Is Online Behavior Changing (For the Better) in 2017?

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This year, it seems like every second article you read is about online behavior. From Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto to Twitter’s ongoing attempts to address abuse, toxicity is a hot topic.

However, forward-thinking companies like Riot Games have been (not so quietly) researching online toxicity for years now. And one of their biggest takeaways is that when it comes to online behavior, as a society we’re still in the discovery stages… and we have a long way to go.

Luckily, we have experts like Riot’s brilliant Senior Technical Designer Kimberly Voll to help guide us on the journey.

A long-time gamer with a background in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science (told you she was brilliant), Kim believes passionately in the power of player experience on game design. She also happens to be an expert in player behavior and online communication.

We sat down with her recently to discuss the current state of online discourse, the psychology of player behavior, and how game designers can promote sportsmanship in their games.

You say you want a revolution

Two Hat: As an industry, it seems like 2017 is the year we start to talk about online behavior, honestly and with an eye to finding solutions.

Kim: We’re on the cusp of a pretty significant shift in how we think of online digital play. Step by step, it’s starting to mature into a real industry. We’re at that awkward teenage phase where all hell keeps breaking loose sometimes. The internet is the fastest spreading technology that humans beings have ever faced. You blink, it went global, and now suddenly everybody’s online.

“How do you teach your kids to behave online when we don’t even know how to behave online?”

It hasn’t been culturally appropriated yet. It’s here, we like it, and we’re using it. There’s not enough of us stepping back and looking at it critically.

The fanciest of etiquette!

TW: Is it something about the nature of the internet that makes us behave this way?

Kim: The way we normally handle etiquette is with actual social settings. When you go to a kid’s club, you use kid-friendly language. When you got to a nightclub, you use nightclub-friendly language. We solve for that pretty easily. Most of us are good at reading a room, knowing how to read our peers, knowing what’s okay to say at work, versus elsewhere, knowing what it’s okay to say when you’re on the player behavior team and you’re exposed to all manner of language [laughs]. We’ve been doing this since we moved out of caves.

But we don’t have that on the internet. You can’t reliably look around and trust that space. And you find with kids that they go into all of the spaces trusting. Or they do what kids do and push the limits. Both are not great. We want kids to push the limits so they can learn the limits, but we don’t want them to build up these terrible habits that propagate these ways of talking.

On the internet, you don’t get the gesticulations, you don’t the presence that is being in the room with another person. There are certain channels that right now are completely cut off. So right now we’re hyper-focusing on other channels — for a long time that’s just been chat. These limitations mean that you end up trying to amplify and bring out your humanity in different ways.

The nature of things

TH: As a gamer and a cognitive scientist, what is your take on toxic player behavior?

Kim: I think the first step is understanding the nature of the problem.

There are different ways to look at toxicity and unsportsmanship. We can’t paint it all with the same brush.

“Are there people who just want to watch the world burn? They’re out there, but in our experience, they’re really, really rare.”

Not everyone else is being a saint, but not everyone is the same.

MOBAs [Multiplayer Battle Arena Games] are frustrating because they’re super intense. If something goes wrong you’re particularly susceptible to losing your temper. That creates a tinderbox that gives rise to other things. Couple that with bad habits and socio-norms that have developed on the internet, and have been honed somewhat for a gaming audience, and they’re just that — they’re norms. Doesn’t make them necessarily right or wrong, and it doesn’t mean that players like them. We find that players don’t like them, overwhelmingly. And they’re becoming incredibly vocal, saying “We don’t want this.”

But there’s a second vocal group that’s saying “Suck it up. It’s the internet, it’s the way we talk.” And the balance is somewhere in the middle.

It’s always a balancing act

TH: How can game designers decide what tactic they should use to promote better behavior in their game?

Kim: There is obviously a line, but it shifts a bit. Where that line falls will depend largely on your community, your content. It’s the same way the line shifts dramatically when you’re out with friends drinking, versus at home with the family playing card games with your kid cousins.

Bandaids help, but they’re not the full solution.

There has to be flexibility. The first thing to do is understand your community, and try to gain a broader perspective of the motivation and underlying things that drive these behaviors. And also understand that there is no “one size fits all” approach. As a producer of interactive content, you need to figure out where your comfort level is. Then draw that line, and stick by that line. It’s your game; you can set those standards.

There is understanding the community, understanding it within the context of your game, and then there’s the work that Community Sift does, which is shield. I think that shielding remains ever-important. But there has to be balance. The shield is the band-aid, but if we only ever do that, we’re missing an opportunity to learn from what that bandaid is blocking.

There’s a nice tension there where we can begin to explore things.

You don’t need to fundamentally alter your core experience. But if you have that awareness it forces you to ask questions like, “Do I want to have chat in this part of the game or do I want to have voice chat immediately after a match when tempers are the most heated?

Change is good

TH: Do you have an example of a time when Riot made a change to gameplay based on player behavior?

Kim: Recently we added the ability to select your role before you go into the queue, with some exceptions. Before it used to be that you would pop into chat and the war would start, because there are some roles that people tend to like more.

