Linden Lab saw a fair bit of backlash this week with its call for blog contributors. You submit an article, and the Lab edits or rewrites it and posts it on the site as an exclusive guest contribution.
The backlash was such that some comments on the post were deleted, commenting was closed and the post itself (while still accessible) appears to have disappeared from the front page of the community site.
What people objected to is that they’re not paying for the writing. I don’t actually think that’s something to kick the Lab in the head about.
There’s a couple of kinds of writing in the SL “blogosphere” (no, that portmanteau still feels awkward and unnatural to say).
I write for my own blog, and that’s generally done for the monetary equivalent of peanuts, though it does turn a profit. Alternatively, when I write for others, I get paid. Pretty well paid. If I wrote all of my posts for other sites, that would be worth quite a bit more money. Some sites pay their contributors very well, and I personally find that it is rare to get much less than about US$17 for an contributed article doing it that way (and often quite a bit more), and it doesn’t even always have to be an exclusive.
Now, on the basis that the Lab has set forth for this initiative, no – I won’t be contributing articles, myself. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t, if that’s what you want to do. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that the Lab is evil and greedy.
It’s possible the Lab will get rubbishy tripe that’s more trouble than it is worth; or they might get good material; or they might get no material.
I don’t think it matters.
I think what matters is that the Lab has tried something new, and that’s good. Maybe it isn’t right for me. Maybe it isn’t right for you. Maybe the Lab will go back and rethink it and try something a little different.
What matters is that it is a good effort. The Lab is trying new things, trying to broaden its game, and trying to see what works and what doesn’t. I don’t think it matters so much if it is daft or short-sighted. Trying things is how the Lab finsd these things out. It’s not as if this particular move has any broad or terrible consequences for Second Life. Deleterious ideas along those lines should certainly attract a fair bit of screaming.
But this? I think this is a Lab we should be proud of, I think, even if we don’t want to be a part of any particular effort or initiative. It’s a Lab that isn’t just standing apparently still and silent.
In the grand scheme that’s a pretty fair cop. It’s an opportunity for some to get or bring specific exposure to certain topics. There’s no obligation to take advantage of the offer that I can see. And if we think about it in the verbose advertisement space we’re not being asked to pay them for the space.
It’s a bit more different if they asked a writer to write about a topic.
SL doesn’t get hurt if it doesn’t work out, so there’s no harm in them trying things out. Maybe they’ll come up with something sweeter.
I think the underlying idea of adding content generated by the SL Community was a good idea, but the implementation strategy was ill-considered. It has alienated many of the people they had hoped to connect with.
It seems to me that the five or ten thousand dollars it would cost per year to pay writers for their contributions would be a blip on the radar within the scope of their marketing budget. So why not err on the high side of the going market rate? It seems penny wise and dollar foolish.
If they don’t want to pay, a less controversial approach would be to curate posts they like from other blogs and link back for the full stories. Blogs like Boing Boing and Brain Pickings are good examples of that strategy.
I don’t think there’s anything ethically wrong with their offer, but it’s another sign that they can’t see the world through the eyes of their community members.
(My last post got eaten by the internet gods, so if this is a semi-duplicate, I apologize.
Another well-written and entertaining commentary, Tateru. It is the quality of your writing that keeps me coming back day after day. *smiles*
I more objected to the exclusive publishing requirement and the thus murky issue of who owned the rights to the writing, then – personally – than the issue of not being paid. I also objected to the “don’t advertise” aspect, since about half of my blogging (and all of the blogging that I get any kind of fiscal return on) includes honest reviews of things.
If I could also reprint my original on my blog, I’d probably have gone for it. Ditto if I could advertize, because I have several store owners i like enough to put in that sort of effort to get them attention of lots of people. And if they were paying, I might also consider it. As it stands, though, I saw no upsides for me, and probable downsides of having my article edited and published in a way which I didn’t like… so I decided to stick to posting where I hold exclusive rights – my blog.
Actually having exclusivity requires (in California) a written agreement (and my memory suggests a minimum fee of US$10 or US$11, but I may be misremembering), otherwise there’s no requirement for anyone to provide it other than politeness, whether or not exclusivity has been agreed to.
If they had not said no advertising people would have been up in arms about favouritism.
Favouritism is a perennial complaint along with… hmm. You know, I think I’ll write something longer about this topic.
Tateru: “I don’t think it matters so much if it is daft or short-sighted. ”
Or alternately… ; )
I think Linden Lab has spent enough time doing things that are “daft or short-sighted”. Maybe it’s time for them to start thinking ahead and considering potential consequences and long-term results of their decisions.
