Kampu Oyen

> However, I wouldn't have expected the belt-tightening to be so dramatic. It's dramatic because it's related to irrationality. People are either realizing they've been spending irrationally in SL already, or they are irrationally imagining that it will somehow do them any good at this point to buy fewer platform shoes and assault rifles in Second Life to offset their cigarette expenditures in RL.

It's a rotating bork, yes. Just enough borkage to hurt whatever is being paid to promote at the time, while not enough to discourage people from continuing promotions on earlier or later products. You can expect it to let up abruptly just as it is about to hit the items listed so as to be promoted on 2 January 2011, some time around mid-May 2012, adjusting for the shift from a 13 February schedule to a 14 February schedule.

>Would love to do a proof of concept and challenge the commerce team to let any decent merchant pick a promotion out of a hat and see if it didn't get the same or better results The easiest thing to do would seem to be to open something like the JIRA system for promotional concepts. If any user could submit one and all users could vote on them, there might still be some amount of numerical abuse of the voting system, sure. But the whole thing would still be a more market-driven way of setting promotional priorities as compared to simply continuing to ask the same cluster of merchants for new ideas while total SL revenues continue to decline. Of course, that would sadly mean that LL no longer has to pay for a market research person whose work is indistinguishable in effect from the result of doing bong hits while channel-surfing... ... which probably explains why the Lindens "never thought of that".

>What you have done is suggest to other merchants to is to use this LL promotion for getting visibility for their underperforming items. Yes, much as the promotion, itself, is being used to get more performance out of specific products offered by specific merchants. Anything that is underpromoted can underperform. Moreover, a borked market is an essentially underperfoming market. If LL wants the weaker products to perform, maybe they could just fix the whole market instead of helping out specific merchants with specific products? Maybe? >You stimulate them to abuse the promotion. The promotion is impossible to abuse because there is no clear criterion for what it intends to promote. Moreover, the promotion, itself, is abusive in terms of what it excludes and how it excludes things; the important criterion of inclusion is not product type, but merchant identity. So, really, I'm stimulating merchants to make the promotion less abusive by making it less exclusive., >This will lead to irritation of customers who do want to shop with this LL choosen keyword. Why should they want to shop with it at all? Only because LL tells them that they want to. If they wanted 60's items, they would already be able to find them with no special problem. So what is LL telling them that they want instead? Why would LL tell them that they want something different from what they want, and then arbitrarily constrain how that other thing is defined? Does this not sound the least bit Orwellian to you? They have effectively replaced a common search word with a different search word they intend to heavily regulate. Just think about that for a second. Please? >I looks like you find it more important to get some sand in the LL machine, than to give your customers a pleasant shopping experience. My customers have only ever had very positive things to say. All the complaints I'm seeing about the shopping experience are related to things LL has either decided to do or have stupidly allowed to happen. There is no amount of sand I could throw into LL's machine, ever that would be significant in comparison to what they are throwing every day that there's an open promotion and a stack of open JIRA's into my own machine, and yours.

>Madstyle looks like a massive fail to me. For the Second Life Marketplace store that is actually named Madstyle, probably no so much, huh.

>Once upon a time, in a land far far away, someone got banned. One should be very cautious about discussing people using alts. If you can show persuasively for example, that a Linden is using an alt on the Merchants Forum, it can get you banned from the forum, and worse, even if there is never any denial by Linden, or by the alt. Assuming someone has been banned, would anyone here be able to cite the specific action that warranted the ban?

There's not need to warp the meaning of anything here. Your post, boiled down, says exactly what I say that it says: You care more about users exploiting LL's effort to exploit users than you care about LL exploiting users.

On this rare occasion, I'm not blaming LL (any more than on a normal day) for the lower rate of sales. A bunch of people in the US just did their taxes, or, if they are still doing them, expect to pay penalties. For most US users, this wouldn't much matter. But for people who are making an amount of money different from last year (people with larger investments in SL, for example), such an occasion will tend to cause them to tighten up, regardless of whether they have more income or less income than before. Money that would otherwise be circulating around SL has begun to stop circulating after a few days. Likewise, when people start getting their tax returns, you may see a momentary boost in SL money supply, probably peaking in terms of effects on SL at the end of the peak period for return receipt, roughly 60 days after 15 April.... ... that is; right about the time that the boxes get shut off and permissions are still not properly supported for DD, thus forcing a surge of new business in-world and setting up a possible total shut-down of the marketplace on 5 July. But... as I said, today's drop in sales as compared to sales in recent days, is probably not LL's fault at all.

