Dan moved, see pinned tootSee Kittania Banter appendix at https://www.improbableisland.com/coc.php - having moments from site history in the Code of Conduct helps explain why the current rules exist and how the current cultural norms came to be, and stops you from going in circles repeating annoying or damaging dynamics over and over again (or constantly answering "why" questions).
Explain tumultuous site history and in-jokes that are vital to illustrating community norms. Don't explain in-jokes that are just for fun or fluff - veterans explaining in-jokes to newbies creates bonding and a sense of community responsibility.
Keep an eye on veteran users who are very quick to welcome newbies.
Keep two eyes on them if they don't interact much with other veterans.
If you see them invite newbies to a Discord or some other off-site comms where you can't keep an eye on them, get out the bloody microscope and cast out your feelers along the whisper networks, 'cause you might well be dealing with an unreported creep.
A welcome wagon will develop on your site and it's nearly indistinguishable from a creep looking to abuse their position of experience as power over new members or indoctrinate them into a particular way of thinking. The way to tell a genuine friendly-welcomer from an abuser going fishing is to watch their interactions with other long-term members, but even if they seem kosher in that respect keep an eye on the members they take under their wing and watch how they develop.
(don't let the community members know you're sniffing around the welcome wagon. Genuine friendly welcome wagons are an unambiguous good, don't jeopardize them by making them feel self-conscious or suspected of foul play.
Hey, I never said this was easy. It's a balancing act.)
A big problem with online communities is they tend to be put together by techy computery programmy logical people, and folks like that tend to assume that people behave rationally, that the things people do make sense, that there's some sort of order behind people's behaviour.
There bloody isn't. People torture themselves for no reason at all, and make you watch. Every five minutes some techy person starts an online community and is shocked, SHOCKED, to find that people are basically bonkers.
(some admins of online communities even believe that all speech is good speech and that there's a thing they call a "marketplace of ideas," which is presumably based around real, money-for-goods markets, and they type out defences of these markets on their QWERTY BLOODY KEYBOARDS, a layout designed to slow down typists so typewriters wouldn't jam, which the market has decided is all we need here in the year 2021. But I digress.)
Anyway these computery programmery types reckon hey I'll whack together some cool new social tech and I can just spend all my time coding to make it better and people will be happy.
Bollocks. If I spend 20% of the time I devote to my game actually writing the game, then that's a code-heavy week. Programming is not what you need to be good at, to do this kind of thing.
People isn't even what you have to be good at, it's not enough to be a very social person, because people act really differently online than they do IRL.
Being Very Online isn't even what you need to be good at, because that only gives you an end-user's perspective, which is useful sometimes but way less often than you think.
Really the only thing that can make you good at admin'ing an online community is doing it for a long time and talking to other admins.
Hey, sorry if you wanted some kinda Ten Neat Tricks thing.
It's very hard, often painful, you're invisible when you do a good job, very visible when you mess up, everyone thinks they can do a better job than you (and the only thing that convinces them otherwise is trying it (and nearly all will never try)), and there are no shortcuts. That's it.
Anyway if you've enjoyed this thread come check out my online game which is in the Sustainably Cosy phase of its so-far thirteen-year life cycle, at https://www.improbableisland.com.
AND ANOTHER THING while I think about it, on the subject of the Decline phase of a community website's lifecycle, which can be characterized as either Sustainable Cosiness or Tragic Heartbreak depending on whether or not the people who are there actually want to be there:
If you're ever on a website and you find yourself thinking "Man, this website's culture is super toxic, I'd better increase my involvement so as to provide a good example and thereby improve it," then CHRIST JUST RUN
Like I applaud your motivations but RUN
RUN RUN RUN
THIS IS WHY HALF THE PEOPLE ON REDDIT ARE STILL ON REDDIT
"I'll upvote the good stuff and downvote the bad stuff because this is an Important Website and there should be good people on it so that when the media runs a -" RUUUUUUNNNNNN
"If I leave, then there'll be one less good person on the site, and sooner or later it'll just become -" IT'S TOO LATE ALREADY RUNNNNNN
THE MONSTER IS BEHIND YOU AND IT'S GOT YOUR ANKLES!
