People will never stop being horrible on the internet. There will never not be garbage. But in a functioning society, someone comes to collect the trash every week. If private platforms are to become communities, collectives, agoras, tiny new societies, they have to make a real effort to collect the garbage.

You should make a budget that supports having a good community, or you should find another line of work. Every single person who’s going to object to these ideas is going to talk about how they can’t afford to hire a community manager, or how it’s so expensive to develop good tools for managing comments. Okay, then save money by turning off your

What made League of Legends better wasn’t an army of contractors in the Philippines, mass-banning, mass-deletion, the stripping of anonymity, or the pursuit of legal action. It was a handful of architecture tweaks and a user-run system of user accountability, designed by a dedicated team.

For example, one of the other things that Riot Games, the publisher of League of Legends, did to mitigate in-game harassment was to turn chat into an opt-in function. Players could still use it if they wanted, but only if they wanted. Hudson writes, “A week before the change, players reported that more than 80% of chat between opponents was

Rather than understanding it as non-technical support tacked onto a technical product, platform cultivation should be understood as a multidisciplinary effort that is integral to the product itself. The basic code of a product can encourage, discourage, or even prevent the proliferation of garbage. An engineer’s work can exacerbate harassment, or

There are decades of collective experience out there on platform cultivation and community moderation from which the industry can draw. There are two futures for social media platforms. One involves professional, expert moderation entwined with technical solutions. The other is sweatshops of laborers clicking away at tickets.

Put aside the very real harms of sustained harassment campaigns—the SWAT team visits, the bomb threats, the publication of addresses, Social Security numbers, or medical records. Even a low-level explosion of sub-threatening harassment should be of concern to tech companies, especially social platforms that rely on user-generated content, because

But throughout I’ve also engaged a pettier, more practical way to understand online harassment: Online harassment makes products unusable.

Online anonymity isn't responsible for the prevalence of horrible behavior online. Shitty moderation is. - Zoë Quinn, March 21st, 2015