Project Open Letter, a letter written to Linden Lab on the status of SecondLife, has been a success in that Linden Lab acknowledged it on the SecondLife blog.
My thoughts on the open letter itself are pretty well laid out in my comments. I do believe most of the issues raised in the letter are due to network congestion within Linden Lab, but it is perhaps a bit too technical for some people to understand this.
Penalizing Verifieds
There is a strong basis in the letter regarding the penalizing of people who do not pay to use SecondLife. It is difficult to make an argument against this - Trevor pointed this out in his comment reply to me - but then, I don't see how the real issue can be tracked scientifically to a 'verified' versus 'unverified' argument. Maybe I missed some statistics. How many unverified accounts are there on the network, logged in to SecondLife - and how does that compare to those who are logged in with verified accounts?
Camping Accounts
My experience has been people who pay for something tend to use it more. Frankly, being broke in Secondlife stinks. I know, I did it. I hear about 'camping bots' all the time, but 2 Lindens every 10 minutes means someone would need 23 accounts operating concurrently to make $1 US in an hour. If people are doing that, they are pretty stupid.
So are unverified accounts really the problem? Is lowering the ability of unverified accounts really going to help the situation? I honestly don't think so, but my argument lacks the same statistics to back it as the argument for penalizing alternates. There's no proof, and it disturbs me when 1,500 people would sign things without proof of a viable solution.
Of course, if people actually have insight into these figures because of a special relationship with Linden Lab... well, that would be a problem. As someone who tried to get information for something I was writing about SecondLife, I can honestly tell you that I wasted a lot of time for silence and non-answers. Maybe I didn't have the secret handshake that some others seem to have.
Got Metrics?
The first step, I think, would be to get Linden Lab to give us the information we want. But for whatever reason, they choose not to do so. The published statistics do not truly indicate anything, the Police blotter gives us no feel for the precedents. Heck, Landbaron Merlin is still running around ripping people off of thousands of dollars - real money - and the response from Linden Lab (if you continuously poke them with a white hot piece of steel) is, "We're talking about it". They explain it away, say that the Terms of Service were not broken )(but is the spirit broken?) and say it is all human error when... guess what? Network latency is an apparent issue here as well. Where are the metrics of the people who have complained about this? Over 161,000 Linden dollars collected in this scenario to help Lucreza Ah.
But still - where are the metrics of anything? Why is it that there is so much network congestion? Is it network congestion? Is it that aliens have invaded Linden Lab and taken some people hostage? We don't know. And that is the travesty.
In The End
In the end, Linden Lab has removed all forms of communication that the community did have before, and it seems that the whole point of the acknowledgment of this open letter is that Linden Lab does want to be publicly castigated in the future - why else would it have come to a public and open letter?
A few friends of mine tell me that they have good experiences with certain Lindens in getting help and so forth. I have as well, but never in a context which actually informed me. Many pressing issues don't make it onto the SecondLife blog while stray Lindens say, "We're talking about it".
Well, I don't believe they are. I see no evidence of it. And I see no solutions coming out... and the solutions which the open letter proposes seems to mask the fact that there is insufficient data to truly know what the problems are... let alone the solutions.
If we don't understand the problems, how can we propose solutions? Maybe we're just not that important to them.
Technorati Tags: 
Hmm?
"the whole point of the acknowledgment of this open letter is that Linden Lab does want to be publicly castigated in the future - why else would it have come to a public and open letter?"
Should there be a "not" in there? ie. "that Linden Lab does NOT want..."?
On this point, you're totally right - and that LL's response to complaints that it's cut off communication with the community is "but you've got Jira!" tells you everything you need to know about the internal state of the Lab.
However, I think you're being a bit optimistic if you think that a petition that's fundamental complaining that LL isn't fixing bugs and doesn't actually listen should - or can - suggest a "viable solution". As I've said elsewhere, I'd rather suggest a potential solution and be shown why it's wrong than posit no solution at all.
Ultimately, it's down to LL to fix SL, no matter how it seems intent on hiving the dull fixing work off to the Second Life community. Have a dig around Jira and look at the number of issues which are open and unallocated - in most categories, that's running at 90% or so...
