More on community management and banning people?

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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?

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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!

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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.

[ifixcoinops@mastodon.social]

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!

[db0@hachyderm.io]

@ifixcoinops this is very useful information. I will share it over at #lemmy as well as it's a new project and I'm certain a lot of admins are not experienced enough to be able to handle these situations well.