Like srsly if you, the viewer, are on a website you don't like, in order to make the website better in exchange for NO MONEY, when THAT'S THE BLOODY WEBSITE OWNER'S JOB, then watch for me galloping away over the hills, I'm gonna look behind me just long enough to shout back "IT'S A TRAAAAAAP!"
More on community management and banning people? Sure yeah more on community management and banning people.
Ban the nazis? Sure! That's easy. No, really, it's easy - only websites run by really rich and often evil people claim to find it hard, and that's because they just don't actually WANT to, even though hosting nazis costs them money and goodwill.
It's incredibly easy to ban nazis, which is why nazis aren't high up on the list of worries for the typical online community.
You see someone openly being a nazi, you ban them, they're easy to deal with. The sort of users who can actually be troublesome are the ones who don't quite, technically, break the rules, just push up against them here and there, trying to find boundaries, see how far they can take things. Sometimes for years.
Often they're well liked, which makes it hard to ban them because you might fear fallout. Unfortunately you HAVE to ban them, because they usually turn out to be creeps.
These folks often turn out to be creepy abusers because they don't just do this boundary-testing with your site rules and established culture. They take the same approach to other things in their life, including interactions with your other members, which the like to take off-site so you can't keep an eye on them.
They push, they see what they can get away with, and they push a little more. They're often funny and charming.
There's often a whisper network about them.
Be prepared for blowback when you ban these creeps. When you finally do, it'll look less like you banned a known abuser/manipulator to keep the community safe, and more like you smote them down because they had half a toe over the line. Be prepared with the logs you've kept on this person and statements from other members who've interacted with them.
You DO keep logs of all moderator/user actions, don't you? Start now. If you don't, abusers can fly under the radar for a long time.
If you think the "banning folks" part of running an online community is all about seeing some guy spout racist slurs and bringing the hammer down on them, you're gonna be disappointed. People are sneakier than that.
A thing that's really worked out well on Improbable Island is telling players right in the CoC about the sort of tactics that abusers like to use, so members can recognize them. https://www.improbableisland.com/coc.php
It's not enough to simply ban abusers when their victim comes forward, because abusers never (and I mean NEVER) have only one victim, and the one who comes forward is never (and I mean NEVER) the first.
You can't be reactive about abusers. You have to create an environment in which:
1. Victims are likely to recognize abuse when it's happening to them;
2. Victims feel empowered to come forward with a report and they know they'll be taken seriously;
3. Abusers are wary of abusing.
And this is HARD. And there's not really a thing (apart from having a guide to common abuse/manipulation tactics right there on your site) that I can recommend to every online community, they're all different.
One tip: make very clear that men, specifically, will be believed if they come forward with a report. Most progressive/leftist spaces take "Believe women" as a matter of policy, and that's great, but men are even less likely to report abuse and they really do need it spelled out.
Make it very clear that you're aware that anybody, regardless of their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, their socioeconomic class, or really anything else about them, can end up in an abusive relationship or situation, and that you're there to help.
Seriously, if you're doing a Spring Clean of creeps and you even IMPLY that you're aware that men get abused too, men will come forward with their own stories about the creeps you're already investigating. This happened on my community.
After you ban someone for being an abusive creep, you need to let the community know you've banned them for being an abusive creep. If you don't, then they'll contact other members off-site and continue the abuse. When you do, you'll get many more reports as people now feel empowered to come forward, and you'll feel like crap because you didn't know this person was doing these awful things.
You'll also get lots of angry messages of disbelief because abusers are always funny and charming.
So now, for a lot of folks, you're the evil admin who banned a beloved community member. And to some others, you should've known they were a creep sooner.
Remember, you have power. These people sending you horrible messages are punching up.
Don't get into this game unless you've got a thick skin. Don't get into this game unless you can put yourself in others' shoes and understand why they might act the way they do. Don't get into this game if you expect people to *always* be understandable.
In your ban announcement, tell people that feedback they have about the ban should go directly to you, and if you see them bitching about it in the public channels there'll be consequences, because right now someone's thinking about coming forward with a report about another creep (there's never just one) and if they see someone being vocally disbelieving then future creeps will run around unchecked and the cycle will repeat.
