Does anyone have any good web resources on how to be a good community moderator?
A friend and I will shortly be launching a podcast and want to have a Reddit community where listeners can interact with us. He and I will be forum’s moderators to begin with, and I want to research how to do it well.
Here is a thing at Making Light. There are probably other relevant posts on said blog, but this one seems to have what I consider the key points.
I’ll quote some specific points that might be more surprising:
\5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.
\9. If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it’s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There’s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can’t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes.
\10. Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.
I don’t know of any resources, but I moderated a community once, and did absolutely no research and everything turned out fine. There were about 15 or so core members in the community and maybe a couple of hundred members in total. My advice is to make explicit rules about what is and is not allowed in the community, and try to enforce them as evenly as possible. If you let people know what’s expected and err on the side of forgiveness when it comes to rule violations, most people in the community will understand and respect that you’re just doing what’s necessary to keep the community running smoothly.
We had two resident trolls who would just say whatever was the most aggravating thing they could think of, but after quite a short time people learned that that was all they were doing and they became quite ineffective. There was also a particular member that everyone in the community seemed to dislike and was continually the victim of quite harsh bullying from most of the other people there. Again, the hands off approach seemed to work best, as while most people were mean to him, he often antagonised them and brought more attacks onto himself, so I felt it wasn’t necessary for me to intervene, as he was making everything worse for himself. So yeah, I recommend being as hands off as possible when it comes to mediating disputes, only intervening when absolutely necessary. That being said, when moderating, you are usually in a position to set up games and activities in a way that the rest of community would be less inclined to do, or not have the moderator powers necessary to set up.
If I were you I’d focus most of my energy on setting up ways for the community to interact constructively, it will most likely lead to there being fewer disputes to mediate, as people won’t start arguments for the sake of having something to talk about.
Does anyone have any good web resources on how to be a good community moderator?
A friend and I will shortly be launching a podcast and want to have a Reddit community where listeners can interact with us. He and I will be forum’s moderators to begin with, and I want to research how to do it well.
Here is a thing at Making Light. There are probably other relevant posts on said blog, but this one seems to have what I consider the key points.
I’ll quote some specific points that might be more surprising:
I don’t know of any resources, but I moderated a community once, and did absolutely no research and everything turned out fine. There were about 15 or so core members in the community and maybe a couple of hundred members in total. My advice is to make explicit rules about what is and is not allowed in the community, and try to enforce them as evenly as possible. If you let people know what’s expected and err on the side of forgiveness when it comes to rule violations, most people in the community will understand and respect that you’re just doing what’s necessary to keep the community running smoothly.
We had two resident trolls who would just say whatever was the most aggravating thing they could think of, but after quite a short time people learned that that was all they were doing and they became quite ineffective. There was also a particular member that everyone in the community seemed to dislike and was continually the victim of quite harsh bullying from most of the other people there. Again, the hands off approach seemed to work best, as while most people were mean to him, he often antagonised them and brought more attacks onto himself, so I felt it wasn’t necessary for me to intervene, as he was making everything worse for himself. So yeah, I recommend being as hands off as possible when it comes to mediating disputes, only intervening when absolutely necessary. That being said, when moderating, you are usually in a position to set up games and activities in a way that the rest of community would be less inclined to do, or not have the moderator powers necessary to set up.
If I were you I’d focus most of my energy on setting up ways for the community to interact constructively, it will most likely lead to there being fewer disputes to mediate, as people won’t start arguments for the sake of having something to talk about.