 Hi, everyone. How are you guys doing today? Awesome. So, yes, I am going to be doing a talk on comments, communities, things of that nature. Moderating communities is what I kind of titled it. Back in my day, the internet was all blah, blah, blah, blah. A little bit about me. My name is Ernie. I am actually a Miami resident for the past four years. I run the local, I run a local front-end developers meetup here for javascript and css developers. I am also one of the captains of code for Miami, which is a place where developers, designers, and concerned citizens can build open source software to make the place we live better. If you're a local Miami and we meet every Monday, come talk to me afterwards. In a different life, I am currently a software engineer at Rockspace, but in a different life, I did many sorts of things. I worked for Ning, which was in the mid-2000s website where we can build social networks for anyone. My little piece of random trivia is that we helped build a rapper 50-cent social network. I have some great stories about that, but that's probably for a couple drinks. Also, I had a now very kind of nascent tumbler called Little Yellow Different back in the days. It was a little bit more popular, and I'll kind of bring that in as we kind of talk a little bit more about that. But before we do, let's take a poll. I want to understand the people that are kind of in this audience. So here's what we're going to do, and this is a total experiment. I had no idea how this will turn out, but what do you think of the statement? All conversations held on the Internet are bound to become awful, right? So if you guys have obviously that is a loaded statement, you can agree or disagree. I'd like to hear your thoughts. Go to the GoVote.link on your laptop or your phone or whatever. Use that code 65103. And there's going to be an opinion scale five for... I really agree with that statement. One is that I really disagree. And yeah, let's see where we go from here. Also, while you guys are voting, Quick Show fans, who here actually moderates a website or owns a website of some sort? Quick Show fans. All right, that's pretty much everyone. That's awesome. Who here has... Let's see. Who here has run a community website for maybe more than 100 people? How about 1,000? 10,000? Okay, yeah. Props to the person in the back. Cool. So obviously everyone who's here kind of has had some experiences with web publishing. So I'm going to make some assumptions, right? I'm going to make some assumptions that the talk that I'm going to be giving is for an audience of people that are kind of building communities, engaging communities, and trying to figure this out. I also am going to give the caveat and the asterisk that I mistakenly thought this was going to be a room small enough to do kind of like a round table to kind of talk about all our experiences. So what I may or may not do is I may go Oprah style and like have folks come down from the audience, sit from the panel, and then when anyone else wants to like tap in or has something just tap on the shoulder of someone else who's been sitting there and continue it, we'll see. We'll play this one by ear, but I do have a little bit of a spiel, so. All right, so a little bit of votes, 50, awesome. Good job, guys. So needless to say, 5.7, not really disagreeing, not really agreeing, and of course you guys know that this is a really, really opinionated statement, shall we say? Because we all know that conversations on the net have opportunities to be right for views. I'm going to also skip ahead and forward and back on my slides a lot, just that's how my brain works. You know, there's, like for most of you guys, you guys are pretty savvy internet users, so you know about kind of like the law, like the greater law of like jerk wad theory and that word jerk wad is obviously censored. Where, you know, this is from Penny Arcade, the local like online comic strip. You know, you take an anonymous person, you give them anonymity and a, like a high audience and everyone turns outright insane. For those of you guys that are tuned into a lot of controversies and for some of you guys who are community managers, you guys are definitely hyper aware of situations like, say, gamer gate, right? Say, like the situation where a lot of, you know, women feminists are, you know, have been like doxxed or they've gotten like kind of like, like, so we'll talk a little bit about that. Well, in the cases of that, that's kind of, they are users and content kind of consumers of a particular platform. So we'll be, obviously it will be taking, you know, those things in context, but we'll also be bringing it into what we do as creators. You know, like, I am definitely from a time where we did not necessarily have the social medias or the twitters or any of that, right? Like, back in the early 2000s, like, these, this was our Facebook. These were our blogs, right? Web logs, obviously, thanks to WordPress and through, you know, blogger and live journal, they were, they were, they were started at a time where not a ton of people were really cognizant about having communities on the web. They only heard about it through like PBS shows or like, you know, like random like shows on access cable or something, right? So when people started, I mean, for me personally, right, when I started my website, little y'all different, back in 1999, oh God, that was 17 years ago, it was, it was one of those things where it's like, I had a blog and I was automatically in a community with other people who had a blog because there were only, you know, 50 or 60 of them at the