Video of workshop with Daniel (Linden) Huebner
April 14, 2007 on 11:57 am | In Uncategorized |Here’s a video of Stanford Humanities Lab’s How They Got Game Workshop #1 with Linden Lab’s Director of community affairs Daniel Huebner.
After the fold you will find my short notes, but if you can spare a good hours time then you should check out this interesting video. You should that the sounds quality is a little rough in few places, but hopefully you will get everything out of the context.
Second Life (SL) community growth is 7% per week!
When Linden Lab first started to accept abuse reports back in 2003 they got 21 in the first week. When Daniel checked last they were receiving 5000 per day.
He has been with Linden Lab for 4 years was employee number 15. Current staff 200+
Detaching ownership of of their world has been very difficult for Linden Lab, but it is working and one of the key reasons for SL’s success.
SL first launched with a more game like profile and it was unsuccessful. In December SL was relaunced and it was the birth of what we see today. The main difference was the introduction of a real economy, which compromised the original vision.
Artificial creation incentives by Linden Lab have all proved unsuccessful over time. The best vote for your creation is other residents willing to pay you real money for it.
The best way to attract people to your SL space is green dots (other residents) on the map. Linden Lab can’t replicate that. So things like Linden picks have been unsuccessful experiments.
The weirdest complaint Daniel could mention was related to age and identity and it highlighted the question: What is the age of consent for a weasel avatar?
Most complaints are like in real life: Neighbours, rudeness etc. but Linden Lab will never intervene in this. Instead residents should be allowed the tools to control their own experience.
The original community standards spanned several pages and was added to every time something new came up. Realized this was unenforceable. The current standards are The Big 6 (rules). Daniel wants to simplify further and shave some more rules of this. Ideally Daniel wants only one rule, but didn’t specify what that should be.
Linden Lab will never instate a resident parliament, but users are welcome to create one.
Daniel loves the possible upcoming SL feature “symmetrical nodraw.” Which boils down to: “If I don’t like you I can make you disappear from my view entirely and I would disappear from yours as well.” This would work because griefers thrive on attention. Programmers hate this idea, because it is “data without representation.”
Linden Lab will continue the drive towards making SL islands more and more independent. In the future island owners will handle their own abuse reports. Currently APIs are in place to let you choose how your new users should see the world.
The only people getting special treatment from Linden Lab are educators who get a discount. Corporate customers gets to stand in line with the rest of us.
People who merely build a 3D version of their website in SL will not be successful. An example is Pontiac who worked with the community to build their SL space vs. BMW who basically built an unsuccessful worlds fair like sim to tell the world how ecofriendly they are.
Social pressure is the biggest tool for any kind of governance in SL. Unlike the Internet you have neighbors. This creates social pressure and Linden Lab wants to leverage this more in the future.
The fantasy is what draws people to SL, but the reality is what makes them stay. Behind every avatar there is a person, so the feelings are very real.
An example was given of a person who speaks more eloquent in SL. This man likes his resident persona better than his real self. Daniel had found that people who were compelling in SL would often be not so much so in real life, so he had started to do job interviews in SL and began hiring better Lindens.
Newly relaunched Orientation Island experience has been somewhat successful, but the “new to SL” experience could still be improved. Daniel envisions a kind of personal add that lets you find like minded people to help you get cohesion with the community. “Get you in contact with people who you want to spend time with.”
Volunteer programs have been largely ineffective. Things work when people do something because it motivates them specifically not because Linden Lab initiates it.
SL appeals broadly to people wants to express themselves, be leaders and those who want to belong. Social capital is big in SL and one of the aspects that are the hardest to quantify and understand.
An analogy for Linden Lab role in dispute resolution is more FBI than the government.
There is work going on at Linden Lab to enable identity persistent across different virtual spaces such as SL and World of Warcraft. This is intended to be inter operable with current open systems such as OpenID.
The resistance in the resident community to voice is mainly related to lack of good voice masking. There will still be room for people who will not use voice. Voice will not hugely change SL but rather bring it more up to date.
Linden Lab does not give you ownership of what you make in SL. They just don’t to take ownership for themselves. Essentially they say that anything you create in SL isn’t ours; it might be yours.
Stealing other people’s creations in SL is incredibly easy. The only thing that can effectively be protected is a script.
SL is not a game but it speaks the language of games. The actual experience is not like a game at all.
Most people will not make any money in SL, but they love the idea that they could. It gives that sense of purpose that SL may lack for some. SL has the entrepreneurial spirit of something like Silicon Valley.
There is little mob mentality in the resident community because of how diverse it is. Some are more vocal than others but there is little unification. Linden Lab have yet to see a galvanizing moment that brings the community together to march on their offices.
