Scylla Rhiadra

How much is going for, Stephanie? And do the boobs downsize well?

Bonjour, @BadVVitch! Vous pouvez bien entendu choisir de ne pas utiliser la tête Genus que vous avez achetée. Les têtes Lelutka recommandées par Echelon sont excellentes, et aussi plus actuelles. Cependant, Genus fait également une bonne tête, et ils les mettront bientôt à jour pour les rendre meilleurs, vous ne devriez donc pas ressentir le besoin d'abandonner celui que vous avez acheté et de le remplacer par un nouveau si vous êtes satisfait du celui que vous avez maintenant. Vraiment, vous ne pouvez pas vous tromper avec l'un ou l'autre. Tout dépend de vos goûts personnels. /me glares at @Echelon Alcott

But WHYYYYYYYYYY????? I wish we could AR posts for cruel and unusual hour long music videos.

Oh, pfffft. Stop that, Jo! Just stop it! Your pics are lovely, and your avatar gorgeous, and I'm delighted, as I am positive is everyone else, whenever I see you post something in this thread. More please!

I'm sorry . . . what is a "valid avatar" exactly? And how on earth did you "fail"?

This is a rather annoying piece on a great many counts. It's extremely paternalistic: apparently, users are lost unless they are given simple goals and tasks, and "told" what the point of the platform "is," a little as though we were children in playschool being led in an activity. That we are quite capable of creatively occupying ourselves given a wide variety of tools to make things and activities for ourselves seems not to have occurred to the writer, which is the more odd given that he supposedly teaches in a creative field, English literature. Also rather bizarre, given the writer's occupation as a teacher of literature, is his suggestion that the "virtual" is rather valueless, because it's not "real." What, exactly, does he think that poems, plays, and novels are? Does he tell his students "Close up that volume of Whitman's poems! It's not real! We're going outside instead to run our fingers through the grass!" Just . . . stupid. What real contempt he seems to hold us all in.

I should keep an archive of your pics, Moira, for those occasions when I feel the need to calm myself and feel grounded and happy. Lovely. 🙂

So very very odd. And super adorable! Great sequence of shots, Eddy. (Now, how do I get that tune out of my head?)

But thank you. 🙂

Can I just note that the costume choice of Belinda -- whose idea of "dressing down" is wearing kitten heels rather than full stilettos -- consists of . . . a cigarette. Well, someone on the expedition had to be stylish. Cuz it sure wasn't the rest of us.

Colleen, that's just so awful. There is, perhaps, some consolation in that you obviously had a blast with them -- and that you made their lives happier? Yeah, consolations suck. I'm just sorry. Hugs.

@Marianne Little@Marigold Devinand @colleen Criss -- Awww, thanks so much, you all! ❤️

Wow. So lovely, Zatasha. The setting and light is perfect (with a bit of mist), and the forefront is crisp and beautiful. So well done!

I don't disagree that the employment of "safe spaces" that merely shut down debate are a good thing. But "safe spaces" that disable, oh, say, holocaust denial, p*rn featuring minors, incitements to violence, etc., are probably not a bad thing? Almost no one I know disagrees that some form of censorship is necessary. Where we trip over each other is in deciding where to draw the line.

Yeah, this I think. Which means it unlikely that they'll ever be a "responsibly moderated social network at scale." Nodes in the metaverse are either going be the Wild West, or fake "safe spaces" that manage to enable the worst of both worlds: uncontrollable garbage, and serious restrictions on freedom and creativity applied to those who do play by the rules.

The debate about copyright and IP -- and I rather suspect you and I are on different sides on this one -- while not entirely irrelevant, is a wee bit of a digressive avenue. What is very much at stake in the issue of governance is, in large measure, control of intellectual property rights. Disney's interest in the metaverse is almost certainly mostly about protecting (and of course finding new ways to monetize) their own IP. The larger point that Masnick is making is not that governance is impossible, and so not worth pursuing, but that it is very very difficult, and will inevitably be very very imperfect. I think that is correct. The issue of surveillance is, I think, huge. LL doesn't much use its systems (except when ARs are filed, I imagine) because they recognize that 1) it would have a freezing effect, and 2) they'd likely have to actually do something about the toxic crap spawning in-world if they detected it. And they don't want to do 2) because of 1). One of the reasons FB looks so very bad right now is that their platform was not merely hosting toxic content and misinformation -- it was actually being tacitly encouraged. I.e., they knew about it and either did nothing or else subtly enabled it. LL likely just doesn't want to know. As AI gets better, surveillance will become more effective -- which may well have the effect of reducing toxic content. But it will also likely turn platforms, including new VR ones run by Meta, Amazon, and whoever -- into banal, sterile places. Creativity and free thought is going to be just as much a victim of surveillance as misinformation and toxic content.

