Comment by beezlebroxxxxxx
2 years ago
IME, places (or forums, or social networks, etc.) with good moderation tend to fall into 2 camps of putting that into play:
1. The very hands-off approach style that relies on the subject matter of the discussion/topic of interest naturally weeding out "normies" and "trolls" with moderation happening "behind the curtain";
2. The very hands-on approach that relies on explicit clear rules and no qualms about acting on those rules, so moderation actions are referred directly back to the specific rule broken and in plain sight.
Camp 1 begins to degrade as more people use your venue; camp 2 degrades as the venue turns over to debate about the rules themselves rather than the topic of interest that was the whole point of the venue itself (for example, this is very common in a number of subreddits where break-off subreddits usually form in direct response to a certain rule or the enforcement of a particular rule).
Camp 2 works fine in perpetuity if the community is built as a cult of personality around a central authority figure; where the authority figure is also the moderator (or, if there are other moderators, their authority is delegated to them by the authority figure, and they can always refer arbitration back to the authority figure); where the clear rules are understood to be descriptive of the authority's decision-tree, rather than prescriptive of it — i.e. "this is how I make a decision; if I make a decision that doesn't cleanly fit this workflow, I won't be constrained by the workflow, but I will try to change the workflow such that it has a case for what I decided."
Is people leaving and founding a different forum with different rules really a failure/degradation?
It would be cool if such forks were transparent on the original forum / subreddit, and if they also forked on specific rules. I.e. like a diff with rule 5 crossed out / changed / new rule added, etc.
I've seen an example of this. The fork is less active than the original, but I wouldn't call it a failure. Rather, it was a successful experiment with a negative result. The original forum was the most high-quality discussion forum I've ever experienced in my life, so this wasn't quite a generalizable experiment.