Heard That One Before, Part 8: Keeping Small Talk Small

This is the latest in a series of posts concerned with unproductive approaches to getting support from members of the Firestorm Viewer Support team. Today's is about opening lines.  But it's about so much more than that (which is why it ended up kinda long). It's about learning lessons from the introverted that allow us to broaden our perspective on effective communication. If you'd like to start from the beginning of this series, episode #1 is here.

But for now, the next unproductive thing to say when you first try to contact a support person is:

8) "Hi."

Dammit, Jim, I'm a support person, not a dentist.

If you need help from support, please be forthcoming and don't make us pull teeth to try to figure out what's wrong. We don't want to play twenty questions with you, we want to hear what your problem is and give you an answer. We're not identical across the board in terms of how we respond to IMs, however, so let's talk about what you can expect when you contact us.

This is a tricky issue to discuss without coming off as unfriendly, so I'd like to frame it within two particular themes. One is respect for people's time; the other is challenging the dominance of extrovert-oriented approaches in social interactions. Eek, I just got really academic-sounding on that second one. I promise it won't be so painful when I get to it. We'll also talk about the benefits of listening.

Keeping the Small Talk Small

Support team members are Second Life residents. We could be doing anything at all when you IM us: creating content or shopping for it, slexxing with partners or leaving our avies afk. We need to set limits for ourselves in order not to feel as if we are "on call" to the entire metaverse at all times. Each of us does this in different ways.

Some support team members don't respond to unsolicited IMs at all. That's a little extreme for me, but hey, if they need to do that to stay happy doing support, then it's all cool. Others are perfectly ok with small talk and will welcome chat before, during, or after the problem-solving process. 

I fall somewhere in between. I just want to know enough about your issue to know how to approach it before I answer. That means that instead of saying just "Hi" or "Are you there?" or even "Can you help?" I want you to tell me your actual problem. "Friendly" introductions like these place the burden on the support person to try and get you to the point. We won't always have the patience or the time.

The IMs I respond to most promptly are the full-paragraph questions that include lots of information and give me a good idea of whether I'm in for a two-minute or two-hour helping session. (Though of course I still can't answer if I'm afk, in the middle of a class, or hosting a trivia event.)

The trouble here is that when people say nothing but "Hi," they're not generally trying to irritate us. Some of them genuinely believe that a warm and social introduction will be appreciated more than a cold, hard question. And others just don't think of it at all -- they're just checking to make sure we're paying attention.

I have no sympathy for that last one and will always ignore "Lette?" and "Are you there?" The wonderful thing about text conversation is that it doesn't always have to take place in real time. If you ask your (direct and highly detailed) question now, I may answer it hours later, but I'll usually answer it. If you absolutely require an answer ASAP, you're best off asking the support group anyway. There isn't always someone immediately available with an answer, but it's a better bet than asking only one.

As for the "warm and social" type, I do sympathize… but there's another side to that. And this brings me to the second point I mentioned above, the one involving lots of long words.

Social Skills 201: Sometimes Less is More

Even in SL, where perhaps the majority of people I've met consider themselves to be introverts in RL, we (introverts, extroverts, and fence-sitters alike) still run the risk of being misunderstood as unfriendly or antisocial if we're not interested in investing energy in a conversation with someone we hardly know. 

I use the word "energy" on purpose, not because I find you, person reading this right now, personally draining, but because for introverts, social interaction usually means an expenditure of energy, while alone time means recharging. This doesn't mean introverts are all hermits, but it does mean that they're likely to be economical with their social time. If you're IMing an introvert like me for viewer help and start in with pleasantries, you're gonna wear us out before you even get to the hard part.

So how do you know if someone's an introvert or an extrovert before you contact them? You don't, unless there's something in their profile to indicate it. But nor does it matter. This isn't about individual styles, this is about what we can learn from the existence of different individual styles.

Let me put it this way: I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, "I wish these users would engage in more small talk before they got to the point. I mean, is it really so much trouble to say, 'Hi,' 'How are you?' and 'Can you help?' before they ask the actual question?"

My point, to put it directly, is that a lot of our habits and what we think of as "courtesy" come out of a culture where extroversion is the norm. Sometimes those habits aren't always the most appropriate, which means it's worth learning from the introvert's perspective what some of the alternatives are and when it's best to use them.

When it comes to IMing someone out of the blue for something, whether it's viewer help or customer support for a store or looking to buy or rent land, courtesy is less likely to mean leading with a few warmup phrases and more likely to mean respecting the other person's time by being direct and to-the-point.

Finally, let's talk about when the equivalent phenomenon hits the support group. There are some key differences in what we see there.

Attention!

It happens when a user unfamiliar with the group says, "Hello?" … "Anyone there?" And there may be fourteen streams of conversation going on around them. Questions, answers, support people caught up in the rhythm of shooting out info, links, and follow-up questions. The person starts to think that because no one is going out of their way to say, "What is it, User X? What can we do for you?" that it must mean they're being ignored. Ten minutes later, after maybe saying "Hello?" a couple more times, the person finally says passive-aggressively, "Fine, guess no one wants to help me."