This came up in the thread: we all know the story of the bartender who kicked out the nice, polite, respectful nazi because he knew if he didn't then the nazi would go tell his friends and then the bartender would be running a nazi pub.
Those bans are STILL easy. You won't receive ANY blowback, because everyone knows nazis are bad. It takes seconds and you don't even need to announce a ban like that, any more than you need to announce bans of robo-spammers, nazis are just noise.
Seriously, nazis of any description are not a problem at all on any well-run website. We ban a few every month, it's nothing, they're easy to spot, they don't even register as an issue, I've instance-blocked a few here on Fedi just while writing this thread.
As a community manager, you don't need to worry about nazis unless you're managing a nazi website, and if you are then you're probably not reading this thread.
Abusers are hard to spot and hard to ban. Nazis are easy.
Here are a few people who are harder to ban than nazis:
* Abusers who are clever enough to fly under the radar until a lot of people like them.
* Creeps who, when they suspect they're under investigation but before they get banned, post criticism of mod policy so as to make the ban look retaliatory.
* Serial abusers who don't fit the model of what people think when they hear "serial abuser" - not necessarily straight, cis, white, rich or male.
* Abusers who are themselves victims of abuse.
* Neurodiverse abusers who are not aware of the abuse they inflict on others, or who claim they are not aware.
* Wealthy abusers who pay a significant proportion of the site's hosting bill, without whom the site is in financial trouble.
Banning any of these people is EXHAUSTING and will make you and others feel TERRIBLE.
Banning nazis is morally uncomplicated and only other nazis or American journalists will have anything to say about it.
There's really only a few websites that let you be a nazi, reddit, twitter, stormfront, facebook, 4chan are the only big ones that come to mind, every other website treats them like spam and bans them without even thinking about it.
If someone tells you that it's difficult and morally complicated to ban nazis, you're not talking to a community manager, you're talking to a nazi who runs a nazi website.
Some of the bannings I've done were like trolley problems, nazis aren't.
How about this one: someone on your site who hints that they might hurt themselves unless other members talk to them. They're an emotional vampire, burning out members left and right, and you really really wish they could get some help, but they live in some godawful hellscape where mental healthcare costs lots of money and they're poor.
Do you ban this poor, obviously hurting person, who's inflicting a lot of hurt on your community?
Do you try to help them, knowing you're not the first and you won't succeed and you won't be the last, investing dozens of hours that you could be spending making cool things for your other members?
Do you ban them? There's a small but non-zero risk that they might literally kill themselves if you do that.
Taking no action is tempting, and would be the worst decision you could make.
I've been in this position more than once.
THAT'S a hard decision. It's NOT a hard decision to ban a nazi.
If you make the wrong decision at any point, it'll follow you around for years. Even many of the correct decisions you make will get you vilified.
It takes a decade of first hand experience, minimum, to get good at this, but the expectation from users is that you'll be perfect from the getgo.
The job requires empathy and ruthlessness at once.
Yikes this thread went from "Here's how to run an online community" into "Here's why not to run an online community" huh :P
This whole big long thing, and I'm gonna have a lil break from it but I'm probably not done, is why when people bang on about Eugen's latest screwup I'm more inclined to give the guy a break than a lot of other folks.
It's also why, when someone asks for a feature and says I can probably code it up in a day or two, I'm inclined to dance around them pointing and laughing and holding my belly
Oh haha I'm not done at all, if your community is successful enough to stick around for a decade (hardly any do) then the world will change around it and the dumbass jokes you made ten years ago will have aged badly. So you just rewrite them or remove them, right? You gotta keep up with the times.
Someone will notice and shout at you for being overly PC. I mean fair enough, that's better than being shouted at for being insensitive - oh no now everyone's talking about what it used to say 😬
You said dumb shit when you were younger, come on. We all did. We're different people now. Remember when I said make it easy for folks to let go of their pasts? Remember when I said that was impossible for celebrities who put their real name on their tweets or whatever? To the members of your online community, you're a celebrity. HAHA WELCOME TO THE SHIT CLUB
Some community members will suck up to you because they're the sort of little goody twoshoes who always told the teacher when someone was pulling funny faces while they were writing on the blackboard.
Some will have a go at you just because you hold some piffling amount of power over one particular thing they do in their free time, they hate authority of even the tiniest and most half-arsed sort and they want everyone to know it.
