Josh Susanto

>if you where getting 100% commission instead of the usual 5% on many of the sales marketplace merchant sales would you be in a hurry to 'fix' things? I would. In fact, I would drop everything else to get that fixed first. If you think leaving other things broken is expensive, you haven't properly considered the possible long-term cost of even appearing to continue to steal from customers.

>Don't fee bad, no butterflies either. And where am I going to put my breedable houses, breedable cars, breedable guns, and breedable mesh 9en1tal1a?

>The category in question was called - 'Breedables/Meeroos' Please don't quote me out of context, but even I think that's a much too stupidly obvious mistake to possibly have been intentional favoritism. I have no problem giving LL credit this time for just getting a little bit ahead of itself and stumbling on some of the category logic that would otherwise have been really easy to manage. It looks to me much like a mistake such as someone would make trying to catch up and provide an immediate fix that can be adjusted later as necessary. That is, it's a comparatively unimportant problem, and the risk of creating it by doing categories too quickly is quite small in comparison to the danger of letting the Mad Men promotion continue (for example). It's much better to rush things that can be fixed, such as category protocol, than to rush things that really can't be fixed, like chosing a promotion with dubious IP provenance and nothing ready to replace it if something should go wrong. Moreover, it was fixed, and quickly. Isn't that what counts most of all?

I don't think the marketplace needs to be completely shut down in order for LL to temporarily stop charging for things for which they can't currently provide any reliable value, such as listing enhancements. OTOH, I'm not really that surprised that, now that I see LL actually acting like they are trying to fix stuff, merchants who have long been silent on this forum are suddenly coming out of the woodwork to say how vitally important it is to shut down the marketplace... you know, just as there's finally some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. Why do I not even need to bother checking in order to know that these day-critics tend to be heavily invested in in-world commerce?

Today has been a bit slow, but my total sales have been really high recently. Of course, I'm still not bothering to try to run a shop in-world. If there's a way to make sim ownership profitable I'd be eager to see it happen, but not by hurting the marketplace. If the grid is too large to assure income to sim owners, that's not the fault of the Marketplace merchants. Maybe if sim owners would consider producing other types of profit ventures besides commercial real estate speculation (which some of them want subsidized, apparently, by killing off marketplace competition), they'd be able to make at least some money in-world, in spite of the RL economy being sluggish. Second Life seems like a good medium for a virtual museum, for example, and I have already supplied hundreds of copymod items that could be used to get the ball rolling. I know that there's a bit of this kind of thing happening already, but I just don't see it being much attacked as a serious professional project. It's weird to me that people are willing to just throw money at the grid without any kind of a plan in terms of how that is supposed to produce value for consumers, and then they complain that the money isn't just magically coming back to them. Why would it do that?

In this case I do not fault LL for trying to be proactive about the next promotion, in spite of everything that remains unfixed. My reasons are: 1) Preparing a promotion is (or should be) a comparatively easy thing to do. 2) The time to start doing it is practically always sooner rather than later. 3) One way or another, the Mad Men promotion has to go, and the sooner the better. Replacing it with something is probably at least as good an idea as replacing it with nothing. 4) To show that LL can at least produce a proper promotion would go some way in regaining merchant confidence while technical fixes still aren't being provided. This could be considered a cheap gimmick if the promotion were badly administered, but, so far, there's no real sign of that. Some pretty important aspects of the promotion process are already different, and LL has already acted decisively in response to merchant input about the new promotion.

I'll try again at some point. I'd just like to point out, though, what a comparatively unimportant issue this is. I'd hate to see Lindens fixing this when they could be fixing stuff that actually affects whether or not people are able to get their deliveries and payments completed.

>Worked for me and others I don't have a problem believing that. But I also still have a window full of unassociated items that don't go away, even if I delete them from inventory and start with fresh boxes.

Category instead of keyword sounds pretty good, too, since things can only be in one category at a time, thus less discouraging gaming the pertinent search function. We can already suggest promotional ideas. There's just no evident integration of such means of suggestion into the decision process behind the promotions. I'm not suggesting that LL simply allow merchants to decide promotions. I'm suggesting that a more transparently itelligent process be instituted in which it can be made clearer whether or not information provided by merchants is even being given any consideration at all.

Untrue.

Well, the Lindens so far have responded to public ridicule, if it's sufficiently public and sufficiently ridiculous.

The logic I imagine should best be used is that, at each categorical level, the number of marketplace items in each category should be close to the number in each other category. That is, if there are more than twice as many items in one category as there are in some other category on the same categorical level, probably two categories should be joined or one category should be split. Not that there's any way to make this work perfectly. I just think that it's probably the kind of principle we're looking for in order to assess whether a change in category structure is probably a good idea or a bad idea. No?

