With episode three of the Wall Street Journal's podcast "How to Make a Metaverse" dropping tomorrow, Linden Lab/CCP Games/Meta developer veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who spoke with the podcast team for the show) has thoughts on Episode 2 (listen to it here), and the disasters which were unleashed when Second Life's early community management policy was simply, "Be Nice". Citing some highly memorable Not Nice examples, here's the problem as he sees it:
A Rape In Cyberspace was already 10 years old when Second Life launched and Linden Lab were talking to many of the pioneers who worked on early virtual worlds. Philip should have known better, but pursued a wishful, naïve approach to moderation and Second Life ended up learning a lot of lessons that had already been learned the hard way...
When I first visited San Francisco I hosted a party on Russian Hill to get to know my colleagues only to end up huddled in the living room with other engineers battling a plague of grey goo spreading across the grid that was enabled by an over-permissive API. The API allowed scripted objects to self-replicate and so exponentially overwhelm regions until firewalls of shut down simulators limited the spread and space lasers were able to delete scripts to purge the world of the menace.
Shortly after I returned to the UK I woke up one morning to my first encounter with the infamous Goatse image which a resident had pasted across the world so that it would show up on the live map that had been naively been added to the front page of secondlife.com without enough thought about how it might be abused.
If you don't know what Goatse is, don't Google but click the Wikipedia link above for the love of god.
At any rate, Jim recommends that metaverse platform developers not just read Snow Crash (or forget the dark side of the Metaverse that Stephenson writes about there), but points people to this very helpful list of non-fiction books on the metaverse/virtual worlds.
As regular readers will remember, Purbrick was previously at Meta, begging the team to read A Rape In Cyberspace and consider the implications. But people at Meta didn't prioritize it, and... here's what happened.
He's also concerned other metaverse platforms may not be learning the lessons of community management. For instance, he tells me, VRChat:
"VRChat is very hands off with moderation in ways which feel a lot like the early days of SL before mature regions. It will be interesting to see if that approach is sustainable. It still seems to be mostly based on automating filtering, it will be interesting to see how well it works and how exploitable it might be.
"My concern with 'Be Nice' or VRChat's filtering and self-moderation is that they are both open to interpretation," he goes one. "If people decide something you don't like is nice, or don't filter it they set norms for the community that are very hard to change. The early days of a virtual world are when the developers have the most influence over the culture. Choosing to see what happens in the beginning and then fix the toxic environment that is likely to emerge is much harder."
I see a lot of positivity in the VRChat community, but to Babbage's point, also notice there's also a level of toxicity around the edges -- and that's surely liable to grow as it grows.
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