

21 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

That's nice. 

Don't care.

Not "elitism" whatsoever.

If you want such a broad scope, go build your own world. Otherwise, quit trying to turn Second Life into its competitors or trying to branch out into areas it simply does not belong to nor need to even touch.

I mean she is one of those people, who wanted to gamify SL. I mean great idea in practice, not in theory. And this is not attacking her, but saying. Not every game needs to be gamified. But that being said, SL is fine how it is. Even with its all its flaws. And sure I get angry with some things that SL does and even LL does. But I would not drastically change it, to something like what Meta is doing. Which they are totally failing btw and FB had to rebrand due to all the bad press recently. 

[Coffee Pancake]

57 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

I mean she is one of those people, who wanted to gamify SL. I mean great idea in practice, not in theory. And this is not attacking her, but saying. Not every game needs to be gamified. But that being said, SL is fine how it is. Even with its all its flaws. And sure I get angry with some things that SL does and even LL does. But I would not drastically change it, to something like what Meta is doing. Which they are totally failing btw and FB had to rebrand due to all the bad press recently. 

FB didn't rebrand due to bad press. They rebranded to signal their intent to go all in on the Metaverse concept whatever the cost. It's easy and misses the entire point to just read about the VR labs section of the business posting huge losses. The Metaverse as it applies to Meta's business model is not just a toy virtual world and some VR goggles. it encompasses a huge refactoring of the entire company and will touch almost everything they do.

Meta are not failing, least of all because their side project virtual world has no users, or that the VR division is burning money to keep the lights on. They are doing what is essentially foundational research in this space and that kind of R&D is very expensive and time consuming.

We have a very limited head start to refine and build up on what we have, to continue standing apart, to in effect, stay as we are.

But to do that we need to show growth. SL needs to prove itself in order to hold it's owners affection. If we don't grow, we are just counting off the days before our inevitable sale to another company that needs to open the goose and see how the eggs are made. 

Don't think that's realistic? - Surprise, it's happened once already. It cost us a Tilia shaped kidney and mountain of debt that we are expected to cover with increased prices.

Pay attention to what our current owners say when they give interviews, growth is the mantra that haunts these guys dreams. No growth means stagnation and death. Coasting on as we have the last 20 years is not acceptable anymore.

We're currently seeing internal investment in platform development. That development needs to coincide with growth. If it doesn't then all that happened is LL spent a load of money making the pig look pretty for someone else.

 

If you honestly think #nochanges is in anyway a viable option to keep SL running as it stands for another 5 or 10 years, you're not paying attention.

Edited January 19, 2023 by Coffee Pancake

[Scylla Rhiadra]

8 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Pay attention to what our current owners say when they give interviews, growth is the mantra that haunts these guys dreams. No growth means stagnation and death. Coasting on as we have the last 20 years is not acceptable anymore.

We're currently seeing internal investment in platform development. That development needs to coincide with growth. If it doesn't then all that happened is LL spent a load of money making the pig look pretty for someone else.

I suspect that this is so.

Ironically, I suspect that the only thing that has prevented them from selling off the platform for spare parts is the fact that the code base is so ancient.

[Coffee Pancake]

5 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I suspect that the only thing that has prevented them from selling off the platform for spare parts is the fact that the code base is so ancient.

I don't even think it's that nuanced. 

It took Philip years and many attempts to hawk this Goose to it's current owners. (who's very on the record as being excited by Tilia .. which they gleefully proceeded to carve off into it's own entity and then hawk to a bank)

Our Golden Goose is now limping a bit and paying for the unnecessary surgery with a flat tax on eggs.

[Sammy Huntsman]

29 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

FB didn't rebrand due to bad press. They rebranded to signal their intent to go all in on the Metaverse concept whatever the cost. It's easy and misses the entire point to just read about the VR labs section of the business posting huge losses. The Metaverse as it applies to Meta's business model is not just a toy virtual world and some VR goggles. it encompasses a huge refactoring of the entire company and will touch almost everything they do.