It has to do with your priorites. You care more about users exploiting LL's effort to exploit users than you care about LL exploiting users.

>This isn't necessarily an evil. People are cut out of the process if the planning portion is by secret invitation only. That may be LL's right, but it's inconsistent with the philosophy they otherwise publicly espouse. > Just the act of promoting something will have people trying to create content that fits, whether you actually ask merchants to build it or not. I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with giving clear advanced notice to corporate lapdogs and making a vague public announcement to everyone else only at some nominal interval before the banner is deployed. >Of course that's where being a trained monkey comes to mind, with these newer attempts at marketing. They only need new trend based content as commodity because they're not doing the real work involved that would draw in and hook customers. Whether it's profoundly stupid in conception and whether it transparently rewards unfair forms of competition, I see as very separate problems. We'd be better not to confuse these things. The only connection I can see is that I don't think rewarding unfair competition is good for total consumer utility because it limits the mind pool for mass promotions and results in half-baked projects going to print, so I would also expect a negative net impact on demand for the total service package, ceteris paribus. > What also comes to mind for all this effort is: Mad Men? That OR this, maybe: http://www.nick.com/madstylefashions/ Or this: http://mad-style.livejournal.com/ Or this: http://www.mad-bags.com/ Or this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MAD-style/115246278540626 Or this: http://www.myspace.com/madstylesound Or... you get the idea. There are already so many other legal entities stepping on each other's toes with this keyword, that they'll all have to explain why they haven't sued each other first before getting to LL. By the time any of them actually does anything to someone else, the marketplace promotion will be long over, and the banner will show robots or dinosaurs or something. Maybe robot dinosaurs? >In contrast, the average merchant does circles around LL in terms of working product, support, promotion, hours invested, passion, etc. Of course. If the minimum criterion of getting paid just not to break sh1t doesn't even apply at LL, why should they even bother to actually make any informed or reasoned decision about anything as comparatively removed in importance, such as how to help merchants generate more commissions or want to buy more listing enhancements? >By asking people to stuff listings with the wrong keyword you're essentially saying that the way to fix the problem with LL is to stoop down to LL's level of business with shoddy product that doesn't fit what customers are looking for. An important difference being, of course, that I'm not telling merchants to offer defective product, charge double for it, and then withhold refund for any part of the transaction. You seem to be saying that it's not abusive to show me a bunch of cr@p I'm totally disinterested in buying, as long as someone has paid to show it to me. Is that right? The preferred merchants are getting a free banner for products they've already had lined up for the banner; products that customers should already be able to find just by searching for "60's". I'm saying that preferred merchants don't get a monopoly on the banner just because they were actively prepared in advance by LL to exploit the thing in ways that other people are somehow expected not to also try to do. Nobody asked me what kind of promotion I thought would be helpful. Because I'm not an example of a successful merchant? OK. Which comes first - the chicken or the egg? As long as LL entertains only the ideas of the most successful merchants, LL will be constaining the potential of others to succeed, because the promotions will invariably provide competitive advantage to those who suggest them. A good idea (for LL) might never be able to squeeze through if it doesn't match the collective personal agendas of the established pool of favored merchants. Here's a thought - if SL is already having some economic problems that affect LL profitability by always asking the same people what to promote (and how), maybe they could, for once, ask someone different and see if maybe it doesn't go any worse. And if it somehow happened to go better, that might be interesting. Wouldn't it? >Not the best strategy, really. It is at least different from what is already being tried by the Lindens and is already failing to solve their most basic problems. So - to the Lindens: "you're welcome".

>My question is not about the what Lindens do or don't, or what conspiricay of theory you have about the whole idea of madstyle, my question is about customers. As I have said, the customers have always been able to search for the keyword "60's", and they still can. Have you tried it? >I looks to me as if you don't care at all what kind of shopping experience your customers have, as long as you can get a cheap ride for your underperforming products. I haven't asked anyone to add the keyword "60's". Thus, I have done nothing to disrupt customers' continuing ability to search for pertinent items. As for people getting free rides for their products, what do you think the preferred merchants are doing? What I've done is to suggest to other merchants that the preferred merchants shouldn't be allowed to exercise a planned monopoly on a keyword function which LL, itself, is using to spam the whole market. Do you favor monopolies? Why do you favor them? Surely the customers can help sort out what is "madstyle" and what isn't. No? Why deprive them of the opportunity to do so by refraining from listing items which they, as consumers, might deem appropriate?

