Comment by 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.
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.
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.