Boundaries and Soft Blurry Edges

A postscript to my essay on moderation, a link to an article it inspired, and a note on assholes

Apr 06, 2023

A person in the Bay Area freedom community — I’ll call her CLA based on the name of her blog, Common Law America — who read my post on moderation a few weeks ago sent me a long message afterwards. It was mostly her empathizing with me but at one point she also wrote:

“I can't imagine spending 3 to 10 hours on a forum problem! That would be quite intolerable, my boundaries wouldn't allow that.”

I know she was trying to be helpful but I almost felt judged for her comment.

Moi, a few straight lines and many blurry edges. (Image by JA-MNP)

However once I got over that initial feeling, I was able to sit with it and admit (as I already had in the post itself) in a response to CLA that yes, my boundaries with the Sane & Free community had indeed been poor on some occasions, and that I had tolerated some bad actors on the forum; I had not always come down hard on such perpetrators. Yep, people were sometimes outright abusive to each other, or to me, and even though I would certainly speak up when it was necessary (especially to stand up for anyone being bullied), it would still take a lot for me to decide to eject a bad actor from the group. Again she empathized, and asked why.

The answer was simple (and I’ve said it before): one of the stated missions of Sane Francisco from the outset, was to bring us together and so it felt like that went against my mission. There were so few of us, relatively speaking, that we needed to stick together. I personally had an innate tendency to nurture people in the community — not burn bridges — even when somebody “behaved badly”.

Without explicitly realizing it until much later when I saw the toll it had taken on me, I had taken it upon myself to be the glue — the connector — and I took that role to heart. In online “fights,” I would often try to assuage the tension; I would try to be the peacemaker. I would believe a person when they said they would no longer do the thing they should be kicked out for. I always wanted to understand and I wanted to hope.

I still do. Like many of you reading this, I truly yearn for people to come together, and especially those on the side of truth.

But that approach — allowing my innate “softness” (for want of a better word) to rule — was ultimately a bad strategy as it enabled the bad actors to continue to behave badly, and it sent a message to other potential bad actors, neither of which helped the community.

How to be a better moderator than I was

Anyway CLA, inspired by my post, wrote her own article on forum moderation and I must say it is excellent!

NB. Whilst I may not be aligned with CLA on all matters political (though we actually agree on more positions than we disagree on), I appreciate her considered and thorough take on how to manage online group behaviour.

Myths that CLA’s article covers

“We should allow free speech.”
“But if you don’t allow free speech you are stifling healthy discussion.”
“Groups don’t need a lot of rules, we are adults.”
“Since we’re all ‘awake’, we’re all clear sighted and reasonable people.”

Yikes to that last bullet point! And this paragraph particularly hit home for me:

One thing that could be important to realize is that some people who’ve joined our groups, (generally very few, but there may be some) may actually be low-functioning people struggling with mental illness, alcoholism or drug addiction, serious neurosis (eg, highly distorted perception or very dysfunctional behavior) or other issues that create social challenges. People like these join one group after another, desperately wanting to belong, precisely because they are so low functioning that they have a hard time making and keeping friends, they have a hard time finding belonging in the world. While this is sad and makes us feel empathy for people in such a difficult situation, we need to use clear thinking skills and realize that in virtually no case when we are running a private group with a specific interest, are we running a charity group seeking to provide a home for people unable to function in a healthy way in groups. Even if we really, really would like to help these people, we need to realize that trying to help them in our group, is likely going to cause problems for all the other group members, as it will cause group deterioration in some form to have ongoing active participation from someone who does not have the skills to participate.

Whew, that resonates!

Due to the position I was in (namely the founder of Sane Francisco, who had literally put herself “out there,” both online and IRL), I had become a magnet for anyone — sane* or not — who was seeking like-minded folk.

(*Granted, ‘sanity’ is assessed according to my own standards of what is reasonable and acceptable behaviour.)

In addition, from observing how people behave online, I came to observe a lot of people these last 3 years. That was a more than decent amount of time to witness and discern who is: ‘sane’, ‘mostly sane’, ‘intermittently sane,’ ‘mostly insane’ or a complete whackjob! At the end of the day, the only way I felt I could extricate myself from the “asshole” behaviour I had unwittingly allowed to proliferate was to shut my group down and start again with better practices. (The best part of that decision was it was self-selecting. Only people who fully resonated with the ideals of the new group would join).

In any case, I advise all forum leaders to read CLA’s post. It is far more useful than mine in terms of giving solid advice on how to deal with tricky issues that inevitably come up in our online freedom scenes.

And I’ll remind you of my own bit of advice, reiterated from a few weeks ago:

Keep your group small (aka manageable) and try to ensure it only contains people that are known to you, and ideally to each other too. Both conditions sure do help to foster considerate online behaviour…

STOP PRESS! Just now as I was about to press “publish” on this post, I read "The No Asshole Rule" a ‘stack by Dr Robert Malone on the book of the same name by Robert I. Sutton. I particularly appreciate the last section of his post, and it connects with CLA’s advice:

(NB. This is an edited version of his edited version of the author’s rules; I’ve left in the parts that pertain to my experience as Sane Francisco founder and forum moderator)

Don’t tolerate assholes online or in your life, if you can help it.
Assholes will attract other assholes. Being an asshole is contagious.
Being an asshole is addictive. On the internet, addictive personality types are drawn to being trolls. The multiple little dopamine hits that assholes can get by being nasty day after day can add up into a full-time addiction. Someone who is chronically being an asshole (particularly on the internet), is most likely feeding or boosting their dopamine receptors.
Get rid of assholes fast. On the internet, this comes often comes down to blocking “trolls” and disagreeable people promptly, as well as avoidance of sites that traffic in content from assholes.
Try not to read or migrate to internet sites that are nasty, because they will infect you. Being an asshole is contagious.
“Power breeds nastiness. Beware that giving people—even seemingly nice and sensitive people—even a little power can turn them into big jerks. (RWM: a little power to hurt people on social media feeds many a troll).
“Embrace the power-performance paradox. Accept that your life (and organizations in your life) do have and should have a pecking order, but do everything you can to downplay and reduce unnecessary status differences among members. The result will be fewer assholes and, according to the best studies, better overall performance, too.
Manage moments—not just practices, policies, and systems. Effective asshole management means focusing on and changing the little things that you and your people do—and big changes will follow. Reflect on what you do, watch how others respond to you and to one another, and work on “tweaking” what happens as you are interacting with the person in front of you right now.
“Model and teach constructive confrontation. Develop a culture where people know when to argue and when to stop fighting and, instead, gather more evidence, listen to other people, or stop whining and implement a decision (even if they still disagree with it). When the time is ripe to battle over ideas, follow Karl Weick’s advice: fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong.

My final take on the above: truly Sane people are very rarely assholes.

Stay Sane, my friends!