I’m going to preface this post with “this is not an excuse to be rude”.  Rudeness isn’t acceptable and in online spaces can often lead to an escalation of rudeness that ultimately makes the environment toxic.  This instead seeks to investigate the reasoning behind rudeness online in particular why it comes about, and possibly point out a path to those who are experiencing rudeness in online spaces to look at what paths can be followed to reduce that type of discourse.

One of those things that comes up time and time again in virtual communites is that of “everyone here is mean.” There is some truth to that.

Try as we might with “be nice” policies and censoring rude comments that have the possibility of driving newcomers away, rudeness still thrives. While one component of this is John Gabriel’s theory and that people are more likely to act out when protected by some veneer of anonymity, it doesn’t handle that on usenet of old and many professional leaning forums where the link between online and real world identity is more tightly coupled for many users.

Clay Shirky touched on this in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy where he talks about a community oriented BBS (it was the 70s with all the ideals that implies) that was overrun by kids and the community there lacked the tools to be able to moderate or censor them (these tools were never built because it ran counter to those ideals).

This brings us to Usenet in the 80s and 90s. Usenet was much larger than the BBSs of old and it had some moderation tools with it. There were moderated news groups that restricted posting to only approved posts – this didn’t scale well. There were also cancel messages as part of the control protocls that were part of cancelbot wars against spam. At the personal level, there were was really only one tool available – kill files which caused specific posts, threads, or users to be ignored by you and only you. The reprocussion of this was that in order to have someone get disinvited from a news group, one had to drive them away with social tools. Rudeness.

Today’s sites are much larger than those BBSs of the 70s and the largest of those contest the volumne of data of a full Usnet feed at its height. The community moderation tools have simillarly grown in capability as the moderated usnet groups would not scale to thousands of posts per day (Reddit has on the order of 200k posts per day, Quora and Stack Overflow/Exchange have on the order of 10k posts per day).

The problem of rudeness arises as people run out of the ability to moderate using the tools provided in software. Votes, the ability to push a post into the workflow of “make it dissapear for everyone” and the ability to completely hide a post or person from ever showing up on one’s feed again – when those tools run out or aren’t provided the “social” moderation tools are the ones that remain.

Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective. Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees the umteenth “how do I draw a pyramid with *” in the first week of classes on a programming site – how does one make it go away when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude and hope that the next person seeing it won’t post the umteenth+1 one.

While it is great sport to poke at these sites and say “see?”, it is also important to attempt to find a path to helping the core groups within those sites be able to protect the site and not get overwhelmed by chatter that isn’t apporpriate and distractions of what they are there for in the first place.

Short of closing up shop and going to a private part of the internet (which many have done – reddit has an entire set of community restricted options), the most important item is to not exaust the core group that is trying to maintain the site, forum, or other online space.

As I’ve now used “core group” more than once, this is defined by Shirky as:

Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner’s phrase for “the group within the group that matters most.”

Shirky goes on to say:

Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn’t allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.

It is that expression of moderation that is seen as rudeness. When the people charged / entrusted with maintaining the content of the site lack the ability to express themselves through the moderation tools provided by the software, they will get rude.

Stack Exchange is one of the frequent targets of the charges of rudeness. When one looks at the size of the core group compared to the onslaught of material that the core group is unable to deal with and doesn’t meet the expectations of content, people get rude.

The powers that be have attempted to fight this rudeness with various tools such as making certain sites forbidden in comments. Making certain jargon forbidden in comments. Stating a “be nice” policy. Unfortunately, much of this has had a negative effect upon the core group as their ability to express themselves has been restricted.