by 0x01d871870cbbdde934526e17637c0cfef0b3b38b (VLM)
Should the following $24,000 grant in the Platform category be approved?
Abstract
As virtual environments like Decentraland grow, the necessity for effective moderation tools becomes increasingly paramount to ensure an enjoyable and welcoming user experience. This project proposes the development of a real-time moderation tool tailored for Decentraland, delivered as an npm library. The tool will feature an API for seamless integration with real-time builder tools, including Virtual Land Manager.
This suite of moderation tools will allow the scene administrator to take the following actions:
Move a troublesome user to a spawn point or other specified location
Create a “jail” area to trap trolls in
Black out a user’s screen
Prompt a troublesome user to teleport to another parcel
Hide your scene with physical walls that show only for people you’ve banned
Scene administrators will also have the ability to empower visitors with certain collective moderation actions, such as:
Community voting to ban or suspend a user from a scene
Community abuse reporting via Discord webhook (visitors can report abuse to a channel in your Discord server)
An integration API will be created along with documentation which will allow other tools to implement these moderation features into existing platforms.
Roadmap
August
Create library, publish to GitHub, set up publishing to NPM
Define API methods that will be needed for integrations
Draft user interface concepts for the tool
September
Define API endpoints that will be needed for integrations
Finalize user interface design
Create a working proof of concept for creating a “jail” box
Create a working proof of concept for allowing admin to move and keep visitors in different locations
October
Build out functional UI skeleton
Create a working proof of concept for scene admin adding/removing users from a ban list and hiding the scene from banned users
Create a working proof of concept for scene admin blacking out a user’s screen
Create a working proof of concept for scene admin prompting a visitor to teleport to another location
November
Start building a system that allows non-admin visitors to propose a ban and vote on removing someone
December
Finish building a system that allows non-admin visitors to propose a ban and vote on removing someone
January
Clean up UI
Implement any proof of concept work into its final interface
Two months full time to do the in-world voting seems a bit long, the Modinator bot on the DAO Discord was built in a couple days.
I understand there is a bit more work but I don’t think there are hundreds of hours of work to build the voting system.
I’m not quoting the price for hundreds of hours of my time. I’m simply giving myself enough time to complete this in my free time during nights and weekends, as I also work full time and have other unpredictable family obligations at the moment.
It could definitely take me less time if everything goes well, but making the grant process longer gives the accountability squad time to revoke the grant if I’m not meeting my milestones, and gives me more time to make sure I hit them without overloading myself.
I will say that building the Discord Modinator is not really an equal comparison to building a user interface for this sort of thing from scratch using the SDK. Any Discord bot is going to benefit from being integrated into the existing interface and infrastructure of Discord, which took them years of work and probably millions of dollars to build.
You wouldn’t have to deal with testing simple things like whether or not the state of a vote was in sync between multiple voters, because you trust that Discord works. That is something I will need to account for in this system.
We asked for in-world moderating tools from Foundation and were unable to protect a user from continued harassment with what we were given. I’ll support anything that helps make this a safer environment.
I remember when big brands spent a lot of money for installations only to have someone repeatedly use slurs in chat. If Decentraland is going to scale, we need better in-world options for moderation.
@Unknower , founder of VLM is a very knowledgeable DCL developer and trusted individual in this Dao. I am confident that Unknower has the skills and know how to bring better moderation to our beloved metaverse platform.
Good question, the answer is kind of a yes wrapped in a no. The main deliverable for this project will be the library that anyone can use and install in the same way that VLM is installed. People will be able to use it without having to use VLM.
I do plan to use this library as a dependency within VLM, so VLM will have a user interface to control some of the features built by this library. But in the spirit of open source, I want this grant to prioritize building modular open source tools that can be used by anyone in the community. Similar to how we have the utils library and ui-utils library, I’m thinking this one will basically be “mod-utils”.
As we gain more capabilities in the new client, I hope the functions in this library can be easily maintained and have new features added without them getting held up by the work to implement them into VLM or any other application.
Hope that gives some additional clarification on the relationship between this library that VLM will build and the VLM tool itself
With @yemel and now @esteban undelegating everyone, i don’t think anything without RobL support will pass unless you can get @radix, @nwiz and one other large district owner to vote in support, along with the majority of the community, who mostly all have sub 5k vp
Extending features brings more utility to DCL, and moderation utils are useful in-world.
The most important is supporting creators with this skillset to keep them building in Decentraland, which currently has too much bureaucracy but lacks productivity/content/community.
Since two of the “No” votes are followed up with rationale pertaining to a dislike of the moderators employed by the DAO, who operate either on this forum or the DAO Discord, I’d like to kindly ask people not to use this proposal as a chance to be an activist against moderators in the DAO. In hopes they even read this far, I suppose.
What’s being proposed here is a tool to allow people operating land and deploying scenes to moderate their own little section of land in-world. This is completely unrelated to the DAO or its own moderation.
Replacing certain staff on the DAO moderation team is not going to give people better tools to moderate their scenes in Decentraland. The DAO is not Decentraland and nobody in the DAO has any power to moderate anything that happens in any scene in the Decentraland world.
I’m disappointed to see people voting no on grants just out of spite for unrelated people who happen to be moderating the DAO, rather than for any relevant disagreement towards the deliverables or budget or anything like that. Please don’t punish actual builders with your desire to lash out at the DAO.
