See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Community Tendencies

1. In any community the behaviour of its early participants will set the tone for it. An organisation run by wealthy people will naturally reflect the interests and perspectives of wealthy people.
   
   
2. A community influences and selects for the behaviour of its participants. If people in a community value a specific kind of humour it’s a natural human tendency to try to adapt to that sense of humour to fit in. Individuals adopt community behaviour and norms, and those who don’t tend to leave.

Considerations & Values

The tendencies described are generalisations. Each member of a given community won’t value the exact same thing or act the same way. The generalisations concern communities as a whole and how they function systemically. If you believe communities have those tendencies then some important questions arise:

• Who are the early participants of the community?
• What perspective do they have?
• What are their values?
  

I’m not going to answer all those questions now but I list them to give you an idea of some of the things I was considering when I drafted the guidelines below. But first I would like to tackle just the final question about values, since they do provide context for the community guidelines.

What does StoryDevs value (besides interactive narratives)?

1. Participation of people with varied skill levels, disciplines, (dis)abilities, locations, ages, gender identities, orientations, races, ethnicities, economic statuses, privacy needs, and so on.
   
2. Education and services that are not profit-driven.
   
3. Social justice.
   

Some obvious things can be deduced about what StoryDevs must do in order to not contradict these values. For example, if we want a wide array of participants we will need an accessible site. If we want education and services that aren’t profit-driven they can’t be exclusively or substantially gated behind money.

Guidelines Draft

The guidelines below are not rules so much as a description of the site’s perspective on community. It’s a draft, intended for refinement and discussion. The points are not in any particular order.

1. A casual, light-hearted tone free of profanity doesn’t automatically make a comment non-toxic. If someone is friendly while describing how they hope for effective genocide they are still a corrosive influence. Tolerating them long-term will make value #1 (participation of varied people) difficult to adhere to as their presence will drive the targeted people away.
   
   
2. Repeated announcements of apathy toward human suffering is toxic. The “repeated” here is important. Sometimes people have their own problems and cannot consider others’ and they may vent something to this effect. A distinction is drawn here between that and someone who makes a pointed effort to consistently state that a particular issue doesn’t affect them.
   
   
3. Repeatedly advancing the sentiment that a better world is not possible is toxic. Everyone has a bad day when they feel down or pessimistic. But there’s a difference between that and being a perpetual storm cloud who will respond with “this will never work” to everything.
   
   In order for the world to improve action must be taken. And for action to be taken one must believe that their actions can have an effect and that they are worthwhile. Criticism is necessary — feeding the desire to exclusively tear things down isn’t.
   
   
4. Repeatedly spreading misinformation is toxic. Again, “repeatedly” is important. Genuine mistakes happen, often even. A distinction is drawn here between that and someone spreading misinformation, being corrected, and then continuing to spread said misinformation anyway.
   
   In cases where someone is consistently incorrect but presents their information as true it may be necessary for staff to take some form of action. This is to help beginners (per value #1, which mentions varied skill-levels) who may have difficulty discerning incorrect info and waste their time on it.
   
   
5. Speculation and gossip about some subjects results in misinformation and baseless antipathy. For example, back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much a developer earns without any grounding in evidence and sound reasoning leads to people judging a developer by a set of criteria that hasn’t even been verified.
   
   
6. “No politics” rules are deeply immoral and insulate privileged community members from ever having to confront views, argumentation, and resources that contradict their own, fostering a broader culture of political ignorance. People develop their political views in the communities they belong to, few attend specifically political forums.
   
   
7. There is no boundary between a community (online or otherwise) and the “real world” — all communities are part of the world. All communities both affect the world and are in turn affected by it.
   
   
8. People are flawed and make mistakes — this is inevitable. In general the community should be accepting and forgiving. However we must recognise that some character flaws that result in damaging behaviour (e.g., racist beliefs) can take many years of personal reflection to address and overcome. While the community should strive to be an educational place that can assist in this change, there must be a line drawn where the behaviour is recognised as simply too damaging to community integrity to be dealt with inside of said community.
   
   
9. Dogpiling is almost never helpful even when the people piling on are right. For example, if someone unwittingly repeats a racist dog whistle what outcome do we want, ideally? Ideally we want them to realise and stop doing it. A dogpile of people saying “you’re racist”, while correct, doesn’t give the person any clear explanation or action they can take.
   
   The world is not ideal and the person may know exactly what they’re doing. If it’s a pattern of behaviour then it ought to result in ejection from the community but there needs to be room for recovery and improving people’s understanding.
   
   
10. The preservation of context, where possible, is important. Ideally the site’s design should strive to situate the content it produces or platforms in context, such that people viewing it can make informed judgements.
    
    
11. Community members’ behaviour offsite can be relevant. For example, if someone has an abusive history on social media they may be banned from the community, regardless of their behaviour inside the actual community. This is a natural development from guideline #7.
    
    This depends on a certain degree of confidence that it is indeed the same person, so care should be taken by staff to verify such things. Nothing prevents that person from making a sock account, however they won’t be able to leverage or associate their usual brand on or with the platform.
    
    
12. Being skilled or useful is not a good reason to retain a community member who is a jerk. There are plenty of nice and skilled developers.
    
    
13. Discussions where community members take pleasure in others’ misfortune (e.g., stripping of privileges) should be discouraged. The enforcement of rules is not for the sake of punishment, it’s done to protect the community and align it with its own values. This framing is important.
    
    A fixation of the deservedness of punishment is at odds with the value of social justice, undermining the possibility of redemption and re-integration.
    
    
14. Staff have a responsibility to be educated such that they can recognise subtle antagonisms such as racist dog whistles. Concerns expressed by community members ought to be considered as research prompts for staff.
    
    
15. Community design is possible and necessary. It’s a skill requiring both research and practice. The values of the site will not necessarily naturally occur, particularly when we consider the broader social context the site exists within.
    
    If a just community is unnatural or unlikely in current circumstances then it ought to be treated as other unnatural things we’ve invented like indoor plumbing — a thing that needs to be maintained in order to reap its benefit. It cannot just be left to evolve at the whims of chance and the starting conditions.
    
    
16. Community growth isn’t necessarily good. At times it may even be preferable to constrain growth or downsize.
    
    
17. Consultation is necessary, particularly when trying to determine policies concerning or affecting disadvantaged people. More generally any sort of design or practices intended to help others should periodically seek input from those people.

Conclusion

Again, the guidelines above are not rules. In fact, if you want any chance of people actually reading your rules they’d probably need to be considerably shorter. Some things aren’t necessary for non-staff to read, for example the #16 guideline about community growth not necessarily being good.

In any case I’d be interested in feedback. There’ll be some more updates on the visual design + feature implementation coming soon so look out for those as well.

StoryDevs is a place for developers of story-focused games and visual novels to find each other and collaborate. The site is under development but handle reservations are open: www.storydevs.com/reserve

Website: www.storydevs.com
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jakebowkett
Twitter: https://twitter.com/storydevs
Discord: https://discord.gg/A2jtNqE
Email: support@storydevs.com