If your website (or app!) is full of assholes, it’s your fault.

The bottom line, as I wrote half a decade ago, is that if your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault. Same goes for your apps. We are accountable for the communities we create, and if we want to take credit for the magical moments that happen when people connect with each other online, then we have to take responsibility for the negative experiences that we enable.

Our communities are defined by the worst things that we permit to happen. What we allow tells the world who we are.

After so many years and so many conversations about this problem, it’s frustrating to think that these basic fallacies keep creeping back into the conversation. Sometimes it’s from those who would seek to enable abuse; obviously, we can safely dismiss the people who support awful behaviors online. But at times, we hear these arguments from otherwise-reasonable people who simply are uninformed about the lessons we’ve learned over the past 20 years.

Too often, decisions about our online communities are being made by those who aren’t familiar with the discussion that’s come before. Perhaps if we can ensure that the well-intentioned aren’t repeating the hoariest and least accurate clichés that stand in the way of addressing abuse online, we can finally make some real progress.