>You do it one by one. That's the official work around for this issue. I have done it one by one. Twice. So what next? Keep doing it and just hoping it will finally all stop coming back?

My current recommendations for future promotions are: 1) ALWAYS set a keyword that will not already be in use such as "masquerade2012". This makes the theme of the promotion clear, but without causing to be included items which will only incidentally pop up on the promotion. 2) Rather than try to regulate what fits the keyword and what doesn't, simply set a limit to the number of items a merchant may have on the promotion at one time. This provides an incentive to merchants to promote only the items which they see as best fitting the stated theme. If they do otherwise, they'll only be hurting themselves. And if they have nothing very appropriate to offer, the amount of spam will remain smaller than previous and stay ranked low for relevance. Some people may use alts to get around the limit, but that seems like a tactic that would require a lot of work for not all that much benefit, so even people with no integrity at all will mostly not create more than a few alts. 3) Set up a forum listing possible future promotional themes, based on legally viable keywords for which shoppers are already searching at high rates. If shoppers are looking for it, that would seem to be a pretty good hint that at least some of them are trying to buy it. Letting merchants know about this instead of keeping it as some kind of secret (as is done now) could be a win for LL, merchants and customers. 4) Set up a referendum system in that forum by which users can vote on future themes in order to help LL prioritize them in terms of what merchants expect they will be most able to provide. If merchants already have something that shoppers want, promoting that first might actually generate sales (instead of just a bunch of dubious delisting work for Linden employees). And if merchants don't have enough of something yet, a referendum could at least provide some ability to project what can be made available before trying to promote things or before deciding not to promote them. 5) Change promotional themes more frequently and announce them several promotions in advance. Plans do have to change sometimes, sure. But having some kind of an advanced plan is almost always better than not having one. Making new promotions more frequent and more predictable allows merchants to focus on any foreseeable promotions for which they might prefer to devote their time in preparation, rather than being tempted just to look for ways to game the current and/or next immediate promotion, not having any idea what might be a better use of their energies. This should also help prevent promotions from becoming stagnant, and somewhat broaden the total range of promoted items over the course of a year. It also provides a more clear comparative basis for a decision to either repeat or not repeat a promotion at some later time. If there's a concern that generating a new graphic for each promotion is going to be (unwanted) extra work for Lindens, forget about that. Users can submit suggested graphics for possible future promotions on the promotions forum well in advance, and if there's a problem, it's more likely to be spotted early. OK... what am I missing?

I'm still OK with the word "masquerade", but I agree we need a list of things to be specifically excluded from the promotion.

>"So... lets stop the factless theories that because a merchant migrated to DD from MB their sales have increased". Well, for my own part, let me just say that I didn't convert to DD when I was first given the chance, and after continuing to use MB instead since then - OMG - I TOTALLY RAN OUT OF BEER IN RL! Why didn't somebody warn me about this possible result?

>Yes, agreed. Thanks, I appreciate that. I'm more interested in getting people to consider the argument than in getting them to say they agree, though, so thanks for that even more. I'm using terms like "benefactor" and "malefector" here strictly in terms of the question of the intention to provide greater or lesser utility to merchants, and because someone else offered the term "malefactor" a few months ago, which I thought was helpful in distinguishing between the idea of a conspiracy and the possibility that one person with something like a compuslive personality disorder, someone with a convoluted grudge, someone being influenced from LL, or even someone who is just very confused about some basic methodological concept could potentially do enough harm to merchant utility to offset all the best efforts of the other Lindens. It certainly occurs to me that the whole team at LL could be fanatically bent to the task of making the Marketplace useless, but I think it's just a lot less unlikely that the bad behavior of one person in a position to influence others would be the real explanation. >I don't think that we can take benefactors or malefactors for granted. Right. That's why I use words like "if". I do not ask people to take the presence of a malefactor for granted. I only ask that they accept it as no less consistent with observable behavior than the opposite idea that someone is actually trying to fix the marketplace. I'm seeing some very telling changes in the last couple of days in terms of the way LL is interacting with merchants, and I hope that will continue regardless of whether or not anyone has left the company or moved to a different position within it. I just need to mention that before I go back to discussing the pattern of failure, so that it's clear I'm not talking about the most recent activity. In terms of the pattern of failure, though... Practically the only thing I can see LL's merchant defenders citing in support of their claim that LL is trying to make the marketplace more useful to merchants is the repeated suggestion of this by LL. I don't think this has any evidentiary value as support for the benevolence angle because if LL were trying to make the marketplace gradually useless without saying so (for legal reasons, for example), they would quite likely tell us the same thing; that they are trying to fix it. So one easy thing to do would be to put aside anything LL has had to say about whether they're trying to fix the marketplace or to make it useless, and just look at their actions. That's where the 10 part list comes in. Forgetting what the stated intentions are, anything approaching total compliance with the 10 steps to failure should more signal an intention to fail than an intention to succeed. And that could be random, sure. But if there is neither benevolent not malevolent intention behind any of the failure decisions, then why bother to tell merchants either thing? That LL tells merchants they are trying to fix the marketplace surely must mean at leas something; either that that's what they intend to do, or just the opposite. >Well, I like MP because I can't log inworld from work but I can access Firefox & MP thru it. I think that's a major benefit to a lot of merchants. There will always be continued thinly-veiled classist rumblings, from merchant sim owners, especially, that this allows a lot of "undeserving" people the opportunity to make money without being willing to commit more completely to participation in the in-world experience, and the costs that that "should" entail. There's an assumption by quite a few people, stated or unstated, that out-world commerce is detrimental to in-world commerce. I think there's some truth to that, but I also think it's a very simplistic way of looking at the whole SL economy as a dynamic entity. Some people say that SL doesn't need the marketplace. I think that the reverse concept is probably at least equally close to the truth; that if in-world shops were all shut down and those merchants had to use the marketplace, they would do so, but that there would just be even less damend for land. It seems to me that if there's too much land for the number of people using it, killing the marketplace just means even fewer use options for new users, so, while it might force people to use more land in the short term, it would probably be worse in the long term by encouraging fewer total new users through reduced commerce options. But I could be wrong. If someone is trying to cripple the marketplace in order to force commerce to go in-world and increase demand for land, that might even be the very formula that LL needs to survive. I don't have the numbers on that. It just sound like something that someone at LL could think will work without having any more solid a reason to think it than I have to think what I think. So is the marketplace being gradually crippled? I can't say that nothing at all has improved, but I think if you look at the total balance of system utility from the end of Xstreet to the present, you'll find that Xstreet was a slightly better platform than what we have now, and that not all of the problems are attributable strictly to the transition from Xstreet to Marketplace; that many things, such as the corruption of the 14xxxxx cluster, are more recent. >"... for some reason..." Like I said above, the reason may be because interests other than merchants' are being served. I think that that meets the situational definition of "malefaction". Not in terms of proving that someone at LL likes to throw Gideon Bibles into pools at motels, but just in terms of doing harm to the interests of merchants, especially while pretending to try to do just the opposite. >Or there may be no reason Yes, that's possible. But there being no reason for something is somewhat inconsistent with the habit of constantly giving reasons for it. >- to tease out active benefit/harm from the results of actions taken at random. I should explain that I meant to treat the question of benefit/harm essentially in terms of producing a set of results that we should expect merchants to prefer as contrasted with a set of results over which we should expect merchants not to prefer by comparison. I suppose that the 10-part list could also be read as a list of steps to producing negative merchant affect as subjectively reported by merchants. I guess we could continue to do a lot more to refine my terminology to make it more scientifically coherent. But I'm pretty sure the point I meant to make can be effectively made without doing that. If people who haven't already made up their minds about whether I even have a point worth further considering, I'll appreciate their help trying to make that point a little more clear as needed, just as I appreciate your help. >Social scientists may have protocols for testing hypothesis regarding motivations but I'm way skeptical of any such methodologies. In fact, I don't even regard the social 'sciences' as being experimental sciences at all. I do think it's unfortunate that I stand to be construed as trying to see into people's minds. That continues to be a major problem with psychology and social sciences. The reason I'm offering the malefactor model here is that it has proven to have a lot of predictive value over the last 6 months and more. As a scientific person, I would really like to see some competing models. I'm really not all that interested in the question of whether there's some kind of counterproductive effort with LL, except in terms of how taking that as a predictive assumption produces good predictive results. Psychology and the social sciences unfortunately continue to use behavior terminology that is infected with nonbehavioral implications. It's difficult to distinguish, for example, between the claim that someone displays no empathy and the statement that someone feels no empathy. The fact that the word "empathy" can even be used in both cases merely underscores the ease with which one can become confused about the point being made. The malefactor I have hypothesized to be operating inside LL would not necessarily have to feel anything in particular; he would only need to produce a pattern of behavior predictably consistent with an intention to do harm to the interests of merchants; that is: a trend of harmfulness to significantly exceeding that at the chance level. One example of this could be the apparent asymmetry in transaction errors. Chance error should produce statistical symmetry. Instead we have an error such that money repeatedly gets lost or destroyed, but never seems to be produced out of nothing by means of a transaction error. At the least sophisticated analytic level, these transaction errors are a benefit to LL or someone at LL, because, even if the money isn't going into a specific Linden's pocket, it's money that never has to be paid out later. At the same level of analytic sophistication, these transactions are malevolent to merchants. Even if the item is also not delivered, the transactions represent a disruption to relationships with customers (and they're bad for customers, too). A fair question is whether or not it would really be in LL's interest to keep taking this money. While our intuition is that it is probably not, we can't be certain without proper analysis of the real data over time. So whether anyone at LL intends to allow it to continue is unclear. They could be very confused, they could be helpless to stop it, or they could think it's a great idea. Where the malefactor model comes in an example like this is in terms of telling us whether we should expect the behavior to continue, and whether we should expect to see anything being done about it. If there's no intention behind stopping it or allowing it to continue, we should expect it to continue, but we should also expect nothing to be said about it. If there's an intention to stop it, we should see an acknowledgement of the problem and not a denial. If there's an intention to allow it to continue, we should see a denial. So far, what we're seeing is least inconsistent with which predictive model? If we picked the right model a long time ago, we would at least have had the right prediction, and if there were some way to adjust our own behavior to make use of the prediction, we could have done that. And, in my case, I actually have made decisions that were importantly informed by this prediction, made by using this predictive model, and they have been good decisions. Can I see into Lindens' minds? Absolutely NO. Does pretending, is some way that that's sort of possible ever produce any useful results? Absolutely YES. > Actually, I'd attribute more malfeasance to the "moderation" of these fora than I would to any perceived attempt to undermine the MP for whatever sinister reasons. Seems to me like there's an active effort being made to run off the most interesting & flamboyant posters. Yes, and no. Only very specific topics really tend to elicit moderation efforts. This is another thing I have tested with some appreciable degree of rigor. The moderation service is not being exploited by just any whiny, cranky person. It is being exploited by a person or persons who want specific things not to be said, ever, in any context or with any kind of spin. What moderation efforts tend to have in common is that they cause to be removed from discussion some thing which a Linden has done which a Linden very clearly should not do.

