By Cummere Mayo
Amanda Linden released a new post on the official blog today. In it she laid out the new rules for use on the forums, blogs, and elsewhere. These rules are both more strict about speaking about topics that don't involve SL, supposedly will end the massive abuse against other residents found throughout the forums. One of the worst bits about the new guidelines is that criticism of LL will be invariably termed under the flaming guidelines, and that we are not allowed to question the moderation of posts which means that the moderators, some of which already abuse their positions, will be more free to do so.
In addition despite the intense opposition of both SL members and of Facebook members, Amanda announced that Facebook is still the place to get some of the best updates about Second Life. Additionally she provides a long list of twitter threads to follow. An entire fricken list!
In facebook there are roughly 115,000 fans of the second life facebook page. Scanning through the first 50 pages of fans, almost 4/5 are accounts made using SL names, a blatant violation of Facebook TOS. Whats even more insane is more then a few of those accounts are from people that have multiple accounts on facebook, one for each Second Life alt.
This has not gone unnoticed in facebook. There are groups devoted to petitioning to get all Second Life linked or named accounts banned, to IP ban Linden Lab, to getting the Second Life fan page removed, and even one to get listing Second Life anywhere in your account automatic grounds for account termination. These groups combined have more then three times the number of fans of the Second Life page. And one of them is within a few thousand of passing Second Life on its own.
If telling us to watch facebook wasn't bad enough, Amanda provides an entire list of twitter accounts we should watch. Not one, not even two, but an entire list. And in addition, we should follow e-mail lists, a half dozen forums, the knoweldge base AND the blogs. All told we need to watch almost two dozen differant channels just to stay caught up with whats going on. (Thats just taking the five main blog channels, the five main forums, Facebook, the six most useful email lists, only the main twitter channel, and the user groups.)
Out of those onlyy the user groups are actually IN Second Life. In fact Twitter and Facebook aren't even owned or hosted by Second Life.
Finally, even our one outlet for getting bugs and feature requests addressed is being made less useful. Instead of asking the makers of jira to add a feature to vote against items, LL is deciding to force us to watch items we are interested in the outcome in order to get any intrest. Which is designed not to allow better gauge what is important as it is to discourage users from using the Jira.
After all the progress in communication that has been made by Linden Lab in communications, this is a huge step backwards. In fact, this almost single Handel destroys any real hope of good communication through the use of information overload.
If LL was serious about communication they would consolidate some of their methods of communication, they would drop the fiasco of Twitter and Facebook and start opening lines of communication within Second Life itself. Chat groups within SL to get direct user feedback, forcing lindens to actually spend even just an hour a day on an alt inside of one or more of the communities within SL, and making each linden hold office hours in addition to the new user groups would go a LONG way towards truly meaningful communications...
Crossposted in both Lindenwatch and SecondLife Technologist
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