Before, it used to be that you would pop into chat and then the war would start to ensure you got the role you wanted. Whoever could type “mid” fastest ideally got the role, assuming people were even willing to accept precedence, which sometimes they weren’t. And if you lagged for any reason, you could miss your chance at your role.

We realized we were starting the game out on the wrong foot with these mini-wars. What was supposed to be a cooperative team game — one team vs another — now included this intra-team fighting because we started off with that kind of atmosphere.

Being able to choose your role gives players agency in a meaningful way, and removes these pre-game arguments. It’s not perfect, but it’s made the game significantly better.

Trigger warnings, road rage, and language norms… oh my!

TH: What kinds of things trigger bad behavior?

Kim: There is a mix of things that trigger toxicity and unsportsmanlike behavior. Obviously, frustration is one. But let’s break that down: What do you want to do when you’re frustrated? You want to kick and scream. You want the world to know. And if somebody is there with you, you need them to know, even if they had nothing to do with it.

“Put yourself in a situation where you’re locked behind a keyboard, your frustration is bubbling over, and you’re quite likely alone in a room playing a game. How do you yell at the person on the other side of the screen? Well, you can use all caps, but that’s not very satisfying. So how do you get more volume into your words? You keep amping up what you’re saying. And what’s the top of that chain? Hate speech.”

It’s very similar to road rage. I remember my mom told me a story about some dude who was upset that she didn’t run a yellow light, He actually got out of the car and started pounding on her hood. And I bet he went home afterward, pulled into his driveway, greeted his kid, and was a normal person for the rest of the day.

You’re not an actual monster; you’re in a particular set of circumstances, in that situation, that have funneled you through the keyboard into typing things you might not otherwise type. So that’s one big bucket.

Sometimes, you Hulk out.

In the 70s and 80s, we used to say things like “You’re such a retard.” Now, we’re like “I can’t believe we used to say that.” There are certain phrases that were normal at the time. We had zero ill intent — it was just a way of saying “You’re a goofball.” That sort of normalcy that you get with language, no matter how severe, when you’re exposed to it regularly, becomes ingrained in you, and you carry that through your life and don’t even realize it.

We’ve sent people their chat logs, and I truly believe that they when they look at them, they have no idea what the problem is. Other people see the problem, but they just think, “Suck it up.” But there is a third group of people who look at it and they think “This is the way everybody talks, I don’t understand.” They’re caught in a weird spot where they don’t know how to move forward. And that can trigger defensiveness.

The thought process is roughly “So, you’re asking me to change, but I don’t quite get it, I don’t want to change, because I’m me, and I like talking this way, and when I say things like this, my friends acknowledge me and laugh, and that’s my bonding mechanism so you can’t take that away from me.”

Typically, no one thinks all those things consciously. But they do get angry, and now we’ve lost all productive discourse.

There is a full spectrum here. It’s a big tapestry of really interesting things that are going on when people behave this way on the internet. All of that feeds into the question how do we shield it?

“Shielding is great, but can we also give feedback in a way that increases the likelihood that people who are getting the feedback are receptive to it?”

Can we draw a line between what’s so bad that the cost of the pain caused to people is far more than the time it would take to try to help this person?

Can we actually prevent them from getting into this state by understanding what’s triggering it, whether it’s the game, human nature, or current socio-norms?

Let’s talk about toxicity

TH: What can we do to ensure that these conversations continue?

Kim: I think we need to steer away from accusations. We’re all in this together; we’re all on the internet. There’s a certain level of individual responsibility in how we conduct ourselves online.

I’ve had these conversations when people are like “Yes, let’s clean up the internet, let’s do everything we have to do to make this happen.” And the flipside is people who say “Just suck it up. People are far too sensitive.”

And what I often find is that the first group are just naturally well-behaved online, while the second group is more likely to lose it. So when we have these conversations, what we don’t realize is that our perspective can unconsciously become an affront on who they are.

If we don’t take that into account in the conversation, then we end up inadvertently pointing fingers again.

We have to get to a point where can we talk about it, without getting defensive.

Redefining our approach to player behavior

TH: Your empathetic approach is refreshing. Many of us have gotten into the habit of assuming the worst of people and being unwilling to see the other person’s perspective. And of course, that isn’t productive.

Kim: Despite our tendency to make flippant, sweeping comments — most people are not jerks. They’re a product of their own situation. And those journeys that have got each of us to where we are today are different, and they’re often dramatically different. And when we put people on the internet, we’ve got a mix of folks for whom the only thing connecting them is this game, and they come into the game with a bunch of bad experiences, or just generally feeling like “Everyone else is going to let me down.”

Then somebody makes an innocent mistake, or not even a mistake — maybe they took a direction you didn’t expect — and that just reinforces their worldview. “See, everyone is an idiot!”

When expectations aren’t met it leads to a lot of frustration, and players head into games with a lot of expectations.

I believe very viscerally that we have to listen before we try to aggressively push things out. But also we have to realize that the folks we are trying to understand may not be ready to talk. So we may have to go to them. And that applies to a lot of human tragedy, from racism to sexism.

We come in wagging our fingers, and our natural human defense is “Walls up, defenses up — this is the only way I will solve the cognitive dissonance that is you telling me that I should change who I am. Because I am who I am, and I don’t want to change who I am. Because who else would I be?” And that’s scary.

