The Value of Complaining

[Darrius Gothly]

(tl;dr warning)

From my first day on the Forums here at SL, I have been a member of the community that likes to "complain". I'm quite sure there are harsher descriptions that apply in my case, and I know for a fact that harsher terms have been used ... but the bottom line is that I often post with an observation or opinion that calls into question some change or policy at LL that has (or will soon have) a negative effect on SL and its customers. So, I've got the label of "Whiner".

I have a reason for making such posts though, and seeing as how lately there have been some pretty harsh personal exchanges, I felt it might be constructive to shine a little light on my personal reasons (and what might also be similar if not the same reasons as others with the same label).

First off, I'm left-handed. That means that since I first started trying to master the Eye-Hand Coordination thing, I have had to learn how to adapt. Being left-handed you quickly realize that nothing "fits" .. everything is made for right-handed people. And it's not just my handedness either. I have a decidedly non-standard body shape (scrawny is probably the best description) so finding clothes that fit has been a life-long challenge of adapting and customizing and "making do". I mention this because there is the common misconception that I complain when anything doesn't suit me perfectly. I want you to understand that this is decidedly not the case with me.

So okay, the personal stuff is out of the way. Now onto the meat of this thread.

Second Life is a MASSIVE machine. Really big .. like bigger than big, really big. Over its lifetime it has acquired 1000's of little cubby-holes and "work arounds" and dark dungeons where things were done, changes made, patches applied .. and the knowledge of those things have ceased to exist in the expertise of the current LL Staff. Well, gosh .. of course it has so that's no news.

But one of the side-effects to that accumulation of "Black Magic" land mines in the Second Life machine, sometimes things get changed for perfectly innocent and well-intentioned reasons ... and something really REALLY bad happens on the other side of the world (or other side of the database). It's not that the LL Staff intentionally set out to screw people over, they just weren't aware that their tiny change could or would result in such far-reaching collateral damage. But doggone it, it did and now whatever got changed needs to be unfixed so the damage can be undone too.

So we customers who use Second Life daily (with ranges from "I logged on to check messages" up through "I earn my income from here") run into one of those unintended consequences. Not too long ago a change was made in some header code on the SL Transaction History pages that caused the date filtering to get seriously whacked wrong. Whatever change was made was certainly not intended to also screw up the date filtering, but it did. And that's just one fairly recent example.

Unfortunately, the Staff at LL are up to their necks in "stuff". SL is so massive that sometimes making tiny changes feels like having to move a dump truck full of marbles .. one marble at a time. Seriously borked and definitely unexpected outcomes are things they just won't see right away .. if at all. And I'm not faulting them for missing some of them either. Their eyes are focused on the next goal and they don't live in SL the way we do, so they just simply won't notice some of the side-effects. That's where we contribute to the process.

The "Approved Method" for notifying LL of a new bug is to create a JIRA Issue and describe the problem in as much detail as possible. But as many of us have found out in our time using SL, sometimes the "New Bug" is a PEBKAC issue. (PEBKAC = Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair) That means it's really not a problem with SL at all, it's something we are doing wrong or maybe we just need to reboot and try again. I daresay that a rather large number of "Issues" are PEBKAC's ... and filing a JIRA Issue for each one would quickly reduce the JIRA system to nothing more than a personalized technical support bazaar ... with all the valid issues drowned out in the noise of truly non-systemic issues.

So we bring the issue here  to the Forums. We bring it here to discuss among the Community so we can determine if this is something that is affecting more than just ourselves. This IS where the SL Community is supposed to communicate and share and interact with each other, so this is the "Right Place" to bring these things to light first. Then if it turns out to be a real issue, that's when someone files a JIRA and sets that mechanism into motion.

When you have 50,000 people logged on at any one time, it's a sure bet at least one of those people is having some sort of issue that is affecting them right now. Because they can bring it to the rest of the Community here, we can quickly determine if it's a real new issue, a temporary problem .. or just someone has their head jammed in the wrong tiny hole. The discussions can be productive, existing already known and well documented issues can be dispatched in a hurry (by someone copy/pasting the canned "how to fix" solution) and we can quickly winnow the candidate issues down to just those that really need further investigation ... and a JIRA.

Now back to this concept of being a "whiner" or "complainer": Some folks have a knack for spotting changes and issues in very specific areas of SL. Some folks are geniuses at spotting connection issues, others know how to handle rezzing issues, still others have system level experience and quickly spot larger, all-encompassing issues.

