SL genocide V.S. "if it aint broke, don't fix it". What will SL being in 2 or 3 years?

[BellaDonna Mocha]

The thing LL  is not regarding is the old adage, "if it aint broke, don't fix it"  Instead they seem to be devoted to the opposite.  The longer you are a resident of LL the more you see this to be true.  They take away what works and replace it with something far inferior while at the same time tooting thier own horn about how wonderful those changes are and how lucky we are to have them.  Don't forget to pick up your limited edition of the Magic box bear to celebrate our new improved streamlined marketplace. Geesh in the last week I've come to really hate that bear.  I can only imagine that as a result of all the changes we've seen in the last couple of years that LL must have lost lots and lots of customers...  and lot's and lot's of businesses...  For example, when they had long established businesses migrate to an Adult area... Many long term businesses and mall owners left...  then they started giving away free houses and many real estate companies went broke and left...  All I heard about for a long time was about people who used to own many many sims dumping all their land...  The marketplace has been a disaster ever since XstreetSL...  Who knows what thier long range plans are.. but it sure does not look like staying in business is one of them.  It's too bad... because in the early days of SL it was really cool. Whoever LL is they seem to thrive on suffering and so I wonder if they are really a group of those kinds of people who create sims of torture and pain...  For now it seems they are more content to create suffering and pain rather than a customer base of creative happy and thankful residents..  It's like they made some bad mistakes and started to drasticly lose alot of money and so they are franticly trying to make improvements that are not well thought out and just create more problems and lose more residents...   It's a downward spiral we have been in for years now and I hope it ends soon.  And I hope hope hope that it is not just some viscious plot to bring more pain and suffering into yet another world where a creative and fun virtual reality was promised. As it turns out... SL has turned into just another virtual version of First Life where greed hatred and delusion rule the corporate boardrooms. Let's hope they learn their lessons before Second Life is gone forever. I know that for many many many people it all ready is. I'm guessing that all they have left now are the die hards and the newbies...  And if things keep on keeping on the way they've been going I'm guessing it will be nothing but newbies after long.  They won't know what they are missing and will think it's all way cool.  All these "upgrades" are good for is weeding out more and more of the old timers.  Its a kind of SL genocide.  Is that what this is all about?

[Dora Gustafson]

(this one I didn't read)

[BellaDonna Mocha]

 

Thanks Sassy Romano for Posting this...  Viewing your video will help to prevent so many SL residents from suffering long term ptsd.  Watching this video over and over is higly suggested.  Thanks so much Sassy. 

[ZaZa Jinn]

vid is hilarious! well done Sassy

[Josh Susanto]

I'm actually just fine with them fixing things that aint broke.

I just think they should always fix the broke stuff first, and I feel very strongly about it.

I think you're being pretty optimistic by giving SL another 2 years.

If LL's decision process continues as-is, at some point a singularity threshold will be reached beyond which no set of decisions they make will be good enough to rescue the company.

Of course, no kind of alarm will have gone off that will allow them to know this has already happened.

So, fo the foreseeable future, I'm just going to operate as if that singularity has already been reached.

[JohnMiddlefield]

Linden Lab has created a new adage: If it ain't broke, then destroy it with improvements.

I would suggest not going against the traditions of Linden Lab. It is rather hopeless.

Besides, the English language has been enriched by the Lab. There is a new word in the dictionary, and I kid you not: to linden: verb, meaning to make something worse.

How can one criticize a company that contributes to the enrichment of the English language? I ask you; really; in all sincerity, eh?

If you continue on in this vain, the gods will linden you. Mark my words.

 

 

 

 

[Paladin Pinion]

Of course, this completely overlooks the fact that Magic Boxes were in fact broken.

It's tedious to read through these forums after a couple months off and find that the primary whiners here are still the same people who haven't a clue how software development works.

[Ann Otoole]

---

Paladin Pinion wrote:

Of course, this completely overlooks the fact that Magic Boxes

were

in fact broken.

It's tedious to read through these forums after a couple months off and find that the primary whiners here are still the same people who haven't a clue how software development works.

---

LL has been "coding" this for over a year. Might want to think on that a while.

