Pictured: Tyche with one of her data-collecting bots
As we watch the controversy over Bonnie Bots roil in angry comments across the Second Life media ecosystem, I've been curious about a mysterious discrepancy:
Grid Survey has been using bots to collect and display Second Life sim and user data for well over 10 years. Run by Tyche Shepherd, it's attracted very little controversy among the community; indeed, many SLers eagerly await her regularly summation of the latest data on community forums.
Why so much appreciation for Grid Survey, and so much outrage over Bonnie Bots?
"I think its a matter of perceptions," Tyche tells me. "From very early on when I started the project, I realized there was a lot more data I could collect including avatar information, but I really didn't want to collect things which were not required for the main task, which in my case, was measuring and monitoring the size of the grid."
Another reason might be that the Bonnie Bots don't look like "bots", and from a distance, look like a standard fashionista avatar. That's led some to fear that Bonnie is an alt "spying" on them.
"Ah an Uncanny Valley hypothesis," Tyche says, when I suggest this idea. "It's probably more the frequency of visiting -- I'm sure a lot of observations are just records in Visitor Lists."
That's another big difference -- Bonnie Bot visits are seriously incessant, compared to Tyche's bots: