A big topic currently going around at the time of this post is the discourse on labeling AI generated worlds and/or adding a filter for them so that users who do not want to see the content can easily remove it from their world hopping routine. Currently, VRChat has officially declared not to make any such label or filter.

This has me thinking that this is more of a discoverability issue in general rather than AI specific. Some people may want to filter other types of content out (or filter content in), and the tags world creators have may not be enough or are too subjective to reach the correct audiences. (For example, someone might make some kind of Racing RPG world, but fail to mention that the RPG mechanics are closer to Pokemon mechanics than Final Fantasy, which may or may not appeal to fans of those respective series.)

A proposal then would be to have public world playlists. These playlists would be similar to Bluesky's lists or Starter Packs where a user could create and manage a list of worlds that they can label and tag themselves.

This playlist differs heavily from favorites as they would be directly searchable, just like worlds and avatars are, rather than needing to find a specific user's favorite's list. Possibly also indexable via the API.

This would allow players to effectively use the community create their own filters. VRChat suggested that players should be the one to determine whether or not a world is AI generated or not. With this, it would be much easier for players to do so as the load could be spread among the community rather than on the individual. Lists could range from "Here are worlds that are confirmed to be not AI Generated" to "Here's a list of fun adventure games I found". This shifts the burden of classifying worlds from individuals to communities, reducing friction for discoverability of the content that players actually want to see. It also allows for VRChat to promote whatever content they want without needing to take on the responsibility of labeling things.

Not everyone has time to travel to each and every world and check if it's worth their time or not, but some do, and they enjoy doing that. Public playlist would allow those players to discover their findings easily and share them with the rest of the playerbase.

To further reduce the load, these list could be managed by multiple people instead of just one person. This could allow the list to grow much faster and have wider ranges of taste, while also curation to be much more in depth. Say someone adds a world that they thought matches the description of their list, but someone else may not agree and could remove it or vote to remove it or whatever. Permission systems could be similar to how groups are made.

A kneejerk reaction might be to tie these lists to groups. It makes sense on the surface as groups already encourage collaboration with roles and such. This might be okay as long as the lists themselves are not buried within the group. This system would only be useful if people could find the lists independent of the group. A group can manage the list, sure, but if finding the list requires the user to find the group first, then it's about as useful as favorites are now.

It is imperative that these lists are independently searchable and indexable; seperated from groups, worlds, users, or avatars.