Advice for community managers:

[pathunstrom@ngmx.com]

Advice for community managers:

Use the Olivia Hill rule.

It's surprisingly easy to enforce:

Fascists get really upset and will talk to you about why the rule is bad.

You then ban them.

That's it, that's all the work it takes!

[avincentinspace@furry.engineer]

@pathunstrom i have been called a fascist for telling people to vote for kamala harris instead of jill stein

[pathunstrom@ngmx.com]

@AVincentInSpace It would be way more funny to just block you for this, but I'm gonna be nice this once:

The reason this works, besides fascists self selecting into being vocal about it, is because the kinds of people who are willing to quibble on a rule that says no fascists?

They're going to push on all of your rules. They will be an explicit drain on community management resources.

Frankly: letting rules lawyers overwhelm your community is a fast way to end up with a community with low trust and exhausted volunteers.

[p4pa@infosec.exchange]

@pathunstrom how do you define fascists? To be able to determine who to ban?

[jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange]

@p4pa @pathunstrom They're fascists when they act like fascists. I refuse to make some formal criteria, because fascists are the worst at bad faith arguing "but I didn't ACTUALLY break any rules, I was just asking questions and posing hypotheticals!"

Besides. Even if I block someone who isn't ACTUALLY a fascist, they're still someone being an ass, and I don't need that noise in my life.

[koantig@mamot.fr]

@pathunstrom
Relevant cartoon, looking at some of the replies.

[pathunstrom@ngmx.com]

So, unsurprisingly, the rule keeps working.

Behold this person, who immediately asked for a sharp definition of fascist.

This is the kind of person you're ejecting before they create problems.

As close as I can tell from what little information I can glean, I don't think this person is a fascist, but he's definitely not someone I want in my spaces.

This is why it works.

[joepie91@fedi.slightly.tech]

@pathunstrom A couple of years ago, I was brought in as a moderator to help de-fascist a community that had practically turned into 4chan, in one of the most fundamentally-abuse-attracting and difficult-to-moderate categories of community (privacy/security-related).

The policy was set as "no fascists, no alt-right, nothing that looks like it" and people would either get banned immediately (if clearly intentionally abusive) or get a warning otherwise that they were expected to take seriously (doubling down would be grounds for a ban). Every ban was permanent but revocable if someone showed genuine reflection and commitment to do better - this sometimes took minutes, sometimes months or even longer, sometimes never.

Randos complained for months. "You just call everyone a nazi", "how do you define fascist then", "you're being unreasonable", "the alt right aren't fascists", and so on, and so forth. Without exception, the ones complaining about it the most were the ones who already had a track prior record of being an asshole in different ways. A lot of the bans were the result of brigading attempts from, well, fascists who objected to being pushed out, pretending to be 'new users' and mysteriously immediately knowing about previous bans that happened before they joined.

It took a while, but they eventually gave up. The result was a pleasant community to be in, unusually pleasant for a privacy/security community. I haven't been around there for quite a while now, but my understanding is that it's still a nice place to this day.

"No fascists allowed" works, even under the worst conditions, and the "no, seriously, this is not up for debate, the moderator decides" is a critical component of making it work.

[filobus@sociale.network]

@pathunstrom @AVincentInSpace and now it's so easy to spot fascists, they don't hide anymore