We'll see who is living on a flat Earth on 1 June. In the meantime, enjoy the 16xxxxx borkages around this same time next month.

>Will this be done and tested by June 1st? Legally, I don't see how they can risk not doing it at this point, since we've already publicly explained what it would imply that they are trying to accomplish by not doing it.

>Yes, I thought meroos were only invented this century. I wonder if they would actually get delisted if someone flagged them. Wouldn't that be kind of interesting if they didn't?

They are persuading you to take your business back to the grid.

>Yes LL needs to micromanage the commerce team and make all LL's pay dependent upon the commerce team's overall performance. Including the stealing or not including the stealing?

>we already tested it out one day last year.. Useless. LL is very specifically disinterested in the results of tests by users.

Much like flaming, keyword spam is less of a question of what is done than a question of who does it.

PREDICTED

>And customers, do they deserve it as well to see everyones underperforming products, while they are actually looking for something from the sixties? They deserve to have the green bear off the screen, finally. So things are at least better than last week in that way. They are being spammed either way, though. Nothing was preventing them from searching the keyword "60's" until just recently, and they can still search that. "Madstyle" is not about making it easier for people to find 60's products, as such. "Madstyle" is about making it more likely for people to see product offered by specific merchants who were well aware of this promotion before it was announced to marketplace merchants. If that's not the whole reason why Lindens are holding unpublicized meetings with merchants in-world, the minutes of which are off-limits to non-participants, then what, really, can possibly be the point of such meetings?