Those folks that excel at pointing out problems in their specific area of "expertise" quickly get labelled with those derogatory names .. unfairly labelled too. The person posting or commenting about an issue gets slammed as being counter productive and "sky is falling" doomsayers when all they are really doing is bringing something to light that others may need to know about or may be experiencing.

I myself often point out troubles by posting here, and I cover a wide array of issues. Sometimes I learn that it's not just me (and I don't just have my head in that tiny wrong hole) and sometimes by discussing the issue we can all come to a quick work-around that saves others a lot of time and trouble.

So I'd like to ask those that immediately take up the torches and pitchforks and chase us into the castle to please consider carefully why the thread was started, why the comments were made .. and what the real goal is before you condemn someone to just being a whiner. Speaking for myself, I am not here to whine nor complain, I am here to try and help all of us Customers and LL at the same time, by bringing issues to light, helping others see that it might not be a really horrible thing ... and alerting LL that a JIRA may soon be appearing that needs attention.

My goal is to help. Sometimes I have to point out that something is broken to begin that helping process. But simply pointing out that it IS broken does not mean I want LL to fail, or that I'm condemning them as being slackers or idiots .. I'm just shining a light where some attention is needed.

[Pamela Galli]

"So we bring the issue here  to the Forums. We bring it here to discuss among the Community so we can determine if this is something that is affecting more than just ourselves. This IS where the SL Community is supposed to communicate and share and interact with each other, so this is the "Right Place" to bring these things to light first. Then if it turns out to be a real issue, that's when someone files a JIRA and sets that mechanism into motion."

 

Yes I try to get more of the inworld group peeps to come here, since this is the designated place.

 

In my experience, yes, the squeaky wheel does get the grease, so we need squeaky wheels. Not wheels that fall off the cart completely tho.

[Chelsea Malibu]

I've always considered you in the role of Advocate not whiner.  I too follow a similar path however, I am probably more reserved than you but part of this is due to my profession where it's often best to walk softly and carry a big subpoena. 

However, there is a limit on what LL is willing to do and after 6 years of hearing their story, attending (and speaking) at SLCC and knowing what many lindens have told me over the years about the chaos behind closed doors it always comes back to one problem I see and his name is Philip Rosedale.  You see he got shoved out of Real Networks in a not so pleasant departure for them (I know many other execs who where there at the time) and had a few buck but no idea what to do. 

They built a game platform rather than a game since a game takes far more creativity than they had at their disposal.  Philip is now bored with SL and doesn't want much to do with it these days.  Their faded excitement has all but diminished and now it's sort of just chugs along, barely managed with little enthusiasm.

It's really sad in the end since many of us have put so much into this and moreover, so much hope into the ideals of this world.

[Josh Susanto]

Demonizing Rosedale, as justified as it may be in itself, is not a very good way of excusing people who are actually running things now.

As long as the company remains profitable, it's reasonable for them to want to continue their work, especially when so much of the RL economy is doing so badly.

One way to look at this is that it's just one more bubble into which noobs will continue pouring money until the pyramid can't hold itself up any longer, just like the US residential real estate market, the dotcom boom, or the classic example of tulips in Holland.

But I don't see it that way. SL might be more compelling to more users if it were a game. But there are a lot of games. To make SL a game would be to have to compete with those games, and to alienate a smaller but significant user base that is less interested in games than in a multiple emergent-purpose simulator. Games have to stay cutting edge in order to remain profitable because they compete with other games. SL just has to stay usable, at least as long as the competitors offer nothing better. 

So why is LL focusing on now gadgets and gimmicks rather than focusing on just making SL less unncecessarily difficult to use? 

Because someone at LL has continued, at least partly, to fail to understand why people choose SL rather than WOW (for example), or, more importantly, why people who might prefer SL eventually get sick of dealing with it. 

I think, if we all consider the question in earnest, we should be able to believe that users don't tend to come to SL when WOW is an option, and then leave simply because SL isn't enough like WOW. If you talk to people who have quit, they have not done so because SL fails to keep up with new game narratives or other things that make WOW appealing; they tend to leave because SL frustrates them; not in terms of lacking a clear narrative structure or gamelike regime of competence, or exciting new features, but simply in terms of things not working as LL says (or effectively says) they do.

My expertise as a whiner is to go over this again and again and again until it sinks in with at least one more person who can make a difference.