Meta are not failing, least of all because their side project virtual world has no users, or that the VR division is burning money to keep the lights on. They are doing what is essentially foundational research in this space and that kind of R&D is very expensive and time consuming.

We have a very limited head start to refine and build up on what we have, to continue standing apart, to in effect, stay as we are.

But to do that we need to show growth. SL needs to prove itself in order to hold it's owners affection. If we don't grow, we are just counting off the days before our inevitable sale to another company that needs to open the goose and see how the eggs are made. 

Don't think that's realistic? - Surprise, it's happened once already. It cost us a Tilia shaped kidney and mountain of debt that we are expected to cover with increased prices.

Pay attention to what our current owners say when they give interviews, growth is the mantra that haunts these guys dreams. No growth means stagnation and death. Coasting on as we have the last 20 years is not acceptable anymore.

We're currently seeing internal investment in platform development. That development needs to coincide with growth. If it doesn't then all that happened is LL spent a load of money making the pig look pretty for someone else.

 

If you honestly think #nochanges is in anyway a viable option to keep SL running as it stands for another 5 or 10 years, you're not paying attention.

I am cool with changes, but not drastic changes, like gamifying the platform. This isn't a mobile game. Lol.That is the issue, I don't want changes that make us practically similar to the competition. I would rather see uniqueness than everything being the same. So in Metas case, I don't want no personal space bubble and the other things or have algorithms attached. So I say something like ***** and MP is showing me *****es for days. Lol 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/16/2023 at 2:52 PM, animats said:

Something I posted on r/metaverse on Reddit. I've made this point before on various metaverse forums. There are people saying in mainstream media that the metaverse needs to be heavily censored or moderated. This is an opposing view. This is a message that needs to get out, before we have some kind of government-mandated moderation. LL is welcome to use these as talking points.

Second Life solved these problems years ago. The solutions are subtle and effective.

First, in a big 3D world, jerks are local. In Second Life, a jerk can only annoy for about a 100 meter radius. The whole world is the size of Los Angeles, and nobody notices distant jerks.

There's no way to broadcast to everyone. There's no such thing as "following" or "retweeting". So jerks are not amplified. They're just harmlessly yelling into the void.

Second, landowners have power over their own land. Go to a club and be a jerk, and you'll be bounced by the club owner. You can't get back in. If you try, large yellow bars appear in front of you, which you cannot pass. Homeowners have that power at their home, too. Jerks soon find themselves on the outside, looking in through ban lines. This eliminates the need for "moderators". Second Life does have a small "governance" department. It's for serious situations for which, in real life, you'd call the cops.

There are some public places where jerks congregate. Second Life users will know about Social Island 10, the Port Authority Bus Terminal of Second Life. It has the same kinds of losers you find in bus terminals, from panhandlers to people with boom boxes. Nobody has to spend time there. It's a problem that new users pass through the social islands, which gives a bad first impression. But by day 3, everyone with a clue knows not to stay there.

Arriving in Second Life is like arriving in a strange big city. The world offers many options but does not compel you to do anything. This confuses some people.

Third, sex. Second Life has an adult continent, a sizable area in which sex is allowed. If you want to go there, you have to be over 18, enable adult content in your viewer, pick an adult destination, and go. Outside of the adult continent, nudity and sex are discouraged. Mostly by peer pressure from other users. There's official enforcement if necessary, but it's rarely needed. The same tools that deal with jerks deal with unwanted sex. In practice, it's just not a problem. Even on the adult continent, there isn't much visible sex.

Finally, a key component of a good metaverse is that users are invested in it. They have virtual homes, stores, and friends. Being a jerk and being banned hurts your life in the virtual world. So most people just don't.

These are not major problems for a well run metaverse. It's just a problem for Meta/Horizon, which has now failed three times at virtual worlds.

