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 😬
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.
(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.)
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.
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/
THE MISSING STAIR
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
RPGNET ON BANNING TRUMP SUPPORTERS
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-post-in-support-of-trump-or-his-administration.835849/
(the whole thread is a good read)
Does the admin "owe" the users, for their participation or donations? Do the users "owe" the admin and mods, for their labour and money invested into keeping the site online?
TBQH I wanna completely sidestep that question and give the unsatisfying non-answer of "If you're thinking in terms of who owes who then things are already shaky and you need to sort that out."
Nobody owes anybody a damn thing. As site admin you make a bet that the advertising money you spend on getting a new user will pay off with a donation. Sometimes you win, most of the time you lose, but if even 10% of your users love the place enough to kick in a fiver or a tenner and you're spending a nickel per new user, you're doing alright.
Yes, it comes down to money. Of COURSE it comes down to money. Web hosting costs money. Hosting a big community costs big money.
The money subject can be a whole nother aspect for another day, 'cause I'm talking about who owes who and I've gotta take the cat to the vet in a few minutes...
Your users shouldn't feel like they owe you anything. You made a bet that enough of them would pay their way for this to shake out well, and that bet is between you and your wallet.
You don't owe your users anything, save for your responsibility to keep them safe. You made this huge thing and let them on it for free.
If your users feel like they're owed something from you, or like they owe you something, that's an obligation that can keep them on the site after they're no longer having fun.
You don't want that. You want your users to feel free to come and go as they please. Hold them too tightly and you're headed to Heartbreak City.
Furthermore, allowing a sense of entitlement to arise among your users will really heck things up. Every improvement you make to the site will be met with cries of anguish (from the 0.1% of users who shout the loudest), either that the improvement is Bad Actually or that you should be working on $theirParticularIssue instead.
It probably goes without saying that your relationship with your users shouldn't be an antagonistic one!
Is it time to talk about money? Aye sure Internet Community Catherding Part 7, GRUBBY CASH
I should start by asking, do you actually wanna make money off a website?
'cause on the one hand, if this is just a hobby and you start having to deal with the sort of thing I've talked about in this thread, damn right you're gonna want paid to put up with that. On the other, if this is a hobby that you enjoy and you turn it into work, you're gonna need a new hobby.
Note: money changes how you, your users and the site interact.
Donating makes your users feel invested in the thing you're doing, and lets them express that they like it and want it to succeed. It doesn't breed a sense of entitlement like you might expect, that's only a thing that happens with users who were gonna end up feeling entitled anyway - if there weren't a donations link they'd feel entitled to your attention just for, like, looking at the site.
Accepting donations from nice users also lowers your tolerance for nonsense from nasty users.
(which is good tbqh, a lot more admins couId stand to be a little more ruthless)
I've been talking about voluntary donations here because other ways of paying the bills... don't.
Not all of this is applicable to paying the bills for other online communities, but here's a couple things we've tried on Improbable Island.
1. Adverts! We used to have banner ads across the top of the site. If I earned a buck a day with a banner ad, that was a good day. It's not 1999 anymore, adverts don't earn money unless you're doing the creepy spyware stuff that right from the start I knew I never wanted to do.
2. Optional adverts! If you paid a fiver you could get rid of them.
Opt-out ads earned even less money, and if you're bothered enough to pay 5c to remove ads you'll just block them, never mind $5.
3. Opt IN adverts! Ads were off by default and if you wanted to support the site you could turn them on! We really did this! Yes! Yes we did! It failed! People VASTLY overestimate how much you can make from running ads, and instead of giving a fiver they'd earn us 0.05c in advertising revenue.
The problem with running adverts on any basis is that the people who were inclined to donate money to keep the site running, the people who think about how much it must cost and what must go into it and go "Hmm, I like this place, wonder how I can help," will just disable their adblocker and earn you a couple pennies, when they'd happily give you a fiver.
When we cut off all ads, even the opt-in ones, donations tripled. It was like people suddenly remembered that clicking doesn't do anything.
4. Merchandise!
Don't do merchandise. Don't do merchandise even if people are begging you to do merchandise. For every twenty people who say they'll buy a T-shirt, one will, and for their tenner you'll get a dollar in profit. Their motivation for buying a T-shirt was to give you twelve dollars, they've already got T-shirts, they don't *really* want the T-shirt, just let them give you the tenner.
Even logistics and inventory aside, it gets worse...
