I think there’s a point here that’s been missed, to realize such “neutral” rating system can become a tool for harassment or exclusion, and potentially create negative/toxic behaviors the team specifically doesn’t want to encourage. The point of contention is the dislike system, if made public.
There is no argument or account verification required to click a downvote button to address why something is being disliked or “downvoted”. All it takes is one click for a vague reaction. That’s what makes “downvote mobbing” or brigading efficient, potentially for silencing specific authors, or to create stress or embarrassment for the targeted creators. There’s no way to moderate these downvotes, because each individual dislike also looks legitimate. This may disproportionally affect new creators more than established creators.
So called review bombing can also happen with dislike systems, where a creator’s content may receive a large number of user-contributed reviews in response to the creator’s actions or opinions (possibly off-platform) that are not related to the content itself being rated.
This way the system fails to measure or reward quality and starts measuring who got targeted or represented a disagreeable opinion in their creation.
The people who do not like something choose not to visit the world. They’re not going to click a dislike button for that.
In 2021, YouTube removed public dislike counts and made the counts privately visible to the creator.
My honest answer is that we really do need this rating system, BUT votes made by Visitor and New User ranks shouldn’t count and instead should be like only visible to the person that left the vote.
If the rating system does turn out to be bad, I think we should still keep it, but have it only be visible to the person that left the vote.
We honestly really really need something like this just for our own reference because we visit so many worlds that it’s really hard to remember sometimes if you’ve even visited a place.
I mean, i agree that it could be used to do some review bombing, but i believe that this can be mitigated by the way it is displayed by the user.
As you mention youtube, the count is not displayed but it most likely influences the way the algorithm see things. And if a creator is harassed we go back to the creator protection point made on the original post.
I believe it could be correctly used in the end but that there is lots of care and tests before pushing it fully.
a vote system would be way less prone to abuses if hiding AI stuff with filters was possible, because it would have way less impact to leave bad reviews en masse
I think it doesn’t matter when there’s so much soulless generated content to wade through, why even bother giving feedback on something the creator probably didn’t even make?
There is no argument or account verification required to click a downvote button to address why something is being disliked or “downvoted”. All it takes is one click for a vague reaction. That’s what makes “downvote mobbing” or brigading efficient, potentially for silencing specific authors, or to create stress or embarrassment for the targeted creators.
No more than there is for any other social platform that has such rating features. Nor do ratings alone dictate the display of content on any of those platforms; they blend a variety of engagement metrics. This is just adding an additional dimension to the existing ones.
There’s no way to moderate these downvotes, because each individual dislike also looks legitimate. This may disproportionally affect new creators more than established creators.
Every other platform has ways to moderate vote manipulation and brigading, so why assume VRChat couldn’t/wouldn’t? They have the data to tell the age of an account, if it’s been to a world it’s voted on, if all it does is rate worlds but never plays, if it has a habit of downvoting, if it’s in a cluster of other spontaneous downvotes, etc. It can also be proactively combated by punishing accounts that abuse the system in clear detectable ways. Vote manipulation isn’t a novel concept with no known mitigations, and there’s ways to handle them just like other platforms already do to help enforce integrity.
VRChat isn’t pioneering anything new here by adding a rating system. It’s simply catching up on a decades old and proven paradigm that virtually everyone uses for a reason. Not a “perfect” one to be sure, but “perfect” should never be the enemy of “better”. And the platform has far and beyond outgrown the old paradigm, which is what led to the frustrations and mess we’re facing now. People are upset that content they think is poor stands on even footing with content they think is good, and that’s been an issue on the platform since long before AI came around. This finally gives people a means to do something about it. Regardless of what anyone else may rate something or the average rating, YOU can finally mark for yourself how you felt about a world and refer back to that if you stumble on it again in the future. That alone is already a huge improvement.
Bad idea , there shouldn’t be a voting system in the first place . Can you imagine how bad it would be if people were disliking a world for no reason , making that world not available even to be searched up?
I agree with your point. I can instantly think of many ways to maliciously sabotage things through a voting system. In fact, even now, there are many disgusting but simple ways to cause serious damage to the world. For example, maliciously report a certain world to get it taken down and have the creator’s account restricted; then the saboteurs can upload pirated versions of the world and place stolen models and promotional ads in them however they like. Why do I use this example? Because in fact, recently several saboteurs have been doing this and have succeeded. As for the voting system, rest assured: whether it will cause severe abuse depends solely on whether saboteurs are interested in it.
This is why I proposed an alternative where it would only be used for self reference. I didn’t make it clear, but in the case where you can only see your own votes it wouldn’t affect discoverability. That’s my bad for not being more specific. I really think we need to give the rating system a try, while having the ratings be publicly visible but also not doing anything to discoverability for now, just simply being a number you can look at.
I’m against it altogether. You simply can’t trust people with voting, especially when trolls are involved. I could understand the idea if everyone acted in good faith, but unfortunately, that’s not the reality we’re dealing with. I don’t think there’s a reliable solution or a better alternative to prevent this from being abused. At this point, I’d rather they just leave it out entirely.
A more controlled approach would be to require users who leave a like or dislike to also provide a written review explaining why they feel that way about the world. This would give creators more insight into the reasoning behind someone’s opinion rather than just receiving a vote without any context and if that reasoning is wrong , the creator could just delete it .
Additionally, I think there should be certain requirements before someone is allowed to vote. For example, users should have created at least two worlds of their own, with a reasonable level of popularity, and have been part of VRChat for at least five years before being eligible to leave reviews. This would help ensure that feedback comes from people who have some actual experience with VRChat’s world creation community, rather than allowing anyone, including trolls or people who don’t understand the work involved, to influence a world’s rating.