One size does not fit all

Everyone seems to want to review and make predictions today, and that is fair enough.  But I want to talk about a trend that, as far as I can tell, is having serious repercussions at the moment – and that is the attempt to apply simplistic solutions to a range of complex problems.

One thing that has become clearer over the last few months is that as Second life grows, Linden Lab is forced to find ways of re-scaling contacts with the customer base and – by and large – those mean reducing contacts, and attempting to create a product that gives the greatest utility to the greatest number for the least cost.

Let’s take one example: mentoring new recruits.

This was handled by the resident mentor group. This was a system that needed, in itself, to be mentored and monitored; mentors needed to be trained, and also monitored to make sure they weren’t giving newcomers inappropriate advice, copybotted content or inappropriate invitations. The vast majority of mentors were altruistic and honourable individuals, who put considerable time and energy into their work. But the programme still had to monitored and besides, mentors would hit problems. Simple problems they were trained to solve – more complex problems needed to be passed up the chain, and those would need proportionally more time and energy to solve. The Lindens would find themselves dealing with concerned mentors as well as troubled residents in real time – with human beings needing interactions that took time and effort.

How much easier to have an asynchronous forum where moderation would be swifter and simpler, and where residents could deal with most problems before up-chain intervention was needed!

So some problems might be missed; forums can intimidate some, and some might be shy of bringing problems they find intensely personal to an open, identified environment. But on the whole this method will serve the needs of the community and free up budget to be used elsewhere.

It also passes the problems to the residents to deal with. Look at the recent convolutions involving NCI, one of the oldest and most respected organisations helping new residents (and more established residents needing new skills) on the grid. I’m not proposing to rehash that whole debate here – Provoky has covered it on Second Thoughts (for example at http://tinyurl.com/nyxzu3), and, in passing, I have to say my own 1980s experiences suggests his portrayal of extremist infiltration is spot on.

But one of the key lessons from this is that dealing with people is horribly difficult – and the more the Lindens can outsource this to the residents, the easier their job will be.

However, it’s not just with this level of personal interaction that the Lab is attempting to take the broad brush one-size-fits-all approach. Another sweep – and one that has drawn day after day after day of screams of protest is the decision to start charging for advertising freebies on XStreetSL.

I have a horse in this race – and it’s a horse that I’m going to have to withdraw. All my products on XStreet are free: the Prim Perfect magazines, the Primgraph magazines, the Step UP! materials and the coffee table books (produced for Burning Life). They are free at point of delivery; the revenue that allows me to go on producing them, and that allows me to employ some of the most brilliant writers, photographers and content creators in Second Life is delivered through the advertising.

I have – as regular readers of the blog will know – five ways of delivering the magazines:

• On the web, using the Calaméo system (see http://en.calameo.com/accounts/4234)
• On the web, through pdfs
• Through subscribe-o-matic kiosks, which are located around the grid – distributing inworld THiNC books
• Through an inworld group (THiNC books again)
• Through XStreetSL (You guessed it – ThiNC books)

I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets when I say that the two most popular ways of getting the magazines are the Subscribe-o-Matics and the Calaméo. But these methods of distribution, which lift us well into five figure readership … cannot be charged. Nor would I want to. When, very early in the lifecycle of Prim Perfect, we were fortunate enough to be mentioned in The New York Times, I realised very quickly that there was no sense in insisting that a wider readership, who might be drawn to Second Life through reading about the positive side portrayed in Prim Perfect, should be forced to pay a small sum of a hard-to-obtain game currency in order to read the magazine.

Do such things register in the calculations of the Lab? Well, when I visited the Lab six months later, I noticed a framed copy of the self-same article.

But it does mean that I must do all I can to make the magazines as open to the readership as possible. And that means free at point of delivery in its most popular formats. And if I cannot charge for these, then I cannot charge on XStreet.

XStreet accounts for a small proportion of my ‘sales’. In fact, the efficiency of the distribution system I have in place means that I ‘sell’ more archive editions on XStreet than I do of the current edition and, all told, XStreet probably amounts to 250 – 300 copies a month – of all editions of Prim Perfect and The Primgraph. So it is not exactly going to be an overwhelming loss – and people still eager for back editions will find them easily on Calaméo, and also by teleporting over to the Prim Perfect offices in Oliveto. It’s simply not worth my paying out over L$3000 per week for the convenience of a small part of the readship.