The idea isn’t to try something “new”, even if it winds up being daft or short-sighted. It’s to do something (new or old) that is of benefit to the company and customer. When they come out with a new project or policy it’s good to consider ahead of time whether that policy will have long-term benefits, or further mark the company as “bad management”. The whole purpose of management is to take the company in the right direction… not to continue making daft decisions.
i think the objectionable thing is LL editing your article – collaboratively would be fine, but not if you turn over your work and they do as they please without bouncing it off of you. trust is important and that works both ways – no way i would ever trust LL after what the did to SL ed and Jokay!
$17 = well paid =)
It’s not just a matter of the offer, it’s the same old message that shows through.
You’re not a user or customer, you’re a resident.
We greatly overcharge our product to the point that it doesn’t match any other virtual world or game prices. We want you to help newbies, answer questions, spend your time filing Jira’s and now writing fluff pieces on Second Life with no compensation.
$75 million USD in profit, so they claim. Taking half of that profit would mean that tier could be reduced by half or better (for anyone that cares to do the math on how much tier would cost if LL were to take $37.5 million instead of $75 million profit).
A vague blog post letting us know what’s coming in 2012 (is this supposed to be a teaser or a placeholder for lack of content?). Wouldn’t users have found it important enough that Will Wright joins the board? How much he bought in for? Is that money being used for these “unrelated to Second Life” projects. What are these projects and improvements to SL? What is this new creator program? Where, when, how? Wouldn’t these get exposure by the blogging community without needing to pimp fluff posts on their own site? Wouldn’t that be more informed and interesting?
Private company investments are generally loan based. This means investments into new projects are debt that will have to be paid from profits gained by us if they fail. If they weren’t taken from existing profits to begin with. Isn’t this something we’d like to know about in more depth? We’re not vested as users despite the “your world, your imagination” social engineering bits, so it’s not worth sharing.
In the days when companies give out laptops and iPads and phones and assorted goodies, they’re giving L$5,000 prizes to people that spend hour after hour dressing up for one of their contests.
On the flip side communication has been flawed, sometimes non-existant, always a token (an hour a week or less, for those groups graced with an office hour).
It’s just more of the same. You’re poor, gullible, rural sheep with oodles of time and content to give us, while everything else is need to know, including when, if ever long standing bugs will get fixed, or what the strategy is for Second Life at the time.
For the company that can’t blog themselves beyond a Flickr pic of the day for months on end, or communicate anything interesting at all to existing bloggers, it’s just an insult to the intelligence.
It’s one faked orgasm after another.
In these times you can’t fake it if you’re not out to build a quality product at reasonable prices and and valuing your customers.
@Dartagan In my experience (and I’ve sat on a few boards), 9 times out of 10 when a prominent industry figure or prominent political figure is made a director, it’s solely for the prestige of having their name and bio on the corporate page. They may or may not own any stock, usually don’t represent any shareholder, don’t attend meetings and don’t vote or provide input – they just collect their directors fees in exchange for the PR boost.
One could look at it like Dartagnan does…but on the other hand, SL is really all ABOUT community, the shared experience, and user contributions. That experience is one of the things we (poor sheep that we are) are paying for! It’s not so much the lack of payment that I object to…I write my own blog for free, and I teach classes in SL for almost-free, and volunteer my time to help newbies. It’s the lack of payment AND the loss of creative control and publication rights.
I’d write for LL for free, if I retained the rights to my work and had a say in the final version presented…OR I’ll write for LL as a work for hire, providing they pay me.
Oh, and marketing budget? I doubt there is one. LL has never paid for any RL advertsing that I’m aware of. They rely on news pieces and exposes to get them publicity.
Exactly Dartagan.
I think backlash is fine. I don’t think this was a “good” effort. Not even close. My expectations would be way too low, and in fact reversed, if I thought it was ok Linden Lab should continue asking for free work for content (be it Snowstorm patches or blog posts), while only shedding money in ways no one asked them to or we don’t care about (funding Linden Homes to compete with tier payers already losing sims, or shelving out L$ prizes for finding gems and commissioning vampire avatars).
The issue of not knowing when to appropriately hurt the balance sheet to encourage desired behavior aside, I simply hate when Linden Lab observes something good, unique and creative its customers are doing, and instead of improving the platform upon which they do it, as a good platform provider SHOULD do, their immediate thought is to gobble it up or compete with it. The Linden exchange, XStreet/Marketplace, Avatars United/Web Profiles, in-world residentials, open-source viewer development, and now the Second Life blogosphere; and I’m sure I’ve missed some things.
I think we have to wonder about opportunity costs when we judge whether Linden Lab has made a “good effort”. What else could they have done?
