Why Lindens in Second Life Seem Arrogant & Out of Touch

Why Lindens in Second Life Seem Arrogant & Out of Touch

Serendipity Haven has a fairly funny field guide for satirically spotting Linden Lab staffers in Second Life(which I first spotted on SL's Reddit group.) The post is largely for the yucks, though there's an underlying assumption I often see SLers make in other, more serious contexts: That Lindens in SL are arrogant and out of touch with SL culture. At the risk of missing the joke, I should explain why that seems to be the case (for it often does), based on my own three year experience as a Linden (albeit one who was mainly contracted to explore and report on SL), and from knowing a hundred or so Lindens personally. Most of them are not arrogant in real life, and most of them do care about SL as a community, at least in the most general sense. However, they may seem both arrogant and detached in regards to SL (both in-world and on their website), for at least a couple key reasons:

Most Lindens are mostly interested in SL as a platform, not a virtual community: As an engineer and developer-centric corporation, most Lindens care about SL on the coding and architecture level, and are vaguely glad that so many people seem to benefit from it. But when it comes to knowing about the actual community and its content, they are usually too busy or too focused elsewhere to notice much of either.

Lindens deal with whackadoodles on the daily: Most SLers are smart, talented, friendly, relatively stable people. Unfortunately, for that very reason, these are the SLers Lindens interact with least. Instead, they are more likely to engage with those most apt to protest, and protest loudly: a vocal minority of SLers who tend toward obsessiveness and paranoia, and the conviction that other users and the Lindens are out to get them, or that everyone is equally interested in their exhaustively-detailed grievances. After enough of these encounters, it's not surprising that Lindens will become generally standoffish. Or as Karl "Qarl Linden" Steifvater once elegantly put it: “You know what’s the best part of being non-Linden? I don’t have to deal with whackadoodles any more.”

There are other reasons to be sure, and by contrast, I'd estimate maybe 10-20 percent of the two hundred Lindens working now do want to engage with the community more. But if you're wondering why most of them in-world seem detached, first try walking a mile in their whackadoodle-bloodied shoes.