Thoughts on community owners who bully

[Shortie]

This is not something we see too often and sometimes it happens behind the scenes where we are not aware of it but in some cases, this happens and it does come to light and members of a community do find out that an owner or leader of a community is a bully,

When it comes to community leaders or owners who bully, what are your thoughts on that? Does that make you want to be part of that community less?

 

[Arantor]

Community owners are not prison keepers. If they make the place unwelcome, visitors can go elsewhere, it really is that simple in many cases.

Though I have come across community leaders holding contributions hostage, which is just gross.

 

[Shortie]

Community owners are not prison keepers. If they make the place unwelcome, visitors can go elsewhere, it really is that simple in many cases.

Though I have come across community leaders holding contributions hostage, which is just gross.

That is shocking. I have never come across community owners that have done that but I can see why anyone would be set back and less likely to want to be part of that community in the future.

 

[Arantor]

I’ve seen things. The darker side of humanity.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I never seen this before but if that was the case I would stay away from the community. If the owner of the site doesn't show respect to their members, then their community isn't worth joining.

 

[Darth Cognus]

I haven't seen this recently although I've seen it before including in places where 'just make a better one' is easier said than done given the original community's dominance in a rather small niche. Forking can sometimes damage the unity that's left. But you certainly can't enable abusers...

I did get in a funny spot recently where a fellow wanted me to get involved on a platform that has a large trolling/vandal problem. So casually I did just to see what the problem is and maybe help clean up. He blames some no name and an ex techie who helped him earlier for the recurring abuse. A cursory investigation later I know the owner who invited me is responsible for the no name's vandalism and some well-chosen questions for bits I wasn't sure about to see if he'd lie (he did) leads me to believe he's completely framed the ex techie too. In other words he's a nutcase who's abusing his own community to... idk, get a dig at people he doesn't like?

Needless to say that didn't end well. He's in no position to dominate any market so that will safely fade away in the wind.

 

[Chris C]

This is not something we see too often and sometimes it happens behind the scenes where we are not aware of it but in some cases, this happens and it does come to light and members of a community do find out that an owner or leader of a community is a bully,

When it comes to community leaders or owners who bully, what are your thoughts on that? Does that make you want to be part of that community less?

Depends on specifically what you mean by bullying. But I will say that I have been a member of forums where there was a clear bias towards people of one particular persuasion, and they've shown a fairly high degree of intolerance for those with differing opinions. It turns people off big time, and word eventually gets around.

I think one answer is for owners to clearly make up their minds what sort of members they want and what sort they don't, and let people know from the outset. Leading people on that they will be welcome only to be intolerant towards their views when they post is a bit like false advertising.

 

[joelr]

Community owners are not prison keepers. If they make the place unwelcome, visitors can go elsewhere, it really is that simple in many cases.

Though I have come across community leaders holding contributions hostage, which is just gross.

What do you mean by contributions? Like donations or code contributions?

 

[Arantor]

What do you mean by contributions? Like donations or code contributions?

Think about the dynamics of writers who drop tens of thousands of words onto a site with a few people, only to be told that if they don’t write threads with other people, or write threads they’re not comfortable with, their existing tens of thousands of words will be deleted.

Or an admin who has a hissy fit and closes the board such that everyone loses out because they had one bad day with one person.

I only wish I were exaggerating, but I’m in fact cherry picking just the most obvious examples, and not even the most extreme examples.

Consider that I’m talking about an ecosystem that is propped up by anonymous-posted blogs either posting gossip, refuting gossip or asking about gossip just in case.

These are people who will never run large scale communities, thankfully, but leave so much bad will in their wake.

 

[joelr]

This sounds like the standards of practice are very low, and ripe for a half-reasonable admin to swoop in.

What I discovered over time is that many forum admins are not good community managers. Being a good community manager requires all the skill sets of real world management - excellent communication, negotiation,persuasion, professionalism even in the face of challenges or personal attacks, etc.

 

[Arantor]

The problem is that the format generates a lot of very specific 1-on-1 engagement and we're actually seeing a shift of people moving off forums and onto Discord where these sessions can't be held hostage by a rogue admin who just happened to produce an environment that sparked something.

RP does function somewhat like a conventional community but it has a lot of very strange alongside dynamics too. As for 'half-reasonable admin', that's difficult.

RP sites are almost like little towns in a way, they're the same as each other in that they have certain things (otherwise they wouldn't be towns) but they all have their own unique twists and locales. And it's not just about replacing the admin; there's an inherent amount of 'founder's vision' tied up in creating that unique twist/locale - though for very many people, many of the facades *are* changeable at a moment's notice.

E.g. any of the RPs set in 'a small mid-Western town' that feature 'slice of life' and 'real life' feelings, there's no shortage of those just as there is no shortage of such towns in reality and all quite unique and yet all very similar.