[Paladin Pinion]

You're right Ann. What's happening now is a disaster. I was just saying that Magic Boxes were in fact broken and and same people were saying the same things about it back then. So I take some time off, come back, and the only change in the forum posts are that the subject nouns have updated.

I did like your comment in another thread: stfu and let them fix it. That pretty much sums it up.

[Josh Susanto]

>Of course, this completely overlooks the fact that Magic Boxes were in fact broken.

They were never broken.

They were intentionally borked.

Under conditions where they could not be borked (attached to an avatar on a Linden sim) thew worked GREAT. 

And they still do.

[Paladin Pinion]

I wonder why LL would intentionally break something their business model relies on.

[Josh Susanto]

Because their real business model relies not on sales commissions, but on land sales.

Xstreet moved a huge amount of commerce off-world, driving down the demand for commercial rentals and, thus, also, land value and continuity of land subscriptions. 

Borking the boxes early in the process would have served as a minimum deterrent to use of Xstreet until they could do "better".

"Better" would have been:

1)buying out Xstreet, replacing it with something subtly less useful and subtly less easy to use, including a shopping cart that's only nominally compatible with the boxes,

2)letting people get fed up with the boxes rather than responding to demands to get them to work (or, I think, just let them work) while drawing out as long as possible the deployment of something that they say will eventually replace the boxes (so why fix them? just be patient!), and

3) finally, when (oops!) the alleged box problem finally seems to have mostly cleared up (unstatedly, and even more unstately due to user involvement in the matter), deploying the thing that was supposed to replace the boxes, but which, instead borks the SLM as a whole, setting the stage for its eventual total shut-down and a (probably wrongly) hoped-for massive wave of merchants returning to expensively land-intensive in-world commercial rentals. 

AND, finally...

4) Explaining (not very credibly) that forcing merchants to pay for land is technologically necessary, and that on off-world market is not technically feasable, as they have now "proved".

Note that the plausibility of #4 depends, utterly, on the early borking of the boxes while they were still connected to Xstreet. 

THAT is why they would bork the boxes, and bork them as early as possible in the process.

Clear enough?

[Paladin Pinion]

That's one theory I suppose. On the principle that the simpler answer is usually the correct one, I'd posit that:

 

1. Boxes that worked in a smaller market did not scale well when applied to the much larger LL-sponsored market. The substantial scripting and server interactions that boxes required were not suitable for large-scale commerce and were subject to failure.
2. Boxes did in fact have issues from the beginning, including the inability to deliver when the recipient was offline or messages were capped, or they were in busy mode. When scaled up to the millions of transactions that occur in today's marketplace, the servers increasingly dropped scripted transactions and deliveries had a decreasing success rate as the servers struggled to keep up with the load. Reports of non-deliveries increased and "stuck" transactions became common.
3. Unrelated to magic box delivery was the side issue that new users were confused about unpacking boxes, and one of the most frequent questions was why they were wearing a box on their hand.
4. All these issues could be solved in one move by implementing a direct server transfer, simplifying the process, eliminating scripted transactions entirely and thus decreasing server load, and as a side benefit, making purchases easier to understand for new users.
5. Tests went well enough in the alpha test group that LL called for a larger beta test group and opened up the process to anyone.
6. A few serious people went to the beta grid to try it and give feedback. Unfortunately a common response here on the forums was "hell no, I'm not going to do their testing for them for free." Consequently the test group was not large or varied enough to catch all potential issues or edge cases. In fact, I suspect very few people took the time to try it out. Beta grid testing was a hassle and inconvenient, it took quite a lot of time, and required a special setup. Many folks haven't ever been on the beta grid and understandably didn't want to start.
7. When the beta group was done and reported issues were resolved, the feature was considered stable and released to the public. Errors occurred. In fact, disastrous errors occurred. The market is now in turmoil.
8. LL has to scramble now to fix it. I don't expect they're any happier about the problem than the merchants are.

The failure here is that the tests and QA were not sufficient, and the test group was not varied enough to find all the potential issues. There could also be some incompetence involved but I have no idea who's working on this or what happened; from what I've read in the JIRA the developers seem to know what they're doing. In a system as complex as SL, I'd fully expect some glitches and last-minute scrambling. Unfortunately this one was big and not easily repaired. People got hurt and are justifiably angry.