time, right? That this was our Facebook, right? This was our Facebook and this was our Twitter timeline, right? Because the audience, there was a high barrier of entry to create a blog, to design it and to curate it. So the folks that were using it, we, we, we meaning the bloggers in like the early 2000s, just assumed that you were cool. Like, assumed that there was no malice intended. So obviously a lot of things have happened, you know, not bad, not good, but it is, right? Blogs became super, super popular after 9-11, right? And then adding to different types of social media like MySpace and Facebook and whatnot, more people kind of come on and, you know, you kind of have the situation you have today, right? Who here actually knows the name Derrick Pawazek? Quick show of hands. Okay, one or two. So Derrick Pawazek was kind of, is also kind of like in the vein of an old school blogger. This is actually a book from 2003. The book is called Design for Community, the Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places. The book has not aged gratefully and has aged very gratefully. And let me explain that one. So basically Derrick Pawazek is an old school blogger. He built these old school storytelling sessions called the Frey Cafe. If you've been to a South by Southwest interactive festival, they still actually hold Frey cafes. But there are storytelling events, and that was his style, right? Like he did storytelling events, and he was all about community and engagement. Great, great book in regards to how people connect on virtual spaces. And a lot of what he still has still kind of says to this day, right? And this was stuff that was built 13 years ago, right? Which is interesting though, because now he is literally a goat farmer in Portland and completely kind of like burnt, you know, kind of... It was burnt out a little bit on the industry, and it was interesting because another kind of old school like blogger, who is Anil Dash, who is a really popular Twitterer, wrote this, which he realizes that all the old timers, meaning old-time bloggers, old-time folks that are cognizant of community stuff, who learn lessons how to build online communities, either just quit or work at Slack now. And I have a theory on why they burn out, right? I think a lot of it is in... I'm going to go off script a little bit, but in the chase to get, like, web clicks, right? Like, in the chase to get, like, readership or whatnot, newspapers, like city newspapers that don't, like, moderate their comments, they're going to try to get as many readership as possible, right? Readers by any means necessary, and if it means, you know, throwing out all the lessons that we've learned on how to be a good community curator out the window, then so be it if it means, like, more clicks. And it's a little bit of a shame, and, you know, there's still things that we can learn to kind of be better about things. So, kind of as a result of that, he was also... Anil Dash was also kind of, like, super, like, cognizant of all the stuff that goes on with Twitter. It's high rates of abuse, you know, issues with, like, Gamergate scandals. He wrote this article kind of directed to, you know, Twitter, newspaper websites, saying, like, if your website's full of assholes, it's your fault, right? And basically, what's summed up is this, right? Like, basically, we've come to a world where... I'll go back to this one slide, where it's like, you know, if you post a harmless video of a Charles' birthday party and you're treated to profoundly racist non-sequiturs in the comments, you can read about a local traffic accident on a newspaper website and see vicious personal attacks on the parties involved, right? And he actually writes another article that follows up about this saying, everyone says don't read the comments, but in a way that actually... He actually writes up a very good case argument of saying, saying that, don't read the comments, is actually perpetuating the system, right? Perpetuating that, you know, well, you know, there's nothing that can be done, you know, it's just going to happen, right? And what if it didn't, right? So that's kind of... And with you guys being web creators, we all have, you know, we all have agency and we all have the responsibility to make sure the community members of the website, or even just a good old-fashioned website commenter doesn't, you know, derail a community or a brand that your website has. He makes these kind of basic takeaways, which is pretty spot-on. He uses harsher words, but basically, it's basically community guidelines and a code of conduct, very similar to what you see at, like, conferences like WordCamp, right? Or, you know, or other organizations, right? He mentions that a human, not a bot, has to be a moderate... Ooh, I need to self... I need a... A moderator for the community and accountable identities and real names. This is stuff that has actually been kind of established for literally decades now, right? And I, you know, there's actually personal antidotes on what happens when you kind of, like, take away numbers two and number three. And I'll skip ahead real quick and I'll actually do a real personal case study about this. So, case study. One of the other kind of past lives back in the day was a site I created in the early 2000s called Eight Asians. Eight Asians is a blog about Asian American awareness. It's called Eight because I wanted to make it, like, the view. So, it was, like, eight people with, like, differing personalities and eight is, like, a lucky number if you're any, like, interested in Feng Shui at all, so it was trying to be all