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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

"Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability."

Oh man I volunteered to moderate on a large gaming related forum ages ago. The amount of BS you deal with along with personal attacks and etc is pretty high. I never felt emotionally upset by it as I felt you had to maintain an even keel .... but it certainly is not a job for everyone and the rub is the folks who WANT to do it the most are often the worst at it. Being a good moderator is not a skill everyone has, but it's also not valued in any real way by most communities / companies.

Really the most frustrating aspect were the non trouble users who seemed to go to bat for the folks who were truly bad actors because of some perceived injustice (lie)... and all the meta that goes into that.

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My favorite moments from moderating a small, semi-private video-game related board:

- an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a romantic encounter that went down poorly.

- a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for why he was banned.

- people being outraged that we asked them to donate a small amount of money (somewhere around a hundred dollars, collectively) to help run the server, then offering to run it on their spare computer in their basement

- discovering that due to a relatively unknown feature of PhpBB, we had a whole secondary parasite community that didn't show up in user registrations, and that had a whole private forum set up that nobody else on the board was aware of. It was like opening up a basement closet and discovering that it's a secret night club.

Oh man 2 and 3... I know those feels.

I hate the word "entitlement" because I think it gets used wrong a lot, but oh man folks perspective when it comes to the internet ... a lot of that. Users just feel it should be free and even a minute of downtime and they want answers, about a gaming forum (god help them if they just went to play games for a bit).

As for the prolific troll thing, one site I worked (well volunteered) was a popular commercial gaming site back in the day. Threats, fake accounts claiming to be lawyers, etc. The site made money and all and had some really dedicated trolls. One they actually took legal action against. I assumed it was just some kid with too much time. Turned out to be a dude in his 40s.... in fact many of the most dedicated trolls turned out to be adults. Kinda shocking to me at the time as I was younger then and just assumed they'd be young dumb kids like me...

Wow, actual legal action? I suppose I should feel lucky, things never got that far.

Yeah I was surprised they even did it, not just legal action, but legal action in another country. But that company did have a presence there....

The handful of actual legal actions never were well known, it was amusing as the dedicated trolls talk big about every perceived injustice or slight or straight up lie they would make. Even posting on other sties about it.

But the only legal actions I was aware of, word never got out. I suspect when it gets real they get quiet fast, or their lawyer tells them to shut up.

The last anecdote reminds me of a similar hilarious story that evolved in a corner of the Douglas Adams universe: http://www.nickbaily.com/?p=13

Edit: Actually this link probably makes more sense: https://kotaku.com/the-secret-douglas-adams-rpg-people-have-...

> but it certainly is not a job for everyone and the rub is the folks who WANT to do it the most are often the worst at it.

This is correct.

As someone who has run forums for a number of years, I can honestly say I've fired 70% of the volunteers for exactly that reason. They wanted to impress their clique and use the power. In reality, it is more about using that power as little as possible except for things that might create a legal issue. (i.e. DMCA)

The other 30% I got rid of were due to activity. (i.e. Would go inactive for 30+ days without notice)

Amen. It's about using it judiciously and doing your best to communicate with / be seen by the regular users / available.

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