It is clear that Linden Lab will not own all the SL servers forever. The SL run by Linden Lab will be just one of many.
Open source will make the software much more robust and reliable, which it isn’t right now.
Daniel is no big fan of the separated Teen and Adult grid model and think that Linden Lab eventually will pursue and All ages option.
There are a lot of things that don’t work the way they should and it is due to a relatively small development team. An example is the PG vs. Mature rating system which is going to go away eventually as well.
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[…] the lead of colleges like Harvard and Stanford, many colleges and academic organizations are using Second Life to teach. These course are […]
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>Linden Lab have yet to see a galvanizing moment that brings the community together to march on their offices.
Oh, there’s been plenty of them, but you may not have found them visible, as they take place in the virtual world itself and on the forums and blogsphere, not physically in San Francisco. And I suspect Daniel Linden, who is notorious for never answering emails, would be the last person to ask about protests in Second Life.
The open protest letter this week with 3,800 signatures is probably something virtually like that march Daniel denied could occur 2 weeks ago, however, and even he’d be forced to admit it now.
And there have been very strong protest movements, such as by telehub mall owners and private island owners that protested so effectively that LL was forced to change policies, they had to compensate for the loss of the telehub land, and had to postpone their plan to make price hikes on the islands.
I find this video absolutely chilling and disturbing, all the more ominous because the news is delivered by this affable blonde sunny hippie in California.
Here are the highlights of some of the profoundly worrisome concepts they are promoting:
1. Getting rid of the offense of RL disclosure essentially ends the second life concept. It means bullies who use RL information to silence dissenters or try to change the behaviour of people they don’t like by outing their gender, or blackmailing them, or simply threatening them with RL stalking, will now be able to operate with impunity. That’s wrong!
The motivation for this was likely the RL businesses who don’t see why they need a fake game-like name. But in this intensely emotional virtual world still used mainly for socializing, many people want their identity protected. SL loses its very being and nature by removing that protective layer. Just because you can’t police something 100 percent doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be promoted by the federal state as a norm.
2. I loathe the overall contempt for the user that I hear coming from this Linden. My God, we are not weasels. We are not people in the unemployment line. We are not grocery clerks making ladies’ lingerie out of our Queens apartments. That kind of arrogant sneer, trying to make out the SL population *that pays your salary, Daniel Linden* has no place in your management culture. None. Zero. It needs to get gone quick. We are all very different. Some people have businesses they make livlihoods from. Some people simply work for IBM and meet their co-workers there. It’s really ridiculous to try to stereotype SL by the minority of furry baby ageplaying BDSMers. It’s long past even being a funny joke at this point. Get over it, Daniel, we all did years ago. Second Life or something like it — virtuality — will be incorporated to most urban populations’ real lives in 10-20 years. It won’t be about baby weasels, it will be about multi-billion dollar businesses, and don’t think YOU can control that economy by disparaging everybody else seeking access to it as a baby weasel or a Queens grocery clerk. Because that’s what it’s about.
3. Symmetrical nodraw is another name for Stalinist airbrushing of people you don’t like right out of history, out of photographs. It’s wrong. You can’t force people to get along. But you can promulgate some basic “do unto others” sort of minimal values and not let the world Balkanize and degenerate endlessly to “I Rule” tyranny like a living Tropico hell.
And doing that automatically is just poor management. Anybody who has done customer service in SL knows that some people ban each other 3 times a night then make up, and don’t keep each other on mute. It’s not rocket science to use ban and mute, and that should not be automated so that people who have a moment’s annoyance with a newbie who is clumsy successfully have him Ban-linked from huge swathes of SL forever.
4. The idea that Lindens don’t intrude with their own wacky, culty, utopianist ideas of governance is wrong. They do. They say that someone reporting from an abusive Goreans’ land will find that complaint routed right back to the Master Gorean leaving the slave or the wandering furry helpless. Again, the federal government should have some minimal obligation to maintain the minimal peace and that means at least processing appeals after local remedies are exhausted. There’s some really objectionable features of this “local rule” stuff as well, such as having chat logs for an entire sim then go into the hands of the sim owner.
5. I could go on and on about all the bad ideas represented in the Linden dystopia, that has made a grid of selfish, vicious, hedonistic people, where only the tiny niche of politically-correct lefty Creative Commonsers sandbox script-kiddies and Burning Man nutters are considered “the community” and the rest of us little better than software beta load-testers.