Vanishingly few will interact with you like NORMAL BLOODY PEOPLE
Someone downthread said they wish this thread would get picked up by tech blogs.
If it does, hi to all the 20somethings who know how to glue twenty different Javascript libraries together and who think that that's enough, and who will absolutely not heed any of this advice at all! I look forward to reading your own versions of this thread in ten or twelve years' time.
(if it sounds like I don't like programmers, you're right, I am one)
I'd better say some nice things in case people think it's all doom and hard decisions and big consequences.
The best part of my job is when someone emails me to say they've gotten married after meeting someone on the game, and this has happened a lot and will likely happen in any moderate to large online community. It's a lovely feeling, that this wonderful thing has happened that you weren't even trying for.
We've been really lucky and we've actually had more marriages than bans. That's partially down to the site being designed to deliberately put off a good chunk of its potential audience by, like, being text-based, having a big wall right at the start (hi hypothetical tech blogs, I see you sputtering there, yes this is the opposite of what y'all do and I do it on purpose), and partially down to the general culture and atmosphere kinda guiding people towards non-dickery.
(and that's a thing. Your mods steer the site's culture like steering an old, mouldy boat - try it if you ever get the chance, you make a tiny correction and then ten seconds later you see the shift, it's not like steering a bike or a car where you see instant results, at least unless you're being really heavy-handed. If you get the culture and atmosphere straight enough then the members set the tone and things tick over with much less direct intervention necessary)
(the physical design of your site, the colours, the layout, set the tone for how people behave on it, moreso than you think.)
Anyway we used to mention that in the site rules, the more-people-married-than-banned thing - it's still true, but we took it out because having it there could give people - maybe people trying to work up the nerve to report an abuser - the impression that we don't ban enough people. Or that we want to preserve this ratio by not banning people who need banned.
This is a very roundabout thread but I see I've got people reading it and this bit's important so I'm just gonna whack it in there: people generally don't report abusers.
This isn't because your site has an atmosphere where people are afraid to talk to the mods and you suck. Well, I mean, you might, but that's besides the point, even if you didn't suck people still wouldn't report their abusers for ALL SORTS OF REASONS.
These are known among certain circles as Barriers To Reporting.
People might not report their abusers because their abusers are well liked (they always are, that's how they get away with it) or because they're not sure they're being abused or if it's all in their head (they're being gaslit) or because the abuser's got dirt on them and might retaliate, or for all sorts of other reasons. These are all barriers to reporting.
NAME THEM AND TALK ABOUT THEM ON YOUR SITE. Then people will notice that they have their own barriers and that helps to dismantle them.
Here's the MotD on my site where we started operation stair repair. This names lots of barriers to reporting:
https://www.improbableisland.com/motd.php?id=467
This and the followup MotD are linked to from the Code of Conduct (linked a few times in the thread).
Naming the barriers to reporting is as important as naming and dissecting the tactics of abusers. This helps create an environment where abusers don't have it so easy. I call this "manipulation inoculation."
(oh man I wanna circle back to that boat thing real quick in case you get the wrong idea and think I'm posh - it's not my boat, it's my father's boat.
wait that's even worse. Okay so my dad bought an air compressor for fifty quid off this bloke in the 90's and he was umming and ahhing and getting ready to offer him thirty but the guy said oh go on I'll chuck in this boat. That's how fancy it is. It smells & is filled with men drinking lager from cans. It's a floating dumpster and we love it.)
(what I love about it most especially is that the river, the fancy yachting club downstream on the way to the pub, the water in general is filled with middle class people and we float right through it all in this noisy smelly belching rotting hulk and we see all these posh people with their upper lips doing that thing and we tip our cans of lager at them and give them a cheery wink. It's not a middle class boat and I'm not middle class. /boat)
what was I talking about
Oh yeah, herding cats. Trying not to end up in a situation where I have to live with the idea that a thing I spent thousands of hours building might be making someone's life measurably worse.
You don't HAVE to have a bunch of neuroses to do this job, but if you don't, you will.
