one thing i’ve noticed, is that when you get into less moderated, harder to moderate, and less centralized services, particularly anti-censorship ones, you get a lot of shitty people congregating there. And the reason why is pretty simple, it’s because you can. Some of it is probably just edgy shitposting, because, internet. Some of it is also just genuine, because again, the internet.
So you get this weird thing where it fractures heavily, into to small communal groups, that each do their own thing. But you have a broad group of outliers, who generally exist outside of this space also, which means that it tends to be rather hit and miss what you find.
This is one of the reasons i really like the darknet conceptually. Yes there may be racism there, but you know what else isn’t there? Rules, and you know what that means? People can make their own however they please. Don’t like it? Go away, simple as that.
The biggest mistake new moderators make is allowing bad actors to use the rules against them. You can’t be too prescriptive, you can’t give them ammo to go “well this doesn’t technically violate any rule.” And when they complain you have a “don’t disrupt the community” rule and say it’s “too vague” just tag them as potentially a problem and see what they do. In my experience, they inevitably deserve a ban.
This is my experience moderating communities as well. The worst trolls get a kick out of testing how far they can stretch the rules and provoke mayhem without getting banned. Excessively explicit rules also trample over people who would usually cause no trouble, but get too tense under exceptional situations.
one thing i’ve noticed, is that when you get into less moderated, harder to moderate, and less centralized services, particularly anti-censorship ones, you get a lot of shitty people congregating there. And the reason why is pretty simple, it’s because you can. Some of it is probably just edgy shitposting, because, internet. Some of it is also just genuine, because again, the internet.
So you get this weird thing where it fractures heavily, into to small communal groups, that each do their own thing. But you have a broad group of outliers, who generally exist outside of this space also, which means that it tends to be rather hit and miss what you find.
This is one of the reasons i really like the darknet conceptually. Yes there may be racism there, but you know what else isn’t there? Rules, and you know what that means? People can make their own however they please. Don’t like it? Go away, simple as that.
The biggest mistake new moderators make is allowing bad actors to use the rules against them. You can’t be too prescriptive, you can’t give them ammo to go “well this doesn’t technically violate any rule.” And when they complain you have a “don’t disrupt the community” rule and say it’s “too vague” just tag them as potentially a problem and see what they do. In my experience, they inevitably deserve a ban.
Users may hate “moderator discretion” as a rule, but by fuck do users hate not having it as well
spoiler
sdfsaf
This is my experience moderating communities as well. The worst trolls get a kick out of testing how far they can stretch the rules and provoke mayhem without getting banned. Excessively explicit rules also trample over people who would usually cause no trouble, but get too tense under exceptional situations.
It’s amazing how disruptive 2-3 people can be in a community of hundreds or even thousands.