Social Networking – Page 4

May 6, 2015

Temporary Problems May Be Encountered When Using SLShare With Facebook

Linden Lab have blogged regarding an issue with Facebook and SL Share : An Update on SLShare Service Issues. The post explains that Facebook have recently announced that they are depreciating an old Open Graph API. The implication with this change is that all apps running version 1.0, need to update to version 2.0.

Linden Lab are on the ball with this and have updated their SL Share app to version 2.0, but things aren’t complete on Facebook’s end, which may mean there are problems for a couple of week. The blog post states :

This means that when using SLShare (updating status, photo uploads, and check-ins from the Viewer) you may experience some temporary problems. Please be assured that we are aware of this and any issues you encounter should be resolved once the migration period is complete.

Thank you for your patience!

So the message is clear, there may be a bit of quirkiness for a couple of weeks when using SL Share with Facebook. Now I’ll be honest, I’ve never used SLShare, but for those who are wondering what it is, SLShare is a way of sharing your Second Life experiences on social media, such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter and it looks rather straight forward.

The first thing to do is to ensure the toolbar buttons for SLShare are available, to do this go to me or avatar (depending upon with viewer you’re using) and then toolbar buttons :

Then the toolbar buttons show up and you can drag and drop these onto your toolbars in the viewer. Hopefully, if you squint you can see there are buttons for Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

Note that my buttons for Facebook, Flickr and Twitter are dull, that’s because they are already on my toolbar.

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March 17, 2015

I Dislike Blockbots, But Let’s Not Pretend We Don’t Know Why People Use Them

James Poulos of The Daily Beast has published an article : How Block Bot Could Save the Internet. The article pains me, deeply, on many levels. First of all it pains me to see a journalist advocating such a system :

Meet The Block Bot, an invention of the social-justice left that allows people to automatically screen out disliked content and disliked people from Twitter. The Block Bot comes complete with a helpful hierarchy of disapproval, ranging from mere irritation to bigotry in the first degree. Some people who have been added to The Block Bot’s rolls have been offended, of course. But in addition to muting offense, The Block Bot dissipates rancor.

When I was a lad and I used to buy newspapers I’d regularly buy The Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. The Mirror is a left wing newspaper, The Mail is a right wing newspaper. Some days if I felt in the mood for a really good read, I’d buy The Guardian and The Times. The Guardian generally leans left, The Times generally leans right. Politically I’m on the left, however sometimes the right will say something I agree with. The idea that I should shut out any and all other ideology is completely against my beliefs and I simply don’t see it as healthy.

My big objection to blockbots are, for want of a better word, McCartyhist style guilt by association and allowing others to think for me. I say for want of a better word because McCarthyism was a far more serious issue than this and I don’t like appearing to belittle it by comparing it to some silly nonsense on the internet. However guilt by association is not something I can buy into on any level.

How silly people can get with their dogma was exemplified in horrendous style recently by Ben Kuchera of Polygon. Ben objected to EA head of communications Chris Mancil linking to a post of Ben’s on Chris’ personal blog. Ben’s objection was due to Chris’ post being critical of blockbots, even though in his post he agreed with Ben :

I had heard about these Twitter Auto-Blockers before, and thought the use of these tools to be extremely sad.

One – because there are no proper harassment protection tools on Twitter, which Polygon’s Ben Kuchera has ingeniously identified the solutions for in this great piece. Which makes these tactics thinkable.
Two – because these auto-blocker tactics leave no hope for change or progress. It’s the cement walls of the West Bank and Gaza, forever dividing the two groups which probably have more in common than not.

Ben Kuchera took to Twitter, tagging Chris Mancil’s employer, to demand the links were removed. Let’s just rewind here, a journalist took to Twitter to demand someone removed links to his work because he didn’t like someone agreeing with him in a post. I lost a lot of respect for Ben Kuchera over this.

There were parts of Chris’ post that were objectionable, a glaring example being comparing these blockbots to the issues in the West Bank, which is quite frankly a ridiculous comparison, but for Ben Kuchera to object to the degree he did was also absurd. The end result is that Chris Mancil’s blog is now set to private. As a journalist Ben Kuchera should be embarrassed about this.

However, let’s not kid ourselves here, the reason people turn to these blockbots is more often than not because they are fed up with being dogpiled and abused for having the temerity to have an opinion.

