How do you avoid negativity in an online community?
Hello. I asked a dozen humans how they currently connect with their communities (e.g., neighborhood, interests, peers). A common pain point was other users complain, are cruel, and not helpful.
How do you avoid negativity in the online communities that you use?
Thank you.
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Every community has a culture. The culture is based on what goes on, what is accepted and how people behave.
As a founder of a community it is your responsibility to guide every single conversation with what you believe aligns with the goals of the community.
People will naturally replicate what they see going on around them. Make sure what they see is what you want to see. You can have guidelines/rules, but really no one will read them.
Also, nip stuff in the bud. If there is something there that you don't like, make sure you get rid of it, or don't let it happen again.
This is the best strategy when building and running a community.
The only thing I would add is that it is very important to have core members who are receptive to and supportive of the purpose and goal of the community.
Such good advice. It's clear that you've been around the block.
@rosiesherry Thank you for the response. I agree. IH has a common goal that seems to reduce negativity.
What other features, besides voting, would help users be helpful in an online community?
Tbh, there's nothing particularly special about the actual features here at IH.
Posts, a homepage feed, comments, upvoting, downvoting of comments, a nice onboarding flow. It's nothing new.
It's the way it is done that makes it work. Keeping things as minimal as they need to be. Focusing on things that will make an impact. Experimenting with what works. Adding and removing things all the time. And of course, just making it all feel very nice. 🥰
Beautiful. Thank you @rosiesherry
I will keep these in mind (e.g., minimal, impactful features, and experimenting) as we move forward.
I love negative feedback, it helps me understand other people's perspective, and also try and cater to a wider audience. Sometimes honest opinions may seem cruel but they can be helpful. Cruel, complaining, and not helpful communities might suggest you are in the wrong communities. If anyone is being over the top cruel and mean, you can always report them. Another approach is you could try and be the hero and make the community better and help others not feel how you feel.
At the end of the day, a good lesson to learn is there are always going to be some people that are mean no matter what you do, but most likely their lives are not going to be as good as yours, so feeling sorry for them is often a better choice than feeling you have done something wrong.
This might not exactly answer your question, but hope it helps.
This. I would gladly take a constructive negative feedback instead a superficial false feedback (such as: "congrats <author>!", "nice post", "great stuff")
@cannonball Thank you for responding. I agree, but not everyone has a growth mindset as you do. :)
Yes, "to err is human," leading to mistakes from time to time.
What features would you suggest would promote helpful/healthy interactions between users besides reporting?
Firstly block swear words.
A rather unique approach which is probably a little advanced to implement, is using word analysis to check if the post has a positive or negative tone, and then ask if the writer could make the post a little friendlier. This could also be used by a moderator to find problematic users.
If we add a little psychology to the game, requiring a user to use a profile picture of themselves, or require an ID before joining could reduce the chances of bad behaviour, but this could also hurt good community members.
Removing swear words is a great idea. I will have to check with our developer to see if we can add that feature. All your additional ideas are great, but appear advanced as we are working on an MVP.
Thank you.
I think it's natural in communities. The problem was that I didn't know it was natural, early on. At a personal level, I'd let people have their say and not encourage more of it by replying endlessly.
At a community level, it needs to be moderated if it's seriously outside of community guidelines (hate, racist, etc). That takes a bit of effort and a good community manager to navigate I reckon.
Edit: ...I've spoken to community managers before (some of big, some of small communities) and they mention identifying and quickly removing those bad posts are some of the most difficult parts of their job. If anything blew up because of one person, other community members would feel bad. They'd prefer to let people voice their opinions in the community freely but often find themselves needing to impose some rules. I think a practical approach might be to have ground rules and a community manager to monitor behaviour.
Maybe there's an opportunity for ML to flag bad posts...?
Thank you for replying. I agree. I think it is natural for humans to complain regardless of the scenario because it allows us to find common ground and relate to each other.
We want to avoid the cruel behavior, so we've added the ability to report and block users.
It sounds like establishing guidelines during onboarding, and our website is our best attempt to set the tone.
If you require real identities, it makes people more reluctant to be jerks.
I think your landing page can set out the basic principles of your community.
You can set the tone through posts.
Thank you. Great points. The app will have real identities behind the usernames, similar to IH.
We can't control the tone of posts, but we will take try our best to encourage helpful content with placeholders.
Where else in an app would you want to see guidelines or hints to encourage positive interactions, not divisive?
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