DRMacIver's Notebook
Showing people the door
Showing people the door
Another draft bankruptcy post. I think this was abandoned for a fairly common reason for me to abandon posts: I tried to write it because it was important, but it’s actually a fairly depressing subject for me to write about and I didn’t particularly want to write it.
I run a smallOfficially we’re about 400 people, with a regulars list of about 100 people, of whom maybe half are regularly active. but fairly successful discord server. You can join if you want to. Nominally it’s about this newsletter, and occasionally we even remember that, but mostly it’s just a bunch of nerds who hang out on the internet, help each other navigate life better, and talk about stuff we like. I think it’s pretty great.
I act as the sole authority figure for how the community works.It’s not a cult, I promise.. This is a space on the internet I manage to cultivate the sort of community and conversations I want to exist. It’s what I’ve called Living Room Rules before - it’s the equivalent of people coming around to my house to hang out.
This doesn’t mean the community do whatever I want. Truthfully, it’s like herding cats sometimes. But it does mean that when the community isn’t working, it’s my responsibility to fix it. Often in consultation with others, but ultimately I’m the one who makes the call.
The hardest part of this is that sometimes you have to show people the door.
I had to do this with someone yesterdayPossibly he’s reading this. If so, sorry. Editor’s note: Presumably not on the notebook. Also this “yesterday” was actually more than a year ago.. He wasn’t right for the community.
This is only the second time I’ve had to ask someone to leave this discord (I’ve banned some people for outright terrible behaviour, but that’s different), but I’ve seen it with other communities in the past. Crucially, I’ve seen it with other communities in the past because the community leadership didn’t ask the person to leave. This kills the community.
One of the key things you are there for in a community - what makes it a community - is the other people. A community is, at its core, a group of people who do stuff together. Having someone who fails to gel with the group and can’t easily be avoided around disrupts that, because it adds friction to every interaction.
What this means is that if some is disrupting the group’s ability to interact, there is less of the thing that brings people there, and some people who were already marginal stop showing up so much. This in turn means that the people who were there partly to hang out with those people stop showing up so much, which in turn…
It’s not a complete death spiral even in the worst case. Usually some subset of the community stays - those who don’t have any better options, or who are still too attached to what the community used to be - but the community turns into a shell of its former self.
More commonly, one person who doesn’t mesh with the others isn’t enough to offset the rest of the benefits people are getting, but the community contracts a bit and what’s left feels slightly less thriving. If you add more such people, it may get worse, .
Internet communities without a shared project are particularly vulnerable to this, because there’s nothing bringing people there except the other people, so if you ruin those interactions you’ve got nothing.
In contrast, communities built around something are a bit more robust. e.g.
- An open source project you have the motivation of the project itself - you’re there because you want it for stuff. A sufficiently toxic contributor can definitely drive you off, and someone you don’t get along with can definitely sap your motivation to contributeOpen source is pretty good at doing this on its own, honestly., but you’re at least there for some specific purpose external to the people involved.
- Volunteer-driven physical projects (e.g. charitable works, maintenance of some space, etc) are the same but more so.
- Communities built around access to some resource. e.g. you’re probably not going to stop hanging out on the midjourney discord just because you don’t like the people there, because that’s where you go to use midjourney.
- Physical communities with shared physical resources are even more like this. The people at your local maker space or tennis club might be super annoying, but if it’s the only place you can go to get access to a laser cutter or a tennis court, you’re still going to keep going.
These places still can be harmed by people who don’t mesh well with the group, and sometimes even outright ruined, but it’s much harder and they’re more robust against it because of the additional draw to keep coming back beyond just liking the people there.
Who needs to leave?
Importantly, the person who I asked to leave wasn’t an asshole. He was a bit hard to deal with, but he didn’t cross any lines where I could feel good about just pressing the ban button. He just consistently failed to mesh with the community in a way that made everyone else’s experience worse when he was in the room.
Frankly, he was probably just of an age where relatively few people would fit in with the rest of us - we’re mostly in our 30s, and he was in his late teens or early 20s, and I think most people of that age wouldn’t have fit. Certainly I can’t imagine a 19 year old version of me doing well there. There’s just too large an experience gap.
This sort of thing is, in general, the problem zone: People who have not and probably never will do anything that lets you go “Right, you’ve crossed a line” and kick them out, but you really wish they would.
When you start feeling that way about someone, you probably need to think seriously about asking them to leave. If you don’t, people you want in the community much more will leave on their own instead.
Afterword
I tapered out there partially because I don’t really have good advice on how to navigate this. This is hard, and I’ve not got more than a handful of personal examples of doing it, and I’m not confident that I handled it especially well, or that I know what handling it well looks like in full generality.
All I know is that I’ve seen communities die by not doing this, and it’s a problem that needs solving