I was delighted to hear Rodvik say that while technical development will continue, usability is the big focal point for the foreseeable future. But I'm not convinced that this is a message that will be taken seriously by others at LL unless there is a persistent message from users that making existing stuff work right is more important than making new stuff that might almost work correctly. That is: the point of complaining is to keep the technical meme on-message.

The reason I'm not nicer about it is that being nicer seems to encourage a more dismissive attitude. The biggest usability flaw is that when something goes wrong, someone else has to actually want to do something about it, or at least recognize the problem. Users, including me, actually don't expect everything to go right. What we should be able to expect, though (and what I think is much more important to us) is that we are not repeatedly told things are working correctly when they are not. When our complaints are handled dismissively, it tells us that fixing the problem isn't worth the effort if it includes the possibility of admitting that we might be right.  

I'm pretty sure none one can deny that what really keeps SL vibrant is user-created content. Providing more tools is nice, even if they do not work properly in every case. But throwing away people willing to develop content without any normal form of pay is pretty stupid. LL seems to do this simply because it's more interesting to make new semi-functional tools than to fix tools we should already be able to use. This is clearly at cross-purposes with the very core mechanism that continues to create value in SL, but I guess, to some people, even this doesn't matter.

I care. So sue me.

When half-assed technical development takes precedence over utility of existing tools, should we complain?

Heck yes. We should scream.

We should say whatever it is that, if said, will get even some tiny part of the process moving in the correct direction again.

If it takes a conspiracy theory, I can do that. I have done that. I will continue to do that.

It can't work any worse than simply ignoring patterns that, really, we should all be able to see by now.

Seriously, conspiratory or otherwise, is anyone NOT yet seeing a pattern in the various technical problems that have occurred since early August?

 

[Darrius Gothly]

You've exactly hit on one of the primary reasons I keep advocating (thank you btw) for more direct interaction and involvement between Lindens and Residents: The Residents are hyped and positive and creative and energized and ... We BELIEVE! I maintain that mixing our enthusiasm and love of the Platform (and all that can be done with it) with the technical know-how and expertise of the Lindens will result in a final product that carries forward the grandeur of our imaginations and the ability to "get it done" from the Labbies.

My theory as to why it doesn't happen routinely? Because they fear that mixing the two ingredients will result in a final product that is soured by the dashed hopes of the Residents and hobbled by the technical faux pas that is typified in the half-completed Marketplace and the "clearly off-target" clumsiness of Viewer 2.

I believe the glass is not only half-full, but that it can hold much more and SHOULD hold much more too. It saddens me that we keep running into silence, intentional "dumbing down" of the platform and a lack of trust that derives from the belief that the glass is half empty and leaking badly.

*sigh*

[Lasher Oh]

You do it so well - rock on :-)

 

^L^

[Josh Susanto]

A glass that's half full might actually be good enough for me.

I mostly just resent being told again and again and again that it isn't also half empty and that I don't know what I'm talking about.

[Ziggy21 Slade]

I guess I would probably consider myself to be one of the torch carrying pitchfork wielders.

I read what you write Darrius with interest each time, you present reasoned argument backed up with you own unique knowledge, I may not always agree but I am often not knowledgeable enough to disagree and can at least clearly see and consider another point of view to my own.

The problem is that the most vociferous complainers here generally don't bother with any facts, knowledge or reasoned argument, instead we get B movie amateur dramatics, convoluted conspiracy theories, and ad absurdum arguments and this is what I object to. These drama queens seem to feed each other and I feel that if I don't try and stamp the fire out quickly it will soon be out of control. There are many examples here but a good recent one, was a thread regarding the fault with transaction downloads, a few posts in and this fault had become a deliberate act perpetrated by LL to conceal an economic collapse which every merchant knew about and was experiencing. This sort of thing does nothing to enhance any argument, it clouds the real issue, makes us all look like fools and discourages new users. 

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

I get the "value" of complaining, except ...

Complaining for complaining's sake ... it comes across as nothing more than complaining at times. Especially when people that don't jump on the complaining bandwagon. Especially when folks who are neutral, unaffected or non-biased are rudely attacked and insulted by people who are threatened that their "righteous cause" is getting dilluted.

Always believed this doesn't help our collective customer base buy more goods. Negative effect on sales and merchants image.

It gets clique-ish. People who like to lead the charge for "causes" tend to be so biased, that it's exclusive rather than inclusive of community. Seen this go to peoples heads often and it gets ugly. It also gets needlessly personal, these self professed leaders always resort to bringing it down to a personal level, when their views are challenged.

