Solution To Solve Content Over-Saturation: "First Sold On" Timestamps On Commercial Products?

Last month we were discussing the over-saturation of content in the Second Life economy-- with clothes that never fray or homes that never need repairs, a mountain of content amassed from five years of activity has expanded the supply of freebie/extremely cheap items, while doing nothing to increase the market for items sold at a substantial price.  (Why buy anything, when there's so many quality objects that cost so much less, especially in the context of an ailing real world economy?)

One idea occurred to me then that I think is worth airing here:  What if the Lindens added a date/timestamp to objects that are put on sale? That's not artificial obsolescence, but it would tend to put a premium on newer objects, while adding an "antique" value to quality items from a year or two back, (if they're extremely well made.) It might also help clarify content theft allegations.

Of course, I'm not really a content creator, except for the words you're reading right now.  How plausible is this suggestion?

Comments

[kanomi]

It's a neat idea, but what good is a timestamp on non-transferable clothing item - no one else can ever see it.?

You are almost getting to where EA and some of the other game companies are going, and where Blizzard with WOW and Linden in a basic sense with SL, have already gone; and where Microsoft wants to go too with its whole offering:

Software as a service, a continually paid for utility -- like electric power or Cable TV -- rather than a CD, or a prim outfit, or ninja sword and HUD, or crummy Spore game -- that you buy once and can copy however much you like.

So if I want to wear anything from say, Cake hair store, I can pay 5L a month for 5 hairdos, or 100L a month for anything...whatever the market will bear, considering their skill, popularity, and competition, would determine that price. But it's no more different than renting the land you supposedly "own" in SL, just renting your clothes through micro-transactions...

This would require a total rewrite and re-think of the SL database probabably, needing an authentication call built in, but it's not out of the realms of the real...and would be a much more fair way to treat some content creators. Don't know, just an idea...

[Doubledown Tandino]

Philip Linden was talking about this a lot when copy bot came out. I specifically remember Philip Linden holding a town hall meeting directly after the copybot arose in SL.

Philip stated that they would immediately begin timestamping objects so the creator and date of creation was never lost. This would be used as a proof of the original creator.

He wanted "more tools for residents to be able to retain and prove their own IP"

did any of this ever happen?

[Jovin]

Surely, it's a slightly negative way to change the perceptions of content - implying older content is worse content? If SL continues to add evolve with new scripting functions, graphics effects and other features then content will reinvent itself naturally.

It seems very likely that SL will get ray-traced shadows at some point in the foreseeable future - that's instantly going to make all these 'baked' objects we have now look dated and silly - not to mention all the prim shadows attached to no-mod furniture.

We should be looking to the future and getting better at making content - not trying to artificially date existing content. What SL really needs is more customers, not less content, and unfortunately LL seem to be doing all they can to prevent that.

[Hiri Nurmi]

But things do become obscelete already, It's just that the pace of change needs a kick again. There has been a steady improvement in clothing over the years as creators discovered baking light and shading, and more recently scuplties have produced something of a revolution were still seeing the effects of. Even the new lighting had some impact. Each time there's been a drive for creators to make new stuff to take advantage of new abilities and people to go and buy it.

Unfortunatly the last significant changes - touch position on a prim, mono and havok 4 - didn't impact the main content creator markets that much. What we need is some significant technological improvement by the Lindens in the viewer. Better sculpties would be good. More attachment points would be useful (or multiple attachments to the same point aka OpenLife). Multi-texturing possibly would be interesting. However the real killer new feature would be an overhaul of the avatar meshes. We're still using the same meshes as SL started with back in 2003 despite obvious limitations. An overhaul to bring them up to modern standards and kick start the SL clothing market. A side benefit would be reducing SL's 'dated graphics' feel which would certainly help it's wider appeal.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

What Hiri Nurmi said; SL creators need to do new things or do old things better than anyone else--including their old selves.