TH: It sounds like we need to take a step back and show a bit of grace. Like we said before, the conversation is finally starting to happen, so let’s give people time to adjust.

Kim: Think about the average company. You’re trying to make a buck to put food on the table and maybe make a few great games. That doesn’t leave a lot of room to do a lot of extra stuff. You may want to, but you may also think, “I have no idea what to do, and I tried a few things and it didn’t work, so what now? What do I do, stop making games?”

“At Riot, we’re lucky to have had the success that we’ve had to make it possible fund these efforts, and that’s why we want to share. Let’s talk, let’s share. I never thought I’d have this job in my life. We’re very lucky to fund our team and try to make a difference in a little corner of the internet.”

It’s harder for games that have been out for a long time. Because it’s harder to shift normative behavior and break those habits. But we’re trying.

 

Want to know more about Kim? Follow @zanytomato on Twitter

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Four Moderation Strategies To Keep the Trolls Away

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To paraphrase the immortal Charles Dickens:

It was the : ) of times, it was the : ( of times…

Today, our tale of two communities continues.

Yesterday, we tested our theory that toxicity can put a dent in your profits. We used our two fictional games AI Warzone and Trials of Serathian as an A/B test, and ran their theoretical financials through our mathematical formula to see how they performed.

And what were the results? The AI Warzone community flourished. With a little help from a powerful moderation strategy, they curbed toxicity and kept the trolls at bay. The community was healthy, and users stuck around.

Trials of Serathian paid the cost of doing nothing. As toxicity spread, user churn went up, and the company had to spend more and more on advertising to attract new users just to meet their growth target.

Today, we move from the hypothetical to the real. Do traditional techniques like crowdsourcing and muting actually work? Are there more effective strategies? And what does it mean to engineer a healthy community?

Charles Kettering famously said that “A problem well stated is a problem half-solved”; so let’s start by defining a word that gets used a lot in the industry, but can mean very different things to different people: trolls.

What is a Troll?

We’re big fans of the Glove and Boots video Levels of Trolling.

Technically these are goblins, but still. These guys again!

The crux of the video is that trolling can be silly and ultimately harmless — like (most) pranks — or it can be malicious and abusive, especially when combined with anonymity.

When we talk about trolls, we refer to users who maliciously and persistently seek to ruin other users’ experiences.

Trolls are persistent. Their goal is to hurt the community. And unfortunately, traditional moderation techniques have inadvertently created a culture where trolls are empowered to become the loudest voices in the room.

Strategies That Aren’t Working

Many social networks and gaming companies— including Trials of Serathian —take a traditional approach to moderation. It follows a simple pattern: depend on your users to report everything, give users the power to mute, and let the trolls control the conversation.

Let’s take a look at each strategy to see where it falls short.

Crowdsourcing Everything

Crowdsourcing — depending on users to report toxic chat — is the most common moderation technique in the industry. As we’ll discover later, crowdsourcing is a valuable tool in your moderation arsenal. But it can’t be your only tool.

Let’s get real — chat happens in real time. So by relying on users to report abusive chat, aren’t you in effect allowing that abuse to continue? The damage is already done by the time the abusive player is finally banned, or the chat is removed. It’s already affected its intended victim.

Imagine if you approached software bugs the same way. You have QA testers for a reason — to find the big bugs. Would you release a game that was plagued with bugs? Would you expect your users to do the heavy lifting? Of course not.

Community is no different. There will always be bugs in our software, just as there will always be users who have a bad day, say something to get a rise out of a rival, or just plain forget the guidelines. Just like there will always be users who want to watch the world burn — the ones we call trolls. If you find and remove trolls without depending on the community to do it for you, you go a long way towards creating a healthier atmosphere.

You earn your audience’s trust — and by extension their loyalty — pretty quickly when you ship a solid, polished product. That’s as true of community as it is of gameplay.

If you’ve already decided that you won’t tolerate harassment, abuse, and hate speech in your community, why let it happen in the first place?

Muting Annoying Players

Muting is similar to crowdsourcing. Again, you’ve put all of the responsibility on your users to police abuse. In a healthy community, only about 1% of users are true trolls — players who are determined to upset the status quo and hurt the community. When left unmoderated, that number can rise to as much as 20%.

That means that the vast majority of users are impacted by the behavior of the few. So why would you ask good players to press mute every time they encounter toxic behavior? It’s a band-aid solution and doesn’t address the root of the problem.

It’s important that users have tools to report and mute other players. But they cannot be the only line of defense in the war on toxicity. It has to start with you.

Letting The Trolls Win

We’ve heard this argument a lot. “Why would I get rid of trolls? They’re our best users!” If trolls make up only 1% of your user base, why are you catering to a tiny minority?

Good users — the kind who spend money and spread the word among their friends — don’t put up with trolls. They leave, and they don’t come back.

Simon Fraser University’s Reddit study proved that a rise in toxicity always results in slower community growth. Remember our formula in yesterday’s post? The more users you lose, the more you need to acquire, and the smaller your profits.

Trust us — there is a better way.