The down and dirty bits:

Constant complaining numbs everyone to issues that may be far more important than trivial issues. Important things get buried. Easier to pass it all off and ignore it.

If you have to justify complaining (or even advocating), you're probably doing it wrong. Guilty of this myself.

We agree that having too little information makes useful feedback that much harder.

I hesitate to mention what I believe is the real problem, although we've all touched on it, that it's a managerial problem and culture style with LL. I don't fault any of the team, in fact I think they're wonderfully intelligent and creative. However, I think that the option for employees to choose what projects they work on, letting developers make decisions in commerce is a bad idea.

I think the measuring stick of performance that the team is graded on (overall Marketplace sales, stuffing Google and social networking, etc.), is the wrong measuring stick. Customer (both ours and ourselves as Merchants) satisfaction is at a low point, and this should be the gauge of success. Apparently the board thinks otherwise.

One product manager (preferably not even someone on the commerce team) should be consolidating our feedback with feedback from commerce team developers. That means more of our bugs and feature requests get done, rather than a team of non business people playing masters of the commerce universe, and analyzing eBay and Amazon to death to figure out how those square pegs fit into the round hole that is SL commerce.

The team is understaffed and under-funded. No one should choose the job to be a Marketplace developer on their own, it's not a fun job compared to others at the Lab. Mooks need to be hired for this specifically with no option to jump to another project.

These are decisions and problems that only the highest level managers can solve, the CEO and the board.

Complaining on forums consistently isn't going to change this. Or to be more optimistic, it's not likely.

Issues brought to Rod's attention are not a solution. It's a scatter shot approach that nitpicks at individual issues that may actually get done that still don't solve a larger problem.

We have some people (not mentioning names or pointing fingers) in every community that if they couldn't complain wouldn't really have anything useful to contribute if they didn't have these complaints to feed off of.

LL hides behind L$. There is no consumer protection. There are no applicable laws. there are no bodies of business groups, no unions and no realistic recourse such as the Better Business Bureau.

There's more, but you see how complaining in its own right is rather ineffective and shoots itself in the foot.

Agree with being vocal, don't agree with the effectiveness of a sustained battle to get the job done. Not a complainer by nature, I don't believe the most successful Merchants are either.

Tough one.

[Darrius Gothly]

The bottom line is just this simple then:

One man's whiny complaint is another man's clear definition of the problem.

[Pamela Galli]

You know, my customers have given me so many good ideas - stuff I would never have thought of -- that I just can't understand LL not being more interested overall to user suggestions.

 

I have to say, tho, that I think the commerce team is well -intentioned -- they sent out that detailed survey and on that basis gave failed deliveries priorities.  I just think they were saddled with a piece of crap software and had no clue how much time things would take.  I mean, no one thought it was going to be "We are going to work on DD for months and in the meantime nothing else will get done."

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Doesn't need to be one or the other. If it's divisive, it's not being done right. Every opinion is just an opinion. Breeding division by classifying people's opinions is about as effective as one political party coming up with their own plan, just because it's not "our" plan, our way, our methods, our ethics.

It's subtle, but telling.

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Pamela Galli wrote:

You know, my customers have given me so many good ideas - stuff I would never have thought of -- that I just can't understand LL not being more interested overall to user suggestions.

 

I have to say, tho, that I think the commerce team is well -intentioned -- they sent out that detailed survey and on that basis gave failed deliveries priorities.  I just think they were saddled with a piece of crap software and had no clue how much time things would take.  I mean, no one thought it was going to be "We are going to work on DD for months and in the meantime nothing else will get done."

---

These are good points and the fact that likely the current LL Commerce & Development Team were completely caught off guard with regard to exactly how complicated and time consuming DD would be to deploy.

And... this symptom / situation is yet one more piece of strong evidence of what I keep saying in posts regarding LL's immature level / evolution of Business Priorities, Effective Resource Planning, and Systems Development.

1)  An effective mature team would have been able to more effectively quantify all aspects of what it would take to design and develop and deploy a DD system into their already known and existing "piece of crap" environment. They would have identified the risks, complexities, resourcing, and time-to-delivery required to deploy DD.  As Pam accurately stated - DD's complexity clearly caught LL by surprise.  Why?  Because with an immature IS organization where the App Developers and coding geeks are asked to assess development estimates, the response from this team is usually "ohh that wont be hard to do... just give us a couple months...".

