Yesterday I happened across an unfortunate thread on the soon-to-be-closed Second Life forum (Link) that called out what appear to be real life threats on another, SL-related forum (I won’t be posting links and you should understand why after you read more). Here is one threat posted under a thread titled “Kill Kill Dies Bitch!”:
Did MadmaG go to any SLCC’s? I am going to the next one and if I see her I am whooping her ass if I don’t shoot her first!
Anyone else wanna take a “stab” at her while I hold her down?
Read it ….
BITCH!
For those who are unaware, the “SLCC” is a real world event and has gotten sufficiently large to attract media attention. Here’s another implied threat posted by another user (maybe) as a poll titled “How to rape MadamG Zagato?”
How would you prefer to rape her or see her raped?
Take the poll then discuss.
I’d rather not post the options available.
Now here’s the thing: while this stuff is disturbing and, at least in the case of the first direct threat, illegal, I’m not sure that either person making these comments is not the same as the person targeted. For all I know the target is targeting themselves. Why would someone do that? Simple. The thread on the SL Forums has started to become a series of advertisements for replacement forums; a place where users can go after the Linden Lab forum shuts down. Everyone wants a piece of the controversy and the pie. Everyone wants to attract eyeballs to their forum.
So while these threats might be real, there is the possibility that they might be manufactured… or at the very least encouraged (note that the people defending the forum allowing those posts to remain, effectively trumpet how they want a forum free from moderation and oversight – which may actually be just a way to draw a crowd). Just like the newstand rags that print garbage, there is potentially some money to be made.
Second Life now has over 600,000 registered users with about 250,000 users active over the past 60 days. On a daily basis at any hour of the day anywhere between about 4500 and almost 10,000 people are logged into the world. Assuming that people spend 8 hours a day in SL (I’m being very conservative here as that’s quite a lot of time), it’s reasonable to assume roughly 20,000 people are active on a daily basis. And those numbers are growing.
Now imagine you run a popular forum and can attract just 1/100th of that number every day. That’s 200 people. And if they make, say 5 visits a day to the forum, that’s 1000 visits. Now imagine they’re somewhat involved and don’t just stay on the main forum page, but visit various threads. That’s additional page views. Let’s now assume that on a daily basis those 200 people hit 5 pages per visit. That’s over 5000 page views a day. Not bad. If the forum owner starts throwing up banner ads and adds AdSense, they could bring in some money. If they take custom ads from the virtual content creators… well, I’d simply direct you to the Second Life front page where – at this moment – apparently $386,000 has been spent between users in just the last 24 hours.
So whether this is a real threat or a manufactured threat, one thing is clear: people are intending to use it for their own personal gain.
I recently commented over on another blog the following response (Link):
When I rephrased one of the lines in an earlier comment, I was making a clear distinction: “mimic” means that SL actively tries to be like Real Life. But SL is undirected. It doesn’t try to mimic anything. It’s the users who come in and make it like it is. It has become what the people wanted.
…
because it is what we make of it, not what someone else (directly) tells us it should be. Thus it shows how ugly our Lives – our Real Lives – really are.
For those who thought the Metaverse was going to be a Utopia, think again. It may turn out to be a showcase for the ugliest side of both human nature and capitalism.
Totally agree that any virtual or real space populated with a threshold of people will give a broad cross-section of humanity – and we all know from history and watching the news each evening what that means. I think your right in implying that the metaverse and Second Life is a great example (as it does not force role playing) will somehow amplify the worst aspects because it is so easy to do things – for good or evil. As SL is also driven by real world money there is no surprise that we already have tens of thousands participating in virtual sex, crime complete with 8 mafia rings, real estate illegalities, cheap unmonitored goods, copyright theft and so on. SL also attracts real world intraweb sordid goings on as a matter of course, so any website needing traffic to generate ad money will use any method to get page hits – even commenting like this (not that I am writing this to get hits – I dont need them).
BUT, BUT, BUT. all of the above will be the result when you do not have any filters on who joins the party. When Linden Labs decided to allow anyone to join for free they must have known the hackers and spammers and deviants will flood through the door. There are many avatars now with no recourse to anyone and who have no inherent interest in being part of a utopian community. There are three tiers of users – the gatecrashers, the paying subscribers and those who own land and who want mainly to create a ‘second life’. Across those three sure we will have all types but the folk who only need to register their ‘false’ real name, and proxy email address to enter SL can and will abuse because it is so easy to do so. To some extent it is not their fault, a world without rules and law but more importantly a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ community spirit will collapse into anarchy. Things will only get worse until LLabs decide to put someone or something on the door.
Gary
In general I agree. But I believe the perception of internet anonymity will start to fade. I’ve previously mentioned the case of the guy who – supposedly as a joke – posted false and libelous information about someone on Wikipedia. If you’re not aware of it, it didn’t take long for some internet sleuths to track him down, and as a result the guy lost his job (he made the Wikipedia entry from work). More of those kinds of stories will start to make it obvious to most people that they may be exposed; that there’s a chance. And if their offense is sufficiently grievous, it’s likely they will be. We already have kids losing job offers because of their Facebook pages. More of that kind of thing will get the ball rolling.
Of course there will be anonymizers and the like and plenty of kiddie geeks will think they can outsmart the world. But in much the same fashion that DRM can be cracked, so too can people be tracked. Information is unlikely to be encrypted such that people will be able to forever hide behind fake identities. They’ll be found out. In fact, that’s what I find interesting: at some point these people will start have their real identities published (just like the WoW acquantaince case I blogged earlier (reLink). And when Reputation becomes a critical part of doing business on the net, some people are going to figure out that behaving in a civil fashion is actually in their own best interests. Until the jerks of the world figure it out, we get to watch this… real or staged.
Now, do I blame LL? No. If they truly want Second Life to evolve into the 3D internet, they really do have to make it like the internet. And that means opening up the floodgates.
Was SL ready for this? I’m not sure. I guess it could be argued that the timing – what with RL corporations starting to take an interest in virtual world commerce – could have been better. But we’ll never know for sure now.
Will LL eventually go back to gatekeeping? I think they will. They intend to release SL to open source at some point. After that, much like Linux, there will still be a place for a company like LL. People will want virtual worlds where there is some measure of law. There may and probably will be different virtual worlds with different laws. And there will also be private worlds hosted by “virtual world service provider” companies because they have the experience to be gatekeepers (at least better gatekeepers than most people running a server at home).
In the meantime, we get to watch this circus. Could be worse.