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Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability. The social Internet's linchpin has almost

Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability. The social Internet's linchpin has almost always (since as long as I can remember) been that it requires a certain kind of person to be an unpaid community manager (by any name), and nearly every site you visit (wikipedia, stackoverflow, reddit, etc) makes use of these nonployees.

crdoconnor 8y ago
This is similar to almost all unpaid positions which require dirty work and give you a bit of power. The people who do them end up being people who volunteer to be "paid" with the opportunity to go on a power trip. I've not had experience of it myself, but I've heard from some people who have worked at high profile charities that a similar thing happens there.
k__ 8y ago
Sure, but mostly policy is the problem here. Instead of "Hunt down bad content and delete it!" they should use "Hunt down good content and promote it!" Why not create a premium version of the product that features only chosen content? Creators can do what they always did and maybe they're even motivated to become "premium creators".
- debacle 8y ago
  How would that work with Wikipedia? You're looking for a solution that aligns with your thesis. You're not going to find one.
  - k__ 8y ago
    Sure, this isn't sanely doable with the current state. I mean what should they do? Write two pages for every article, one where everyone could write and one where moderators accumulate the quality content? That won't scale. Maybe they need a VCS based approach, that merges only quality content but keeps all low-quality content in dead-end branches. I don't know what the solution would be, but the current approach is sub-optimal. Not because it's not nice to delete the work of people, but because they don't motivate people to do a better job.
duxup 8y ago
"Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability." Oh man I volunteered to moderate on a large gaming related forum ages ago. The amount of BS you deal with along with personal attacks and etc is pretty high. I never felt emotionally upset by it as I felt you had to maintain an even keel .... but it certainly is not a job for everyone and the rub is the folks who WANT to do it the most are often the worst at it. Being a good moderator is not a skill everyone has, but it's also not valued in any real way by most communities / companies. Really the most frustrating aspect were the non trouble users who seemed to go to bat for the folks who were truly bad actors because of some perceived injustice (lie)... and all the meta that goes into that.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  My favorite moments from moderating a small, semi-private video-game related board: - an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a romantic encounter that went down poorly. - a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for why he was banned. - people being outraged that we asked them to donate a small amount of money (somewhere around a hundred dollars, collectively) to help run the server, then offering to run it on their spare computer in their basement - discovering that due to a relatively unknown feature of PhpBB, we had a whole secondary parasite community that didn't show up in user registrations, and that had a whole private forum set up that nobody else on the board was aware of. It was like opening up a basement closet and discovering that it's a secret night club.
  - duxup 8y ago
    Oh man 2 and 3... I know those feels. I hate the word "entitlement" because I think it gets used wrong a lot, but oh man folks perspective when it comes to the internet ... a lot of that. Users just feel it should be free and even a minute of downtime and they want answers, about a gaming forum (god help them if they just went to play games for a bit). As for the prolific troll thing, one site I worked (well volunteered) was a popular commercial gaming site back in the day. Threats, fake accounts claiming to be lawyers, etc. The site made money and all and had some really dedicated trolls. One they actually took legal action against. I assumed it was just some kid with too much time. Turned out to be a dude in his 40s.... in fact many of the most dedicated trolls turned out to be adults. Kinda shocking to me at the time as I was younger then and just assumed they'd be young dumb kids like me...
irrational 8y ago
"it requires a certain kind of person" So, is it kind of like if you desire to be a politician (or any position of power), you are definitely not the kind of person who should be a politician?
- debacle 8y ago
  The altruistic people who genuinely want to help tend to be squeezed out of the system by the power hungry authoritarians. See: pretty much every communist revolution ever.

crdoconnor 8y ago

This is similar to almost all unpaid positions which require dirty work and give you a bit of power. The people who do them end up being people who volunteer to be "paid" with the opportunity to go on a power trip. I've not had experience of it myself, but I've heard from some people who have worked at high profile charities that a similar thing happens there.

k__ 8y ago

Sure, but mostly policy is the problem here. Instead of "Hunt down bad content and delete it!" they should use "Hunt down good content and promote it!" Why not create a premium version of the product that features only chosen content? Creators can do what they always did and maybe they're even motivated to become "premium creators".

debacle 8y ago
How would that work with Wikipedia? You're looking for a solution that aligns with your thesis. You're not going to find one.
- k__ 8y ago
  Sure, this isn't sanely doable with the current state. I mean what should they do? Write two pages for every article, one where everyone could write and one where moderators accumulate the quality content? That won't scale. Maybe they need a VCS based approach, that merges only quality content but keeps all low-quality content in dead-end branches. I don't know what the solution would be, but the current approach is sub-optimal. Not because it's not nice to delete the work of people, but because they don't motivate people to do a better job.

duxup 8y ago

"Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability." Oh man I volunteered to moderate on a large gaming related forum ages ago. The amount of BS you deal with along with personal attacks and etc is pretty high. I never felt emotionally upset by it as I felt you had to maintain an even keel .... but it certainly is not a job for everyone and the rub is the folks who WANT to do it the most are often the worst at it. Being a good moderator is not a skill everyone has, but it's also not valued in any real way by most communities / companies. Really the most frustrating aspect were the non trouble users who seemed to go to bat for the folks who were truly bad actors because of some perceived injustice (lie)... and all the meta that goes into that.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
My favorite moments from moderating a small, semi-private video-game related board: - an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a romantic encounter that went down poorly. - a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for why he was banned. - people being outraged that we asked them to donate a small amount of money (somewhere around a hundred dollars, collectively) to help run the server, then offering to run it on their spare computer in their basement - discovering that due to a relatively unknown feature of PhpBB, we had a whole secondary parasite community that didn't show up in user registrations, and that had a whole private forum set up that nobody else on the board was aware of. It was like opening up a basement closet and discovering that it's a secret night club.
- duxup 8y ago
  Oh man 2 and 3... I know those feels. I hate the word "entitlement" because I think it gets used wrong a lot, but oh man folks perspective when it comes to the internet ... a lot of that. Users just feel it should be free and even a minute of downtime and they want answers, about a gaming forum (god help them if they just went to play games for a bit). As for the prolific troll thing, one site I worked (well volunteered) was a popular commercial gaming site back in the day. Threats, fake accounts claiming to be lawyers, etc. The site made money and all and had some really dedicated trolls. One they actually took legal action against. I assumed it was just some kid with too much time. Turned out to be a dude in his 40s.... in fact many of the most dedicated trolls turned out to be adults. Kinda shocking to me at the time as I was younger then and just assumed they'd be young dumb kids like me...

irrational 8y ago

"it requires a certain kind of person" So, is it kind of like if you desire to be a politician (or any position of power), you are definitely not the kind of person who should be a politician?

debacle 8y ago
The altruistic people who genuinely want to help tend to be squeezed out of the system by the power hungry authoritarians. See: pretty much every communist revolution ever.