More on community management and banning people?

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

* 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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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?

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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)

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

(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)

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

(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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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."