Comment by _mb2v | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _mb2v | Hacker News Reader

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Tangentially to EAC, I've commented downthread several times on the danger to children and lax moderation of VRChat, but just to drive the point home, search "VRCat" on PornHub and you'll find all sorts of videos created in-game. These are avatars on VRChat's servers that users can and sometimes do use in public worlds. Officially VRChat's Terms of Service prohibits NSFW content. In practice, the game's loading screen tips say "no NSFW content in public worlds" and staff know exactly what's going on.

There is no NSFW tagging system, no content filtering for uploaded avatars, no effective means to permanently ban abusive users, and extremely lax in-game moderation. There are tons of sexualized, fully nude, and fully-functional avatars all over the place. Spend a couple hours in the main public worlds and you're almost guaranteed to see some. Remember, this game is absolutely full of children and pre-teens, and the kind of adults who choose to hang out around them. The game is free on the Meta Quest store with zero age restrictions.

In my experience, and from what I asked a few friends about: We have never seen an actual "NSFW" avatar in our combined hundreds of hours of playtime, and those that use the avatars that comes close to being NSFW are usually the younger audience. It is possible to filter out avatars from the world space, and only be able to see your friends avatars. Making your own instances (servers), you are able to kick out players that misbehave.

But I would like a NSFW-tag on content.

And as a side-note: The game is free everywhere, Steam, too.

As someone who makes quite a few avatars for myself and friends, there is a flag for NSFW when publishing your avatars to VRChat's servers as well as ones for realistic violence, gore and such. I'm unaware of what impact these flags have for the use of said avatars though.

I have tested a fully SFW avatar with the NSFW flag checked in the past and I was able to use it just fine inside private and public lobbies so what we actually need here is a way for either world creators and/or lobby visibility settings to restrict what avatar flags are allowed within the current session of that lobby, as well as the ability for users to auto hide/show avatars with specific flags checked.

This wont be bullet proof as this relies heavily on user based trust (which VRChat have a long history of being against) and someone can very easily reverse what I did and mark a heavily NSFW avatar as SFWto bypass such filters, but it will be a good start for limiting exposure to these avatars.

I am just a regular (free-)user in VRChat, and have never seen a "NSFW"-tag or any kind of rating on avatars, so I thought there were no such thing. I wonder how it is used then.

I would contest that in this sense VRChat is just a VR version of Omegle in this sense. If a parent lets their young children onto a VR headset unsupervised, well they probably would also let them onto Omegle unsupervised. In both cases I'm inclined to think the parent is somewhat negligent in letting their kids talk to random strangers on the internet.

To go even further, it seems the same issues occur on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and those sites don't have to install kernel level anti-cheat to ensure you don't look at illicit content. At the same time, I would argue that this shows that kid-unfriendliness is an internet-wide problem and maybe we should be doing more in general to build an internet that works for kids.

Is that really related to modding though? I thought model swapping was built-into the game, people can change their look without any mods. How does banning mods solve that?

It doesn’t. I’m talking about a problem that’s inherent to the base game, and unfortunately not widely known.

This sort of just sounds like the internet at large.

Yes, to an extent it’s more of the same, just more immersive. If you’re an adult, the bad stuff is white noise for the most part.

If you’re a kid, it can be scary and potentially dangerous. The game is advertised with cartoon characters and a child-friendly aesthetic, far from what you actually find in public worlds. It’s easy for bad actors to hone in on kids based on voice, then corner them and do bad things. I’ve spoken to kids who were approached and “flashed” by much older users with explicit, ejaculating sexual avatars. It’s unpleasant and disorienting. Not to mention adults who zero in on kids, drop a portal to show them a “cool world” and then get them one-on-one in essentially an unsupervised VoIP call. This platform is practically designed to trap and abuse kids.

And yes, kids technically aren’t allowed to play VRChat or even go online using the Quest per Terms of Service. Enforcement is impossible, not that anyone tries, so kids are everywhere.

If kids are banned from the service then people shouldn't bother trying to protect them on the service. That's the responsibility of their parents not the owners of the service.

When the service is full of kids anyway and the operator knows this, the situation changes. Also many adults (me, other users I’ve spoken with in-game) would like the option to filter NSFW content, as on practically every other large Internet platform.

Bible Black and South Park are technically "cartoon characters", that doesn't mean acceptable for kids.

Please don't let your child talk to strangers - in person, in Roblox or VRChat, in sketchy forums, etc. If you do, set boundaries for them and have the talk about danger.

If you let your kid talk to strangers, strangers will talk to them.

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