Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Moderation
68 Plays1 year ago
Dylan and Steve talk about moderating a Discord server, and they more or less stay on topic.
Join the Nervous Discord server here: https://discord.gg/287jm9yMKj
nervous.net
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, Steve, we've been trying to read you about your car's extended warranty. Oh, God, please don't do the ASMR thing. But Steve, I'm going to carefully open up this deck of cards. No, please don't. It's gonna be fantastic. You're rippling them. Nope. And then you're gonna know. Oh, yeah.
00:00:19
Speaker
Oh God, that whole like tapping things and peeling, carving soap and like, oh, it just, it's no. This is my fancy soda that I'm currently drinking. Oh, dude. You like what you see? This makes me uncomfortable. This makes me like that same level of uncomfortable is like when you're watching a movie with your parents and there's like a sex scene that you weren't expecting.
00:00:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty much what we did. So hope everyone is nice and comfortable today. For the nervous podcast. Oh, stop it. Hey there, I'm Dylan. And I'm uncomfortable. And we are nervous.
00:01:32
Speaker
Thank you for listening. No, stop it, rat bastard.
Handling Discord Conflicts
00:01:39
Speaker
So today, as long as Dylan doesn't keep doing that, we're going to talk a little bit about handling conflict, drama, and disruptive members of your discord community.
00:01:52
Speaker
And I think the biggest point that we're trying to get across is that you need to not be afraid to moderate your discord. I think that happens a lot of times and we have a story to kind of illustrate why this is important.
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, there's this story. It made the rounds on Twitter for a little while. It's, you know, it's very clearly made up bullshit, but it's also a hundred percent correct. So there's a story about a guy sitting at a bar, random punk, right? Dude comes into the bar, sits down next to him. Bartender looks at the guy and is immediately like, get the fuck out of here. The guy's like, what? What's the big deal? I'm just here to buy a beer. Bartender's like, Nope, fuck off. Get out.
00:02:32
Speaker
kicks the dude out of the bar and the guy's just like, what was that all about? Bartender's like, you couldn't see it, but on his jacket, he had a bunch of pins. He had a bunch of buttons. He had iron crosses and he had Nazi shit on there. And the guy's just like, Oh, Oh, okay.
00:02:47
Speaker
bartenders like you got to nip that kind of shit in the bud immediately because these guys come in they're nice they're polite you serve them a beer because you don't want to like cause a scene and then they become a regular and then they bring a friend and that dude's alright too and then that guy brings a friend and then those guys bring friends and then at some point
00:03:05
Speaker
you realize that there's a shitload of Nazis hanging out in your bar all the time and then at some point they all stop being nice and reasonable and cool, but then it's too late because they're completely entrenched in the place and when you try to kick them all out, then you have a real problem. So when you see people like this, when people pull shit like this, you need to shut them down immediately.
00:03:28
Speaker
Now this is one of those stories that's like, it's very apocryphal. It's very ironic that it got passed around on Twitter, which has absolutely turned into a fucking Nazi bar.
Moderation Comparisons & Strategies
00:03:38
Speaker
I hadn't even thought of that. It is so true. Don't be like Twitter, you guys.
00:03:44
Speaker
Essentially, yeah. I mean, our Twitter account, we stopped using it because every time, every time I'd log in to go and check stuff, we were getting fed all kinds of weird, super alt-right garbage on the algorithm. And this is gross.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah. But that's, that's a great example of why you need to, you need to moderate your space. And like, if you're trying to provide a comfortable, safe community space for a diverse group of people on the internet, then you need to be careful to keep those bad actors out. Yep. And I think with Discord, it's a little bit easier because you as this person running the server have control over who can come into your bar. So you don't have to rely on contacting
00:04:30
Speaker
content moderation for Twitter to try to get bad actors removed, you can do it yourself from your server. You just don't be afraid to do it. Yeah, and because this is your space, it's definitely on you to keep it tidy.
00:04:45
Speaker
And the thing about bad actors is that, again, they will try to make themselves sound reasonable. They'll be like, well, you know, devil's advocate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they will try to put forth very intellectual sounding arguments about why it's perfectly okay for them to do X, Y, and Z. But the end result, the thing to remember is that their goal is to fuck shit up.
