Andy Baio is over online meetups. Zoomed out. VR skeptical. Serendipity deficient. A lot of us probably feel the same way.
But Baio has an advantage: He’s a technologist, a blogger, and the cofounder of the XOXO festival, which first launched in 2012 as an event for creators minus the soulless marketing of SXSW. He’s experienced conferences and virtual meetups from all angles: IRL, 2D, sort-of-3D. So after nearly a year of mostly lackluster online events, he decided to build a new kind of meeting space, one that, he says, would fix the more depressing elements of online meetings while welcoming in “bright spots of creative experimentation.”
The result is Skittish, a game-like meetup space that runs in the web browser. People appear as animal avatars; when I met up with Baio in Skittish, I appeared as a pony, and he was an owl. Users communicate with each other via live audio chat, and who you’re chatting with depends on your position in the cartoon-like 3D world. Move closer to a group of animated avatars, and their conversation gets louder; move away from them and the audio recedes. The look and feel of Skittish’s virtual world is reminiscent of Animal Crossing, which Baio says was an intentional design choice, to get close to the game’s “playfulness” and social elements.
Skittish is still in beta. Baio was, well, skittish to say exactly when it will launch to the public, since the team behind it is still working on supporting potentially thousands of users and formulating its content moderation policies. At some point, he plans to charge for the service. For now, Baio agreed to talk to WIRED (where he has also contributed as a writer) about his new creation, his ideas for online conferences, and what the future of events like XOXO might be. The conversation has been edited for length.
WIRED: What are you hoping to accomplish in building Skittish?
Andy Baio: This entire project came out of a couple things. First, my experience running XOXO and then having the pandemic cancel that and upend my entire event organizing career. And by extension, seeing every other event organizer in the world struggle with trying to adapt to that. I started going to a bunch of remote events and I just didn't feel that they were right for me. A lot of them feel like you're just watching a YouTube live stream, or you're in a Zoom call. That just wasn't super compelling to me. The kind of events that I love—that I love attending and the ones that I try to organize—have the experience of getting a bunch of like-minded people into the same space at the same time, and then all of the the magic that happens after that when you allow them to interact in different ways, as they're moving between programming or as they just run into each other in line or in the hallway.
But over the last year we did start seeing some really interesting experimentation. I mentioned in my post, the environments created for Roguelike Celebration and LIKELIKE events were kind of borrowed from games. And then there’s experimentation around what we're doing right now—proximity chat, which allows you to talk to people that are nearby [in a virtual world]. I mean, there's dozens of these now, like that sort of spatial audio has been around for 15 years at least with Second Life, but all of these platforms are now kind of using this idea to help scale up a community, because with Zoom only one person can really speak at a time, right? And, you can’t see this right now, but it’s worth mentioning that Skittish supports an emerging standard for streaming payments to creators over the web.
So what I started working on was a platform that would bring those things together, partly because I wanted to run events myself again, but also for other event organizers to be able to use … and I wanted to build something with social interaction in mind, that just didn't feel like a meeting. This is very clear from the moment that you walk into it, this is not a Zoom call, this is not “work,” this is … I don't know what it is, but this is the opposite of work.
WIRED: What’s the strangest or most challenging experience you’ve had during this time period of all-virtual events, the thing that made you think, OK, we need to figure this out? I can think of a couple instances myself, where I’ve experimented with taking meetings in a VR headset, and I actually think it’s cool but it will take me an additional 30 minutes before the meeting to get set up for the meeting. Or, just the other day I was thinking back on Amazon’s recent hardware events, and thinking, OK, I covered it in 2017, 2018, 2019 … and I forgot they had an event in 2020, because it was all virtual, it just wasn’t stored in my brain in the same way. Because I wasn’t physically in Seattle.
Baio: Yeah. I mentioned some of the events where I think they did a good job. But most of the ones I’ve checked out, I can’t even say that I attended, you know what I mean? Like they call it an event, and it might have tickets, and there are attendees, but when you experience it, it doesn’t actually feel like an event at all. I feel like I’ve walked away from watching a long YouTube video. And there’s this existential thing where I think, Is this even an event? Sometimes they’re not even live; they’ve pre-recorded the talk. So you were literally just watching pre-recorded videos that aired at a particular time. In which case, it’s like you’re watching a TV event. I mean, if you watch the Oscars, I suppose that’s an event, but I certainly don’t feel like I’ve attended the Oscars when I watch it on television.
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WIRED: After all the software conferences last year, I kind of stepped back and talked to people, mostly developers or tech workers, about what was working for them and what wasn’t. Some of them noted the upsides of everything going online, in the sense that barriers are lowered—people don’t have to pay to attend. And there are real upsides for those in the accessibility community. But some people also said that it’s marginalized communities that might also benefit most from the in-person networking or gathering with peers, and that’s really taken a hit during the pandemic. What are your thoughts on that?
