Skip to main content

A Call for Quality Control: Rethinking Promotion Campaigns

Feature Request

Hello, my name is Rosefall and I believe promotion campaigns are problematic because they enable any creator to just buy a top spot and have their avatar featured at the top of it's respective category, without having to pass any kind of quality assurance checks or meet any kind industry standards.

Here's why:

  1. It disencourages content creators from investing time and effort into creating decent content because anybody can achieve overnight success through a paid promotion campaign rather than by focusing on the quality of their work.

  2. It's potentially detrimental to the global state of VRChat because it can significantly accelerate the spread of content that is low quality or otherwise harmful to the platform.

  3. It's unfair because it allows less skilled creators to artificially boost low(er) quality content to the top and drown out the work of talented creators, who may end up feeling discouraged as they may feel that their hard work is not being rewarded.

To address the problems above I proppose the following solutions to be implemented:

  1. Replace the 'Promotion Campaigns' with 'Curated Content', the spotlight should be given to those who deserve it, not those who pay for it. This will benefit VRChat and it's communities as a whole while also being much more fair because it favors equality of opportunity over equality of outcome. And it should be easy to implement because it can re-use parts of the infrastructure developed for paid promotions.

  2. Implement quality control measures, at least for promoted content. Kitbashers and low skill content creators should not be able to promote $45 avatars with horrible performance metrics, such as 1 million active triangles, upwards of 2000 physbone collision checks, etc. These products are harfmul to the global state of VRChat as they have substantial negative impact on the experience of users who come in contact with them, even on high-end hardware.

Additionally Jinxxy could allow it's customers to mark specific items, tags and content creators as "Not Interesting/Not Relevant", some people may not like particular art styles or creators, they should have the ability to prevent these items they deem irrelevant or not interesting from being displayed to them, which would benefit just about everybody who uses Jinxxy.

Thank you for taking the time to read my suggestion, please let me know what you think in the comments below, and if you share my vision and would like to see these changes implemented let the people at Jinxxy know by upvoting this post.

Posted by ItsRosefall ·
5 comments

Log in to comment and vote

Comments5

  • Kudalyn

    •

    Dec 17, 2024

    I think there could still be a best of both worlds. Paid promotion is important still for helping support Jinxxy. I am all for it - even if I personally do not really pay attention to most paid promotion stuff as I am always looking for very specific things and know what is and isn't optimized. Not everyone does, and there's nothing to be done about that. We can't tell others what to and to not make just as we can't force people what to buy. Best we can do is try to educate and let customers make informed decisions - even if in the end they still decide to go with a 8 material dress asset, or 40k poly fingernail asset. But having something that can be boosted to a lesser scale via community likes/votes could be a solution to your request, and have a 'cooldown' on that creators community vote for a few months/half a year. This will still require some sort of vetting/staff management, but possibly not as much as if the site and staff had to personally pick what's deemed 'worthy' enough to be boosted. This way the community picks what's popular and is a reward for users and sellers both using the site and for creators that have an engaged community. This may still favor 'popular' makers, but like. At that point? It wraps back around to just make a Paid Promotion. That helps solve the 'popularity' issue, and having a high cooldown helps keep makers from consistently holding slots. (Of course this could all be negated by a 'sort by likes/hearts' tag with the search function, but I'm specially trying to think in the idea of a specific promo boost as you requested, as anything in a 'sort by likes' tag won't change monthly. That will always stay the same as reviews very rarely fluctuate in the negative ) There's no easy or perfect solution, and we don't want to force Jinxxy staff to be God and pick what's deemed worthy of a promotion. Letting the users pick while also giving creators the option to pay for more visibility is the best solution imo.

  • PrimordialGirl

    •

    Dec 13, 2024

    I'm voting in particular for the "stop showing me this because it's not relevant" option. I see the same ten things at the start of every page and search, despite the fact that I already own one of them and want nothing to do with the other nine.

