Founding Linden Advises Tech Companies Avoid God Mode (Listening, Linden Lab?)

My pal YouTube executive Hunter Walk has a great insight from that company, which explains why he ordered the online video service to limit videos to 10 minutes for so long after its launch -- even for top brass who worked at YouTube:

We needed to experience the product as our community did and not solve problems for ourselves that we weren't also solving for them. So while God Mode might be essential for debugging or internal efficiency, be careful to not create a distorted reality. [emph. mine]

Hunter, as longtime readers know (especially if you read The Making of Second Life) is a founding Linden Lab executive, and the man who gave Second Life the name Second Life, so I think his advice is especially poignant, and worth heeding by the company he left in 2003. While God Mode is important for tech support and bug fixes (as Hunter acknowledges), I know for a fact that Linden Lab developers in Second Life have been prone to use God Mode far more than is needed. It's quite likely a major reason why SL's user interface and general usability still remains a frustrating morass. Imagine what the viewer would be, if they had use SL as their customers actually experience it.

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[Salazar Jack]

Interesting concept… come down to the Grid and experience life as a regular avatar. That just might help restore faith in the Makers and bring about the Second Coming of Second Life.

[Metacam Oh]

not sure i would take advice from the guy who gave a condescending name for a virtual world product. I wonder if he suggested No Life or Loserville before that one.

[Ezra]

I wouldn't stop at the viewer. Between Linden Homes, Linden Realms, Wilderness, Premium and Marketplace (if it's still ok to remember that as a space users once competed), there's a lot of instances of Linden Lab relying on tooling only available to them that makes running their competing businesses in Second Life a lot easier for them, but not the users they're so willing to compete unfairly with.

Instead of giving tier payers better tools for leasing parcels than scripted rental boxes, they built Linden Homes.

Instead of building a PayPal like service with an API that could allow anyone to build an L$ based Marketplace without the hackery that was XStreet, they bought XStreet and tacked on Direct Delivery.

Instead of create a Facebook Graph like API, they bought Avatars United and created Web Profiles.

Instead of actually building Linden Realms and Wilderness with tools releasable to us, they took a year to release a couple of crippled LSL functions that can't match a quarter of the use cases previewed in Linden Realms.

Linden Lab doesn't know the meaning of "eat your own dog food". Let's not even get into whether or not they pay user-level prices for any land that they have.

[Shug Maitland]

The Lindens come in-world?? I remember a time when they used to drop in at events or just wander the roads and byways of the mainland. Now if you see a Linden he is working. I am sure some have alts they use recreationally, I wish they all did (not because they had to, but because they just couldn't resist).
I agree with the thesis here though, God mode should be used only as a technical or support tool, not to get around issues that should be fixed.

[Ferd Frederix]

They need to get off vanilla Macs and get on Windows PC's with a variety of routers, cable and wireless connections.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

"They need to get off vanilla Macs and get on Windows PC's..."

...or 64-bit Linux.

[Iggy]

Can we dodge the platform wars? I run SL fine on my Mac, but friends with powerful PC rigs have issues. Others with Macs find v.3 unusable.

At least now I know where the toxic name "Second Life" came from. The Lindens might have gotten out of their own heads more in, say, 2002 to test-market potential names.

We are stuck now with the cybernetic equivalent of "test drive the exciting new Chevy Lemon!"

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

@Shug a relatively well-informed source, who shall remain anonymous, told me last week that under the current direction, Lindens are technically forbidden to join resident events/discussions with their Linden avatars. They may, of course, hold Office Hours. And while a few might log in with their non-Linden avatars, this seems to currently be discouraged. It's worth reflecting on what this means and what the consequences are of a company whose employees are technically not allowed to talk to their customers.

Anyway, it's obviously not only "God mode" which is a problem. I don't know if you have ever tried "God mode" out — it doesn't have SO many tools, although a few would be very good for Estate Owners, but have an enormous potential for griefing (e.g. changing land ownership, changing object ownership, etc.). Nevertheless these tools are required to do tech support, so I wonder how they might be "dropped" and replaced by something else which is not griefer-prone but achieves the same thing.

If you want to test God mode just try it out on OpenSim. You'll see it doesn't make a HUGE difference — an OpenSim admin can do the same from the console, after all — but it's convenient if you don't want to give the login & password to the OpenSim server but wish others to administrate the content. I suppose that's the whole point of LL's God mode tools — making things easier.