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February 11, 2015

The Computer Gaming Industry Should Pay Attention To Linden Lab’s Community Relations

When it comes to the computing gaming industry and communications, there’s a very sorry picture lying before us in 2015. The industry as a whole has an extremely immature reputation and this applies to gamers, gaming publications, gaming journalists and game developers. There’s a toxic pile of cack in front of them that far too many are happy to pour oil onto the fire of.

The industry as a whole could do far worse than to take a step back and look at how Linden Lab have approached community relationships over the years. Linden Lab have certainly not always got it right, indeed at times they have got it very wrong, the communication blackout being one glaring example. However at no point in the history of Second Life have I ever witnessed anything close to the sorry state that the computer gaming industry currently finds itself in.

There was a time when the official forums were far more vitriolic. Office hours inworld could get vitriolic.The Jira could get vitriolic and of course the blog post comments could get vitriolic. Linden Lab cut off some of those vitriolic sources by removing those communication channels. That wasn’t the smartest move and in some cases it appeared as if Linden Lab were burying their heads in the sand. Recently Linden Lab have vastly improved their communications, brought back some of those communication channels, engaged with their community and it’s working well.

Ok when Rod Humble was interviewed by Draxtor Despres he was quoted as saying :

I come from gaming communities, where I was running a gaming community, I received three death threats in a day! I’ve never received three death threats in a day from Second Life users, I’ve only received only one death threat here. And that was from a guy who got banned, you know, he was angry.

We shouldn’t make light of death threats but I think this puts into context some of the levels of vitriol that have been around. When Second Life did receive vitriolic comments they were more measured than what we see in the computer gaming industry. When I was more of a git in the forums, blog posts and office hours, the idea of threatening en employee would never have been on my or pretty much anyone else’s radar.

I used to point out in the Second Life forums that the levels of vitriol were tame compared to other forums. This tells me two things, one that I’d accepted that vitriolic behaviour was something of a norm and two, that I thought the level of vitriol aimed at Linden Lab was at an acceptable level. As I’ve aged, I’m puzzled as to why I accepted this behaviour as being part and parcel of online communities.

However Linden Lab largely continued to engage, to talk, to try and work around the noise. As I’ve said, sometimes they took extreme measures, but Linden Lab’s employees in public remained professional, courteous and engaging. That’s not something you could say about the computer gaming industry.

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February 6, 2015February 8, 2015

The Problem With Twitter Is People Not Names

I was driving home from work the other week listening to BBC Radio 4 when I heard an excerpt from a forthcoming television documentary. The excerpt featured the agent of a woman who is infamous in the UK for being controversial, and that seems to be her main talent. The excerpt had a point that was rather sad, the agent admitted that his client deliberately targets Twitter trolls by spelling words incorrectly on purpose or making outrageous comments. He admitted that without the Twitter trolls, his client would not be so successful.

At this point it is worth noting that picking someone up on their spelling isn’t exactly trolling, but the concept that people deliberately court controversy and know that this will work on Twitter to generate revenue, is rather depressing.

Twitter continues to make headlines for the wrong reasons but those of us who have been in Second Life for a number of years know that those headlines can be very misleading. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has an article about Twitter : Twitter CEO Basically Admits Pseudonym Policy a Disaster. That headline itself is a tad misleading as I can’t see anything from Twitter CEO Dick Costlolo that suggests that. However Hamlet’s article links to another article on The Verge : Twitter CEO: ‘We suck at dealing with abuse’. In that article Dick Costolo is quoted as saying :

“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.”

I use Twitter, I’ve seen the trolls in action, I’ve seen the heinous abuse but if Twitter was as bad as some folk make out, I would not be on Twitter. The problem with Twitter is not pseudonyms. Over time, even with a pseudonym, you build up a reputation of sorts, you own your words. The problem with Twitter isn’t accounts who don’t say much but use a pseudonym either. Whereas people can demonstrate horror stories from Twitter to try and claim pseudonyms are a problem, the same thing can be done on Facebook with people using their real names. Names aren’t the issue here, people are and more to the point, the way we interact online.

Online communications are largely faceless. We don’t see the person we’re talking to, we lose the tips that guide us in a face to face conversation. We lose sight of emotion, intent and humour and we focus on the words. On a platform such as Twitter where you’re restricted to 140 characters, this doesn’t make for a healthy meeting of minds when it comes to debate.

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