You are wrong about a lot of this, because you simply don't have experience and you are taking the narrow view that griefing is merely a proximity problem. It simply is not. Social engineering is used extensively in griefing and you are simply unaware of it.

Let's start with specious ARs -- this is a common form of deliberate griefing by organized griefers as well as a way to annoy others involved in disputes. A person sics the Lindens on someone who swears on a G-rated sim or imagines some encroachment affects traffic -- sound familiar? And they get a person banned for 3 days because the Lindens can be counted on to look narrowly at a situation and not acknowledge that the AR system is being weaponed.

On particularly pernicious social engineering technique that has fallout for years and years, I have found, is for griefers, sometimes only a day old, to join a group with a name that sounds similar to your name or your company name. They begin to shout obscenities, racist and sexist remarks, etc. and get everyone in the group hating the person they think is responsible for disrupting their group and inciting hatred. The hatred that actually gets incited is of me, for example, and people seem incapable of realizing that day-old alts, not me should be AR'd. Hundreds of people will write scolding me for invading their group with Trump-like rants, and when they are told this is a griefing technique, they still think I somehow deserve it or should answer for it. This is endless and hard to clean up.

If you think nudity and sex in public places is discouraged and people control themselves because they are property owners, I guess you never shopped at Lelutka or other big, popular stores where, as you can find from recent Twitter threads, there are creeps regularly hitting on women -- and as I witnessed myself -- committing obscenities in the store, with no action from the owners because apparently they can't keep 24/7 security. We can AR this activity -- even if the Lindens react, which is unlikely, another one will replace that particular jerk in another 10 minutes. The idea that peer pressure alone controls this is simply ludicrous. The idea that ban tools alone can control it is also ludicrous. 

The Lindens can't respond to every call; grief prims on physics tumble around on no-show neighbours' land for months on end until finally, at a Concierge meeting, I can confront a land Linden and get them to tear their eyes away from Bellisseria for a moment to fix something that I and others have AR'd multiple times for months on end.

If we do better than Meta (that's setting the bar low), it's because we have only 50,000 concurrency; we've had 20 years for both the company and the users to develop various practices. Go over to the thread in "Relationships" I started about avatar sex and you may marvel as I did at people who avoid having sex in their own homes because they feel they are vulnerable to griefers or jerks or even partners who may turn into a problem. Security and tools don't fix all this.

The idea that you deal with crime only through code was always misplaced, but that's the path the Lindens have taken. The idea that you fix it with social norms enforced by various authoritarian alpha wolves (this is how certain scripters think they will fix the problem of Copybot) is also utterly misplaced. Human nature must be restrained by the rule of law, and that requires an independent judiciary, a free press, adversarial defense and many more attributes of a liberal democratic society. We don't have that in SL.

On particularly juvenile group that didn't seem to outgrow the teen grid ruins the view with huge glowing obelisks they deploy all over the place, sometimes in large clusters deliberately against people who criticize this offensive practice. The Lindens merely sell them the small parcels to do this particular form of social griefing which is able to technically skirt the law on microparcels which only concerns ads and land for sale.

Recently, a stranger whom I have never dealt with to my knowledge burned $299 to "gift" me an obscene gag gift that some people might find humorous among friends. It was only deployed to grief me. The combinations of such behaviour are endless. I am not the exception. It's not that you can say, "You have a critical blog, you deserve this." People who are silent and never post a thing have this happen to them. And no one deserves such lawless behaviour/

Crime and terrorism and other crimes in the Metaverse -- and the actions *are* those things even if only virtual -- can only change when the platform providers begin to take an attitude that this isn't a unicorn realm, and it can't be solved by "tools," but the institutions of RL society like a criminal justice system are required.

On the forums, we can't even name the names of businesses that have pernicious practices and defraud us. So please don't talk to me about how crime is "solved" within 96 m2 because somebody's draw distance doesn't go past that to see all the problems I've outlined -- and more.

