What moderating a Discord server (and getting banned) taught me about society
In 2023, I watched professional cycling for the first time via the Tour de France, and fell in love. It was my first time falling in love with a sport, and so I wanted to do what I’ve done with most of my hobbies since I’ve become a regular internet user: I wanted to share it with likeminded people on the internet. You can count several years of games journalism as me sharing my love for games in that category, too — had that not happened, I would probably have joined a forum or something. Cycling forums however, closely reflect their main audience, middle-aged men with a keen interest in statistics, a group of people that wasn’t for me. Cycling fans on tumblr on the other hand, were more likely to be women, and that’s how I ended up finding people who invited me into a Discord server for what they called underrepresented fans — younger people, mostly in their twenties, women, queer people. When the server grew and its creator and only mod needed help with server maintenance, I offered to help.
For about a year, I pretty much lived an online hobbyist’s dream of having made friends, real friends, on the internet. We watched races together. We had deep discussions about the sport. We pooled money to participate in a memorabilia auction. I created a blog we ran together. Someone made actual member t-shirts. I got to know some people well enough to talk to them every day, and we planned trips together. The best thing? Even at over 100 members, the Discord seemed to hardly require moderation, as people had an excellent sense of self-moderation.
It may sound dramatic to say this, but never having had a bird’s eye view on a larger group of people in this way before, as soon as something went wrong, I began to think about the ways in which small groups such as this eventually begin to resemble society at large (The sociology elective I took may have something to do with this). Modding at the server essentially functioned like this,– we assumed that unless we heard otherwise, things were going as desired. Seemed normal to me. If someone had a complaint, they were encouraged to reach out to a moderator. The moderator would then say something along the lines of “someone complained about having been triggered by the discussion of weight.” A problem with a relatively easy solution — moderators started asking people to put potentially triggering topics behind a spoiler, which on Discord is a bit of blacked out text you can click to reveal. But it turned out that, since “potentially triggering subjects” hadn’t been clearly defined, several more users then asked to no longer see topics that were difficult for them. I am personally in doubt of the helpfulness of trigger warnings, generally, and in this case in particular. My hardline opinion where cycling is concerned, would be that if the potential mention of injury and weight loss make you uncomfortable, maybe cycling isn’t the sport for you. Still, I think it’s generally a well-meant attempt to find a way to help people enjoy the good and avoid the bad, in as far as you are able. But this attempt at shielding showed that in doing your best to help everyone, you create an expectation that you will do this for absolutely EVERYONE. Countering with “but the majority of people are actually fine” was never an option, simply because, and I don’t exclude myself in this, no one asked what the majority thought. The requests seemed reasonable, the solution simple. Before you know it, you have a situation similar to that of a country run by unelected officials.
Fascinating, right? But the situation became even more comparable to everyday society — once called to action, the moderators tried to find a solution to every single person’s problems. But up to what point can a highly homogenous group of moderators help someone, and when should they ask people to self-regulate? This is a question the best societies haven’t been able to work out. As the server grew, so did the amount of people who could take umbrage at something, and in an attempt to satisfy everyone, the amount of rules grew incredibly unwieldy. And, not every proposed solution actually solved the problem it was meant to solve. The problem was that an attempt at finding every solution to every problem, well-meant as it was to try, would’ve needed an amount of workshopping and discussions that 6 people with studies and jobs of their own didn’t have the time for. People whose exact job it is to do that don’t have time for every problem. And so a minority group of moderators implemented rules, and didn’t wait for input or community approval, simply because everything they did was supposed to help, and quickly. Suddenly, moderators were assuming that whether someone spoke up or not, things were going wrong, or were about to.
The idea of democracy in this situation was that if one moderator disagreed with a proposed change (usually me), as long as at least two people thought it was a good idea, my concerns were voided. Democracy means the majority wins, right? This is how, in a matter of months, I basically did a speedrun the minority experience that is my entire life. Speak up, be overruled or ignored. The topics were mostly UX concerns at this point — how many channels do you need, what should they be named, things that were easy for me to eventually give up on, really. But I think I was seen as somewhat of a dragon, someone who “always has to disagree”, because I questioned the necessity and validity of ideas where other moderators simply abstained. As a person of colour, I have a precedent for the experience of being a minority, but it was also exactly what made me speak up.