Right I'm actually gonna try and write some code for a minute haha
Tonight I'm making a new Monthly Memento, that's a thing you get if you give me a tenner, and it's different every month. This month it's a rainbow torch (flashlight to you americans) and I would've done it last night but I had an absolutely banging migraine so right now the item's in the game but the description reads "This'll do something tomorrow, tonight I have a banging migraine thx 4 patience"
THIS ALSO HELPS REMIND YOUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS THAT THEIR ADMIN IS A REAL ACTUAL PERSON
Talk about your day a bit. Tread a real fine line between being absolutely robotic customer service person and letting a bunch of Internet People know too much about you.
Oh and don't talk like a customer service person. If you talk like customer service then people will treat you like customer service and christ you've seen how people treat customer service
Online community management thread continued, back to talking about the decline phase:
I touched on this earlier, but members leave websites because... well, they're websites, and staying on one website for a decade is WEIRD. Nobody does that, really.
I had a good furtle around in a "state of the site" thread on a big, old website currently stuck in Heartbreak Mode (I won't name the site) and to read that thread you'd think the only people left on the site are people who shouldn't be.
State of the Site updates where everyone freaks out about declining numbers are a characteristic of Heartbreak Mode, and in threads like this, the reason why everyone left the site is, obviously, the reason you personally are unhappy being on the site.
Everyone in this thread is unhappy for a different reason and this is a GREAT thing to fight over because no side ever gets proven wrong.
A thread like this can spin its wheels into hundreds of extremely unhelpful comments and the mods won't shut it down because to do so would be a Bad Look, given that the thread is full of complaints about the site and heartfelt pleas to have $yourParticularIssue taken seriously because the admin's failure to properly address it is *obviously* the reason numbers are dropping.
Also, these threads do, occasionally, provide a nugget of semi-helpful advice, if one is willing to fish around for it.
Remember, the only people who participate in "State of the Site" threads are people who've already been here too long. Newbies don't look at that stuff. Christ, why would they?
Anyway the arguing about why people left. There are parallels here with people arguing about where your "you" goes when you die.
1. You can't ever know. You can't ask someone, because they're not here. If you email someone and ask, then you'll be emailing someone who was well known enough on the site to have their otherly-online identities known, and they leave for different reasons.
2. The actual reason people leave (it's JUST a WEBSITE) is emotionally unsatisfying and we want an alternative!
3. This is the dumbest part. People (who are STILL THERE) will chime in to say "Well I left because of $myParticularIssue, there's one data point."
Oh you left did you love, left forever and just happened to pop in randomly just for this thread, you were dead but you got better, aye fair do's
If some of the issues brought up in the thread are social justice issues, then WOE BETIDE YE.
Progressive/leftist online spaces have their own set of problems unique to them, which I might have a chat about at some point when wiping my arse with 80-grit sandpaper isn't enough to shake the cobwebs off in the morning.
Say you're throwing a party, and it's a good one. When it's time for someone to leave, do you say "Cheers for stopping by, it's been really fun!" or do you say "No, please don't go, I'll pull out the futon, we have to keep this going..."
You do the first one because you're not a BLOODY CRAZY PERSON. Or a website.
Let people leave your website!
Pulling the sort of crap that modern websites pull, the little FOMO nags or notifications or emails about "Please don't leave we're desperate and you're really cool" or whatever, is a great way of filling your site with people who don't actually want to be there, and that's a one-way ticket to a dysfunctional, unhealthy community.
Hold people GENTLY. When it's time for them to go, wish them well and let them go, don't try to stop them or lure them or entice them back.
Internet Greybeard Community Management Thread Continued!
Some more required reading for anyone thinking of setting up any kind of geeky/nerdy community, and how it can all go wrong. Forewarned is forearmed!
FIVE GEEK SOCIAL FALLACIES
https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
THE WRATH OF CAT PISS MAN
https://web.archive.org/web/20060212205816/http://www.savantmag.com/16/retail16.html
FF7 FANDOM MADHOUSE
http://www.demon-sushi.com/warning/
Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]@ifixcoinops I always have at least two accounts on anything I run for this reason. I have an "official mouthpiece" and a "real me". Sometimes that "customer service" voice is handy and it's good to be able to pull it out as needed.
My regular account just posts like a regular person, mostly, because that's what I want to be. I wouldn't (shouldn't?) be running these things if I didn't want to be one of the users of them.