 

Edited January 19, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/16/2023 at 2:52 PM, animats said:

Something I posted on r/metaverse on Reddit. I've made this point before on various metaverse forums. There are people saying in mainstream media that the metaverse needs to be heavily censored or moderated. This is an opposing view. This is a message that needs to get out, before we have some kind of government-mandated moderation. LL is welcome to use these as talking points.

Second Life solved these problems years ago. The solutions are subtle and effective.

First, in a big 3D world, jerks are local. In Second Life, a jerk can only annoy for about a 100 meter radius. The whole world is the size of Los Angeles, and nobody notices distant jerks.

There's no way to broadcast to everyone. There's no such thing as "following" or "retweeting". So jerks are not amplified. They're just harmlessly yelling into the void.

Second, landowners have power over their own land. Go to a club and be a jerk, and you'll be bounced by the club owner. You can't get back in. If you try, large yellow bars appear in front of you, which you cannot pass. Homeowners have that power at their home, too. Jerks soon find themselves on the outside, looking in through ban lines. This eliminates the need for "moderators". Second Life does have a small "governance" department. It's for serious situations for which, in real life, you'd call the cops.

There are some public places where jerks congregate. Second Life users will know about Social Island 10, the Port Authority Bus Terminal of Second Life. It has the same kinds of losers you find in bus terminals, from panhandlers to people with boom boxes. Nobody has to spend time there. It's a problem that new users pass through the social islands, which gives a bad first impression. But by day 3, everyone with a clue knows not to stay there.

Arriving in Second Life is like arriving in a strange big city. The world offers many options but does not compel you to do anything. This confuses some people.

Third, sex. Second Life has an adult continent, a sizable area in which sex is allowed. If you want to go there, you have to be over 18, enable adult content in your viewer, pick an adult destination, and go. Outside of the adult continent, nudity and sex are discouraged. Mostly by peer pressure from other users. There's official enforcement if necessary, but it's rarely needed. The same tools that deal with jerks deal with unwanted sex. In practice, it's just not a problem. Even on the adult continent, there isn't much visible sex.

Finally, a key component of a good metaverse is that users are invested in it. They have virtual homes, stores, and friends. Being a jerk and being banned hurts your life in the virtual world. So most people just don't.

These are not major problems for a well run metaverse. It's just a problem for Meta/Horizon, which has now failed three times at virtual worlds.

You could not be more wrong about this in 100 ways.

Edited January 19, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[EliseAnne85]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I suspect that this is so.

Ironically, I suspect that the only thing that has prevented them from selling off the platform for spare parts is the fact that the code base is so ancient.

To add some fairness, even though I'm not a geek in any way, is the code would still work with prims and sculpties and we could still be a virtual 3D chatroom but we wanted everything with mesh, and the old code doesn't mesh too well with mesh.  

 

[Orwar]

12 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If you honestly think #nochanges is in anyway a viable option to keep SL running as it stands for another 5 or 10 years, you're not paying attention.

   No one has said #NoChanges, though? Just because your ideas get shot down doesn't mean that we're resistant to change, we just didn't agree with your ideas - the two are not synonymous.

   Having 40-50K concurrent users at any given time isn't at all bad. And 'concurrent' users do not equate 'userbase size'; there are still around 200,000 users logging in daily, and far from every 'active user' logs in each and every day - there's no real way of knowing how many 'active' users SL has at any given time unless LL wants to share that data. As of writing this, though, SL would be #15 on the Steam charts - we beat Wallpaper Engine (whatever that is), take that! 

   As for SL's profitability, well, LL isn't a public company, so unless they've said 'we're bleeding money' somewhere, assuming they are whilst still actively developing the platform seems strange. Whilst Google/Quora mightn't be a totally reliable resource, what I found was:

   "Second Life, the user-generated virtual world, generates almost $100 million in revenue a year, according to a new report on LAUNCH. A “company insider” says that Linden Lab has grossed over $75 million per year for the past three years and the company is profitable." And something certainly must be doing all right if Bellisseria is still being expanded at this rate - you can almost fit Jeogeot plus Satori in it by now; that's a lot of premium accounts ticking dosh in. 

