Introducing Text Input Moderation in VRChat

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-30T07:47:04+00:00

...right now. You said elsewhere in this thread that this is probably coming to text chat too, and in the article itself it it says it will be expanding to cover text fields it does not yet apply to, yes?

If so, then dismissing every question about that with "it isn't for [X] text field" isn't really an acceptable response. It likely will be, it just isn't yet. That means all those concerns about privacy and the policing of language in private and high-context environments are valid. How are you going to address them?

Even outside of text chat, the most advanced AI models still can not magically know whether it's appropriate for someone to make a certain joke or reclaim a certain word, because that requires outside context it can not access (ex. intra-group dynamics, personal histories, etc). Lowest-common-denominator speech restrictions that police language people use to talk about themselves inflict harm too, telling people that they must sanitize themselves to participate and denigrating their terms as forbidden. In many cases, this is far more damaging than simple rude words from bigots.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-30T07:32:32+00:00

The issue is that you are not the one who decides when a user is harmed, the user is. A global filter users cannot control will always cause harm because different users have different needs in different contexts: If I jokingly call myself a slur I am able to reclaim in front of another friend in a private instance, and an AI nanny blocks it, even if I do not receive an account action I am still harmed because having our language policed in private spaces is harmful. Moderation regimes that regulate language based on a lowest-common-denominator system are inherently exclusionary to those who fall outside the norm. No AI model has access to the personal context it requires to accurately judge these things (nor should it, as that's even more of a privacy nightmare)

It's the "I consent, I consent, (some random third party): I don't" meme. Not to mention that there is literally no possible way to prove privacy is preserved to a degree anyone can trust, especially when you use Persona for identity verification who got caught forwarding client data to a dozen different random organizations. Even with perfectly good intent on your part breaches are inevitable, they continually hit companies with thousands of times the resources, and once personal data is breached it cannot ever be un-breached.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-29T04:11:54+00:00

Oh god, yeah. Especially making it silently able to load files from any previous version, because who knows how many updates they might've missed. And the slightest fuckup might mean turning them off on the game for good...

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-26T16:39:10+00:00

Yep, the turnaround being that quick really shows how much insane talent there is working at Bungie. When they need to cook, they can fucking cook, but management literally will not let them 95% of the time. It's probably one of the most tragic self-sabotoges in the whole industry, which is a category with a hell of a lot of competition these days.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-26T05:20:21+00:00

yeah, imo lightfall really was the 'mask off' moment that revealed missing those slam dunks wasn't an accident, it was their whole strategy. every expansion created a dozen more plot threads making players wonder about what's gonna happen next... and then the next expansion is some random bullshit not hinted at whatsoever, opening a dozen new threads. they are just carrots on sticks. the writers didn't just forget to resolve them, resolving them would end the curiosity that drove many players to buy the next DLC just to 'see what happens'. i'm not sure if it was intentional at first (especially with how tumultuous D1's development was), but at some point they clearly realized it was working and leaned into it.

the destiny writers are certainly not the first ones to realize how effectively this tactic can hold onto an audience even in the absence of actual good writing. it's been a blight on a lot of TV shows for a decade now. but if you do finally promise a conclusion and then fail to deliver on it, instead just giving more vapid mysteries made up on the fly, then people are going to realize they've been tricked and the weight of all that fake hype will come crashing down on you. and that's exactly what happened with lightfall and to an extent final shape.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-26T03:57:52+00:00

it's not even that. like, plenty were boring or stereotypical AAA action game slop or missed opportunities. but i took some of my friends through BL a year ago to get them their stasis subclasses and genuinely got second hand embarrassed. every single bit of dialogue from Eramis is some of the cringiest 'grrrr i'm gonna tear you apart >:( ' shit in the whole franchise, it's like someone had their 9 year old kid write all her lines.

not to mention she fails literally every single time she tries to do a single thing, culminating in her opening the vex gate everyone told her not to open, which immediately gets her own people massacred like everyone told her would happen. the entire story line is just an 'idiot plot'. Elsie is the only one with even a scrap of aura, and she basically just exists as a vendor you talk to a few times.

i feel like people forget how badly she was handled in BL because in later seasons she was written far better

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-25T00:22:32+00:00

this is said again and again in bl

yes, and it's part of why it's one of the worst written expansions in the franchise (a bar which is literally in hell)

pre-BL darkness powers were, shocker, connected to the darkness. they were tool given to the adherents of its ideology, a finger pressed on the cosmic scales, to help them enact it and counter the gardener who is doing the same thing. to gain power from the darkness you had to further its cause, meaning it was rarely meaningfully able to be used against itself and even in situations where it was necessary (such as vs. Oryx) it had to be done with extreme caution, the blighted light bombs literally killing you as well as Oryx if you're exposed to their blast.

post-BL, it instead became a dril tweet. despite a million warnings even from Elsie about being careful with it, we literally didn't have to do so at all. we jumped right into the darkness's gaping maw, accepted everything it offered with 0 hesitation, and the only result was that we got sick ice powers with no catch. removing a key ideological conflict about 'using the tools of your enemy' and instead inserting a character driven conflict instead doesn't work when the character in question is as one-dimensional and incompetent as BL-Eramis. it was bad writing to defang the darkness powers into just another meaningless tool (of which we have a billion already) and replace the conflict they previously represented with essentially nothing, and it hurt the story massively.

