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Establishing roles for bad-actor participants is not how you keep conversations on track and keep them civil, it's how you get passive aggression.

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Roles can help to keep conversations civil when the participants are benign as well as malign by removing communication friction. For malign actors they make it easier to pick out specific behaviours to review in one on ones and - if they persist - dismiss them for.

A lot of corporate policies are about limiting damage by bad actors.

I know. My point is that large corporations have little in common with startups. A startup should not already be so ossified that it's possible for bad actors to get in and stay in.

In other words, if you get to the point that you need to wage legalese wars with corporate policy documents, you're probably not a startup anymore. We really need to stop treating big, 5+ year old companies like Twitter as "startups".

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