SXSW: When Communities Attack

Chris Tolls is the VP of marketing of Topix. Topix gets approximately 30,000 posts a day and deletes five to 10 percent of them. Here are just a few of his tips for community management:

1. Geotag comments
When users know their comments are associated with their location, they are less likely to be rude. I find this quite interesting and would love to do more user research on this topic.

2. Forget about registration
Registration takes incentive away from busy people with good stuff to say and it instead encourages a troll environment. Topix showed how this worked for them, so I believe it, but I am an advocate for registration. I appreciate the seed of doubt though, I will be thinking about this.

3. Find and focus on the good stuff
Yes!

4. Get rid of the bad stuff
Bad stuff means threats, calls to violence, personal details, and postings with 100 percent intent of harm. It’s important to have a policy defining this. To achieve this, you can use a number of tools, such as using meta-moderators, Captcha, heat language analysis, IP/domain moderation, and community voting systems.

5. Have a goal or purpose
Here here. While we often hear that “interest” is what ties communities together but I’d suggest that the best communities have a sense of “purpose.”