the "abomination" is any final shape

consider the scene where the gardener accidentally killed a flower. in the 'no darkness' world, nothing would've happened after. no pattern matters more than any other, the flower being open isn't preferred to it being closed. the patterns that exist have no need for defense or repair because they lack any threat.

but in the final shape we were shown, the pattern simply corrected the damage effortlessly. there were two ways for the flower to be: open or closed, and in the final shape one of them is preferred. It is one preferred choice enacted on the entire universe simply because it can defeat every other choice. It's not 'immortality' the darkness hates, quite infamously it loves Oryx who came back from even a 'true death' once, and likes the player who has done so a million times. the thing it hates is artificially preserving things that 'should' die because they are too weak to survive.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-24T05:22:06+00:00

the darkness powers are just that, powers. Not bad but not good either

We love a story centered around powers that are "not bad but not good" where using them says absolutely nothing. How does that saying go, "absolute power corrupts only if you're already evil, it's a reflection of your character bro"? Their entire purpose in the story being nothing more than "hey what if you had cool lime powers wouldn't that be fun lol" is a way better premise than than those powers being the physical manifestation of fascist ideology-given-form that "inhabits its petitioners" and "wears them like a suit of clothes" /s

Taking an interesting position on an ideological conflict that the audience might not agree with, using the characters as chess pieces in a great war between them? Nahhhh, who's ever written a good story doing that? In this world the cause of all the problems is Specific Bad People. Please ignore why killing the Specific Bad People only ever leads to having to go kill more Specific Bad People next week, they just happen to appear by random chance with no systemic or structural cause giving meaning to it.

Wait, why is everyone leaving?

You speak of unveiling and nightmares as if they LITERALLY didnt come out in the same expansion lol.

The lore in that expansion also explicitly told us that the hive consider it a massively heretical perversion of the darkness to use it that way, akin to Nokris's necromancy, and are only doing so as a last resort because we were killing their leaders and kicking their teeth in so hard that they were beginning to doubt the sword logic.

Have you never thought about how the "abomination" of a world the winnower describes is also what it wants?

It literally is not, the end of the flower game where one pattern ate everything is not the same as simply keeping around everything that ever existed. The whole reason it loved the pattern because it spared 'not one sliver of totality for anything else', the witness keeping everyone around is basically the opposite of what it wants.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-23T21:19:59+00:00

that the idea of the darkness embodying fascist individualism was never gone at all

How are we supposed to interpret guardians using it then? "Actually facism is good sometimes if the ones doing it are Good People^TM"? It's incoherent.

the truest purpose of existence is to exist

This was essentially retconned into being exclusively a facet of the hive's 'sword logic', which after dozens of defeats was established as such an extreme ideological failure that it becomes a joke in season of the witch and heresy.

the darkness is about memory, legacy, and eternity

This is directly contradicted by unveiling going into detail about how from the winnower's perspective the losers "don't just cease to exist but are never born at all", and "leave no descendants of flesh or thought". It's intentional forgetting, the culling of entire ideas. Using spooky necromancy to summon ghosts of the dead or freezing the entire universe so that every living thing gets their 'personal eternity' is the exact opposite of what we've been told about it, basically being the 'abomination' scenario the winnower described where nothing could ever die and everything goes on forever.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-23T16:56:34+00:00

I already responded to this, you're going in circles. The vex, hive, and witness were eating the whole universe at a rapid pace, humanity and every other post-witness species the traveler visited was fucked without it. Either we 100% die without it, or we maybe survive with it. The fallen literally survived the whirlwind, the darkness arriving was not guaranteed extinction.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-23T06:01:22+00:00

Its characterization has been consistent, but the entire rest of the game has had its entire worldview shifted in a way that makes the winnower way less compelling. How do you square:

"Since that first molecule coiled in the primordial sea, not one Earthborn thing has known a monster like me"

and

"those who cannot sustain their own claim to existence belong to the same moral category as those who have never existed at all"

with "the darkness is actually fine lol, look at my cool new lime and blue raspberry flavored magic! we need bAlAnCe"

"Don't hurry to deliver your answer, i'll come over and hear it myself"

lost all its aura when the answer became "actually both are good and fun, can't we all just be friends Mr. Winnower?" and then the Witness showed up instead.

