{"id":2262,"date":"2014-04-04T08:21:27","date_gmt":"2014-04-04T12:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=2262"},"modified":"2014-04-04T08:21:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-04T12:21:27","slug":"group-admin-in-the-era-of-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=2262","title":{"rendered":"group admin in the era of facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Along the difficulties of\u00a0initially building<\/a><\/em> a good group\/community, comes the hassles of\u00a0managing<\/em> said [virtual] community – especially on the book of the face.<\/p>\n

I am a coadmin on the Ontario & Western Railways Historical Society Inc<\/a> Facebook group. My friend Peter<\/a> is a coadmin of the Linux Mint<\/a> group.<\/p>\n

Something both of us have noticed is the ridiculous spam problem Facebook groups have developed over the past 1-2 years. It’s not a new problem, of course – Stack Overflow has had problems since very early on, too: they printed A Theory of Moderation<\/a> to outline the issues they were seeing, and how they planned to handle it.<\/p>\n

The real problem at the root of all the spam lies, though, not in technology, but in people.<\/p>\n

Even with active community self-regulation, moderators occasionally need to intervene.\u00a0Moderators are human exception handlers<\/b>, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally<\/i>\u00a0happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt –\u00a0if<\/i>\u00a0you don\u2019t have human exception handling in place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Spam doesn’t arise on its own – it’s all developed by people. Until the\u00a0people<\/em> problem of spam can be addressed, it will continue. Sadly, technology, in and of itself, cannot deal with the people problem.<\/p>\n

So instead we have human admins and moderators whose [typically volunteer] job is to ensure that the communit[y|ies] keeps to a general standard, as defined by the community itself. By assuming technology could be made that\u00a0would<\/em> fix the problem, we’re asking the wrong<\/a> question: human behavior needs to be addressed and improved; while technology is wonderful and can\u00a0aid<\/em> in the process, it is no panacea.<\/p>\n

Encouragements for moderation teams can come in the form of gamification<\/a> (the SO model), community accolade, or just the individual admin’s personal satisfaction.<\/p>\n

The drawback is that this task can become so overwhelming at times and in places that it those tasked with caring for the community, when the community itself<\/i> won’t do anything about the problem(s), give up because they adopt the view that it’s everyone’s problem<\/a>, and presume that since it is everyone’s problem, it’s not “theirs”.<\/p>\n

What are the solutions to these issues? I can think of a few – but many remain yet unanswered:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the community must encourage the admins\n