clever. This was the site, what it looked like in, like, 2009. Obviously, it was, you know, when you're talking about Asian American politics or race politics in general, right? Like, there's a high degree of conversations, so we tried, you know, to do our best and, like, be able to have, you know, have a conversation where, you know, where disagreements were allowed, but, you know, but being able to, like, not handle it into abusive situations. And it was one of those things where as the creator of this website, I was an editor for maybe four or five years before I ended up stepping down for personal reasons, but it was one of those things where, like, moderating the comments actually ended up taking more time than writing all, like, these articles itself, right? But it was worth it because you actually had amazing articles. So, fast forward to 20, to, that should say 2016, but fast forward to 2016, right? And I ended up selling my part of the website and the owner who kind of runs it now as it has it very much on autopilot. And what has happened is stuff like what you see, right? Like, basically, folks, the trolls, it ended up being trolling. And the thing is, is that because there is, there are bots that automatically take in, like, inappropriate words, right? But without a human to properly curate this, you see stuff like this. And then what happens is that you see one terrible, angry, you know, comment, and then it is basically a magnet for all terrible, angry comments, right? So, I'd actually like, you know, so back in the days, we had, we did have a commenting policy. And this is what we wrote, right? Like, we wrote that, you know, we tried to cover our bases. We knew about the comment policy. We said that, like, for legal purposes, because one of the eight Asians was an attorney, and we're like, oh, okay, we'll trust everything you have to say. You know, it was like, the comment policy at the time was thinking that we were just doing things to just prevent, like, for liability's sake, right? Like, obviously, we don't want to get sued. What if someone says something horrible? You know, in hindsight, if I were to go back again, I mean, and this is a valid comment policy, but in hindsight, if I were to do this again, I would actually kind of reconsider this first sentence, right? Like, all comments with this block are the responsibility of the commenter. Well, they are the responsibility of the commenter legally, but they're your responsibility, too, right? They're your responsibility to make sure that you're having a productive conversation, and if you are not able to have the resources to have a conversation, then maybe you shouldn't be having comments at all. And then that is also the kind of the mindset of what Anil was trying to say when he kind of wrote this very angry, but very accurate post on why, like, why there needs to be more accountability, right? You hear all, and kind of quick side note with all the abuse stories you may have not heard of about Twitter, and those doxing things. That's also why there's also been a lot of criticism towards Twitter lately because of, you know, because there are folks that believe that there are not proper, you know, a lot of people are feeling threatened, like, for their physical safety. And, you know, a lot, it's like in the fine line that Twitter engineering and business staff try to stand in between, you know, being marketable and having a constructive, you know, pleasant, non-abusive experience, the pendulum might be swinging a particular way that folks might not be happy with. These three, these three, where am I? So these three bullet points are pretty accurate, and they've always kind of been talked about, but there's many kind of ways on how we can kind of do this, right? Derek, the book I was actually talking about earlier, actually adds a couple things further, right? And would love to hear, like, any kind of, like, opinions or conversations or actual, extra additional notes that you guys may have, and I might just run up and, like, hand you guys a mic to figure that out and stuff, right? So one of the things that Derek talks about in the book is basically tying in your community to the real world as much as possible, right? And that goes a little bit back to the accountable identities and real names. There might be cases where folks might not have, be able to use the real names, and that's fine. It's not so much getting a name as much as it is the accountability and making sure whatever pseudonym is a regular pseudonym, right? Because what we want to do is we want to prevent the idea of someone coming in, dropping in, like, spewing a bunch of n words and then, like, jumping back out again, right? So it also brings up to, like, a third point, which is the tougher it is to get someone to contribute, the better the content will be. And this is totally true, right? There are a bunch of WordPress plugins that do a little bit of this. I can, you know, I can name some off. There's, like, man, there's... Discuss is actually a pretty solid platform, you know. There is, because it requires registration and it ties it into, you know, Facebook. And for a lot of, like, you know, American users, at least, Facebook is definitely tied into your personal identity. Lifire is a different one. I haven't used them lately, but they also kind of, like, make sure that you are logged into the system so there is a accountability measure. And, you know, basically being able to log in and have, like, the more steps it takes to actually register yourself as a user and put in that content, the better the content will be. There