Thread by @Delafina777

every so often a friend links me to something on the Paizo forums, and I go read it, and discover that there are still people who have been espousing open white supremacist rhetoric for years there

and I just sigh and wish Paizo would, like, EVER hire an actual community manager

like, community management is a lot more than moderation

and one of the things a professional community manager *does* is think about how to actually *architect* the community instead of just maintain it

That is, how to set standards for behavior that encourage the community to grow toward a desired state, as opposed to just having binary yes/no rules--like do this thing, get your post deleted, do it three times, get a suspension

Building a community that is welcoming to trans people, for example, isn't as simple as just deleting posts that are openly transphobic. And it isn't as simple as assuming that you'll recognize transphobia.

It means actually doing research--often, *deeply unpleasant* research into what transphobia looks like *right now* on the internet, into what the dogwhistles are, into what the NOT saying the quiet part out loud looks like

And it means being a stickler about language--in two directions.

One is being very literal. It means gentle, public corrections when someone who appears to be in good faith uses a term incorrectly.

(Btw, I'm using transphobia as an example right now because it's running rampant on the Paizo forums, but this holds true for all sorts of marginalized groups.)

It also means NOT being super-literal about dog whistles. It means not pretending naivete about the implied meaning of what someone's saying, not moderating based purely on literal meaning.

It means being very clear that "this thing right here that you did is not acceptable in this community."

It DOESN'T mean "praise in public, reprimand in private."

All that bullshit does is make members of the marginalized group feel unsafe.

In our current political climate? Marginalized people need to see the people with authority actually reprimand bad behavior. Otherwise it feels like either the bad behavior isn't being addressed, or it's not being addressed in a way that makes it clear to others where the line is

It means not acquiescing with pretended naivete, like the whole, "oh, that's just what we call X people here," "oh, I didn't know that was a slur," all that shit.

Cool. Then the public response needs to be "Now you do know, and if you use it again, you're gone."

It means not humoring "just asking questions" or "playing devil's advocate," or "just expressing an opinion" when we're talking about marginalized groups' humanity and equality.

Like, it involves a certain amount of cynicism about what's in good faith.

It's 20fucking21. If someone's "just asking questions" about whether a trans woman is actually a man, either they're doing it in bad faith, or they've been so isolated that they need to be told that's too bad, here's some basic reading, but your education doesn't get to come...

...at the expense of the trans people in the community, who deserve to be able to participate without being dehumanized regularly.

It's 20fucking21. If they're regularly experiencing transphobia in your community, you have chosen something that is of minor importance to some people (their opinions about a subject that doesn't really involve them) over something that is of LIFE AND DEATH IMPORTANCE...

...to others (not having their gender identity questioned CONSTANTLY).

One reason Paizo's forums have always been so toxic is that leadership confuses community management with customer service (and has often dumped it on the customer service people).

They're not the same. In fact, they're approaching being opposites.

Customer service is usually about satisfying an individual customer's needs, and trying to keep them happy as much as possible. The customer isn't always right, and CSRs can't always treat them as right, but usually that's the starting point.

The responsibility of a community manager ISN'T to individual customers. It's to the community as a whole. And in general, that's going to involve pissing off individual customers, because most problems in communities stem from the behavior of individuals.

Where a customer service rep is generally trying to manage the feelings of the individual they're trying to help, a community manager often has to care less about the feelings of the guy who really feels should be able to get to express his opinions about biological sex...

...and more about the effect that's going to have on the trans people who just want to do whatever the forum is actually about without having to hear this for the 90th time. That can mean telling him bluntly, in public, that he needs to shut up.

Effective CSRs' main stat is patience. Effective community managers' main stat is often suspicion.

But, like, the ability to do this well, to actually recognize when stuff is in bad faith, to recognize the colonizing techniques white supremacists/misogynists/TERFs/etc. use to normalize their ideas in online communities, etc. isn't something you just get passively.

It's not something you get even by being a member of a marginalized community. That might make you conversant in, say, homophobic dogwhistles but probably not antiBlack dogwhistles or ableist dogwhistles or fatphobic dogwhistles or antisemitic dogwhistles.

That actually takes *research.*

It takes being part of larger professional communities of community managers, DEI people, etc. who are sharing research and expertise and current best practices.

Because honestly it's not even enough to be an expert on a particular type of marginalization, or even, as if it were even possible by yourself, ALL of them.

It also involves being an expert on *how to encourage group behaviors that make the community environment hostile to persecution of marginalized groups.*

You have to
-understand what makes a community welcoming versus hostile to people from different marginalized backgrounds
-recognize prejudice even when it's not obvious
-recognize unconscious bias and how it plays out in interpersonal interactions
-recognize microaggressions

-understand how to interact with posters and use your authority to deal with individual bad actors
-understand how to model normalization of welcoming behaviors and denormalization of unwelcoming ones

-understand how to get a whole community to *value* creating a truly welcoming environment
-understand how to get a group of people to *recognize* welcoming and unwelcoming behaviors
-understand how to get them to engage in themselves

-understand how to get them to reinforce them to others
-recognize when to let the community itself push back and discourage unwelcoming behaviors vs. step in yourself and shut down interactions
-and much, much more!

And on top of all that, how to do all these things is constantly changing depending on the age and size and makeup of the community!

(the "and much, much more!" was a Paizo in-joke, btw. It was always the last bullet point in our back-cover copy)

like this is super-hard, probably impossible, to do by yourself. It's why when I was at Microsoft we had weekly community manager meetings where we'd share research and talk through different incidents--NOT, usually, in the sense of "how do I handle this incident," but

in terms of "is there a rule to be learned here? what do we want to encourage or discourage about this or how people reacted to this, and how do we do that?"

It's not something you can do in your free time when you're not handling customer service requests.

(And, as I noted, since it's very different mindsets, CSRs probably aren't the best people to be doing it--that's a lot of perspective-switching to do in a day.)

About 10 years ago, there was a trend of different sites and publications shutting down their comment sections, because they realized that online communities--even if they're as loose and ephemeral as a comment section on an article--are never a net neutral.

They realized that if they couldn't afford to invest in those communities that they were creating and hosting, they were actually *doing harm* but continuing to host them. They were creating breeding grounds for the sort of stuff we saw take over the internet in 2016.

And the Paizo execs have always acted like, because they've managed to attract a queer fanbase, because they've openly been LGBTQ-friendly in their products, because they have a lot of queer staff, that things will largely take care of themselves.

These things DON'T take care of themselves.

And what you get when you're not willing to invest in professionals and give them resources is a LOT of damage to the emotional and mental health of your staff, who are trying to do it without adequate resources or training...

...not to mention to queer community members, who know very well what that guy who never swears or uses "impolite" language means when he says what he says, and who aren't willing to let it stand unchallenged, but who are essentially (unintentionally) gaslit by moderation...

...that isn't allowed to acknowledge what we all know he means because he's using dogwhistles rather than saying it in a way Grandma in the CEO office recognizes.

And I'll reiterate: online communities are never neutral.

If you aren't willing to invest in community management, you are, more likely than not, creating an environment that does harm and helps *normalize* harm.

anyway another former employee said that reading the Paizo forums is self-harm, and I think she's right, and while I'll still read *individual posts* my friends send me, I am not going to read any of the context