But…the main point is…why does Linden Lab get to decide these issues affecting us all, by itself, in secret, alone, or only occasionall ina little chat like this in Stanford??. in secret, with only self-selected special beta-era and other friends they pay to come to SF to chat to them in SL Views? You don’t have to have a cumbersome “parliament” to have basic, normal open channels — like a forums, which is now closed, or community round tables, which have been closed.
Routing everybody to take part in a geeky bug JIRA lets us know exactly what you really think about feedback: you want it from the 13 1/2 people who can code software and have the time to work for you for free. Do you really think a handful of kids on a beta grid are the way that a company with grown men collecting high salaries for coding should be testing and gaining feedback on their product?
We all pay the tier that makes up 80 percent of LL revenue. How can we be so disenfranchised from the actual governance of the software features and world’s nature??? This can’t last, and this insularity will be among the reasons LL is overtaken by other world-makers in the long run.
There is nothing enlightened about this despotism. the removal of the forums, the banning of people from criticism of LL itself from the blog, the very idea that Daniel espouses in Rolling Stone, that if you are “not moving the conversation forward” (as defined by this clique of coders) then you need to get gone — well, it’s just dead wrong. It’s unacceptable in RL; it’s unacceptable in virtual life.
What kind of creativity is it, intense though it may be, that leads people who don’t live in the desert to adopt for a few days the false posture of those who do, and worse, make an effigy of something which they then go about destroying by fire? That’s the most primitive and stupid kind of tribalism. Why is that what inspires Second Life?
Comment by Prokofy Neva — May 3, 2007 #
Haha, I love the Linden Lab wacky, culty, utopianist ideas. They’re so in tune with the tekki community.
Soon enough we will all be despots of our own servers oppressing Prokofy Neva by its very existence. I can hardly wait!
Comment by Baba — May 6, 2007 #
Great video! It was very informative and reassuring.
It was good to see Daniel mention the importance of the social facilitator. Those of us who have taken on this role often are doing it for free, and I’m glad LL values it, even though we’re not very visible. Some of us are officers in groups and could be counted that way.
The continued movement toward user control and open source and/or licensing is great. I was very glad to see a welcoming, hands off attitude toward the “niche verticals” of specific subcultures. The tendency in the various official and unofficial forums to yell “your subculture is about to get banned” is grade school stuff in comparision. It was reassuring to see that adult space will always exist in some form, since some of the most creative subcultures are a bit off the wall.
Inclusion and diversity have always been important to me and are core values in the group I run, Bisexuals in Second Life. I was glad to see Daniel support a tolerant, welcoming, inclusive Second Life. I think the San Francisco-style liberal mainland is very marketable and always will be, while diversity proliferates all around it. This is a very constructive vision of the future of Second Life. Thank you!
Comment by Brenda Archer — June 2, 2007 #
[…] me below so VTOR readers can conveniently skip directly to these parts in the video. Hat tip to the SL Creativity blog who also watched the video and made comments on various points […]
Pingback by Daniel Linden haunting words about SL at Standford Humanities Lab » VTOR - Virtual TO Reality — June 2, 2007 #
“Linden Lab have yet to see a galvanizing moment that brings the community together to march on their office”
Ive seen many moments of this.
1). copy bot caused a vast amount of Business to close down there shops, this was such a big thing it actually caused a dip in the economy. Linden lab had to make a statement about copy bot and admit that everyones stuff could always be copied.
2. recent inworld conferances with Robin Linden have been swamped by angry protesters.
3. the fact that you cant relly have many residents in one place at a time means we cant mass a big protest in one place anyway. If we could fit 500 on a sim you would see something remarkable im sure.
Comment by Loki — June 3, 2007 #
[…] that brings the community together to march on their offices.” Here’s the source: http://slcreativity.org/blog/?p=32 - quite interesting if you have the time. Feel free to laugh where you deem appropriate. It looks […]
Pingback by Group Note: 4th June 2007 « Support BDSM in Second Life — June 5, 2007 #
[…] Huebner spoke. The video was then shared at Google Video and posted by Second Life Creativity here. It’s over an hour long, but provides valuable insight into who Daniel Linden is, and Linden […]
Pingback by » Communication, Second Life, Daniel Linden and virtual liberties M is for Myg — June 6, 2007 #
In short Daniel Linden is a LIAR!
I know personally of several instances where in world businesses were told to remove “offensive” products or be shut down.
THe sole advantage that I see is the impetus to create a truly independent version of Second Life which cannot be controlled by any “central committee”.
Comment by Karen Palen — August 1, 2007 #
Gosh they (LL) is totally clueless about the real reasons most of us don’t want need, or will use voice:( Soo typical of an bunch of inept gods No wonder they are having so many probs
Comment by Marlena Petrov — September 19, 2007 #