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/
I saw someone had posted this link on Fedi earlier but I forget who it was. I remember coming across this site five years or so ago and absolutely inhaling it. In the time since I last had a look it's been updated:
http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/index.html
It's a study of forums for estranged parents - that is, forums full of people so horrible that their own kids disown them.
I'm posting this to the community moderation thread because the behaviour patterns of these sorts of estranged parents mesh so perfectly with the sorts of abusive behaviours that you have to warn your community members about.
This series of articles is ostensibly about parental abuse, but much of the content applies equally well to most emotional abusers.
Particularly useful for online community modulation is this list of dysfunctional beliefs at http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/dysfunctional-beliefs.html - here's a sampling:
* If one understands something, then one agrees with it. If I don’t agree with something, then I don’t understand it. If you don’t agree with me, then you don’t understand me, and can’t claim that you understand me until you agree with me.
* Emotions cause actions. When I feel something, I can’t not act on it.
Dysfunctional ideas about interacting in online spaces, ban if you see evidence of folks thinking this way:
* This website won't survive if I leave it.
* This website's norms don't work for me, so I will try to change those norms rather than fitting in or going to a different website.
* If a website's rule is insufficiently specific, then the important thing is to break it, or nearly break it, so that the admin will make it more specific.
* This website owes me for the time I spend on it.
* Power corrupts, so the moderators of a hobby website should be treated with the same disdain or distrust one would treat a millionaire politician or CEO.
* Moderators only become moderators because they want power over others.
Oof, sad news about Something Awful founder Lowtax.
Something Awful has been going through a messy and painful transformation, a kind of reckoning with its past self, and at some point I was gonna do a case study for this thread.
I've only just heard about Lowtax's suicide so it's probably not a great time to start that analysis, but in the moment this feels like a cautionary tale about deleting your old stuff so you can change.
Community Moderation Thread continued, a case study:
@[email protected] shows us the eventual end state of the hobby degradation dynamic I talked about earlier in this thread.
https://social.bau-ha.us/@aurora/107434889581265192
This starts with admins allowing forums to shift away from normal, everyday conversation about a hobby, and towards threads where people post pictures of the thing they bought today. Further in Aurora's thread are some counterexamples of still-viable groups.
trying to sell my old hifi setup and realizing that the stuff i bought for 1-10€ a piece on ebay 15 years ago is now worth over 500€ :blobfoxeyes:
All hobby communities are vulnerable to consumerist takeover, and the effects can spill out into the real world as we've seen here, inflating prices and cutting off new members apart from the very rich, cementing a self-reinforcing mechanism.
There is no saving a hobby community that has entered this downward spiral. Once a hobby becomes involved with financial speculation, it's a rich-getting-richer wasteland until the bubble bursts, which can take years.
Stopping a hobby from becoming taken over by the empty content of the rich is easy, but requires vigilance and community buy-in.
Establish in your CoC that posts amounting to no more than "Look at this thing I bought today" are spam, and will be treated as such. Talk about the hobby degradation phenomenon in your CoC so that people understand why it's a necessary rule; your members will help with enforcement if they're familiar with the alternative.
Moar online community moderation thread!
A browse through reddit's "hobbydrama" forum often yields cautionary tales that can illustrate What Not To Do, and here's a good write-up of Neopets' infiltration by NFT scammers:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/pzmcy2/pet_site_game_neopets_introduces_nfts_burns/
The bit that caught my eye, the bit that made me think this belongs in the moderation thread rather than web3isgoinggreat or wherever, is the language the scammers use.
In this writeup we see Neopets invaded by NFTrolls who have spent so much time sniffing their own farts that it doesn't occur to them to code-switch; they chuck around 4chan words like "oldf**" thinking this is just how people talk.
Unmoderated, anonymous websites (here I say "anonymous" to mean places where you don't have strong visual differentiation between users) ruin your brain.
In places where the users are difficult to tell apart, and especially in places that attach numeric scores to socialization, people end up talking the same way. Heck, go browse that subreddit I just linked to, ordered by top; the posts all have the same rhythm, same style, same slang, even though they were written by allegedly different people.
Imagine a party full of people who are so close they talk alike, but aren't friends and don't actually know each other. WEIRD AND SCARY.
This is of course deliberate!
Everyone here knows that spyware companies invest billions into improving their programs to better spy on people and try to predict what people are gonna want to buy. Most people here know that targeted advertising doesn't actually work and it's all just a long con, but the folk who work at spyware companies like google and facebook etc have been - YES! - sniffing their own farts for so long that they're starting to honestly believe their own nonsense!
So when you've chucked billions towards paying some brogrammers to try and predict the behaviour of individual humans and still the best your program can do is show them adverts for a toothbrush they bought last week, if you're particularly sociopathic you might look at the other side of the equation:
Your program might give accurate guesses more often if the people it was spying on were easier to predict.
That's where we're at now: spyware companies have, after decades of trying, finally invented a square-shaped hole, and realised that it'd take many further billions to make that hole sufficiently people-shaped to actually work; now they reason it's cheaper to make a bigger hammer.
Hence facebook's reaction emojis; it's WAY easier to have the product choose from five emotional reactions than to try and parse emotion from a textual comment.
https://rixx.de/blog/on-running-a-mastodon-instance/
Adding on to my massive long online-community-management thread: Here's a great post from the admin of chaos.social on his experiences running a Mastodon instance along with @leah. There's overlap with running any kind of online community, but federated stuff has its own specific quirks that @rixx highlights nicely in this blog post. A worthwhile read if you're thinking of setting up a Mastodon server or any online space.
Content warning: Moderation philosophy, from a retired mod
Meta bit in this thread: Elon Musk just bought twitter, so we may be about to witness what happens when a formerly-badly-moderated site deliberately turns off moderation.
We've seen this before loads of times, and it's predictable - the site fills up with toxic people who scare off first the normies and then each other and it collapses in on itself within months. But I don't believe we've ever seen it happen with a website as big as twitter. This is gonna be fascinating/horrifying to watch.
Here on Fedi we're also gonna get ourselves a big ol' dose of No Fountain, but I see @feditips and others REALLY GOING HARD on the "Write down and broadcast the unwritten social norms for preservation" thing, and I think fedi reminds people of forums and BBSes enough that they're remembering netiquette and dramabombs and site implosions from their own pasts, and taking measures to get the newbies thoroughly doused in Fedi Culture really quickly.
Fedi is very cool in a lot of ways
@ifixcoinops VRAT don't quite do that, but they are quite strict about /not/ signing up just to sell items (even if they are useful components) and folk are not allowed to post ebay links for this reason and have to contribute to get access to such resources as the circuit diagram/datasheet library
Dan moved, see pinned toot
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