What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't

[sao]

I do think presuming good faith until demonstrated otherwise is a good place to start.

In my lawyer work (sigh, I know, sorry) many of my clients presume malice on the part of authority figures, because the system is broken, cops lie, etc., and it is, and they do, but my advice is usually this:

Don’t assume malicious intent. Assume incompetence. It is way more likely that people fuck up and then try to cover their ass than people deliberately try to hurt you for mysterious conspiracy reason.

Sometimes there really is malicious intent, but having been a human being who has hurt people, I think at least 80% of the time when one of us hurts another of us, there is no malice. There’s thoughtlessness. There’s not considering other people’s feelings to matter. There’s not realizing someone else was invested or involved at all.

Some people are creepers who are out there using people to get off or to get even. But MOST people are just out there being people. And I’m of the Discworld school of thought that people are neither basically good nor basically evil, but basically people, who want the status to remain quo and for tomorrow to be pretty much like today.

That’s not to say that when presented with evidence of malice aforethought we should reject it. But assuming X hates you is dumb when it’s so much more likely that X doesn’t or didn’t remember you exist.

[farfalla]

@Polk I’m a big proponent of don’t attribute stupidity (or disagreement or misunderstanding or whatever) to malice. I try to approach life with what Paul Farmer called the H of G even when it’s hard.

That said, the times on msb where I’ve had charged interactions with someone, it’s been people who have proven that they have a history of not acting in good faith. At that point, I’m not going to go into every disagreement starting from even, good faith footing. If I don’t know you or have a history with you, yeah of course start there, but if you’ve shown yourself to me to be someone who historically doesn’t engage in good faith (I’ve said good faith too many times now it sounds fake) then I’m not starting from that assumption.

People don’t need to earn respect, but they can lose it.

[TNP]

That’s Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Though variations on the theme go back centuries.

[Tez]

@Polk said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:

If this forum is going to thrive, being nice to ONE ANOTHER should be the norm, and that should be socially policed.

I’m mostly skimming while playing a lot of Raft, but I wanna pull out and emphasize this point right here. I would rather see the community setting the tone by telling people who are going too far – in public or in DMs – or encouraging their preferred tone via upvotes. THE UPVOTES CONSOLIDATE THE CLIQUE HIVEMIND. I haven’t really heard anything I would consider a hard request as a change in policy, and I’m not sure I’d want to enforce one.

THAT SAID:

If there ARE certain things that people consolidate around in this thread that we COULD lay out, please consider me open to hearing them.

[Kestrel]

@shit-piss-love said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:

When someone starts to drift from civility in interaction with a community they actually care about, it’s because their emotions have got on top of them. That’s not a Bad Thing. Trying to climb on top of your brain is just what emotions do. And we apes like that and it can serve a purpose. Angry Gets Shit Done. But emoting that anger has a tendency to degrade many messages, even if just as a subconscious reaction in the reader/listener. Sure, it’s galling that if I want to be as well-received as possible when expressing myself, I may have to curtail the rage roiling like stomach acid in my furious punk heart. But demonstrably, if I do that, my messaging is received far better especially by the people watching me argue with the person I want to flatten with a rogue meteor. Imbuing my words with the full force of my anger by veering off the path of civility certainly feels good and it may even totally hit right with people that already totally agree with my position but those are the people you least need to reach in a public discourse.
The issue is really that dropping civility is assuming claim to a larger portion of the emotional space in a discussion or community than you are tacitly entitled to by default. It’s the verbal/written equivalent of an animal turning to their largest profile to ward off potential aggressors.

With regards to the idea that emotionally-charged statements degrade the acuity of one’s argument for its intended audience, I think that this is often down to personal and/or cultural bias.

There may be good and understandable reasons for why a person’s more inclined to listen to stoically delivered arguments over emotive ones; you’ve given yours. However, I think it’s an error to suggest that this bias is universal or that it’s inherently correct.

Since we’re bringing up fascists, let me jump straight to a reverse Godwin’s Law and mention that the big famous one from back in the day was regarded as a very charismatic and effective communicator. He had 0 chill about it, though. In more modern times we have the likes of Alex Jones, who I think most of us here are likely to agree is a blithering idiot, but nevertheless one who’s depressingly successful at securing an audience. Bill O’Reilly would be another example.

