This is kinda a huge factor as to why Discord isn’t working well for this. The constant redundancy of non-indexable questions makes it especially hard to find information, which just results in a feedback loop of more of the same redundant questions.
Something that is open but also indexable would definitely improve the ease of access and also improve the clarity of what people post. Personally I find myself triple checking posts on forums for example rather than a few discord messages I can quickly reply to and fix.
I really do think if VRChat used a proper forum service and directed people there, it would just work better, people would migrate there rather than asking over and over if it was easier to find information from a proper service with actual indexing, if directed.
I understand the idea of the demographic being centred around Discord, etc. but I feel for this specific instance, the demographic shifts a ton. Not to mention, we’re not so much talking discussion, rather talking about information, etc. As we can see from this thread alone, it leads to a much more productive conversation.
Really, it comes down to post encouragement, and lowering the noise by having indexable information from the start, at least in my opinion.
Ironically, it actually is quite indexable. I use discord as a notes server to tag and search for things. The problem is just that you need to tag them in the first place. Though, the forums tags are inclusive, not exclusive, so it is hard to narrow down results. But you can search for those tags in the title of posts and it usually provides has a solid set of results, since discord is able to search for words independently and exclusively.
I am going to shill a thing I’ve been working on, not because I want to promote it, but to show that this absolutely a problem that needs to be fixed. Goes in line with what I said about the information being splintered all over the place.
I am trying to create a website that aggregates/indexes all of the available information that can be relevant to VRChat Content Creation. This way, people have a one-stop shop to search for useful information, or even see roadmaps on how to learn how to create.
We mainly just need a way for the information/discussions to be interconnected and easy to access. That should be the number one priority.
Absolutely agree.
I understand the possible issues with a system like this. However, it would just be a basic gate, imo. One tier would be “did you upload at least one thing to VRChat ever”, and the other would be “you consistently have or currently create content for VRChat”.
This way, there can be:
Tier 2: Focused discussions that anyone can see
Tier 1: General discussions that anyone can contribute to
This is solely because, far too often, people interject with noise. Not that their opinions are wrong, but it’s very easy for conversations to go into circles or off track. Just look at User Support in the Discord server.
Gatekeeping isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Everyone has an opinion that is probably valid, but there is such a thing as focused discussion that is productive. There needs to be some level of filtering or restriction in order to get qualitative feedback.
Indexable != searchable, when I say indexable I’m mostly referring to from an outside source, i.e. search engines, etc. Your soft has kinda already run into this issue I’m guessing? Since we cannot index Discord servers without some sort of ‘hacky’ workaround, it makes it hard to populate something useful like this. Instead of something you could search / scrape / whatever on the open net.
I’m not entirely sure this needs to be limited, but having stronger moderation and rules dedicated to preventing redundant posting would be more appropriate.
I also think create is a very important word here, at least in the avatar community, there are lots of people working with assets from other creators, which is fundamental to the structure of a UCG platform, but these sorts of things need to be handled in appropriate channels, such as the original creator’s Discord etc. It needs to be a “bottom-up” search for fixes, starting with the most probable factor.
For example, If I release a prefab, that I created with a tool, and a user of my prefab has an issue, the process should look like this:
User asks me for help => Problem lies within the tool, so I ask the tool creator for help => Problem lies within something more fundamental, so the tool creator asks for help in the place we are discussing.
Then the solution would go back down the chain, rather than having a user ask about somebody else’s tool in a place were they cannot fix the underlying issue.
Forums were able to solve this by having threads for tools, etc. Which is similar to having Discord servers, though those are private.
Man, a public space with groups that could be created for specific tools / assets, would be absolutely incredible. I cannot think of any examples of this, but a centralized forum for smaller creator-based forums / cannys would be wild.
This might get a bit messy haha, definitely not in order either. Just quoting and responding as I see stuff.
Just wanted to mention that as you said I was definitely blindsided by this. I really lucked out in that most of my stuff is shaders, and as such very little broke (and only with personal projects). But as a college student mid finals, I really would have preferred to not have to scramble checking if anything broke so that I am not selling someone something that is literally useless until I am able to fix it.
In my case its impossible to even do this. Phone number verification has been enabled since I can remember, and I use an alt for interaction with everything I do VRC related. I would like to keep my school/work discord account separate from my main online presence (used to not really care, but now its something I am more worried about), and discord does not allow verifying two accounts with the same phone number. I do totally get why the restriction is in place however. Just a small thing I figured I would mention .
