No Business As Usual At SL Pics Site
Snapzilla, the Flickr-like site for Second Life screenshots, is taking the day off today, as a way to protest recent changes Linden Lab has made to the registration process for SL, changes that allow “complete unrestricted access to Second Life by minor children and destructive users with no accountability and no ability to ban problem users,” according to Snapzilla creator Cristiano Diaz. While the changes to the registration process may in fact be problematic, it’s strange to see one of the most popular SL-related Web-based services take itself off the air for a day in protest — especially on today, the virtual world’s third birthday, when Snapzilla should be a more popular destination than ever, given the number of birthday events going on this week.
Some weeks ago, Linden Lab changed the registration process for new Second Life accounts (which are free), now requiring only an email address to get on the Grid, where before it required credit card billing information. The concern among a number of SL residents is twofold: that it is now impossible to insure that new users are 18 years or older, as the virtual world’s Terms of Service require, and that it is too easy for griefers intent on disrupting life on the Grid to simply make a new account each time they are disciplined or banned from the world.
Those concerns are both valid, to differing extents. The issue of age is one that Linden Lab has never sufficiently grappled with. There is a Teen Grid for users 13-18 (users 12 and under may not use SL at all), but there is no way to insure that younger users stay there and older users stay on the main Grid. Linden Lab has claimed that possession of a credit card and parental age verification clear up the problem, but those things have not stopped many young people from inhabiting the main Grid and a number of adults from having accounts on the Teen Grid. With no age verification measures in place at all now, it is hard to see how the situation is helped.
But what is Snapzilla doing closing its doors for the day? (Any screenshots uploaded to the site will be processed as normal, they just won’t be available until tomorrow.) The development of Web-based services for Second Life is one of the keys to making the virtual world more useful and robust, and reliability is one of the keys to developing those services. Snapzilla users, arguably, would have been better served by a protest notice on the site, rather than a day of darkness. It’s also an open question as to whether a service portal should be weighing in on these issues at all. The problem Diaz no doubt faced, however, is that there are precious few ways to communicate to a large number of SL users at once. Snapzilla, as perhaps the most popular SL-related Web site out there, is a great platform for Diaz’s protest. The community might have been better served, though, had the protest taken a back seat to the operation of the site. In any case, it’s only a small interruption. But I’m interested to know how people react to it, and to the issue of registration in SL.
Feeds
I find this to be so much empty posturing. A much more effective protest would be for Cristiano to refuse to come to his scheduled inworld appearance at the prestigious Harvard Berkman Center’s private island, where avatar marketing will be discussed. Cristiano doesn’t seem to be so greatly disturbed at kids coming into SL as to fail to appear at a very much media-saturated event about selling to avatars in games. Third-party site protests are easy; boycotting log-ons to the world itself or staging events/protests there are another thing. I notice Cristiano hasn’t shuttered the doors of his inworld stores and vendors, they’ll go on collecting payments.
Events inworld that continue to engage with the world are more effective. There should be a concerted petition-signing or IMing campaign or something of the sort for those concerned about this.
What’s been particularly onerous is to see the ways in which the Lindens are dealing with the sudden surge of “democratic participation”. The first voting proposition that went up on the voting features section of the site attracted more than 2000 votes from I believe 500 plus avatars (go and check). And the Lindens responded “acknowledged” and claimed they were responding not by saying that they’d deal with the “unaccountable accounts” problem but that they’d introduce some new anti-griefing measures.
And the concepts they are putting forward, like three different levels of icons showing verified, semi-verified, and unverified, will lead to automatic banning and discrimination inworld, it’s awful. The Lindens are justing the construction of a massive Security State with this whole gambit, and the FIC is setting them up with the arguments by posturing in this manner.
When the second round of votes was created to overcome this automatic return of votes by the ostensible “acknowledged,” the Lindens responded *again* and returned the votes this time writing “can’t do”.
So much for “direct democracy”.
[…] SL machinima-maker Pierce Portocarrero caught some footage of a protest in the virtual world of Second Life today, held to coincide with the world’s third birthday. The protest was being held to voice some residents’ dissatisfaction with the new registration requirements (or lack thereof) we mentioned earlier today. I haven’t heard the narration on this yet, as I’m still at the Supernova conference, but the footage is engaging, and gives a good idea of what it’s like when a bunch of SL avatars get together for a protest — which is not an unusual thing in itself. […]