(BTW calling this new SLM platform a piece of crap (which I would suspect is a true assessment) is funny and ironic as in the era of Pink Linden.... it was this new platform LL selected for SLM to be developed on that would leave behind the old crap XSTREET platform and allow LL to expand SLM much more effectively... 18 months later we now call SLM crap.)

2)  IF LL actually did have an accurate understanding of the complexity and risks of a DD deployment, then the next LL org weakness is their resource planning and priorities.   So if DD deployment was so important a priority - regardless of the complexity, then they should have put some common sense behind how they were actually going to accomplish this?  A more feasible option might have been to outsource the development of this with a trusted contracted development shop that was guided by a smaller team of the LL staff.  Since the LL Staff is so small, their resourcing could have more effectively been directed to important and yet more digestable deliverables... LIKE... UHMMM .... the backlog of Merchant request to fix Xstreet functions that a year later are still not addressed.

Sadly, this is just another example of a company that screams of immature business management and IS development immaturity.  LL Customers continue to pay the price.  But we all know that LL's Customer Service priority is among the bottom of LL's priority.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

Complaining has an important function in the proces of making things better. It works best when the complains are picked up by the people who are in charge of making things better.
For a long time this is not done by the Lab, because we were simply not their focus group, LL aimed for getting businesses into the platform in stead of hobbyists. Users felt massively they were not valued by the lab, they were not heard, they were not considered important, they were at best just labrats. But despite of the behaviour of the compagny, we stayed because we love the product despite all shortcomings. We kept renting land from the compagny, despite all frustrations about the service.

But frustrations have go somewhere. You can bring them to a place where they don't belong, like shouting at your partner or your dog.  Or you can share them with peers who are in a simulair position as you, and that is what happens on these forums. Because LL didn't care for its customers complaints and concerns for years, a culture of corumination arised. And this culture is most vivid in the merchant forum.
This might have to do with the interests that people have who are active in the commerce field. Steps that LL makes or doesn't make, can have influence on our income. Because we have no inside in the strategy of LL and are powerless when it comes to decission making we seem to find no other ways then just keeping complaining.

Maybe this will be productive in the end. I think we already gained a lot compared to two, three years ago. Nowadays we are the focus group for LL; the focus on future clients (compagnies) in stead of existing customers is gone, together with M. Linden.  They listen to us, now and then. Not always, and maybe not enough, but 'now and then' is still better then 'not at all' which wat the case in the past.

But on the other hand, this culture of complaining puts me in a kind of split as a merchant. On the one hand I also need LL to improve things, because that is better for my business. But on the other hand a culture of complaining has never been good for any business. I'm convinced that a culture of happiness would lead to more sales for all of us, then a culture of complaining. It is for this reason that a compagny like Coca Cola nowadays promotes with the slogan 'open happiness'.

I was a mesh beta tester. In this group I experienced a very different way of working together between Lindens and residents. It was productive. And in general there was not much complaining going on. Until it came to the crucial point of prim count. LL had deciced that the minimum prim count of a mesh would be two prims. There was a lot of protest about this. And that was effective as well. People who had been very cooperative for a while were venting their concerns and frustration about this prim count in all possible ways, but also people who had never showed up before start raising their voice about this issue. After a few weeks LL changed the plan, and mesh was released with a minimum prim count of 1.

But you can ask yourself would this protest have been as effective when their would have been a culture of complaining from the beginning in the mesh beta group? Complaining a lot can also cause that the people at the lab that you depend on, become less open to listen to you. Because they can feel like 'no matter how I do my best for them, they are always blaming me or my team for their frustrations'.  It is not a pleasant atmosphere to communicate in, when you are attacked every time you show your face somewhere. In the end you might simple start to avoid those places. And what have we archieved then?

I hope that in the end we can grow over this current culture in the commerce forums. This process will take some time. The lab is an important party in that, because our happiness as a merchant partly depends on them. But not completely, you are also responsable yourself.

Despite of some frustrations about the system and some critism I have,  I'm still happy to be a merchant in SL. 

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Doesn't need to be one or the other. If it's divisive, it's not being done right. Every opinion is just an opinion. Breeding division by classifying people's opinions is about as effective as one political party coming up with their own plan, just because it's not "our" plan, our way, our methods, our ethics.

It's subtle, but telling.

---

Tell me then, which are the sides I am dividing? You state "if it's divisive", but how can I be dividing two sides if I only state in a clear manner the observations and opinions of one side?

