Moderators who treat their forums as a privilege to be a part of, and who enforce a bar reward their users with that value every day I think. I've been a membe

Moderators who treat their forums as a privilege to be a part of, and who enforce a bar reward their users with that value every day I think. I've been a member of a variety of communities in my life, and to a single one what made them good was the sense of ownership and stewardship by a core member or senate of members. They were all minor personality cults around BDFLs. Whether it was bands, bars and restaurants, hackers, software projects, companies, sports teams, volunteer projects, or anything else, there was someone who could say, "this is my thing, the bar is here, be welcome or leave," and the main thing they did not tolerate was members usurping that authority with external criteria, criticism, or drama. The difference between an organic community and a "scene," I'd suspect is this ownership piece, where an organic community has a founder steward who is a hub or hierarch, whereas a scene is a kind of dynamic running opporunistic power struggle. While I thought there might be masculine and feminine aspects to that, I've known too many women who had that steward/hierarch role in different places to think it is an artifact of sex. I suspect you could replace most of the rules in the article with one rule, which is "respect the mods," and provided the moderators don't debase themselves or get trolled, that's pretty sustainable. The more rules you have, the more likely someone will leverage any possible inconsistency into creating chaos that puts them at the center of it. I would be interested in others' thoughts about why irc/silc, usenet, fidonet, early reddit, and even early twitter worked. Did they implement this articles recommendations, and which ones are sufficient or necessary? IRC was pretty anonymous for its time, especially with proxies and shells, and it persists today. IRC helped scale communities pretty fast, but being an entertaining participant vs. running a show are very different skills and desires. In each case, the rule was "respect the mods," and so long as they stayed aloof, appreciated what they had created, and acted minimally and according to principle, their communities sustained and thrived. I don't know whether these additional rules are that necessary if the recipe for a thriving community is just really a good BDFL.