I am of the opinion, that if one of the servers primary purpose’s is for information sharing, then it should be public in at least a read only form. At least the information sharing channels. We have already seen the rot that is occurring in other areas of tech where tons of information is hidden or lost inside of discord. This would allow people who don’t yet meet the requirements of the server to learn from and look for answers to questions they have. While also eliminating the problem of the server getting too noisy.
On the note of requirements, I am certainly not qualified to grade what makes a creator a creator. However, overall I feel that its important that the requirements aim to not exclude disciplines, and if necessary are later updated to include disciplines that are missed. A shader creator like me may have trouble meeting a requirement that is angled towards world creators, while being equally qualified as a creator for example.
I feel the requirements should also very public, If someone hears about this discord or forum or whatever, they should not feel resentful over knowing that an “in group” exists that they have no idea how to access. They should know exactly how to access it, what requirements they need to hit, etc.
I am of the opinion that this is totally fine, as long as its pretty clear that while the input was seen, it isn’t something in the cards at the moment. It feels bad to see a feature get seen, and then nothing at all gets said about it for potentially years, especially if its something popular or would be revolutionary for a discipline of creation. Just a simple, “don’t think this is in the cards right now, but if it is eventually you will see it on the XXX place”.
I honestly don’t really understand what this would even do for creators. Outside of the creator economy, which I assume is a different beast in terms of who will be able to sell stuff, a partner program seemingly has very little to actually offer creators. Nothing that I could think of as a “service” would be acceptable from a wider view. Maybe a regularly scheduled check in meeting of some sort? But even then that seems sort of pointless if that meeting had no extra impact on what is being looked at (which it shouldn’t, as then it becomes a small “in group” situation).
Maybe a badge, similar to early supporter, but even that really doesn’t do anything practical, its just a cosmetic flex (and sometimes not flex when you have some “rage against the VRCocracy” person yelling at you lol) that at best would be a way to tell if someone was a reliable source of creator information, and at worse would be abused.
It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me as a concept. For almost every idea I can think of I don’t see the benefit from the view of the creator or VRChat. Sounds like extra work that could be used to benefit everyone from VRC’s end, like setting up networking events or discussions (both of these would be the same effort to extend to all creators, at least how I am considering them). It seems almost impossible to encourage creators to partner, when nothing could really be given to them that doesn’t cause issues of favoritism, could be extended to all creators or is just cosmetic.
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But that’s just my two cents on all this stuff. I am glad to see that more thought is being put into the pipeline of communication between VRC and creators. No matter what happens I am excited to see VRC continue to grow and hopefully become more transparent with the community.
I seems difficult to come up with an alternative beyond the proposal in the first post.
If it were to be supplemented, it would be to first gather and share the “will of the people”, exsample preferably by setting up a CANNY list and voting function in the VRC homeworld or GUI itself (I think the web is fine as before for post the issues).
VRChat needs to have a greater seperation between it’s player-base, and creator-base. I believe the demographic here is NOT the same as the average playerbase, not in a way that is demeaning. It’s extremely apparent that creators have a harder time reaching staff related to their issues, as we get flooded by noise from users that are asking completely different questions.
I think lumping the two demographics together, may be a source of the communication and pipeline issues everyone is experiencing. (last post sorry D:)
There is a fatal problem in mainland China, it is not possible to legally use discord, which means that all creators must violate local laws in order to access discord to join the official server.
I have a suggestion, instead of using discord, VRChat could use a site similar to ask forums, just like ask forums, which can be legally accessed in mainland China (except it runs a bit slow, but it works). Or maybe a non-profit organization co-founded by me and my friends could assist VRChat in doing this using social software that works in mainland China (QQ channel and kook, which are poor imitations of discord but at least function similarly).
Structured release cadence, in-app + VCC notifications would be extremely helpful for everyone involved! +1 for that!
On a long enough time horizon, wouldn’t the creator discord also exhibit the same signal-to-noise ratio that’s making it hard to engage with creators on the official server currently?
This applies to a prospective patnership program too. Defining the doorkeeper seems like the real important dark matter here.
If human review is involved in the process, it’s not hard to imagine biases that could lead to voices being excluded.
If you rely on some form of platform metric as a heuristic, you could still inherit the system designer(s) biases. It’s also not difficult to imagine that it could facilitate (or enforce) patterns from creators and their content in their natural pursuit of wanting to have a voice in the decisions that could ultimately affect their source of income.
