Thread | Brutkey

One tool we have at work to ablate harassment is a set of tags for our public issue tracker - “abuse” and “admin” that summon a mod within the hour; what we tell people is, if it’s obviously abusive, tag it as such, but if it’s on the line, or you’re not sure, or you’re just uncomfortable and thinking “I want somebody who isn’t me to deal with … whatever this is”, use the admin flag.

Under the hood both tags do exactly the same thing, but:

mhoye
@mhoye@mastodon.social

There’s a significant psychological difference between those labels. Because the tags and their assigners are visible, one is felt to be an accusation, the other simply a janitorial function. The fact that it’s not a fire alarm makes pushing that button much easier, meaning we can find and address low grade toxicity - the small brush fires - early and easily. This psychological accessibility is critical for keeping our community safe and healthy.

mhoye
@mhoye@mastodon.social

As a community manager or leader the worst thing you tolerate is what your community becomes. The worst thing you walk past is who you are. And in open source communities the blast radius of that negligence is enormous; for every person you can see pushing back against toxicity there might be dozens, hundreds or thousands peeking in, seeing that this is how you and your project have decided to live, shaking their heads and silently moving on, knowing they have better options.