Communities do moderation wrong

I see this pattern time and time again where communities do moderation wrong. Instead of following helpful patterns like what is laid out in my post about the words we use and why they are bad they are stuck in these ancient bad patterns.

In this blog post I go into how communities get into this pattern and what those who avoided it did differently.

How do communities fall into these pattens?

In my opinion the root cause for where this problem comes from lies in how communities that form organically grow and evolve if they have inexperienced founders.

This is made especially clear in how these patterns show up less in highly organised communities that have had the benefit of a restructuring or initial good structure.

So where does it go wrong for those communities are not reaping the benefit of a restructure or having done it right from the start?

The Founder Problem

This problem tends to originate in the very founding of communities. The founders tend to have to serve as Administrative Caretakers and Custodial Moderators and Janitorial Moderators.

Now the problems don’t actually start to manifest here though. They manifest after you grow to a sufficient size that you need more administrative capacity. Because as soon as you need more administrative capacity people will assume that the new "admin" will have the same roles that the founders have carried out. So, they will wear all 3 hats.

This confusion is usually not present when the founders created moderators there you only confuse Janitors and Custodians but that’s the focus of my previous post.

If your community is not properly setup so that people understand moderation and administration are separate this is where you ran into trouble. And the worst part is that you see this structure everywhere that has a community origin.

I primarily see this mistake not being made as much in places with a corporate origin. Corporate Governance structures understand that IT, Security and HR are separate roles with separate areas they have delegated authority in. Our communities should follow the same idea by having it be clear that Administration is a separate role from Trust and Safety.

How to do things the right way in a matrix context

So, building on that Administration and Trust and Safety are separate here is a bit of a contradiction. You most likely want to have all rooms in your community owned by Trust and Safety but administered by the Admin Team. Ok so why is that? The reason for this structure is that realistically with today’s tech and what’s on the current horizon it’s the easiest structure to achieve.

Because of room version 12 bringing us the creators have infinite power quirk the moderation bots are likely going to be forced to have the infrastructure for room creation and upgrades.

The moderation bot account is one candidate for an account that has this ownership role as it’s a team account not an individual account and this is important for being able to have administrators and moderators come and go over the years without it requiring manual room upgrades to fix this.

Now in addition to having your rooms creator be a team account belonging to whatever team owns rooms in your community break glass accounts should also be employed.

One or several break glass in case of emergency accounts should be co-creators of your rooms in v12 or have sufficient powers in v11 and older rooms to also act as co-owners.

This is essentially an insurance policy to prevent losing access to creator status. Now for the exact details of this due to that this post is written before we know the exact mechanics of room version 12 it will have to be left as an exercise for the reader to do an assessment on if its needed.

All of this will require using room upgrades and well room upgrades now that’s an easy thing to screw up. Now as for how to execute room upgrades properly, I will leave that to a separate post. I will though say that it’s a complicated mess for the uninitiated and we should wait until Draupnir and other tools have added this feature as the current tooling is crap.

Closing Thoughts

Writing this post turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. It has gone thru at least one complete rewrite before I got something I’m happy with and hell an interim state of it even went into political theory and state craft and the keys to power. Let’s say it has been hard to write and I am not even sure this version is perfect but it’s something.

I also don’t go into all that much detail about some stuff and I should be honest it’s pretty much because writer’s block. Cat wants to write this post but also is not. Cat is odd with writing. Maby I should write a blog post one day on the Cats writing dilemma.