And btw, you misunderstood me. I corrupted an old saying to point out that we see things differently. Obviously that means it is both, not "one or the other".

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Good example, and I've seen exactly that in a beta!

Entirely different and mature atmosphere in the beta programs. That is until some decision is made that seems a bit over the top and then it starts resembling something the forums here. That's understandable.

I think what I'm trying to get at isn't that "complaining" is bad, but rather hmm .... feedback that's not positive isn't complaining at all, it's just feedback.

It's not really complaining until people try to unite that into some unified voice, and even that's ok ... but then it turns into this thing that "you're for us or against us". At that point you can kiss a community of merchants goodbye, because the main purpose turns into trying to squeeze LL. At that point, people who have no problem start to get insulted and put into a box of "not one of us".

You're either with us, or you're not a thinking person and now your entire logic must be defended.

God forbid like one person the other day eluded that if it's that bad for you, leave. Even though leaving would be the loudest course of action, and most effective for all parties if you want to be honest about it. But now the popular argument is that we complain because we love SL. And I get that too, I really do.

When the context is either complainer of cheerleader, and there are people that will ALWAYS take an angle that puts people into one of those boxes, it becomes something less than honest feedback. This is fake, and I think taking that people who harp on that kind of division are hucksters selling hair tonic off the back of a wagon.

And ... it's weird.

Let people have their opinions good or bad. They don't have to be complainers or fanbois or pro or con or anything but a person with an opinion. My take is that these forums are for any topic relating to commerce in SL, and related topics like virtual goods, etc.

Watch it closely and you'll see what I mean, take away those labels and divisions and you have just people with opinions. And those people will get along much better no matter how much they agree or disagree.

My gripes now as a non advocate are the same views that I've always had but wouldn't express because I thought I'd be adding fuel to an already strange thing we have going on sometimes in SL. Giving ammunition to trolls, etc.

I place all the blame on a greedy and clueless LL board that in spite of flat numbers can't seem to grasp that it's time to stop monetizing and get rid of this work culture that equates to coloring books in a day care center. Hire some product managers over these departments, rate their performance based on customer satisifaction and writing software, because on their level, SL is nothing but virtual worlds software.

The money will naturally follow, because that's the secret sauce of SL, when people are happy, hyped and excited about the possibilities, it goes viral and people come here in droves. Primarily to make a buck as the biggest draw, secondarily to be creative, thirdly for socializing, fourthly for pixel bumping and hooking up with each other.

I think my "complaining" has as much bite as anyone elses, and yet ... I'm not complaining. If they don't get it together in the next year I may not consider it worth more years of my life waiting for that to happen.

It's just feedback and opinion. It's not us vs. them, it's not cheerleader, fanboi, complainer and I certainly don't need to constantly convince people who are already complaining about the value of complaining.

It's this kind of weirdness that makes me not recommend people to SL more than anything else. Makes me want to go back to advocating though

[Josh Susanto]

As much as I admit that I enjoy forming a complaint so that failing to address it makes its target look ridiculous, I didn't initally come here to complain, and if I were never again given anything about which to complain, that's a kind of frustration I think I could learn to live with. I'd be crying all the way back to the other fora where I used to actually help people and get help with technical and conceptual challenges that had nothing to do with the system being broken. Humor me and make that happen. Any time.

As far as conspiracy theories go, my own "malicious insider" theory regarding SL is even less convoluted and harder to refute than the most popular conspiracy theory surrounding 911... that theory being THE OFFICIAL STORY. If you find the official story behind 911 to be plausible (as I actually mostly do), what I've pointed out repeatedly regarding the lack of any better explanation for the pattern of recent failures at LL should only be a lot easier to swallow. Moreover, if it were what the Lindens told you had happened, would you even bother to question it? If it were they, rather than I, giving you the conspiracy explanation, would it really make any less sense than the way things are currently explained? 

It's not the theory, itself, that people are rejecting; they reject it because they trust LL more than they trust me to come up with credible explanations. That is; they reject the theory because they find LL's explanations easy to believe regardless of what is actually said or what evidence is provided. In other words, they reject the theory only because they reject me as a theorist because I'm not a Linden. (And has LL actually yet denied ANY of what I have said?).

