Not to speak for a whole community but I think the decentralization idealist would say that people can do their own moderation, instead of relying on a central entity which makes the same broad rules for everyone
That's how Second Life works. Landowners can eject or ban people from their land. This is entirely at the discretion of the landowner. People are always complaining about having been banned from clubs, but there are hundreds of clubs, run by hundreds of people.
This is far, far better than having "moderators". In practice, social media moderators come from the same pool of people that staff low-end call centers. Arming them with ban hammers while giving them anonymity and lack of accountability creates major headaches of its own.
Second Life does have a few paid moderators. A user has to file an abuse report to make anything happen, and in a few days, someone will process the trouble ticket. Policy is not to attempt to intervene in resident to resident disputes at all.
What makes this work is that it's a big, sparsely populated world. A user's radius of annoyance is about 100 meters, and the whole world is about the size of Los Angeles.
So, jerks are local, even with over 50,000 people logged in.
The metaverse crowd, if and when they actually create big virtual worlds with large numbers of users, needs to understand this.
Not really. Take Minecraft for example – before the acquisition by Microsoft, servers were entirely run by individuals/groups who set their own moderation policies. Some servers were entirely PG-rated, some allowed cursing/sex stuff/etc. Mojang technically still had some level of control over things like skins (which were centrally managed), but otherwise it was choose-your-own-moderation for each individual server.
However recently (and widely discussed on HN[1]) Microsoft has started censoring the entire ecosystem, to the point where you can get banned from all servers for chat behavior in one server, because your MC account is now your MSFT account. So they can just ban the latter to block you from all of MC (except for cracked servers).
But the point of an MMO is to share a space with thousands of people so individual servers with differing rules don’t really work in that context. And individual servers doing moderation is the same as individual server based games doing moderation, it’s just a difference in scale. I’m sure there are loads of other games people can play. For example Rust is infamous for a lack of moderation and has all the racist and otherwise edgey content in it your heart desires.
Ultima had plenty independent (pirate) servers with vastly different cultures and even game mechanics. Even WoW, I think, has servers with different moderation - those that require roleplay and those that don't. Unified experience IMO would be a detriment for most games.
There's no difference between a Minecraft server implementing moderation policies and an MMO implementing them. The self-moderation we're talking about would be on an individual level.
Moderation on Minecraft servers are done by admins, just as it's done on MMOs. Both controlled by a central entity. What is the difference?
The people appointing moderators are part of the central entity, unless you mean that the trolls being muted also have a say in it. Show me one such server that is not a tiny one with just a bunch of friends, where moderation is not needed anyway.
Not at all. Doing your own moderation depends on having the tools available to mute/censor/block people you don't want to hear from.
For example, I used to play Rocket League. I played either solo or teamed exclusively with a few friends and mutual acquaintances. They have various settings to mute the chat and comments from other people. I'm not interested in all in hearing flames or nonsense chatting from random people I'm playing against, so I have all chat muted except for team chat (people I know and choose to team with). This is doing your "own moderation", and is the ideal circumstance is far as I'm concerned.
Unfortunately, however, Rocket League doesn't allow you do your own moderation, despite the proper tools being available. One time, someone I was teamed with (who similarly had all non-team chat muted), typed something in team chat that ran afoul of Rocket Leagues sensibilities, and they subsequently received a week-long ban. Nobody could see this chat except our team (myself and this other person). We had already engaged in our "own moderation" by muting everyone else. This was an overreach as far as I'm concerned, and would far prefer to have the power to see and hear what I choose, and not what the platform chooses.
Rocket League is a bad comparison. You only have at max, what 5 other players, that you need to block if necessary. In an MMO without moderation you wouldn't be able to keep up with blocking every troll spamming even if that was all you did.
An MMO without central moderation would mean a chat with 99% trolls spamming and even if you spent all time blocking people instead of playing you wouldn't be able to keep up.
To welshwelsh's point, he wasn't advocating for no moderation, but rather good and limited moderation. For example, I doubt most would have an issue with something like moderation over cheating.
Most cheaters do — but they’ll represent their viewpoint in terms that claim a “greater cause”, such as individual liberties or rights or whatever, so that they can try to rabble-rouse the crowd against enforcement in order to continue cheating. (This occurs with kernel anti-cheat drivers, for example, but there’s no way to measure what percentage of folks that is.)
Christ, if a game needs access to my operating system runtime to function, I think I'll just play a different game. Might as well just give them every file on your computer and a list of every connected device at that point.
No need to act surprised, and a rabble-rousing post isn’t necessary here. This is HN. We go around the same circular warpath about kernel anti-cheat drivers every few months for the past five years, and your argument is a poorly-presented rehash of a common viewpoint from those many, many discussions.
Eh, we are talking about games hooking into OS kernels, "rabble rousing", if that's what you want to call it, absolutely is necessary. Do the games even notify the users that this is happening and what exactly it means to the security of their computer - the tool they (or their parents) probably use to manage their entire life on? I really don't think so.
Regardless of what you might think, since I'm not a gamer (the isometric Ultima Online was about the last game I was interested in, more than a decade or two ago) this is the first time I heard about it - and it's completely insane. How can we - the industry, the software engineers - allow it? Why do we even turn on the protected mode?
The first post shown, and the first couple pages of results, will help you catch up on the discussions around these methods. I don’t have anything new to offer you that isn’t already hashed out extensively therein. Good luck with the reading, and welcome to HN.
I think there's a bright line between "content moderation" where speech and behavior is being moderated, and spam and/or bug abuse which has nothing to do with content of speech whatsoever. Rate limiting inputs is not the same as picking and choosing who is allowed to say what based on arbitrary standards of speech content.
Communities on MMOs these days aren't like they were 20 years ago. They're FULL of racists, bigots, and morons spewing their shitty political opinions in the different world chats. Way more than there used to be.
I'd be happy for some moderation to silence all of those people.
Um, 20 years ago MMOs were also full of racists, misogynists, and others engaging in harassment and “spewing their shitty political opinions” both in-game and out (e.g. guild sites).
