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Last active August 1, 2023 15:58
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Moderation Principles that actually scale

General Moderation Principles

I recommend a few basic principles for moderation that I've enjoyed over the years. Hopefully it will preserve both everyone's sanity on the mod team, as well as the sanity of the people whom moderation decisions affect. This is the first time moderating large communities for some of you, and this kind of thing isn't spelled out, so here:

  1. USE A LIGHT TOUCH. Unless discussions are explicitly toxic (in the therapy-speak sense, a flamewar is going on between individuals, hate-mongering is rampant etc.), the only moderation policy that scales is a light touch. You cannot, and I need to stress this, dictate the course of conversation by applying force. It simply never works out. The discussions are alive in a sense, and will carry on in other threads or over a period of time between individuals regardless of what you do.

  2. DON'T BE CHRONICALLY ONLINE. While moderation discretion is the basis for individual decisions, we should never find ourselves consistently policing borderline conversations often. If you find yourself consistently offended, it's best to take a step back from discussion, and rather than reaching for the trigger as soon as possible, take a 5-10min breather away from the screen and then decide what to do. Itchy trigger fingers often have the effect of creating more problems than they solve at this scale.

  3. PEOPLE DON'T AGREE WITH YOU. They often don't agree like a bunch of assholes. This is the hardest part about moderating: your kneejerk reaction should never be to find a way to shut discussion down. It needs to be "you're entitled to your asshole opinion as long as you don't break the rules", and you can warn along those lines.

  4. DO NOT MODERATE LIKE A BRICK THROUGH A WINDOW. Allow moderation issues to be pushed to you - do not go looking for problems. You should be enjoying your space the same as everyone else. If you see something egregious, do something about it, but it's not your job to sweep threads for content. Let the community do the lifting. They can govern themselves in 99.9% of interactions.

  5. RESERVE THE RIGHT TO KICK BAD FAITH ACTORS. Often, the most difficult kind of person to deal with is the one that rushes up against the line and stops just short of it. Constantly. Forever. This is a special kind of troll that never quite breaks the rules, but makes spaces suck. When you see this, gather information silently for a short period of time, and then kick that person on the next offense. They will kick, they will scream, and they will call you a dictator, and they will often enlist others to do the same. No one offense will ever suffice, and no one has the same perspective as you as a moderator who sees their behavior over time. You must build a case to deal with them, and once the case is established, this defeats the troll. This is the hardest won lesson of any of these principles.

  6. ENJOY YOUR TIME. Moderating a space should never feel like a chore. Let other people handle things if you're feeling burnt out and need a break. Moderation is not serious business. It only becomes serious business when you start treating it like serious business.

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