This makes a lot more sense to me than a group of cackling businessmen in a back room plotting to make your SL life miserable, and breaking things on purpose on the theory that you'll decide to invest more if they hose the system.

[Josh Susanto]

I think your theory is also a valid theory, but it is not necessarily simpler, mainly because it fails to address the question of why so many "accidental" things inevitably add up to produce the same set of effects; errors which erroneously benefit LL's revenues but never erroneously benefit merchant revenues, and new forms of reduced functionality, just as some previous functionality problem seems to have cleared up or begun clearing up due to user behavior.

>Boxes that worked in a smaller market did not scale well when applied to the much larger LL-sponsored market. The substantial scripting and server interactions that boxes required were not suitable for large-scale commerce and were subject to failure.

The boxes continued to function just fine when rezzed in specific places. The problem was never a box problem, but a sim problem. LL could have chosen to work on the sim problem, but they instead chose to focus on the side of the equation that wasn't broken. Why?

>Boxes did in fact have issues from the beginning, including the inability to deliver when the recipient was offline or messages were capped, or they were in busy mode. When scaled up to the millions of transactions that occur in today's marketplace, the servers increasingly dropped scripted transactions and deliveries had a decreasing success rate as the servers struggled to keep up with the load. Reports of non-deliveries increased and "stuck" transactions became common.

These problems were neither continuous not universal. The problem was not on the the Xstreet end, not inside the boxes. Again, it was a problem inside SL which LL preferred not to address, even as they replaced (for apparently no other reason) Xstreet with a website of their own creation which only exacerbated the problem. And, again, why?

>Unrelated to magic box delivery was the side issue that new users were confused about unpacking boxes, and one of the most frequent questions was why they were wearing a box on their hand.

That has been an issue with sales to new users even from the very beginning of SL. And yet LL chose to completely ignore it until it suddenly provided an additional rationale to eliminate magic boxes. And, yet again, why?

>All these issues could be solved in one move by implementing a direct server transfer, simplifying the process, eliminating scripted transactions entirely and thus decreasing server load, and as a side benefit, making purchases easier to understand for new users.

Not "could"; "should". "Could" is the subjunctive of "can", and there's no "can" here. And now that it's past subjunctive, anyway, it's in the coulda-shoulda-woulda zone. Since there's essentially no end to how high or how low upward or downward counterfactuals can go, it seems to be a moot point that some other possibility arguably existed to what actually happened. They never proved that it worked in Alpha and they never proved that it worked in Beta. So why did they deploy it? That is, yet, yet again, why?

>Tests went well enough in the alpha test group that LL called for a larger beta test group and opened up the process to anyone.

That the test design was flawed is not only evident in the final outcome, but further supports my belief that the whole process was set up for failure. Before one applies a test, an important thing to do is to test the test, itself. If it can't provide a fail result, it's not much of a test. They can't possibly have done that. And, yet,yet,yet again, why?

>A few serious people went to the beta grid to try it and give feedback.

I take issue with your implicit charcaterization of the test group as especially serious in some way as compared to those who did not find the risks acceptable.

>Unfortunately a common response here on the forums was "hell no, I'm not going to do their testing for them for free."

It was fortunate for those who declined, because we didn't find ourselves trapped in a nondisclosure agreement, later worried we might get into trouble if we pointed out or described this week's problems in a way that might be construed as breaking the agreement. I am free to point out whatever there is to point out and describe it however it asks to be described.

Our reasons for not participating were not necessarily all the same, and therefor, not entirely as you have characterized them. Some kind of pay might have tipped the balance for me, but probably not. My previous experiences had taught me not to trust LL, and I couldn't participate in good conscience under the suspended belief that they were just going through the motions of testing their new toy, trying to get me to act as an unwitting accessory in its approval for release.

>Consequently the test group was not large or varied enough to catch all potential issues or edge cases.

OR, the test process was not continued long enough to adjust for the small group fo Kool-Aid drinkers, who, understandably can't have been diverse enough after everyone already being **bleep**-slapped by LL on 13 September.

