Discord and moderation.

As much as a I enjoy being away from some community drama, sooner or later I end up doing moderation work, which depending on a community can be rather fun but also a tiresome duty.

Being a moderator on Discord is for most part a tiresome thing. Discord has a lot of toxic users and some of them have serious personality disorders, which only make moderation harder because there’s no method of controlling how many accounts a user makes, so they can have multiple accounts and actively disrupt a server with them.
It’s a mess and sure there are bots and ways of limiting access to unverified accounts but anyone with time and patience can go around those fences and believe me some of these users have both things to spare.

Sure most users are just people who want to have fun and connect with others who share their love for a certain theme. What bugs me the most is the fact Discord has no easy way for reporting toxic users and banning them from the platform. Ok, you can delete a comment and report it but by then the same user already made multiple accounts, turning a server into a shit show.

I’m all for anonymity but administrator and moderation teams should have a way of at least cross reference if users on the same server share the same IP address, discord doesn’t need to actually show the full IP adress, just warn that two or more users share the same IP, so it’s easier to detect disruptive trolls.

Every moderator has a way of dealing with problematic people who don’t play well with others, it can be in public or in private, mods need to solve community problems, but in the end every mod has some kind of bias towards or against someone.
I had problems on a server because a moderator couldn’t take some hard jokes I made about Apple, if that’s not a biased view I’m not sure what it is.
I became persona non grata, in a server with 9000 users and I ranked near the top 100, so I was not a unknown face, and this brings me to the next thing I want to write about.

Discord communities have short collective memories and users are ephemeral, this means that people will make a fuss when something happens to you but in the long run people will forget about your contributions to said community. In short, people don’t give a fuck about others on Discord, specially on large servers.
These words might sound cold but unless you truly connect with someone on Discord, you can just leave and only return after some months, in fact the same thing goes for most online communities.

Do have fun but remember that in the end Discord servers are ephemeral, so always try to keep close to you the friends you found there, that’s what I do.

One thought on “Discord and moderation.

  1. Pingback: Maintaining a small discord server. – The Journeyman's Toolbox

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