Why this exists: An Introduction

In real life, especially that part of real life lived online, there are these people who, for the lack of a better (and less offensive) word, we shall call "sphincters." Difficult people who are not trying to be anything other than difficult. As an administrator of a number of groups, I get to deal with these magical folk, and with the fact that they love to tell stories that cast their own morally questionable exploits in a far more positive light than they deserve, at the expense of those who've had to deal with the disruption that those exploits have caused. As much as I'd like to be able to just ignore these people, I really can't, not unless I'd like the rumor mill to run out of control and my own membership to get the wrong idea about what has been a generally good natured (but still assertive) administrative style - mine.

Given the type of group I try to run, that matters a lot. Yes, I could probably get away with just bullying people into silence at the first sign of dissent, as the seeming success of a lot of groups run that way shows, if I were that kind of person, and having done so, find myself in firm control of exactly the joyless sort of group I'd deserve. But that's not what I've ever set out to do. Don't get me wrong - if somebody is genuinely, aggressively (or passive aggressively) being a pain, I will (without apology) toss him out of the group, much as I would remove an unruly guest from my living room. I have done so before - but I haven't done so often, gladly or lightly. At the time of this writing, the total number of users banned from a group of over 2,100 people that has existed since 2008 is 18, and the only reason the number has climbed even that high is because a few people who got banned (with ample cause) went out to recruit a few of their equally trollish friends, and had them come over to make trouble. The theory seemed to be that I was either going to let them back into the group, just to make peace, or pay the price in one way or another. One of the ways in which I was going to pay for this was in an increase in what had been the very low number of people I had banned. Before one particular incident, in which the aforementioned friends were recruited (one which will be mentioned on this blog), only four people had ever been banned, and one of them had been reinstated.

That's not a lot of people (not in a group of over 2000 people), and the bannings were unquestionably justified - two spammers and two posters of adult content. One of the spammers, having been put up to it by the admin of another group, apologized and I let bygones be bygones. Then came somebody who was really special, who had publicly announced his willingness to inflict bodily harm on others. Having banned him out of obvious safety concerns, I found that a small contingent of members was willing to publicly support the psychotic fellow in his search for what he claimed to imagine was justice, and then screamed about the injustice of it all as they found that I had banned them, too - and why wouldn't I?

In the beginning, when I started running groups, I'd go along with the completely unreasonable expectation that I spell out a detailed set of rules that would explain to one and all exactly what would and would not be acceptable as behavior, leaving me with the question "who is going to read this." I can't think of every bizarre, anti-social thing a member could do and if I could, imagine how long that litany of potential woes would be. So long that surely nobody would read it all, and thus, so long that it wouldn't serve as being anything but an excuse to spring an unpleasant surprise on hapless users who would then be told that ignorance of the law was no excuse. Far better to use a less formal method of telling people what was expected of them and offered to them. After listing a few rules (eg. no nudity), I explained what I was trying to do as an admin, what my philosophy of management was, and then invited them to use their common sense.

As I've said before, my group is like my virtual living room, the members are my guests and I am their host at this party to which our younger relatives are invited. If one has anything resembling common sense and common decency, and even the most modest social skills, few (if any) surprises are to be found in the management decisions I make or the relatively few ejections I've carried out. If one goes out and spreads rumors at the expense of one's host, does one really expect to continue being invited to his parties? If one is not completely insane, I mean? But a lot of people are either that - nut, just nuts - or are having fun pretending to be; eg. the owner of a car dealership who posting a rant in the discussion section after I told him that he wouldn't be allowed to advertise any more cars in my group. Again, same old theory - "give me what I want, or I'll create a hostile environment in your group that will halt activity in it, because nobody will want to deal with that" - and he didn't become one of the 18 banned members until he resorted that that attempt at strong arming, in order to win a right for himself to post spam. I would have been within my rights to ban him without warning, and probably that would have been prudent, but I did try to reason with him first, as much as he will try to pretend otherwise. He did not stumble into trouble blindly, he came storming into it looking for a fight, and that's what got him thrown out of the group.

That's what I want people to understand, and part of why this blog is here - I really am running a "mellow show", as I've said in the past, I'm just not being a wimp about it. I'm going to try to maintain a more than reasonable level of transparency - as reasonable as privacy concerns will allow - because as an admin, I really don't have anything to hide, and both I and my group benefit when this is seen. The vast majority of the members of my group - thousands of people - have no desire to act like jerks (as far as I can tell), and it is good ... no, it is important for them to know that as long as they're trying to be good people in my group, they should feel free to relax. If they have a bad day, like that one reinstated member did, and there's a misunderstanding, that's nothing we can't fix. The one thing that really has gotten people in trouble, when they've stayed in trouble on my group, has been the attempt to win through intimidation or harassment (in some form), in cases in which they were clearly in the wrong or by putting the group at risk for deletion - in other words, by going out of their way to act like jerks. Having done so, they've then made a fuss, because that's what jerks do, when they're in the wrong, more often than not. They go on trying to win through intimidation and deceit, just like before.





That's tells you why I write about these incidents (sometimes), but it doesn't tell you why I have a whole blog devoted to them. Perhaps you might wonder about that? Simple enough. While some people will have concerns, wondering if they really can relax in my groups, a lot of other people won't ever want to hear about any of this drama, and I don't blame them. Really, most of this is boring stuff. Man shows up, posts pictures of somebody's penis, and then screams about homophobia because I don't want the children in my extended family to see that. "Are we really even having that discussion?", somebody will ask, and my answer has to be "I'm afraid so." But I don't have to make him wade through this junk on his way to read about something more interesting. I separate this out so that it can be avoided, both by those who, having learned that they can count on me to be at least reasonably fair (I would never claim to be perfect), don't need the reassurance any more, and by those who would never have wanted to read any of this in the first place.

I will absolutely not take it personally if you fall in the second group. I probably would, for reasons that point to why the legalism I reject in running my groups isn't as reasonable as it might look, at first. Really, how much is at stake in the decisions I make as an admin? When I throw somebody out of a group, I'm not depriving him or his freedom or his property, either tangible or intangible (eg. his web pages). There are plenty of other groups, some of which will have many of the same people, so if I make a bad call, this will hurt me more than it will hurt the member, and if truth be told, we're both going to be walking away from the incident without serious harm. This being the case, there's no reason to set up anything like a set of statutes for my groups, and every reason not to. I assume we've all heard of wikilawyering or pettifoggery? The more formal a system becomes, the more easily it is gamed, and the less cause it gives anybody for relaxation.

Isn't relaxation the reason we're all supposed to be here, in the first place? How funny that so many of us seem to forget that so often, and perhaps, along the way, forget why they came online, in the beginning. I'm guessing that in most cases, it wasn't for the drama. So, read this or don't, it's all good, this is just a reference and, as I've admitted, not a very interesting one, probably.





How can you follow this blog, which I expect won't be updated very often? I don't know, yet, but probably there will be some pages on Twitter (and elsewhere) which it will share with a few "gripe groups" on Flickr - groups I've set up, in which people can take their disputes into the discussion section, while the photo section is reserved for something light and amusing, and somehow tangentially related to what is going on in the shouting matches in the discussion section, but not really. So, goofy fun photos to go with the not so fun goofiness covered on the blog, giving non-masochists a reason to subscribe to the update microblogs. With any luck, there will be enough subscribers that word of a rebuttal will get around, and I'll be able to largely forget about the rumor mill, because rumors will be quickly squashed. With even more luck, I'll have run into the last of the idiots, and the update microblogs will have nothing but links to fun stuff.

I'd like that and who knows? Maybe that will happen. Let's find out.