The tone of discourse might be improved here if I stopped calling people "LL apologist lapdogs", but if I refrained from such while comparable epithets continued to be hurled in the other direction, I'm not sure if that would be a less unproductive environment here. Sorry to play the primacy card like a 3-year-old, but it's not totally unfair to ask who really started it. My intent isn't to get people pissed off, it's to get people to scrutinize how their own approach to my posts must look to anyone who might tend to agree with my core position. That's why I dont just call people iditiots or tell them they must have small penises or how I just had sex with their mom. That kind of thing IS counterproductive, and I take for granted that if I engage in it, it will just make people not want to consider in earnest anything else I may have to say; it's a sign of a person desperate to come up with anything to shut someone else up. That's not me. I'd LOVE it if you would all keep arguing with me, provided that it's because we really all want the same thing for SL, but just don't agree on how it will be necessary to get there (which is what I have no problem believing, really).

I'm against letting serious problems get further out of control. I am not against people trying to do their jobs and trying to use the system effectively, even if I may sometimes disagree about what, precisely, this means. I am not even really against the malicious insider or insiders making some money by applying certain skills; I am merely against them doing so in a way that kills the golden goose. If they can really clean up the act and move on in such a way that no one will ever really know what happened, that would probably be an acceptable outcome for my purposes. I just don't see that happening.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

 

It's not the theory, itself, that people are rejecting; they reject it because they trust LL more than they trust me to come up with credible explanations. That is; they reject the theory because they find LL's explanations easy to believe regardless of what is actually said or what evidence is provided. In other words, they reject the theory only because they reject me as a theorist because I'm not a Linden.

---

Or they just don't care for your theorie at all, because they are not doing business with you, but with LL.

[Darrius Gothly]

This is where you and I differ in our personal recollection of events and circumstances. I am also quite sure this is why you often get one of my patented novellas in response.

---

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

[..] It's not really complaining until people try to unite that into some unified voice, and even that's ok ... but then it turns into this thing that "you're for us or against us". At that point you can kiss a community of merchants goodbye, because the main purpose turns into trying to squeeze LL. At that point, people who have no problem start to get insulted and put into a box of "not one of us". [..]

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I don't recall ever saying to anyone, under any circumstances whatsoever anything that remotely resembles the "you're for us or against us" sentiment. That is never my style nor my feelings. Each and every person has their own personal perspective and opinion on each topic and I just cannot fathom me ever insisting that people align with my personal take on things "or else." I believe this may be a misperception on your part regarding the chain of events and the opinions expressed in the posts .. specifically my posts.

My recollection of events is that I wind up pushing the conversation into a "personal issues" frame because of statements you have made such as "if you were really a businessman" or "if you had any experience" .. and similar disparaging comments. I also recall posting my professional particulars directly in response to such challenges.

This issue of "divisiveness" that you raised earlier is yet another device that I have yet to utilize. From my very first posts in this venue (on a topic long dead and buried now) it was my goal to unite opinions and bring together those voices that were perhaps too quiet to make a mark yet had the same or very similar goals. Even this thread was begun in the hopes that people from both sides of the "nothing but whiners" debate would more clearly understand why the words I choose are not whines and not "non-stop negativity" .. but are instead attempts to make all sides of the issue more visible to everyone involved. This thread was started with the goal of calming the conflict by helping us all understand each other better.

I am guilty of trying to guide people "into some unified voice". I do this because I know that while differing opinions are healthy and necessary to reach any kind of successful solution, there is no benefit to holding onto those differing opinions once a solution has been identified and begun. And until we reach a unified voice, until we select one direction and go that way, we will never accomplish anything.

We have selected numerous paths and solutions in the past three years (my "life span" on SL) and I've not agreed with them all. But I'm not here complaining about those battles that I lost, I'm here trying to push the various resources and "Magical Things" of SL to even greater heights. I'm here to make sure we don't forget the promises that were made to us that are still unfulfilled. And I'm here trying to help others find the fun and enjoyment that SL can and should be.

If, as you've alluded in the past, you feel my posts and my tl;drs are nothing but Trolling to stir up useless conflict .. then by all means don't feed the Troll (me). Let it pass on by and don't jump into the middle challenging my motives or methods or trying to divide the opinions into two wholly separate camps. But if that's not possible, and you just feel it absolutely necesary to challenge me on every opinion, at least leave the personal assessments of my own thoughts and motives out, and just share your opinions and your motives ... because they are the only things over which you have absolute knowledge.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Wasn't directed at you, they were clearly general statements. See how this gets personal really quickly? That in itself proves a point.

