Second the Vote

Don't ask for things you can do yourself

Discussing the OpenID proposal, Cienna Rand had a great suggestion:

[W]ould it not be possible to create a resident-run openID server? One group could handle the verification of who you are in-world and then provide authentication to others. Adoption could be driven by other third party sites referencing the community server.

This is exactly something I intended to discuss, only I hadn't quite thought of it in this context. Yes, it would be possible to build a passable OpenID server without help from Linden Lab, and that's a flaw in my proposal. (So now you know, for the record, I'm not perfect.)

✗ Don't ask for things you can do yourself.

Many of the suggestions I give are designed to prevent work on the part of Linden Lab to manage the proposal system. The biggest thing you can do to make less work is not propose features you don't need. The biggest group of these are plain old bad ideas, but many of them are simply things that you don't need Linden Lab to do.

When I thought of this rule, I had seen a proposal similar to #469 Listening to your favorite music regardless of land, which is short enough I'll quote it here:

Give players another audio control that gives them the ability to locally listen to their MP3 collection or enter a URL to listen to their favorite streaming audio.

This is a useful feature that everyone should agree should be possible. The reason this is a bad proposal is because it already is possible: when you play Second Life, you have at your disposal a whole computer, capable of doing wonderful amazing things such as this. If you want to listen to your music or a stream of your choice, you are fully capable of running a separate music player program designed specifically to do exactly that.

I hadn't connected that thought with the OpenID suggestion, but it still applies. You could very well build your own OpenID server for Second Life accounts. It would still have to verify you in-world instead of through secondlife.com, but residents would only have to do that once, not for every site. You would still have to remember an additional password, but it would only be one, not one for every site. That would improve the current account situation, and still encourage third-party web sites, though perhaps not as much as if Linden Lab built it.

However, many things are possible through hacks and workarounds. How does this rule not prevent almost every suggestion? Those "but"s are the main reason. While a resident-run OpenID server would be both possible and useful, it would really work better as an automatic process without the in-world validation step. In this case, there's also something to be said about trusting secondlife.com's authority with Second Life residents more than, say, openid.slworld.com. If your own idea requires too big a hack or too messy a workaround, you might go straight from idea to proposal.

Building your own OpenID server would best serve as a proof of concept for Linden Lab's implementation. Any idea that's reasonably implementable by a resident should be implemented first, to prove it works and that it would make a good feature. Science tells us your proposal will be one thousand times more applicable with real proof and experience behind it. And who knows? You may find it wasn't such a good idea after all. (Not that that would happen with your idea, of course.)

In both the client and the world, it's in Linden Lab's best interests to leave out features. A lot of making good software is making a good interface, and a lot of designing a good interface is leaving out as much as possible. Apple is historically the king of leaving things out, but Linden Lab prides themselves on it too, in that the Second Life client is a relatively slender download in the neighborhood of 20 MB. (They then depend on it by not having patches when a new version comes out, instead redownloading the entire client.) Linden Lab is also a resource-strapped startup, unable to build even the features they want to do as fast as they'd like.

Leaving out features is absolutely critical to Second Life's development, so it's remarkable and wonderful that Linden Lab is still so open to accepting community suggestions. You shouldn't squander their limited resources by asking for things you could already do or make yourself.

Don't ask for Linden Lab to go out of business

As a general class of proposal not to make, anything that requires Linden Lab to change its business model will not happen in the short term. Anything that requires Linden Lab to stop being a potentially viable commercial concern is simply not going to happen, ever, if the Lindens can help it.

✗ Don't ask for Linden Lab to go out of business.

It is reasonable to assume that you would like Second Life to continue to exist, in which case you probably do not intend for Linden Lab to go out of business. When writing your proposal, you should keep a few things in mind:

• Linden Lab has to make money. While it did receive US$8 million in venture funding, you aren't given that much money unless the people who own that money think you can turn it into even more money. Any proposal that would not create a sink for money or time (after all, time is money) is simply not going to be accepted.
• Linden Lab has legal responsibilites. Many virtual worlds operate as temporary autonomous zones, but they are largely volunteer-run and non-commercial. Linden Lab is a legally incorporated entity with a board, officers, and physical offices (I've seen them, they're not shabby). It's required to operate Second Life within the laws of San Francisco, California, and the United States of America. Some rules you are asked to accept are required out of simple legal necessity. (Those very same rules suggest I should state that I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
• Linden Lab does not need to please you individually. As a corrolary to the need to make money, Linden Lab has to please its customers to keep them paying. Depending on their business model, this may or may not include you. (I know it doesn't include me.) While Linden Lab may choose to cater to your needs, that's because your needs match most of their paying customers' needs, directly or indirectly (for example, free accounts are good because paying land owners need a customer base to buy their virtual goods). No one's needs are more directly important than paying customers'.

These are important factors to keep in mind when deciding if your idea is viable enough to become a proposal. However, they have subtle myriad ramifications when you actually work through them. Take care when deciding your idea is good enough to propose.

Requests that would add new terms of service or exempt some residents from the rules are mainly not worth considering. The rules have been worked out as a compromise between business managers and the company's lawyers to balance business needs against legal liability, and are only indirectly informed by the product design. While the terms of service are open to discussion, I wouldn't think that discussion is best undertaken in the feature voting system.

Don't ask Linden Lab to give up revenue without proposing how to replace it. Celebrated skeptic Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." Your suggestion of an obvious way to make less money is extraordinary; you'll need an extraordinary proposal on how that causes you to generate more. You can't suggest SL be 100% gratis then wave your hands, "I dunno, sell ads or something." Many proposals aren't that obvious, but have similar effects. You might suggest open sourcing Second Life to improve the quality of the software. How does Linden Lab then recover the revenue lost by competing with other providers of Second Life service? There are ways, and many people believe it's possible to compete in an open source market, but Linden Lab would need an ironclad business case to consider creating direct rivals.

In a manner of speaking, all esoteric feature requests are in this category, as they are demands on Linden Lab's limited resources. New features have various costs: designers' time, engineers' time, the support staff's time, and usability impact to name a few. Any feature that doesn't generate at least its cost in revenue is not worth accepting. While that's hard to measure directly, a good product designer can simply tell that some feature requests are too esoteric to be a net positive revenue addition. (That's what makes them good product designers.) Some of these strange proposals seem to be the first time their respective ideas have been exposed to public scrutiny. Your ideas would be well served by being discussed before being put to a vote; you can always add a proposal later.

Some proposals, such as #369 Limit ability of land barrons to monopolize property and #391 Increase L$ Supply, relate not to Second Life's operation within a free market but the operation of a free market within Second Life. This is an important distinction, similar to how the first amendment to the US Bill of Rights guarantees citizens the freedom from government restrictions on their speech, but not freedom from actions of private citizens or organizations because of their speech. These are not the cases I mean here; I hope to cover these issues separately later.

Lastly, when proposing Linden Lab close up shop, the unspoken scenario is if you do, in fact, want Linden Lab to go out of business. You are free to espouse that notion, loudly and publically. However, the feature voting system is not the appropriate venue. There are SL forums in which you can vent, and many weblog services that would be delighted to receive your business. An entire internet is at your disposal; please don't clutter Linden Lab's feature feedback mechanism with your discontent.

I hope you'll keep these points in mind when wishing for changes and new features. While Second Life is an amazing experiment in personal freedom, Linden Lab simply cannot comply with requests that they cease to exist. You shouldn't ask them to.