00:05:10
Speaker
And it doesn't matter how reasonable or how nice or they're being in that moment, their end goal is to fuck shit up. And you don't want that. You don't want that in anything you're doing. It's not worth your time and energy to put up with. So I guess we're starting with banning people. Don't be afraid to do it. Boot people from your server, but also be prepared for them to find another way to get into your server. Because a lot of times these people who are coming to do this, if their first attempt gets shut down, they're going to try again.
00:05:40
Speaker
which is why it's important that your moderation team really communicates well with each other and with anyone else involved in your server so that you can catch these bad actors early, especially if they're trying to come back for round two.
Rules & Enforcement
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah. And you know, a lot of these people, they will have alt accounts that they will immediately rejoin your server with specifically so that they can keep causing problems. Sometimes they will make it very obvious that it's them. Sometimes it won't be so obvious. So when you do ban someone, this is the point where you need to make sure that you've got good message and moderation log channels set up in your server and make sure that like, as soon as your mod team ban someone, make sure that they start watching for new joins.
00:06:22
Speaker
And as soon as anybody joins within like a short window after that in your mod back channel, just flag that user so that everybody knows like, Hey, we just banned X. Now Y has joined. Like everybody keep an eye on them in case it's an alt and just making sure that that communication among your mod team is like really solid can like really help, you know, make sure that you don't have this person coming in, staying quiet for a couple of hours and then causing another problem.
00:06:52
Speaker
Another thing to keep in mind when dealing with these bad actors and trolls is that you're not going to get them to change their mind. So that means that if someone is just coming in just to start a fight or you ban someone and someone else immediately comes in and is talking about how you violated their free speech or whatever other nonsense they'll spew, just don't engage. It's not worth your time and energy to try to fight a fight that they've already won in their head a million times.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, again, this is a bad faith argument on their part. They're not trying to actually like put forth a valid point. All they're trying to do is undermine whatever it is that you're doing.
00:07:36
Speaker
Oh man, I'm just thinking about some of the trolls, man. They're the best and the worst. The best thing too, and this is why having a good mod back channel will help out a lot, is your mods will start to learn what is okay and what isn't okay in the server. And we'll be able to make quicker decisions without having to run it up the flagpole. That's another important part of this is empower your mods to make decisions so they don't have to have someone
00:08:02
Speaker
saying super homophobic or transphobic things and wait to get communication from the CEO of the company in order to ban that person or time out that person. Just give them permission. If they think they're acting in bad faith, they can put someone in time out while they wait for an answer. Yeah. You know, obviously you're going to have clear rules already laid out in your server, but from a moderation standpoint, there are rules that are put in place to keep people from getting into arguments with each other.
00:08:32
Speaker
And then there are rules that you put in place that are hard lines that you don't cross. And we highly recommend that anybody trying to build a welcoming and inclusive community, especially for a brand.
00:08:45
Speaker
You draw hard lines at sexism, homophobia, transphobia, like racism, like all of these kinds of things. No discussion, no conversation, no, Hey man, let's like, let's knock it off. No, Hey, don't tap in the rule sign. No, there's nothing to discuss. You delete the messages and you ban that person immediately. The faster and more decisively you take action,
00:09:10
Speaker
the more comfortable the rest of your community is going to feel that this is in fact a safe place for them to exist without being hated.
00:09:18
Speaker
And a good example of this is we were working on a server and we had a moderator that was working on another team. We were just doing consulting and someone started talking some weird conspiracy theory shit. I don't remember which one it was. Something was stolen. Election was stolen or some of that nonsense. And one of the mods engaged with them. We had to step in and be like, no, we don't engage them because then they're just going to want to spew more of that hateful rhetoric. So just
00:09:45
Speaker
mute them, ban them, get rid of them. We don't need that in the server. And I think it's important to do that when someone violates those hardline rules. I would also make those hardline rules higher up in your list of rules. If you have 10 rules, make sure the first three, because that's all the further most people read, are the ones that are like really important to the server. And then down a little lower, you can have the like, don't eat waffles while doing ASMR at Steve's house.
