the-real-seebs:

aellagirl:

Most of my friends have been on the internet, and I’ve spent many years as part of various internet communities, many of which I have moderated as either part of the mod team or the sole creator.

There’s a pattern that inevitably emerges, something like this:

1. Community forms based off of a common interest, personality, value set, etc. We’ll describe “people who strongly share the interest/personality/value” as Opossums: people who like talking to specific people. These people have nothing against anybody, they just only feel a strong sense of community from really specific sorts of people, and tend to actively seek out and form niche or cultivated communities. To them, “friendly and welcoming” community isn’t enough to give them a sense of belonging.
2. This community becomes successful and fun
3. Community starts attracting

   Otters: People who like talking to most people. They can find a way to get along with anybody, they don’t have specific standards that cause them to enjoy someone’s company. They’re mostly ok with whatever sort of community comes their way, as long as it’s friendly and welcoming. These Otters see the Opossum community and happily enter, delighted to find all these fine lovely folk and their interesting subculture. 
    (e.g., in a christian server, otters would be atheists who want to discuss religion; in a rationality server, it would be members who don’t practice rationality but like talking with rationalists)

4. Community grows to have more and more otters, as they invite their friends. Gradually the community grows diluted until some otters start entering who don’t share the opossum goals even a little bit – or even start inviting opossums with rival goals. (e.g., members who actively dislike rationality practices in the rationality server).
5. Opossums realize the community culture is not what it used to be and not what they wanted, so they try to moderate. Sometimes a constitution, laws, and removal process, usually involving voting, is formed after way too much discussion about it, and mostly because the mods are too scared to make everybody as angry as they are threatening to be. This just staves off the problem. Alternatively, the mods just outright kick and ban who they don’t like, which leads us to:
6. The Otters like each other, and kicking an Otter makes all of the other Otters members really unhappy. There are long debates about whether or not what the (opossum) moderator did was the Right Thing and whether the laws or constitution are working correctly or whether they should split off and form their own chat room
7. The new chat room is formed, usually by Otters. Some of the members join both chats, but the majority are split, as the aforementioned debates generated a lot of hostility
8. Rinse and repeat

   —

One problem is when Otters misinterpret Opossum ideology. It takes a lot of people very unhappy to get Otters to kick people out, and so when they see Opossums doing kicking, they assume all of the Opossums are very unhappy too, and take it personally.

Otters and Opossums tend to get into the “is elitism good” discussion – Otters will generally say things like “I want an inclusive and tolerant environment” and “I don’t want people to have to watch their every step” and “The thought of testing or filtering people for being good enough for admission here makes me really uncomfortable.”

Opossums are on the other side, saying “but you can’t just have a free for all,” or “this community is here for a specific purpose and it’s ok to get rid of people who don’t want it” and “I like having strict admission standards.”

I think at the core of this is Otters interpreting Opossum censorship as something personal, because their standard for feeling a sense of belonging is just ‘human decency’, and it’s difficult for them to empathize with a motivation of exclusion based on other things.

–

I don’t really have a point with this, but I am interested in methods we can take to help preemptively solve this inevitable Otter vs. Opossum clash and the dilution of group members. One idea is to have a periodic ‘chat splitting,’ where every 3-6 months (or when membership hits a certain number) there is a new forum/chatroom made, and people have to choose which group to join. This would help separate the Otters from the Opossums in a way that is inevitable and hopefully creates no hard feelings. 

Also, possibly normalizing the social differences between Otters and Opossums and loudly labeling chatrooms by their spectrum on the Otter-Opossum scale. That way, if someone knows they’re stepping foot into an Opossum room, they know that being kicked is more likely, and it’s also probably not personal at all.

There’s also lots of ways to try to filter out Otters from joining in the first place, like tests for entry, interviews, and trial periods.

If you have any more proposed methods for avoiding culture dilution, I’d love to hear them!

This is fascinating. We’ve been having forum drama recently, and honestly, kicking people out was not one of things that would have occurred to me. I guess we did sorta do the “here’s what we’re trying to do” thing, which is sorta like the “Constitution” described, but the idea of trying to “enforce” it strikes me as really weird.