No gods but moderation
A few years ago, I called something “crazy” in a Slack room and was very rapidly pinged, in private, by a moderator, that calling things crazy was ableist and could I please reword. I was shocked – I had never been called out for calling something crazy before, but it made sense! So I reworded it, apologized profusely, and said I would never do it again.
This history of the decline of Something Awful is worth reading, even if you think the website itself is problematic. In short, some ill-intentioned power users led a revolt against moderators, some of whom acted in bad faith and failed to cultivate a sense of camaraderie among forum members. One day, a rule change resulted in the general board devolving into a grim spiral of white supremacy and general hatred.
Mastodon, shocking precisely nobody, has had many challenges with hate as it’s scaled – and too few people are talking about it. BIPOC people are being instantly harassed off the platform – and on Twitter as well. White supremacist Mastodon instances are popping up at an alarming rate. Gray-area yikesy situations have already happened. People are addressing this by favoring good vibes only.
So that’s rough. Let’s check in on Twitter.
The instant you let anything but direct relationship define inclusion in a group of people, you need to worry about questions of moderation. Are you gathering around a common interest? Are you inviting strangers into your home? Are you creating a paid community for people to gather? In any of these situations, norms need to exist, and a way of enforcing these norms needs to happen consistently and at scale.
No public social network can address moderation at scale without significant damage to both the network and its moderators. And no private social structure can exist without moderators being implicated.
Participants are not going to remain particularly patient for you to address questions of moderation. They will experience something bad and then instantly leave. In short, moderate poorly, and you won’t find yourself with much of a community.
Nobody wants to talk about moderation, and yet we all must talk about moderation. We needed to talk about moderation before social media reached its permanent conclusion, and we definitely need to talk about moderation now. Moderation is essential work, because we keep us safe and communities default to evil if they are left to their own devices.
Few people want to be moderators, and for good reason. It is thankless, garbage work that largely harms your standing in a community. I don’t think people are conscious enough about the potential reputational hit that comes from moderation. All members of a community must be protected, including moderators.
In what ways will we be keeping ourselves safe now? In what ways will we be keeping communities small, in order to make the hard work of moderation manageable in the long run? How do we support those who are correctly disengaging from spaces where moderation has disappeared or turned against them? And what comes next for the process of remaining in right relationship to one another?