00:10:13
Speaker
that sort of thing so you know that people have at least skimmed those first couple of rules.
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah. These folks are going to make themselves known pretty quickly, right? And you just need to deal with them quickly and decisively. Like they're bad people who are only there to do bad things, get rid of them.
Managing Community Relations
00:10:31
Speaker
But then you're going to also have members who are perfectly good people and you're just going to have personality clashes. Yeah. And this realistically is probably going to be the most common issue that you have on your server.
00:10:43
Speaker
You're going to have issues where people just don't get along. You're going to have issues where somebody misinterpret something that someone said. You're going to have issues where, you know, people just do not like each other for whatever reason. And one of the best things that you can do when you have two otherwise reasonable, sane, productive,
00:11:07
Speaker
server members, like going at it hard, give them both timeouts. Just time them both out. Not one of them, it doesn't matter even if one of them is being the aggressor, time them both out and give them both just a quick five, 10 minutes to just like stop, cool off.
00:11:24
Speaker
Because if you don't do that, if you just time out one person, even if they're being the aggressor, but if the other person's like aching them on or something like that, but you only time out one other person, that other person immediately thinks they're right. And the person who got timed out thinks they're wrong. Whereas if they're in conflict with one another, they both need to take a breath, step away from each other, return to their corners, give them a moment. And then when they come back in, just monitor them to make sure they're continuing to hold themselves to a standard of we're all human beings here. Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker
And administering that immediate timeout also gives your moderation team to quickly go through that chat history and delete as much of it as you feel is necessary to prevent any further conversation. You don't want to leave a whole bunch of it sitting on your server for other server members to chime in on and decide to start taking sides.
00:12:13
Speaker
it also gives you a good chance to document what was said. You give them a 10 minute time out, your moderators can go through and say, oh, this person was saying these things, let's make a note, or be able to see if you need to give them an infraction so you can track like, oh, this person said something super rude. If it wasn't the line in the sand you don't cross, but it was close to it, let's give them an infraction and a warning saying, hey, you need to be nice to people or you need to not yell at Steve. Steve hates ASMR, deal with it, you know, that kind of thing. And that allows your team
00:12:43
Speaker
the chance to do that without having to deal with more of the back and forth bickering at each other. Yeah. So there's, there's a handful of different bots that have this different kind of functionality available. Gear bot is one that we've specifically been using lately. What that does is it allows you to actually log in fractions and assign them to a user.
00:13:01
Speaker
And then you can go back later, do a query on that user ID, and you can see any and all previously logged in fractions. There's multiple bots that can do this. I would say, as with all bots, use the one that you're the most comfortable with for your server and that your moderation team is the most comfortable using.
00:13:20
Speaker
but definitely find one that lets you log infractions because it can really help with some of those difficult decisions like do we need to kick this person? Do we need to ban this person? Is this an isolated incident? Being able to go back and see like oh this person has like 16 logged infractions for doing this exact same kind of shit versus you know oh they have one infraction because they posted a link in a channel they weren't supposed to post links in.
00:13:47
Speaker
Being able to have that context engage the severity of issues makes it a lot easier to decide whether or not to kick people out of your server.
00:13:57
Speaker
And the nice thing about Gearbot is that you can look through what their infractions are. And so even if your nighttime moderator gave someone an infraction and then the next morning someone gets up and they do the same stupid shit again, you can look and be like, oh, they got an infraction for that like eight hours ago and they're doing it again. Maybe they need a long time out. They need to take a long weekend from the internet.
00:14:19
Speaker
and then ban them from the entire internet. One of the last things to say about this as well, there's actually two more things I can think of, but one for sure is that when someone violates a rule that is not like a straight up banable offense, but even a banable offense, when you ban them or send them a warning or give them an infraction, refer them to whatever rule it is that they broke. Because you can't just expect people to know, come into the server one day, they're feeling hot and riled up about something, they say something that maybe they
00:14:48
Speaker
wouldn't have normally, you say, hey, remember the rule about being nice to everybody, you know, 24 hour timeout, whatever it is, then when they come back, they at least know why that happened.
