Community moderation thread continued: I recently saw a messy moderation incident play out in a very public and very cursed way, and in trying to untangle the thread of bad decisions that got to this point, I figured I'd talk a bit about power, because it looks like this is where the whole mess started.

Much much earlier in the thread I said that some people will resent you or treat you differently for the "power" that they think you hold over them.

Now most people don't actually want power, and are (rightly) suspicious of those who do. You made a website to have a laugh with some mates, not to have power.

Well, I've got some bad news for ya, buddy.

Whether you personally think you have power or not is as irrelevant as the distinction between having power, and having a bunch of people THINK you have power.

So while you may think you're talking to someone under your power as a friend, to them it doesn't feel that way. To them it feels more like talking to a boss or a teacher or a doctor or a judge, someone with power over them.

It's very very easy to hurt people from this position.

(this is why I cringe reading guides on how to set up social networks for your real-life friends. This dynamic ends friendships.)

Take this "I have power" dynamic and put it anywhere you need to make a delicate decision. Even though you just run a website, people (especially those in a fragile mental state) think you have power over them, so you have power over them. Offhanded remarks will be taken deeply to heart. Casual banter is ill advised.

Once you're an admin, to some people you're no longer a person, you're a cop. No matter how you act, no matter who you are, Power = Cop to some people.

It's on my mind, both because of the Bad Decision Train I saw unfold on another instance and because of my own experiences lately - mental health and bans.

I recently had a chat with a player who asked me to erase all of their characters. They were having a very bad time mental-health-wise, the Island was making it worse, and they wanted their characters erased because they couldn't stop themselves from logging on.

Anyway about a week later this player turns up again with a new account. At this point, with the conversation about how they hurt themselves with the site fresh in my mind, I issue a permanent ban - both because I don't want them to hurt themselves, and because I absolutely will not consent to them using *my* website to hurt themselves. I may not be able to stop them from hurting themselves elsewhere, but I don't consent to being made a part of that.

And this is one ban that I don't disclose.

The decision about whether, when and how to talk about bans really has to be taken on a case-by-case basis.

If a player is banned because they pose a risk to other players, then we tell EEEEVERYONE, because Discord is, regrettably, a thing.

If a player is banned for cheating or being a general dick, well, that's a maybe - I might mention it in chat but it doesn't warrant a Message Of The Day.

If a player is banned to protect themselves more than other players, then no, that's not a thing we'll talk about. Because of our position of power (whether it's real, imagined, or whether there's really any difference between the two) it would be at best inappropriate for us to do a public announcement about an issue that involves a user's mental health.

Sometimes this starts a rumour mill churning. Which sucks, but the churn's gonna churn. Refer to earlier "ban for lying about mods" bit.

Refer also to earlier "Be thick-skinned" and "People think you're a cop" bits.

Being an admin means that sometimes people will hate you and tell lies about you, and there's nothing you can do about it that won't make it worse.

There's a lot of good times involved in being an admin too, but you have to be prepared for being hated and lied about. This is important. If you honestly don't want that, if you think that would outweigh the good you're able to see and do, then this isn't a job for you.

More for the community moderation thread? Aye sure more for the community moderation thread.

Improbable Island made a grand last month. For a hobby that'd be AMAZING. For a full-time job, that sucks. Especially for a moderator, sysadmin, artist,
writer and developer all in one.

But this is the way it goes, running a website for money. Some months you're rich, some months you're poor.

Some folks don't do well with uncertainty but if you grew up scrabbling then you'll have an easier time!

One of the things that leads to this feast-or-famine kind of situation is the way people support websites.

The overwhelming majority of people will never give a website any money, no matter how politely the site may ask. A very small handful of people are very rich and will think of donating a grand the way you or I might stick 20p in the Barnardo's box. These people are called "Whales" and I've spent a decade trying to work around them, to limited success.

The thing about whales - quite aside from the dodgy ethics of having one or two people be basically financially responsible for the whole site - is that if you rely on whales, your income's gonna be incredibly inconsistent and you're gonna have a nightmare of a time trying to budget both your business and your life.

Improbable Island's donation setup tries hard to discourage whales and encourage instead small, manageable, regular donations from lots of people.

No matter how hard you try to set things up so that each month is more or less the same money as last month, you're probably gonna be in Feast-Or-Famine mode. If you're used to self-employment then you're used to this, but it can still be scary, especially if you have a financial emergency like a suddenly-sick pet or car problems combined with a bad month. It can make you think "Aw man, am I ever gonna have a good month again?"

And yeah, you will, but in the moment it's hard to remember that.

Another one for the community moderation thread: DEATH.

