So I’m really starting to consider starting a few small communities just to help grow the communities. I have never moderated anything and I am just curious on what to expect. Things such as tools to use or things to look out for?
- Write down the rules
- Be lenient to 1st time offenders
- Banhammer fairly
Think of yourself as a football referee. You want the game to run smoothly.
Right now mod tools are minimal. Appoint and remove mods, ban user, remove/restore post functions. Depending on the size of your community you might want other mods to help, preferably in another time zone. Whenever a user reports a post, you will see a flag to address it. Not sure about the status of mods tools in apps atm, so I check multiple times a day through the original instance website. That’s about all I can help you with. Goodluck!
I haven’t moderated in a very long time, but the one thing that sticks out for me from my phpbb forum days is the paradox of tolerance.
Basically–you generally don’t want to be a jerk. You do want to be fair and tolerant to the best of your ability.
However, if you let THAT GUY run around doing shitty things, your community will end up polluted and toxic and it will drive away the people who would/could’ve made your community a nice place.
So be kind–but not so kind it allows losers to rampage unchecked.
It can really feel shitty to use the banhammer, but sometimes it’s important to pull the trigger for the sake of the community. If you don’t, the good people will leave, and the fuckwads will stay and fuck around.
The best-moderated community I’ve seen in recent memory is actually the Raised by Narcissists sub on Reddit. Probably because the mods there are all trauma survivors and have hawk-eyes for ALL the weasly shit verbally-manipulative people can get up to. So they lay out the rules plainly and fairly–but they also don’t fuck around when things need to be shut down. Most of the time the troll/drama posts don’t even get out of New.
I don’t know what sort of sub you’re moderating here, it’s possible it won’t attract the same BS that THAT sub attracts by its very nature, but as a mod (if you want to be a good/fair one) you’ll start to develop a second sense for when someone is using outwardly-reasonable words to try to defend what they’re doing, while continuing to shit-stir below the surface. You’ll get an eye for overall patterns.
Trust your gut–if you feel something’s wrong but can’t put a finger on why because everyone’s using polite words, ponder it for a while and see if you can figure out what’s up. Often where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
But yeah. Don’t be a dick, explain your rules clearly, but when someone’s fucking around on your sub? Let 'em find out.
Oh…and if you have been modding for a while, but find yourself getting stressed as fuck or angry and snappish in real life? It’s totally cool to step back from a modding job. I don’t mod anymore even though I know “how” to because I have C-PTSD and sub drama puts me into legit raging flashbacks. It’s terrible for my health, and not fun for others if my temper slips, so I don’t do it anymore.
I really appreciate you taking your time to respond.
At one point when I first started learning Linux I ran a tiny Minecraft server. I really struggled with always giving way too much benefit of doubt. I felt like I had to build a case to defend my position but keep moving the goalposts on myself. I really struggled with one kid who hadn’t really done anything wrong but just wasn’t fitting the vibe of the community.
So that is something I’m conscientious about now that I am older.
I’m not really worried too much about traffic as this would be an industry specific community. I work in television broadcasting and would love to make a place for other people in the industry to hang out.
I’m glad it was helpful–I know sometimes people go TL;DR and get annoyed at long posts, lol.
And yeah, re: Minecraft–been there, done that with the genuinely clueless user who just constantly doesn’t get it. I ran into it with WoW guilds. It’s hard to deal with, esp. when their behavior looks genuinely not-with-it instead of malicious. Like, if you have a player that is a kid (or who hasn’t matured mentally) who is always begging for help or gold or items. Esp. if they’re being nice or saying sorry or being cute about it–verbal veneers that try to manipulate you into being soft on them (even if they are not consciously trying to be manipulative). It’s hard being the one putting your foot down.
Anyway. I honestly don’t see a television broadcasting sub with tech nerds inviting too much trouble. (Or anything along those lines…I know you weren’t fully specific about niche.) I would guess the most likely routes of bullshit would be straight-up spam bots, or people inappropriately advertising some sort of object or service and clogging up the page with drivel nobody cares about. I guess “low effort posts” might be a thing, too.
You MIGHT see some drama if like…it comes out some CEO or manager or something who is known in the industry is being a dickwad. Or like if an industry professional is let go, fairly or unfairly…lots of hot drama and speculation can come up. Might be worth it to look at existing forums for your niche and see if you can find the past drama, and see what shape it took previously. Might help you prepare a way to deal with it, put rules in place beforehand.
Edit: Had a thought. Are discussions about “censorship” common in this niche? Censorship as it pertains to broadcast television. If so, you might get drama around that, and might need to plan for it sometimes raising its head.
People don’t like to be first in the pool. Decorate it with an icon and banner and regularly put content in it and people will come. Discoverability is good here.
Totally. I mean I wouldn’t stay in a community that is barren.
I’m really thinking about reaching out to the Reddit mods of similar subreddits to see if there is any plans for more to move. This would be for a very niche career field (Television Broadcast).
People will hate you regardless of what you do
That’s alright, I will always be my biggest hater.
