On the sickness of our community

I'm mostly thinking of gaming communities - the ones I interact with (like Civilization) are somewhat skewed more in favour of adult participants versus the more console-oriented areas that have to deal with things like this gamergate nonsense.

Also, other hobbyist communities, principally related to electronics, such as Arduino/wearables/assorted open hardware initiatives, plus recently some more traditional analogue electronics.

One thing most of these have in common is *some* degree of moderation, which is commonly hated by the ultra-libertarian elements of the FOSS community (where this ideology is unusually prevalent), but which appears to be a practical necessity in growing a community past a certain size when none of the participants can ever see each other's faces (seeing each other's faces acts like a natural form of moderation IRL, especially in combination with the impermanence of the spoken word).

There doesn't usually need to be *much* moderation though: the maker community seems to be generally very good, even with very little visible moderation. The gaming communities I suspect could devolve more easily, but in practice even very little light moderation is generally enough so long as it is consistent and has well-defined rules.

Moderation is a lot easier to get right if it's baked in to the system from the start, because then you're not trying to get people to *change*, but to behave in a certain way in the first place. It also only works when it is transparent (eg there is an explicit 'post removed/edited by ...') and the moderators are actually good at it - don't act emotionally, are specific about why they are taking some action, and are polite. The latter is extremely important, and I'm not just talking about using polite *words*, which many people seem to feel is enough, but being *genuinely* polite: just because you insulted somebody without using the word 'fucking', it is no less of an insult. Somebody whose post is being moderated should never be made to feel like they are being victimised because it's counter-productive.