Hamlet Au on Adult Content JIRA Ticket Closure

Hamlet Au, of the New World Notes blog, wrote about the closure of the JIRA ticket for the upcoming Adult Content Changes today on his blog, noting that the ticket had received more votes than any ticket in the system…ever. He made the point that the rest of us have been making for weeks now, saying:

“…the [JIRA] software’s voting architecture (which can only be used by established Residents) is able to count the exact number of passionate supporters of a proposal in a clear, publicly transparent way.”

The Lindens claim that they closed the ticket because the JIRA system is not for debating policy issues, saying:

“This issue tracker is used by developers and engineers and this has turned into an issue of policy.”

While this is true, we are correct to say that there is no other place where only Second Life residents can add their vote in favor of a measure. Casting a vote for this JIRA ticket meant that a resident was against the adult content changes, and we voted overwhelmingly. Is 4,418 votes a small number compared to the 70,000-75,000 users who are usually online? Yes. But what Linden Lab failed to understand is that most users never use the JIRA support ticket system and a good number have no idea that the system even exists. What’s worse is that many residents have no idea that these adult content changes are coming (which is why we have been trying to get the word out and get people to vote on the ticket).

We are a vocal group opposed to these changes. The Lindens cannot say that they have a similarly-sized vocal group in favor of these changes. We’ve asked and they are unable to provide us with any solid numbers. They have used the phrase “small minority” to estimate the size of those in favor, but that says very little, and we learned last Sunday evening that it was business and education customers (read as “people with a lot of money”) who wanted these changes in the first place.

Although I do not think we have any real chance of getting the JIRA ticket re-opened, I’m glad that Hamlet and other media sources have written about this issue. When we formed the Revolting Adults protest group, we made it clear that the Lindens would not be able to say that they did this without protest from the resident community (in fact, at the time, Linden Lab was saying that only “2-4%” of the community opposed the changes — I think we’ve proved that the percentage is much higher).

As Blue Linden put it, this was a policy decision. As with any company, policy decisions are usually made without consideration of the views of the customers/community as a whole, and once made, they are difficult to reverse.