Soon as they do that, a few people, usually our more regular users/non-mod helpers, will inevitably point out that the passive-aggressive person still hasn't asked a question, and then it devolves into an antagonistic spat about what the person should or shouldn't have done instead of focusing on what the person's goddamn problem was.

This isn't really a pleasantries thing. It's not really small talk. I think that usually, these poor folks just don't know the norms of our group and think they need to get someone's attention first in order to get their question answered. But what happens after the unanswered hellos is the important thing here.

Some will open with the intro phrases, notice what's going on in the group, and then figure out how it works. Those people will usually realize they just need to ask their question and will do so.

But others, the "Fine, guess no one wants to help me" people, don't catch on. Mostly, it seems they don't catch on because they aren't paying attention to any of the existing discussion. They aren't interested in observing the group's flow of communication; they just want the attention to be turned toward them. Now. Because only when they have the spotlight can their Very Important Question be enunciated.

The moral of this part of the story is: Observe. When you enter any new group or location. You don't have to lurk for days, just a few minutes. Spend more time reading than speaking, and you're likely to find your interactions going a lot more smoothly. In the support context, you'll also get your problems solved more quickly.

This is actually another lesson to be learned from prototypical introversion. Being the loudest might get you what you want eventually, but there are other ways of going about it that don't alienate other people from you before you have the chance to ask the question we want to answer.

Ashes to Ashes

The prospect of the "death" of Phoenix Viewer has been vexing its ardent users for anywhere from the past week or so to two years (depending on when they first heard something about it). Our team first warned of Linden Lab's intentions to make the grid increasingly incompatible with traditional V1s in the fall of 2010 and then ramped up the volume a year later. Although LL's plans have taken much longer to develop than we expected, the end of Phoenix's viability on the grid is now concrete and fast approaching. 

Some Phoenix users see the Phoenix Firestorm team's decision not to keep the viewer up to date with the grid's impending changes as a betrayal of their loyalty or a murder of the client; they can't imagine using another viewer. I will attempt in this post, as straightforwardly as possible, to explain why it is actually neither one.

Viewer software for Second Life is open source, meaning that anyone who wants to and knows what they're doing can obtain the source code and try to improve on it, customize it, make it something closer to what they want it to be. As long as you stay within both legal parameters (a lot of the code and the supplementary software is subject to licensing terms) and Linden Lab's policies, the options are as broad as your imagination and coding abilities.

Sounds a lot like creating inworld content, right? Your world, your imagination, and your proficiency with Blender and Photoshop. Only with a lot less Blender and Photoshop and a lot more C++.

Where do developers get this code and do this fun stuff with it? Linden Lab and any Third Party Viewers on the Linden-approved TPV list keep their released code and most of their unreleased code in online spaces called repositories. It's available for anyone to view or download. Whether you can make sense of it or not is another story.

But the important thing is that some people can. And not all of them are on the Phoenix Firestorm Project. 

The important thing, in other words, is that the Phoenix Firestorm team has no ownership, no monopoly, no exclusive claim to the Phoenix code. It means that anyone with the desire and the know-how can dive right in and claim the continuation of Phoenix's development as their own ambitious project. Not just one person. Lots of people. Lots of Phoenix forks can come out of the Phoenix code.

They'd have to change the name, and if they wanted it on the TPV directory, they'd need to incorporate some original code, but there's zero reason why the Phoenix Firestorm team's decision to no longer be the ones developing Phoenix should mean the viewer dies.

All you need is the desire and the know-how, and YOU can be Phoenix's savior. YOU can be the one whom Phoenix fans adore for your passion to keep the viewer alive. YOU can do for Phoenix users what was once done for Emerald users back in 2010, pulling the "viewer from the ashes" from, well, the ashes. YOU can be -- fine, I'll just say it -- the Jessica Lyon of 2013.

But there's that one hangup: the fact that this task has two requirements, both desire and know-how. Which means there are Phoenatics saying, "I'd love to do that, but I don't know anything about coding!" and there are developers saying, "Well sure, I could do that… if I cared."

The trouble for Phoenatics is not solely that our team no longer wants to work on -- and, soon, won't be supporting -- Phoenix. The trouble is that there may be no one else with development background who wants to, either. There seems to be no overlap between those with desire and those with know-how. Why is that?

Let's crank out some theories.

Theory 1: Developers are technologically progressive, and most have moved on to V3 viewers.

This can work as a partial explanation but not a full one, since folks generally have lots of different reasons for their viewer choices. It does, however, thin the herd for potential candidates considerably. Although there are still coders, developers, and self-compilers who prefer Phoenix over Firestorm, they seem to be in the minority, and an ever-shrinking minority at that.

The most common reasons that people remain on Phoenix are less likely to apply to the people most equipped to keep it going.