The time to release new code is after it has been tested, not after some kind of an excuse not to test it more has been constructed.

They had the opportunity to test it more if they wanted to. But they didn't. And yet,yet,yet,yet again, why?

>In fact, I suspect very few people took the time to try it out.

Time was far from the only issue. And in my own case, not even a major one.

>Beta grid testing was a hassle and inconvenient, it took quite a lot of time, and required a special setup. Many folks haven't ever been on the beta grid and understandably didn't want to start.

But, instead of blaming LL for doing nothing about that, you blame the users who didn't want to enter a nondisclosure agreement that would effectively silence them as critics, open their account to any possible amount of fudging, and devote some unstated and possibly open-ended amount of unpaid time to a company that had already repeatedly abused their trust. 

LL had more access to a more diverse group of merchants before 13 September, but rather than using them to better test DD, they scared people off at pretty much the worst time to scare people off as they made an unannouced code deployment after specifically telling us that they would do no such thing. And, yet,yet,yet,yet,yet again, why?

>When the beta group was done and reported issues were resolved, the feature was considered stable and released to the public. Errors occurred. In fact, disastrous errors occurred. The market is now in turmoil.

If such a broad and serious range of errors was set to occur, why was the feature nonetheless deemed to be stable? And why use amateur beta testers rather than hire people with pertinent experience if the cost of getting the wrong result is as high as they must have known it could be? Do they not have some kind of accountant or statistician working there at all?

And yet,yet,yet,yet,yet,yet again why?

>LL has to scramble now to fix it.

No they don't. They need to appear to scramble to fix it. Surely, it is easier to fix code in 6 months than in 2 months. And yet they appear to have chosen to fix it in 2 months after not fixing it for 6 months. And yet,yet,yet,yet,yet,yet,yet again why?

>I don't expect they're any happier about the problem than the merchants are.

Some of them won't be, of course.

But those will be the same people who were not part of the basic decision process in the first place. 

>The failure here is that the tests and QA were not sufficient,

OR the success here is that tests were not sufficient. If the tests were not sufficient, the thing to do is not release the feature. Who could possibly have missed out on this basic principle in their education? ALL the Lindens? Is that even possible? Something like 100 people should have been able to point this out to someone in-house. Am I supposed to believe that no one mentioned it, or that, when mentioned, it was deliberately ingored? Which makes better mathematical sense?

>and the test group was not varied enough to find all the potential issues.

Thus making the test design, itself, a problem. But why hold back a new feature due to bad test design when you can just go ahead and release the feature, then blame users who didn't trust you enough for the fact that it was not ready when released? The only possible logic I can see behind this is that what appears to be a problem left intentionally unsolved is really the solution to some other problem. 

>There could also be some incompetence involved

If it were just one or two things, I might agree. But consistently doing the opposite of what will provide a more functional off-world commerce tool is not a sign of incompetence; it is the sign of competence directed in some direction other than that stated or implied. 

>but I have no idea who's working on this or what happened; from what I've read in the JIRA the developers seem to know what they're doing.

They have said that much all along. 

Were they right on 13 September?

Were they right on 14 February?

Were they right on 21 March?

When have they been right yet?

>In a system as complex as SL, I'd fully expect some glitches and last-minute scrambling.

True. But sending us a green bear and telling us to ditch our magic boxes pronto is behavior totally inconsistent with a team that understands the normal process even as well as you or I understand it. Again, it's the opposite of what logic or reason should have led to them to do in order to maintain user confidence in the SLM. Given their massive collective education and experience, how can consistently doing the opposite of the right thing possibly be some kind of unanimous, collective Linden accident?

>Unfortunately this one was big and not easily repaired. People got hurt and are justifiably angry.

Yes. Mission accomplished. My point, exactly.

>This makes a lot more sense to me than a group of cackling businessmen in a back room plotting to make your SL life miserable, and breaking things on purpose on the theory that you'll decide to invest more if they hose the system.