>In order for that to occur, you'd have to have some semblance of knowledge of the law. I've been reading your posts the past few days - the ones that contain the legal lawsuit sabre rattling. On what legal basis do you think you're going to sue them? I have neither claimed to be a lawyer, nor said that I would sue them, personally. >1 - There is contractual, legally binding consideration between a merchant and LL. The consideration is as follows: merchant builds products and is provided a vehicle from which to sell from and receive payment for said products. LL, as the vehicle provider, receives a percentage of each sale. That is consideration. A percentage of sales revenues, yes. A multiple of an enhancement fee, or an enhancement fee for an undeliverable product because LL has made it undeliverable while continuing to encourage others to buy listing enhancements? No. >2 - If the vehicle - MP - is broken or unavailable, both parties suffer (LL doesn't get their percentages and the merchants don't get the sales) That's very simplistic. The percentage of sales they would be getting instead by allowing things to work correctly is a tiny fraction of what they should already expect not to get from land sales if the Marketplace is allowed to continue providing a preferred venue for a majority of merchants. >3. When there have been errors, goods sold but payment to the merchant not rendered, LL has pushed those through to see that the merchant gets paid. (This I know from personal experience on two support tickets) Token gestures, yes. Like replacing Xstreet with anything at all in the first place when they bought it out. Admirable, at least in some way. >Exactly how do you plan to make a case? That's not really my problem unless I will also sue them for something, or unless they sue me (and try to prove with things like records they already more or less claim do not even exist, that there's no basis to anything I've described? Yarite). People who have lost more money than I'd be able to show are those who should first be threatening to sue, which, personally, I have not done. What I've done here is to show motive, means, and opportunity. That's actually procedure for criminal investigation. But as the evidentiary burden in civil court will only be lower, the two smoking guns of 13 September and 14 February are two things for which it is reasonable to demand better explanation than what has been provided. Those and a bunch of other things; especially the fact that transaction errors oddly never seem to favor merchant and/or customer at a loss to LL. The argument (among those of us who bother to argue) at this point is essentially intentional sabotage versus mere coincidence. Linden has not even claimed mere coincidence, or at least not officially. The dates and other data do not plausibly add up to mere coincidence in any universe constrained by basic laws of statistical probability. If there is a 3rd explanation better than the other two, I would like to hear it, either from LL or from someone else. Simple incompetence is not a 3rd explanation; it is one of the "mere coincidence" arguments. Really there are any possible number of hypotheses that could explain the 13th & 14th, but almost all of them would be even scientifically weaker than mere coincidence. Being hacked by time-traveling cyborgs in some convoluted plan to prevent Hitler from being cloned, for example, is arguably below the chance level for selecting those deployment dates because there would seem to be no precedent for it, either in SL or in other companies. I concede that this doesn't mean it can't be what really happened. OTOH, there's plenty of precedent for sabotage in the histories of other types of companies, and no specific reason to assume that LL would be especially immune. Surely you've heard of corporate corruption at some point. No? How many people at the now dead corrupt companies you hear about do you think would have found it easy to believe that their company would be one of them? The historical list of corporate abuses is a list of things that most people either found or would have found practically impossible to believe if not first proved. The chance events angle is also not totally unviable. But even where such an explanation is to be concluded, such as in the death of Brandon Lee, it's unethical to conclude such a thing without first investigating. Moreover, I expect you can take for granted that the Brandon Lee death was suspicious enough to warrant a thorough investigation before anyone could state with legal authority that it was a convergence of chance events. And yet the chance events that led to Lee's death are collectively far less improbable than what is being posited here as "obviously" mere coincidence. That's why the movie industry now has procedures in place specifically to prevent it from happening again while LL has essentially proved that they don't care if they do repeat their mistakes (and why would that be?). A 3rd explanation sounds possible to me, but, so far, nobody has been offering anything. What it would require in order to compete probabilistically with an intentional sabotage theory would be at least one variable that incidentally both correlates to optimization of release dates (independently of risk consideration) and correlates to daily utility value for listing enhancements. If you have such a variable, please tell me what it is. The only thing of that sort which comes to my mind is that there could be calendar days on which a release is either impossible or approaches impossibility for some reason. And even that doesn't really satisfy the question of how such a 3rd explanation would be any more scientifically valid than a sabotage theory. Moreover, even if releases were only possible one day a week, that would only close the probability gap between sabotage theory and mere coincidence theory by a factor of about 50, still leaving a gap of absolutely no less than 1320 to 1 in favor of sabotage. But I know... even that would just mean that the company you happen to really like is the one in 1320 that was just really, really unlucky. Guess what... people favoring 1329 other companies mostly think exactly the same thing, and they can't all be right, can they? In fact though, there seems to be no specific day of the week for code release. So even the best numerical angle I can provide in favor of mere coincidence is both still inadequate and overstated to LL's favor by some factor approaching 50. >There is NO conspiracy here. And on what evidentiary basis can you make such a statement? Do you have any numerical data? And why would it have to be a conspiracy anyway? Couldn't it just be one person exercising control over others? >There is NO intention on the part of LL to sabotage MP, shut it down, or make people shop in-world only. The overwhelmingly preponderant pattern of Linden action toward the Markeplace over the last 8 months says that there is. Official communications could say anything and it wouldn't matter, because what LL says they're going to do and what they ultimately do have only some kind of incidental region of overlap which I think probably also would show as being below the chance level if subjected to more rigorous scrutiny. OTOH, if they even ever bothered to deny anything I've described, that might change the way I'm approaching things here. But, so far, what have they even bothered to deny? >Why would they? Because they are desperate to find any possible way of getting merchants to start paying for land again. Without the word "because", what part of the above sentence can you possibly tell me is untrue? The "because" just explains that, whereas they otherwise seem to be doing absolutely nothing about this immense and apparently insoluble problem, they at least appear to be doing one thing about it; forcibly pushing merchants back to the grid. Here's what I think is pretty reasonable question for you, specifically, Ilyra: If they shut off the boxes on 1 June as planned, without first fully supporting the permissions to deliver breedables with DD, what meaning should we assign to that? Please feel free to bookmark this question to review on 1 June if you don't see any reason to answer it today, because I'm betting you'll have very good reason to answer it then. >They make money on marketplace. They make a lot less on the marketplace than they lose on unwanted land by allowing the marketplace even to work as well as it does. So the simple monetary question is not why they should try to shut down or marginalize the marketplace; the simple monetary question is how they can possibly dare to risk making it even more useful. So what do I want them to do? I want them to either REALLY fix the marketplace system and stop tampering with it irresponsibly, OR simply admit that they need to shut down the marketplace in order to keep their company alive. Either thing would satisfy me. It's this in-between stuff that I have a problem with.

What you're seeing is a continuation of the borking schedule that was supposed to begin on 13 September, but which was delayed until 14 February. That is: the new items being borked today are those which were intended to be borked on 15 October.

>Can't say Twilight and friends but we can say vampires for instance. I forget.... did they already do cartoon pirates? (yes, I AM offering that idea for free)

I'm looking at the banner now. The 60's sure look like the 90's, huh. Maybe they meant 90's? Maybe it's dyslexia. Maybe they also meant "WAD style".

Maybe they meant THIS Facebook: http://www.heavy.com/comedy/comedy-videos/funny-videos/2012/03/facebook-of-the-90s/