Pick for Pay: Dedric Discovers Profile Picks Payola

With Second Life's Popular Places listings and Traffic rankings rendered useless by camping chairs and now bots, experienced Residents searching for quality content have long depended on the Picks tab in users' profile panel.  Since these are places chosen and described by the individual Resident, the selections are usually made with care and genuine enthusiasm; consequently, they're a much more reliable way of finding places worth visiting.

Until, perhaps, now, as Dedric Mauriac recently discovered.  A business is paying Residents to add their site to Picks, and if I read Dedric's post correctly, has figured out how to automate payment.  How soon will Picks be rendered useless, too?

Comments

[Nuschi Martynov]

we covered this story too.
and we proposed the following to everybody:
FILL YOUR PICKS with really good places! the more picks are in the profiles, the less weight have the spampers!

[Lillie Yifu]

Places have been offering prizes for picks for months now, though the automation of outright pick camping is new.

The lesson from google is "everything will be spammed."

One reason I've started to push the Second Life wiki and WikiHUD is because the more sources of user generated information there are, the harder it is for anyone of them to be too corrupted.

Next phase of wiki HUD will, in fact, be search, but it is going to take finding a better scripter than me to do it...

[Dedric Mauriac]

Thanks for the link over to my post. The same place that I purchased the "picks camping" system, I also purchased a bot that permits me to automate group invites when touching a sign. I created some scripts to tell the system to invite people who purchase my products as well.

I too have seen people ofer to pay in the past for picks, but I hadn't seen it automated and sold as a product. This one requires people to have the landmark in their picks for 30 days.

With the state of the economy in second life, and the broken money tree directory, I have been scrambling for the last few months to make tier on my island. I'm always looking into new opportunities and trying out things as I find them. I post the effectiveness to my business as well.

Many things that I tried out are simply useless to attrack new business (such as camping chairs, lucky chairs, prize pyramids, etc). Money trees used to work well in getting new eyeballs to run past my shop. So far, good old fashioned word-of-mouth seems to work best.

[Hiri Nurmi]

I'm not sure how much of an issue this would actually be in practice, especially as I have strong suspicions the Lindons are already weighting the score from Picks by avatar.

This wouldn't be hard to do, weighting towards..
1. Recently logged accounts.
2 Accounts that tp around over a certain rate.
3. A threshold of the number and size of Linden transactions on the account.
4. Weighting subscriber and/or payment info accounts over anonymous.

Indeed if they are just weighting by raw picks count then that's very very crude compared with the subtlty they could attack the problem with.

Real residents tend to be very choosy about what goes in their picks. I run a weekly 1000L gift voucher draw for anyone in my shop's group with a me in their picks. Out of approx 500 in the group I have around 10% who have the pick. The draw result is announced in the group, so there is a weekly reminder so I must assume that for most people a 1000L prize is not sufficient to tempt them. In the main I'm selling to experience ppl who've been in-world a while, and who or what they have in their picks is obviously of great importance in saying who they are.

As to tempting people into stores, my take has *always* been SL is a reputation-based economy and the only way to succeed in the long term is to deliver good, distinctive product with excellent service. Look at people stores like Shiny Things, or PixelDolls, or Bitter Thorns to see how it's done.