Roblox is working on a "moderation" system that can ban a user within 100ms after saying a bad word in voice. But their average user is 13 years old.
Interestingly, Second Life, the virtual world built of user-created content, does not have this problem. Second Life has real estate with strong property rights. Property owners can eject or ban people from their own property. So moderation, such as it is, is the responsibility of landowners. Operators of clubs ban people regularly, and some share ban lists. Linden Lab generally takes the position that what you and your guests do on your own land is your own business, provided that it isn't visible or audible beyond the parcel boundary. This works well in practice.
There are more and less restrictive areas. There's the "adult continent", which allows adult content in public view. But there's not that much in public view. Activity is mostly in private homes or clubs. At the other extreme, there's a giant planned unit development (60,000 houses and growing) which mostly looks like upper-middle class American suburbia. It has more rules and a HOA covenant. Users can choose to live or visit either, or both.
Because it's a big 3D world, about the size of Greater London, most problems are local. There's a certain amount of griefing, but the world is so big that the impact is limited. Spam in Second Life consists of putting up large billboards along roads.
Second Life has a governance group. It's about six people, for a system that averages 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent connected users. They deal mostly with reported incidents that fall into narrow categories. Things like someone putting a tree on their property that has a branch sticking out into a road and interferes with traffic.
There's getting to be an assumption that the Internet must be heavily censored. That is not correct. There are other approaches. It helps that Second Life is not indexed by Google and doesn't have "sharing".
The biggest reason IMO for moderation in the first place is because if you don't block/censor some people, they will block/censor others. Either by spamming, making others feel intimidated or unwelcome, making others upset, creating "bad vibes" or a boring atmosphere, etc.
So in theory, passing on moderation to the users seems natural. The users form groups where they decide what's ok and what's banned, and people join the groups where they're welcome and get along. Plus, what's tolerable for some people is offensive or intimidating for others and vice versa: e.g. "black culture", dark humor.
If you choose the self-moderation route you still have to deal with legal implications. Fortunately, I believe what's blatantly illegal on the internet is more narrow, and you can employ a smaller team of moderators to filter it out. Though I can't speak much to that.
In practice, self-moderation can be useful, and I think it's the best and only real way to allow maximum discourse. But self-moderation alone is not enough. Bad communities can still taint your entire ecosystem and scare people away from the good ones. Trolls and spammers make up the minority of people, but they have outsized influence and even more outsized coverage coverage from news etc.. Not to mention they can brigade and span small good communities and easily overwhelm moderators who are doing this for volunteering.
The only times I've really seen moderation succeed are when the community is largely good, reasonable, dedicated people, so the few bad people get overwhelmed and pushed out. I suspect Second Life is of this category. If your community is mostly toxic people, there's no form of moderation which will make your product viable: you need to basically force much of your userbase out and replace them, and probably overhaul your site in the process.
It sounds like Second Life lived long enough to build content moderation, pushed the work of content moderation onto its users, and in a hilarious psychological trick worthy of machiavelli, made the users think they own a piece of something (they don't) so that what other users do on "your" land is up to you. My job would also love if I paid them to work there instead of the other way around.
The Internet must be heavily censored to be suitable for mainstream consumption and the tools described make Second Life sound like no exception.
> You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation
made the users think they own a piece of something (they don't)
True, land in Second Life is really a transferable lease. It is a asset, though. You can resell to someone else. Second Life makes most of their money from "tier charges", which work like property taxes and are a fixed amount per square meter. Land resales and rentals, though, are a free market. "Content moderation" is a minor part of using land in Second Life. You usually build something on land and do something with it.
You have to be present (as an avatar) to make trouble. You can be a jerk in a virtual world, but you have to do it "in person". Most of the social pressures of real life work. Troublemakers can be talked to before things reach the ejection stage.
Many of the problems on forums come from being able to post blind, with no interaction during posting. What you posted persists, and is amplified by "sharing" and search engines. Virtual worlds lack that kind of amplification. You can gather a crowd, if you wish, but they don't have to stay around.
It's not perfect. There are still jerks. But being a jerk in a virtual world does not scale. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place.
In both your original comment and in this followup, which makes the point explicit, I find it ironic that SL have addressed one of the key challenges of "spaceless" cyberspace ... by reinventing the concept of space. Which, as you say, "keeps everything from being in the same place".