   So, should we trust in a company which has gotten this far and which keeps evolving (in spite of certain claims to the contrary), or some doomsayer whose solution to a 'failing product' is to 'slap a new name on it and call a press conference to whack it with a champagne bottle'?

[EliseAnne85]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

No growth means stagnation and death. Coasting on as we have the last 20 years is not acceptable anymore.

Yes, but because we want "everything" and plus we don't want to go minimalistic for phones either where we look like a stick body.

But, you and others on the PBR bandwagon, haven't convinced me yet that reflections will bring in new users.  There will be new equipment to buy and higher cost per face to make items in what is looking as a not so good economy right now.  And, there is still the high learning curve.  I don't see people wanting to join to look at reflections.  Gimme some meat here to chew on about PBR coupled with a bad economy.  

Edited January 19, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Ags Falconer]

On 1/16/2023 at 2:52 PM, animats said:

Something I posted on r/metaverse on Reddit. I've made this point before on various metaverse forums. There are people saying in mainstream media that the metaverse needs to be heavily censored or moderated. This is an opposing view. This is a message that needs to get out, before we have some kind of government-mandated moderation. LL is welcome to use these as talking points.

Second Life solved these problems years ago. The solutions are subtle and effective.

First, in a big 3D world, jerks are local. In Second Life, a jerk can only annoy for about a 100 meter radius. The whole world is the size of Los Angeles, and nobody notices distant jerks.

There's no way to broadcast to everyone. There's no such thing as "following" or "retweeting". So jerks are not amplified. They're just harmlessly yelling into the void.

Second, landowners have power over their own land. Go to a club and be a jerk, and you'll be bounced by the club owner. You can't get back in. If you try, large yellow bars appear in front of you, which you cannot pass. Homeowners have that power at their home, too. Jerks soon find themselves on the outside, looking in through ban lines. This eliminates the need for "moderators". Second Life does have a small "governance" department. It's for serious situations for which, in real life, you'd call the cops.

There are some public places where jerks congregate. Second Life users will know about Social Island 10, the Port Authority Bus Terminal of Second Life. It has the same kinds of losers you find in bus terminals, from panhandlers to people with boom boxes. Nobody has to spend time there. It's a problem that new users pass through the social islands, which gives a bad first impression. But by day 3, everyone with a clue knows not to stay there.

Arriving in Second Life is like arriving in a strange big city. The world offers many options but does not compel you to do anything. This confuses some people.

Third, sex. Second Life has an adult continent, a sizable area in which sex is allowed. If you want to go there, you have to be over 18, enable adult content in your viewer, pick an adult destination, and go. Outside of the adult continent, nudity and sex are discouraged. Mostly by peer pressure from other users. There's official enforcement if necessary, but it's rarely needed. The same tools that deal with jerks deal with unwanted sex. In practice, it's just not a problem. Even on the adult continent, there isn't much visible sex.

Finally, a key component of a good metaverse is that users are invested in it. They have virtual homes, stores, and friends. Being a jerk and being banned hurts your life in the virtual world. So most people just don't.

These are not major problems for a well run metaverse. It's just a problem for Meta/Horizon, which has now failed three times at virtual worlds.

@animats, i like your perspective on the strengths on distributed governance of behaviors based on distributed authorities because of local control of spacial areas in Second Life. I had not thought of it in precisely this way before you outlined it. Thank you for that. 

Personally, I love the notion of a community that governs itself to become the kind of community that it wants to become. Kinda like real life....

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Orwar said:

   No one has said #NoChanges, though? Just because your ideas get shot down doesn't mean that we're resistant to change, we just didn't agree with your ideas - the two are not synonymous.

The same few people here shoot down all ideas.

SL is more than capable of including things that don't appeal to everyone, least of all the tiny fraction that have made these forums rather than the virtual world their home.