Baio: I think about, you know, how at XOXO 80 percent of the attendees would come in from out of state, not to mention a lot of international attendees. And I think about the amount of friction involved in taking time off of work, booking a flight, booking a hotel. It’s very expensive, and the people who are able to do it often are either very privileged or they’re in a privileged position of working for a company that's willing to to pay for that expense. There’s no question that’s out of reach for many people.
But there are trade-offs here. I mean, I don’t think there’s ever going to be a replacement for the depth and meaningful connections that can happen in a real-world space, where you can just meet someone for the first time and go have a drink or lunch together. There’s never going to be a digital virtual replacement for that.
At the same time, there are enormous benefits to having a space if it facilitates those types of connections where it can just happen in a browser. You mentioned something like the VR setups, and that’s an example where there’s also quite a bit of friction. You have to have the VR hardware, or a powerful computer, or an Oculus Quest. Even with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which I got really into during the beginning of the pandemic—you can see the influence in Skittish for sure—you have to invite someone to the island, and it takes time, and you’ll need a Nintendo Switch, and I was like … I just wish this was in a browser. I wish we could just click a link and bring people in.
WIRED: One WIRED writer recently noted that powerful people could build virtual environments to shape those worlds in ways they see fit, and that the rush to create VR worlds ignores the hard realities of how we need to fix the real world. He wrote, “Virtual worlds will be molded in the image of their creators, not their participants.” That’s definitely a dark way of looking at this technology, but do you see any truth in that?
Baio: I saw a link to that. I think I’d have to read it first. I think that feels peripheral to what I’m interested in. You know, it’s funny, I was interested in the rise of VR and it becoming more accessible. But I don’t own any VR hardware at all. And I’ve had people ask about it because you can do VR on the web now, there are open standards for this. But I just want Skittish to be extremely approachable, to let you just click around and move through this space. Like, a child could sit down and use this.
And maybe this is not the question you originally asked, but I don’t have any interest in building a defining persistent virtual world for everybody and being the master of the universe over it. I mean, yes, I want that for my own events. I want to be able to have creative control to be able to craft a space for people, but the idea that I would be able to impose that on everyone is ridiculous, because when you’re dealing with a community there are different needs. You want to build a framework from which others can create experiences. So in this case, I'm thinking of the event venue as a canvas, with individual creators or organizers being able to craft and customize the event to make it their own.
WIRED: What do you think of audio-only apps like Clubhouse that are trying to replicate a sense of serendipity, that hallway-like experience where you're just like roaming a hallway and can pop into different rooms?
Baio: I just joined Clubhouse a week ago. I waited a really long time, for a number of reasons. I’m not super interested in a lot of startup culture, VC culture, hustle culture. Obsessing over crypto and bitcoin is not my world. So that was my impression going in. Then I started to hear some things where I thought, oh, it’s clearly moving beyond that audience. There are a large number of creative people using it to bring their own communities together, comedians, podcasters, filmmakers, musicians. There’s a really thriving Black community on Clubhouse too.
So my experience was that I waited a long time, but I was heartened to see that the audio worked the way I expected, which is people moving in and out of rooms. It really does feel natural, and that’s why I made Skittish this way. It can be kind of imposing for people to ask them to be on camera all the time, and it’s also jarring to see video feeds pop in and out as you move away from someone or someone leaves. Imagine if you have hundreds of people in a space and they do that. It’s much more seamless to, like, walk away from clusters of conversations if it’s an audio-only app. The idea that you’re “leaving quietly” makes people feel more comfortable.
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WIRED: Content moderation is obviously a big topic on any social platform these days. How have you approached content moderation in physical spaces, like at XOXO, and how do you plan to approach it in an online environment like Skittish?
Baio: This is a big part of the reason why it’s not public yet. I feel really strongly that it needs to have clear and strong moderation tools, not just for the event organizer to be able to control attendance and enforce their codes of conduct, but for attendees to be able to kind of take control over their experience and decide if they want to block someone. [With XOXO], we've gone to great lengths over the years to develop really inclusive practices and have a very strong enforced code of conduct. I know that their events out there that kind of put up a code of conduct as a perfunctory, you know, this is a thing we have to do, and don’t enforce it. But at XOXO, it's a very serious thing.
So, Skittish is going to have to have its own set of moderation policies, so that attendees are effectively able to escalate issues. There are going to be allowed uses and there are going to be disallowed uses. There are going to be clear guidelines, and communities or event organizers that simply will not be allowed to to use it. This is not going to be a place that allows misinformation, harassment, or abuse to happen. I'm not punting all of those decisions to event organizers. They’ll have the tools to take actions and enforce their own codes of conduct, but if they won’t then we will.
WIRED: What do you think is the future of an event like XOXO?
Baio: God, I wish I knew. We already canceled our 2021 event. We hope to bring it back in September of 2022, which would be the 10th anniversary of the festival. All being well, we will be back in September of 2022. The last one was 1,200 speakers and attendees—I mean, it's not Coachella, but it is a good size—and it's drawing from all over the place. It’s going to be really difficult to safely put everyone in an indoor space, and I think that we'll know that the pandemic has receded, when events like ours are able to safely return.