Coffee Pancake

No I'm not. My problem is with the apparent value of L$ once in SL.

That's your opinion, obviously I disagree. yet your input into the economy would be unchanged...

Carefully ignoring the fact he has ONE hours work and in the example, every single person at an 80 person event tipped. We all know no more than 10% of attendees tip at all, and that events rarely run to 80 people. The cost of hiring a DJ for a real world event is more like $700 US for 3 hours of performance time.

Say you were making clothing. Time from inception to store is about a week's work full time hours. You have to make the item, hand paint it 14 different shades and do 6 special patterns for the fat pack, rig it for 6 bodies, box art, documentation, set up huds and packages, list it and get up in a store or at an event. You keep 60% of the money you make after fees and tax and you get no paid time off, no healthcare, etc etc/ Still happy with a buck fiddy? He made $17 an hour for ONE hour. Is min wage (which is not a livable wage) really the benchmark here? How is he paying for his comfortable home.

That's a wonderful sentiment, meanwhile ... in the real world where stuff is made by real people who need to eat.

Oh I'm not kidding. You're all out here making considered purchases over items too cheap for Dollar Tree. Who's the fool.

The L$ is in dire need of being revalued. The high number of 'Linden fun monies' per real USD creates the false impression that small amounts of L$ have more value than they actually present. 1 real money American dollar is worth 100 pennies. 1 Linden dollar isn't even worth that. L$1000 is not a lot of money, but it looks and sounds like it might be. L$10,000 .. wow, that's obviously a fortune!! The difference between L$499 and L$299 is about a fun sized candy bar, you know, the size that isn't fun. But it's psychologically enough to make someone think twice about a purchase. Did you tip a DJ L$100 for an hours entertainment. What if the entire crowd, as big as it can be at 80 all people tipped (and we all know most don't tip a bean) L$100. L$8000 !! WOW !! .. US $32 .. that's US $17 after fees and income tax. .. It's a bit yikes once you do the math isn't it. We're selling ourselves short, delivering hand crafted Etsy artistry at prices too cheap for Temu, and complaining about it. All while our core life blood content creators literally starve trying to compete with content farms and piracy. This needs fixing.

Everyone listed on that page with the exception of Eric & Anya (Patch & Grumpity) are also listed as being part of Tilia's executive team .. which on the whole seems far more well established (including 4 directors and a CTO) https://www.tilia.io/about Feeling a bit like the ugly red headed step child over here ... you know, the one that's been looking after the entire family on their own the whole time. Can't wait for new house rules.

That would be a Jedi mind trick, one would not want to question your commitment.

Hell no. Some wont be happy till the world is burning and all their imagined enemies are hurting.

It wont stop people trying to leverage the rules to get avatars belonging to certain social groups banned .. you know, for existing.

Oh yes, that will work.

They post on reddit asking why they got banned. Their posts don't even see the light of day as we can't help them and letting the community debate their ban with a presumption of wrong doing never ends well. LL have learnt the hard way that if they draw a line, someone will walk right up to the line and mash they face up against it screaming "SAFE!". Judgement calls are part of the problem through, we've seen bans waves that seemed to target specific demographics that whoever was playing governance at the time didn't like. Anime and femboys seem to get the worst of it.

Likely because it was used by here by people defending themselves from accusations and employees just went with the term. Words shape outcomes, and sometimes the verbiage needs to be revisited to ensure the intended meanings and outcomes are clear. This is especially true when dealing with people. Over the years the term has drifted to encompass anything that might be considered "ick" to SL's aging majority demographic. The barely legal look more and more like little children as time passes because at this point, anyone looking under 25 might as well be a child. So should a barely legal (YET LEGAL) teen join SL and make an avatar that looks like them, the entrenched instinct here is to make it rain fire. Nukes on fire if they dare to lean into a kawaii cute makeup style (omg toddler faces). If we want actually real life young adults (18-25) to join and stay in SL, we are going to have to accept they might want to look their age or role-play family.

That term exists here with one specific meaning (CSAM) and everywhere else under the sun meaning something else. Every movie is wall to wall ********. Every roleplay character is ******** Every avatar we make here is ******** (heaven forbid we actually have to look and act our age!!) ******** is not a dirty word or term. This is the first place people encounter the term and because it's so broad and so vague, people end up thinking that being under a certain age here is inherently wrong. Using SL to make CSAM is what's wrong, and that is very specific. Making a young looking avatar for "barely legal" sex isn't. Barely legal, like being barely under the speed limit, is entirely ok.

Oh no!! The free starter kink included in the welcome pack! BREEEEEEDING ...

Please define "childlike facial features, is child-sized" so that there can be no doubt about where the line is. Please do so in a way that does not ban accurate and diverse representations of 18 year olds.

Inspiring an awkward feeling should not be grounds to get ejected from the platform and your avatars taken out back.

Too many want this to be true, just so they can watch the world burn.

