Set the tone, and the tone will maintain the tone.
This is an excerpt from my essay, Aikido Moves for Online Community Management, written last fall. It may not be relevant to every community situation, but it worked for me. I’d love to hear your version. -sd
Okay, so lack of hate isn’t really “magic” — it’s the tone we set from the beginning.
Have you ever shown up to a conversation that was already in progress? What did you do? You listened to what was going on, how people were interacting, and where they were in the discussion before you joined in. You drew all sorts of conclusions about expectations and protocol just by taking a quick inventory of the situation, and then you went with the flow, adding your perspective in a way that seemed to fit.
That’s what people do when they show up to online communities, too. They take a brief scan around, they pull in whatever cues they can gather, they decide if they want to join in, and then they do so in a way that fits all the factors. Think of the quality of comments on Flickr versus YouTube. Flickr takes community management very seriously, and people have gotten the message over time (whether consciously or unconsciously) that being respectful in comments is important. On YouTube, the expectation is more or less that people will be idiots. So people are idiots.
Take note of what kind of conversation people are experiencing when they show up to your site. If you monitor it carefully enough in the beginning, it will begin to (mostly) monitor itself.
How do you set the tone? By contributing in the style that you’d like others to contribute. By offering some simple, clear guidelines on how people should treat each other and why. By suggesting to the people in your inner circle that they engage in a certain way. By showing up and being personally involved to positively redirect things when someone goes off course.
At first I was going to say I feel sorry for YouTube that they’re the standard example these days of a dysfunctional online community, but then I remembered that they actually have one of the most popular communities on the whole internet! So who’s to say their mosh-pit atmosphere isn’t just what people like about the place? Maybe they like the permission it gives them to be rude, to yell back at the TV.
It’s not just that we can set a positive or a negative tone. We can actually create a complicated social structure, a whole dance of how to relate, how to be, even how to think, and people will gladly comply. A simple example: You could declare that a forum was only for playing “20 Questions”, and that the first post in each thread should just say animal, vegetable, or mineral. Theoretically you could look at that and see it as totalitarian control (everything not forbidden is mandatory!), but actually almost everyone would perceive it as a fun game and compliance would probably be very high. It’s fun to play by rules. We know instinctively that it’s a way to make something interesting happen.
That’s what most interests me about the formation of community: I believe it’s the only way, or at least by far the easiest way, to change anything. Individuals tend to be very consistent in their aesthetic and approach to things. Communities, as well, tend to find a stable norm after a while and reject deviation. But in the formation of a brand new community is an opportunity to give breathing space to something that’s genuinely different. People will follow the norms of a community– even if those norms aren’t anything they would have thought of on their own! Even if they’re something you just made up! It’s a golden opportunity to create new patterns of human interaction.
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