There are more positive examples, such as Greta Thunberg, MLK Jr., etc. There are surely people who disagree with the messages that these famous figures espouse, and particularly in both Thunberg and Jones’ case, those who mock them for their emotionality; however, I don’t think that’s ultimately the reason why their detractors are disinclined to hear their message.

There’ve been a few recent posts on these boards that I can personally attest to having found compelling, specifically because their authors were willing to convey themselves emotionally; posts which reference personal accounts, which I deemed instinctively to be authentic and true, even without being aware of too many facts about their situation. In a number of cases, I’ve reached out to let the poster know, ‘I know how you feel.’ And I think those moments can in fact strengthen a community, so I don’t think that one in which we uphold communications that are drier and purely factual is better.

Of course there’s a balance, and there’s a time and place; I try not to bleed all over people uninvited if I can help it. If I can’t help it, I try to later reflect on whether the behaviour was appropriate, or if I might’ve done better to instead extract myself from the situation. Emotions can be harnessed and weaponised, for better or worse; a person can appear suspicious, or unsafe to others, if their communications always telegraphs a heightened level of emotion. But I think the opposite is also true, and those who appear to feel too little can seem insincere, unkind, or simply unengaging.

---

If your community is able to keep things civil most of the time, you can use it as a barometer both for how healthy your community is and for measuring your own emotional load relative to a topic in discussion.

I think this was an important point, so I hope I haven’t misread it.

A community should, generally, be civil. I don’t want to be friends with people who are usually negative, nor to participate in a community that usually is.

When my friends are acting in a way that seems negative or toxic, it’s a cause for concern, specifically because that behaviour isn’t like them. And in that light, I don’t treat it as a character flaw: I see that it reveals a problem that needs to be addressed. A healthy community may need to convene and weather a rough patch in order to come out the other side better able to breathe. I’ll be optimistic and say that I think that’s likely to be the case with BMD.

No one wants to engage in a community that’s consistently joyless, but most don’t have a problem resolving concerns in one that otherwise tends towards enthusiasm.

[eye8urcake]

I’m so not as deep as everybody else answering here, but I’ll throw two cents in because I care to…

I’d quit the old board a little under a year ago because of Really Fucking Bad real life shit slapping me across the face with the idea that the time, energy and care I was wasting engaging with toxic, obsessed people dragging my name into shit on said board from a game I hadn’t touched in a year could best be spent on literally anything else with a far better return on investment.

I found out about this board because things calmed down enough for me to want to see what games were poppin’ and I checked that board to find out it was basically turning into a pre-Reddit-purge incel sub at lightspeed. While some of the personae engaging in doing that were absolutely zero surprise to me, what did surprise me was who ended up deputized to deal with that and the attitude the deputizers took about it. That blew me the fuck away.

I’m not sure who said ‘believe people when they tell you who they are’, but it’s a pretty solid statement, and updating myself on ‘the state of the community’ before finding this place was really just me watching a few people - with shiny new ‘Admin’ tags - screaming out who they are at the top of their lungs. Not only this, but their actions were speaking even louder even than those words - bannings, unbannings, weird ‘mobbing’ of people who dared question or disagree with that screaming in groups with other new people sporting shiny new ‘Admin’ badges - something I think is actually still going on there, to be honest.

I guess I’m using a shitton of words to say simply if the moderators of the community start shouting from the community’s rooftops that they have no respect for a majority of the community, in between spitting at and sniping members of that same majority of said community that they personally detest because the powers of their shiny ‘Admin’ badges make them feel empowered to do so, people are going to tap out again.

I have no idea how WORA or whatever you guys called it was, but I really didn’t think MSB was such a horrible place. I mostly lurked after initially engaging in the thread that brought me there and motivated me to register in the first place, with little spates of shooting my virtual ‘mouth’ off when I felt a situation warranted my input, but by and large I participated because I didn’t think it was a terrible place where terrible people were allowed to engage in terrible behavior unrestrained, because terrible people weren’t running it.