is actually a great example of this. Again, I'm going to go off script a little bit. Who here has heard of Metafilter? Okay, ah, not too many. So Metafilter is also one of those circa early 2000 websites, which has kind of become a sole war for, like, what makes a great community. Matt Howey, the original founder of Metafilter now actually works at Slack, which kind of triggered the tweet by Neil, saying that everyone who works on community sites has either quit or joined Slack. But one of the things that Metafilter is really good at is that they have really, really great, like, you know, conversations, like, comparing, and I'm just, like, doing this off the cuff, right, where the comments, you know, are a little different from, say, like, say, go on YouTube, right, and like the comments there, right. What are some of the ways they do it differently? They have, you know, there is a lot of, there's a lot of things that we pointed out, like in the slide earlier, right. There are content guidelines. There's ways, there is a clear rule of how you're expected to act on a community site, right. One week waiting periods, right. That would sound crazy for anyone that is, you know, doing like a pure business site that would require you to take as many times, like, that would want, you know, your click-throughs and use of registrations as quickly as possible, but this is great because what happens is that this curates the people coming in to, if people really want to join this conversation, they have to work for it. And if someone wants to troll, you know, this post for whatever reason, they can't run in and, you know, just drop in like a threat or anything like that, right. They'd have to come in and create the new account. Another thing, do they still have the, you know, yeah, but so basically, like a lot of websites will also have like consequences, right. Like being able to have these guidelines is one thing, but actually enforcing them is actually, is a very kind of relevant thing as well, you know, like being, holding abusers accountable for how they, you know, how the actions that they've made for other members of their site. They also have, Derek actually has another really good thing that I didn't put on my slide, which was for those that actually have a community website to find or power users and to make them regular kind of content producers, right. Like that sounds a little nefarious, but it's just a better way of saying making them community managers or making them, you know, kind of having like a risk or like a reward system, right. The same way there's like negative feedback for folks that, you know, don't play by their rules. Positive feedback for those who do, right. So jumping back. So we already talked about eight Asians. And this is where I would kind of like, if I had, if this was kind of like a kind of a round table where I would kind of be like, so let's talk about like what kind of the situations other folks have gone through. So I want to actually put the question out there to the audience. Like what are some of the tools that you use, right. Whether it's a plugin or whether it is a community manager, whether it's a staff, whether it's a combination of the two. I'd love to hear about other folks that run communities especially virtual communities. But real life communities is good too. And I'd love to hear about how other folks kind of moderate or handle cases of abuse. Any, is there any brave souls here? All right. Oh sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. What's your question? So are there beneficial ways. So let me get this question right. Are there are there beneficial ways of having good community? Has anyone found good ways to hold abusers accountable beyond blocking or marking their stuff as spam, specifically ways that would convert them to a good community member as opposed to a spammer or troll or whatever? Blog comments. I mean, so for me it's like if, it's been my personal experience has been a combination of technical stuff and like human, you know, human curation, right? So the technical stuff like eight Asians was on, let's say a WordPress blog. So I used special things like I had folks register, you know, registered users. I had folks kind of, you know, make sure that they're tied in with a real name. Towards the end of eight Asians I ended up having them actually tied to their actual Facebook account because people were more likely to, you know, write genuine content if they had their name and their face associated with it. That automatically took, you know, some of that down. As far as other people marking, I do think there is, as far as other people that might not be like curators or moderators commenting on commenters, abusive comments, I honestly think that at least the tools we have now for spam and such, that is kind of the way it's been. I mean, there's definitely filters out there, right? Especially like WordPress, right? There's definitely filters that will automatically like flag things for certain words. Of course that only goes so far, which is why there having the personal curation is imperative, right? Yes, you and the, okay. The question was when I started eight Asians, what was the first thing, what was the first topics that started the controversial kind of flame baby stuff? Turns out that interracial relationships are a huge kind of deal. Yeah, so that was kind of like, so there was, yes. So the question was, so the controversial things is what made people, yeah. Basically, there are controversial topics that riled people up and then if people weren't careful, it would fall into personal tax