Another Reality Check from the MSM: Daily Telegraph Interviews Media Mack Daddy, Peter Ludlow
by Urizenus Sklar on 24/10/06 at 5:21 pm
No sooner did I link to the the story by Mark Glaser with his smackdown on the hyperventilating Business Week story, but now The Daily Telegraph from the UK has signed up for Herald Reality Therapy ™ and offers part one of an interview with the always fairly unbalanced (tm) typist for Urizenus Sklar. The interview, entitled “Virtual Villainy,” is conducted by Ian Douglas and part one focusses on online crime, dispute resolution, and the Linden model for dispute resolution: i.e., the greek god model.
Prokofy Neva
Oct 24th, 2006
Uri, just to tune you in here, I think yes, the Lindens do play Greek God, and yes, they tried to come up with vanilla solutions to fit all with things like the odious ResMod system on the forums. But lately, they *have* been saying that hey, the users can make their own dispute systems and call us when it’s ready if you need any coding in the client to make it possible. And this hugely sucks. It sucks because they still play favourites — look at the way Angel Fluffy was able to overthrow the entire voting system merely by showing up, chronicling its flaws, tilting his fixes to his own agenda of super-banning and super-privacy for his BDSM capture roleplay stuff and own takeover ambitions, and getting harried and partly clueless Lindens to endorse it and then decide, oh, we’ll just get rid of other residents’ content because we know the thing is broken, and here this Helpful Hal here has shown us the way to clean it up. This is a hugely slippery slope.
In the same way they showed up at Thinkers and when Thinkers were spawning SL Mediators (which I’ve frequently reported on and feel is largely discredited), the Lindens were all golf-clapping in the audience pretending to be AFK and merely observing.
Torley famously said at a Community Round Table that juries and dispute system would be “creeping out of the alleyways” and would just start working. And that sounds good on paper at first because you picture it working, oh, as something perhaps as good as the Motor Vehicles Department works in Michigan and possible as bad as the U.S. Postal Service, but still remaining benign.
But picture how it will work when mass-bans affect hundreds of islands (already happening) and the Goreans decide that even people who want to leave their realm and accuse them of abuse can’t get their TOS violation complaints heard because the Lindens have conceded that all complaints coming to LL from Gor-land get rerouted back from LL’s abuse-reporting system to the chief Gor.
Anyway, a longer discussion, and I can only urge you to think through this idea of having all this home-brewed justice — it’s a recipe for Balkanization.