"My point being: it isn't child avatars that are the problem, it's the community and it's appetite for harassment. It is that the OSW/opensim community is so completely hostile/toxic and it has such a high tolerance for harassment -combined with an unwillingness to address harassment effectively."
That's it exactly, and I keep having to tell people: OSW does not have moderation. OSW does not have "staff" in the traditional community staff sense. OSW's staff, AFAIK, is only Satyr. Satyr is only a tech admin and developer at which he admittedly excels. But he is not fit for moderation. He isn't interested in moderation either. He has stated several times that he wants us to deal with any kinds of trouble ourselves, and be it things that are clearly illegal. He has told me that he normally never bans anyone. As rarely as he's here, he never knows what's going on either, and he has never been in touch with the community. And he doesn't have time to moderate everything himself in real-time 24/7.
At the same time, he isn't even interested in establishing moderation at all. Neither does he implement moderation tools, nor does he appoint moderators, nor does he even define community rules as guides for moderation. This site has two rules for sims, both of which are frequently and blatantly broken with no repercussions whatsoever, and exactly zero rules for users.
In other words: On OSW, you can get away with everything. And I mean absolutely everything. AFAIR, OSW itself came under attack a while ago. Others would have called the authorities for investigations. Satyr simply restored the site and shrugged it off.
That's why it's so attractive to troublemakers. I dare say that not few people are only in OpenSim to cause trouble and harass others because it's so easy and with exactly zero consequences for themselves.
I mean, we, the community, can't do anything ourselves with no moderation tools to do it with. Ignoring doesn't work as has been demonstrated over and over again. The only countermeasure against troublemakers at our hands is retaliation, and that usually makes things only worse.
And I think I'm the only OSW user who has been here for several years while still only having one account.
"From where I stand, kid avatars are simply the red flag de jour; but any issue would work. This community loves them some pitchforks and torches!"
That, too. Only that most other issues lead to aggressive counter-attacks rather than attacks. I mean, it's hard to harass bot-using sim owners if there are always at least seven avatars on your own sim and always right after it has started, that number barely fluctuates up, and you claim it's regular visitor traffic. And you can't speak up against copybotting and content theft from SL if the only thing on your own avatar that's legal is the alpha'd-out system body. So you defend both tooth and nail instead with massive counter-attacks.
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