There should be a 'Not'
but there isn't. Because it did come to that. :-)
and let's be frank - Jira sucks. It really does. I have used many open source tracking systems, and I have a good feel for what sucks. This thing hasn't been made friendly at the least, and I'm a person with a technical background saying that... I can't imagine a non-technical person wrestling with that interface for the first time.
"As I've said elsewhere, I'd rather suggest a potential solution and be shown why it's wrong than posit no solution at all."... I can go with that.
But the whole basis on verifieds versus unverifieds itself cannot be proven without some statistics, so it's very shakey (at best). I believe if you're going to propose a solution, you should have your foot on solid ground. I would think the first thing that the open letter should have asked for is the data so that the community can give sensible solutions. LL has neglected to do so for some time, and cutting off communication with the residents seems pretty much like 'circling the wagons'. So the open letter didn't ask for anything that would support it's solutions, it didn't have supporting data that demonstrated the solutions might be valid, and it demonstrated the 'verified vs. unverified' argument in Yet Another Iteration. Frankly, I don't even think the letter had a solution in there - just some snipes at unverified accounts. It might have been effective to say "your paying customers don't like this" instead of saying "punish those people who do not pay". And maybe they do pay, somehow. Who knows? The world is a big place, bigger than PayPal or credit card access.
A lot of these issues are related to network latency based on what I have been finding in discussion and personal experience, but are explained away with silence for the most part.
Yeah
"But the whole basis on verifieds versus unverifieds itself cannot be proven without some statistics, so it's very shakey (at best). I believe if you're going to propose a solution, you should have your foot on solid ground."
I think that's a fair comment, and to be honest one that should have been foreseen. Drafts of the letter were posted at SC, in public - so it's not like there wasn't chance for people to object to those phrases earlier. Remember that no effort like this is perfect.
But there's a simple answer: take the letter text, delete the bits about unverifieds, and post it yourself. Let people who agree with the overall sentiment but object to the bits about unverifieds sign that one - not as some kind of contest between different view points, but to show that we're all united in asking Linden Lab to take these issues seriously.
If you want to draft it, I'll happily host it.
Thank you.
Thank you for saying a comment of mine was fair. That's what I aim for.
I understand your basis about open letters, but I see open letters as a last resort and not something to flood the internet with. What I think and how what I think evolves is pretty apparent here (in chronological order, no less), and I don't see how writing another open letter will help.
That the letter was open to editing beforehand is to be applauded, but I've spent too many hours wordsmithing things by committee in the real world - with issues from Internet Governance to cultural ICT (in PortugeseSpanish, French and English, no less...). It's tiresome, leaving me a dry husk and despondent. I don't want everyone to agree with me, but I can't spend hours upon hours dealing with people who simply will not agree with me no matter how I shuffle the words. Therefore I don't argue. I write what I think here, in the open, and let everyone else sort it out because I have other things to do. Selfish? Perhaps. Pragmatic? Yes. :-)
The cultural ICT point also brings out something about this letter which is interesting. It's written by Anglophones. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but I wonder at how many people may have had something to say about it from other languages. These are things I always consider by default because of my own experiences, and I would like to think that others should. In essence, where is the Spanish version? French? Italian? Greek? Turkish? Now that would be a lovely thing to see happen, since it would demonstrate true community involvement across language barriers.
SecondLife community. Hmm. That would lead to an interesting discussion right there, but guess what? We don't have those numbers either... what do we have? We have questions. And questions are underrated. Questions are awesome, because they lead to more questions. And all those questions lead to an understanding of the problem, and when lots of people understand the problems... solutions typically present themselves quite readily.
Why? Aside from all our faults, we're a pretty creative and intelligent species once we get to asking the right questions. The trick is getting to the point where we are asking the right questions.
Different comment?
I believe (based on the context of this post) that you meant to link to this comment, as it addresses the topic.
Sure, that works.
So many urls... :-) Thanks.
coffee overload...sorry
I read your opinions, I read the letter, I read the comments posted on the sites you linked, and my first thought was, "huh, Prok and Nobody are at it again.", and I laughed. A good long hard laugh. So I have to thank you, I really needed that. It's wonderful to see that some things haven't changed. I look forward to reading more. btw, I do have opinions, but I'm not a programmer and experience has shown most people don't actually care about others' opinions, so I'm not going to bother:)
Post new comment