← Back to context

Comment by TulliusCicero

2 years ago

I'm confused, do you think some individual leaving is a failure state? Realistically I don't think you can avoid banning or pissing some people off as a moderator, at least in most cases.

There's a lot of people whose behavior on internet message boards/chat groups can be succinctly summarized as, "they're an asshole." Now maybe IRL they're a perfectly fine person, but for whatever reason they just engage like an disingenuous jerk on the internet, and the latter case is what's relevant to you as a moderator. In some cases a warning or talking-to will suffice for people to change how they engage, but often times it won't, they're just dead set on some toxic behavior.

9 comments

TulliusCicero

Reply
shepherdjerred  2 years ago

> I'm confused, do you think some individual leaving is a failure state?

When you are trying to grow something, them leaving is a failure.

I ran a Minecraft server for many years when I was in high school. It's very hard to strike a balance of:

1. Having players

2. Giving those players a positive experience (banning abusers)

3. Stepping in only when necessary

Every player that I banned meant I lost some of my player base. Some players in particular would cause an entire group to leave. Of course, plenty of players have alternate accounts and would just log onto one of those.

  • TulliusCicero  2 years ago

    I think it can be a failure state, certainly, but sometimes it's unavoidable, and banning someone can also mean more people in the community, rather than less.

    Would HN be bigger if it had always had looser moderation that involved less banning of people? I'm guessing not.

    edit: I guess what I was thinking was that often in a community conflict where one party is 'targeted' by another party, banning one of those parties is inevitable. Not always, but often people just cannot be turned away from doing some toxic thing, they feel that they're justified in some way and would rather leave/get banned than stop.

    • shepherdjerred  2 years ago

      It was hard from my perspective because I would rather not ban anyone. You're right that failure to ban could cause players to leave because they are being harassed, but it's hard to know when to step in.

      If you're too strict you'll drive off a lot of players, which sounds acceptable, but nobody wants to play on a near-empty server. If you're too lenient you'll have too many hostile players, but at least your server is not empty.

      This was by far my least favorite aspect of managing a server, but I still had an overall positive experience and it is a huge part of me becoming a software engineer.

whatshisface  2 years ago

The person leaving is the least bad part of what happened in the OP's example, try reading this again?:

>In first incident I chose to ignore a certain user being targeted by others for posting repeated messages. The person left a very angry message and left.

  • TulliusCicero  2 years ago

    They have three examples, and all of them ended with the person leaving; it just sounded to me like they were implying that the person leaving represented a failure on their part as a moderator. That, had they moderated better, they could've prevented people leaving.