My personal opinion on this that I’ll shoot into the void for historicity-sake:
I don’t believe it will benefit creators in any communal way to consolidate themselves (or their domain knowledge) under a closed structure moderated by the entity that ultimately dictates the value of their labor — especially not in the midst of it’s budding monetization system where the speculative value of their labor is being negotiated in real-time between the platform, it’s users, and the creators. You have leverage and your own say in that negotiation as a creator, don’t forfeit it.
In this creator → partnership pipeline, is there a viable alternative when you scale enough as a monetized creator on the platform? Could it become a form of partnership-by-ransom?
I know this was written in re: to a program already in development that VRChat will offer, but to be more literal and voice my opinion:
If VRChat really wants to have a healthy partnership with it’s creators and accomplish something new in that dynamic —that is—challenge ‘enshittification’ by balancing being a profitable social platform whilst not exploiting the providers of content that make it so … then it needs to reckon with the infeasibility of that ever happening naturally under the structure of business it exists in. Maybe a better angle here is to seek out the ways that VRChat can ultimately protect it’s creators from itself. Not as it is now, where I doubt there’s any exploitative intent. More so when the precedent of VRChat’s creator economy learns to walk, is eventually required to sprint, and then one day is forced to run. The point of auto-pilot where it can’t slow down or turn backwards anymore. In this regard, I feel one of the most meaningful moves VRChat could make is the one least likely to be made by an entity that orients itself around tech nerdom; publicly push for some form of creator protection legislation akin to consumer protection laws in a way that’d force itself to abide by it.
In any case, those considerations are ultimately what I’m looking for in a '‘creator partnership’ dichotomy.
The big thing in my opinion that I don’t see here (though I’m tired so maybe I’m missing it) is why can’t we have a dedicated day of the week for live updates? Beta I understand, but LIVE??? The one that effects everyone? At the least, it’d let people be more expected of it. I may be wrong about a consistent update day, I’ve heard people make claims that its every Friday, Wednesday, etc. But I can never predict it. There’s been a few times I’ve wanted to go into beta, but didn’t have time and thought that I could check it out later since theres no way VRC would push it in a few days. If I knew-or at least assumed-that the earliest time the beta goes live is that next Tuesday, I’d be able to plan to check it out before then and log my experiences. And if theres an update that was supposed to come out Tuesday, but Monday night someone found a bug, it could just wait and be pushed out the next Tuesday. A week won’t kill the game lmao, and it could actually end up helping since people would have more time to mess around. We all have experienced live updates that broke VRC temporality. Its gonna happen, so why not at least plan for it?
Literally the fact that there’s so little consistency with updates (date wise) drives me nuts and puts me in such a mood because I have to move around all my plans to accommodate the sudden change that was thrown out of Beta a few days later when I thought we’d try to spend a lil more time before just going all hail mary. Bringing back the whole ‘sometimes the update had unseen issues and needs a quick fixing’, if it was consistent that the updates happened every Tuesday at…idk 11pm, then people would plan around that, or at least start to. I can think of at least 3 instances that I was hosting or joining an event that had to be cancelled because of a VRChat update that was so unstable I had better luck balancing one foot on a surfboard vertically sitting on top of a beach ball. This obviously doesn’t account for emergency updates to fix those problems, but once again, I think it’d help if everything was just…slower. And actually try to slap dates when a beta comes out. How hard is it to say “Hey guys, beta is coming out now! If theres no problems, expect it to go live THIS TUESDAY. If there are sudden issues ya’ll find, then we’ll go from there and maybe push it to NEXT TUESDAY.” I don’t expect to get hard dates for everything, but for the big ones that can mess with people’s worlds/avatars/etc, it’d make a WORLD of a difference so that everyones aware and don’t plan for a new world to come out…only for VRC’s update to put it at risk followed with a "well you should have tried the beta. For some projects, at least personally, we just wanna make sure it works in the live first, and don’t expect a sudden change a week out. Thats what happened to me at Spookiality and it really put me in a tizzy (luckily nothing was broken, but having to retest EVERYTHING in spirit O’pumpkin was mad aggro.) It feels like to me that a beta comes out, and its a “good enough” situation, where ya’ll just wanna throw it out there ASAP because you know thats where the real testing begins. Which then kinda screws over people who do wanna try the beta, and just don’t have time, or the people who just want to build their projects and deal with a problem when it comes out.