We just lost an Islander to COVID-19. I had to knock out an MotD in a hurry to get money and messages of condolence to his widow:
https://www.improbableisland.com/motd.php?id=509

It's very late and I'm getting up very early and I'm emotionally exhausted from writing this, so there'll be more on this subject tomorrow.

For now, think on it, because this will happen to you.

Alright real quick thought on this because it just popped in there and grief does weird things to us:

Remember that bit towards the start of RoboCop where the chief comes in and takes the dude's name off the locker, says when the funeral is and donations to the family can be given to Cecil as usual? For a start, you're the chief, and you're Cecil too, so that's two jobs right out the damn gate

Alright, I'm awake, too damn early, and online death.

On any community website, people will die. When you, the admin, learn of one, it's because they were so heavily into the site that their spouse or whoever reached out to you or someone on the site to say hey this thing meant a lot to this person. That's vanishingly rare and for every one of those people there are scores who appear to just stop logging on, and are indistinguishable from people who just stop logging on but who are alive.

Specific to our game, when a modulator died some years ago, we organized a walkabout through her places (player-created buildings) to find that she had left her character in a bed.

Seeing her name on a computer screen sent adrenaline down my spine and I legit felt like I'd seen a ghost. I reacted to seeing her name, in this context, the way I'd react to seeing a ghost, because although I knew her very well, I knew her *as a name.* I saw her *name* in exactly the context that I knew *her.*

Other things to keep in mind when dealing with the death of an online community member:

Yes, post a public message. You'll have complex admin-only feelings about the member that do not apply to the general userbase; keep those to yourself unless directed otherwise by the player's friends, because this isn't about you. Search "Comfort in, dump out" for info on that.

(our player's MotD, his friends told me, should be to GET PEOPLE THE HELL VACCINATED)

The family may ask you for kind words from the userbase, or set up a funeral fund.

The member's grieving family see your site as a source of happiness for the deceased member, and want to include it. The grieving family is not thinking, right now, of the nazi troll you banned last week.

The funeral home will set up a memorial page with all sorts of personal info. Don't link to it.

Tell your members to send kind words and money to *you,* and you'll pass them along.

DON'T DOXX THE WIDOW.

Everyone but the very young has known death. Traumatizing and awful as it can often be, it's a common experience for which we have a script to follow. *Online* death, or rather *noticed* online death, is much newer, people don't know how to cope, and there'll be kind of a mess. Be extra gentle with your users for the next little while.

Also be extra gentle with yourself, and try to resist the temptation to view the deceased as the most visible tip of an iceberg of unknown ghosts.

Online Community Moderation Thread Part NaN: backseat moderation

You've gotta have a thing in your CoC that prohibits talking on behalf of mods, IE people going around saying "Careful, the mods don't like that."

When people say that, they usually mean "I don't like it but I'm gonna shift the fallout of this social sanction away from Cool Free Speech Guy Who Doesn't Care here, and onto Evil Site Staff Who Are Literally Hitler."

Never let anyone speak for you or your mods.

Adding this on to the community moderation thread:

Someone at Stern Pinball got talked into making a pinball discussion platform to go with their new high-scores app. The forum isn't live yet but it's 100% going to be an absolute disaster and I Can Not Wait.

Pinball specifically suffers from several of the dynamics I've talked about in this thread, and having a manufacturer start their own forum about their own games is also a uniquely awful idea so get your drama-slurping straws ready

Pinball is currently going through a slow but steady revival, which means new people are coming into the hobby.

Some of them are young.

Some of them are *women* for god's sake.

I've even heard that one or two of them might be... "you know..."

So pinball has been undergoing the sort of drama that happens when a hobby has gone a long time without any new blood, and the old guard are stubborn - and even the ones who aren't resistant to change are slow to adapt.

The biggest pinball forum is Pinside, and it's a horrible, horrible place. It's less horrible than the newsgroup that came before it, but it's still horrible. There's also Tilt Forums, which can be horrible sometimes but for pinball it's comparatively unhorrible.

The pinball community has been so poorly served that they're primed to expect online pinball discussions *in general* to be some flavour of horrible. Standards and expectations are *very* low going in.

Stern in particular is well-known for erasing threads on their Facebook page that veer into territory even slightly critical (such as asking for code updates to abandoned games). Combine this with the sense of entitlement you often see in rich people, and you've got a recipe for a 1:1 ratio of Pinball/First Amendment threads.

This forum will be a case study unto itself!

Earlier on I talked about how targeted advertising is a scam from flim-flam men, and your best bet was to go for completely untargeted and really wide-reach advertising to find the people who don't yet know (or act like) they want your thing.

This article says that companies who turned off targeted ads don't notice any difference, and nearly all of the people who were targeted would have bought the thing anyway:
https://sparktoro.com/blog/what-if-performance-advertising-is-just-an-analytics-scam/