• Developers are more likely to keep their systems up to date than most of us, so they are seldom the ones being held back on an old viewer because of their hardware.
• If there's something they hate about a viewer (like Firestorm), they are more likely to know how to change it themselves rather than avoid it completely or know the correct avenues (JIRA) for requesting the change.
• Many spend more use hours inworld, which means more of a chance to push themselves to get used to the V3 interface even if they can't improve on it themselves.
• If they experience poorer performance on V3s than on V1s, they're more likely to know what adjustments to make at their end to compensate.

There are certainly developers the above points don't apply to. I'm not gonna say they aren't out there. There are even devs on our team who still use Phoenix. But my general impression is that the vast pool of Phoenatics who would be passionate enough to fuel a revival simply does not include a lot of people who possess the expertise to do it, largely because most of the folks with expertise have already moved on.

Meanwhile, most of the V1-using developers around are already spoken for.

Theory 2: V1 developers are already hard at work on their own projects.

There are, in fact, two V1-based viewers under active development -- Singularity and CoolVL -- whose developers clearly challenge Theory 1. Are developers like Siana Gearz and Henri Beauchamp contenders to the savior-of-Phoenix throne? They could be if they wanted to be, knowledge-wise, but I have the feeling they're more ready to watch their own viewers' user numbers go up in the near future.

You see, what you may not know is that these viewers have had releases more recently than Phoenix and have thus advanced beyond Phoenix in some areas, such as multiple clothing layer support (the ability to wear more than one tattoo, alpha layer, or other clothing item on the same system layer -- not to be confused with multiple attachments, which Phoenix has had for two years). If existing V1s were to refashion themselves as Phoenix forks, they'd actually be moving backward. Phoenix hasn't been the most advanced V1 viewer in a long time. Anything these devs wanted to draw from Phoenix in terms of code content has been available to them for months.

In other words, the revival has long been in progress. Just not by our team. Or even by people who would associate themselves with the Phoenix name. But they're there for the V1 diehards, and I'm sure they'll be happy to see your downloads.

Those developers, in fact, have done most of the work that Phoenix pulled in during its final six months of development -- most notably, mesh rendering, built by Henri Beauchamp. Our devs did the work of merging it in, but the original coding was done by others. 

If Singularity and Cool aren't what you're looking for -- if nothing will do for you except an actual Phoenix resurrection -- then let's tabulate… now you need someone who not only has the desire to develop a V1 and the skill to develop a V1 but who isn't already busy with their own V1 project.

Theory 3: Keeping a V1 viewer compatible with a V3 world is difficult and time-consuming.

Well… it is. It's the entire reason for where we are now.

Theories 1 and 2 only explain part of the reason why no one so far has jumped in to pump new wind into Phoenix's sails. Number 3 takes care of the rest. It explains not only why our team doesn't want to do it but why we may find that no one else does, either. Or at least no one has been making a visible effort so far. The last major Phoenix release was a year ago this month, with a minor one in March 2012. Jessica Lyon warned that Phoenix 1.6.1 would be one of the last Phoenix releases 53 weeks ago. Those were 53 weeks during which someone could've gotten their butt in gear to be ready for the final end to development and support.

Didn't happen.

Of course, now that the cat is out of the bag about the team's decision to move away from Phoenix, we might see people stepping forward. If someone does end up coming to bat for Team Phoenix, then their first essential task is going to be preparing the viewer to be compatible with server-side baking. This is a fix for avatar bake issues (think clouds, ruths, blurry people, and unintended nudity) that Linden Lab will be rolling out some time in the New Year and that will considerably break the usability of any viewer that doesn't upgrade between now and then, Phoenix's included. There's no real disadvantage to using an unsupported viewer right now. But when that change comes, you'll be -- pardon my Esperanto -- up shit creek. Unless your favorite color is grey.

These hypothetical Phoenix-of-the-future devs will also probably want to work on pulling multi-layer support from the other V1 viewers to make Phoenix current. And if they're trying to get Phoenix's users before they migrate fully to another viewer, they might want to scramble some support resources together or prepare for a deluge of questions and requests for help.

It will be a significant amount of work and will take someone who has a true passion for Phoenix. If someone decides to do it, they can probably expect a moment of notoriety and a lot of grateful users at first, but that will fade as soon as those happy users start to take the viewer and its upkeep for granted. Eventually, there will be all the usual support and bug complaints, along with passive-aggressive reminiscences of how great the old Phoenix was (not because the new devs do anything wrong but for the same reason we still hear people fondly remembering Emerald and asking, "Why do none of these viewers run as well as that did?" and conveniently forgetting that its problems were not fewer but merely different), and whines about why it doesn't yet have that Awesome Feature X that all the V3s got weeks ago.

Goddess help them if they ever discover it's too much to handle, though. Take it from us… as hard as it is to jump into an endeavor like that, it's a lot harder to disengage from it.