With Apologies to Scott…
Saw today’s Dilbert comic strip, and I just couldn’t resist altering it as seen below.
Traffic and Search Rank is a hot topic right now, as LL is talking about making some radical changes, as they posted on their blog. Naturally this concerns me as a business owner. But there are wider implications which affect every Resident of Second Life.
The central issue revolves around falsifying traffic, either by using ‘bots’ (artificial accounts which do nothing but ‘hang out’ to give a parcel traffic) or camping. We’ve all seen campers, dancing away on their little pad, making 2L an hour or something ridiculous. There was a time when this was a sort of mutually beneficial arrangement, the Store owner received some traffic, the camper got some lindens, and everyone was happy. But it’s degraded into little more than a sham. Most ‘campers’ are now day actually bots. There are people who run armies of bots for the purpose of draining these lindens offered into their own pockets. And the false traffic that results from either of these practices distorts the market in favor of the dishonest, untalented, and unscrupulous.
The other problem is concurrency, we have problems daily due to the databases and other parts of the infrastructure can’t handle the load. By some estimates, there are 10-15 *thousand* bots logged in at any given time. While there is no way to remove them with certainty, making their desirability low by making traffic meaningless would go a long way to helping improve grid conditions.
I joined the “LL Traffic Future” group when it was announced, to find out more about what was going on. I found a incredibly vocal, forceful, and opinionated bunch had already gathered. There is a war raging from different viewpoints, and what’s decided, and who ends up the eventual ‘winner’ will have a large effect on SL in the future. I’ve met with the Lindens, said my piece along with the others, and its now up to them to decide their course of action. Its a complex problem with no easy answers. We can only hope what we end up with is better than what we have, by some small degree. Only time will tell.
Leave a Reply