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:
Continue reading "Civil Discussion About Virtual World Trolls (Comments of the Week)" »
How Virtual Worlds' Creator Economies Can Exert a "Big Sort" Cultural Effect (Comment of the Week)
Responding to my post on VRChat's emerging new creator economy featuring the video above), longtime reader Martin K. has some provocative thoughts on the sociology of virtual worlds:
Martin's referring to the highly influential sociology book arguing that people across the United States have been "sorting" themselves by culture and worldview, to the point where even differing neighborhoods in the same city can hold widely contrary values and opinions.
Martin argues that different kinds of commerce can have the same sorting effect on virtual worlds:
Continue reading "How Virtual Worlds' Creator Economies Can Exert a "Big Sort" Cultural Effect (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Monday, August 05, 2024 at 02:38 PM in Comment of the Week, Social Structures, Social Upheaval | Permalink | Comments (0)
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