Liars and Trolls and Bores, Oh My! Online Communities and Group Dynamics
I've been a member of several online communities, starting back in 1994 when I belonged to the Compuserve SCUBA diving forum, as well as a few others. The group dynamics in online communities have always fascinated me, and this article by Cory Doctorow, on getting rid of trolls, or hostile jerks, as the title calls them, really interested me.
First of all, I had never heard the term "Troll Whisperer" to refer to a person who knows how to handle the hostile jerks who do tend to take over chat rooms and message boards. I have been a troll whisperer from way back. My first serious involvement in an online community was on Compuserve where we had both a message board and a chat room in a forum long ago and far away. There was a major "flame war" complete with competing sides of allies. I was actually proposed as a "compromise candidate" to be part of a two-person peace keeping task force.
Back then there wasn't much information around about managing a very active online community. We flew by the seat of our pants. Creating a place that both encouraged soul searching, hard questions, and lively debate while at the same time discouraging personal attacks wasn't easy. I helped do it fairly well, for the most part, for about 5 years.
These days I hang out in a few chat rooms and have a reputation for knowing quickly seeing whether someone is "a clueless wonder" with ill-conceived ideas about what sort of conduct is expected and tolerated, and a real jerk who for whatever reason really does want to disrupt things. I don't know how I know. But I would say I have about an 80% success rate in turning around the clueless wonders even when the rest of the room thinks they are jerks.
So do I support the "Blogger Code of Conduct" mentioned by Doctorow and proposed by blogger Jim O'Reilly? Yes, absolutely, but not necessarily in the way he suggests. I think civility and the culture of a chat room or blog is more a matter of culture than laws.
Online communities have cultures of their own. I've seen one person change a community culture for the better or the worse by persistence and volume. Annoucing formally that your community (or blog) has a culture of civility can't, in my mind, hurt. I don't consider civility censorship or mandating the warm and fuzzies. Read some of Winston Churchill's speeches - they are not warm and fuzzy - but they are civil, even in opposition to the ultimate uncivility.
Of course this blog isn't a community - yet. But were it to grow, you can bet your bippy I'd want to impose my personal brand of civility (and troll whispering) to it.