 

[joelr]

I have a big question. And this is a very open ended, hypothetical question but I think it can be very intellectually interesting:

Are there any technological features that can be built to protect and safeguard the interests of the town?

And what I mean by that is - and your metaphor to actual Western towns is fascinating - actual towns have civic structures such as town charters, and constitutions, and civic groups, and annual elections that provide a series of checks and balances. One of the flaws of forums is that the admin is judge, jury, and executioner, and I wonder if there might be a way of technologically enforcing and separating those powers, much like how real towns work!

 

[Arantor]

I've seen and heard attempts over the years to make the administration more civic in that exact sense - elected admins, elected mods and so on. But a) these quickly run the risk of becoming popularity contests rather than competence contests and b) forums have one thing townships in that vein do not: direct personal liability.

If I set up a forum, I personally am legally responsible for what goes on in that space. It's my hosting account, the costs to run it are borne by me. So too the risks and rewards that come with that.

It's a little bit different to a township in that regard; the town charter might make an individual or groups of individuals responsible and accountable for preservation of justice in the town (functionally equivalent to the mayor electing a sheriff and their deputies), but the town charter presumably implies that the town's ownership is in spirit to the townspeople as a common good, such that any liabilities in its running are borne equally out of local taxes.

It's actually, then, a social problem we're talking about rather than a technological one. How do we shift the balance of power away from the fundamental requirement of a (reasonably) benevolent dictator for life? Because that's the reality of today: functioning communities function because the mayor of the town *runs the town*. They're the sheriff, running the bad folks out of town; they're the city ordnance making sure the trash collection is done; they're the contract holder with the utilities providers ensuring that there are the relevant utilities hooked up for the town's collective benefit.

Now, if we're talking about protecting one's social contributions in the form of written works, the answer is surprisingly low-tech: if you value it, make a copy of it. Because even if we talk about adversial admins, we have to remember that not all adversial situations are intentional: how many forums have disappeared because the admin died and there was no way to hand over the forum to anyone else? How much has been lost through no-fault situations?

Interestingly I did see one semi-solution proposed to this many years ago on SMF. There was a guy called gri, whose posts were often incoherent, hard to read, as if badly written Russian was shoved into a bad Google Translate and turned into English and then messed about with by someone whose English was about as good as their Russian. But if you sat back and pieced it together, he had an idea: the notion that forums would produce 'grivitniks' and 'grivoutniks' which were essentially forums having a mirror copy of each other with posts flowing both out (grivoutniks) and in (grivitniks). You'd connect forums together and the forums would sort of mirror each other in an accountability sense; you couldn't edit your posts without it being flagged as an edit, but neither could other forums you'd twinned with. Of course, moderation was a constant battle and unconsidered in its fullest extremes, but gri was one of the few people I've ever met that I could genuinely consider a free speech absolutionist in the non-pejorative sense (everyone else I ever heard using that phrase or its variants meant 'free speech for me to say what I like without consequence', while gri meant it that everyone could say what they liked but there *were* consequences and you would be accountable because everyone else would have the receipts; sort of like a Fediverse but one that could actually have worked with more thought). Most people wrote him off as a troll, though.

While we're on the subject, the Fediverse doesn't solve the problem either; ActivityPub gives you some ability to let your contributions flow between nodes but it still has fundamental points of failure engineered into it - if your home node goes away or you get banned from it, sucks to be you.

I should also add, I have seen what happens in an environment where the admins were elected and given some duties as sworn members of a legal entity (company) that existed to protect the IP of the forum, and the folks were rotated through the company as elections happened. It ended poorly after there was basically a mutiny from key contributors and then then-admins went into a 'you'll never prise it from us' mood. Acrimonious to say the least. People that invest time and energy deserve for their faith to be rewarded, especially if they invest years of time and even money on top.

 

[Jason]

I was in this one forum full of bullies. They were all racists. I won't go into details. I'm not a racist, but I hung around cause I thought I could reasonable discussions with them. Anyway, people give up too easily. Life is tough. Everyone isn't nice. Why not try to engage difficult people? Isn't that what teachers do that go to these inner-cities in the US?

Note: This example did not have a community owner as a bully.

 

[Husk]

I guess it depends. I was part of a large community where the head admin was an asshole but I enjoyed the discourse and the ability to write freely about certain topics.

But in other areas of interest, I just get so freaking tired of the same BS being thrown around over and over and over again, with a handful of the members coming at me personally as if my sharing my dissenting opinions was the WORST and honestly? My open dislike for the path my hobby took. After a while, I just had to thrown in the towel. Not exactly bullies to me personally but I've definitely seen them act like bullies and don't got time for that.

 

[Arantor]

People don’t like being told things that don’t fit their worldview. It’s only gotten worse since social media effectively gave people the means to curate their own reality.