Abi Sutherland:
Making Light: Points from a moderator's Twitter stream:
- Surfing sites that I used to love, but which have gone downhill: my personal form of ruin porn.
- If you’re gonna have feminist front-pagers, the other mods have to have their backs or the women leave the comment threads.
- If people consistently drag the conversation down, don’t blame others for rising to the bait. Move ‘em on. It’s a big internet.
- Someone who never improves the conversation, but never breaks the rules, is still a troll — just a skilled one. Move ‘em on.
- Worthy people can fall into bad (& self-damaging) habits in communities. They might do better w/ a fresh start somewhere else. Move ‘em on.
- Just as bad money drives out good, so trolling and niggling drives out good argument.
- Community management is the art of balancing the rights of your most difficult voices against the joy of your most fragile ones.
- When community managers fail, the interesting voices leave, or become exhausted. The difficult ones just grind onward.
- It’s not important what site inspired these observations. It could have been any one of a good dozen I’ve frequented over the years.
Yet there are some sites that appear to keep an interesting discussion… or perhaps "discussion"… rolling for as long as a decade now. I think of boingboing, Crooked Timber, Making Light, and (shudder) Unfogged. How do they do it?
