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
Examples
Mental Health
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
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.