[Darrius Gothly]

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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Wasn't directed at you, they were clearly general statements. See how this gets personal really quickly? That in itself proves a point.

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Perhaps to someone that doesn't know our history, they could be passed off as "clearly general statements", but you and I both know differently. It's your habit to lay oblique accusations, salt the wound with some new jabbing words .. then play Mr. Innocent when called on the carpet for it.

Play your games .. it's okay with me. My conscience is at ease with this whole mess Mr. Shepherd .. but I daresay yours is not.

Have a nice day.

[Josh Susanto]

1) I'm pretty sure I saw many of the same very personal statements, and mostly not even directed at me.

2) If people didn't care about my theory, they wouldn't keep disparaging it and disparaging me for having it; they would just ignore it.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Wasn't directed at you, they were clearly general statements. See how this gets personal really quickly? That in itself proves a point.

---

Perhaps to someone that doesn't know our history, they could be passed off as "clearly general statements", but you and I both know differently. It's your habit to lay oblique accusations, salt the wound with some new jabbing words .. then play Mr. Innocent when called on the carpet for it.

Play your games .. it's okay with me. My conscience is at ease with this whole mess Mr. Shepherd .. but I daresay yours is not.

Have a nice day

---

It might be that you are so colored because of your history, that you see this as a personal attack, Darrius. But to me as an outsider it seems more an observation of things going on in this forum, in general. And I do recognize something in this observation, but I don't connect it with you, or the way you express your concerns here.

I must admit I don't read all of the quarrels you both have here, so I might oversee some things. But is this case I think you pick it up as something personal, while it was honestly ment as a general observation.

[Mickey Vandeverre]

 

The money will naturally follow, because that's the secret sauce of SL, when people are happy, hyped and excited about the possibilities, it goes viral and people come here in droves. Primarily to make a buck as the biggest draw, secondarily to be creative, thirdly for socializing, fourthly for pixel bumping and hooking up with each other.

---

 

Make Pixel Bumping #1 priority and everyone will be too busy to complain.

holy cow there's enough stinky bait dropped in this thread to have a community catfish fry tomorrow.

 

[TatianaDokuchic Varriale]

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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Good example, and I've seen exactly that in a beta!

Entirely different and mature atmosphere in the beta programs. That is until some decision is made that seems a bit over the top and then it starts resembling something the forums here. That's understandable.

I think what I'm trying to get at isn't that "complaining" is bad, but rather hmm .... feedback that's not positive isn't complaining at all, it's just feedback.

It's not really complaining until people try to unite that into some unified voice, and even that's ok ... but then it turns into this thing that "you're for us or against us". At that point you can kiss a community of merchants goodbye, because the main purpose turns into trying to squeeze LL. At that point, people who have no problem start to get insulted and put into a box of "not one of us".

You're either with us, or you're not a thinking person and now your entire logic must be defended.

God forbid like one person the other day eluded that if it's that bad for you, leave. Even though leaving would be the loudest course of action, and most effective for all parties if you want to be honest about it. But now the popular argument is that we complain because we love SL. And I get that too, I really do.

When the context is either complainer of cheerleader, and there are people that will ALWAYS take an angle that puts people into one of those boxes, it becomes something less than honest feedback. This is fake, and I think taking that people who harp on that kind of division are hucksters selling hair tonic off the back of a wagon.

And ... it's weird.

Let people have their opinions good or bad. They don't have to be complainers or fanbois or pro or con or anything but a person with an opinion. My take is that these forums are for any topic relating to commerce in SL, and related topics like virtual goods, etc.

Watch it closely and you'll see what I mean, take away those labels and divisions and you have just people with opinions. And those people will get along much better no matter how much they agree or disagree.

My gripes now as a non advocate are the same views that I've always had but wouldn't express because I thought I'd be adding fuel to an already strange thing we have going on sometimes in SL. Giving ammunition to trolls, etc.

[snip]

It's just feedback and opinion. It's not us vs. them, it's not cheerleader, fanboi, complainer and I certainly don't need to constantly convince people who are already complaining about the value of complaining.

It's this kind of weirdness that makes me not recommend people to SL more than anything else. Makes me want to go back to advocating though

---

Thanks for this! 

It's always unfortunate when a discussion with differing opinions gets derailed and becomes an "us vs. them" battle.  At that point I usually just walk away because I don't have the patience for it.  I would guess that is the case with others and so it turns into another opportunity lost.