How to Handle a Crowd : The Art of Creating Healthy and Dynamic Online Communities

A guide to successful community moderation exploring everything from the trenches of Reddit to your neighborhood Facebook page. Don't read the comments . Old advice, yet more relevant than ever. The tools we once hailed for their power to connect people and spark creativity can also be hotbeds of hate, harassment, and political division. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are under fire for either too much or too little moderation. Creating and maintaining healthy online communities isn't easy. Over the course of two years of graduate research at MIT, former tech journalist and current product manager Anika Gupta interviewed moderators who'd worked on the sidelines of gamer forums and in the quagmires of online news comments sections. She's spoken with professional and volunteer moderators for communities like Pantsuit Nation, Nextdoor, World of Warcraft guilds, Reddit, and FetLife. In How to Handle a Crowd , she shares what makes successful communities tick – and what you can learn from them about the delicate balance of community moderation. Topics include: -Building creative communities in online spaces -Bridging political division—and creating new alliances -Encouraging freedom of speech -Defining and eliminating hate and trolling -Ensuring safety for all participants- -Motivating community members to action How to Handle a Crowd is the perfect book for anyone looking to take their small community group to the next level, start a career in online moderation, or tackle their own business's comments section. "Today's digital experience is primarily driven by powerful online communities. Social media networks have gained enormous power over our online experience, partly by harnessing our desire to connect and share with each other. But successful, intentional communities are incredibly difficult to build and get right, as media organizations often discover when they attempt to create their own. Anika Gupta has helped develop community products for media companies in both the United States and India, across boundaries of language and culture. She's seen firsthand the challenges inherent in trying to engineer something that should feel organic, and the difficulties traditional media companies face in leveraging participatory online culture. How, then, to bridge this gap? One answer is moderators. Good moderators set shared goals for community members, invest in long-term relationships, and thoughtfully craft discussion norms. In her research, Anika has found that moderators are drawn to the work because they love interacting and sharing with others - exactly what the best communities run on. In How to Handle a Crowd, she looks at a range of examples -- from Reddit to your local mommy board -- for the dos and don'ts of building better cultures. Whether it's diffusing tensions, attracting new members or encouraging shared action, these lessons will be invaluable for anyone charged with running a community - whether for money, for fun, or for the greater good"-- Provided by publisher