Wagner James Au / New World Notes

In the lead-up to my interview in The Atlantic last week, this recent blog post by veteran Internet thinker Anil Dash helped crystallize my thoughts around community and the Metaverse. Because while it's not specifically about the Metaverse, Anil's insights very much apply to metaverse platforms, especially around fostering community and user content creation.

Here's how, he explains, not to do it:

Find the inevitable initial bad actors or harmful content on your platform, and make them the responsibility of the least resourced, most marginalized team in your organization. When that team’s leader suggests structural changes that might prevent future harms, push them out and replace them with someone who had previously only ever been focusing on growth at all costs.

Half-ass all attempts at moderation and building safety into your platform, choosing only to react belatedly and inconsistently when hate and exploitation happen in your community. As a result, only the bad actors will truly thrive as creators on your platform, since everyone else will get hounded off as soon as they gain any traction or audience.

Much more here. The thing is, many metaverse platforms seem to be following Anil's rules on how not to do it… but doing exactly the wrong thing.

His analysis isn't simply theoretical, or based on years of watching platforms fail at community and content management – they also reflect Anil's role as founder and CEO of Glitch, a popular and much-used platform for creating web apps:

They reflect, Anil tells me, "why have we been able to get people to build hundreds of thousands of apps on Glitch".

That comes from cultivating a platform where people can create and remix each other's work but in a way that won't be "that toxic extractive mess" which typically emerges on user-generated platforms amplified by gamified systems.

By contrast, Glitch has no leaderboards or algorithms that can be gamed — and which would also change how people create, and why. (I.E. simply in order to go viral, or only to make money.)  

Glitch’s system does have an option for users to flag offensive/harassing content, but Anil tells me that he and his team put much more focus around community norms. Once inculcated, the community itself will then enforce those mores among each other, and new users.  

"They tell each other 'we don't do that [trollish behavior] here',” says Anil. “That has more power than banning or any policy things we can do… we don't want to be in an arm's race of bad actors, and [community norms are] super powerful."

But establishing those norms, he notes, takes time, and can’t be imposed on a code level or through automation. 

All this resonates with me, and with how Linden Lab fostered the early user community of Second Life — a process of nearly two years, before the virtual world was even available to consumers on an open basis. And that happened, of course, before any early user could make money from the metaverse. 

Thousands of Glitch apps, he tells me, fall into the XR/metaverse-ish category. In fact, here is Anil's vision for building the open metaverse on Glitch.