Linden Dollar Third Party L$ Exchange Survey Results: 28% Report Moderate to Heavy Impact on Their SL Usage. Also, SurveyMonkey Sucks.

Here's the first 100 votes from yesterday's survey on the impact of Linden Lab forbidding third party exchanges trading in Linden Dollars. Of those who took the survey, 28% say this policy change signifies a "Heavy" or "Moderate" impact on their Second Life usage. That represents a significant minority of the userbase. Based on reader Comments (and common sense), users who stand to suffer most are in areas where PayPal is inaccessible (such as much of Europe), since this is the service Linden Lab uses to cash out Linden Dollars on the official exchange. As one reader, vandamian, writes:

what a shit for the most eoropean player! sl was a nice game years ago.. but there are fewer and fewer players ... the question is why? I know why. keep it up and sl will die, linden lab!

So there's that. Roughly 40% of Second Life's userbase is in Europe, at least it was when the company reported demographics by country. Also, like I mentioned above, this is just the first 100 votes. This survey actually received about 300 reader votes, but SurveyMonkey only lets you see the first 100 before charging you $32 a month to see the rest. Yes, really. So 100% of me thinks SurveyMonkey sucks monkey butt. So there's that too.

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Comments

[Maria Korolov]

Good to know that about SurveyMonkey. I've been considering switching away from Google Forms for surveys, and will now cross SurveyMonkey off the list.

[Ziki Questi]

The Washington Post just reported: "U.S. government reportedly freezes funds of largest Bitcoin exchange" -- so this may be why the Lab acted so quickly: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/15/the-coming-political-battle-over-bitcoin/

[Amanda Dallin]

This sucks for a lot of people but having a court ordered freeze of all monetary transactions in and out of SL would suck for a lot more.

Also the first 100 answers on a survey like that are pretty much useless for statistical purposes. Just one issue is the timezones. The time of day those responses were given could be either over or under representing Europe. The margin of error on this poll has to be huge.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Well, I just think that shutting down the third-party exchanges will not be enough; if LL is fearing US Government action, then they'll have to shut down the LindeX next.

At that time, either residents become very creative (using other ways of doing business), or, well, without a way for creators to earn their money, they will stop creating; without content, there will be little incentive to shell out cartloads of money to pay tier, when almost-content-less virtual worlds exist beyond SL — namely, on the many OpenSim grids (many of which are beyond the reach of the US Government, fortunately).

[Ezra]

@Gwyneth "if LL is fearing US Government action, then they'll have to shut down the LindeX next."

US Government action for what? It's not illegal to operate a virtual currency. Their rumored move to become more compliant with law, if they already weren't, just puts them in the same rank as corner stores that issue money orders.

When people hear words like "government" the issue becomes way too conflated. Linden Lab maybe understandably doesn't want to be responsible for L$ being used to mask illegal activities like human trafficking on a third party exchange, but if it happens on the LindeX, they're in a better position to notice misuse of their own service and report it to authorities as they should.

As far as the survey goes, 99% of responses probably should've been "Don't know". We'll know in a month or two a lot better. With an international, and even local subset of userbase that either can't or don't use PayPal, there's bound to be people who can't add money to shop or donate, or cash out earnings or donations to fund things like tier, their livelihood or any causes they're associated with. It'd be really great if Linden Lab announced plans to tend to these people.

[Keith Selmes]

A survey really needs to check how much people use SL as well as the impact on their usage. I wonder how many would select little to no impact because they hardly use SL now ? I nearly did, as I have little invested there, and seldom visit now. But I went for "don't care" as it was also true, but less misleading. It could be that 59% regular users are largely unaffected, but we can't tell.

[zzpearlbottom]

Portuguese don't have any problem when using Paypal and so far, we are still European!
Using it since day one on SL to pay premium embership and to buy Linden via viewer option!

[2013]

I know many Euros that have zero problems, and typical journalism, headline is negative although the percentage Of "no effect" is far greater.

[Eddy]

Totally agree on the "Heavy impact". I'm thinking about closing up shop, if there's no change within the next few weeks. This lindens i do make, i got no easy way to get them out and turn them into either euros or bitcoins.
So it's either close down, or start accepting bitcoins for products, although that would pose an additional programming challenge..

About surveymoney.. great site (NOT - LMAO!)