1 hour ago, Orwar said:

   Having 40-50K concurrent users at any given time isn't at all bad.

After 20 years .. yeah, its shockingly bad. We're dead in the water and have been for years. 

Profitable and growth are entirely different things, and to assume simple profitability is acceptable fundamentally misunderstands the culture of US tech businesses.

If simple profitability was acceptable, our own King Philip wouldn't have spent years running around trying to make a deal to sell this place. Or why when he did find a buyer, the first thing they did was carve off the exciting fintech part.

1 hour ago, Orwar said:

And something certainly must be doing all right if Bellisseria is still being expanded at this rate

Belli is a loss leader that has shown it can grow user subscriptions. Which in turn helps to lock users in to the platform and increase on going engagement.

LL are losing money on Belli in order to achieve growth.

Growth is the only metric that matters.

1 hour ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Yes, but because we want "everything" and plus we don't want to go minimalistic for phones either where we look like a stick body.

You don't have to worry, full fat SL will never run natively on phones or even tablets. 

It's actually for the same reason SL hasn't been made to run in a game engine like Unreal .. even though the source is open. Everyone with sufficient skill and understanding of how the platform works to pull off porting SL to unreal (etc), knows it's a fools errand to even try. The naïve see 3D graphics, games have 3D graphics, hey why isn't this thing like that thing.

1 hour ago, EliseAnne85 said:

But, you and others on the PBR bandwagon, haven't convinced me yet that reflections will bring in new users. 

They wont. No one will suddenly join because texture rendering was dragged kicking and screaming into something approaching standard industry workflows. Not a single person.

PBR will usher in a whole new generation of content for us to shop for, make all our old content look more like garbage and further increase the technical & artistic mastery required to make acceptable content. It might boost the economy as we all repurchase everything and help retain creators. 

I'm very excited it's coming and believe it to be long overdue, but it's just one thing on a long list of things that LL as custodians of this platform should have been doing for the last 10 years. PBR is like a fresh lick of paint. It's maintenance .. and hopefully part of a longer term plan to get us away from opengl and advance the platform generally.

[Arielle Popstar]

52 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The same few people here shoot down all ideas.

Hopes you aren't in denial about you being one of the top 3 people to shoot down all ideas other than your own.

Quote

You don't have to worry, full fat SL will never run natively on phones or even tablets. 

It's already been proven that a full fat S/L client isn't needed to be attractive to those who run mobile clients. A viewer with a capability equalling Lumiya  would be quite sufficient and would open SL to a large untapped market of Mobile users, especially if they actually promoted mobile connection capability.

[Sammy Huntsman]

39 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Hopes you aren't in denial about you being one of the top 3 people to shoot down all ideas other than your own.

How dare you call her out. Lol. But yeah I don't agree with her ideas, as I don't see a need to anger the userbase. Most of her ideas have been to gamify the platform. But I think most of her ideas would kill SL and not make it better. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

We're all on the same team here, people. We all want SL to succeed, and none of us wants to upend it radically: we all value what it has to offer now.

This is a discussion about ways and means forward. That's all.

[Love Zhaoying]

Go Team!

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, Orwar said:

No one has said #NoChanges, though? Just because your ideas get shot down doesn't mean that we're resistant to change, we just didn't agree with your ideas - the two are not synonymous.

There's not really a nice way to say, "your ideas are dumb", is there?

[Prokofy Neva]

4 hours ago, Ags Falconer said:

@animats, i like your perspective on the strengths on distributed governance of behaviors based on distributed authorities because of local control of spacial areas in Second Life. I had not thought of it in precisely this way before you outlined it. Thank you for that. 

Personally, I love the notion of a community that governs itself to become the kind of community that it wants to become. Kinda like real life....

It's utterly myopic to view the problem of griefing as "land based" or about "proximity" and therefore fixable with land tools when ingenious and unchecked griefers use all kinds of social engineering to invade groups, events, sims they don't own (by using Linden land as a safe house) -- etc.