The law of unintended consequences applies here; all those folks signing the Open Letter insisting that LL concentrate solely on bug fixes did their bit in killing or postponing improvements that would open new markets.

[Ann Otoole]

I'm sure somewhere there is someone that would like to buy and wear the old "Diva Hair" I have seen in pictures. But it is obsolete nonetheless. Scripts that worked on Havoc 1 but no longer work are obsolete. A lot of clothing made long before people knew what dodge and burn did are obsolete along with all the white halo'd alpha textures.

However some stuff does not go out of style.

But anyway whatever Linden Lab thinks they can do to help fight content theft the rippers will succeed in bypassing the mechanisms. First sold date? Well that has to be date of first sale after last linking date. Otherwise the rippers will link in an old root prim they sold 2 years ago and there you go.

There are no easy answers.

[Nexus Burbclave]

@kanomi, This whole debate stems from the damage that freebies may be doing to certain businesses. If anything, switching to an on-going cost model is going to push more people toward freebies and further away from innovators using that model. You point to all of the software companies going toward this model, but seem to be missing that this trend has been one of the biggest drivers of Open Source Software growth.

@hiri, while I can see your point, as a gadgeteer I have a very different view on the utility of the most recent updates. That said I see no reason why a creative fashion designer couldn't do something interesting with some of these new features. Surely, I am not the only person that remembers hypercolor tee shirts. :)

[Salazar Jack]

"...homes that never need repairs..."

I don't know what part of the Grid you call home but where I live there is definitely the need for repair and upkeep. There are any number of forces and effects that shape our world including erasers, afterasers, prim drift, tuning displacement and temporal dislocation. I've had to fill cracks that have appeared in the concrete foundations of the Cowell village and realign pavement outside the Brownstones in Grignano. Nova Albion seems to attract a lot of paragrid activity, most notably the water pipe that materialized from a previous era in Osprey Therian's gallery:

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=131380

and the seemingly catastrophic deletion of most of Grignano's primitives as reported by Lordfly Digeridoo:

http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=44462

Things aren't as permanent as one would think. My mom wrote of what happened here years before the Lindens' arrival:

http://web.mac.com/salazarjack/Site/Valdora_Graysons_Letter.html

Knock on plywood that none of this ever happens to you. I 'd normally recommend an occasional sacrifice to Mt. G'al to appease the Grid and buy a bit of protection, but even our most holy of hills seems to gone dormant:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1139

[Ruby Vandye]

I think you can find out the date any rezzable object was created. You rez the object onto the ground, click on it, choose More>More>Inspect and it will show you the creator's name and date the object was created. This would work for clothes that are attachments, but not clothes that are worn.

[Iggy O]

@Salazar Jack...this is some delightfully purple prose of the Steampunk variety:

"There are any number of forces and effects that shape our world including erasers, afterasers, prim drift, tuning displacement and temporal dislocation."

Good Heavens, Man! Get to the time-displacer monolith, posthaste! The Hounds of Tindalos are coming through the angles...I hear their baying...bring the Pitchblende-Ray Cannon!

Seriously, it's a frightening sign of how long I've been in SL that I half-understand you. We have to tweak prims on our structures on Richmond Island from time to time...little cracks show up on the non-prefab stuff I cobble together.

And improvements to graphics in SL will make a lot of stuff look cheesy over time...some older skins look terrible now, post-Windlight.

Still, SL repairs are a hell of a lot easier (and probably cheaper) than RL building. My cast-iron water supply pipes are being replaced under the house as I type this. Give me prim-drift and SL building tools any time...instead of $3000 US so some guy can do a lot of crawling with a reciprocating saw, 100' of foam-core PVC, and bloody knuckles. I'm handy with tools IRL, but that job called for a specialist.

Hope the Hounds of Tindalos don't get him before he finishes my plumbing.