Strategies That Work

Our fictional game AI Warzone took a new approach to community. They proactively moderated chat with the intention to shape a thriving, safe, and healthy community using cutting-edge techniques and the latest in artificial and human intelligence.

The following four strategies worked for AI Warzone — and luckily, they work in the real world too.

Knowing Community Resilience

One of the hardest things to achieve in games is balance. Developers spend tremendous amounts of time, money, and resources ensuring that no one dominant strategy defines gameplay. Both Trials of Serathian and AI Warzone spent a hefty chunk of development time preventing imbalance in their games.

The same concept can be applied to community dynamics. In products where tension and conflict are built into gameplay, doesn’t it make sense to ensure that your community isn’t constantly at each other’s throats? Some tension is good, but a community that is always at war can hardly sustain itself.

It all comes down to resilience — how much negativity can a community take before it collapses?

Without moderation, players in battle games like AI Warzone and Trials of Serathian are naturally inclined to acts — and words — of aggression. Unfortunately, that’s also true of social networks, comment sections, and forums.

The first step to building an effective moderation strategy is determining your community’s unique resilience level. Dividing content into quadrants can help:

  • High Risk, High Frequency
  • High Risk, Low Frequency
  • Low Risk, High Frequency
  • Low Risk, Low Frequency

 

Where does your community draw the line?

Younger communities will always have a lower threshold for high-risk chat. That means stricter community guidelines with a low tolerance for swearing, bullying, and other potentially dangerous activity.

The older the community gets, the stronger its resilience. An adult audience might be fine with swearing, as long as it isn’t directed at other users.

Once you know what your community can handle, it’s time to look closely at your userbase.

Dividing Users Based on Behavior

It’s tempting to think of users as just a collection of usernames and avatars, devoid of personality or human quirks. But the truth is that your community is made up of individuals, all with different behavior patterns.

You can divide this complex community into four categories based on behavior.

 

The four categories of user behavior.

Let’s take a closer look at each risk group:

  • Boundary testers: High risk, low frequency offenders. These players will log in and instantly see what they can get away with. They don’t start out as trolls — but they will upset your community balance if you let them get away with it.
  • Trolls: High risk, high frequency offenders. As we’ve discussed, these players represent a real threat to your community’s health. They exist only to harass good players and drive them away.
  • Average users/don’t worry: Low risk, low frequency offenders. These players usually follow community guidelines, but they have a bad day now and then. They might take their mood out on the rest of the community, mostly in a high-stress situation.
  • Spammers: Low risk, high frequency offenders. Annoying and tenacious, but they pose a minor threat to the community.

Once you’ve divided your users into four groups, you can start figuring out how best to deal with them.

Taking Action Based on Behavior

Each of the four user groups should be treated differently. Spammers aren’t trolls. And players who drop an f-bomb during a heated argument aren’t as dangerous as players who frequently harass new users.

 

How to deal with different kinds of behavior.

Filter and Ban Trolls

Your best option is to deal with trolls swiftly and surely. Filter their abusive chat, and ban their accounts if they don’t stop. Set up escalation queues for potentially dangerous content like rape threats, excessive bullying, and threats, then let your moderation team review them and take action.

Warn Boundary Testers

A combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence works great for these users. Set up computer automation to warn and/or mute them in real time. If you show them that you’re serious about community guidelines early on, they are unlikely to re-offend.

Crowdsource Average Users

Crowdsourcing is ideal for this group. Content here is low risk and low frequency, so if a few users see it, it’s unlikely that the community will be harmed. Well-trained moderators can review reported content and take action on users if necessary.

Mute Spammers

There are a couple of options here. You can mute spammers and let them know they’ve been muted. Or, for a bit of fun try a stealth ban. Let them post away, blissfully unaware that no one in the room can see what they’re saying.

Combining Artificial and Human Intelligence

The final winning strategy? Artificial intelligence (AI) and computer automation are smarter, more advanced, and more powerful than they’ve ever been. Combine that with well-trained and thoughtful human teams, and you have the opportunity to bring moderation and community health to the next level.

A great real world example of this is Twitch. In December 2016 they introduced a new tool called AutoMod.

It allows individual streamers to select a unique resilience level for their own channel. On a scale of 1–4, streamers set their tolerance level for hate speech, bullying, sexual language, and profanity. AutoMod reviews and labels each message for the above topics. Based on the streamer’s chosen tolerance level, AutoMod holds the message back for moderators to review, then approve or reject.

Reactions to AutoMod were resoundingly positive:

Positive user responses and great press? We hope the industry is watching.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

So, what have Trials of Serathian and AI Warzone taught us? First, we really, really need someone to make these games. Like seriously. We’ll wait…

 

This is as far as we got.

 

We learned that toxicity increases user churn, that traditional moderation techniques don’t work, and that community resilience is essential. We learned that trolls can impact profits in surprising ways.

In the end, there are three costs of doing nothing:

  • Financial. Money matters.
  • Brand. Reputation matters.
  • Community. People matter.

