Anika Gupta - How to Handle a Crowd: The Art of Creating Healthy and Dynamic Online Communities

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Copyright 2020 by Anika Gupta

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First Tiller Press trade paperback edition August 2020

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ISBN 978-1-9821-3231-6

ISBN 978-1-9821-3232-3 (ebook)

For my family

S ome of our earliest communities were bounded and defined by geography. In 2005, when the academic researchers Jenny Preece and Diane Maloney-Krichmar wrote an essay about online communities for the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, they began by saying, Until the advent of telecommunications technology, definitions of community focused on close-knit groups in a single location. Factors such as birth and physical location determined belonging to a community. But then communications networks expanded. As the internet and then social media came into existence, the boundaries of the modern community expanded beyond what people in those early communities might have imagined. We began to spend time in online groups. These groups werent defined only by geography, religion, or birth; they included an expanding array of ever-more-niche interests. In researching this book, I came across online groups dedicated to all of the following: a specific cooking implement; a particular and now-discontinued science fiction show; home-brewed cosmetics; and the word yikes. Joining an online community today is an act of self-definition, even when its something as simple as clicking the Join button on a Facebook page or the Subscribe button on a YouTube profile.

As with geographic communities, even a simple online community can require enormous work to sustain. Who defines the boundaries and identities of the community? Who makes and enforces rules? In the geographic community, there were authoritieselders, leaders, officials. Online, those roles are performed by many different individuals and agencies: participants, software companies, governments. In their essay, Preece and Maloney-Krichmar eventually settle on the following definition for an online community: the people who come together for a particular purpose, and who are guided by policies (including norms and rules) and supported by software.

People, purpose, policies, software. Powerful technology companies like Facebook and Google build the software, then draft terms and conditions that specify how people can use their tools. They have enormous power to decide who connects with whom, and how. Governments also play a rolethey specify legal consequences for certain types of online behavior. They can ban pornography, gambling, and prostitution on the internet, for example, and companies and individuals will have to comply.

But technology alone isnt enough. In a study of online groups, the researchers Brian Butler, Lee Sproull, Sara Kiesler, and Robert Kraut explain the social behavior required:

First, people must tend the tools themselves by managing software versions, keeping address files up to date, and so on. People also must recruit members to replace those who leave. They must manage social dynamics. They must participate. Without these group maintenance activities, even sophisticated tools and infrastructure will not sustain viable online groups.

The people in a group create purpose and policies among themselves. They work with software, but also around and through it. For example, Twitter provides a platform where people can send short messages out into the world. In theory, these messages can be only 280 characters long, but people build linked tweets into chains or threads. There are whole online conventions around how to label a Twitter thread so that it becomes a sequential argument. The author Jennifer Egan wrote an entire short story in tweets, subverting the mediums brevity. People do fascinating things to get around and through the restrictions and limitations of the software they use, sometimes transforming its original or intended purpose in order to better suit a social need.

Participants also craft policies. Many online communities these days have additional policies beyond the terms and conditions required by the platform. These policies appear in a variety of places: in sidebars on forums, in questions that people have to answer before they join the community, in introductory or pinned posts at the top of a message board. In addition to written rules, communities often have unwritten rules and codes of behavior, developed among members over time. These norms are powerful, toothey can influence who feels welcome in the community, how members post, and how other people respond. Where do these policies come from? How are they enforced? It turns out that this work doesnt fall on everyone equally. There are some people who do more of the work in online communities than others. Theyre called moderators.

Moderator is a new-ish job title. According to more traditional definitions, its barely a job title at all. Many moderators work for free, volunteering many hours every week to update their communitys technology, manage relationships, and recruit and train other moderators. The skills the job requires are as old as human conversation and overlap with those needed for customer service, digital media, marketing, conflict mediation, and event management. Moderating draws on the tradition of the bard or the storyteller, as well as the host.

Of course, moderation work isnt limited to volunteers. As more and more people join and share ideas in social networks, organizations, governments, and brands operate in these spaces also. Paid customer-service specialists and community liaisons often do moderation work. So do audience development editors and some journalists. Many influencers either manage their own communities or recruit other people to do it.

How to Handle a Crowd deals mainly with volunteer moderators (although there are two exceptions: someone who started out as a volunteer moderator and then was hired for the role, and a YouTube influencer who went full-time). These moderators have certain responsibilities in common: they add or remove users, write rules and guidelines, message people one-on-one to talk about rules violations, approve posts, and intervene in online arguments.

Through careful and constant work, moderators also shape their communities in the long term, and this is perhaps the most important function they perform. When they draft rules and admit or remove people, moderators shape not only the communitys structure but also its fundamental identity. In this task, they sometimes receive support from the companies whose software they use; social media companies realize that they depend on moderators to keep communities healthy and to keep users coming back. Representatives at platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit regularly reach out to moderators of large groups. They offer them invitations to moderator-only groups and events, offer them the chance to give early feedback on new features, and give them priority access to tech support. Platforms also offer moderators access to information that other members of the community might not have, in order to help them moderate better: historical records of individual users behavior, special communication channels for moderators only, and graphs or charts of things like comments and interactions over time.