That's not what I envision at all. I envision some people looking at the too-large grid not being rented enough to generate the projected land revenues that are keeping them in a job at this unfortunate economic time for them to be unemployed. I envision someone realizing that land rental is in decline due to Xstreet pulling merchants off-world. I envision someone realizing that if they could find a legal way to shut down Xstreet, that might send merchant back in-world. I envision someone realizing that borking sims that are advertised as having boxes on them is step 1...

I see means, motive and opportunity.

You see a bunch of people repeatedly, accidentally doing the opposite of what they obviously should do. 

Basic statistical principles do not favor your vision. They favor mine. 

 

[Darrius Gothly]

N.I.H.

[Ann Otoole]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

Because their real business model relies not on sales commissions, but on land sales.

Xstreet moved a huge amount of commerce off-world, driving down the demand for commercial rentals and, thus, also, land value and continuity of land subscriptions. 

...

Clear enough?

---

Clearly that is why, with direct delivery, there is no longer any need to have land at all to sell on SLM. /sarcasm

There had always been random issues with the magic boxes. one massively scripted dragon enters your sim where your magic boxes are and boom might have some failed deliveries. Which is why we place copies in multiple sims. The real advantage of DD is faster processing (when fixed) and less load on the grid in general.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Well, Josh has one point, although he didn't make that directly in that there isn't a one of these bugs that couldn't have been caught with automated testing and simulated shopping. In fact it should pass those kind of tests before putting it out to any sort of beta.

There's not a "need" to involve customers as beta testers, it's LL's choice to develop the marketplace on a shoestring budget or under-skilled labor.

Many companies develop far more sophisticated software than a shopping cart and "delivery system" without anything more than internal testing and bug reporting is as minimal and as non obtrusive as possible, because you don't foist that burden on customers.

Whether people participate in beta or not is moot. They shouldn't have to in the first place, nor should they have to fill out complex Jira's when a simpler interface would do for what should be far fewer problems.

This is closer to open source/crowd sourcing rather than commercial development. If it were commercial development nearly all of these bugs would have never seen the light of day and it would never have required thousands of hours of customer interaction to find and report said bugs.

All of this wasn't necessary in the first place if it were done properly.

Things like this do tend to boggle. Apparently in extreme cases the lack of good sense and professionalism is fodder for conspiracy.

I think Josh's arguments can be summed up by another Heinlein quote

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

[Josh Susanto]

>Clearly that is why, with direct delivery, there is no longer any need to have land at all to sell on SLM. /sarcasm

That's why it's such a brilliant idea.

"If" it works as implied "then" it reduces demand for land.

But if it works "incorrectly", it increases demand for land. 

And they just spent the better part of a year assuring not only that it doesn't work correctly, but that it also produces an abundance of other deterrents to continued SLM use, even to users who have not migrated.

Seriously, what am I supposed to think about this?

>There had always been random issues with the magic boxes. one massively scripted dragon enters your sim where your magic boxes are and boom might have some failed deliveries.

Yes. I get that. And it's a potential problem which I think was extra-well exploited starting right around the beginning of August (hmm). That the SLM tended to exacerbate the negative consequences more than Xstreet by doing things like producing double orders on SLM-active items not available in boxes also seems like an interesting coincidence, especially since LL chose not even to change the deactivate/delete instructions after I made such a strong point about how easy a fix that would be for most people trying to avoid the problem.

The bottom line is that DD's delivery record isn't any better than the magic box delivery record was in its first 2 weeks of deployment. And the box issue only got worse the more that LL got involved with it, despite the fact that conditions can and could be easily created under which boxes function incredibly well. How well should I expect DD to work after we've given LL another year or two to continue breaking it?

>Which is why we place copies in multiple sims.

Not exactly. We place copies in multiple sims because LL didn't create specific location to rez them that would be free from borking; something they very easily could have done, considering the huge number of empty sims. The only thing to conclude is that they wanted the borking to happen, even if they (maybe) were not actually producing it in order to create the perception that there was some fundmental problem with box design. Note that they also provided a shopping cart that is only nominally compatible with the magic boxes, pulling yet another "box problem" essentially out of thin air. 

>The real advantage of DD is faster processing (when fixed) and less load on the grid in general.

I will thank you not to abuse the present tense this way henceforth.

There is no "is" in terms of DD representing a real advantage at this point. 