But even if I did that – or accepted the kind offer of one content creator who offered to sponsor Prim Perfect at XStreet – I would still find the magazine dumped in the ‘freebie’ bin and excluded from the main search. So for a not inconsiderable sum, I would be graciously allowed to pile my magazines in the rummage pile? Gosh, thanks.

My point in dwelling on this is to demonstrate that there are categories that will be lost when the new policy is imposed that are valuable. The tools and kits that help new residents, the magazines that promote Second Life, the freebies that new content creators hope will attract residents to their stores, materials that promote good causes. Yes, there is a lot of bad content available on XStreet – but some of it is quite highly priced. And there is stolen content too … reducing the number of freebies may make it marginally easier to tackle this problem – but apart from the copybotted content that is given away free as a deliberate nose-thumb at content creators and/or the Labs, stolen content on XStreet is charged for.

But pushing freebies off XStreet is an awful lot easier than going through every piece individually – and perhaps makes the necessary task of going through the remaining items a lot easier. Once again, a broad brush solution is imposed – and a lot of value is lost.

The latest instance of the broad brush solutions we are seeing comes with the removal of possibly trademarked goods. Unfortunately, decisions are being made her that are draconian and – it appears – with no possibility of remonstrance. Shopping Cart Disco has the latest report – but other instances have come up of accounts being taken over, without prior warning, and goods stripped from inventories because they reference a film star. This is a wholly different level of trademark protection from acting against, for example, fake Guccis. And it’s leading to absurd mistakes. We’ve seen people being warned against using the words “converse” in descriptions of goods, because a brand of sport shoe has this name … I believe the product was, however, poseballs that allowed avatars to converse. As PG Wodehouse might have said, you could be looking at that conversation a long while before you start thinking about sports shoes.

Now we have a respected content creator’s stock swept clear of anything bearing the name Marilyn because of the resemblance that a dress bears to a dress worn in a film by Marilyn Monroe. But this is madness. At the height of her fame, designers would copy the designs worn by Marilyn in real life – just as hours after the wedding of Princess Diana, designers were at working of styling gowns that echoed the Emmanuelle dress she wore. In the nineteen fifties, paper pattern books would supply the means for ladies who sewed to create their own Marilyn dresses at home. Women would beg to have their hair cut in the Marilyn style – just as in the 1970s women demanded Farrah cuts, in the 1980s Princess Di styles and in the 1990s Jennifer Aniston looks.

Are Linden Labs proposing to sweep everyone’s inventory for anything that might possibly have a real life reference? The designer in question, Miko Omegamu of Icing, didn’t just lose the dress – she lost Ingenue hair, textures and a pair of sunglasses – presumably because they used the name “Marilyn”.

But this is crazy. Will every product on the web called “Marilyn” be painstakingly removed – just in case? One popular hair designer names some hair styles after film stars who wore them. But then – so did thousands upon thousands of other women wear those hairstyles back in the 1930s and 40s. Will those be deleted too? Are designers from now on to give their products numbers, not names, in case there is a remote chance that the given name references a movie star or some other media personality, or some other product that has a real life identity?

And the most shocking thing about this is that it is happening seemingly randomly, with no warning in advance to the content creator, suggesting that they should remove the disputed item (let alone discuss whether it is infringing copyright). Their account is taking over, the content is removed … and there is no recourse.

In most cases, the simple manner of this has occasioned great distress. In a couple of cases (one referenced on Shopping Cart Disco and one which was discussed on the Content Creators Association), business partners have watched as their partners’ accounts have been activated – when they knew it could not be their partner. Unsurprisingly, they believed the accounts had been hacked – situations not helped when the partners tried to log in and failed, because the passwords had been changed. A belated email explained the situation in one case – but this should not be happening. On a day when one appalled content creator watched as his entire store was copybotted and rebuilt in a sandbox, surely the Lindens need to be thinking of ways of supporting content creators, not demoralising them further by acting with brutal insensitivity and crass incompetence.

Once again, it’s the one size fits all policy at work. Quickest, simplest, cheapest.

There are some problems the Lindens are facing that have my sympathy. They have some very tough calls to make – and a huge job to do simply to maintain and grow what they have. And a lot of the time, they are called unfairly on things that are not their fault – or on things that they might have done differently had they been blessed with 20/20 foresight. Then there are the random idiotic mistakes …

But this time they’re not just careering down the stairs. They’ve taken the elevator.