Why Community Hosting is Better than Community Managing

My first real experience in community management wasn’t even for my own community.

The group was on Facebook, and it happened back when I was a reporter at The Times-Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans. I was on the arts and entertainment team, which basically meant that it was my job to talk to celebrities and break news about the city’s largest events. A couple of my colleagues focused exclusively on food — eating it, making it, celebrating it — and the Facebook group was their brainchild: Why not bring together all the people who love New Orleans food in one place?It was simple and straightforward enough to work…like, really work. Soon after it launched, the group had more than 55,000 people in it. As anyone in community management knows, that means it quickly outgrew the management capacity of the three-person food team who had started it and who definitely still had to keep up with their writing and reporting. As the group grew, a handful of us from the newspaper got tapped for support duties, essentially as back-up to help keep an eye on things in case a conversation went off the rails.

Which, as I’m sure you can guess, absolutely happened. (If you think a post about tomatoes in your jambalaya or potato salad in your gumbo wouldn’t start a fight, think again.) Eventually, our team moved on from that Facebook Group when our newspaper sold to a competitor, but the experiences I got from simply being on the sidelines of that community have stuck with me. (Check out the interview Poyner did with the journalists who created that group. There’s also this podcast with one of the journalists for a deeper dive.)

I was reminded of those experiences when I saw that The New York Times’ own food team decided to walk away from its 77,000-member Facebook group. Ben Smith, The New York Times’ media columnist, shared an insightful detail about the abandoned Facebook group. As reported by the Nieman Lab, the decision to leave the group was about two things, really:

One, moderating the group was a full-time job for someone, and that became less of a good deal when faced with the second thing, that the group had become “a lot of people who want to post pictures of their dog next to their souffle.” Over the years, content and community moderators have seen their worlds expand exponentially. As Sophie Haigney wrote for Study Hall, more than 60 percent of the world’s population is online, and a huge number of those people are involved in one of a small handful of social media platforms. So, what have we actually learned about community moderation? 

First, rules are hard to enforce if you’re the only cop on the beat. As a community grows, as both food Facebook groups did, a hands-on approach to making sure everyone in the community actually follows guidelines, stays on topic and just plays nicely is incredibly difficult to maintain. Even in our Facebook group, at best, we were dealing with a moderator to member ratio of something like 1 to 5,000. 

In Haigney’s piece, she spoke with Howard Rheingold, the author of “The Virtual Community,” which was published in 1998 and was aimed at early online gathering spaces. In it, Rheingold wrote, “A host is like a host at a party. You don’t automatically throw a great party by hiring a room and buying some beer. Someone needs to invite an interesting mix of people, greet people at the door, make introductions, start conversations, avert fisticuffs, encourage people to let their hair down and entertain each other.”

Put another way: If you were hosting a party, would you want to have the kind of crowd that would see a situation get out of hand and expect you to handle it on your own, or would you want everyone to help you diffuse it? 

Second, with any sizable group, moderators have to realize that the community itself is really in control. That means the content is ultimately up to the community. Post something engaging, and it’ll be rewarded. Post something boring and it’ll die a quiet death. In many ways, Rheingold’s early advice remains more true than ever. In the best cases, an excellent online community feels grassroots-driven: No one is policing, per se, because the group ethos makes it clear what is and isn’t on-topic or appropriate, which allows the group itself to become the pulse of an organization or collective, reflecting what’s important and, perhaps most valuable, what’s unimportant at any given time. 

Rheingold republished his piece in 2016 on Medium, perhaps a solid indicator of how sometimes the best rules are the first rules. In it, Rheingold offers best practices for online “hosts” and what makes good online discussions. “Hosts catalyze, facilitate, nurture,” he writes, “and get outta the way.”

Chelsea Brasted is the general manager of Sidecar, an educational platform for association professionals looking to get connected, be inspired and transform their organizations for bold new futures. Learn more at www.SidecarGlobal.com.