Struggling for Fairness in an Online Community

By John M Grohol PsyD
May 31, 2005

Running an online community — any online community — requires a level of devotion and dedication that challenges even the most altruistic soul. When I left Mental Health (ne’ Help) Net in 1999 to go pursue my dot.com pot of gold, I sighed a sigh of relief in having the burden of responsibility of running the online community removed. But within a year or so, I decided something was missing from my own site, and that was the joy that an online community can bring! So I began a new one, right here, for just the few who would stumble upon it during their online travels.

Fast forward four and a half years later and the once-small community has grown to be over 7,000 members strong. Wow, I never expected it to become that large. Luckily I have a great team of moderators and a fellow administrator that make it easier to deal with than when I was at MHN and didn’t have such a group in place. They take care of most of the day-to-day burdens.

But one of the burdens that is difficult to address is that of applying guidelines fairly across every forum, every thread, and every member. We’ve had community guidelines since Day One, as one of the things I learned was in the absence of guidelines, people make their own (sometimes inappropriate) rules. I wanted a simple set of “live and let live” guidelines. A few changes have been made throughout the years, and the list of things discouraged from being discusssed in this particular community has grown. For instance, topics of both politics and religion tend to polarize individuals. I haven’t discovered a simple way to allow for discussions on these topics without a great deal of oversight, so we discourage them altogether.

Inevitably, though, you can’t ban such a wide area of life that influences so many people (such as religion). So we try and discourage outright religious discussion, while allowing spirituality (in a broad sense) and general well-wishes be posted. I’m well aware that this a gray line drawn in shifting sand. But a line nonetheless.

I’ve learned many lessons over the years in running online communities of various sizes and topic areas. One of the most important is that while you can try and be fair in every action, word and guideline you set, you have to acknowledge your humanity, your imperfectness, and your own fraility and shortcomings. Humans cannot administer any system perfectly, even if every single parameter is well-defined. (That’s why, for instance, software still has bugs, even though the programmer has often defined the scope and parameters of the software from the ground-up. The system can be perfect, but the people who design, code and administer the system are not.)

Fairness is an ideal goal to strive for in an online community, much as it is in life itself. But reality often intrudes in the best of our intentions, and fairness sometimes is seen in the eye of the beholder. We continue to try our best, while acknowledging we may not always succeed.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.