DB

I want to talk about the role of community and defining community in an online environment because I think this is relevant to a lot of recent news. And it is something that I don’t think I will be able to make into a larger post, as these are observations of a person who doesn’t know how to care for an online community.

In recent news, there has been some controversy on Dropout’s Discord server. Dropout being the streaming service and company that was formerly College Humor. The Dropout Discord has been banning or has been restricting folks around the discussion of the current conflict in the middle east between Israel and Palestine. Or at least, that is what Twitter has been saying. There has been a lot of backlash about that sort of moderation, mostly because it is a very charged subject.

Like, you cannot be the good guy on either side for that. It’s either you’re a genocide sympathizer or you are anti-semitic. It’s not a winning fight. So, it would be understandable if a company didn’t want that type of discourse being discussed on their official fan community, right?

Wrong. Wrong because there are themes in their content that directly relate to these sort of issues, which would imply that the company has made a type of stance about topics that are related to the conflict in the middle east. What conflict, do you ask?

Well, capitalism and colonialism of course. Dropout has a D&D actual play show called Dimension 20, where a lot of the main conflicts in a number of the seasons are surrounded around fighting capitalism and war.

Because of this, it would be strange to restrict your community from discussing topics related to your shows. It’s kind of strange to go to your community and say, “Hey you can’t discuss themes that are similar. You can’t discuss stuff in the real world that are relevant to the type of the art which we create.”

I was first privy to this by means of Twitter, where there was a discussion about bans on Dropout. There was a lot of noise, until I came upon a Twitter thread by James D’Amato of the One Shot podcast, who discussed about how unenvious of a situation Dropout is in. He discussed, how difficult it is to manage an online “community” partially because there is no right side to take and at a certain point should your audience grow very large there’s just going to be so many people talking. That’s going to be hard to manage all of them.

Usually, community managers or Discord mods manage those chats and community spaces on a volunteer business. They do it out of the love of the community and these people that they feel camaraderie with. They are not professionally trained to handle the nuance of facilitating those discussions and delicately managing a community to their ideals and community guidelines. These community managers, often, are not paid. So, not only are they not professionally trained to handle the nuance of these sorts of delicate topics, but they are not even getting paid. It’s a little unfair to expect community managers that are unpaid to make these decisions.

For a company that looks to be doing well financially however, it is fair to have grievances with how they conduct their business and how they police their communities. Should their moderation team have professional training? Yeah, I think so. Should they be paid? Yeah, I think so. Are they professionally trained or paid?

I have no idea.

Managing an online community is hard. There’s a lot of nuances to it.

For James D’Amato, he has decided to opt out of having an officially managed community. They don’t have the resources for it, despite the benefits of having a formally organized community in enabling an audience to grow.

I have many questions about establishing and maintaining an online community. It comes from the idea of establishing a community for myself. Part of the role of a game master, it seems, is scheduling games and whatnot and finding ways (usually through a game) for like-people to gather in a common place to create stories together. It’s great to do art together and a lot of fun.

So, a lot of that was trying to find being able to like build communities around TTRPGs because what I want, what I would like to do is provide a space where people came have fulfilling relationships with one another. It’s one of our core desires as social animals, and one of those ways is by engaging with others who share the same values and hobbies with you!

Being able to do that is hard. You need a lot of investment from multiple people. You need investment from people within that group to be like, okay, not only is one person organizing stuff, but there is a back-and-forth process where people are freely engaging with each other and whatnot within the social contract of that space.

The thing about community is that for me as a GM, I have discussions that I want to have with my peers that also do the stuff that I do. Like, I would love to have discussions about running the game, things like figuring out how to better include my players, finding resources and tools that other GMs use, and also just to be able to hang out with like people. A lot of GMs are immensely creative. That’s not that’s not say that players are not creative. It’s just that GMs have a different muscle. This becomes apparent when you play GMless games. Stepping into a GM role makes you work those different muscles in an obvious way, whereas working those same muscles as a player is not immediately obvious. Muscles like actively listening and honoring the choices of your fellow players. Muscles like finding a way to genuinely challenge the morals of characters, and finding ways to get them on a journey to discover themselves. Muscles like making a world or a person believable. Muscles that an improviser actively works on, which makes practiced improvisers GMs and players, in my opinion.

So yeah, I just wanted to create a community like that. I have invited like a few, like, GMs that I have gamed with. These are people that I respect and folks that I know who would be friendly and cordial with one another. There wasn’t any foreseen issues between these personalities. I put them all in a server and I was like, hey, this is the place where we can hang out and whatnot. But besides like the first little bubbles of conversation, it doesn’t have as much engagement as I wanted to.

I don’t think that means that that community is dead per se. In fact, I don’t know how you can tell when a community is successful!

I have some musings on how to measure the health of a community. Perhaps it’s when a community foregoes its goals. Perhaps a community was formed to read books every month. A book club! When that book club stops reading books every month, it failed, right?

What if that book club has turned into a space for people to rant about one specific fantasy novel fandom? Then, its purpose has changed, but the community is still active.

What about a chat that’s only active on a weekly or a monthly basis? Maybe it’s not dead, so long as the goal or purpose of the community is still being fulfilled. Was it meant to meet its goals on a monthly or a weekly basis? It’s still alive! Has the period of time not been strictly defined, but still gets occasional engagement?

Maybe…it’s…crawling?

Because I don’t have the energy to constantly be engaging first in conversation or in meetings with people, I can only handle so many social interactions in a week. And for the most part, I have now supplemented my need for social interaction with real life interactions—improv classes, improv jams, and my weekly gaming groups.

That’s about all the energy I can spare, so it’s very difficult to initiate and keep organizing a group of people as its leader! Do I want more TTRPG things to be happening? Yes, hell yes!

But, it requires buy in and initiative from a lot of other people as well. And not having that is draining to me.

So yeah, I dunno.

Being around people is hard. Organizing is community is hard. People are complicated.

That’s all I got.