00:14:58
Speaker
And this will go one of two ways. One, they'll be like, that's my bad. And sometimes they'll even apologize to the moderators, which is mind boggling when it happens. And the other time is they'll come back from their 12, 24 hour timeout and they'll be like, I can't believe you did that to me. All I did was call that guy a fucking asshole. And you're like, goodbye. Um, so it gives you a chance to really give them a reason why they got the timeout, but also see how they're going to react when they come back. Yeah. You know, realistically, there's the expectation that everyone in your server has fully read the rules.
00:15:28
Speaker
But you should just go ahead and assume that no one has. And another part of that, and this actually works really well, is if you notice a conversation is starting to get a little heated or people are starting to maybe go towards the dark side of the rules, it's always okay to have a moderator pop in there and say, hey guys, don't forget about rule number three. Be nice to everyone.
00:15:50
Speaker
You know, this is a place for productive discussion, not a place to place the amount at each other. And that will help diffuse the situation, hopefully, in theory. But it also shows that the moderation team isn't just there to ban people or kick people out, but they're there to guide people as well.
00:16:06
Speaker
Yeah. Gentle moderation is a thing that we, we very much encourage, um, because it does two things. One, it gives your moderators kind of the ability to moderate the community by being part of the community. One of your mods chiming in and just being like, Hey, come on guys. Like, let's just cool this off.
00:16:26
Speaker
You don't need to issue warnings. You don't need to issue full bot warnings or official infractions or anything like that. Sometimes all it takes is a mod just being like, oh, whoa, that was a little much. Just like, let's simmer down. Let's just cool off a little bit. And the thing that you'll find is that most of the time, people will respond really positively to that because the internet
00:16:50
Speaker
is a very dehumanizing platform. You don't see the people that you're talking to. All you see is a name and a line of text. It's very, very, very easy, especially with many friction points in culture and society as we have today for people to forget they're talking to a person.
00:17:09
Speaker
We deal so much on the internet. We deal so much in like the abstract idea that it's a very different thing to talk about an idea in the abstract than it is to look someone in the eyes and have to discuss it with them reasonably. So, you know, having your moderation team just step in and remind people like, Hey, let's chill out a little bit. It's a lot more effective than you would think.
Wellbeing of Moderators
00:17:32
Speaker
And it builds a level of trust and a rapport between your moderation team and your community that it'll encourage people to not do that in the first place. It's true. And the last thing, and this one's important for both moderating, but also for your mental health, is if you're having a hard time dealing with someone, if someone touches on an issue that just sets you on edge, whatever it is, walk away.
00:17:59
Speaker
Like you don't have to be the person that handles that. Your team can help you do it. And if there's something going on in your life that makes it really hard for you to like deal with whatever issues going on on the server, reach out to your team, reach out to other moderators to help get the help you need so that this doesn't become a like punishment for yourself to have to be in this server. And the other thing too, as part of that and your moderators engaging in good faith and all of that good stuff is your community will handle it for you too a lot of times.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah. Don't mod angry. Yep. Don't mod angry. Um, or hungry. Don't mod hungry. Yeah, man. Always. Yeah. I mean, that's just number one mod rule, dude. Keep snacks at your desk.
Closing & Community Engagement
00:18:42
Speaker
This episode has been brought to you by our sponsor. Snacks. Snacks. Get some. All right. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. Remember stay safe on the internet. Don't start a Nazi bar. Yeah. And just man, fucking be nice and join our discord.
00:18:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, join our Discord for more tips and tricks and to hang out and be nice with other nice people.
00:19:04
Speaker
It's true. It's true. And let us know if you have any questions. Don't forget to like, and subscribe. I don't know how podcasts work, Steve. I don't like and subscribe. I don't think there's a lot. I mean, yeah. So please do subscribe wherever you, or maybe there's ratings. Yeah. You could, you could rate the shit out of us. You could be like fucking, I don't know, 90 star. I don't know how ratings work either. I don't do it. But if you give us a one star rating, we will ban you from our discord. Absolutely. But not, not until after we've excoriated you in text.
00:19:33
Speaker
Yep, yep, for sure. Alright, everybody have a good day. It was nice talking. Bye!
00:20:02
Speaker
The End