1. The SL reputation system that used to exist was self-correcting, too. It wasn’t as bad as everyone imagines. While some aspects of it were “gamed,” any system can be gamed. What happened is that when there *was* self-correction — negative votes — oldbies whose reputations had been established by long years of gaming the system were outraged and lobbied the Lindens to nerf the system. I don’t particularly care for reputation systems, but I have to say that the Linden system, if it had stuck to the idea of paying for making reputation points, and still provided some modest payout from the points, would work.

2. Re: “For this system to work as an economy, though, there has to be a way to actually get something out of your good reputation. Say, in SL, that land was given out based on reputation, and people with a certain rating got an island…it would make for a radically different environment. If there’s money coming in somewhere, it’s easier. If there is ad revenue, the higher your reputation, the higher the percentage of ad revenue passed on to you.”

This is a pretty awful idea, because it immediately leads to a FIC, a privileged group who mete out land and points according to their own lights. It’s not an open system. It isn’t self-correcting. And that “radically different environment” would rapidly become intolerable except for the in-group that benefited from it. Reputation systems are always rapidly controlled by those who code them, and those who have the time to work them. A lot of people don’t participate.

3. E-bay isn’t even the marvel people imagine, and there’s something very different about the very flat 2-D transaction of buy-sell with a listed product, and a “yes/no” as to whether the product was a) delivered on time b) in working order and as advertised and the far more complex transactions in a virtual world, i.e. “this hair creator made good hair and followed up to help me get it positioned right” or “this landlord provided orientation and customization and helped solve problems” etc. etc. It’s a far more robust and complex system, and a plus/minus, yes/no system can’t address it.

4. I don’t get this allergy to money, capitalist economies (Japan has one! works well!), marketplaces. Barter and communistic models tried over the ages have always failed, even if kept as small, tightly controlled hippie commune sorts of things. It’s not a model that can work in a huge decentralized widely distributed system with many different cultures and levels of people.

5. Visa and PayPal are not a solution, because they are flat, two-way transactions. You pay me behind the firewall on those sites — you don’t pay me inworld, in the round. One of the beauties of Second Life is that you have a microcurrency that is roughly on a free currency market (although Supply Linden constantly devalues it to keep it cheap) and people can buy and sell and trade with each other inworld spontaneously without signing up a lot of information (as they would have to do in Visa or PayPal), without having to meet certain levels of payment, and without high costs to the vendor. Lindens work really well. I don’t understand the aversion to them. Not having economies with buy-sell-trade interfaces in these new opensim worlds will make them exotic open-sourcey testtubes for geeks to gawk at, but not normal places for lots of people to benefit from and interact in.

As always, frankly, I’m annoyed, that under the guise of “new media technology” and “open source coding” and all the tekkie categories, the social and political issues of economy and politics are being discussed without the people who will have to participate in it, in ways that are of a distinct extremist viewpoint on the left. It opens up the question of whether you are trying to smuggle in leftist economic models by welding them into technology itself, so that people must helplessly obey their laws when the log on.

Ken, this stuff about Creative Commons is for the birds. Do *you* make your living with CC??? Do you know *anybody* who does?! I mean, seriously. It really becomes suspect for people who are consultants to companies that pay them normally in capitalist economies to then come up with these socialistic recipes for everyone else inside the world.

Prokofy