Scylla Rhiadra

How beautifully elegant! I hope you are doing fashion pics? You've got a good eye for it, I think!

(Should I be posting this in the "Photography" section instead?)

A couple of not-quite random thoughts 1) Yes, on the whole, SL does governance quite well on the personal level. We don't tend to banish jerks, but we do have tools that mostly deal with them quite well. 2) What Rowan says is quite right, however: sexual harassment and the milder form of just continually hitting on women (and men, I guess?) who don't want that kind of attention is cultural and systemic. That means that blocking Annoying Person 1 because they are making obnoxious advances doesn't stem the problem, because SL is stuffed full of Annoying Persons who will simply take their place. 3) Dealing with "jerks" is the easy stuff. The real issues with governance extend far beyond that. Governments don't much care that people are jerks online: if they are tempted to intervene, it's for other, far more egregious stuff. Stuff that is illegal in RL, for instance, or that spills over with toxic effects to RL (such as the way in which FB has been accused of aiding the poisoning of civil and political discourse, a charge that I think is entirely justified). 4) The premise of this thread is that platforms want to get rid of jerks. Sometimes they don't. Twitter is, right now, actively encourage Jerkism by reactivating accounts that were once banned for harassment, doxxing, and the like. Facebook and Instagram have both been revealed to be encouraging toxicity because they know it increases the all-important metric of "engagement," despite knowing from internal research that they were causing harm. 5) I don't think that LL wants to encourage "jerks." But it is quite happy to host a variety of activities, content, and behaviours that would turn off new users if they knew about them. (And of course, many do: hence, SL's continuing reputation as a haven for "weird" sex and antisocial fetishists.) 6) Following up on the above point, I'll remind you that LL has never made a move to stop an activity, be it ponzi scams masquerading as "banks" or sexual *** play, until they felt threatened either by external regulators or really bad PR. LL has given every indication that it's just fine with pretty much anything that goes on in-world, so long as word about it doesn't get out, attracting the attention of RL authorities, or impacting on the interest of potential new users. "Governance" for LL is more frequently an extended form of "damage control."

How broadly would you apply this principle? In RL and SL, there are laws and/or "rules" about harassment and bullying, and so forth, designed to protect people. Would you argue that these are also instances of the "Nanny State," and that everyone should just learn to handle bullies on their own? What about laws against theft? Should we just learn to be more careful, and not expect "authority" to protect us? If so, how does being scammed by an unscrupulous merchant differ? Were there more and better resources available to protect tenants and consumers, I might be more inclined to agree: the point of this thread is precisely that there aren't. You're telling us that we should learn to fight back, and ignoring the fact that we've been forbidden the use of weapons to do so. I don't think that many here believe that LL can, or will, step in to institute better and stronger guidelines to protect us from scams and questionable business practices. We all know that that isn't going to happen. What we are talking about here is how we, the "children," can better empower ourselves so that we can manage the job ourselves.

Actually, it occurs to me that one partial solution would be to permit anyone who purchases an item, whether in-world or on the MP, to write a review on the MP. But I suspect the coding for that would be difficult to impossible to accomplish. There is the danger, too, of retaliation from creators for poor reviews, but that's always going to be an issue if an critique is transparent. Anonymous critiques are suspect by their very nature.

Blogging in SL is interesting. Bloggers almost invariably receive free goods for blogging about them, of course; this is frankly why a good many bloggers blog at all. And they are expected, in return, to highlight those goods in pictures and credits. Failing to showcase -- really, advertise -- those goods to the satisfaction of the merchant will sometimes lead to be dumped. On the face of it, it is a form of graft, albeit a pretty common one even in RL. But one wouldn't really call it "corrupt" for the simple reason you reference: we all know that this is how it works, and so we don't really trust the bloggers to be objective. We aren't taken in (generally) because we understand (most of us) how the system works. Finding critiques of goods and services in SL, and most especially thoughtful and measured ones, is therefore difficult. We've got the MP reviews, which are easily gamed and only available for goods purchased on the MP, and we have . . . Virtual Secrets. It's not a lot to go on.

And this is indeed the crux of the problem. A free market system is premised on a balance of "power" between two forces. On the one hand, unregulated producers, merchants, and businesses have the ability to serve up to the public whatever they want (i.e., whatever they think will produce profits), even if the goods are shoddy, their business practices fraudulent, etc., because the "market" is supposed to "regulate" such practices by rewarding those who offer goods and services that consumers find valuable, and "punish" those who sell garbage or try to cheat them. The mechanism by which this market regulation works is what one might call "word of mouth," although in practice more powerful communication tools are needed: a nation of several million people can't be alerted to scams by over-the-fence gossip, but requires a free media to get the word out about such practices. So, when a sufficient number of people (the number is the key) learn that Merchant X produces excellent goods and offers great services, they reap the rewards of more business, while those who cheat or scam, or offer crappy goods are correspondingly punished as word gets around about their practices. It's actually a system that has never worked well, which is why at the beginning of the last century governments began to introduce antitrust laws and penalties for quiet "Gentlemen's agreements" between dishonest businesses. But in SL the problem is badly compounded because LL has effectively crippled the second part of this equation. By not merely not providing tools to "get the word out" about shady practices, but actually forbidding them on LL's platforms (including most obviously this forum), LL has made it very very difficult for a sufficient critical mass of consumers to "punish" bad actors by depriving them of business. Basically, LL has enabled merchants to do whatever they want, while making it all but impossible for the mechanisms by which the free market is supposed to work to function. The dice are loaded against consumers here.

Where's Leonard and Janis?

