A Tweet got to me

I just responded to the following Tweet by Andreas Antonopoulos.

My response was simple and from experience.

I have worked as a community manager for over 15 years now, starting as admin on the now defunct forum of Weebls-Stuff (people may remember the "Badger, badger, badger"-meme: that was Weebl and we were there!).

I have managed communities both online and offline and the one guiding rule is that the community reflects what the community leaders express.

This is not because people are "sheeple", oh no. It is much simpler than that: if you have a community leader that allows trolls, bullies and simply anti-social people their space, the people on the opposite side of the spectrum simply won't bother anymore.

The internet is a vast place, and why submit yourself to bad treatment if you can go somewhere else? So by allowing the bullies their space (under the guise of "Freedom of Speech") the moderators of these places are effectively creating a situation where no socially minded person would go. The responsibility is theirs, and no one elses.

Why rules are not censorship

In the NXT Forum we go by a very simple set of rules.

As stated on our forums: "These rules are based on common sense and will be lightly enforced."

And they are: we only have had to use the ultimate penalty of a "ban" four times in almost two years. Our forums are nice and well-behaved, and there is a lot of room for discussion.

However, we have always made clear that the forums are not a place to insult people. Not because we feel it's our duty to stamp out the Evil of Insulting, but because it doesn't fit the aim of the forums: to discuss and promote NXT.

I have received the accusation of censorship a few times, and I feel these people are missing the point. There have been numerous energetic discussions between devs and forum users about which way to go, and that is fine. It's good, because this is what the forums are MEANT to do. The rules we impose, however, are there to create a basis of communication. Should that basis disappear, the forums become useless.

Where bad modding leads

What I call "bad mods" suffer from the misconception that groups will invent their own rules to the greater benefit of the group. And they are not wrong.

The problem is that if a benevolent group moves in first, they will get told that "rules are bad" and "You should never impose your will on others", thereby ironically imposing their vision of "freedom" on others. This leaves a fledgling community wide open to the more aggressive people. These will quickly take over any forum and impose (by vehemently attacking anyone who dares to confront them) their "order of disorder" on the community.

The mods, even though well-meaning, stand to the side with no other recourse but to wring their hands and wash themselves of any responsibility by maintaining "this is the will of the community". They are blind to the fact that by hamstringing any social effort, they have created a safe haven for destructive elements. I repeat: "The responsibility is wholly theirs."

Bitcoin forums

We see the process I've described on a lot of Bitcoin related forums, and I tend to be really surprised when people don't understand how this happens.

Bitcointalk.org, the subreddit /r/Bitcoin to name a few, have all gone down the dumps because their mods (the same group for both in this instance) failed to spot what they are actually supposed to do. For some reason, they have internalised the figure of "leader" to such an extent, they cannot see that other ways of leadership that do not mean "impose your will arbitrarily" are possible.

Apparently, /r/btc is currently working out how to deal with these problems. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Conclusion

History is replete with examples of perverse stimuli that turn ordinary, nice people into monsters under certain circumstances. Forum users are no different. Community management is a skill that is based on this simple truth. I am willing to bet that most people who are horrible on forums are nice people offline or even on other forums.

The forums themselves provide the stimuli in the form of rules, unwritten or not, that create a healthy basis for discussion or not. There is no template for this, and I am not advocating one.

The only thing I am calling for is for mods to own up to the truth that they have a responsibility and that if a forum goes to pot, it's on them.