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shannon_aI've been professionally overseeing the management of online communities for something over 15 years. In that time, there's one very important lesson that I learned:
The Thesis
One bad member in a community can drive out ten, or even a hundred, good members. By keeping those bad community members you're not only shrinking your community but worsening it too.
So what do you do get rid of bad actors in your community?
Both community managers and community members can help a lot.
Solution One: Community Management
If you're a community manager, you need to ban the bad actors when it's obvious that they're acting to the deficit of the community. Part of this requires a rule like RPGnet's rule zero: "Keep the forums friendly and welcoming to as wide a range of gamers as possible."
If someone is being virulently argumentative, particularly if they're constantly arguing in bad faith; if they're constantly putting other people down and deriding their thoughts; if they're making the community unpleasant and its other members unhappy;; if they're fighting against the basic precepts of the community; or if it's obvious that they're making the forums about them, not the community, then they need to go.
That's a lot of "ifs", but there's a pretty easy litmus test that you can use: if someone is taking up a lot of your administration and moderation time, then you need to think more carefully about them. As a community manager, your time is a limited resource intended to better your community. If a single person uses as much of your resource as ten or a hundred or a thousand average community members, you have to ask what they're giving back.
A lot of bad actors in communities will walk the line, staying just one step back from personal attacks or whatever else you explicitly ban in your rules. That's not a sign that they should be kept (because they're obeying the rules), but instead that they should be ousted (because they're abusing them). It's why you need a rule zero.
You'll never have a perfect rule set but then your online community isn't a court of law. You certainly do need to be fair and just, or else you'll be corroding the community in a different way. But that's why you need to advertise a rule of conduct that puts the forums first. If you're transparent about why you're making disciplinary decisions, that'll help, because it allows you to explicitly say why you're removing someone from your community (and hopefully make the case that it's for the community's betterment).
Solution Two: Community Belief
It's certainly fair to question, and it's certainly fair to point out when they made a mistake. They will; we do. But try not to assume motives other than the betterment of the community, because in any good community that will be the motive.
Solution Three: Community Support
If you're a community member who wants to be more active in protecting your community against bad actors, you can take explicit actions to help. You don't have to; just being a good community member is a great help to a site. But, there's ultimately no way that community managers are going to do it alone. They quite literally need the support of their community.
In increasing order of engagement:
1. You can block the bad actor. Any bad actor in a community ultimately thrives on attention. Deny it to them.
2. You can alert the community managers about the bad actor by their favored reporting mechanism. Don't expect a response: this isn't about you. Do expect any good community to put this info into their internal data files for how they think about the person.
3. You can speak out against the bad actor explicitly ... but you still don't necessarily want to interact with them, because that's what they want. But you can reshape the discussions around them, supporting the people they might otherwise drive out and rebuilding the conversation. There's nothing a bad actor hates more than being ignored by people talking right past their bad faith arguments.
We're not just community members, but also hobby members, part of a community that's larger than just one site. A lot of bad actors take advantage of this balkanization. Because their bad actions are spread out among many people in many places, they can more easily deny them. It enables them to spin conspiracy theories, which all too often are believed.
The most obvious defense against this is to listen to what other sites within your larger hobby say. If they're also reputable, you need to believe them as well, even if they're not your online home.
You can also improve everyone within a hobby's understanding by using the weapon that any bad actor is most afraid of: knowledge. If you're willing to put yourself out there, then make your bad experiences with the bad actor public. Try to do so bloodlessly, without blame. Just describe what happened and how you felt. This will decrease the ability of the bad actor to present your description as a he-said-she-said experience and meanwhile will give everyone else one bit of knowledge that they can hopefully use to build a complete picture of what's really going on.
Conclusion
The internet is a great medium that opens up the whole world in a way that a lot of us couldn't have even imagined in our youths. But it also gives bad actors the ability to carry out their selfish desires and to damage the communities we're trying to create. Though obviously community managers are on the frontline of that, and need to understand how to put their community first, every single one of our can support our community in ways that match of our own needs for safety.