When I asked for details beyond “someone has complained about [concern],” no further details were shared, ostensibly in an attempt to keep the person with the problem safe. The idea that someone I was supposed to help needed to be kept safe from me didn’t sit well with me, and the lack of details made it difficult to suggest alternate solutions. You don’t need someone’s identity to help them, and if knowing their identity makes you biased against them, you’re not cut out to help. What you do need however, is nuanced insight into a problem. Assuming that I would be biased against a person as soon as I knew they had complained is, in hindsight, a pretty telling view by someone who wants to make a server that works for “everyone”. It’s basically like saying as soon as someone has a different opinion from you or doesn’t like something you do, you won’t like them. Sometimes, moderators devised solutions for problems that had yet to exist, again in an attempt to help. What it did, in quite a few cases, was make people feel like they couldn’t be trusted and were put under general suspicion. I do believe there are some issues, based on how we all live in a society and know many of its pitfalls, you can preemptively stop, but there is a difference between reacting to a problem and assuming something you have no precedent for will inevitably happen.
Eventually, I spoke up against a proposed large-scale change to the server publicly — giving each member a role that would show the user enjoyed fanfiction. Roles on Discord are used to divide people into groups, both to, yes, make it easier to see who is and isn’t interested in something, but also to keep them to certain parts of a server by locking certain channels to certain rules. It was designed as an extra layer of protection for those talking about fanfiction, but it targeted the fear of potential harassment, harassment that hadn’t occurred yet, and gave moderators an additional instrument that is very easy to abuse. It doesn’t seem like a matter to get so worked up about, and on a larger scale, yes, it isn’t! We are talking about fanfiction on a server filled with fandom girlies. But I felt strongly about the principle of the thing — it put people under suspicion, it didn’t solve the problem.
My speaking up about this, was, no kidding, called a breach of trust. The overarching sentiment was that all mods needed to be of the same opinion to help, and that I had thus betrayed the trust of the community by essentially whistleblowing and telling people what my concerns were, especially since the system was devised by a minority, for a minority. Several people were suddenly really keen to let me know what they really thought of me. People in a HIGHLY relative position of power didn’t enjoy being questioned, and again, if you think about what this is originally about, that’s wild.
Because of that, I decided it was time to leave and finally went for the server Holy Grail — I deleted a file folder of TV shows I’d uploaded for everyone to watch. Taking the vcl file directory is a punishable offence in any fandom, but I received messages over this that are akin to the last time I was harassed by gamers. Suddenly, some people lost all compunction — attempts to report me to Discord for allegedly circumventing a ban were made, as were attempts to access and delete personal accounts of mine. There was a biiig post about why I had been removed, filled with untruths that are very easy to verify, and I was called, among other things, a vandal and recalcitrant. I’m close to 40 and I’ve never been called a vandal or recalcitrant before. (Actually, kind of a shame, but that isn’t the point) There’s now an entire story about what I did that was so horrible, when all I did was take a few files that can be reuploaded in less than an hour.
So. Why did I write all of this down? In order to work through it, for one. I’ve spent a large part of the last few days crying, absolutely sobbing, not because people said mean things about me, but because who those people are and who they purported to be. I admit I had been gunning for a mask-off moment, chiefly because of another minority experience I’m very familiar with: when no one agrees with you, you start to wonder whether you’re the problem. I’ve learned to collect documents, any sort of verifiable information, and stick to it always, because when people gaslight you, you stop trusting yourself. I did fall into that hole, in the last few nights I lay awake over this, wondering if I were simply as horrible and mean a person as people told me I was. I had people who called me friends block me, but not before calling me something nasty, and honestly, in the end, that’s what solved this for me. I’m not perfect. I am brash and I am resentful and I can be terribly petty. I have made people feel looked down on, and I let my anger fester until I explode and there is no holding back. But I won’t go out of my way to hurt someone, really hurt someone, because I still cry when I lose a friend in a vicious way. When someone I thought of as a friend called me a terrible person this week, I didn’t think “are we in kindergarten, who calls people that?” I cried for hours because friends aren’t supposed to say that to you.
But I wrote this down because this detached view does help me, it hammers down the point that the internet is the wildest thing we’ve ever come up with, and, most importantly, how easy it is to feel that you’re surrounded by friends, when really, you don’t know these people, and even people. I mean, real friendships can end at any time. I guess I just want people to be more careful, and I want myself to be more careful, without becoming cynical. This is akin to what happened to me in the professional networking department, minus the prime minister of Sweden — it’s just very easy to open yourself a little too far, too soon, when you feel like you’ve found your people. Sometimes I would love to close down a bit.