Our fictional friends at AI Warzone found a way to keep the trolls away — and keep profits up. They carefully considered how to achieve community balance, and how to build resilience. They constructed a moderation strategy that divided users into four distinct groups and dealt with each group differently. They consistently reinforced community guidelines in real-time. And in the process, they proved to their community that a troll-free environment doesn’t diminish tension or competition. Quite the opposite — it keeps it alive and thriving.

Any community can use the four moderation strategies outlined here, whether it’s an online game, social sharing app, or comments section, and regardless of demographic. And as we’ve seen with Twitch’s AutoMod, communities are welcoming these strategies with open arms and open minds.

One final thought:

Think of toxicity as a computer virus. We know that online games and social networks attract trolls. And we know that if we go online without virus protection, we’re going to get a virus. It’s the nature of social products, and the reality of the internet. Would you deliberately put a virus on your computer, knowing what’s out there? Of course not. You would do everything in your power to protect your computer from infection.

By the same token, shouldn’t you do everything in your power to protect your community from infection?

Want more? Check out the rest of the series:

At Two Hat Security, we use Artificial Intelligence to protect online communities from high-risk content. Visit our website to learn more.

Just getting started? Growing communities deserve to be troll-free, too.

Originally published on Medium

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Doing The Math: Does Moderation Matter?

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Welcome back to our series about the cost of doing nothing. Feeling lost? Take a minute to read the first two posts, The Other Reason You Should Care About Online Toxicity and A Tale of Two Online Communities.

Today we test our theory: when social products do nothing about toxicity, they lose money. Using AI Warzone and Trials of Serathian (two totally-made-up-but-awesome online games) as examples, we’ll run their theoretical financials through our mathematical formula to see how they perform.

Remember — despite being slightly different games, AI Warzone and Trials of Serathian have similar communities. They’re both competitive MMOs, are targeted to a 13+ audience, and are predominantly male.

But they differ in one key way. Our post-apocalyptic robot battle game AI Warzone proactively moderates the community, and our epic Medieval fantasy Trials of Serathian does nothing.

Let’s take a look at the math.

The Math of Toxicity

In 2014, Jeffrey Lin from Riot Games presented a stat at GDC that turned the gaming world on its head. According to their research, users who experience toxicity are 320% more likely to quit. That’s huge. To put that number in further perspective, consider this statistic from a 2015 study:

52% of MMORPG players reported that they had been cyber-victimized, and 35% said they had committed cyberbullying themselves.

A majority of players have experienced toxicity. And a surprising amount of them admit to engaging in toxic behavior.

We’ll take those numbers as our starting point. Now, let’s add a few key facts — based on real data — about our two fictional games to fill in the blanks:

  • Each community has 1 million users
  • Each community generates $13.51 in revenue from each user
  • The base monthly churn rate for an MMO is 5%, regardless of moderation
  • According to the latest Fiksu score, it costs $2.78 to acquire a new user
  • They’ve set a 10% Month over Month growth target

So far, so good — they’re even.

Now let’s add toxicity into the mix.

Even with a proactive moderation strategy in place, we expect AI Warzone users to experience about 10% toxicity. It’s a complex battle game where tension is built into the game mechanic, so there will be conflict. Users in Trials of Serathian — our community that does nothing to mitigate that tension— experience a much higher rate of toxicity, at 30%.

Using a weighted average, we’ll raise AI Warzone’s churn rate from 5% to 6.6%. And we’ll raise Trials of Serathian to 9.8%.

Taking all of these numbers into account, we can calculate the cost of doing nothing using a fairly simple formula, where U is total users, and U¹ is next month’s total users:

U¹ = U — (U * Loss Rate) + Acquired through Advertising

Using our formula to calculate user churn and acquisition costs, let’s watch what happens in their first quarter.

Increased User Churn = Increased Acquisition Costs

In their first quarter, AI Warzone loses 218,460 users. And to meet their 10% growth rate target, they spend $1,527,498 to acquire more.

Trials of Serathian, however, loses 324,380 users (remember, their toxicity rate is much higher). And they have to spend $1,821,956 to acquire more users to meet the same growth target.

Let’s imagine that AI Warzone spends an additional $60,000 in that first quarter on moderation costs. Even with the added costs, they’ve still saved $234,457 in profits.

That’s a lot. Not enough to break a company, but enough to make executives nervous.

Let’s check back in at the end of the year.

The Seven Million Dollar Difference

We gathered a few key stats from our two communities.

When Trials of Serathian does nothing, their EOY results are:

  • Churn rate: 9.8%
  • User Attrition: -8,672,738
  • Total Profits (after acquisition costs): $39,784,858

And when AI Warzone proactively moderates, their EOY results are:

  • Churn rate: 6.6%
  • User Attrition: -5,840,824
  • Total Profits (after acquisition costs): $47,177,580

AI Warzone deals with toxicity in real time and loses fewer users in the process — by nearly 3 million. They can devote more of their advertising budget to acquiring new users, and their userbase grows exponentially. The end result? They collect $7,392,722 more in profits than Trials of Serathian, who does nothing.

Userbase growth with constant 30% revenue devoted to advertising.

And what does AI Warzone do with $7 million more in revenue? Well, they develop and ship new features, fix bugs, and even start working on their next game. AI Warzone: Aftermath, anyone?