Finally I think that maybe having a Beta-Badge for VRC might bring some people incentives to get more active IN the beta if thats a real problem. We have a spot for badges, like the early badge, why not actually utilize it a bit more? May not raise the popularity by a lot, but sure would add some people since now others could have a cool badge on their profile. Could be from either being active in the server, or maybe spending X amount of time in VRChat’s Beta form. Even if it is only achievable easily, it’ll make people aware of the beta at least and force people to learn how to get into the beta. I know this is a big blurb, but I have been significantly annoyed by the lack of a consistent day for live updates for a long time now and could probably talk about it for hours hahaha.
There isn’t any requirement to have a specific level of skill or popularity to get in.
Verification should focus purely on ‘are you a creator’, and nothing on ‘how good/known/experienced of a creator are you’.
I think the idea of another public Discord is good overall. Having a targeted place to discuss more advanced concepts and get direct feedback is a nice thing to do.
In terms of the target audience, I believe it should cater to experienced and dedicated creators in VRChat.
The main chat Discord is great for onboarding new creators into the world of content creation, with many volunteers, myself included, dedicating their time to help people take their first steps.
Breaking out the more experienced users into this channel is a good thing in my opinion.
This may be a good idea, it may not, but I think that using the in-game trust rank as a verification tool for when people are allowed to send messages in the server would be neat. The trust rank already serves as an indicator of a user’s activity in VRChat.
By gating access to messaging in some chats behind the trust rank, it ensures that the information is publicly available but creates a nice balance. Allowing feedback from the most active and dedicated users while letting those new look in.
For anything where information needs to be referenced, do not use Discord. It’s a chat program and that’s for synchronous communication.
If it’s an immediate and time-connected thing, sure Discord works. But for “SDK 3.5 doesn’t work in unity 2022, why?” the person has to already be in a Discord that has a chance of having that information.
A forum will be indexed (and archived) and is accessable to people who can’t or won’t use Discord.
These are good steps to improving communication. I especially like the inclusion of a discussion Discord (as long as documentation manages to escape its gravity well to the website
as well ).
Also, a very dumb question I have is whether VRC could use existing channels for app installs, like the news posting feature for Steam (and its equivalents on other platforms). More frequent communication of patch notes there would go a long way to announcing changes earlier, and while it’s less refined for creators specifically (and has some separate moderation issues), it would prompt discussion earlier and likely get people to notice breaking changes sooner.
Honestly, if y’all could get the things you’re discussing in the original post going and include a regular export of patch notes to the Steam news pane for VRC, that would already have significant impact.
I think the objectives need to be made clearer to really interrogate the best path forward.
For example:
Is this for a more equitably distributed and more direct support relationship to high powered creators?
Is this for VRChat to gain early signal from external experts?
Is this for representing players’ viewpoints to VRChat to make them feel heard? For being actually heard?
Is VRChat interested in hearing opinions on process or structure that is VRChat’s responsibility to implement, when they require the nuance of experts? I.e. release process to tool creators?
How can it sustainably demonstrate responsiveness to the concerns (not just that it is listening, but that it is doing)?
When does it go too far
Signal-to-noise ratio is important. How does one earn the privilege to be heard like this in the first place?
What are the imagined benefits for a Creator Partnership program?
Does this imply a relationship closer than current highly engaged community members have to the company?
Does this imply a contractual obligation, monetary exchange of any sort?
Will this require official NDAs? What will the penalty be for breaking them?
Does visibility offer positive or negative clout, and are the benefits enough that this is either a good idea or ripe for abuse?
I would say having feedback and communication about the shared source tools there is on Github (can’t call open source for now and all).
There are quite a few tools for CI, new projects and there is few communication on who runs them, if they review community suggestions and projects like this.
Maybe there could be community members helping for those projects as well.
I think that VRChat has needed more communication with creators for a long time. Especially with beginner creators. I’ve voiced that quite a lot.
It’s difficult to say if a dedicated discord server will be good, because here comes a question - How are people going to be allowed in ? Is it going to be open like the official server ? Is it going to be invite only ? Is there going to be an approval process ? I think it should be open to everyone, so everybody can learn.
If there is enough manpower to handle this, maybe there could be “advanced” or “expert” channels, that are read-only for beginners but advanced or expert people can write in them.
Meaning, there would have to be some kind of authentication, where a human (or a pre-setup system) would decide if a person is advanced or a beginner. Beginner being able to read these channels would prevent knowledge being available only to small groups of people.