Well, yes . . . and no. The point that I was making in my subsequent posts -- and not a particularly novel one, god knows -- is that there is a tension between those, mostly techno-utopians, who see the metaverse as a sort of 3D web, and corporations who want to "own" it. In the former instance, the metaverse, like the web now, becomes largely ungovernable, at least at the "meta" level. Interoperability and technical standards, of the sort established for the web by the W3C, aren't really about governance in the sense of controlling content. In the latter instance, the metaverse will be controlled, and literally owned, by corporations, probably working in collaboration. Facebook sees the metaverse as their own walled garden; Microsoft (working with FB) wants to establish and control standards of interoperability, and, by implication, the connections that link different VR "bubbles." Disney just a couple of days ago spoke of what "their" metaverse would look like, without irony. So, there is a bit of a battle on right now to define the metaverse -- whether it is to be free, open access, and open source -- in which case it will be ungovernable except within carefully controlled bubbles, more democratic, and probably toxic as hell -- or whether it is corporate controlled, in which case it will be both oppressive and ultimately ungovernable, because content control doesn't scale well. My own sense is that it's the latter model that is going to prevail, which doesn't bode well for it as an enabling, democratizing technology -- but, ironically, may bring it closer to the dystopian, corporatist model imagined in Snow Crash.

Lovely outfit, lovely hair, lovely pic. Just lovely. 🙂

Yesssss!! @Zeta Vandyke, where are those from? (With apologies for momentarily turning the thread into The Shopping Channel.)

This is interesting and relevant: "At the same time, [Meta CTO Andrew] Bosworth said policing user behavior “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.” FT reporter Hannah Murphy later tweeted that Bosworth was citing Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: a maxim, coined by Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, that says “content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.” (Masnick’s writing notes that this isn’t an argument against pushing for better moderation, but large systems will “always end up frustrating very large segments of the population.”)." And this (emphasis mine): "While the full memo isn’t publicly available, Bosworth posted a blog entry alluding to it later in the day. The post, titled “Keeping people safe in VR and beyond,” references several of Meta’s existing VR moderation tools. That includes letting people block other users in VR, as well as an extensive Horizon surveillance system for monitoring and reporting bad behavior. Meta has also pledged $50 million for research into practical and ethical issues around its metaverse plans." Sounds like a good time. https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22779006/meta-facebook-cto-andrew-bosworth-memo-metaverse-disney-safety-content-moderation-scale

They can have my breasts when they pry them from my cold, dea . . . Ya know, actually, nvm. /me hands them her breasts

I'm seeing a theme develop here in this thread . . .

Well, and that's one of the central issues at stake, right? Will the metaverse be, as techno-utopians would like, a free-wheeling, open-access, decentralized network, much like the internet? In which case, governance becomes very difficult indeed, but the whole thing is much more "democratic." Or, does it mean what Meta and Microsoft (and probably also Apple and Amazon) would prefer, which is a huge walled garden run on, and ultimately controlled by one or more corporations? Which is, of course, also what SL is, in essence. In this case, governance will become not merely possible but necessary, because the controlling corporations will be held liable for content and online behaviours. The latter seems to me a lot more likely than the former, because the conditions that saw the birth of the internet no longer apply. The internet developed more-or-less organically with very little centralized control. I don't think that the metaverse will be permitted that luxury. And if not, will it really be a "metaverse"? Or just a 3D Facebook?

Prok is right -- governance in SL generally falls somewhere between awful and non-existent. There are no protections for consumers whatsoever. That simply isn't going to fly on a really large commercial platform where the sums of cash involved are in the hundreds of millions. Individual landowners can function as petty tinpot dictators here. Most of them are benevolent -- some are saints -- but the lack of standards, rights, and responsibilities won't cut it in a metaverse that seeks to parallel the real world. SL is rife with appalling content -- racist, misogynist, homophobic, and a dozen or so other "ists" -- that often violates LL's own TOS, and that the governance team seems incapable or unwilling to do anything about. The TOS itself is crudely inadequate and simply not built to deal with the complexities of civil society on any appreciable scale. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms are besieged by demands that they police themselves; LL barely even tries. A really large scale metaverse is simply going to have to do better, or it will be legislated to do so by real world governments. SL mostly flies under the radar; the media no longer pays us much attention, and there aren't enough of us to produce the critical mass at which a really elaborate system of governance becomes necessary. A really large scale metaverse might well prove to be as ungovernable as the internet has proven to be -- but it will demand that strenuous and continuous attempts be made to at least maintain the illusion that it's not merely about sheer anarchy.