Hat tip to Johnstone Metzger (@chthonstone) and GrzegorzWierzowiecki (@GWierzowiecki), whose posts and questions on Twitter led me to write the tweetstorm that became this article.
The Thesis
One bad member in a community can drive out ten, or even a hundred, good members. By keeping those bad community members you're not only shrinking your community but worsening it too.
I still remember vividly our first bad community member at the Skotos online games site. He'd complain about how we were managing our games and how it wasn't matching his vision. In retrospect he was a narcissist who thought the game (nay, the world) revolved around him, and our community manager fell right into the trap. She literally spent days of work-time talking this player off the ledge time after time, practically begging him to stay. We eventually asked our community manager to stop, and sometime afterward we gave the problematic community member the boot. Almost immediately afterward, we had an inrush of other players telling us how they'd almost left due to the narcissist — and how some of their friends already had. Not only had we wasted our time trying to keep a bad player aboard, but we'd also harmed our community by doing so — and that's why I still remember the lesson so vividly two decades on.
So what do you do get rid of bad actors in your community?
Both community managers and community members can help a lot.
Solution One: Community Management
If you're a community manager, you need to ban the bad actors when it's obvious that they're acting to the deficit of the community. Part of this requires a rule like RPGnet's rule zero: "Keep the forums friendly and welcoming to as wide a range of gamers as possible."
If someone is being virulently argumentative, particularly if they're constantly arguing in bad faith; if they're constantly putting other people down and deriding their thoughts; if they're making the community unpleasant and its other members unhappy;; if they're fighting against the basic precepts of the community; or if it's obvious that they're making the forums about them, not the community, then they need to go.
That's a lot of "ifs", but there's a pretty easy litmus test that you can use: if someone is taking up a lot of your administration and moderation time, then you need to think more carefully about them. As a community manager, your time is a limited resource intended to better your community. If a single person uses as much of your resource as ten or a hundred or a thousand average community members, you have to ask what they're giving back.
A lot of bad actors in communities will walk the line, staying just one step back from personal attacks or whatever else you explicitly ban in your rules. That's not a sign that they should be kept (because they're obeying the rules), but instead that they should be ousted (because they're abusing them). It's why you need a rule zero.
You'll never have a perfect rule set but then your online community isn't a court of law. You certainly do need to be fair and just, or else you'll be corroding the community in a different way. But that's why you need to advertise a rule of conduct that puts the forums first. If you're transparent about why you're making disciplinary decisions, that'll help, because it allows you to explicitly say why you're removing someone from your community (and hopefully make the case that it's for the community's betterment).
My own rule zero might read something like this: "Our most important rule is that we're all working toward the creation of a better community. If you make the community worse instead of better, if you detract from the community instead of improving it, then we'll ask you to leave — whether there's a specific rule you've violated or not. In fact, the rest of these rules are largely intended to help codify our general goal of community betterment."
Solution Two: Community Belief
If you're a community member, the more important way you can improve your community is simply to support the community managers. More specifically, you can believe them. If they've banned or blocked someone, there's usually a good reason. Your default position should be that they did the right thing.
It's certainly fair to question, and it's certainly fair to point out when they made a mistake. They will; we do. But try not to assume motives other than the betterment of the community, because in any good community that will be the motive.
Community managers have to make horrible, stressful decisions about interactions between different people and the site. But if there's one thing that just frustrates me and makes me throw up my hands in despair, it's the conspiracy theories that arise about why we're doing things. They sometimes arise from poor transparency but sometimes, even when you're being totally transparent, people will come up with their own reasons for what you're doing, call you liars when you explain the real reasons, and convince other people of their fallacies. I remember well when we created the d20 forum on RPGnet: it was based on my personal disappointment in the quantity of D&D discussions at RPGnet over the years, and my hope that we could increase those discussions by giving them their own forum where D&D wouldn't have to fight with the White Wolf and indie games that were RPGnet's bread and butter. The results speak for themselves: D&D has gone from a little discussed to game to a major topic at our site. But we had to waste a lot of time and energy arguing against the totally unfounded conspiracy theory that we were creating a "D&D ghetto" to silence discussion of the game.