I suppose I tend to use the one to highlight my avatar, and the other to feature something I've been doing in-world in the other -- where my look is less important than the context and activity.

🙄

I just demo'ed an outfit that came with a HUD that very clearly separated the colour options you get as singles from those available only in the FP. Now, it's kind of annoying that there were something like three times as many colours in the FP . . . but at least it wasn't deceptive. I don't really understand the point of NOT labeling and previewing properly. If you don't you get very annoyed customers who've only paid for a single, and are unlikely now to buy the FP because they're pissed off. Whereas if you preview properly, you'll get customers who decide to get the FP because they want something only available in it. So, last night, for instance, I bought a FP of a hair because the demo made it clear that a style I wanted was available only in the FP. I paid more, but I'm happy. If I'd bought a single and discovered that, contrary to my expectations, it wasn't there, I'd have been peeved. Surely you want people to choose to buy the FP from the outset?

And which, at the very least, provides mechanisms and space for creators to respond.

Lovely colours in this! And welcome back. 🙂

An additional point of some importance is that the merchants themselves are highly unlikely to know that they are being castigated here unless someone tells them. In fact, this is generally a problem: the percentage of residents who actually read (yet alone actively participate) in this forum is pretty tiny. Who exactly would this be serving? Not the vast majority of consumers.

I personally agree with you that this forum is not the place to do this, because it would potentially turn this place into a hell hole of retributive accusations and arguments. Nor do I think that an unmoderated external site would work for the same reason: it would become a consumer-oriented version of Virtual Secrets (which, actually, VS already is, to some degree). But you also know that this would be pointless, right? LL wouldn't even look at a report of someone being fleeced for anything less than thousands of RL dollars, yet alone "investigate" it.

I've talked before about a sort of consumer watchdog group that would not merely provide a place to complain about unethical business practices, but actively and transparently investigate these -- because if they didn't, it would be gamed madly. I'm reconciled to the reality that that isn't going to happen, because it would be an immense amount of work, and responsibility. But I DO like the idea of an opt-in code of conduct. A set of rules and practices established by merchants themselves and made public and, again, transparent. Businesses that subscribed to this code would be listed on a central web site, and permitted to display a certification of some sort on their MP pages and in-world stores. Yes, that latter would be gamed, and there's no mechanism to prevent merchants from simply forging the certification, but a centralized list would counterbalance that. It would be great if some of the more responsible merchants undertook to do that. It would, conceivably, even give them a competitive edge over those who didn't sign on. But . . . ain't gonna happen. Welcome to Xtreme Free Marketism.

You are looking absolutely fantastic. You've really done a lovely job of not merely being "realistic" looking, but also communicating a sense of personality and character!

Gorgeous!

And for those occasions when one is attending the county meet, and needs something a bit more formal . . .

Spiders? Peh! I have a new HORSE! Which means, of course, I need new riding outfits . . .

You evidently enjoy living dangerously, don't you?

You may be right Ceka, although I was under the impression that the new bodies were also on sale. I'd have to do more digging around than I have time for to find out. I noted myself that I doubt if many were sold even if they were on sale. It doesn't really change my main point though. Whether they were purchased at full price before the sale, or at a discount during, they are now pricey bits of utterly useless junk littering people's inventory. And although the situation is not as dire for those with the other bodies, the incredibly brief notice of the closing of the store will have impacted some who owned Hourglass and Physique, and who found out too late to update, etc. The fact that there will be no more of these sold means that the few creators still rigging for them will undoubtedly drop them too. I'm not looking to assign blame here. I don't know the full circumstances of Siddeans' choice. But I can understand why people might be upset, regardless of the underlying cause for the sudden closure.

Well, sure. But what I was responding to was your use of the word "entitled," which is why it was italicized. And in fact I was agreeing with you -- sort of, with caveats. My point was that it's not merely a sense of "entitlement" that is motivating those who are expressing a wish for some sort of continued access to the Slink catalogue, and it's not really fair to suggest that that is the only thing at play here. For whatever reason -- and because I like Siddean, I'm entirely willing to believe it was not deliberate -- this was not managed well. And it is in that context that I think one should read the pleas of those who'd like to see the sudden disappearance of everything remedied.

This is true enough. No one is entitled to her work. What is a little disturbing about this, though, is that there was almost no notice that Slink was closing down, which meant that there must be many out there who didn't get the opportunity to get updates or items that they couldn't have known would soon be disappearing for good. And her Black Friday sale, which encouraged people who had no reason to think that the entire line was about to become deprecated to spend more might be read as an opportunistic move to cash in as much as possible at the expense of her loyal customers. And that's not unimportant. Physique and Hourglass had very little support from creators as is; you can expect that no one will rig for them now. But at least there is a wealth of older content available for them. That's not true of the two new bodies, Cinnamon and Chai. Virtually the only garments available for either were from Slink. That has all disappeared now, and there sure won't be anyone filling the gap now that the bodies are gone. Basically, anyone who dropped the substantial sum these bodies cost, even on sale, before the closing are now saddled with essentially useless items. Likely there aren't many who find themselves in this situation. But if it is true that Siddean has the right to simply drop out of sight, leaving her customers high and dry, it is also true that there is an ethical issue at stake here: if she knew she was going to be exiting, she should at the very least have warned those to whom she was selling soon-to-be useless content. I don't know her situation: possibly she had no choice. But the reaction of her customers is more than mere "entitlement": the way this went down gives them every right to be annoyed at the least.

This may be the single most bizarre picture I've ever seen here. I have no idea what's happening! It's quite wonderful!