Here are some insights gained from around 15 years of online community moderation, in varied formats. They're mine, and are opinion and experience-based, not empirical, of course:
1. Different online communities exist to serve different needs and goals.
2. Achieving high signal-to-noise ratio online conversations, in order to facilitate those goals -- i.e. to have a healthy and productive online community -- almost always requires active moderation. (See "Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending by Human Hands," by Xeni Jardin, journalist and blogger of BoingBoing.net fame.)
3. Being the available authority figure, the moderator will sometimes become a target for ire.
4. (Assuming good moderation...) This ire is the individual's problem, however much transference is attempted to make it the list's problem. (Put another way: "Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!")
5. A plethora of written "rules" to codify behavior is generally an invitation for people to try and game those rules.
6. An online community (list, blog, group...) is not a public utility. If you don't find a particular online community useful or to your liking, you can go start your own group, list, or other form of online community any time you want. See #1.
I hope these pointers (which I posted today on a mailing list of Society of Environmental Journalists members, in response to a kerfuffle there) are useful for fellow journalists who may suddenly find themselves in the position of moderating blogs or other online fora.
Image: Listening Post, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, at Whitney Museum of American Art, December 2002.
