The Intimidation That Is Moderation

This is mainly about Discord Servers, and how they are managed.

It's quite common for people to think "You can ask the Moderation for help" is a great idea. It kind of is... but not really. This is decent if it's in public, as you can quickly tag them. But expecting any user to suddenly go into a private message with them in some way? This doesn't work. This is because they already are highly intimidated by their existence. No friendly face works at any point and never will. That's not enough. The only person they will feel comfortable around is someone they already started talking to before joining said server. Oftentimes the Admin, anyway.

This is also why it's very important, if a user breaks a rule or causes issues that would require a new rule, it's fully up to the Moderation to take them aside and help explain why it's necessary. If a rule if blatantly made because of a user, they will take it badly, especially with how it's worded. Expecting them to suddenly take the initiative is overall bad for everyone. They already feel vastly uncomfortable. This is a great way to alienate people as it doesn't actually show enough caring about how they might feel. There's no excuse for being completely silent on the matter. See next paragraph to explain the other side of the issue a bit.

(As I said before in my last blog, a user leaving silently doesn't help, but you have to remember that they don't even feel comfortable enough to say anything in the first place. Why would they? They already feel horrible in the first place. They at best would expect to be talked to a bit, before or after. The worst thing you can do is ghost them instead of at least asking why they left. Maybe it'll help. Maybe said user who left was actually a troll in the first place. That's however pretty rare).

In the end, when enforcing rules, it's very important you communicate directly with said rule breaker. But don't be intimidating and at least try to hear their side of the story. They aren't trying to justify it, they're trying to explain their side so they can be helped to not make further mistakes/break more rules. Never ever assume it's in bad faith. This is a failure to actually listen. There's going to be obviously cases where there's nothing to listen to(blatantly violent threats, bigotry, those kind of things. Like, uh, yeah, no. There's no side of the story to tell. You want to see people hurt. End of story. Naturally there's tons of other cases where there was nothing remotely similar to that and it was taken the wrong way).