Awooest Mawr @mawr@awoo.space

@IrisKalmia As a community scales up, inevitably some users will find divisions around the very definition of toxicity. When two sides of a community define the other as toxic, that's a division, and you can't moderate around that. At that point, the only way to keep things together is to take a less hands-on approach to moderation. That's where we're at with Twitter and Facebook.

@IrisKalmia Good moderation stems the tide of toxicity. In smaller communities, it can eliminate it near entirely, and have procedures to keep it at bay when it inevitably returns.

The larger scale, though, is way more complicated. The healthiest solution is to let communities branch off naturally as their members find points of division with one another. Mastodon is probably the healthiest model I've seen for keeping large scale communities healthy and connected.

@IrisKalmia Forums that grow popular quickly develop a social condition similar to the "5 Monkeys and a Ladder" experiment, except almost everything is a different type of ladder with different levels of punishment associated.

Point systems help alleviate this by making it easier to find the ladders ahead of time, though they also more rapidly condition users to mirror the dominant culture.

Generally speaking, the larger the space, the more toxic that culture becomes. :x

@Soreth Hear hear.

🙌☀️

@Soreth *hugs you softly close* :<