The pre-setup system to decide if a user is advanced could be one of the following:
Have 10 avatars uploaded
Have 2 worlds uploaded
Have X amount of hours in VRChat
Or something else. I am not quite sure if this is the right idea for this, so I’d be happy if someone would propose a better system.
Also, VRChat mentioned in one of the videos, they have a new indoor video editor. Why not also make more videos ?
Especially about new features that nobody knows about and you have to read into discord servers to find obscure knowledge that you wouldn’t find any other way (or you are lucky and one of your friends who knows about this particular thing tells you)
Big focus here should be not to create elitism or the notion of elitism. That’s why I think the server should be open, with maybe some channel being read-only for beginners.
The Creator Discord idea is just you duping Prefabs and one or two other communities. What advantage does it actually give you? You end up with 20,000 people in there because it is an official Discord and 200 actually active people at best.
How does an official VRC one make the life of the average world dev better? Are there regular events? Is it required to get access to devs or bleeding edge access to client or SDK updates?
Does it have to be Discord? What happens when Discord enshittifies further?
The only reason to do an enforced release cadence is for internal velocity, not external comms. “Oh no, Udon 2 missed the June window, I guess we have to wait until December” is mad. Improve your internal processes, don’t try and solve it via a pivot on customer-facing rules.
I thought the announcements channel on Discord was good, until it stopped being the place where content development announcements were sent. A lot of it was in the beta category for some reason. These are announcements meant for all creators, not just beta testers or bug reporters.
It would make a lot of sense to have notifications specifically for creators, through whatever means that happens to be, VCC, Discord pings, etc. I understand that many players do not want to see creator-specific announcements. So have two separate announcement channels next to each other, or something else.
Being able to see what’s in progress or coming soon would be immensely useful.
Lastly, I know you know this, but it bears repeating: up to date documentation is gold.
Regarding the “server for creators”, I’ll try to reply in short with the main points:
There is the obvious situation of co-arranging this with existing communities. If communities end up splintered, they may easily remain splintered, so I feel like it makes sense to take some time to do this properly.
The existence of the community should be apparent. Even in the case that you can’t join it immediately as a new creator, you would still want to know of it, and that you will be able to join it in the near future.
There should be a relatively low barrier to entry, if you choose to have one. I would want anyone at all interested to be able to read, but contribution could have a low barrier. My first thought is to require maybe 10 uploads (that is, 10 clicks of the upload button). It could probably be 20 and maybe still be reasonable. Additionally, maybe a trust requirement of Known User tier. I don’t remember what the requirement for Trusted User is but it should never be above that. (I don’t know how many times a player making their own avatars/worlds would upload by the time they reach Trusted User, and it obviously varies quite a bit, but that amount of effort is the absolute maximum I could see as acceptable.)
A lot of valuable creators’ work will go largely unseen for potentially long amounts of time - that’s when they’re learning and improving - so something like “50 user faves required” sounds completely absurd. Not every meaningful creator even makes any public assets at the beginning, but if their interest remains, they will likely eventually have positive contributions. Lastly, given just how much there is to learn, let alone master, in avatar or world creation, there will still occasionally be relatively experienced people asking or wondering about some silly things.
A forum format, over a chatroom format, would be so much more accessible, when you’re just searching for info, be it existing solutions or just discussions. Search (on Discord) is hit-and-miss, and searching for info, in practice, is a lot more than just finding key words in their context. (I don’t have extended experience with Discord’s own forum format.)
Regarding a creator partnership program, I don’t have much to say yet because I don’t know what you intend it to be, but the single most important thing for me would be to not pedestal partners too much when it comes to content recommendation. If you must, then a separate world/avatar section of works specifically made by partners. Otherwise, at most, I’m thinking of an icon next to their name or something, not entirely unlike a trusted mark on other social media. The crux of this, is that their work will already be of great quality, and greater in number than most others, and thus their work will naturally show itself to people, both in VRChat’s listings and just wherever there are people and hangouts. Also, these creators’ feedback can obviously be useful, but could never be the be-all and end-all of discussion and interactions between developers and management and the game’s users and creators. (There is obviously a lot that could be said about the upcoming paid content features, but handling payments, memberships between partners and users, and so on - that’s a discussion of its own.)
Somewhat related points:
The Canny software is indeed bad. Way too hard to find relevant existing stuff, and it feels like its missing functionality for browsing or searching.
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