Last week's post on Dr. Ruth Diaz's new project to interview and better understand virtual world trolls helped provoke a pretty interesting reader conversation that's difficult to summarize, but here's one particular highlight -- longtime reader Martin K. makes the provocative argument that trolls are somewhat necessary to the long term health of virtual worlds:
[T]rolling and toxicity might be important for many virtual communities to stay stable (and relatively small) by limiting the influx of new users (and thereby avoiding the "Eternal September" problem). I consider Second Life, VRChat, Rec Room, and Gorilla Tag examples of such communities.
By Eternal September, Martin's referring to a phenomena back in the early 90s when Usenet was opened up to mainstream Internet users, causing a backlash among the established user base of Usenet groups. In other words, trolling might have the effect of driving out noobs while maintaining stability and group cohesion among the dedicated community.
But how can a platform expand? Martin again:
The way to grow a community beyond those limits appears to be the fragmentation of a community into smaller groups ("bubbles") with limited communication between groups. Facebook has perfected this approach, but long before Facebook (and other social media), competitive team-based multiplayer games have strictly limited communication between competing teams to limit toxicity.
Whether social VR can adopt this approach of fragmentation to grow larger communities is an open question.
VRChat actually did keep growing its user base beyond the infamous Ugandan Knuckles troll era of 2017/2018 and now boasts over 10 million active users. That's largely a credit to the platform's karmic system (as I discuss in my book); arguably the fact that individual VRChat worlds tend to have a small capacity (20-30 is ideal) helped enable sub-communities to avoid both trolls and noobs.
Anyway, in response to Martin's argument, Samantha Venia Logan, a colleague of Dr. Diaz and herself a PhD candidate, makes some important distinctions:
[T]he current academic discourse currently thinks that 'trolling' and 'toxicity' are not necessarily one and the same. Trolls don't solely produce toxicity. Toxic communities can exist in heavily governed communities that look according to all our ways of measuring them, to be perfectly healthy and civil places.
For example, In Trott, Beckett, and Paech's paper, "Toxicity in the Manosphere" they argue that we have to define the impacts of toxic or trolling conversations by why they happened, what became of those actions, and the scale of that contributor's impact. Individual trolling contributions for clout-sake could mark someone who is going against the cultural norms of a community because it gives them attention, or because they believe the community is actually wrong for some belief. This is not necessarily "toxic". Instead, this is a lone act of "incivility" we can consider just acting up. We define incivility then as "an act that attacks, degrades, or calls for a community to deviate from its previously established values, goals, or practices."
This is broadly different from 'trolling' acts that come from a demonstrably more harmful source; what we'd consider 'toxic.' A toxic contribution comes from someone who was probably already harmed in some way by another community. this is a contribution whose sole intent is to explicitly harm the well-being of a community due to the 'poisoned influence' from another already-soured community's impact on them. Definitionally then Toxicity is, "a measure of the potential harm one community's ideology may have on another, or on the health of the public sphere." These contributions are capable of harming a community's health as backed by entire swaths of populations who believe that same thing - a much more scalable threat.
One is a personal act of rebellion. The other is harmful cross-community spill-over whose impact causes polarization, bubbling, and worse.
Much more here. I haven't delved too deeply into this topic, but one point I'm fascinated in is the value of genial, consensual trolling, especially in open-ended virtual worlds. Maybe many people don't want Tim Apple barging into their virtual home babbling about "tech!" and "kit!" while wearing a VisionPro; but to many others, that just adds more serendipitous fun to a night online.
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