Not rhetorical - how does one design a community for healthy development? I've messed with forum design before and I'm curious how the layout and format influence behavior.
I think this is an interesting topic too. Some ideas I've had on this:
You prevent people from posting terribly toxic comments in the first place, whether that's automatic moderation or warning them that their comment is toxic and to reconsider what they're about to post. I'm gonna plug http://www.getspectrum.io here b/c it's relevant.
Require answering a question related to the topic at hand before allowing comment submissions. I read about this being done by a news site in Europe not too long ago.
Prompt the audience/community with a specific question/prompt that the discussion/comments will be in about. That way every comment is a direct response to the same question. This could help keep things on topic. I think a lot of toxic comments are often from indirect tangents.
What if you could see comments that have been posted only after posting one of your own? That way your primary contribution is an organic thought and not an angered response to what someone else has said.
You're thinking good thoughts as far as being aware of the various effects that software design will have on community. Hacker News, for example, restricts certain actions (like downvoting) until you've crossed a certain participation threshold. Other sites disallow downvoting entirely. Some sites don't allow images or links. Others do. Some require a few bucks payment to join. There are all sorts of technical tricks to help tune a community.
But there's also just non-technical stuff. Which I would argue is actually more important, since any piece of social software can be perverted if a certain subset of users is determined. A non-technical example: setting community norms. Hacker News also does this reasonably well -- the community doesn't respond well to goofy memes, for example. This isn't something you read in the rule book, it's something you experience by reading comments and feeling out the tone of the conversation. And if you do post something that doesn't fit the community, you'll pick up a few downvotes or some-such. Most users understand the nature of the community so it self-polices relatively well (with a little help from moderators). I think large open communities (Twitter, Reddit) that need to maintain a ton of traffic to make money have trouble with this: It's tough to want to service the community needs of the entire planet and tell people "Behavior X isn't something that's appropriate here."
I'm not an expert and before you tear me a new one, remember that this is a Hacker News comment and not a peer reviewed journal article. I'm just tossing out some thoughts.
But my belief is that designing for communities is actually quite a challenge, and the fact of the matter is most people putting communities up online right now don't really put much thought into it. Which is a shame. It allows a small subset of toxic users to really damage what should be a good thing for the rest of us.
Back in the days of yore -- late 90s through 2006-ish -- community design was actually a pretty hotly debated topic. But, like I said, it really seems like these days old fashioned comment threads (like you see on news articles), Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter have established themselves as the blueprint for community design and people just sort of copy those without thinking about how they do and don't work. And then online communities become toxic and some people assume all online communities are toxic and then some people start thinking all people are toxic and -- hey! Look where we are. (I'm stretching a bit at the end, here, of course. ;-) )
Not sure why you think I'd tear you a new one, that was a well thought out reply, which I very much appreciate.
You bring up a great point about the self policing. That's why HackerNews, ProductHunt, and many of the smaller subreddits do quite well.
But what differentiates an old fashion comment thread from a better solution if not the "technical tricks"?
Also, "in the days of yore", when community design was a hotly debated topic, what were the debates about? I'd love to learn more about that discussion.
Again: I'm not an expert. But I feel I've been around the block on this topic.
Some people think it's a naughty word, but: Moderation. Or -- to put it in different terms -- a community manager. That's one way to try to enforce norms. But I'd say that the most powerful way is via intelligent growth. For example, don't just open the floodgates. Grow a community at a rate where newcomers never overwhelm the existing users. Communities that "break" can be hard to "fix" once toxic norms have been established.
The debates would probably seem fairly simplistic to today's ears, but remember that the community design of Twitter (140 chars, public, "following") was a novel idea a dozen-or-so years ago. There was a ton of experimentation with how different communities could be built. Big business at the time!
One place I've found interesting as far as learning about community design is online games. Game designers are trying to design very specific experiences for users, and you can learn a lot by looking at how Overwatch (for example) tunes both gameplay and community to craft that experience. Even when playing with a dozen strangers.
In this vein this talk from Raph Koster from this years GDC is great, it's VR/AR directed but widely applicable beyond as the lessons are drawn from long experience with MMOs and it's really about designing societies:
