Daniel Linden’s haunting words about SL at Stanford Humanities Lab
On April 4, 2007 Daniel Linden (Daniel Huebner in RL) Linden Lab Director of community affairs stopped by Stanford Humanities Lab’s How They Got Game Workshop #1. A podcast and the video below was created and shared via Google video.
The full video length is 1:17:24 which you can watch in its entirety below and draw full context of the statements and quotes made. I’ve gone through and created Google video permalinks to key points that stuck out to 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 made.
Key points and quotes from Daniel Linden
[3:59]:
“When I started at Linden Lab in April of 2003 there were 335 people in the world of Second Life … In that first week we received 21 abuse reports. In the last week I checked [in 2007] we were receiving about 5,000 a day … Interestingly enough I think we — I — realized that we were never going to be able to keep up.”
The abuse reporting and resolution process doomed to failure from the start. Familiar problem? It didn’t scale!
[4:30]:
“We were never going to be able to define what was acceptable in the virtual world.”
And yet Linden Lab is trying to do exactly that. See fellow VTOR author Weirdharold’s post: What is and Isn’t Allowed?. Also the Washington Post is running a good article this morning over the ongoing concerns regarding virtual rape and other assorted virtual crimes asking: Does Virtual Reality need a Sheriff?
[4:45] (emphasis mine):
“To take a corporate company like Linden Lab and say we are not going to put our fingers in this. We’re not gonna meta. We’re not going to overreact and jump in every time we see something we don’t necessarily like. That process of detaching the ownership of this virtual world from our own personal goals and personal beliefs and personal morals has been incredibly difficult to achieve but it’s been working.“
Query: does anybody outside of Linden Lab believe “it’s been working”?
[6:50] :
“[Back in 2003] We had quite a bit of content that we had put in place. There was a casino which was actually run by Linden Lab at the time [2003]. We wouldn’t touch that with a twenty meter pole at this point.”
Ironically Linden Lab still promotes “casino operator” as a business opportunity on their business opportunities page after this author pointed out in April here at VTOR that this was contradictory. Or maybe this reinforces Daniel’s point about they aren’t going to jump in every time they see something they don’t like? It’s ok to promote that this is an “opportunity” for residents?
Meanwhile, if you join SL today and choose to be a casino operator like one of our VTOR group members did many months ago (and has since sold the casino and got out of it), you’ll find that Linden Lab has removed casino listings from the inworld search. Interesting that in the beginning they had a more free idea of how the virtual world would operate but as more people have come into SL there have been more and more restrictions put on what can and can’t be done inside it. A fascinating study in virtual world government.
[15:02]:
“As the person who’s doing governance in Second Life, I’m not going to decide what is and isn’t a good use of the platform. That’s mostly what I spend my time trying to avoid. And trying to get everyone else in Linden Lab to agree with me.”
[16:45]:
“So we [Linden Lab] try not to be specific about what you can and cannot do. We say that you cannot use content that’s broadly offensive and Linden Lab is going to be the group that decides what’s broadly offensive. We make that decision based on the community. If the community complains enough about something being broadly offensive we’ll enforce it.”
This is in reference to the current concerns surrounding age play.
[22:13]:
“The one thing I can definitely say about the future of Second Life is that there will never be a Second Life parliament … If it does happen, I think it’s fascinating. I am not going to build it.”
So definitely it won’t happen for Linden Lab creating this parliament but hey if residents band together and do it, more power to them. That’s the official Linden Lab word. It will be interesting to learn if real world government bodies force a parliament like structure on virtual worlds.
[34:25]:
“If you come in and simply make a 3D representation of your website in Second Life you are going to fail. It is not going to be interesting to anyone and nobody will go. If you make something that engages the community you are going to be more successful.”
Good point made about businesses trying to enter SL.
[43:22]:
“We know if people spend X number of hours in Second Life the first week they’ll stay for a very, very long time. How do we get them to spend that long? If your first experience is slow frame rates, bumping into things, finding rude people, not finding any interesting content … if you happen to bear with us long enough something suddenly happens and then you’re converted. It’s entirely possible that the people who are converted would stay no matter what and that nothing we do will change that.”
Sounds cult-like. Does this apply to you? I think it’s more a case that Second Life doesn’t have a true competitor — they are the lone example of trying to blend the real world with virtual world — not that Linden Lab can do everything wrong and people who are “converted” will just hang on. Give residents another option that truly competes — and don’t anybody mention There.com — and then we’ll see how many of the converted stay.
If Google search results started completely sucking tomorrow and the site was hard to use and became ad saturated or slow, there would be a move to other options like Yahoo and Microsoft. I think Linden Lab underestimates how patient their customers are, or rather, aren’t. Being the only game in town gives them an advantage that I don’t see being there too much longer. Other companies are smelling the blood in the water.
