Back in October I wrote my moderation observations, and optimistically titled the post “part 1,” presumably believing that I had enough profound thoughts on the subject to add more to the series.
It’s perhaps time I follow up on that idea, and while I don’t know if they’re profound, I certainly have thoughts…
People like to be involved
Many sites like to hide their administration. Sometimes the administrator’s username is simply “admin,” and new projects are developed in secret, presumably so the members can be surprised by the staff’s brilliance.
To be honest: it doesn’t work this way. Online forums don’t have the same draw of social networking — the “I can find out when all of my real-life friends pick their nose and broadcast it on the Internet appeal” — but merely have interesting discussions, and discussions don’t keep users coming back. What keeps users is their involvement in those discussions, and in the community as a whole.
This means that if you want to be an interesting and engaging site, you involve your members in the process. Give them a reason to visit! Make the site’s well-being and development in their control. Those who get involved will want to come back to contribute ideas and see what’s happening in “their” site.
(Illustrative example: I opened a “What don’t you like about SFN?” thread and got six pages of responses in ten days. When you ask people for their opinions about the site, boy, do they give you some…)
Never be confrontational
When engaged in discussion, it pays to be patient. Imagine you’re in an argument with someone over politics; your opponent brings up many good points, and you’re forced to do some serious researching on Google to counter them and defend your position.
Now, your opponent is getting angry. Seriously angry. He tells you that you have to be stupid to hold your beliefs; he says you must be clinically insane.
Now it’s personal. You’re going to prove that bastard wrong no matter what it takes. How dare he? How dare he insult your well-researched position? At this point, you’ll shred everything he says, no matter how clever it is. (This being the Internet, of course, the debate is likely over the relative merits of Marmite or which movie in the Matrix trilogy was best.)
But wait: change your perspectives. Now, you’re the other guy. You’re arguing with some guy, and you have some pretty good points. Your opponent is floundering, doing desperate research to prove you wrong. You get mad and insult him.
Now what? He’ll never change his mind. By using that insult, you have cemented his place as firmly being against you. Not only does he disagree with you, he hates you, and any points you make are passed through a filter of emotion.
Of course, few debates are this charged. Nobody consciously notices the anger and intentionally rejects their opponent’s views. But when you make a debate personal, and attack a specific person’s views, you put them on the defensive, and their instinct is to deny your points, not consider them and say “Hmm, you’re right.”
If you want to convince an opponent, never make it personal.
Don’t know your audience
Guides to public speaking all have one common bit of advice: “know your audience.” Understand the kind of people you’re speaking to, they say, so you can target your explanations and imagery to their level; clearly you must explain things differently to middle school girls than to graduate students. (Middle school girls need you to mention Twilight more often.)
On the Internet, however, you don’t know your audience. That dude you’re arguing with? He could be anybody: an 11-year-old kid from Illinois, a college student in Mozambique, a grandfather in the UK, your mother, or perhaps some creepy dude just out of federal prison. You just don’t know.
So when you write a post on the Internet, always do a quick visualization before you hit “Post”: what would your grandfather say? your mother? an 11-year-old? Are you sure the person you’re arguing with doesn’t fit into one of those categories?
As the saying goes, you could be arguing with a dog on the Internet and you’d have no way of knowing.