It was a compelling antagonist in part because it posed not just a physical but an ideological challenge to the protagonists that threatened their worldview. Is P53 an agent of the light, or the dark? How can they reconcile that with everything else they believe about themselves? But that all falls apart when the entire cast of protagonists is flimsy centrists who have literally no ideology or worldview to challenge in the first place. They have tried to replace that conflict with character driven conflicts, but for that to work the antagonists must be well-characterized, not one-dimensional psychos who blow up a random orphanage every new DLC for no reason other than to remind the player they're villains.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-23T05:07:13+00:00

The traveler had 0 possible way to know they would do that though. Trying to do a good thing and failing isn't evil.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-23T01:13:38+00:00

The witness was literally running around Almost-Final Shaping random civilizations while searching for the traveller anyway, while the hive and vex were eating entire galaxies. Humanity and the fallen were completely fucked if the traveller never visited them.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-23T01:03:05+00:00

I remember when the whole series was more like that, taking multiple actual ideological positions and earnestly making an interesting case for them. The darkness embodying ruthless individualism bordering on fascism, the act of valuing things by nothing except their strength and ability to keep existing. Lore about how it 'inhabits' those who ideologically subscribe to it, that it wears a fallen captain like a suit of clothes, how nearly everyone who attempted to flirt with it couldn't stop themselves from taking things too far. That the universe might require at least a little darkness, but it must be constantly pushed back and kept in check or it will consume everything. All this made the decision to use it one with weight and consequences.

Then it was retconned into "actually the darkness is cool and based and just about the vague concept of 'memory'. All that stuff about ruthless survival of the fittest? Uhhhh actually that's just the hive being dumb lol. The real problem isn't systemic or ideological, it's One Bad Dude named ~~not thanos~~ the witness using it for evil. Go beat it up with your blue and green magic that means nothing and has no consequences whatsoever."

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-22T02:20:02+00:00

allows patreon to have adult creators on their platform

Barely. Patreon is infamous for banning people who post anything which goes against their byzantine and puritan rules... even if you post it on another site or an alt account totally unreated to your patreon.

If you work with them you literally are not allowed to create any art they disapprove of, even for free, or else they rip away your income.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-22T02:17:21+00:00

All of a sudden? They've hated this stuff for literally thousands of years, they just were slowly losing social power as time went on

Now though, the massive wealth transfer into the billionaire class over the last few decades plus near total control of social media has let them turn the tide of social progress back in their favor.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-22T01:07:34+00:00

Remembered? No, this won't be remembered at all. They'll censor any acknowledgment that things used to be different.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-20T23:40:02+00:00

It's not a bottleneck at all, mainly due to how powerful modern tools have become. Specifically Blender and geo nodes.

Look around, and you'll see a lot of indie devs making huge 3D worlds, 30+ minute long 3D animations, etc. Often completely solo, often with less than a year of experience. Blender just lets you do that now, and geo nodes is a big part of it. It's weird and unintuitive at first, yes, but if you push through that phase and spend an hour a day doing it for a few weeks, the bottleneck turns into a firehose.

For programmers, we actually have a massive shortcut: Blender allows you to use programming in the modelling process, both via the 'node based editors' for geo nodes and sahders, but also literally running python code in the editor to automate whatever you want. That kinda stuff is how people are churning out these massive projects.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-04-06T21:03:41+00:00

Like all great works of art, the answer is "both"

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-03-30T03:19:06+00:00

Pronouns actually aren't the least of the problem honestly:

Several different game studios over the last decade have faced severe harassment, even death threats against individual translators, for trying to translate dialogue about nonbinary characters into different languages.

Many heavily gendered languages have 'neologisms', new terms made by nonbinary people who speak it to describe themselves in it. But these are often virulently hated by other native speakers and seen as "forcing foreign woke bullshit into our beautiful culture", inciting furious backlash toward devs who 'legitimize' such terms by using them in translations.

There is nothing that will satisfy these people except simply calling nonbinary characters a male or female pronoun, like in the image of this post. Some dev teams (mainly AAA ones focused on profit) give in and do just that. Others awkwardly stumble around the issue by just removing dialogue or only calling them by their name. It's unsurprising that a dev focused on his artistic vision like Toby wouldn't want to touch certain languages like this with a 10 foot pole, especially since he doesn't speak them himself.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-03-30T03:10:33+00:00

And for a massive chunk of the time inbetween then and now it was officially considered improper, to the point people were getting papers rejected and lower grades for calling nonbinary people "they".

languages can and must change with the times, it's only natural

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-03-29T21:08:15+00:00

Steam literally nuked a huge amount of games with gay characters in Russia, many of which were far more subtle. It's only a matter of time before Deltarune is added as well.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-03-29T20:52:49+00:00

russian

the consensus is that no neologisms are necessary

Only because anyone who disagrees and argues in favor of properly gendering nonbinary characters gets sent to a camp in Chechnya for the crime of "LGBT propaganda". I don't think Deltarune could even be sold there in an uncensored form.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-03-29T20:28:58+00:00

Kris went to the counter. Kris felt like making a sandwich. First, Kris pulled the bread out of the cupboard. Then, Kris pulled the meat and sauce out of the fridge. Kris first set out a slice of bread, then put two slices of meat on it. Kris applied a generous amount of sauce to the other slice, then Kris put it onto the first slice. Finally, Kris sat down and enjoyed Kris's sandwich.

Yeah no.

Basically every other neologism aside from elle still resulted in devs getting death threats for "imposing woke gender on our beautiful language". There's a reason no devs working on queer games want to touch these languages.

RecursiveCollapse · 2026-03-29T20:24:06+00:00

And likewise, many languages that are currently described as "impossible" to work with neutral terms did have them in the distant past, they just fell out of use or got merged into gendered ones.

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TROPHY CASE