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:
"Most of my surveys don't require teleporting around the grid — only the Mainland Census and the private estate random surveying, both of which I no longer run.
"But even when I was running those, it was a single visit to each mainland region once or twice a year and a sample of ~2000 regions once a month at the peak. So in practice my bots (and it was probably only 2 to 3 running at a time at most) only made infrequent visits.
"If I understand it, Bonnie Bots try to visits all regions every 24 hours. I'm sure they are therefore more visible than mine ever were. I can understand why they feel they need to sample at such a high rate to give good coverage, but as a statistician I would suggest that a well-designed sampling frame could be developed which would significantly reduce the number and frequency visits they actually need to make."
Also, Tyche does get complaints from time to time, from sim owners "angry or upset about intrusions by my bots. But I always treated them politely and put the region on a No Survey list. I still see some of these people defending my bots on [forums] discussions purely because of how their complaint was handled by me."
Tyche does have some advice for the Bonnie Bots team:
"[T]hink about what the core service is they want to provide and stick to that — some of the more controversial things they have done such as the Avatar Search really doesn't offer any value to users over and above what's in My.Second Life.com. So why bother? It just attracts controversy.
"Maybe think about either anonymizing users or just reporting summary data rather than specific Merchant sales would go some why to cooling things down.
"As I said earlier, just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be."
To all that, I would add this: Tyche is a friendly and active member of some popular Second Life community forums, which also contributes greatly to the difference in reaction. Like a real world community, SLers are likely to react much better when a well-known and trusted member starts collecting data on them, as opposed to some mysterious stranger shows up and starts doing that.
If the Bonnie Bots team keeps engaging with and being responsive to the community, chances are they could become as welcome as Grid Survey.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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