The logical move for Linden Lab is to open source the model (see quote toward end), which is the direction they are moving toward and thus anybody could run their own Second Life server and connect in sort of an IRC-like fashion to other SL servers. This will also release some of the burden (all currenly on Linden Lab) of the buggy server side issues. For example, if we at VTOR wanted to run our own SL servers and we chose to use more powerful servers with more optimized settings than the equipment and settings that Linden Lab uses. The client is already open source, but the server needs to be open sourced too. When — and it doesn’t appear to be ‘if’ — that happens, Linden Lab will see another explosion of growth and interest as well as truly improved architecture.
[47:03]:
“I think any time you base something on volunteer sort of efforts it’s gonna eventually sort of wither away. There’s no real way to keep the volunteers interest long term … If it can be completely generated by the users start to finish then it will be successful. If we [Linden Lab] build it, less so.”
[53:02]:
“If I had to draw a law enforcement analogy, I think we are more of the FBI. We want to concern ourselves with cross sim crime rather than sort of the one-to-one level.”
[58:48]:
“There’s an interesting nuance in our approach to intellectual property … We don’t give anyone ownership of anything they create in Second Life. If you read our Terms of Service, we simply fail to take it. We don’t necessarily say that you own what you create, we say that we [Linden Lab] don’t. Now whether you own it or not is up to the various copyright regulations… For the most part we don’t want to be involved in your intellectual property disputes because we don’t have enough knowledge.”
The last three quotes all deal with Linden Lab’s efforts to have a more hands-off corporate philosophy on the world. The problem, and perhaps something that’s all too easy for residents to criticize is when to go into hands-on mode. This isn’t just a virtual world problem, it extends to online communities all over the web.
[105:54]:
“For the most part, most of the users in Second Life seem to be really, really happy with what their doing … They don’t have a lot of complaints about the service et cetera. There are a vocal group who do [have complaints] and we try to do everything we can to listen to them but we have yet to see a really sort of galvanizing moment that brings them all together to march on our offices.”
The most recent public outcry with significant resident support was the letter signed by over 4,000 residents. While that number is insignificant if you look at overall registered residents, it is roughly 10% of the regularly logged online users number. Some are saying that the list also represented the people more (or most) active in Second Life.
[110:20]:
“We won’t own all of the servers forever. The server side software that runs Second Life will either be open sourced or licensed for people to run their own servers … I think when we open the backend we’re going to see more interesting behavior and more independence of these other experiences. I think Second Life as we know it now will be just one of many and they’ll be interoperable and they’ll be completely owned and operated by different people.”
Nothing haunting (title reference) about this quote, wish this was here now. Good point to end on. As always, your feedback and discussion is welcome below.
June 2nd, 2007 • 
TD Goodliffe • 
comment | June 2, 2007 at 04:48 | individual comment-link
Ah, the infamous video where the director of community affairs of a company insults segments of his own customer base and even admits to trying to find ways to quash their behavior within their service, without acting outside the scope of their TOS. And now they have done just that. Except that they have laid blame on “the community,” saying effectively “we didn’t want to regulate, but you wanted us to so we will.” Yeah. Right.
On top of that, they acted outside of the scope of their own Community Standards by saying “broadly offensive” things are prohibited everywhere, even though the document itself says it’s only prohibited outside of private Mature areas.
And on top of *that*, their own ToS was just declared unfair and illegal with respect to the law of their own state in which they operate. Yet they chug along with their agenda and actually think people will be spoon fed their rhetoric and believe every word.
That’s just my opinion, anyway. The cult reference is a good one because anyone who does actually believe that you can be “hooked” to their platform without a viable alternative being in existence is kidding themselves.
People may well be hooked to the idea, but if another similar idea comes along, don’t expect people to decide to stick around just because they like the color of your logo or the faces of your employees. It’s about the service and what you do with it, and how your ideology devolves over time.
Anyone else besides me think the goal was to lure people in within great promises of both riches and freedom, then once people came in, relationships formed and assets acquired, and cost of leaving became, swoop in, and slowly change the rules to try to mold the service into what you really initially wanted it to be, rather than the “monster” you created.
So yeah, he sounds a bit off the wall there.
comment | June 2, 2007 at 08:36 | individual comment-link
Badger - if they do succeed in going open source with the server or projects like the Open Grid that are trying to reverse engineer the server succeed then it will be possible to create our own virtual worlds just as it is possible to create our own sites (and probably a lot less expensive than what Linden Lab is charging for private islands). Then whatever silly rules the Linden quasi government try to pass down will matter less and less. Decentralization seems to be what Linden Lab also feels is the best way to avoid having to use the heavy hand they say they so desperately want to avoid.