Even the Hog Pit wasn’t so much ‘gloves off’ as I feel like some people have tried to portray it in the past few months, nor do I feel that its existence is why that community fractured - I think it’s merely a convenient scapegoat so (primarily) the people running the show and (secondarily) the people still participating can feel good about themselves even though their sandbox is basically empty now. In their whole Moral Panic about The Clique, they’re now just a little clique, and that’s fine, they’re happy like that and the people who aren’t have moved on.

TL;DR is really the fact that just the existence of this thread, without ‘Admin’-tagged people packing up to loom over every post with an ‘ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SAY THAT??’ attitude more or less proves that this community was created to be and likely will be quite healthy and open to myriad viewpoints, because the people running it and participating in it are making that a priority.

[Kestrel]

@jujube said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:

There is a clear difference in criticism for an action (When so-and-so does blah, it produces these types of consequences), then there’s the ad hominem attacks (So and so is a filthy bitchass stalker).

Remember, we are MUers. We’ve ALL done shitty things. So just remember that when criticizing others, cause someone else might have receipts on you.

I’m OK with calling someone a filthy bitchass stalker. And I’m totally OK with being in a community where others call out that kind of thing, too.

I’d actually be very uncomfortable in a community where doing so was forbidden. Why should calling out a serious concern of that nature be deemed worse than the behaviour itself? I don’t want to be in a community where stalking’s tolerated.

I’ve been a MU*er since prepuberty, and I’m pretty comfortable with the way I’ve participated in the hobby. Is some of my RP history super cringe? Totally. Have I said really dumb stuff as a teenager that someone sufficiently motivated could point to now? Yeah. I think even three years ago I was publicly called out on MSB for saying something racist, which was thoughtless, embarrassing, and for which I immediately apologised. I think that’s what people do when they regret their actions, and if they don’t regret their actions, then for better or worse they live with the consequences of drawing a line in the sand on what they stand for and what they don’t. This is a good thing, because there’s very little to be gained from trying to earn the respect of those who don’t share your tastes or values. Even if those values relate to one’s willingness to forgive mistakes, or the amount of evidence required for condemnation.

I have, in fact, been accused of stalking a MU*er before. I don’t know if this thread is the right place to share that story? But it’s a funny one.

If you end up hearing it sometime and determine that I’m someone you’d want nothing to do with, then for a variety of possible reasons, you’re probably right.

[eye8urcake]

@Kestrel said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:

@jujube said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:

There is a clear difference in criticism for an action (When so-and-so does blah, it produces these types of consequences), then there’s the ad hominem attacks (So and so is a filthy bitchass stalker).

Remember, we are MUers. We’ve ALL done shitty things. So just remember that when criticizing others, cause someone else might have receipts on you.

I’m OK with calling someone a filthy bitchass stalker. And I’m totally OK with being in a community where others call out that kind of thing, too.

I’d actually be very uncomfortable in a community where doing so was forbidden. Why should calling out a serious concern of that nature be deemed worse than the behaviour itself? I don’t want to be in a community where stalking’s tolerated.

This, and when the community also allows and encourages the alleged FBS to participate in the same discussion, which I’ve always felt we do, well…

[WhiteRaven]

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[GF]

@WhiteRaven said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:

I am sure that it is cultural, but cursing really gets to me. Over the last few years, I have learnt to curse, but I’ve never cursed /at/ someone except in roleplaying experiments with rougher characters. And if someone curses at me? That is game over. No more reasonable dialogue of good faith can be engaged in. I am walking away.

This is very interesting, and could be a useful demonstration in a discussion of healthy boundaries. May I ask how you express this discomfort? Do you tell people beforehand as a nod to your awareness of the different cultural values, or do you prefer not to associate with someone you’d have to tell that to?

[WhiteRaven]

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[GF]

@WhiteRaven said in What Makes a Healthy Community and How to Deal When it Isn't:

I realize there is an argument for fighting back and changing cultures from within instead of leaving them to fester in an echo chamber but I’m not that person.

I would say that rather than fight a culture, a person should fight for their right to be respected within a culture, but that’s definitely a “do as I say, not as I do” situation.