Each property owner can eject anyone from their land. They can keep them out by banning them. They can even keep others from seeing avatars on their land, to get privacy. Communications from specific users can be blocked.
Being a jerk is local. It's difficult to be annoying for more than a 100m radius. The world is the size of Los Angeles. Space keeps everything from being in the same place. Jerks tend to get frustrated after a while, because the big world is ignoring them.
The combination of those two features means that the world mostly runs itself. There's no need for the army of low-wage goons armed with ban hammers both Meta and Roblox have to employ. The Second Life "governance" department is about half a dozen people. Mostly it deals with such land issues as oversize advertising signs.
This is what the much-touted "metaverse" of 2021-2022 was supposed to have, but nobody making metaverse noises ever got enough users to have those problems.
Now, there's another, completely different model. Improbable is, as of two days ago, demoing their metaverse system, MSquared. It seems sort of like Second Life, in that you can log in and build stuff. But the business model is totally different. Improbable has made the world work in a browser, with "cloud rendering". They support big crowds at low avatar resolution. They're thinking in terms of big performances, with big-name acts performing and users paying big prices to watch them.
The Improbable system is very expensive to run. The five games that tried to use it a few years ago all went broke. ("Worlds Adrift" was pretty good.) There's a connect charge, and a charge for every internal event. The rendering back end runs on NVidia GeForce Now, the service back end runs on Google Cloud, and there's a CDN involved, too. So the business model is that it's only turned on for special events. It's been used for Otherside, the Bored Ape Yacht Club's virtual world, which they turn on for demos for a few hours maybe twice a year. (Arguably they're just cooling out the marks who paid a total of US $400,000,000 for land in their virtual world.) It's not clear this is a viable business model. It's funded by Softbank. (Who else?) Maybe they can do Taylor Swift concerts with it.
