Via Marc Garrett:
“In a move that continues to shake the Second Life community of content creators, merchants, and consumers, Linden Labs has declared that free virtual content will no longer be searchable without listing payments on their website portal
See: (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Managing_Freebies_on_Xs treet_SL_Roadmap_FAQ);
and additional fees will be added with the intention of discouraging content listed for inexpensive selling prices. The move is particularly troubling because the online Web listing service is the de facto search engine for virtual content in Second Life, since the in-world search tools are unable to provide information about an object beyond name and location - basic textual descriptions, pictures, or descriptions of licensing, size, or content-category are not possible. While initially the change was explained as a response to community feedback, the residents involved in this feedback process were revealed to be fewer than 100 in number, primarily larger merchants among a community of millions.
Within 24 hours of the announcement, the feedback thread
See: (https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/38923#38923)
has swelled to over 1,000 overwhelmingly negative responses. Additionally, in-world protests have erupted throughout the day, and over 20,000 objects have been voluntarily removed from the online store by angered merchants.”
More Information
Read on for more details on the brouhaha.
Adding to the controversy are the officially stated justifications in the FAQ
See: (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Managing_Freebies_on_Xs treet_SL_Roadmap_FAQ),
such as ‘They [free content listings] hinder the shopping experience because a “sort by price” puts all freebies first,’ and the perplexing statement ‘They [free listings] garner so much attention that Residents are driven toward the freebies instead of quality, fairly priced items.’
Various independent virtual content listing sites have been proposed, such as Meta-life.net (http://meta-life.net/) and Slapt.me (http://slapt.me/), but attempts to post this information on the Second Life forums has been met with aggressive administrative censorship of these links.