No, it really isn't. An IP address can change, be easily masked, and is often routinely shared between multiple users. You can routinely have the same IP address with people living over the street or in the same college campus. If you're using a VPN, your IP address is shared by hundreds of others. There is no infallible way to stop any specific person from accessing any service connected to the internet and appearing as a brand new individual. Trying to do serious user tracking without the user joining a service designed to do explicitly that (like facebook) is a fools errand, even then .. it's easy to present a fresh identity.

It could have been made with any viewer, make a minor change to some XML file to rename a floater showing a list of cunningly named plywood cubes. It would actually be easier to make in photoshop. But .. claiming it was made using a secret evil viewer regular people don't have and can't verify suddenly makes it legitimate.

The allegation was insane. If person A and person B are married in REAL LIFE .. why would they ever even need .. no, WANT to do anything here. If by some amazing feat of mental gymnastics they do in fact desire to, as individuals of considerable platform power and wealth, why would they opt to do it on a PUBLIC region. I swear to god, that article opened with a free box of stupid pills and everyone lapped it up without once thinking "hang on a feckin minute" .. gays .. yup.. children .. yup .. that ********* term I only know about because it's banned here .. yup .. easily faked pictures with unverifiable context .. obvious sock puppet grinding his axe .. COME ON

We should not be perma-banning anyone. It catches and forever removes people who most likely got caught out of position on a technicality and who would respond to a suspension and warning. We lose our most invested users. People should be afforded every opportunity to 'grow into' Second Life, and that can be a rocky road, we all know stories of those who started out breaking rules and getting banned, only to come back later and shine. Those who come to SL with the intention of causing harm and breaking social, cultural and legal rules are not deterred and LL are powerless to actually prevent their return. Burning their account to the ground creates a revolving door where an account is simply part of their misadventures cost. It would always be better to suspend an account and let the person reclaim it (or even buy it out of jail), fostering a sense of attachment to an account creates motivation to not get suspended and locked out again, even if it takes a few trips to the sin bin.

Due to individuals concerns about what might or might not be adult content back in 2007, a lot of statements were made and then codified into rules on the wiki. Like all rules, the moment that line is defined, people will find a way to stand right next to the line yet not cross it. This has created edge cases such as clothing optional family beaches, Perfectly complaint with the letter of the ToS. The problem we have is that ******* is entirely the wrong term. It's an umbrella term covering all aspects of role-playing a character that is not the exact real age of the person behind the character. Quite literally all acting and by extension, all role-play and every avatar we have ever made is ********. What's not allowed is 'sexualized ******** involving representations of minors', and here comes the issue, that's both subjectively and culturally defined. The term that should be used is CSAM and Linden Lab should defer to existing legal definitions. The original article was not a smoking gun. It was dripping with homophobia, couched "facts" and provided all the context itself. SL's own cultural definitions (that do not match real world definitions) were heavily leveraged to create outrage. The existing rules are so vague and so easily subject to interpretative abuse that enforcing them at all is a problem. If the author of the medium article can leverage our culture to create a plausible assertion, imagine what a well crafted abuse report can and does do. This is another side of reddit .. the banned come to us to ask for help, and we lock and remove their their posts before they hit the ground because we can't help them. The assumption from the peanut gallery will always be they got caught doing the very worst things imaginable. But here's the part no one wants to accept. Governance gets it wrong from time to time.

All of this. I've been biting my tongue and I'm about done. It has been an ugly and consuming (almost) full time job for our mod team. There have been bans. We have been threatened, accused of being specific senior Linden staff and directly compared to Maxine Ghislaine. We're still getting flack for individuals and a corporation that chose to go dark and cease all communication, on all platforms, for weeks. The majority of people attempting to post the initial medium article were not regulars from our community, neither are many of those having a mud slinging contest in the responses to Brad's statement (that as an official announcement we have had to allow). This whole mess, from whatever side you chose to look at it, was not a product of the regular SL community (embroiled in such meaty topics as how do I find this hair, do you like my avatar and where to find company & connection), neither are those most vocal about banning people and punishing specific social groups in SL. The entire thrust of the article was Linden's own dirty laundry. Not ours. The damage has been done and it hardly matters if there is validity to the claims. Yes, there are SL issues to resolve, there has always been issues, but to take an axe to the community over this is absolutely not the right course of action. I will be deeply upset if this results in a crack down, removal, limitation (explicit or implicit) of child avatars (or those who might be swept up in such a change), the overwhelming majority of whom (and their friends and virtual families) have done nothing wrong. Even simplistically locking them to G rated regions makes the majority of SL activities impossible, G & M regions form a patchwork all over the mainland, it would be impossible to drive or sail. Governance needs to change its approach. They have one tool and it's an orbital nuke, applied in response to one specific accusation OR failing to pay the bill on time. If the way this whole adventure has been handled is any indication, I beg to disagree. They likely don't even realize that the scale of the problem this issue has raised, is almost entirely of their own making. The correct policy terms should be "Using SL to make CSAM isn't allowed. Have one free orbital nuke. Goodbye.". Instead we have the nebulous ******** term, that not only differs considerably from its real world usage, it's been so poorly defined that it acts as a social dragnet encompassing both adult and non adult activities and appearances. Something Virtual Secret managed to illustrate with staggering consistency for 800 weeks straight.