I always find the most difficult is to deal with users who are not actively breaking any rules but are toxic and hurting the conversation. Given your experience, what's your take on handling this?
I always find the most difficult is to deal with users who are not actively breaking any rules but are toxic and hurting the conversation. Given your experience, what's your take on handling this?
Ban them. I also recommend making it explicit: your last rule should be “moderators have final discretion”.
The hard part is figuring out when to apply rules leniently or strictly. For example, I think users should always be warned, then given shorter bans, before a long or perma ban (unless they break an obvious egregious rule, or they’re a suspected alt of a banned user). At the same time, you do need to kick out persistent rules lawyerers or they’ll drive away good users.
Moderators shape their community. Hacker News is decent (compared to what it could be) because of dang and tomhow. Many communities (especially on Reddit) have become echo chambers, mainly because the mods are too happy to ban people for unspoken and/or vague rules.
Depends a lot on the community's topic, purpose, and size.
However, a sign that someone needs to be removed is if you find that the community writ-large treats them as a Missing Stair [0]. If they have refused direct requests from community moderators/leaders to address their behavior, or regressed after a short period of improvement, and if most of the community is required to do work to actively manage their toxicity, that is not sustainable.
It is a mistake I once made in managing a community. There was a person who was able to present as "pleasant enough" when the situation called for it, but who was often toxic when something didn't go perfectly (especially in a 1-on-1 setting). I allowed them to stay for too long, and the community as a whole suffered from the ambient sense of tension and hostility.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
It really depends on the community and the exact guidelines, but if someone is clearly toxic, I start with a direct message, then mute, then kick and ban.
You can spend endless time with internet weirdos, the trick is acting early and also being open to reverse a decision (also saying sorry if a moderation misstake was made, it can be easy attribute something to malice that was in reality really a newb misstake - and then you say sorry, explain that you are not paid and have also the real world to deal with at times and then all is good and with those who are really bad, well, one should not be light skinned and be able to tolerate some vague and concrete threats).
Hackernews' approach is hellbans. FWIW that seems to work pretty well here at least.
In my experience it's okay to have some troll or odd users. If they do targeted campaigns against single users or small groups we ban them.