If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

Even then, I'd rather have one of those motivated by cleanliness service my area. Just the same way, I'll choose a forum that's not monetized.

I don't see how that sentence means that funding is needed. Plenty of forums exist with community moderation. Whether the person doing the work is compensated in respect and social connections, or money, doesn't really make a difference to me.

I've been a member of a variety of communities in my life, and to a single one what made them good was the sense of ownership and stewardship by a core member or senate of members. They were all minor personality cults around BDFLs. Whether it was bands, bars and restaurants, hackers, software projects, companies, sports teams, volunteer projects, or anything else, there was someone who could say, "this is my thing, the bar is here, be welcome or leave," and the main thing they did not tolerate was members usurping that authority with external criteria, criticism, or drama. The difference between an organic community and a "scene," I'd suspect is this ownership piece, where an organic community has a founder steward who is a hub or hierarch, whereas a scene is a kind of dynamic running opporunistic power struggle. While I thought there might be masculine and feminine aspects to that, I've known too many women who had that steward/hierarch role in different places to think it is an artifact of sex. I suspect you could replace most of the rules in the article with one rule, which is "respect the mods," and provided the moderators don't debase themselves or get trolled, that's pretty sustainable. The more rules you have, the more likely someone will leverage any possible inconsistency into creating chaos that puts them at the center of it.

I would be interested in others' thoughts about why irc/silc, usenet, fidonet, early reddit, and even early twitter worked. Did they implement this articles recommendations, and which ones are sufficient or necessary? IRC was pretty anonymous for its time, especially with proxies and shells, and it persists today. IRC helped scale communities pretty fast, but being an entertaining participant vs. running a show are very different skills and desires. In each case, the rule was "respect the mods," and so long as they stayed aloof, appreciated what they had created, and acted minimally and according to principle, their communities sustained and thrived. I don't know whether these additional rules are that necessary if the recipe for a thriving community is just really a good BDFL.

You delete everything you don't instantly agree with.

Don't get emotional about it, just sit there like a robot and delete everything. It's okay to be amused when people enrage to levels they themselves didn't think possible when you delete their comments then delete what she wrote again. No need to ban anyone.

Each comment should be valuable to read and provide further insight into the mission. What does bigfoot eat? What is the best time to spot nessie? When was Dr Fritz channeled for last time? When will bitcoin finally die? etc etc No space for detailed explanations why the very essence of the platform is nonsense.

Ideally written things served to other people are written by yourself but comments can be as good and sometimes even better. Nearly all of it doesn't make the cut. However polite the compliment to the author of the article, it is wasting other peoples time. It needs to be a homogeneous mass of remote viewers, color forth programmers or vic 20 evangelists aimed like lasers at a goal. Simply buying a Tucker Torpedo doesn't make you worth listening to.

If the author just like you thinks the rapture is happening, then we have a keeper!

is that there is little choice and even less variation