For years I’ve been a volunteer moderator on the Write the Docs Slack. Here are four things I try to remind myself when it comes to moderating the Write the Docs chat:

1. My responsibility is to the community, not the rules.

   My job is to create expectations and norms that allow helpful discussions to flourish and make hostile messages and fights unlikely or inconvenient. My job is not to make individual people behave correctly or act against every undesirable thing that might happen.

2. Don’t work alone.

   If my job is the community then it stands to reason that the moderation work should be communal as well. I work with other moderators and infrequently take action without informing or consulting them first. And as a practical matter, moderation work often involves bad feelings and ambiguity. Working alone intensifies them; working with others weakens them.

3. Moderate in public.

   This is where not working alone and responsibility to the community meet. When it’s reasonable to do it, I put the moderation process in public. For example, the Write the Docs Slack has a #meta channel for publicly discussing the chat community itself, so we can answer questions, change guidelines, and create new channels as a community.

   Moderating in public also means that I sometimes have to tell people to change their behavior in public. That feels bad sometimes but it’s part of the process of creating community expectations that the community understands and shares.

4. Routinize kindness.

   I wield powers that other members of the community do not. There is no need for me to hold this over them (and it’s probably bad for me to let it go to my head). So until I have evidence to the contrary, I assume that most people mean well, want to do well, and are willing to join me in doing so for the benefit of the community. I try to follow a pattern that shows that I recognize a participant’s motivations and wish to help them align those motivations with the community’s needs.