These communities don’t actually exist, of course. And there are a multitude of factors that can effect userbase growth and churn rate. But it’s telling, nonetheless.

And there are real-world examples, too.

Sticks and Stones

Remember the human cost that we talked about earlier? Money matters — but so do people.

We mentioned Twitter in The Other Reason You Share About Online Toxicity. Twitter is an easy target right now, so it’s tempting to forget how important the social network is, and how powerful it can be.

Twitter is a vital platform for sharing new ideas and forging connections around the globe. Crucially, it’s a place where activists and grassroots organizers can assemble and connect with like-minded citizens to incite real political change. The Arab Spring in 2011 and the Women’s March in January of this year are only two examples out of thousands.

But it’s become known for the kind of abuse that Lily Allen experienced recently — and for failing to deal with it adequately. Twitter is starting to do something — over the last two years, they’ve released new features that make it easier to report and block abusive accounts. And earlier this week even more new features were introduced. The question is, how long can a community go without doing something before the consequences catch up to them?

Twitter’s user base is dwindling, and their stock is plummeting, in large part due to their inability to address toxicity. Can they turn it around? We hope so. And we have some ideas about how they can do it (stay tuned for tomorrow’s post).

What Reddit Teaches us About Toxicity and Churn

Reddit is another real-world example of the cost of doing nothing.

In collaboration with Simon Fraser University, we provided the technology to conduct an independent study of 180 subreddits, using a public Reddit data set. In their academic paper “The Impact of Toxic Language on the Health of Reddit Communities,” SFU analyzes the link between toxicity and community growth.

They found a correlation between an increase in toxic posts and a decrease in community growth. Here is just one example:

The blue line shows high-risk posts decreasing; the red line shows the corresponding increase in community growth.

It’s a comprehensive study and well worth your time. You can download the whitepaper here.

What Now?

Using our formula, we can predict how a proactive moderation strategy can impact your bottom line. And using our two fictional games as a model, we can see how a real-world community might be affected by toxicity.

AI Warzone chose to engineer a healthy community — and Trials of Serathian chose to do nothing.

But what does it mean to “engineer a healthy community”? And what strategies can you leverage in the real world to shape a troll-free community?

In tomorrow’s post, we examine the moderation techniques that AI Warzone used to succeed.

Spoiler alert: They work in real games, too.

Originally published on Medium

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A Tale of Two Online Communities

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What happens when two games with similar communities take two very different approaches to chat?

Welcome to the end of the world. We have robots!

Picture this:

It’s dark. The faint green glow of a computer screen lights your field of vision. You swipe left, right, up, down, tracing the outline of a floating brain, refining a neural network, making connections. Now, an LED counter flashes red to your right, counting down from ten. You hear clanking machinery and grinding cogs in the distance. To your left, a new screen appears: a scrap yard, miles of twisted, rusty metal. The metal begins to move, slowly. It shakes itself like a wet dog. The counter is closer to zero. Urgent voices, behind, below, above you:

“NOW.”

“YOUR TURN.”

“DON’T MESS IT UP!”

“LET’S DO THIS!”

“YOU GOT THIS!”

Welcome to AI Warzone, a highly immersive, choice-driven game in which players create machines that slowly gain self-awareness, based on user’s key moral decisions. Set in 3030, machines battle each other in the industrial ruins of Earth. You create and join factions with other users that can help or hinder their progress, leading to — as we see above — a tense atmosphere rife with competition. A complex game with a steep learning curve, AI Warzone is not for the faint of heart.

Welcome to the past. We have dragons!

Now, imagine this:

You stand atop a great rocky crag, looking down on a small village consisting of a few thatch-roofed cottages. A motley crew stands behind you; several slope-browed goblins, the towering figure of a hooded female Mage, and two small dragons outfitted with rough-hewn leather saddles.

You hold a gleaming silver sword in your hand. A group of black-robed men and women, accompanied by trolls and Mages, approach the village, some on dragon-back, others atop snarling wolves. Some of them shout, their voices ringing across the bleak landscape. Almost time, you whisper, lifting your broadsword in the air and swinging it, so it shines in the pale sun. Almost time…

“FUCK YOU FAGGOT,” you hear from far below.

“kill yurself,” a goblin behind you says.

“Show us yr tits!” yells one of the black-robed warriors in the village.

“Oh fuck this,” says the hooded female Mage. She disappears abruptly.

This is life in Trials of Serathian, an MMO set in the Medieval world of Haean. Users can play on the Dawn or Dusk side. On the Dawn side, they can choose to be descendants of the famed warrior Serathian, Sun Mages, or goblins; on the Dusk side, they can play as descendants of the infamous warrior Lord Warelind, Moon Mages, or trolls. Dawn and Dusk clans battle for the ultimate goal — control of Haean.

Two Communities, Two Approaches to Chat

Spoiler alert: AI Warzone and Trials of Serathian aren’t real games. We cobbled together elements from existing games to create two typical gaming communities.

Like most products with social components, both AI Warzone and Trials of Serathian struggle with trolls. And not the mythical, Tolkien-esque kind — the humans-behaving-badly-online kind.