[swannjiejie]

i think this is reproducing the rl values to sl... too much hassle. is something timeless worth more or less when it gets older? obsolete software is worth zero over time. other things... how far back do you keep your emails? old files? is sl goods any different from regular files? for people who live or live from sl - sl is a real world and must be treated as such because of real livelyhood income, for the others, sl is a microscopic spiritual world --- get a good job in rl and enjoy sl for what it is... i think this issue is completely relevant for people who live in sl world but less so for the others

[Veeyawn Spoonhammer]

What if it was possible to put an expiration date on created content?

I, as a content creator, would love to be able to create, for instance, a 2008 series of clothing that a buyer can use for 2 years (or some arbitrary date). After 2 years, the clothing is no longer wearable (ya know, like stuff from the 70's) and it can be kept for nostalgic sake or tossed in the trash.

[Timeless Prototype]

Items have a natural age just like attention span.

When people get bored of one thing, they enjoy finding something else that's new and even if it's not unique, they could be the first in their group to have one. It's the same kind of thrill you get from real life shopping. In addition to this, the consumer has "hope" for new products on the market. Effectively they choose to subscribe to this way of life and is a form of entertainment (SL's biggest export to RL).

You don't need to artificially age any product, the people will take care of that automatically and subconsciously. There are probably numerous other use cases too that are not considered here, and this makes it unrealistic to make a blanket judgement on what one person alone decides is a "good thing" when others will start with the pitch fork protesting all over again and/or gaming the system.

Rather think of it like this: to patch things to artificially adjust the economy/market doesn't actually solve the underlying problem that supply doesn't meet demand - suppliers need to understand what people would really enjoy and deliver that instead. This includes people really enjoying a change every now and then.

If you're making a ripped-off item, using CopyBot or selling a freebie, you've already misunderstood that the real demand is actually for something different, not the same.

All been done before, saturated? Nope. Plenty of stuff not even thought of yet. :) Start hiring "ideas" people.

Everything lasts forever? Nope, attention span and human mortality will ensure that doesn't happen.

[Timeless Prototype]

PS. Linden Lab should not only focus on new user experience, but on keeping the content creators happily investing their time and energy in SL content creation, or you will simply not see the new ideas being implemented.

[Tormy]

Chalk me down as not being down for turning SL into the craphole that There and Entropia are. Must repair stick!

[Ann Otoole]

why isn't anyone selling leisure suits? Hmmm.. Could it be that they are out of style/obsolete?

Today's style is obsolete tomorrow.

Sort of like bling. People have to ask me to stick bling scripts in stuff now.

Jeans won't go out of style but cruddy torn up dirty styles of jeans might. Just depends on what people want next year. I easily predict bulky "jackets" that look like tater sacks will become obsolete fairly soon. But at the same tome nice looking shoes in various styles will never become obsolete.

I'm not too sure people will appreciate something they paid good money for suddenly becoming intentionally unusable. Sounds like a good way to lose customers. Like how kill scripts that make L$5k no copy items vanish because you accidentally dropped it on the ground tend to make people never trust the designer again.

[Nexii Malthus]

As others have mentioned, products naturally degrade due to attention span from fashion styles moving from generation to generation, version to version, technique to technique. Also your suggestion wouldn't work for scripted vendors, in fact wouldn't it keep resetting the first-set-to-sale timestamp because of it changing prices on/off scriptwise? I would like to see more support for scripted vendors, for example on 'Search' when looking at places it would be nice to have an easier way to scroll through the products of a vendor directly from search. Perhaps a new function llSetSearchCritera(list Tags) or even a llSetVendorSearchCritera(string Vendor, list Products)?

Would be nice if the dates would be replaced by an optional far more intuitive 'Days Ago' though than some bunch of numbers with a few slashes in a confusing tipsy-turvy order due to the unintuitive american date system.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Hmmm... did someone from the Department of Redundancy Department get his hands on the title of this article?

[Faerie]

I don't care when it was made, I just want to see Hamlet in that black latex number that he's unpacking.

Pictures! I want pictures!