Welcome to Second the Vote

On April 13, Philip Rosedale announced on his blog that Second Life now had a new feature voting system. As the system describes itself:

As we make our plans for future development, we'll use your votes to help us decide what to tackle next. We'll look at both how important the feature is to you based on the number of votes it has received, and at our own estimates of the complexity and time involved in implementation.

Since its launch, almost 600 proposals have been filed. However, one of the most recent proposals decries the experiment in feature voting as a failure:

It was supposed to be something awesome and great. It was too... for three days. Now it's a waste of time because it has no credibility. LL doesn't seem to be paying attention to voting, most of the active proposals are pretty moronic anyways, so let's just end this failed experiment gracefully.

Ahroun is right about the current quality of proposals. As anyone who has browsed the list can plainly see, the average quality is atrocious. Here's a sampling of recent stupid proposals:

• more money: "i think we should get more money for our stuppend or allowence" 55 votes/14 voters
• Banned?: "Banned for months because of my age, I applied for Teen Second life, and of course I was still IP banned, and I cannot play Secondlife from any other computer in my house, and I really am hooked on second life, and to think I was playing heavinly, and then boop banned. How to figure out my age? Someone ratted on me...." 12 votes/6 voters
• Upload files, upload bandwidth p/w insted of $L10 per file: "I suggest we get rid of this stupid upload tariff, in favour for a more realistic bandwidth upload limit per week, since half the stuff people upload are real small files anyway, so linden can set this bandwidth say 10mb allowed each week, or whatever they feel they can handle, its fair for all." 47 votes/14 voters

The saddest part about the current state of the voting system is the following truth. It's the truth indicated by successful projects like the Java Community Process, the entire history of successful text-based online communities, and open source software development projects like Mozilla Firefox. It's also where Ahroun is wrong.

It doesn't have to be this way.

This weblog will describe how.

Comments

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

This is one of the best set of articles about the feature voting proposal that I have ever read.

It should be required reading for anyone ever entering the business of proposing features. Actually, you address the problem of "too much democracy" — the right to exercize free speech means that people who don't understand a bit about what they're talking about have precisely the same rights as experts on a subject. Of course, the net result, as we see on the feature boting system, is that the signal-to-noise ration is incredibly low. You get thousands of useless proposals for features and only a handful of pretty good ones.

I hope that you feel encouraged to continue this series of articles. I'm not sure if SL's population, used to anarchy, will ever take 5 minutes to read your wonderful suggestions. At least I'm glad someone pointed me to your blog. These 5 minutes already "paid out" in the amount of things I've already learned from your articles :)

Congratulations on your ability to teach so well. I wonder if you wouldn't be interested in hosting a few events in-world to explain people how they should submit their proposals, based upon your articles, and have Q&A sessions on the "dos" and "don'ts".

*hugs* from Gwyn!