It is not only broken, but it has broken other things as well. 

Moreover, it was built broken and built to break other things.

[Josh Susanto]

>You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

Stupidity isn't consistent.

Villainy is consistent.

So far LL has consistently done the opposite of what they should to in order to keep people wanting to use the SLM rather than use in-world commerce.

[Paladin Pinion]

There was no NDA involved in the public beta test. Anyone could participate and many did post here on the forums about it. LL imposed no restrictions on that.

The complexity of the setup couldn't be avoided; to test, you had to set up a temporary storefront, get a test magic box, and conduct all transactions on the beta grid. This protected your real storefront, which was essential. I don't see any way LL could have made it less trouble, but because it was complicated I'm not critical of those who didn't participate.

I have written automated software testing systems. It is extremely time consuming, it took a large team, it is very expensive, and no matter what you do you can't catch every edge case. That said, automated testing would indeed have found some of the issues, and LL could have chosen to do a subset of an automated test suite, which would have cost less (and maybe they did; who knows.) But the ROI was likely too steep for LL in the current economy. These systems are extremely time-consuming to write. I'm betting they didn't have the funds.

By "serious" testers I didn't mean to imply that others were at fault. Remember that my background is software development. I do voluntary testing for the company that makes the development tools I use. It is simply self-protection. I want to find all the problems in any pre-release because if I don't, my own software will have bugs. So I consider myself a "serious" developer with a personal stake in the stability of the tools I use. I test voluntarily because I will make far more trouble for myself if I don't.

There are people who use the same tools as a hobby and I consider them less serious users. My terminiology was unfortunate, and I apologize. But I do think that if your income depends on SL and the outcome will affect you in a significant way, then you are hurting yourself if you don't test in self defense. In an ideal world you wouldn't have to, but software is a quirky animal and it is what it is. It's your choice, and there's no requirement to do it, and you are not at fault if you don't, and yes, LL has a responsibility to not screw up your store. But still.

Finally, it is common to outline a set of tests that need to be performed, and bugs found by these tests can be easily fixed. But the cause of many bugs are in actions that the tests could not predict -- things that happen rarely, or only in a specific set of circumstances, or only in a specific order. These crop up all the time and they're hard to anticipate. That's why large test groups are desirable; someone in a large group is likely to do the unexpected.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Oh, I agree. I don't mean that to belittle your expertise, or the contribution of time and skill of anyone who decides to beta test.

Not even against beta programs with customers, when the product is ready for beta.

One of their big flaws is that at the outset, they're making decisions and then backtracking due to feedback after the fact. I'm sure you know this is money and time down the toilet.

An unwillingness to produce the product for the customer rather than themselves as they've said bluntly more than once when customers bring up features they preferred in the older SLX ... "the Marketplace is NOT SLX". Bad business decisions in that they're "creative" and more experimental in their methods than polished.

Yes I know it takes a larger team and the testing is time consuming, agreed.

On the other hand, setting up a modest test lab isn't rocket science either. Can you honestly tell me that 3 entry level full time, but capable people trained in the Marketplace couldn't have caught every bug in that post of Jiras? Come on, they would have noticed the image problem on day one as well as most of the others. If they can't manage that, they either don't know how to hire or they're just as clueless as the entry level mooks.

Expand that test lab just a tad more for some entry to mid level techs to handle some of the testing processes and monitoring what we saw here never would have happened.

Granted you also need more than a whopping two developers.

A manager that knows how to funnel requirements and testing isn't difficult to find if you deem it important enough to pay for.

This company isn't a pauper, they can afford a modest team of 10-15. Care to guestimate the amount of goods moved through the marketplace in a day converted to real dollars? Is that cost/responsibility not worth that investment? Not my problem that they won't bite it on payroll. Shouldn't be anyones problem that they won't bite it on payroll.

I'm surrounded by companies with similar setups. I'm not surrounded at all by any commerce software anywhere of this quality.

What about the importance of the integrity of commerce software in general. We're not talking about fake money here, however they need to work that liability factor.

LL has always been known for it's fast and loose ethic and approach, experimental social aspect, an affinity for open source, etc. and it has hurt them. They lost corporate, they lost education, they lost dev because of it.

