[Dash Deal Thread]

>> "I thought I'd give it a shot so I applied, and received a "sorry, you weren't selected" email a few days ago. LL said there were thousands of applicants and they only had six slots for this test run."

There are so many problems with this plan that it's difficult to know where to begin.  A so-called open program that has no transparency at all, it isn't even literally open (it closed March 28th before the promotions even started), so they are not accepting submissions, and if we just ball-park the entries at 2000 and you tried a submission before the first email, your chances for being denied were about 97%.  (1994 of 2000)  It would take years to work through submissions fairly, and that assumes that during that period no new submissions were added.  This simply cannot succeed.

Regardless of the submission numbers, this is a program to highlight a very small number of specific vendors at the discretion of unnamed people within LL with no transparency on the criteria for selection, not that it mattered since the submissions were bound to be sufficient and deals filled before most vendors interested would get word of it anyway.  So there are these submission problems, the limited places should be enough to raise red flags and file this one under "unworkable", but to me this is all just the sideshow avoiding the real issue, below.

Second Life has a huge commerce component, and Linden Lab needs to be doing everything they can to provide a level playing field, consistent rules for commerce, and even opportunities for those with sound or unsound business plans to succeed or fail on their own merits.  SL is a environment of capitalism, and for the overlords of that system to muck around with that in such a careless and haphazard way would be like a central bank saying "Product X from Corp Y is a good deal right now".  It's... just... so wrong.  They don't seem to understand that they are the overlords, not the s%#@ disturbers, and that this brings with it a responsibility.  They should be enabling commerce across the whole virtual goods industry, not selecting a few enterprises to highlight.

That brings me to the third point, their manner of highlighting.  It is a complete abuse of my email address to send me a notice of 50% off price for a dress, especially one that is not being sold by Linden Lab.  They are using their direct communications channel to me for third-party marketing, in a manner that is so unfair that I was immediately shocked when reading the email.  And as far as I know, there is no opt-out for this.  I understand that LL might want to email me a marketing blurb, and like their inappropriate direct promotion of Ozimals, this is direct interference by Linden Lab in the business plans of their residents.  Was Amaretto given a similar promotion?  No.  Will the competitors of this dress get an equal opportunity for direct promotion?  No, but I hope not anyway.  This program will end, long before the thousands of applicants are given a fair opportunity.  So end it now.  I would not even proceed with the remaining 5 "chosen ones".

It is a program destined to fail and designed to fail and what I find most appalling is that this should be obvious to anyone working there, otherwise, as I said earlier, they are in way over their head.  Singling out specific products from specific content creators is an abuse of LL's email channel. Selecting a very small number of vendors to reward unfairly is a failure of free enterprise. Let the SL markets -- the buyers -- decide fairly.

Linden Lab should let the market of SL live; it's fine when they don't muck with it. If the reliability of in-world operations was fixed, and they stopped directly competing with their own residents (e.g. Linden Homes competing directly with landlords), fixed search so that it didn't use traffic as a ranking mechanism (i.e. wasn't polluted by gaming the system) and didn't use payments as a ranking mechanism (polluting results in exchange for L$), Second Life would actually provide an excellent virtual business environment.

I haven't given up hope that one day they will wake up and let the SL market operate freely.  But realistically, they muck with SL businesses in significant ways at least yearly.

[Dash Deal Thread]

I received the email this afternoon, after seeing the occasional reference to "dash deal" in twitter messages.

I looked, blinked twice, looked again.  I can't believe it.  Linden Lab is singling out specific single products from specific single vendors... like one at a time?  This will do nothing for Second Life, except to alienate a few competitors of the products getting this preferential treatment, and to annoy large groups of residents with irrelevant spam.

No, I'm not interested in wearing a dress.

And I'm highly annoyed that Linden Lab would abuse that email channel they have to me in this way.  Like the inappropriate marketing of a specific brand of bunnies to me by the grid owner, this is one of the biggest mistakes I have seen in recent SL history.  This was a horrible, horrible idea and the decision to proceed should be reviewed by those in charge.

Someone in the decision hierachy there is in over their head.  Please terminate this program without repeating it.