The other day I approached a friend of mine with what seemed like a simple idea: make a public, large-scale Roblox developer server with a culture that encourages kindness, shuns ego and hostility, and allows mature discussion. I already own a gatekept Discord server named “Devvit”, which only allows vetted developers; in that server we crack down on toxicity, bigotry, etc, and as a result we have been able to maintain a healthy, active community with a reputation for being friendly.

I love the culture I created, and so I wanted to share it with the public and scale it to the scale of server the size of Hidden Devs or RoDevs.

The problem I wanted to fix

The Roblox development community is notoriously toxic, mostly because of how much the platform fuels quick cash and oligopolization. Large-scale Roblox developer servers also scale this culture, meaning that around every corner is somebody putting others down for their success on a simulator or brainrot game. It’s such a sharp contrast from other non-Roblox dev servers, which have a more mature and humble audience.

When I told my friend that I wanted to make my own large-scale server for Roblox devs, I wanted to fix exactly this. More specifically, I wanted to scale a culture similar to Devvit’s… but this is easier said than done.

The complications with my idea

Before I explain why this is complicated, I want to find out how I was able to create the existing culture.

Devvit originally started as a server out of spite of another I didn’t like, but that meant that it originally had a culture of spite. Us versus them, we thought! Looking back, I’m glad I made the revamp of the server to adjust the culture and goals. Trying to grow a server from a seed of anger just results in the same toxicity problem I originally talked about. I essentially had to restart when I redid the culture, starting with the staff team.

For staff members, I hand-picked people I knew were level-headed and mature adults that could share the same mission as me. Right off the bat, this meant that I was surrounding myself with a system that could now be set up to enforce itself. It was a lot of work originally and it resulted in many big crackdowns on the way people acted… but it wasn’t for naught! Fast forward to today, and the community mostly moderates itself, shunning those who try to step out of line and put themselves above others or otherwise try to be awful.

As great as this is, it just is hard to scale. Devvit has under 2000 members, but trying to do something along the lines of 10k, 100k, or even more sounds like a lot of effort. I am not a Discord mod; I have a life and a job that prevents me from putting a lot of time into maintaining a community. Trying to create and scale the same culture to a massive audience is extremely difficult, because it means that the massive staff team has to all be on the same page and align with the same goals. Unfortunately, I don’t think that would be able to happen with the time I have.

Culture has to begin from the top-down before it is able to maintain itself. This means the hardest part is the beginning of a change, not the end. The more you try to grow, the harder this gets, and the more work it takes. This is true for all authority in life, whether it be a company, a government, or even a family.

Can it be done?

It’s not impossible to do this, but oh boy would it take a lot of work. Some medium-sized servers have gotten close, don’t get me wrong, but at some point the owners of those servers become less active, the server is run anarchically, and “maturity” transforms into elitism.

To respond my original idea, my friend said he doesn’t think I can do it. We put a lot of time into thinking about how we could scale Devvit’s culture to the public, but for every idea we had, there were two more problems. So… I don’t think I’ll be making a server like that anytime soon. I’ll never say never, though.

So what can we do?

Large-scale servers like Hidden Devs have a toxicity problem, that’s agreed on by anybody active in any of them. Here are some things those servers can do:

• Moderate voice calls, please! Many servers don’t do this, and it means the voice calls are the worst of the worst; elitism, ego trips, crash outs, you name it. Having just one mod in voice calls most of the time is enough to make a huge difference.
• Crack down on hostility! This feels common sense to me, but apparently being hostile to others over stupid things isn’t punishable in many of these places.
• Encourage discussion, shun arguments! Even if it’s teenagers talking, enforce respect that a normal adult would give. This means staff should spend effort to make the flow of discussion have less friction than arguing.

Obviously more can be done than those three, but I feel like severs are lacking those the most.

There is a takeaway from this, though

Enforcing a culture is much more difficult than just creating a community, since it’s changing the way people behave around each other to act like sane human beings. It can be done on large-scale, but believe me when I say that it takes effort and intent.

Again, the hardest part is the beginning. If you can get over the short-term hurdles, you’ll reap the long-term rewards.