territory. I mean, I can show you what eight Asians looks like now, and I'll give you a caveat, is that I do not have really much part of eight Asians nowadays, and I'll kind of explain why. I will also give you a warning if you are offended to sensitive content. I mean, it's not pornographic or anything, but I'll show you what I mean. So what happened was a couple of years ago, we were like, okay, as an editor, you were like, how do we bring in web clicks? And someone had the great idea of, you know, going the obvious way, right? Of like, are Asians the smartest race? Like, how to basically, by the way, having questions as blog titles is the number one way to get away with the most slanderous things ever, because you're going to be like, are Asians the best race? And the answer is, no, but because you have it in the form of a question, it's totally valid and people will click on it, right? So I fully admit to being part of this terrible, terrible problem, right? And again, it goes into that conflict that we have as web producers to make sure that people read it, but making sure that the people that comment about it are, you know, not terrible, right? So the question is, is like, would I go on discus and start other things on your own? We did try that. We did try going on to say Metafilter and other great Asians. For us, what ended up getting, we took the long tail route. It was literally five years of kind of word of mouth. And then this was the benefit and the curse, right? Because then we started to be like, well, buzzfeed and, you know, other sites are having these kind of like salacious titles. Why don't we do this? And you know, it's so easy to take that cookie and take it all the way, you know, and why are Asians yellow? I mean, really come on now, right? But so on the one hand, it's like the Google traffic fed to it, you know. And then on the other hand, it was like it fed to it, but the wrong people started coming in, right? So that was our, I think that was our downfall, right? But it was weird, right? Because we were also wanting to make this like a profitable site. At that point, this is when I was doing Asians, eight Asians as like my primary part-time job. And I mean, my primary hobby. And you know, it was, if I were to do it again, you know, I think I would definitely find in-person groups, right? Like, you know, there's a lot more Asian-Americans in California. One of the reasons why I kind of ended up selling the site to someone else was because like, I'm in Miami, there's like four Asians here, right? So I move, you know, so if I were to do this again and get the proper cultivated audience, I would probably go to like the Asian-American Film Festival in Los Angeles, right? I'd probably go to the Japanese, but basically tie it into like in-person things, right? Yes, sir? Yes. Oh, why don't you repeat that? My solution for comments was to turn them off. I had a kind of a lighthearted site. It's a city site where it was tourism. And I wanted to keep it light. I had comments on there, but there's restaurants. People started slamming a couple of restaurants. People started making comments about the city. I loved having the quantity of people because it did incite conversation and everything like that about the city. But then I had to curate too much. And I did have to shut off comments where people then emailed me and said, what kind of site is this? You're going to shut off comments? Where's my liberty? Where's my, and so I just turned everything off. What I'm, the takeaway that I get from here is that if I do want to have a forum on there, that it's going to be quality-based where I have people quantify themselves over quantity where I'm getting anybody. I can anonymously do that. And I think then I can probably have them curate themselves at that point. Or it'll filter things out as to go into a bot and have that do it. I think that quantity is a good clue. I literally could not have said that better myself. So thank you for that. Yeah. So I think we're at the three-minute market. So I think we're just about, Nizar, want to do some closing thoughts like Maury? I just have another question. It's another interesting thing that you might want to think about. It's just that I often, I have a dark sense of humor. So sometimes I say things inappropriately without intending to. And so with me, I would be concerned about, when I'm responding to these comments, saying the wrong thing. And so on a similar thing, I would be wondering, just get an example of what a good code of conduct would be. What would be your top three things on there? Yeah. That's a great one. And I think it's probably super quick. But a lot of it depends on context. So with a set like 8 Asians, which is totally informal, like we literally had, at one point, had a YouTube video and I don't know if I have time to link it. Yeah, I know. Sorry. Is it there? Yeah. Okay. I have literally linked that as my comment policy. And I've been like, there you go. Right? And of course, obviously, if you're running a business, you probably want some actual content. You probably want to write that popular. But you can phrase it in the style that you're building for. Right? Like you can see it totally informally. Listen, the fact that you have them is just as important. And the fact that you're going to be, you know, that you're going to enforce them. Those are the two biggest things right there. The way you phrase it, you know, that depends on like the tone of the site, right? The context. That and that. Yeah. All right, guys. That's about it for me. If you guys want, that's my Twitter. Thanks, guys.