In the case of buying XStreet and spent the last 2-3 years redoign it; what if they instead created APIs like PayPal and Amazon that allowed the embedding of content to purchase in websites, akin to the book embeds on Hamlets blog, and L$ “pay” and “donate” buttons akin to the one this blog has?
What if instead of purchasing Avatars United, they created a “Facebook Connect”-esque OAuth provider so with a push of a button Tateru Nino could verify she’s Tateru Nino anywhere on the web?
What if instead of setting up Linden Homes, Linden Lab’s developers instead created new tools to improve the rental process for land barons who’re still using half a decade old Hippo scripts?
What if instead of observing how well blogs like this, Hamlet’s and others are doing and deciding to try and get writers to blog for free under random topic and rights constraints, they did something like…I don’t know, observe all the IMVU and OpenSim ads on these blogs and create an advertising effort and adopt an RSS feed if what they truly want is traffic and content from the bloggers.
I see a trend that’s long since been dangerous with Linden Lab in how they approach running a platform. Whether we’re renting, blogging, writing code or whatever else; if its in Linden Lab’s power they’ll immediately attempt to monopolize and silo the activity in some knock-off, or at best ignore it because they can’t easily emulate it.
We have to have higher expectations of Linden Lab and continue to get pissed whenever they do things “daft or short-sighted”. Yes, maybe this like many other such decisions and attempts in the past have been relatively harmless, while others have been very harmful, but the harm is much, much greater when it comes to opportunity costs when Linden Lab approaches something the wrong way and stubbornly keeps to it rather than course correct.
Linden Lab is a company where good employees disappear for the wrong reasons and the buck stop absolutely no where and we’re left blaming “Linden Lab” instead of specific individuals when the daftness and short-sightedness comes. There’s no choice but to be very loud and very pointedly critical altogether, all at once, in order to hope an unknown decision maker at Linden Lab actually listens. At present, it really, really doesn’t seem to work as is, so I really don’t mind substantive criticism thrown at Linden Lab at every chance that presents itself.The volume should always be at 11 when a JIRA isn’t being ignored or a comment thread isn’t locked.
@Ezra That authentication service exists. You can’t actually use it for anything else, but it’s there, underpinning the logins across the various official sites and services.
@Ener If you write for a newspaper or magazine (or many Web-sites), you write your article, you submit it to the editor, and it gets wholly or partially rewritten, and it is a bit pot-luck as to what appears under your by-line.
A couple years ago, I wrote about one such article that I’d written where (of the 800 original words that the editor had so enthused about) he’d kept just six of them.
But then, I felt okay about that, because I was getting paid.
@Tateru True, the Will Wright conjecture was just a bit of connecting the dots over timing. He joins the board and shortly after we’re doing new projects not related to SL.Seemed like a cash injection. Could very well be as you say though, and probably more likely, although the perk for him is minimal, could be warming the seat as a glorified consultant.
I think a better point might be that you as a dedicated blogger (and a fair one at that, I’ve never seen anything reactionary or overly biased from you, and always level-headed thoughtfulness) should be able to ask the company and provide us with that information along with some thoughtful commentary if LL isn’t going to post “real” news on their own.
You have my complete attention every time I hear you say “I took this question to the company and …”. Reading between the lines, I get some sense of frustration there as the responses never seem to have real meat. I get corporate non-committal and the reasons why, but there is actually volumes of information they could be sharing.
Something like the roadmap for the year, or why they’ve decided to push so hard with vampires and the results of that effort shouldn’t be a mystery in a company that tries to push “your world” community. I don’t even know what to get behind with SL. Where are we even going these days? Not a clue. Which makes people say that LL doesn’t have a clue either.
@Ezra. Agreed, my first reaction to the post was that LL was thinking this would be “so” attractive to bloggers that they’d hold even blog posts outside of LL hostage. Meaning that if you’re not a happy-thoughts poster in general that your posts wouldn’t stand a chance of getting published on the LL site. A way to control the message from within and outside of SL.
That may not have been at all true, but that was my knee-jerk reaction to expecting yet more free labor from users. And that’s not all evil given that all of social networking is now about monetizing every scrap of user content and information, but then again the social networking model is about giving you everything for free, rather than at the rate of $300/month before they monetize the rest of your life.
Agree also that everything they touch when they grab onto user content and businesses and ideas destroys user opportunity.
Am I being crass? I think they should pay their bloggers something, even a few thou in Linden bucks. I’m not interested in writing for them, however; I do agree with some NWN respondents that the Lab seems to want what Hamlet did for them, but now for free.
