Really excellent piece on community management.
Interesting strategy to redirect the most controversial (read: dumb to the point of causing a riot) opinions to private feedback.
Some TL;DRs that I found worthwhile:
Second, provide guidelines that eliminate the worst of the tone problems (the “don’t be an asshole” rule works great until you encounter someone who doesn’t know how to pull that off.)
Lists of problem or flat-out forbidden words: this goes beyond slurs to things like “always” or “never”, your local equivalent of “noob” or other disparagement, the category-classes the Problem Child likes to lump people into. The ones we see a lot at Metafilter aren’t gaming related, they’re things like “hipster”, “SJW”, “men’s rights activist,” all of which make people feel dismissed or mischaracterized, two debuffs that tend to prevent people from responding civilly.
Another thing I’ve had good luck with are “I statements”: This sounds hippy-dippy, but “I want this change” is a much less arguable statement than “The game needs this change”.
And
One more thing that works well: If you have two people who reinforce each other’s bad behavior, forbid them to interact. You have to enforce it on both sides, or you end up with ten times the tantrums you started with, but it’s a simple way to solve a recurring problem.
Good food for thought here. The high cost of “just ignore that post” is extreme measured in the number of people (thousands!) who have to do the right thing, every time, when they see that post.