But it's NOT a way to view content in a completely different way and have a different experience of SL, which I suppose is what the article is about. For system administration geeks, this is the equivalent to use a normal login for most tasks on a Mac or Ubuntu/Debian environment, but use a few administration tasks using sudo, instead of doing everything under root which has no permission issues. In fact, I have no idea if any of my Macs have the root account enabled, and I forgot the root password of the Ubuntu Server I have :-) In essence, what LL has is the similar equivalent transposed to a 3D environment: do whatever you need to do as a regular user — and thus experience what others experience (specially permission issues!) — but when it comes to fix them, you have a tool to do so.

There is no much point to "run around in God mode". There is no difference in content really. I can imagine that it might mean being able to cross banlines or avoid being affected by orbiters and such, but I'm not even sure of that.

But there is much more which is only Linden-accessible. Let's take a typical example: region rollbacks. Regions run on simulator's memory, but every day or so, a snapshot of the memory is saved to disk, and archived (allegedly two weeks of snapshots are stored that way). When someone requests a rollback, Lindens have a special web page which shows the list of snapshots and can click on one of them to get them restored. It's a simple tool. No "island backup" needs to be actually stored on a complex system or so. One thus wonders why Estate Owners cannot have access to that interface and, as such, avoid requesting LL for assistance. I can imagine that there might be some griefing potential from an insane Estate Owner who is constantly rollbacking content to annoy their tenants... but... let's be honest... as an Estate Owner, you can already claim back land and kick people out, and anyone in the land business will obviously NOT do that constantly, and lose all their tenants. When money is at stake, Estate Owners have to be careful about their decisions. And most obviously are very careful. So why don't they give access to this fantastic tool to EOs and cut down on support requests?

It's not giving EOs the ability to "download all content" to their home computers and being able to restore it. No, all content remains on LL's servers. Linden Concierges don't even see the archived files. They just get a tool to point and click and revert to a previous snapshot. They cannot even "see" what's inside a snapshot. I believe that they cannot even select an object from a past snapshot and just restore it; the snapshots don't work like Time Machine (but they SHOULD!!), and, AFAIK, they're really just a memory dump of the entire sim memory — a binary file without structure. It's a very simple thing and I don't see ANY reason for LL not giving that tool to EOs (see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-8171)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Customer service needs god mode in many cases to deal with situations... but since we have effectively no customer service in SL, that's hardly an issue.

Otherwise, everybody from the CEO on down ought to log a full work day every few weeks with a standard user account on an old laptop from some fleabag hotel with first-generation wi-fi. In Brazil, preferably. Try to keep a club or shop running under a pseudonym, paying retail out-of-pocket for space and expenses. Don't try to imagine what it's like -- live it.

[Pathfinder]

Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

"When someone requests a rollback, Lindens have a special web page which shows the list of snapshots and can click on one of them to get them restored. It's a simple tool. No "island backup" needs to be actually stored on a complex system or so. One thus wonders why Estate Owners cannot have access to that interface and, as such, avoid requesting LL for assistance."

Here's why.

1) Rez no-copy object.

2) Take object into inventory.

3) Roll region back to when object was rezzed.

4) Goto 2

[Frans Charming]

It's really shocking to hear that Lindens are discouraged to use/enjoy Secondlife, even on a alt.

The problem is not only they aren't allowed to talk to us but by extension that means they would not use the product they create either. Second Life is social, if you can't be social it loses its appeal quickly.

[Salazar Jack]

When the Makers leave their mode on high and grid themselves beneath the sky, they’ll learn as us and see our plight, what once was wrong will be made right.

[Dale Innis]

"And while a few might log in with their non-Linden avatars, this seems to currently be discouraged."

I think it's more than a few; I know a couple of Lindens in their non-business AVs who are on pretty regularly, and if I happen to know a couple there must be quite a number. Could you say anything more about "this seems to currently be discouraged"? If LL employees are actually discouraged from using the Grid themselves as private Resi's, that would be a pretty important (and sad) datapoint...

[shockwave yareach]

Having Lindens being discouraged from actually using SL for anything is like hiring a cook and then forbidding him from using the stove.

If the lindens don't get to run the product, they won't know how to use the product, which is kinda the point of being a linden. If they don't want to interface with the customers and instead focus on technical issues, fine -- but someone needs to have linden powers who DOES interface with the customers and does actually use the product and knows the strengths and the weaknesses of it.

[Dizzy Banjo]

"Lindens are technically forbidden to join resident events/discussions with their Linden avatars"

If that is true.. then thats a really really sad alteration of policy.

Some of my fondest memories of Second Life are of very interesting discussions that involved many Lindens and interesting residents ( including Pathfinder and Gwyneth! ) freely discussing ideas and the future. It was a really valuable resource - many great projects and indeed features came out of it.