In both games, players create intense bonds with their clan or faction, since they are dependent on fellow players to complete challenges. When players make mistakes, both games have seen incidents of ongoing harassment in retaliation. Challenges are complex, and new users are subject to intense harassment if they don’t catch on immediately.

Second spoiler alert: Only one of these games avoids excessive user churn. Only one of these games has to spend more and more out of their advertising budget to attract new users. And only one of these games nurtures a healthy, growing community that is willing to follow the creators — that’s you — to their next game. The difference? One of these games took steps to deal with toxicity, and the other did nothing.

In tomorrow’s post, we take a deep dive into the math. Remember our “math magic” from The Other Reason You Should Care About Online Toxicity? We’re going to put it to the test.

Originally published on Medium

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The Other Reason You Should Care About Online Toxicity

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In these divisive and partisan times, there seems to be one thing we can all agree on, regardless of party lines — online toxicity sucks.

Earlier this week Lily Allen announced that she was leaving Twitter. When you read this recent thread about her devastating early labor in 2010, it’s not hard to see why:

Does anyone want their social feeds to be peppered with hate speech or threats? Does anyone like logging into their favorite game and being greeted with a barrage of insults? And does anyone want to hear another story about cyberbullying gone tragically, fatally wrong? And yet we allow it to happen, time and time again.

The human cost of online abuse is obvious. But there’s another hidden cost when you allow trolls and toxicity to flourish in your product.

Toxicity is poison — and it will eat away at your profits.

Every company faces a critical decision when creating a social network or online game. Do you take steps to deal with toxicity from the very beginning? Do you proactively moderate the community to ensure that everyone plays nice?

Or — do you do nothing? Do you launch your product and hope for the best? Maybe you build a Report feature so users can report abuse or harassment. Maybe you build a Mute button so players can ignore other players who post offensive content. Sure, it’s a traditional approach to moderation, but does it really work?

If you’re not sure what to choose, you’re not alone. The industry has grappled with these questions for years now.

We want to make it an easy choice. We want it to be a no-brainer. We want doing something to be the industry standard. We believe that chat is a game mechanic like any other, and that community balance is as important as game balance.

When you choose to do something, not only do you build the framework for a healthy, growing, loyal community — you’ll also save yourself a bunch of money in the process.

In this series of posts, we’ll introduce two fictional online games, AI Warzone and Trials of Serathian. We’ll people them with communities, each a million users strong. One game will choose to proactively moderate the community, and the other will do nothing. Think of it as an A/B test.

Then, armed with real-world statistics, our own research, and a few brilliant data scientists, we’ll perform a bit of math magic. We’ll toss them all into a hat (minus the data scientists; they get cranky when we try to put them in hats), say the magic words, wave our wands, and — tada! — pull out a formula. We’ll run both games’ profits, user churn, and acquisition costs through our formula to determine, once and for all, the cost of doing nothing.

But first, let’s have a bit of fun and delve into our fictional communities. Who is Serathian and why is he on trial? And what kind of virtual battles can one expect in an AI Warzone?

Join us tomorrow for our second installment in this four-part series: A Tale of Two Online Communities.

 

Originally published on Medium

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Can Community Sift Outperform Google Jigsaw’s Conversation AI in the War on Trolls?

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There are some problems in the world that everyone should be working on, like creating a cure for cancer and ensuring that everyone in the world has access to clean drinking water.

On the internet, there is a growing epidemic of child exploitative content, and it is up to us as digital service providers to protect users from illegal and harmful content. Another issue that’s been spreading is online harassment — celebrities, journalists, game developers, and many others face an influx of hate speech and destructive threats on a regular basis.

Harassment is a real problem — not a novelty startup idea like ‘the Uber for emergency hairstylists.’ Cyberbullying and harassment are problems that affect people in real-life, causing them psychological damage, trauma, and sometimes even causing people to self-harm or take their own lives. Young people are particularly susceptible to this, but so are many adults. There is no disconnect between our virtual lives and our real lives in our interconnected, mesh-of-things society. Our actual reality is already augmented.

Issues such as child exploitation, hate speech, and harassment are problems we should be solving together.

We are excited to see that our friends at Alphabet (Google) are publicly joining the fray, taking proactive action against harassment. The internal incubator formerly known as Google Ideas will now be known as Jigsaw, with a mission to make people in the world safer. It’s encouraging to see that they are tackling the same problems that we are — countering extremism and protecting people from harassment and hate speech online.

Like Jigsaw, we also employ a team of engineers, scientists, researchers, and designers from around the world. And like the talented folks at Google, we also collaborate to solve the really tough problems using technology.

There are also some key differences in how we approach these problems!

Since the Two Hat Security team started by developing technology solutions for child-directed products, we have unique, rich, battle-tested experience with conversational subversion, grooming, and cyberbullying. We’re not talking about sitting on the sidelines here — we have hands-on experience protecting kids’ communities from high-risk content and behaviours.

Our CEO, Chris Priebe, helped code and develop the original safety and moderation solutions for Club Penguin, the children’s social network with over 300 million users acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2007. Chris applied what he’s learned over the past 20 years of software development and security testing to Community Sift, our flagship product.

