3pointD.com

Over at the Second Life Herald, we’re running a story on one of the periodic Town Hall meetings held by Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale. In yesterday’s live chat with residents, Philip confirmed that LL had indeed reported griefers to the FBI, as had been hinted at in the past. “In cases where we are able to establish a reasonable equivalance between that kind of disruption, we have, and we will be, and we will get better at, turning those people in, in general to the FBI here in the US,” Rosedale said. “We are serious about doing this and we have done it.”

Perhaps more notably, Rosedale mentioned that for “criminal acts below the threshold where you’d see RL authorities getting involved,” user-led dispute resolution would probably be the best approach. This is a shift from Linden Lab’s direction in the past, though it remains to be seen how closely the company can hew to such a direction.

“I suspect that people are going to create groups and collections of individuals [and] add to the ban list names of [griefers],” Rosedale said.

Letting users handle their own dispute resolution is often seen as one of the soundest approaches to managing large communities. Such systems have worked well on sites like eBay and others. But when the idea has been floated to LL in the past, the company has usually set it aside. Now, it seems, they may be realizing the wisdom of the approach as their world grows too large to easily handle. Some of their customer service is already handled at Alchemic Dream by people who are not LL employees, nor chosen by LL from the pool of SL residents.

In fact, user-created disciplinary mechanisms have already begun to crop up on SL’s Grid. As Herald correspondent Dow Jonas points out, “Club owners and landowners have already been operating for some time a group known as S.L.A.M., where names of griefers on any location are instantly posted to all other group members on line so they can ban the suspect, too.” This is similar to the mechanisms used by communities in The Sims Online, where users would form loose communications networks for better distribution of information about alleged griefers. The system is anything but foolproof, of course, but it is an indication that users are willing to take on the task of policing their worlds themselves.

For such mechanisms to work, however, LL will have to remove themselves from the process at a certain level and demonstrate their trust in such systems. So far, the company’s record of enforcement, where its Terms of Service is concerned, is so inconsistent as to appear whimsical. If LL really wants user-led dispute resolution to flourish, it will have to show the users that the company trusts them to handle situations up to a certain point. The best way to show that trust will be to remove itself from weighing in, in situations that would be better handled by residents.