Merrill: Riot erred by replacing crowdsourced moderation with top-down policing
Marc Merrill · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · Dec 14, 2020 · at 1:14:16
Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill reflects on community moderation and negative media perceptions regarding player toxicity in League of Legends.
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“We made a mistake when we were investing in building out our player behavior team to try to nurture, you know, a really positive community, and promote sportsmanship, and train people how to be better online, where we moved from sort of a crowdsource self-policing model, where the community would agree to sort of a code of conduct, to one where Riot was Sort of identifying what good or bad was and all this. And in a lot of ways, we then started creating headlines where we pat ourselves on the back for reducing toxicity. And then, so the headlines or the stories really became bad toxic community gets incrementally better.”
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