postdrome

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@christine.website>

blog/postdrome-2022-02-26.markdown

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+---
+title: Postdrome
+date: 2022-02-26
+series: freenode
+---
+
+The darkness flailed around, the millions it expected did not follow. The
+numbers the darkness was fostering had faltered more and more. The replacement
+to the halls the darkness destroyed continued on like the old halls never
+existed.
+
+The darkness felt true loneliness for the first time in its life. Everyone was
+leaving. Attempts to grow its influence failed. Association with the darkness
+became an indelible stain like the mark of Cain. Every attempt to scrub it ended
+up staining the mark deeper and deeper until the stain defined the darkness even
+more than its namesake.
+
+Ideas spring forth. Public works blossomed for brief moments. Ideas on how to
+leverage new discoveries were put into place, only to rot into decay and
+eventually succumb to their inherent irrelevance.
+
+---
+
+In the early phase, communities often fail. For every success you see in the
+wild, hundreds and thousands more have failed. 
+
+Everything has to go right. If any of a hundred thousand things go wrong, your
+community fails. If you mess up, you fail. If one of your moderators
+misinterprets a vaguely defined rule due to fundamental differences in worldview
+and ends up creating a scene as a result, you fail.
+
+If you build it, they will come. If you don't know what you are building or the
+people that want to use it, you will never be able to predict the kind of people
+that show up.
+
+Those people that do show up may not be the people you want to show up at all.
+Even if they can be good in the moment it doesn't mean they'll be good
+persistently. Every rose has its thorns, some are more ignorable than others.
+Some are more palateable than others. Some are more viable to pivot from than
+others.
+
+---
+
+Not to mention the meddling effects of the urinators stirring up fake activity
+to later defecate all over the community in a thick slather of oil that scared
+away new people even more.
+
+The good name of the halls had been shattered and there was nothing the darkness
+could do about it. It was irreparable. The darkness had destroyed his reputation
+in turn with those halls. Bardic inspiration failed too.
+
+---
+
+If the wrong people come, you run the risk of [accidentally creating a Nazi
+bar](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kicking_a_nazi_out_as_soon_as_they_walk_in/).
+If they fester, your community suffers a fate worse than death. Your community
+becomes a stain on your name.
+
+You become associated with that community if you don't kick them out, yet at the
+same time if you try to kick them out you'll kill your community instantly. At
+that point your monthly active users will all be the people you don't want and
+it becomes easier to kill the community outright than it is to try to trim the
+wheat from the chaff.
+
+If there is any wheat left.
+
+---
+
+High charisma and low wisdom created a fuel to blast the darkness into
+irrelevance, and into that irrelevance it faded. The relevance of the darkness
+has since vanished like a grain of sait in an ocean.
+
+A lesson for the ages: do not destroy communities and expect to have good will
+from the people in those communities.
+
+---
+
+Sometimes communities need to die and it is hard to pull the plug on them. It
+always hurts. You will be tempted to leave it on life support, even just to not
+feel the emotions. It gets worse if you wait longer. It becomes more agonizing.
+
+It is better to rip off the bandaid and clean the wound than it is to let the
+infection grow. Each idle question by someone that means well about how that
+community is going rips into you like serrated knives coated in salt. People
+desperately try to make the community cling to life but one by one they give up
+after realizing the futility of it all.
+
+That doesn't change how much it hurts to even _conceive_ giving up on that
+community in the moment. It's understandable why someone wouldn't want to throw
+in the towel and would instead opt to let things fade naturally.