Maybe Coke stopped paying LL to allow coke machines in SL, and now you're going to see an explosion of Pepsi memorabilia instead. Seriously, though, it's probably just a sign that LL has suddenly decided to institute a more proactive IP policy.

Just looking at this thread, all I can say is that I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming. This thread is exactly how I have always imagined I would want CTL to interact with merchants if I were in charge. No one gets everything right the first time, and I have never really cared about that. But see how quickly and effectively CTL has already hit the Meroo thing. I know that a lot of people have varying ideas about me having some kind of grudge against Brooke. Being that as it is, please feel free to quote me when I say that if it's not Brooke working this thread, I guess that's OK, too, but I'd really like to believe it's Brooke. (edit) Also considering what everyone knows I think about "madstyle", I'd like to add that "masquerade" works just fine with me in terms of being brand-neutral. OTOH... I do have some masks...

It's still a different tone than I'm used to from LL. Something is going differently this time. One possible explanation is that they think the explanation will be too technical to assure that it is properly communicated. Another possibility is that they found out that someone had intentionally messed with something, but they can't just say that (I probably wouldn't).

CTL or Linden Lab? It looks like it has been a while now since CTL has said anything at all. In fact, it seems like she basically falls silent right around the time that Linden Lab starts taking over the updates. I guess that could somewhat explain the order speed-up and the extended box cutoff date.

>"and order processing sped up" I believe that this is true. I also think it's probably less of a question of team effort than of finally assigning the right thing to the right person.

>The deadline for MB retirement has now moved to August 1 and Brooke has publically stated that we all will get 4 weeks notice. remember that folks. I don't think that was Brooke.

>Null hypothesis is that theres no malefactor A secondary and equally strong null hypothesis being that there is also no benefactor. But how many people are just as willing to accept that? The shape of the data says that if people will accept that there is no one working to damage the Marketplace, then people should also accept that there is no one working to improve the marketplace. Moreover, if we can take benefactors for granted in spite of the data, we should also take malefactors for granted. Moreover, the total utility of the Marketplace has declined rather than improved steadily over many months, so if we should assign any positive or negative disposition to anyone acting nonrandomly at LL, we should assign negative more readily than positive. For every improvement in out-world commerce utility since the very inception of the Marketplace parallel to Xstreet, a larger utility reduction can be paired, and then some. For how many more months would this have to be true before it's reasonable to conclude that, by simply not leaving things as they are, but instead changing them repeatedly for the worse, someone at LL must be intending such a result for some reason? >Design an objective non-arbitrary test of this hypothesis Oh, I have done that, certainly. But posting the results of that gets one banned, and the posts erased. Thus, I'm trying to stick to what data is being allowed.

>Disney is okay... according to the Linden Lab employee who uses Disney IP as both their avatar & profile picture No... Disney is OK for Lindens, but when YOU do it, it's infringement. That's why the texture that consisted of a cropped screenshot of a Linden's Disney-derivative profile pic was taken off the Marketplace for IP violation without a take-down notice from Disney. If you read the Linden IP policy, you'll find that this must mean Linden, itself, asserts IP rights to the Disney-derived image. They better hope Disney agrees, huh.