Who goes there?
What this article is and is not.
This article is about my personal perception of an emotional cost related to running a community and how my experiences as a community manager have led me to accumulate a vast knowledge of problematic, vile, and disturbing topics—and people—as their relevance to my role fluctuates. This is not meant to be a rant or a complaint. It isn’t meant to boast, or suggest that I’m more thick-skinned than others.
What this article is, simply put, is a reflection on my experiences as a community manager, particularly regarding my understanding of prejudicial terms, disturbing individuals, and toxic behavior.
The Burden of Knowledge
Everyone will experience a varying degrees of trauma in their lives. The loss of the loved ones, terrifying events, and so on. Many people will encounter deception by those close to them, or perhaps deal with the shock of learning that someone they looked up to has secretly been harboring terrible beliefs that go against your values or the values of your peers. People will get hurt, and every time they get hurt, they carry that pain in ways they may never notice. You might find yourself—once a vibrant, social person—suddenly weary of where you spend your energy. Less interested in talking or meeting new people, and may not understand why.
The point is, I want to emphasize that none of what I will be saying here is unique, just different. These things may be more familiar among fellow community managers, activists, organizers, and so on. Effectively, a trait among those whose lives involve managing large groups of people.
Historically, unless you found yourself in a role like or similar to those above, you generally never really pushed your attention outside of your circle. You didn't know or care about what happened in a different city or town. Had absolutely zero idea of what happened in a different country unless a traveler told you about it. Newspapers and TV, while informative, are still so new compared to how long humans have been organizing themselves.
But nothing has ever compared to the power of the internet. In just a couple decades, we suddenly can see what's happening virtually everywhere. And today, like it or not, we will know what is happening. Our circle of awareness has exploded into an unstable mess of celebrity drama, political discussions, endless arguments and 24/7 news. Chances are, the only people you really care about are still pretty few, you may loosely follow along with what's going on in the world, but it's more than likely you're up to date only because a youtuber with a nice voice caught you up while you ate lunch.
But for those like that list of roles I mentioned above, our roles require us to understand more. What is happening in our community, our pride, our schools, our local government, our chatrooms, our forums, our discords. Who did what, who said that, what stupid law is being talked about now.
Patterns of Harm
Over the years of running my community, I've picked up countless stories with the hundreds upon hundreds of people I've interacted with. Most of them good, but there's an untold number of experiences with people that wind up sour. How many people have I banned for being racist? How many people were aggressively anti-social? How many of them wanted to bother me or my friends because we're being queer in our own corner. How many times could you tell me a person's name, and I might have replied with, "Oh, them? I'm not too fond of them, because (insert reason here)". How many of those times were people I have only ever interacted with once, but left such a bad first impression, that's all they forever are to me?
But I have to know them, and what they've done, or might do. I have a community to protect, and there's always someone lurking in the shadows trying to do something to it. I really need to know if this person coming in for the first time is going to shout something racist!
Racism is a surprisingly difficult topic, it's very easy to condense it down to "we ban people who are racist". Most of the time, it's really easy to know when someone is doing that! But sometimes it isn't. There are a lot of ways people can be racist, a lot of terms, nicknames, seemingly innocent contexts, dog-whistles, etc. In order to keep vile people away from our community, it comes with the burden of knowing what to look for. As time passes and things change, words change, and that requires staying up to date on everything.
Dogwhistles, as I mentioned above, are a wild concept on their own. If you're unaware, a dogwhistle is when something is said or an action performed that seems absolutely innocent. It might be a completely ordinary term or phrase. However, there may be a hidden context inside, only those "in the know" (like how only dogs hear the whistle) understand, but you might not. That's a dogwhistle. The idea is that they can be used by trolls to try and identify each other. The ulterior motive is to make anyone calling them out appear crazy.
Here's an example; I once overheard a commercial that my father was watching. A certain pillow salesman was advertising a sale in which they offered a product for the price of $14.88. If you're unaware, 14/88 is understood to be a white supremacist symbol. 14 being the "14 Words" slogan, which I will not repeat here. The second is 88, which stands for "Heil Hitler". This is because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. Thus, these two together can be seen as a hate symbol.
When I attempted to tell my father this information, and that pillow salesman surely didn't just accidentally price his product an unusual number for a sale, he accused me of just trying to start something and that the entire concept sounded made up. Now, I don't think my father was out to gaslight me in this instance, but trying to make others appear crazy is a tactic that people will do.
And this doesn't stop with racism. Homophobes, transphobes, animal abusers or simply all "trolls" may use these tricks to invade and destroy communities. Keeping up with these tactics demands constant vigilance, learning, and emotional resilience. Why is this term offensive, what did this person do and why are they disliked, why do these people believe the things they do, etc.
Why Vigilance Matters
It can be exhausting, each new person that walks in can potentially be your next headache, and it's a constant fight not to lose yourself to the paranoia that perhaps every single person is out to get you. You may perhaps worry about how far someone will take something if you have ban them or what can they do to retaliate. Vulnerable communities like queer spaces often need to be extremely vigilant to protect themselves from bad actors. They can come in the form of people intentionally trying to burn the community down, but they can also come from government interaction, or even their own members who end up engaging in vile acts.
Cliques of people form, united by sick desires or interests. It's a corruption that spreads to chats, to communities, to conventions. Education is the first step to fighting it. To see what is going on, who is doing what, who is friends with whom, it requires a lot of attention and the right charisma not to come off like the person who cried wolf. These memories weigh you down, you remember them forever. You remember each person you thought was nice that turned out to be awful. You remember the friend groups that were ruined by a single person, you remember all of the times you didn't see something and found out too late.
Again, these concepts aren't new or unique, but what is new is that our view of the world is incalculably bigger now than it has been ever in the history of civilization. We are bombarded with constant, up to the minute news from places we never would have heard about in our entire lifetime before the internet. A tragedy comes from the lack of action. Constantly hearing about who did what burns people out, they're not interested in callout post #5345. Some people defend those accused purely because they disagree with how internet justice works. It can be a special kind of exhausting knowing that people are getting away with things simply because there aren't enough people that care. That alone can be enough to make you think you're crazy.
A quote I once heard that has stuck with me was "If this is pointless, then we should be able to deal with it easily. If we can't even do that, what hope do we have against the serious stuff.", I still to this day don't really know how I feel about it, but the older I get and the lack of conclusions I see for most events, the more I think about it.
Coping With the Cost
Like everyone else, I am the product of my experiences. Shaped into the person I am today not only by my own actions, but including the actions of others. I love the person I’ve become, and I am proud of the work I’ve done—but I carry the weight of everyone who left a scar on me as they passed through my community.
I’m always watching, always learning, always protecting. I sometimes wish I didn’t have to know as much as I do. Some days, I hear a word or phrase that reminds me of soemthing vile or see a name I wish I could forget. But I can’t. I still hesitate when new people try to get close. I have to wonder what they might be up to. But I remind myself: most people are good. Most people mean well. I try to stay open. I try to keep talking.