Nevertheless, the questions about transparency and what the numbers actually mean are quite pertinent. I also miss the huge amount of monthly statistics that we got, in almost-raw-format — to be replaced by a quarterly report which is interesting but always too full of “marketing” for my simple tastes.

I would love it if we could have a few quarters where we didn’t need to discount (or account for) some kind of policy change – this quarter, we need to consider Homesteads and bots, next quarter something else – would be nice if there were a few quarters where conditions were generally the same and we could just look at ‘clean data’.

Why doesn’t the Lab get an economist or something on staff? They’re hiring like mad, and they’ll never publish stats on how well the Lab itself is doing until they go public or whatever…so why not treat the economy like a real economy, and have um Castranova or someone lol come in and put out real reports as if he were the Fed.

So, yeah – no detailed economic stats posted anymore, and all these other sites putting out press releases about how large the virtual goods industry is, yet with SL we get these obscure hard to parse numbers which reflect only one slice of the overall economy in any case.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/08/my-manifesto-for-t-linden.html

https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/7818#7818

Each time I open the front page now and see that “94 percent growth!” I feel like I’m looking at the breathless agitprop of some Eurasian dictatorship fluffing their stats for the visiting IMF delegation. It’s ridiculous.

Bots are not gone.

Ad farms extortion are not gone

Homestead sales are empty calories because they are a temp boost due to $95 grandfathering that glutted the rentals market and we are starting to see them sold or abandoned now

You forgot the empty calories of the $50,000 1024 m2 Nautilus sales.

The decline in Positive Monthly Linden Flow businesses isn’t even touched, and should have been; those numbers are squirrely due to their failure to subtract tier.

And so on.

There are just so many questions, and so real hard answers, that I don’t know what to think anymore.

I will tell you one thing: the Lindens retired “Economic Statistics” as a feature of their product, as a dedicated hyperlink on the front page and other page side bars with a text explanation and further links to Excel documents.

It’s gone; it’s not just a temporary lack of reporting, the *entire section* is deleted and gone as a link from the front page.

So that tells me a basic truth that we will watch unfold in the coming year: as the deletion of the product feature “Economic Statistics” goes, so *the economy itself*.

The Lindens will end by removing the economy from their product feature.

They may disguise that by the fact that people have the ability still to buy carnival tickets in batches and perhaps even sell their unused tickets back to the system for other carnival goers, and carnies will be able to cash out their carnival tickets.

But…it will not be a complex and robust economy like a normal country and will never become…a real boy.

I agree with Aki that there is more Homestead drama coming as the 1 yr anniversary of the debacle comes around.

And LL has wonderful figures to boast about an economy as long as you don’t parse out the zero and 1L transactions, the Zyngo transactions, and the transactions by people pretending to be “day-traders” trying to turn a profit by moving L$’s between alt accounts and different L$ providers.

Remember the old adage; if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

I sincerely doubt the grandfathered price is going to carry through past a year, even though LL’s had a history of grandfathering full regions in to updated programs (like upgrading class 3s to 4s, 4s to 5s). So unless things have changed significantly by then, I think we can probably see a lot of unhappy and homeless folks by July of ‘10.