  • Winks

    •

    Dec 11, 2024

    I understand where you’re coming from, but I have an alternative perspective. Paid promotions are straightforward: a creator pays for exposure in a prime spot on the marketplace, aiming to drive user clicks to their product. These promoted items are clearly marked as such, ensuring transparency. However, engagement doesn’t guarantee a sale. It’s misleading to suggest that promotional campaigns are a surefire path to success or a way to disguise low-quality products. Ultimately, it’s up to users to evaluate the product and make informed decisions. Curated systems, on the other hand, rely on subjective opinions about what’s considered “worthy.” This creates a slippery slope, as criteria for what makes a product “deserving” of recognition would need to be defined. Such systems are inherently vulnerable to personal preferences, biases, or fleeting trends. By contrast, marketplace models typically empower users to decide what’s good or bad. Enforcing quality standards also introduces challenges. We can’t predict how an asset will be used in VRC or if it will be used there at all. A user might find that a 100k-tris, 10 material slot dress works perfectly fine for a render they’re creating or for use on an entirely different platform. A lack of optimization usually stems from a lack of understanding, concern, or even indifference - it’s essentially a human problem, not one software can easily solve. I agree there’s an abundance of unoptimized offerings out there. Ideally, the platform itself (VRChat) should enforce the standards it wants its creators to follow. Over time, those standards would naturally be reflected in the marketplaces that supply content for it. That’s not to say curation is inherently bad; it can certainly have its place. However, it shouldn’t replace promoted campaigns in this way.

    • ItsRosefall

      •

      Dec 11, 2024

      Winks Interesting perspective, sadly I have to begin my reply on a bit of a bitter note... You say it’s up to the users to evaluate the product and make informed decisions about it, but the avatar market has proven countless times that this just doesn't work in VRChat. The average VRChat user does not care about the quality nor performance of the avatar they like, unless they themself are adversely affected by it. You can validate this claim just about anywhere, the wast majority of the more popular and mainstream avatars from even the most beloved and well established avatar creators suffer from a vast array of issues I can't list here, and yet all of them hover around 99% five star review ratios, and nothing but positive comments of satisfied customers who will never be aware of these issues and will simply blame VRChat for bad performance because the majority of users either lack the expertise to assess the technical quality of a product or they rely only on quantifiable metrics such as VRChat performance metrics, triangle count, material slots or VRAM usage which are often displayed for consumers to draw conclusions from, despite being extremely limited and inaccurate for estimating both the quality and performance. Now on a more positive note... Regarding the subjectivity of curation, the criteria for curated content obviously needs be based on quantifiable metrics, industry standards and a peer review process, which of course would require multiple experienced curators for every category, as to minimize the risk of personal biases influencing the selection, so I understand your worries and concerns. And as for enforcing quality standards, assets could be split depending on their target use case or purpose they were designed for, which would allow assets for use in VRChat or V-Tubing to have their own set of rules and criteria for what's allowed to be sold, what's allowe to be promoted, curated and what's considered too low quality to be sold or even mass distributed, And while it should be up to VRChat to handle quality standards... that's never gonna happen, stricter limits on what can be uploaded or what is displayed by default is as far as it will ever go officially I'm afraid, because there would be massive backlash against VRChat from majority of less experienced creators as well as consumers who use older or lower quality content about their creative freedom being taken away or limited.

    • Winks

      •

      Dec 12, 2024

      ItsRosefall Yeah, I totally get it. I've put a crazy amount of hours into a product only to have it shadowed by a sea of other promoted listings. Sometimes it can honestly be demotivating, but that's nature of a growing and saturating market. Jinxxy operates as a two-sided marketplace, facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers while taking a cut from sales. To maintain its role effectively, Jinxxy benefits from staying as neutral as possible. If VRC itself doesn’t enforce specific performance standards and the average customer is indifferent to them, why would Jinxxy position itself in the middle of that? Performance considerations are simply out of scope for the role Jinxxy plays. Imagine if you applied the same logic to a platform like Artstation. Now, let’s consider replacing paid campaigns with curation. Where would the resources, staffing, and proven industry standards come from to manage a curation panel? Who would audit the panel to ensure transparency and fairness? Would users clearly understand why certain products are featured over others? That said, curation does have its place in marketplaces, but it’s not a simple swap for paid campaigns. Paid promotion provides a revenue stream that supports platform development and operational costs. In business there is the concept of "Negative externalities" - When individual actions (like purchasing suboptimal products) create broader negative impacts on others. So as soul crushing as it is, the users of the Jinxxy market have spoken.