I never object to my editors going after my work with a blue pencil. If you write on contract for someone, that’s the price you pay. My writing is not fine art, and the one SF story I sold in recent years got some heavy “suggestions” from the editor. I did as told. It’s easy to understand why some writers are very hesitant to “murder their darlings.” I’d argue, however, that as you get started as a writer, you must do exactly that to move copy, build your rep, even make a little money.
So all LL needed to do for aspiring “official” bloggers would be to mint a few thousand spacebux. Lord knows, the fake economy won’t crash if they do that.
Well Tat, that’s why Linden Lab is terrible right now as a platform provider.
Not to overly derail, but I read this a few months ago. An employee at Google and ex-employee at Amazon, Steve Yegge, who’s rant on Google compared it as a platform provider to Amazon: https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX
The guy pointed out the steps Amazon took to become the great platform provider it is today. Linden Lab like most other companies on the web, directly or indirectly, are in some way dependent upon Amazon.
Speaking on Bezos:
“His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!”
Amazon made sure their own teams couldn’t accomplish anything with one another in some half-baked way that could never be exposed to outside developers on their platform, and that all such ways internal teams leveraged one another’s services eventually became ways outside developers do.
Linden Lab sucks at this. For example, its why it took so long for LSL to simply be able to -confirm- money was actually received when a llGiveMoney() was called regardless of how many JIRAs popped up about affiliate vendor scams. It took the L$ transaction people years to work with the LSL people. If Linden Lab sucks at working together internally, and it took a person like Kelly Linden years to be able to address such an issue, then there’s little hope Linden Lab will ever be grown up enough a company to figure out a way to facilitate transactions out of world in a way other than building more silos like Marketplace.
While that example might seem irrelevant to this blog post, it isn’t. Nor are the 1,000 other examples where Linden Lab either fails as a platform provider for itself, or just to us on the outside, such as your mentioned keeping of the authentication system to themselves unlike every other large authentication provider nowdays.
The reason Linden Lab fails as platform provider is for the very same reason they’d ask for blog posts for free. These are all just symptoms of a disease in Linden Lab that has consequent predictable behavior of Linden Lab always moving to capture and compete with good, world-growing, profit-inducing customer activities rather than facilitating it with new tools and encouraging more of what’s already working. Linden Lab’s answer to everything good that we do is cage and silo it, be it marketplace, linden homes, snowstorm, web profiles, or now the official SL blog.
You may think this is somehow different. For example, a blog program from Linden Lab could never hurt this blog or anyone else’s blog. Maybe in the same way Marketplace doesn’t stop a new XStreet from popping up, Linden Homes doesn’t stop small parcel rental businesses, web profiles doesn’t stop a new Avatars United, etc. Where are these things though? It isn’t until Linden Lab starts doing what you were trying to do, and ontop of that competing with you unfairly by leveraging the platform in ways you simply can’t, do you start to feel discouraged along with hundreds or thousands more like you and then Second Life suffers because a good user behavior was killed by Linden Lab’s attempt to cannibalize for no good reason.
What do you think the chances are of Peter Gray suddenly only giving quality responses and news breaks to the silo bloggers? How likely would it have been Rod granting an exclusive sit down with Dwell On It vs. an official blog contributor?
Be extra wary whenever Linden Lab ever starts attempting to do the same things as you. Or worse, use you. Their track record speaks for itself on how these things turn out. For this reason and a thousand more, we have to start rejecting this kind of behavior of Linden Lab and demand they support us in exchange for us doing things that contribute to their bottom line. Its not right that we contribute to their bottom line only for them to turn around and find new ways to reach their hands out towards ours.
And another thing in regards to the “work for free” issue some people have.
I know Philip is an entrepreneur that has earned every single dollar he has, but you know, the guy brags about his newer company, Love Machine, paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars to build his new product Coffee & Power.
“In a nutshell: C&P was built in less than a year for under $200,000 by a team of amazing people all around the world working in an open codebase using our Worklist.net micro-contracting system. We feel the work was done faster, better, and cheaper than a traditional small startup team.”
http://blog.coffeeandpower.com/2011/11/08/philip-rosedales-keynote-at-crowdconf-258-guys-in-a-garage/
I guarantee if $200,000 was put towards Snowstorm contributor contracts (that’s 40 Qarl-esque projects?) or $200,000 put towards freelance content producers like bloggers (that’s how many words per dollar?), Second Life would be a whooooooole lot better.
If $200,000 of profits from Second Life can go to building something completely unrelated to it, and Philip at least understands micro-pay for micro-work translates to “faster” and “better”, then please, everyone should be of the attitude of doing -nothing- for Linden Lab for free, be it blog posts or code submissions to Snowstorm. Rod should ask Philip about this if he doesn’t have a similar understanding of what motivates people to produce timely, quality content.