I think it’s probably coincidence but I’m seeing more reports of dodgy market place stores appearing and end users getting ripped off. Let’s get some things straight here, The SL Marketplace is not a hive of villainy, the vast majority of people shop on The Marketplace happily, they receive good service and goods they want.
Dodgy goods and practices in Second Life are also not exclusive to The Marketplace, long before The Marketplace arrived copybot was being misused. I’ve had a skin creator in tears inworld showing me a store selling her ripped skins and she was extremely frustrated about the options open to her.
However The Marketplace, unfortunately, makes dodgy practices easier, the question is, is there any way of minimising the issues? I’ve seen suggestions such as requiring premium membership or PIOF to operate a Marketplace store. PIOF hasn’t stopped dodgy Mesh items being sold on The Marketplace and a premium membership requirement would drastically cut the number of sellers on The Marketplace, whilst at the same time punishing honest sellers who may even spend more than premium membership fees each month renting land.
However I don’t think doing nothing is an option anymore. Maybe we need to see a simple verification scheme, whereby people who have a payment history with Linden Lab become verified merchants and can display a verified merchant logo on their listings.
Then to keep your verified merchant logo, you’d need to be a resident in good standing, if you sell dodgy content you’d lose the logo. Upload ripped Mesh and get found out? You’d lose the logo.
This wouldn’t stop ripped content, but by encouraging people to be known to Linden Lab, which having a payment history largely does, it discourages people from engaging in some of the blatant scams. Now you might think that PIOF does that already, so why bother with a verfied merchant status? The point really being that if a verified merhant logo is on listings, people don’t need to go checking profiles, they see it in front of them.
LL should also make it easier to link alts to any such status, so the alts you identify to LL, are linked and then if those alts play up, all your avatars lose verified status.
There are far bigger online markets than the one we have in Second Life that have problems with fraud and abuse, Linden Lab can only do so much and they certainly won’t want to do anything to upset the applecart too much, as I said earlier, the vast majority of transactions are happy transactions, but I do think it’s time for Linden Lab to do something about The Marketplace.
I can fully understand Linden Lab not wanting to get into a discussion about these issues, they are sensitive issues, maybe Linden Lab are on the case and are playing the long game with people. The thing is though, when someone has a bad experience with The Marketplace, they associate that bad experience not just with the merchant who they feel ripped them off, they associate it with Second Life as a whole and that’s bad for all of us.
If Linden Lab don’t want to act, maybe we need to hire Traci Bullit, who describes herself as the private dick without the … anyway!