Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will turn into a ‘metaverse’

Second Life, which has been at this a while, has a reasonably workable solution - a rather strong notion of individual property rights. By default, anyone can enter anyone else's property. The property owner can change that. They can block everybody from entering. They can block individuals. They can eject people already there. They can set time limits. They can create groups and only allow members of that group in. They can charge to get in. They can delegate those powers to a program of their own. All those options are in use.

So, for most land in Second Life, Linden Lab doesn't have to get involved. Linden Lab itself owns land, but it's mostly roads, water, and open space. Almost all the places where people congregate are privately owned. Club owners routinely eject people, and are not required to justify their decisions to anyone. There are more complaints about "I was ejected from ..." than "I was harassed at ..." To which the Linden Lab stock answer is "we don't get involved in resident to resident disputes".

There's still some trouble at Linden Lab's own "safe hubs", which are probably the worst places in Second Life. Linden Lab does not police those much. So they're jerk magnets. This is mostly a problem for new users who haven't figured out not to hang out there much.

There's a paid "governance" team, of about six people. They do sometimes ban people for griefing. Most of what they do is deal with real estate complaints - "There's a 60 meter tall rotating, floating, glowing FOR RENT sign at REGION/X/Y/Z, which violates ad policy", or "There's a big tree at REGION/X/Y/Z which goes over the edge of private property onto a public road and has a solid branch too low for trucks." (You can usually build stuff only on your own property, but it can stick out over the edge. The owner of the parcel encroached upon can remove the object if they want, but that's not automatic, because a bit of encroachment makes the shared landscaping look better. It really works like real life as much as possible.) Governance has public meetings, and it's like going to your local board of zoning appeals.

This rather low-key approach works well in practice, and it doesn't require an army of "moderators".

I mention all this because almost nobody making "metaverse" noises seems to get this. Of course, Decentraland has only 200-300 concurrent users, so they don't have the scale to get these scaling problems. The worlds that are divided into little disconnected rooms don't have neighbor problems. Roblox has a huge moderator staff, but their target demographic is aged around 13. If you can't solve this problem, your biggest labor cost is your paid goon squad.

Still cheaper than daycare!

Love the blunt and honest feedback. The platform comes alive in VR btw, but understand if you don’t have a headset. You can start building using the editor tool and share your room with others to view it in a social manner.

If there’s any features you’d think would make this more like a proper metaverse, please let me know.