At Two Hat, we have an international, native-speaking team of professionals from all around the world — Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, India, and more. We combine their expertise with computer algorithms to validate their decisions, increase efficiency, and improve future results. Instead of depending on crowdsourced results (which require that users are forced to see a message
before they can report it), we focus on enabling platforms to sift out messages before they are deployed.

Google vs. Community Sift — Test Results

In a recent article published in Wired, writer Andy Greenberg put Google Jigsaw’s Conversation AI to the test. As he rightly stated in his article, “Conversation AI, meant to curb that abuse, could take down its own share of legitimate speech in the process.” This is exactly the issue we have in maintaining Community Sift — ensuring that we don’t take down legitimate free speech in the process of protecting users from hate speech.

We thought it would be interesting to run the same phrases featured in the Wired article through Community Sift to see how we’re measuring up. After all, the Google team sets a fairly high bar when it comes to quality!

From these examples, you can see that our human-reviewed language signatures provided a more nuanced classification to the messages than the artificial intelligence did. Instead of starting with artificial intelligence assigning risk, we bring conversation trends and human professionals to the forefront, then allow the A.I. to learn from their classifications.

Here’s a peak behind the scenes at some of our risk classifications.

We break apart sentences into phrase patterns, instead of just looking at the individual words or the phase on its own. Then we assign other labels to the data, such as the user’s reputation, the context of the conversation, and other variables like vertical chat to catch subversive behaviours, which is particularly important for child-directed products.

Since both of the previous messages contain a common swearword, we need to classify that to enable child-directed products to filter this out of their chat. However, in this context, the message is addressing another user directly, so it is at higher risk of escalation.

This phrase, while seemingly harmless to an adult audience, contains some risk for younger demographics, as it could be used inappropriately in some contexts.

As the Wired writer points out in his article, “Inside Google’s Internet Justice League and Its AI-Powered War on Trolls”, this phrase is often a response from troll victims to harassment behaviours. In our system, this is a lower-risk message.

The intention of our classification system is to empower platform owners to make informed and educated decisions about their content. Much like how the MPAA rates films or the ESRB rates video games, we rate user-generated content to empower informed decision-making.

*****

Trolls vs. Regular Users

We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that every company cares about how their users are being treated. We want customers to be treated with dignity and respect.

Imagine you’re the owner of a social platform like a game or app. If your average cost of acquisition sits at around $4, then it will cost you a lot of money if a troll starts pushing people away from your platform.

Unfortunately, customers who become trolls don’t have your community’s best interests or your marketing budget in mind — they care more about getting attention… at any cost. Trolls show up on a social platform to get the attention they’re not getting elsewhere.

Identifying who these users are is the first step to helping your community, your product, and even the trolls themselves. Here at Two Hat, we like to talk about our “Troll Performance Improvement Plans” (Troll PIPs), where we identify who your top trolls are, and work on a plan to give them a chance to reform their behaviour before taking disciplinary action. After all, we don’t tolerate belligerent behaviour or harassment in the workplace, so why would we tolerate it within our online communities?

Over time, community norms set in, and it’s difficult to reshape those norms. Take 4chan, for example. While this adult-only anonymous message board has a team of “volunteer moderators and janitors”, the site is still regularly filled with trolling, flame wars, racism, grotesque images, and pornography. And while there may be many legitimate, civil conversations lurking beneath the surface of 4chan, the site has earned a reputation that likely won’t change in the eyes of the public.

Striking a balance between free speech while preventing online harassment is tricky, yet necessary. If you allow trolls to harass other users, you are inadvertently enabling someone to cause another psychological harm. However, if you suppress every message, you’re just going to annoy users who are just trying to express themselves.

*****

We’ve spent the last four years improving and advancing our technology to help make the internet great again. It’s a fantastic compliment to have a company as amazing as Google jumping into the space we’ve been focused on for so long, where we’re helping social apps and games like Dreadnought, PopJam, and ROBLOX.

Having Google join the fray shows that harassment is a big problem worth solving, and it also helps show that we have already made some tremendous strides to pave the way for them. We have had conversations with the Google team about the Riot Games’ experiments and learnings about toxic behaviours in games. Seeing them citing the same material is a great compliment, and we are honored to welcome them to the battle against abusive content online.

Back at Two Hat, we are already training the core Community Sift system on huge data sets — we’re under contract to process four billion messages a day across multiple languages in real-time. As we all continue to train artificial intelligence to recognize toxic behaviors like harassment, we can better serve the real people who are using these social products online. We can empower a freedom of choice for users to allow them to choose meaningful settings, like opting out of rape threats if they so choose. After all, we believe a woman shouldn’t have to self-censor herself, questioning whether that funny meme will result in a rape or death threat against her family. We’d much rather enable people to censor out inappropriate messages from those special kind of idiots who threaten to rape women.

While it’s a shame that we have to develop technology to curb behaviours that would be obviously inappropriate (and in some cases, illegal) in real-life, it is encouraging to know that there are so many groups taking strides to end hate speech now. From activist documentaries and pledges like The Bully Project, inspiring people to stand up against
bullying, to Alphabet/Google’s new Jigsaw division, we are on-track to start turning the negative tides in a new direction. And we are proud to be a part of such an important movement.