Yesterday I mentioned that Linden Lab’s intent to provide a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered (here on in abbreviated to LGBT) forum could be misconstrued because there was mention of the forum being private or age restricted. The people who were in favour of this forum, people such as Amanda, Lexie and Blondin are not homophobic, old fashioned or insensitive to the LGBT community, but someone at Linden Lab seems to have a book of moral code straight out of the 1950’s.
This isn’t just a problem for an LGBT forum, it’s an issue for events where music from John Lee Hooker could be problematic, it was problematic on the forum where Dick Van Dyke was a no no at one stage, it’s problematic on the Jira where you can’t tell someone a master and slave device gets a product flagged as adult, it’s problematic on the marketplace where the ridiculous no references to alcohol rule is listed, although I’m not sure it’s enforced. The latter is particularly absurd as World of Warcraft which is aimed at those thirteen upwards, has plenty of references to alcohol, so whomever it is at Linden Lab who lives in fear of sixteen year olds being exposed to such things, should be asking Blizzard why it doesn’t bother them one iota.
However the problem really isn’t to do with exteme moral thinking, it’s to do with laibilities and the teens, and the poor teens don’t deserve to be being used as a political football.
I was not in favour of the grid merger, not because I hate teens, but because I didn’t think Second Life was teen friendly enough. Plenty of people disagreed with me and continue to disagree with me, but I maintain that the platform isn’t suitable and the issues I listed above, overly zealous forum censorship, concerns about LGBT issues being public, silly word filters, are all being imposed on the Second Life userbase because of fear of the teens and Linden Lab should never have put themselves in this position.
The family friendly continent should have been built at the time of Ursula…. if you’re wondering what Ursula is, Ursula became Zindra. That was when Linden Lab should have implemented a family friendly area, long before declaring Second Life as suitable for families.
There have been changes over the months, indeed today, if you go to https://my.secondlife.com/ and aren’t logged in, you’ll notice that picks and classifieds don’t appear anymore, they only show for logged in users. This actually makes sense because picks and classifieds can be adult, but picks and profiles should have maturity features, this should have been done by now and that would put Second Life further along the road to being suitable for teens.
The latest events, with the LGBT forum, are just another in a long line of absurdly over the top restrictions from Linden Lab’s hierarchy, but, there’s hope because the LGBT forum idea appears to have morphed into an Identity and Relationships forum, but it isn’t private and it isn’t age restricted. However, it also isn’t openly advertising itself as being LGBT friendly, so does this mean that the person or persons with the 1950’s manual on morality is still sticking to their guns or have Linden Lab merely decided it’s easier to have an all inclusive forum, because other communities would probably have started to ask “Where’s my forum” had LL specifically earmarked a LGBT forum?
Really, in this day and age LGBT conversation should be for general audiences and should be public, not hiding in the closet, but there’s plenty more that Linden Lab can do here and if they really are concerned about teens seeing words such as “Hooker” or “Dyke” can they explain why exactly, because sixteen year olds aren’t going to hell for knowing those words. Linden Lab’s word filters remain absurdly restrictive and Linden Lab’s overall outlook on maturity, remains absurdly over the top.
However, let’s not point the finger at Amanda, Lexie and Blondin, these instructions come from further up the tree, and really, why we can’t have a private adult discussion forum continues to remain a mystery, just what are Linden Lab so scared of that other platforms aren’t?