Research about harassment on Social VR: I need your help!

General Discussion
1

Dear VRChat Team,

I’m Reinier, a 24-year-old student from the Netherlands. Currently, I’m enrolled in the master’s degree of Digital Business and Innovation at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. For my thesis, I’m writing about the prevalence of harassment on Social VR platforms. I think we can all agree that this is an issue that needs to be addressed, as it takes away some of the enormous potential that Social VR can have. The aim of my thesis is to construct a guideline-based framework that can help platform owners to better manage the problem of harassment. However, to make these guidelines as tailored as possible, I need your help.

More details will follow later (as I’m still in the early stages of my thesis), but for now I wanted to ask whether it’s possible to have an interview with one of the staff members in April, to discuss the issue. The interview can provide me with very useful information that I can use to make the framework a better fit!

Kind Regards,

Reinier

2

I think you’re better off emailing them directly.

This part of the community is well, for community members to help one another with things like avatars, worlds, etc.

They’re actually decently fast with responses through
https://help.vrchat.com/

That said, it might also be valuable to get responses from a wider sample size.

There are different communities using vrchat and the prevalence of harassment differs from group to group on the platform. What might also help your thesis is hopping onto vrchat yourself and holding interviews with various players and members and getting their opinion and vision on things.
Or going onto twitch and asking some of the VRChat streamers what their opinion is.

Additionally, it’s also important to set a clear definition of what harassment is. Since it differs from person to person and from community to community. Something that can be just banter can be seen as harassment by some one else.