That's not a criticism. There's a considerable degree of respect. There's some irony in that spacelessness is one of the purported advantages of the online world. It also makes me wonder what, if any, other options might exist, because effective tools for combatting abuse seem scarce, and those that do exist either brittle or capricious.
For some reason I remember everyone's behavior on old school message boards as much better than modern social media. Sure, you have your degenerate boards, but just don't go there. Moderation and censor ship will always exist, but they seem to work better when they are more locally applied.
I remember it being a huge mix! It really depended on what boards you were on. There were boards I was a member of in 2003 that had very strong moderation and they were great!
I was also on some basically unmoderated boards and saw some stuff I wish I didn't see.
I think this is more indicative of the communities you were a part of than the actual behavioral norms of people at the time.
Echoing the same sentiment Counter Strike was exactly the same. There was an insane diversity of servers. Some were literally labeled Adult Content and way on the other extreme some were 'christian' where saying the word "shit" would get you banned.
True sense of authority keeps everyone at bay; if one a mod goes rogue it all collapses. But when a mod can be countable for their actions, everyone acts as a community and holds the peace. A transparent modlog could really make a community.
Clan's were more than just a bunch of mates playing a game. It was a free-open community where everyone was treated with respect regardless of who you were. Q3Arena was my first FPS at 13 and I fell in love for just the community spirit.
Organized clan-wars between X and Y, joining rival clan-servers just to poke and have fun are days which are now lost. It's the same experience of inserting a VHS cassette and hitting play knowing you were going to receive a real-feel of an experience.
I may of hit the tequila a bit too stiff tonight and this really hits hard but I do wonder if the same experience will ever make a come back.
I think this is because old school message boards had a sense of community between existing users and there wasn't a large influx of users at any single point. If one person comes in and starts running amok it's easy to just ignore them, tell them off or ban them. But now there's less persistent forums that people are a part of, so there's a lack of community standards that people just naturally gravitate towards. There's no overall community between, for example, people who comment on youtube, so any youtube comment section is just whoever happens to stumble across it.
Having run a platform of a million or so of those, this is somewhat true. But there were spammers posting across many communities and those where the mods left got littered. We had to set forums to automatically move to require moderator approval to post which at least saved the board in history, but was a pain for a moderator if they returned.
> Second Life has real estate with strong property rights.
Property rights is the wrong framing. We know this from the social sciences. The actual solution is just ownership.
This is the problem with public spaces in big cities compared to close-knit smaller communities: if it "belongs to everyone" it doesn't belong to anyone, if it is owned by the city/state/government, it's not actually owned by the people.
I'm not saying framing it as individual property rights doesn't work, I'm just saying it's too narrow an interpretation and a bad analogy, e.g. because property rights can allow for layers of indirection which erode this effect whereas ownership can be shared and still maintain the effect (although a cynic would then frame it as "peer pressure").
> Roblox is working on a "moderation" system that can ban a user within 100ms after saying a bad word in voice. But their average user is 13 years old.
Reminds me of XBox live more than 10 years ago. They banned the word "Gay" since it was used as a slur by (by their estimate) 98% of users.
But there was a two percent population that simply used it legitimately. [0]
Interestingly, Second Life, the virtual world built of user-created content, does not have this problem. Second Life has real estate with strong property rights. Property owners can eject or ban people from their own property. So moderation, such as it is, is the responsibility of landowners. Operators of clubs ban people regularly, and some share ban lists. Linden Lab generally takes the position that what you and your guests do on your own land is your own business, provided that it isn't visible or audible beyond the parcel boundary. This works well in practice.
There are more and less restrictive areas. There's the "adult continent", which allows adult content in public view. But there's not that much in public view. Activity is mostly in private homes or clubs. At the other extreme, there's a giant planned unit development (60,000 houses and growing) which mostly looks like upper-middle class American suburbia. It has more rules and a HOA covenant. Users can choose to live or visit either, or both.
Because it's a big 3D world, about the size of Greater London, most problems are local. There's a certain amount of griefing, but the world is so big that the impact is limited. Spam in Second Life consists of putting up large billboards along roads.
Second Life has a governance group. It's about six people, for a system that averages 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent connected users. They deal mostly with reported incidents that fall into narrow categories. Things like someone putting a tree on their property that has a branch sticking out into a road and interferes with traffic.
There's getting to be an assumption that the Internet must be heavily censored. That is not correct. There are other approaches. It helps that Second Life is not indexed by Google and doesn't have "sharing".