If people see that you're selling merch, they'll think "They're making a fortune in merch, I don't need to donate," and then they won't donate AND they won't buy the merch!
Just do a donation meter. When it gets full, everybody gets a little something and the ones who donate get a little something extra. Simple.
Remind people that there are no ads (most won't notice, or assume there are ads they've blocked) and ask politely for some money. Be straightforward about it. Don't be sneaky.
christ this whole thread is like the opposite of what all the big sites do isn't it
If you wanna be a big site with millions of users obviously don't do any of this
(who the hell wants a big site with millions of users, that sounds like a heart attack before 40 to me)
I wanna reemphasize the merch thing. People just don't buy it. And it was good merch, y'know, we didn't half-arse it - we did voting on the designs, get people invested, everything you're supposed to do, had a list hundreds-long of everyone who'd said "OMFG TAKE MY MONEY" to a given design. Sold maybe 20 in 2 years, while donations cratered. Took away the merch link, donations went up again.
If you still think merch is a good idea: have you ever seen someone wearing a website T-shirt?
Aaahhhhh time for another nice cool glass of bollocks, it's internet community management thread part 3.14
Couple people have asked me hey put this in a blog or something so I can submit it to hacker news or reddit or whatevs, and that reminded me to talk about advertising and where your traffic comes from
Some communities might get good spread by word-of-mouth, but tbh you can't rely on that - especially if you run the sort of community where people enjoy trying on new identities like hats, figuring out which ones fit nice. They don't want to bring their real-life mates into that, they want to chat with semianonymous internet people.
(bookmark for myself later, talk about avatars & user differentiation dan)
The other reason you can't rely on it is normal people don't really talk about websites.
Anyway the importance of NOT targeting your ads is threefold.
First, targeted ads are creepy, scummy and privacy-invading.
Second, they're really expensive and they don't bloody work.
Third, if you target your ads towards people who already like your stuff, then you won't find people who do not yet know that they like your stuff.
You want that moment of serendipity. You want people stumbling across something they weren't looking for and falling in love with it. You want people to randomly find a thing that fits into a slot in their life that they didn't know was there. You want your site associated with that feeling!
Most new visitors will bounce straight away, but a few will go "Oh my god this is perfect for me!" and no algorithm can find those people. Algorithms only find people what they already like, nothing new.
Anyway it's important to go and LOOK at the site you're thinking of advertising on, and ask yourself "Are the people who regularly visit this website gonna be nice friendly people who I'd quite happily have a pint with, or a bunch of screaming dickheads?"
Don't try to match the subject of your site vs the publisher site, look more at the tone. Feel the place out. Don't advertise on Reddit (super toxic community and they inflate the ad click numbers) or American tech sites (freezepeach).
Unrelated, but do look at encyclopedia dramatica, kiwifarms, any LJ or fandom drama archives you can find, these are absolutely godawful websites but they often illustrate in exhausting detail the ways that communities implode or explode, and trolls will quite happily show off their moves so you can recognize when they try the same on you.
(I reiterate, they're awful and often upsetting websites, view at own risk)
To sum up the thread on online community management so far:
* Nazis are nothing to worry about;
* Encyclopedia Dramatica is full of very useful information;
* You should absolutely ban whoever you want for whatever reason you please;
* Admins who do a really terrible job deserve a break;
* It's really important that you make sure you get paid, but make sure you don't give people anything tangible in return.
pls feel free to boost and screencap this toot devoid of its context
@ifixcoinops First of all this whole thread is amazing and I hope to return and read more than I’ve already skimmed.
Just commenting to point out how amusing to me this used to be flat out Advertising 101 Common Sense: you pay more for the biggest audience because you find more of the people that don’t know they need your product.
It’s amazing that Google et al have managed to convince so many of the false reality it’s worth paying more to target people and preach to the choir.
@ifixcoinops I did the heart-attack-before-40 thing. Would not recommend.
You don't want to do things the mega-websites do or try to be like them. That is a recipe for failure because then you're inviting competition from the most brutal competitors and be at a great disadvantage.
By being "not them" you are much more compelling than being "like them" because if users are already with them why would they bother with "like them"?
@ifixcoinops
> who the hell wants a big site with millions of users
I can think of one guy... 🤣
Dan moved, see pinned toot
Max
Port-humping pupper
Reinder Dijkhuis
Andrew (Television Executive)
Daniel Cassidy 🦌
Mark Shane Hayden
Strypey