Community Management and Moderation

This repository contains my thoughts, lessons, guidelines and learnings around community management and moderation.

Rules of Thumb

• Not everything deserves a response
• Of the things that do merit a response, virtually none of them need a response right now

Articles

General Communication

• Conversational Aikido - Directing the flow of conversation
• When not to respond - Extinction
• Up with which I shall not put - Taking care of yourself while you take care of the community
• Being humble and gracious - How to be a good host
• Open Source - How it is different from normal customer support
• The X/Y Problem - How to get at the real problem underneath it all
• Setting Expectations - Communicating the difference between desires, hopes, plans and facts
• Voting System Flaws - Why Atom doesn't have an Issue or PR voting system

Moderation

• The Ministry of Truth - When to edit or delete posts or lock threads
• Taking Out the Trash - When to warn and ban people
• Why Not to Talk About Why

Destructive Behavior

• Terminology

Examples

• Overwatch Griefer

Mental Health

• A fellow open source mantainer's experience with burnout

Other Reading

General

• A community isn't a garden, it's a bar — An article making a good case for the standard community metaphor being more like a bar than a garden
• Complicated politics of moderation — Twitter thread about the slow decline of the Something Awful forums, presaging Gamergate
• Harassing for Contact — Twitter thread describing someone harassing a woman with the intention of establishing personal contact, including a fabulous strategy for responding (with permission to use as a template for others 💖)
• The Asshole Filter — Great article describing the specific mechanism behind which not enforcing rules or boundaries makes them meaningless
• Nazi Bar example of Paradox of Tolerance
• I’m the TikTok Couch Guy. Here’s What It Was Like Being Investigated on the Internet.
• Design Principles to Combat Technology-Mediated Abuse
• The case for removing abuse-enabling language from the Ruby mailing list — by Jacob Herrington
• Why racist/sexist/ableist jokes aren't acceptable — by Brandon Weaver
• Why "assume good intent" harms inclusion — by Tiffani Ashley Bell
• How many Pepe the Frog emoji is too many? — A Twitter thread
• Woman in infosec is harassed for posting selfie in bikini on Twitter
• Tolerance is not a moral precept
• I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place
• Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem
• Women Making Science Videos on YouTube Face Hostile Comments
• 25% of a group is what is required to cause a shift in a social norm — to me, this means that allowing destructive activities to grow to that point is when a community can be lost to anarchy
• Wikipedia article on tactics used by fringe or pseudoscience advocates
• The Petrie Number - how minorities experience exponentially more discrimination even when the prevalence of prejudice is fixed across a population
• We Don't Do That Here
• How "Good Intent" Undermines Diversity and Inclusion
• Being rude to your child's doctor could lead to worse care - Rudeness has real costs
• The Benjamin Franklin Effect
• Reddit post about propaganda - The quote from Sartre applies directly to trolls
• The Neuroscience and Psychology of Open Source by @elizabethn
• Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types - While it is specifically about people who play online games, a lot can be gleaned from the categorization of motivations approaching open-source projects
• The Secret Rules of the Internet - How moderation works at the large content companies: Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Maintainer's Guide to Staying Positive - Don't let the trolls get you down! Use this reference to avoid open-source burnout and keep doing what you love: writing code!
• How to be a human being in the comments: a refresher - From https://www.engadget.com - A very detailed and human description of how to not be a jerk in the comments
• Utopia Inc - Article about how communes are similar to startups ... and, in my opinion, open source projects

Open Source

• Trip report by creator of Fossil to the first GitHub Open Source Advisory Council meeting
  • Fossil is a simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management system designed to be a self-contained source control server including bug-tracking, wiki, forum, and technotes, among many other features.

Videos

• Politeness or clarity? - From Fun, Fun, Function

Books

• Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-based Social Design
• Haters: Harassment, Abuse and Violence Online
• The Internet of Garbage
• The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy
• Crash Override

Lee Dohm

• My Studies in Community series, originally on the GitHub Support Community
• Conversational Aikido - The Presentation - My thoughts after being the Atom message board moderator for a little over a year (see the Conversational Aikido article for the latest version of the core concept)

Jeff Atwood and Discourse

• Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
• Suspension, Ban or Hellban? - these were Jeff Atwood's thoughts when he was working on Stack Overflow, he backed off of these ideas when building Discourse
• The "Just In Time" Theory of User Behavior - why Discourse shows little yellow popups when posting things
• Your Community Door - why user-to-user blocking is harmful for smaller communities and the "zero tolerance" idea
• What If We Could Weaponize Empathy?
• Because Reading is Fundamental - be careful what you incentivize
• What is Trolling? - thoughts on the nature of trolls
• The Hugging Will Continue Until Morale Improves - codes of conduct and the objections to them
• They Have to be Monsters - why empathy seems lacking in online communication

Copyright

All material in this project is copyright © 2016-2022 by Lee Dohm. All Rights Reserved.