(and yet as you point out too Badger, their actions speak the opposite)
comment | June 2, 2007 at 17:54 | individual comment-link
TD, I finally got time to watch this video in its entirety, and I am actually impressed with Daniel responses, of course that was a month and a half ago… But most all the responses seem reasonable.
I think that video speaks volumes about the dreams of LL.
comment | June 4, 2007 at 01:11 | individual comment-link
TD Goodlife, that’s a good point except for one point that I think is very relevant:
We all could have created our own virtual worlds already, anyway without Linden Lab. Whether it’s Croquet or the others, or simply building one from scratch, nobody *needed* Linden Lab to have their own world.
What I think is the most important thing that makes Second Life be Second Life is Content, Content, Conent. Linden Labs has already said, if I recall correctly, that even after open sourcing, *they* want to be the primary providers of Inventory management, data management, and by extension that means content management.
External islands aren’t necesarily going to have great builds and great environments except if content creators decide to cross license to each individual island owner outside of the official grid. Otherwise, these island owners are going to have to connect to the Second Life grid to preserve inventories and carry content to their islands. And if they to do that, guess what? They’re going to probably have to live by the *same* set of standards that Linden Lab implements, otherwise Linden Labs will simply not allow them to connect.
Scenario:
Linden Labs: Oh, you have certain content X on your external island, or you engage in Y type of behavior there? Well, sorry, but you can’t have our inventories because we have “community” standards here, and our “community” disagrees with yours and we’re not going to indirectly say to our community that your content behavior is ok by allowing you to connect. Bye.
Perhaps even Worse at some point:
Linden Labs: Oh, content creator X, I see you’ve been sharing content with external island Y, and we disagree with Y’s content or behavior. Sorry, but you’re going to have to stop creating content for them in order to stay on our grid because we don’t want to be associated with them, even indirectly.
They will still hold most of the keys to the kingdom so long as the content creators find it more beneficial to stay in their grid where most of the customers and most of the economy is, don’t you think? If push comes to shove, based on their prior behavior, I certainly don’t expect Linden Labs not to cave in to certain pressures that call for this sort of isolation from external “undesirables.” And by external pressures, I mean legal pressures not “community” pressure, mainly where different countries’ laws conflict and Linden Labs decides to abide by the most restrictive of the bunch.
When the code is released, I am nearly certain it’s going to be licensed similarly to the client, in a GPL+exception style license, perhaps even with GPLv3 (???) to ensure that improvements or changes must be shared with the world so that nobody uses their code to create a better world that they can keep to themselves.
The last and only resort then will be to get those cross-licensed content deals and hope Linden Labs doesn’t deter the content creators from making them.
And even without that pressure, you are going to run into problems with content creators wanting to charge more simply for carrying content to your island (because they can) or simply deny it because they too disagree with your island’s practices. (Not to agree or disagree whether or not they have that right.)
So I don’t know.. were it not for the Content, I don’t see what truly makes Linden Lab’s Second Life so great that would make somebody want to choose a future GPLv3 (or similar licensed) coded Second Life server when there are so many other alternatives (doesn’t Croquet already have HTML-on-a-”prim” and even entire-applications-on-a-”prim” already, for example?).
I think they’re continuing to shoot themselves in the foot by becoming more involved in regulating content and trying to spread their software across the globe “at all costs,” rather than sticking with their initial stated intentions, OR AT THE VERY LEAST, putting restrictions on residents ONLY where absolutely necessary (German users can’t do X, French users can’t do Y, Spanish users can’t do Z…).
Because now, they’re just throwing the years of promises to the early adopters to the wind and saying good riddance. I’m not sure how much they’re going to like that as time goes on.
comment | June 4, 2007 at 08:31 | individual comment-link
Badger - yes, it’s the content and the thing about an IRC channel (again, that analogy) you can run whatever content you want. People will gather in interesting places chatting with interesting people no matter what the technology. The reason I cite Second Life is because they are the best example of a real world / virtual world economy, certainly not because of the technology. There have always been cases in the tech sector where a better technology exists and yet doesn’t gain widespread adoption.
Look at Blu-Ray and HD-DVD which are both superior from a quality perspective and yet are totally insignificant compared to DVD the current standard. Second Life is in a great position because of the economy. There are others that have an economy like Entropria, but there aren’t many. Croquet? Is there an economy there yet?
As for linden lab being able to control who can connect to the servers? If we are to believe what Daniel Linden says, they want to step away from that, not get further entrenched. I don’t know who to believe or exactly what will happen but once it goes open source, the horses are out of the barn no matter what licensing they use. It’s possible Linden Lab’s hands will be forced with projects like opengrid, just like the RIAA is being forced to deal with DRM.
pingback | June 6, 2007 at 04:44 | individual pingback-link
[...] video at Stanford in April 2007, found at Google videos, is well presented and commented upon at this link. I found it interesting that Daniel, at around 19 minutes into the video, clearly states that the [...]