Not believing community managers not only makes their job harder, but it also gives cover to bad actors by allowing them to make bad-faith both-sidist arguments.
Solution Three: Community Support
If you're a community member who wants to be more active in protecting your community against bad actors, you can take explicit actions to help. You don't have to; just being a good community member is a great help to a site. But, there's ultimately no way that community managers are going to do it alone. They quite literally need the support of their community.
In increasing order of engagement:
1. You can block the bad actor. Any bad actor in a community ultimately thrives on attention. Deny it to them.
2. You can alert the community managers about the bad actor by their favored reporting mechanism. Don't expect a response: this isn't about you. Do expect any good community to put this info into their internal data files for how they think about the person.
3. You can speak out against the bad actor explicitly ... but you still don't necessarily want to interact with them, because that's what they want. But you can reshape the discussions around them, supporting the people they might otherwise drive out and rebuilding the conversation. There's nothing a bad actor hates more than being ignored by people talking right past their bad faith arguments.
Let's be honest: engaging with a bad actor can be scary. I think we can all improve our communities by challenging ourselves to go just one step past our natural tendency, but we should also be aware of our own limitations. Personally, I can be sent spinning if someone makes a nasty or threatening argument against me, so I'm definitely less likely to explicitly speak out against a bad actor. But, I do often push myself to take the time and effort to alert a community of a problem, and if I'm feeling good, I might speak about a bad actor, even if I don't explicitly speak to them.
Solution Four: Hobby Support
We're not just community members, but also hobby members, part of a community that's larger than just one site. A lot of bad actors take advantage of this balkanization. Because their bad actions are spread out among many people in many places, they can more easily deny them. It enables them to spin conspiracy theories, which all too often are believed.
The most obvious defense against this is to listen to what other sites within your larger hobby say. If they're also reputable, you need to believe them as well, even if they're not your online home.
You can also improve everyone within a hobby's understanding by using the weapon that any bad actor is most afraid of: knowledge. If you're willing to put yourself out there, then make your bad experiences with the bad actor public. Try to do so bloodlessly, without blame. Just describe what happened and how you felt. This will decrease the ability of the bad actor to present your description as a he-said-she-said experience and meanwhile will give everyone else one bit of knowledge that they can hopefully use to build a complete picture of what's really going on.
Anyone in the roleplaying community who reads this knows that it's largely in response to the revelations about Zak S. in the last week. There were certainly many people over the years who talked about him being a bad actor, but he did exactly what's described here: he used the balkanization of roleplaying communities on the internet to present it as just RPGnet (or story gamers or Evil Hat or whoever) picking on him, and suggested that there were two sides to the story. But what really made his schtick work was obsessively searching for discussions of him and attacking people who spoke out against him. This made people afraid to talk about him, and meant that the bad things he did to dozens or hundreds of different people often stayed private. Although I never had a good thing to say about Zak (once I learned who he was, about when he got kicked off RPGnet), I also didn't say very many bad things, such as being really clear about his bullying toward me. I hope the post I wrote last week meets my goal of being a fairly bloodless description, describing what happened and how I felt about it.
Conclusion
The internet is a great medium that opens up the whole world in a way that a lot of us couldn't have even imagined in our youths. But it also gives bad actors the ability to carry out their selfish desires and to damage the communities we're trying to create. Though obviously community managers are on the frontline of that, and need to understand how to put their community first, every single one of our can support our community in ways that match of our own needs for safety.
Hat tip to Johnstone Metzger (@chthonstone) and GrzegorzWierzowiecki (@GWierzowiecki), whose posts and questions on Twitter led me to write the tweetstorm that became this article.