As amazing as some of these merchants have been with this, they don't have the direct connection to the info, and it's worse. Not only are they expected to play a guessing game on what (some of the already known by LL) the actual problems are, after submitting hours of work and testing they're not given the feedback to know in what areas their work is redundant, useless, already known or tossed aside.

From what I understand some of these workers are remote and sorry, not big on that. It works less often than it does.

So basically they're not even operating the crowd sourcing thing efficiently. They can't have their cake and eat it too and the proof is in the pudding of the product.

It's a joke without a punchline.

[Paladin Pinion]

Valid points, Dartagan. All of them. The QA was very poorly done. I don't disagree with any of the merchant complaints, only with the idea that it was intentionally orchestrated to do harm. I don't know any company that does that on purpose, it's just bad business. I suppose this company could be an exception but it just doesn't make any logical sense that they'd be aiming for that.

In short, conspiracy theories rub me the wrong way.

[Couldbe Yue]

---

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:   ....   It's a joke without a punchline.

---

 

I just needed to quote this so I can find it again.  It's the clearest and most succinct description of LL I've ever come across

[Josh Susanto]

>.I don't disagree with any of the merchant complaints, only with the idea that it was intentionally orchestrated to do harm.

I don't claim that it was orchestrated to do net harm. I say, instead, that from a scientific standpoint, the available evidence is least inconsistent with an effort to sacrifice the off-world market in order to maintain a level of land revenue necessary to sustain the company. That is: without enough land revenue (has anyone claimed that this is improving?), the SLM will not be able to continue connecting to anything, so, if it has to go one way or another, maybe better it should be killed off to at least save the grid. 

If that's their reasoning, I actually may sort of have to respect it, even if they can't talk about it without creating a bunch of additional legal exposures. But I'm not convinced that it will work, and I'm not sure that it should be tried just out of desperation to compensate for loss of consumer confidence, especially since replacing Xstreet and then gradually crippling the thing that replaces it only serves to further smother consumer confidence in the short-term, causing the grid to further empty out. (maybe it's a gentrification scheme? - I don't know).

>I don't know any company that does that on purpose, it's just bad business.

It's not bad busniness if it works. And not doing it already seems to be bad business, so - what if it does work?

>I suppose this company could be an exception but it just doesn't make any logical sense that they'd be aiming for that.

It makes logical sense. It just doesn't make gut sense. I understand that's why most people will simply not choose to consider it as a possibility in earnest. 

Where's the logic? 

Let's start with this:

Simplicity is a criterion you've already cited as a favorable sign for a scientific theory.

So what's simpler?...

I have asked the question "why" in the above thread 9 times.

To answer these questions your way requires 9 different complicated answers, each of which describes some effect which converges in function with the other 8 effects, the sum of which i understand you prefer to construe as some kind of bizzarre 9-part coincidence. 

To answer all questions my own way requires only one answer, and a very simple one.

Assuming yours is the scientific theory and mine is the screwball theory, we're seeing the opposite complexity dynamic we should expect.

Are you next going to ask us to drop the simplicity criterion?

>In short, conspiracy theories rub me the wrong way.

They rub a lot of people the wrong way. But some of the ones that rubbed people the most wrong turned out to be completely true. The Holocaust. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Operation MK Ultra. 

How distasteful a theory is shouldn't be allowed to be applied as a criterion in assessing its possible validity.

You probably know how distasteful the theory of evolution was to a lot of people, and still is. 

The Vatican also found Heliocentrism to be plenty distasteful.

Whether it's tasteful or not, these points remain solid to date:

I have explained all pertinent past Linden behavior; the Lindens really haven't

I have repeatedly predicted Linden behavior; something the Lindens implictly want you to believe that even they cannot do.

I know, right now, what LL is going to do next unless someone's job is on the line; that is, if no one gets fired or quits by the time the next feature gets announced, I can essentially tell you what that feature will be; something to facilitate in-world commerce. (and it will NOT be buggy).

Have they announced it?

No. They don't need to.

It's the next logical step.

 

[Paladin Pinion]

I described the usual course of software development, Josh. It's pretty standard.