Getting rid of the bad apples in a net community
Dealing with narcissists on the Internet
JoeUser Forums
If you spend enough time in a net community you will run into all kinds of people. If you run a net community you have to make some tough decisions very quickly about what to do with some of these kinds of people. Some people, let's face it, are just bad apples. If you met them in person they might be perfectly reasonable, even normal people. But on-line something happens to them. They become aggressive, totally devoid of empathy, manipulative, emotionally needy to the point of demanding attention at all times.
What do you do with these anti-social people? Or actually, more to the point, these disruptive people? When I started WinCustomize, my instinct was firmly to go by the "freedom of speech" principle. But as the site became more popular, the number of disruptive people increased. And these people would drive away the kinds of people that a net community really needs.
Eventually I was able to find out specifically what type of person really goes nuts when on-line: Narcisist. Here are the primary symptoms:
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These kinds of people probably function fine in normal society because they do not have the ability (or means at least) to constantly be seen by hundreds, even thousands of people at once. But on-line, they become monsters. And as bastardly as it may sound, over the years I've become increasingly intolerant of them. They tend to have the same patterns of behavior. But I still kept myself from removing these people in all but the most extreme cases.
But then something on another site happened. Over time, our site had become the most popular skin site in the world. Such popularity tends to breed resentment with some people and someone commented, wrongly, that we "Exile" people for simply disagreeing with us. I argued passionately about how we do not do that. We only exile those who make personal attacks (after sufficient warning) or promote warez. But it became clear that there was a consensus that we remove people simply because they tick us off.
Which was a really freeing moment. Because we had wanted to remove disruptive people for a very long time but didn't because we were trying to be nice guys and we didn't want people elsewhere to see us as some sort of totalitarian regime. But heck, if we were already getting falsely accused of it, then why were we worrying about how people already hostile to us thought.
That was about 3 months ago and since then we have been able to clean up our net community with great effectiveness. Now, if someone is a jerk or just plain pisses us off, they're gone. We exercise restraint still but essentially we just don't want to have jerks hanging out on our forums on WinCustomize. And we mean jerks in the sense that these would be people that most people would find to be jerks. If they go on and start flaming people or hijacking topics or being obnoxious, we'll look at what they've contributed to the community versus what they are currently doing. If they have contributed to the community we'll drop them an email asking them to watch their language or behavior. But if they've never done anything for the net community, zap. Just a click and they're history. If it's a borderline case at all, we'll discuss it privately in our admin forum first before deciding.
Not that it happens often. Maybe once a month or so. But what a difference it makes. Instead of having tempers running high because some jerk is trying to make life unpleasant for others, that jerk is now gone. Of course, those people can still go off to other sites and flame us. But at least it's not happening on our site.
The worst narcissists on-line tend to be women. I have no idea why that is except that males tend to enable them. I've seen textbook narcissists behaving in ways that if it were a male they would, at the very least, be criticized. But if it's a female, they'll get sympathy for behavior that no one would ever tolerate outside the Internet. Anyone who has spent even a few months on-line has almost certainly seen this. But whether male or female they are equally disruptive to a community because both try to turn every forum, every topic, into being about them. Those who don't fall into line become targets.
I had an incident this past week where a narcissist type user who had long since been banned from our site for her behavior took her grievance to another site and began "Standard persecution post #226" about some other user. But subsequently she apparently could not control her anger and began lashing out at her usual target list of frustrations (such as me even though I wasn't even remotely involved on the issue she was upset about). Such posts never resolve anything (particularly when on other sites that aren't even tangentially involved). All they do is create strive and ill feelings within a community.
That is why any administrator running a large net community will learn, as we eventually did, that you have to identify narcissists and remove them. Net communities (especially blogs) attract narcissists. Most bloggers, myself included, will exhibit some narcissistic traits. Identifying it in yourself or in others is crucial to being successful, long term, in a net community. But most of all, removing those who are unable to control their narcissism will go a long way to creating a healthier, happier net community.
