Curbing Online Abuse

“Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible. Here’s Where We Start” by Laura Hudson describes how online abuse was curbed in the battle-arena game League of Legends, published by Riot Games. The following insight is interesting:

“Riot found that persistently negative players were only responsible for roughly 13 percent of the game’s bad behavior. The other 87 percent was coming from players whose presence, most of the time, seemed to be generally inoffensive or even positive. […] Banning the worst trolls wouldn’t be enough to clean up League of Legends, Riot’s player behavior team realized. Nothing less than community-wide reforms could succeed.

It’s great that Riot’s measures often succeeded in educating offenders and changing their behavior.